by Ann Rule
Marjorie’s best friend verified that she expected to have a date with Jim for her birthday party on Saturday night. “He was supposed to call her Friday, and then pick her up on Saturday afternoon and bring her to my house. She was very pleased and was looking forward to her date with Jim. As far as I know, Marge was home Friday night—waiting for his call.”
This woman knew Jim’s last name—it was Marrek. But that was all she knew about him.
It was a long weekend for the investigators who were trying to solve the murder of Marjorie Knope. On Monday morning, August 14, they attended her autopsy. The slender blonde woman had succumbed to the grievous damage caused by a car’s being driven back and forth across her body. She had multiple rib fractures, and one sharp bone had punctured her right lung, causing a fatal hemopneumothorax. She had literally drowned in her own blood. Her nose, jaw, and thigh bones had been fractured, her knees cut to the bone, and the internal organ damage was extensive—so extensive that it was impossible to tell if she had been subjected to a sexual attack before her death. Her reproductive organs had been crushed too. However, no semen was found.
A woman who weighed 105 pounds would have been no threat even to a small man. This was overkill, and the detectives witnessing her autopsy realized that they were looking either for a man who hated Marjorie personally—or who was a danger to all women. They could sense the rage behind his attack, and they left the Medical Examiner’s office determined to catch him before he hurt another woman.
It was easy enough to find Scott Benti. He was at home in Kent, and he appeared to the detectives from King County to be in genuine mourning for Marjorie. Moreover, he had an alibi for the late night of August 11—12. He had spent from 7:30 P.M. until well after two A.M. with a half-dozen friends at the carnival rides at Seattle Center. His friends agreed that he had been with them. His car? It was a tiny foreign model that didn’t resemble a Ford Falcon in any respect.
Ted Forrester located Jim Marrek at his home in Kent on Tuesday, August 14. Yes, he had met Marjorie at the Ad Lib, left with her to get something to eat, and even taken down her phone number. “I promised to call her on Friday after work,” he said, “but I never intended to. I have a steady girlfriend in the north end of Seattle. I knew she was coming to Kent for the weekend.”
Forrester nodded without expression, but he thought how sad it was that the dead girl had spent the last night of her life waiting for a call from this man who had already dismissed her.
Nevertheless, Forrester and May checked out the man’s alibi for late Friday night. It was good. He had been with several friends. He may not have very gallant—but he was not a murderer.
Already, two likely looking suspects—one a handsome stranger, and the other acquaintance who had threatened to rape the victim—had vanished in a handful of solid alibis. The King County investigators could not find any secrets in Marjorie Knope’s life, nothing at all that would make her a likely target for a killer. She had been a sweet and friendly young woman who hoped for a second chance at happiness. Was it possible that a complete stranger had seen her sitting in her parents’ living room in her frilly pajamas? Surely, he would have made noise as he forced his way in to get to her. No, that didn’t fly at all; the Knope house was too far off the beaten track.
Ted Forrester and Keith May had learned only that Marjorie had been a friendly, quiet girl who was liked by everyone. She had been temporarily out of a job but was cheerfully looking for a new one. Her social life had consisted of going to the funky taverns in the Kent area—taverns that catered to people in their twenties who liked hard rock and cheap beer. Marjorie herself didn’t even like beer. She seldom drank more than Coke.
The long summer of 1972 ground on, and the news stories about the small blonde woman killed in Kent went quickly to the back pages and then disappeared completely. There was bigger news as far as the world was concerned: the Olympics in Munich were the scene of a terrible massacre, and there were seven indictments in the Watergate break-in. King County detectives kept up their intensive probe, determined to find the savage killer who had somehow talked his way into the Knopes’ home and taken their daughter away.
They stopped scores of cars—dark-toned Fords—and scrutinized their tires, comparing them to the moulages they had made of the tracks in the junior high field and in the victim’s driveway. They combed wrecking yards for a Ford with similar tires and a bad muffler and/or an oil leak. Hundreds of people were interviewed, friends of Marge’s and friends of friends of friends.
