One of the most disheartening cases Seattle homicide detectives ever faced began on Wednesday morning, June 2, 1976. True, there were moments when everything seemed to be going their way, but their successes were soon blunted. In the end, they would win only a half a victory, but it was enough to lock up a murderer who was infinitely dangerous to beautiful dark-haired young women.
Marcia Perkins lived in a unit on one of the upper floors of an apartment house on East Madison Street in Seattle, close to the funky and exciting Broadway District and Seattle University, and near what was known as “Pill Hill,” where many of the city’s hospitals were located. Marcia was twenty-four, beautiful and raven-haired. She was slender and tall, and she looked a lot like Cher with her waist-length hair and miniskirts, so much so that she got a lot of double takes—which amused her.
Marcia was a nurse at the University of Washington Hospital; she was estranged from her husband and in the process of beginning a new life. For the moment, her husband had temporary custody of their children and she was on very good terms with him. It wasn’t a bitter separation at all. In fact, they often dated. They had discovered that they got along better when they dated than they ever had when they were married.
Marcia had married very young, and, now, she didn’t limit her dating to her estranged husband. She had other friends, but she was in no particular hurry to get a divorce or to marry again. She was enjoying some of the freedom she’d missed as a teenager. She suspected that she might end up back with her husband, but first she needed some time to breathe.
Marcia’s husband attempted to reach her by phone many times over the Memorial Day weekend of May 29–30. At first, he’d gotten nothing but a busy signal; later, the phone had rung and rung and no one had answered. He hadn’t been particularly concerned because Marcia had told him she might take a trip over the holiday, but by Wednesday morning he still hadn’t found her home. He knew that she was supposed to be back in Seattle on Tuesday for her job at the hospital. He was beginning to feel a niggle of concern.
And so, on that Wednesday, he went to the apartment building where she lived before he headed to his own job. It was 7:30 in the morning when he knocked on the door of the manager’s apartment. “I’m worried about Marcia,” he said, trying not to be an alarmist. “I haven’t been able to reach her—I’m a little afraid she might be sick, or—”
The manager nodded, and reached for his passkey. Marcia was a pretty predictable lady, and it was strange that she wasn’t answering her phone. They knocked first, but got no answer. Still, they could hear a radio or television playing somewhere beyond the door. The manager put the key in the lock and turned it.
When the door swung open, and they stepped a few feet inside, they could see why Marcia hadn’t answered her phone. She lay spread-eagled between the kitchen and living room of her usually neat apartment. There was no question at all that she was dead. The shocked men quickly backed out and ran to call Seattle police.
The two patrol officers who responded confirmed that Marcia was dead—and that it looked as if she had been for several days, lying alone in the hot apartment. Along with their sergeant, the officers secured the premises with yellow crime scene tape, and stood by until detectives from the Homicide Unit arrived at 8:30.
Detective Sergeant Don Cameron’s crew—specifically Detectives Duane Homan and Benny DePalmo—were next up on call. They would do the crime scene search, a task that always took many hours as they gathered every possible bit of evidence they could find and photographed the scene. Ideally, they hoped to get to the scene of a murder as quickly as possible; time was their enemy. And, this time, they were running behind.
There was the faint odor of a death too long undiscovered in the apartment. Marcia Perkins lay just inside the entrance, her legs spread wide in the classic position of a rape victim. She wore only a short blue terry cloth robe and a bra, and both had been pushed up to her shoulders. Rigor mortis, the rigidity that comes soon after death, had come and departed, a natural process that took several days. They noted that there also was considerable skin slippage on the victim’s body because decomposition had begun.
Marcia had suffered a beating, although she had obviously put up a terrific fight against her attacker. Dark purple abrasions marred her face, throat and left knee. There were definite indications that she’d died of strangulation—manual strangulation—at the hands of a powerful killer. Her eyes showed the burst blood vessels (petechiae) that are characteristic of death from strangulation.
