A Rage to Kill (37 page)

Marcia’s husband was quite sure that Melvin wasn’t Marcia’s boyfriend, at least not anyone she would have dated steadily. Rather, he thought he was a friend of Marcia’s sister who had moved to Montana. He described Melvin as being a husky man, broad-shouldered and thick in the chest. He didn’t know where he worked—or
if
he worked, for that matter.

On the heels of that interview, the apartment manager called detectives to say that a man had been by asking for Marcia. This struck him as eerie since her body had been removed the previous day, and she’d been dead for five. He told the man that Marcia had been murdered, and the man had left, driving a two-tone green General Motors car. Oddly, he hadn’t seemed devastated or even shocked by the news. “I got the license number,” the manager said, and handed over a scribbled note.

Homan and DePalmo quickly ran the plate numbers through the WASIC computer and found the car registered to a Ralph Ditty* with an address on Thirty-first Avenue in Seattle. More interesting was the fact that Ralph Ditty was a relative of Melvin Jones, and Jones lived at the same address. If Melvin Jones had known that Marcia was dead at 10
P.M.
on June 2, then why was his relative looking for her on June 3? Maybe he’d come by to check because he didn’t believe Melvin when he told him.

Melvin Jones came into the Homicide Unit later that day. He was a huge, muscular man, but he had a very young face, handsome and soft. He seemed earnest when he said he’d be glad to give a statement about his friendship with Marcia Perkins. He said that he had lived with Marcia and her sister from the previous October until February. But he pointed out that it was her sister—not Marcia—with whom he’d been romantically involved. When her sister decided to move to Montana, Marcia took an apartment by herself. He stressed that his breakup with the sister was friendly, and that he and Marcia were buddies, still. He had no idea who might have wanted to harm her.

Jones said he last had seen the victim on May 26—a day earlier than he had told her husband—when he went to her apartment to retrieve a stereo set which belonged to him. He said he had learned of her murder on June 2 when her sister called him from Montana to tell him. He said he didn’t know anything about his own cousin’s visit to the apartment house. “He wouldn’t have had a reason to go over there asking questions,” Melvin said, puzzled.

The investigators studied Melvin Jones. He was a big man, six feet three or more, and he easily topped 230 pounds. He was a good-looking man, with an easy-going manner despite the tragedy to his friend. When they commented on his size, he smiled and said he’d been working out with the Seattle Seahawks during spring training for the professional football team, although he wasn’t yet officially on the squad. “Needed a tackling dummy, I guess,” he said.

Although they didn’t say it out loud, the homicide detectives were both thinking the same thing: a man that big and powerful could easily have subdued Marcia Perkins and crushed her throat. He could have lifted her right out of her shoes with one hand. But that wasn’t enough to arrest him. There were thousands of other big, strong men in Seattle.

A look at Melvin Jones’s rap sheet, however, did little to quell their gut feelings. Melvin had been convicted of Indecent Liberties in 1969 and sentenced to the state prison at Monroe for six years. That might well mean he was still obsessed with violent sex. On the other hand, it also could explain why he might be apprehensive about being accused of Marcia’s murder. He had served his time for the first offense, and so far he was clean.

But Melvin Jones seemed to have a problem with alcohol. The day after his interview with the police, he called Marcia’s husband, and he was obviously drunk. “He told me that he wasn’t the one who killed Marcia,” her husband told the detectives. “And he said he didn’t want anyone to hang the rap on him.”

Since no one was trying to hang a rap on him at the moment, the investigators thought Melvin was getting awfully skittish—especially for an innocent man. But they weren’t going to get any help from the man’s ring found on the sink in Marcia’s bathroom. “It’s mine,” her husband said. “I left it there a long time ago. Just forgot to get it back.”

That made sense, considering that the sink bore no traces of blood either in the bowl or the trap; the killer would surely have had to clean up after the murder, but he hadn’t done it there.

On June 5, DePalmo and Homan talked to Melvin’s cousin and asked him how he had happened to be asking for Marcia. He told them that he had been to her apartment house about midnight on Saturday night, but that no one would buzz the door to let him in. Then he’d called her repeatedly, but the phone was always busy. He had gone so far as to call the operator—who had told him that Marcia’s phone was off the hook. He had worried about it sporadically, until he finally went back on June 3 and learned from the manager in the apartment house that Marcia had been murdered.