The detectives fielded the kook calls that invariably come in after a sensational murder. An anonymous caller phoned the Knopes weeks after their daughter died and breathed, “Listen carefully: Elton Joe Stark* killed your daughter.”
The King County investigators found Elton Stark and quickly saw why he was not the most popular guy in his circle of acquaintances. He was a hothead who annoyed people. But he had barely known Marjorie, and he hadn’t even been in town the night she was murdered.
Once more, Keith May, Ted Forrester and George Helland went back over Marjorie’s past, and every event—no matter how minuscule—that had changed the dynamics of her family. They still had the key on the princess phone key chain and the button, the two items they had found next to her body. All they had to do was tie them to someone.
They learned that the Knopes were good-hearted, friendly people who had often opened their home to someone in need of help. Most stayed for a short time, but one young man stayed so long that he was almost like a son to them. In the autumn of 1965, when Marjorie was still in high school, they had taken in one of her classmates, a kid who had no place to live. The boy had lived with them for about a year.
His name was Bernard Henry Pierce.
Ted Forrester set out to find Pierce. He followed an increasingly cold trail of apartments where Pierce had lived in the past. At each address, Forrester tried the Kwik-set key. None of the doors swung open. That didn’t mean a whole lot; many people get new locks when they move into an apartment. And Pierce was a long shot, anyway, someone who hadn’t lived with the Knopes for six or seven years.
Ted Forrester had no idea at this point that a man named Bernie Pierce continued to be a suspect in the murder of Georgia Murphy. That was a Seattle Police case, and since he wasn’t a really hot suspect in that case, there was no reason that the King County detective would have heard about his connection to another vicious murder of a young woman.
And then Forrester received confidential information from a young woman who had known Bernie Pierce in 1970. Suddenly, the whole complexion of the investigation changed dramatically. The woman’s statement about Pierce took him out of the casual contact category. Trembling with remembered terror, the girl told Ted Forrester that she had once lived in the same apartment complex as Pierce.
“We thought he was a really great guy,” she began. “My roommate and I considered him as close as a brother. He was really nice to us, helped with heavy stuff and fixed things, you know. But this one time, my roommate was gone for the weekend, and—”
“Go on,” Forrester encouraged.
“Well, Bernie came to visit and I could tell he’d been drinking. He was very talkative. He just stayed and stayed—for over two hours. I finally just suggested that he’d better go—”
She recalled that, to her shock, Bernie Pierce had asked her to have sex with him, and he did so in crude terms. When the informant told him to go or she would have to find someone who would make him leave, she had seen a whole different side of his personality. “He grabbed me by the throat until I couldn’t get my breath. I was struggling and fighting him. I know I managed to kick him in the crotch—and then everything got black.”
She told Forrester that when she came to, she was lying on the floor and Bernie Pierce was leaning over her. “He was crying and he said, ‘I almost killed you. I blacked out.’ ” He had then confessed that he had done something like that “once before.”
Terrified, the witness said that she h
ad tried to keep her wits about her. She didn’t want him to tell her what he’d done to someone else, fearful that he might get violent again. She pleaded with him to get some psychiatric care—“for his own sake.” Somehow she had managed to ease him out of her apartment without any further confrontation.
“I guess I should have reported him,” she told Ted Forrester. “But I was too afraid he’d get mad and come back.”
“Did you ever see him again?”
“He didn’t come back for six months,” she said. “And then I wouldn’t let him in.”
Checking further into Pierce’s background, Forrester learned that Bernie Pierce had raped a sixteen-year-old girl whose family had befriended him, and he had been arrested for that. He was currently on probation. It was beginning to look as if befriending Bernie Pierce was a decidedly unhealthy thing to do.