A pair of blue bikini panties lay crumpled in a nearby doorway, and oddly, a pair of women’s shoes with both straps broken—as if the wearer had been lifted forcibly out of them—rested close to the panties.
The motive for Marcia Perkins’s murder was apparent; she had clearly been the victim of a violent sexual attack. It would take an autopsy and laboratory tests to say whether rape had been committed.
There were signs in the apartment that seemed to say that Marcia had known her killer and had admitted him willingly to her home. Two cups with a teaspoon of instant coffee powder in them sat on the kitchen counter, and there was a pan of water on the stove, although the burner beneath was turned off. A partial bottle of rum sat on the counter. Since the kitchen was otherwise immaculate, it appeared that Marcia had been in the process of serving refreshments when someone had come up behind her, seized her boldly, and literally yanked her out of her shoes as the attack began.
Her killer had to have been a man possessed of tremendous strength. And cunning. The three homicide detectives noted that someone had made a concentrated effort to wipe away all traces of himself from the premises. There were no fingerprints on any of the smooth surfaces which ordinarily would be expected to reveal latent prints. Everything had been laboriously wiped clean. The killer had even swept up long strands of the victim’s black hair into a dustpan, although he hadn’t thrown them away. Maybe he’d realized there was nothing incriminating about the hair of a person who lived in this apartment. He had yanked the phone cord from the wall, although the phone was already off the hook.
All the drapes were tightly shut, closing the apartment off from the world outside, and the radio still played—loud enough to cover sounds in the apartment, but not loud enough to draw complaints from other tenants. It looked as if the killer had wanted to move around his victim’s home unseen and unheard.
A woman’s purse—probably Marcia’s—had been dumped on the floor. There was no wallet or money inside. For some obscure reason, the bedding from the victim’s bed was tangled on the living room floor. A steam iron and an empty Miller’s beer can were caught inside the bedding.
Benny DePalmo checked the only bathroom, and found the sink spotless, with bottles of perfume undisturbed on its ledge. But he did find a man’s ring on the counter behind the sink. That seemed strange; if the killer had gone to such efforts to wipe his presence away, why would he leave such a distinctive ring behind?
With so many questions, one thing was clear: Marcia Perkins had to have been been killed by someone she knew and trusted. The apartment house had an excellent security system. Marcia would have had to buzz open a downstairs lock to let anyone come up to her floor. Then, she had to let a visitor into the locked apartment itself. She was in her robe, and she had been preparing to serve coffee when she was attacked. A complete stranger wouldn’t have been so obsessive in wiping away his fingerprints. The killer must have had reason to believe he would be questioned and printed, and so he had tried to make certain he couldn’t be placed in her apartment near the time of her death.
But the investigators didn’t know enough about Marcia Perkins at this point to speculate who that might have been. Her estranged husband was outside with the apartment manager, and he seemed to be genuinely grieving. Who else was there in Marcia’s life whom she trusted enough to let into her apartment?
Duane Homan and Benny DePalmo attended the postmortem examination of Marcia Perkins. Their original supposition that she
had died by manual strangulation had been correct: the cricoid cartilage was fractured and there were hemorrhages in the strap muscles on either side of her neck. There were no ligature marks that would have been left by a rope or noose, but there were bruises where fingers and thumbs had exerted intense pressure.
In addition, there were many, many scratches and lacerations on Marcia’s body; she had fought her killer like a tiger. But she had lost. She had been brutally raped and sodomized, and there were tears and contusions in her genital organs. Purple teeth marks encircled her right nipple. Her killer had been a man of great strength and, certainly, possessed with terrible anger.
The medical examiner pointed to the right portion of the victim’s forehead and explained, “This wound was administered with a blunt instrument. This was a stunning wound, but there is no fracture.”
The two detectives headed out to interview Marcia’s neighbors. Whoever had killed her had a running start. Even the time of death was not a certainty at this point, although it had been at least three days earlier. Along with Detectives Bill Baughman and George Marberg, they began a canvass of the apartment house where Marcia Perkins had lived and its twin adjacent building.