Asked if he were in the habit of seeing Marcia often, Ditty said he wasn’t. “I guess I hadn’t seen her for about two months. I just suddenly thought of her and dropped by at midnight.”

Now they either had one man who had been back
twice
on one night to try to get into Marcia Perkins’s apartment, or two
different
men who had called on her between midnight and six
A.M.
on the Friday night/Saturday morning she had probably been murdered. Marcia was alive between four and six; the manager had listened in to the intercom and heard her voice. Ralph Ditty, Melvin Jones’s cousin, seemed sincere and volunteered to take a lie detector test if the detectives wanted him to do so. They did, and made an appointment with him for just that.

They also had an estranged husband who seemed remarkably understanding about his legal wife’s boyfriends, but he seemed to be in genuine mourning and he was very open with the detectives. But most of all, he had a solid alibi for the early morning hours of May 29. He had been home taking care of their children. He told them what he had been able to put together about Marcia’s last “steady” boyfriend, whose name was Chuck Lyons.* He said that Lyons didn’t drink at all. He was a teetotaler whose main interest—beyond Marcia—was in cars. In fact, Lyons owned four, one a black Lincoln. Marcia had been fond of Lyons, according to her husband, but she had vacillated about her future with the car buff. “She thought he had no plans and no purpose in life,” her husband said, “and they didn’t have much in common. Marcia worked hard but she liked to party.” He described Lyons as being too much of a straight arrow for Marcia, even though he was very attracted to her.

But still, questions arose. If Chuck Lyons thought so much of Marcia, why hadn’t he come around to see her? Why hadn’t he gone to her funeral? That didn’t make sense. The woman had been dead for a week, and no one knew if Lyons even knew it.

None of the people the Seattle detectives talked to knew where Chuck Lyons lived, although the detectives were told that one of his relatives was supposed to own a barber shop on Rainier Avenue South. Homan and DePalmo went there and found the shop closed. Marcia’s husband was at a loss to help the investigators until he remembered a letter that Marcia had written to him. “You know,” he said, “she talked about Lyons in that letter, and she said that she and Lyons would like to have a baby boy and name him ‘Beaufort Charles Lyons, Jr.’ ”

While the name “Chuck Lyons” had sparked no information on the police computers, the name “Beaufort Charles Lyons” did. Homan and DePalmo found a man by that name who owned a classic 1962 black Lincoln, among other cars, and worked at a Seattle marina. The detective partners walked along the bobbing docks of the marina until they found Chuck Lyons’s boss.

“Chuck was off over the three-day weekend, starting the 29th,” the man said. “But he came back to work on June 1st, and he’s been here regular ever since.” Lyons was not, however, working the present shift, so they asked that he call police headquarters when he appeared.

When “Chuck” Lyons showed up for work, he called DePalmo immediately, his voice edgy, having gotten a message from the Homicide Unit. He clearly had no idea why they were calling him. When Benny DePalmo told him that Marcia was dead, he gasped, “Oh no!” and seemed to be stunned. He asked how she had died and, when he was told that she had been murdered, he said he would be in to talk to detectives right away.

This was the fourth male who had been closely linked to Marcia Perkins—her ex-husband, Melvin, Melvin’s cousin—and now, Chuck Lyons. All of them sounded seriously upset and shocked. Chuck was as good as his word and walked into the fifth floor Homicide Unit within half an hour. To the trained eye of the detectives, he seemed to be barely fighting back tears.

“I haven’t seen Marcia since about 9
P.M.
on the Wednesday before Memorial Day,” he said softly. “I didn’t even try to call her over the weekend because she said she’d probably be going to Montana to see her sister. Then when I tried to call on Tuesday and Wednesday [June first and second], the phone just kept ringing on and on. I figured she was still in Montana or on the way back.”

“You didn’t read about it in the paper?” Homan asked him.

“Nope. Haven’t read the paper, or even caught the TV news, I guess. All this time, she’s been dead—I didn’t go to her funeral. I didn’t even know she was dead,” he said brokenly.