Forrester located Pierce’s probation officer and obtained a current address for him. On September 18, 1972, five weeks after Marjorie Knope’s murder, and almost three years from the time Georgia Murphy had disappeared, he located Bernie Pierce at an address on Des Moines Way South. Forrester realized that the apartment was approximately halfway between the spots where Georgia Murphy’s and Marjorie Knope’s bodies had been found. He left a note asking Pierce to come into headquarters—which he did the next day.
Ted Forrester had asked the Seattle detectives working the Georgia Murphy case—Ted Fonis and Don Cameron—to attend his interview with Bernie Pierce. If he was responsible for the murders of two trusting young women, he had to be questioned carefully.
Bernie Pierce was a softly handsome man who affected an “Elvis” look. He had wavy bangs and sideburns halfway to his chin. He was stocky and powerfully muscled in his arms and shoulders. He didn’t seem particularly nervous to be questioned about Marjorie, although he gave as little information about himself as possible. He said that he’d lived with the Knope family from September of 1965 until June of 1966. Marjorie?
“I looked upon her as my sister.”
“When was the last time you saw her?” Forrester asked.
“It might have been June or early July,” he answered. “I went out to the house to visit her father.”
At this point, Fonis and Cameron didn’t ask Pierce about Georgia Murphy; he was a reluctant and seclusive subject at best, and the detectives did not want to put him on edge until they were ready. Fonis and Cameron waited.
Asked about the night Marjorie disappeared from her home, only to be found dead at the junior high school, Bernie Pierce said that he had had a fight with his new wife on that Friday—August 11. Sometime after nine, he had left and gone on a drinking binge from tavern to tavern in the southeast part of King County. A lot of the evening was fuzzy, but he recalled talking to a woman he knew at the Four Corners Tavern. He said he had no memory at all of driving home.
“What were you driving?” Forrester asked.
“It was my purple Ford—1963. I don’t have it anymore. I sold it to a wrecking yard for junk.”
The car was right, but none of the detectives showed their elation. Pierce was allowed to leave.
Ted Forrester found the junked Ford, and it was already partially stripped. No motor. No wheels. The muffler was gutted; it would have been very noisy. He found a blonde hair caught in the car’s undercarriage, and he photographed it. He took samples of grease and oil from the undercarriage and then he took pictures of the hulk from every angle, concentrating especially on the snow tires in the back seat. They had a distinctive zig-zag pattern.
It was beginning to appear that Pierce’s brotherly feelings for Marjorie Knope were as dangerous as those he had felt for the woman he’d come close to strangling two years before. Before the investigators moved in to arrest him, they needed some tangible physical evidence. The long blonde hair on the junked Ford’s undercarriage was good—but even the crime lab couldn’t prove absolutely that it had come from Marjorie; the most they could hope for was that it would prove to be microscopically alike in class and characteristics.
Keith May talked to the new Mrs. Pierce at their apartment. He showed her the Kwik-set key. Her face was a study of pain and dull acceptance.
“I had one like that,” she said. “But I haven’t seen it for several weeks. The last place I saw it was in the glove compartment of the purple Ford that Bernie sold to the wrecking yard.”
She explained that the key fit the front door of a home she’d once lived in. When May showed her the brass button, she studied it quietly. Then she moved slowly to a closet and pulled out a woman’s coat. She reached into the coat pocket and pulled out a button identical to the one May held.
“I lost that button when it fell off my coat onto the back seat floor of the Ford. I forgot to pick it up when I got out.”
Bernie Pierce’s wife recalled the bleak night of August 11 well. Bernie had come home very late, and very drunk. The next morning she’d noticed a great deal of cut grass stuck under the rear bumper of the Ford. When she asked her husband about it, she said he hadn’t been very concerned. He had simply brushed the clumps of grass off.
“Anything unusual about that Saturday?” Keith May asked.
She shook her head. Bernie had spent the day with her. He had even taken her for a ferry ride. “He seemed perfectly normal—just like his old self.”