Some people seem to remember every strange noise or out-of-place person in their neighborhoods; others apparently go through life wearing earplugs and blinders. The quartet of investigators hoped to find the former.
The building next to Marcia’s was occupied by patients or families of patients receiving cancer treatment at the nearby Fred Hutchinson Cancer Clinic. Because that was why they were in Seattle, many of the occupants were away from their apartments most of the daytime hours, and the detectives would have to check back several times to make contact with them. Also, a lot of people had taken advantage of the three-day holiday weekend and left town for Memorial Day.
But there were some illuminating statements coming from the victim’s neighbors. The manager of Marcia’s building remembered now that someone had buzzed his intercom between four and six o’clock on Saturday morning, May 29. “It woke me up,” he said. “I answered and I talked to a man who sounded drunk. He asked for Marcia and I told him he’d made a mistake and to buzz the correct apartment.”
The manager had been annoyed enough to stay on the intercom to listen in on the ensuing conversation, and he heard the man talking to Marcia. He was pleading very insistently to come in. “He was saying, ‘Please, little sister, let me in.’ ”
“Did she buzz him up?” Bill Baughman asked.
“Not at first—but she finally agreed to unlock the door when the guy kept begging.”
He had apparently stumbled up to her apartment. That is, the manager had heard some faltering steps clumping up the stairway, but he hadn’t looked out to see who the man was.
The manager’s apartment was just across the hall from Marcia’s quarters, and he could have peeked out the door, but he wasn’t that curious; he was sleepy and went back to bed. However, he told Marberg and Baughman that the occupants of the building next door would have been in a better spot to hear what went on in Marcia’s apartment. “Their windows face the same breezeway as Marcia’s. It’s almost like being in the same room in the summer when the windows are open . . .”
And that proved to be true. One of the residents in the next-door building told the detectives she had heard a woman’s voice in a “loud argument” about 6 A.M. “There were doors slamming and banging, all right,” she recalled. “It went on for about three minutes.” But she hadn’t gone to the window and looked over into Marcia’s apartment. This was a live-and-let-live neighborhood where people didn’t poke their noses into their neighbors’ business.
Still, one of the women who lived in Marcia’s apartment house had also been been awakened on the morning of the 29th by someone at the intercom just outside the front door. It was practically under her bedroom window. She told the detectives that the man had first said he was the police. “But then he laughed, and I heard him say that he was Marcia’s brother. I could hear him talking first to the manager and then to Marcia.”
As it happened, a number of people who lived in the apartment buildings had seen a stranger about midnight on Friday night. One occupant recalled seeing a stocky man in a blue denim jacket and cap at the entrance to the building where Marcia lived. “He was pushing all the buttons trying to get in, but it looked to me as though nobody was buzzing him up.”
The apartment manager said that Marcia Perkins had a number of visitors—men she dated or knew as friends, and a woman with three children who seemed to be a good friend. He thought Marcia was dating a quiet, well-mannered man on a regular basis, although he had not seen him at the apartment in the past week. He was not aware of any trouble between Marcia and her boyfriend, or anyone else for that matter. She was a good tenant.
On June 3, Detectives Benny DePalmo and Duane Homan got two interesting bits of information. The victim’s grieving estranged husband called to report something that seemed a little strange to him. A man named Melvin Jones had dropped in on him at ten o’clock the previous night to discuss Marcia’s murder. Jones had fervently denied any involvement in the pretty nurse’s death. In fact, it seemed to her husband that he was almost protesting too much. He went to great pains to explain that he hadn’t seen Marcia since Thursday, May 27, when he’d stopped by to pick up a stereo set that belonged to him. “He told me he hadn’t stayed longer than fifteen minutes,” the widower said. “He insisted on leaving me his phone number—just in case I needed him for anything.”
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 tr
agedy 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.