They talked to Chuck Lyons about people in Marcia Perkins’s life. He said he knew Melvin Jones, but only as an acquaintance. He remembered, however, that Melvin had already picked up his stereo set by Wednesday night, May 26. He wouldn’t have been coming by to get it on the Friday before Memorial Day, since he didn’t have any other belongings at Marcia’s.

Some homicide cases have too few suspects, and this one was floundering because there were so
many
suspects. Still another one surfaced when an attorney friend told Duane Homan that Marcia Perkins had been the object of another man’s obsession. Marcia worked at the University of Washington Hospital, and there had been a patient there who was convinced that he was having an affair with her. He talked on and on about Marcia. The patient, who was a prisoner at the Monroe Reformatory, was in the hospital because he’d been stabbed in the back in a prison fight. He was partially paralyzed.

“He’s a little weird,” the lawyer said, “and this affair was all in his head, but I thought you ought to know.”

It wasn’t out of the realm of possibilities that a man, slightly deranged, should have been in love with his beautiful nurse. Stalkers have hounded women literally to their deaths because of imagined romantic connections. Had the prisoner somehow found where Marcia lived and gone to her apartment, begged to be let in, and then turned violent when she offered him no more than a cup of coffee? It sounded plausible until Homan and DePalmo found that the prisoner had been back in the reformatory by the Memorial Day weekend, and every minute there was accounted for.

Marcia’s sister, who had flown to Seattle for her funeral, had the most vital information. She told the detectives about her relationship with Melvin Jones. He had once been her boyfriend, and the three of them—herself, Melvin, and Marcia—had indeed lived together. “He used to call Marcia ‘Sister Dear,’ and I know he’d been coming around to see her,” she said. “When I talked to her by phone from Montana on Wednesday night [May 26] she said, ‘That damn Melvin is here again.’ I told her just not to let him in, and we continued to talk.”

Marcia had apparently been having trouble with Melvin Jones. She told her sister that he’d come by her apartment four days earlier at three in the morning. “She said he was really drunk and he was pressing the call buttons to her apartment. She didn’t let him in because he sounded so drunk.”

“What does Melvin drink?” Benny DePalmo asked.

“Bacardi rum and Miller beer. He does weird things when he’s drunk.”

“Was he involved with Marcia?”

She shook her head. “No.
No.
He never had a physical relationship with Marcia. He always considered her his ‘sister.’ ”

Sister
was the word they were looking for. Melvin Jones was emerging as the investigators’ best suspect. The man who had buzzed Marcia’s apartment the morning she was killed had referred to her as “Little Sister.” And the liquor found at the crime scene was a bottle of Bacardi rum and a can of Miller High Life beer. The detectives knew now that Melvin had tried before to gain entrance to Marcia’s apartment during the wee hours of the morning when he was drunk. It seemed now that she had probably given in to his pleas—and with tragic consequences—on May 29. The only thing they really needed now was some direct physical evidence that would tie Jones to the murder scene.

If only the apartment manager had opened his door that morning to get a look at the man who stumbled toward Marcia’s door. But he hadn’t—and it looked as though the only eyewitness was dead.

Benny DePalmo learned one more thing about the unknown killer when he talked with officials at the telephone company. Marcia’s phone had been busy when friends called during the first hours after her murder. That would have happened if it were simply off the hook. But he had witnesses who said it had rung normally later that morning and no one answered. Phone technicians said that could only have occurred if the cord was yanked from the phone itself or from the wall. Obviously, someone either had waited for hours beside Marcia’s dead body and yanked the wire as he left, or returned later to do it. DePalmo suspected that someone had returned to her apartment to clean it up several hours after the murder.

But now Melvin Jones suddenly became elusive. He could not be found for further questioning. Days later, when the investigators finally located him, he was even more confident and self-assured than he had been when he talked to them the first time. He explained that he had spent the evening of May 28 (Friday) at a party at the University of Washington with a friend and the friend’s girlfriend, a pretty American Indian girl named Jeanie Easley. He had drunk a great deal of rum, he said, and returned home long after midnight.