Forrester and May went to the Four Corners Tavern, and they learned the identity of the woman Bernie Pierce had talked to the night Marjorie Knope died. She remembered him well; he was hard to forget. She had danced with him, but then he had made an unwelcome pass. She’d walked off the dance floor when he became too familiar. When she told him firmly that she wasn’t interested in having sex with him, his response was boorish enough that she remembered it. “He asked me if I knew any other woman in the Kent Valley who might be ‘available’!”
On October 10, Bernie Pierce submitted to a lie detector test given by Dewey Gillespie, a highly skilled polygrapher. Gillespie seldom had to complete a lie-detector test; his pre-test explanations were designed to psychologically alarm the test subject. Gillespie’s technique worked on Bernie Pierce, and only halfway through the test, he indicated that he was ready to make a statement about Marjorie Knope. Gillespie stepped to the door of the room, and beckoned to Keith May and Ted Forrester.
Bernie Pierce gave several statements to May and Forrester, hedging and stalling before he finally told the whole incredible story. He insisted that he had “blacked out” in the last tavern he visited, and that he had only come to his senses when he was on his way to the Knope house. He had knocked on the kitchen door, and he could see Marge sitting alone watching TV. He had simply walked into the kitchen through the unlocked door, just as he had done scores of times when he lived there. Marge had been wearing a nightie and a robe, and looked up at him with some alarm. First, he said, he told her he was drunk and apologized for that. She was nervous as she sat on the edge of the couch. She told him that her folks were just in the next room.
He had stood up then and prepared to leave, but he told the two detectives that he had suddenly gotten the idea that he should rape Marjorie. “First, though, I had to figure out some way to get Marge outside because any scuffle would bring her father out of bed with his big .44 . . .”
He said he had seized upon a ruse to get the trusting girl outside. He’d pulled out the choke on his car to flood it, and then asked Marge to come outside and help him start it. She’d slipped on the ski jacket and obligingly walked out to the driveway.
But, as Marjorie neared the driver’s side door, Bernie Pierce had suddenly grabbed her by the throat and held on. The young woman had tried vainly to pull his hands away, but she became unconscious and sank on one knee to the driveway dirt. Then he had picked her up and put her in the trunk before she came to, and sped away from the home that had once been his own.
Bernie Pierce continued his sickening confession. He said that Marjorie was conscious when they got to the play field. When he opened the trunk,
she had tried to crawl out. She was bewildered and asked him why he’d choked her.
“I told her, ‘I want to have sex with you.’ ”
Marjorie had asked him where they were, disoriented by shock and being unconscious. She didn’t recognize the junior high playing field in the dark of night. Apparently realizing she was trapped, Marjorie reportedly begged the man who had been like a brother to her to promise not to hurt her.
“I told her I wouldn’t hurt her.”
Pierce said he had removed his own clothing first, and then Marjorie’s. In an ironically “gallant” gesture, he said he had spread “Marge’s coat on the ground so she wouldn’t have to lie on the damp grass.”
Asked to describe his victim’s attitude, he recalled that it was one of submission. She was trying not to do anything to anger him. She had kept asking him “Why?” again and again, and she’d reminded him of his wife and his family. She had pleaded with him to “see a doctor.”
Although he would not admit to it in so many words, it was apparent to the investigators that Bernie Pierce had been unable to reach a climax. It may have been because he was very drunk, or Marjorie’s pleading may have distracted him.
She apparently still believed that he could be reasoned with.
Pierce recalled that Marjorie had complained that she was cold. She tried to put her coat on. “I took it away from her and told her to get in the car because it was warmer there.”
He directed her into the back seat of the car, and again tried unsuccessfully to rape her. At last, he moved away from her and started to put on his clothes.
Marjorie Knope must have thought she might have a chance to get away. But, tragically, after she got out of the car she stopped to find her clothes. Had she not been so modest, she might have been able to slip away in the dark and hide from him.
“Marge had moved somewhere behind the car,” Pierce continued. “It sounded like she was crying.”