by Ann Rule
She agreed with him. She had missed him terribly, and they spent a week together and, as Marcia wrote later, took “two incredible mind trips together.” Marcia Moore had been traveling for five years, never spending more than three months in one place before moving on.
Certainly, a lot of men had come on to her, had desired her, but this was the first man in a long, long time who had seemed right for her. With him, she’d felt that she had “come home” at last.
Marcia and Happy were married on November 25, 1977. Two days later, she wrote to Elise Devereaux, “Little did you know what forces you set in motion when you invited me to stop off in Seattle this last July! Anyway, here I am married to Walter, and very much enjoying life in our clean, fresh, and shining new home near Lynnwood. We would both love to see you! Do come by whenever you can. Also, we are having an open house on Friday night, December 23. So much news to catch you up on . . . You won’t believe what we are doing!”
One would never expect to find a woman like Marcia Moore living in a duplex apartment in Alderwood Manor, Washington. She had always seemed to belong in Los Angeles or Shanghai, or, even India, studying the masters of the occult.
But Marcia’s own particular karma had intervened. The man she had fallen in love with lived in Washington and, when she joined her life with his, she, too, would settle in the principally rural area of Snohomish County. Fir forests, lumber mills and farms instead of incense, tapestries, and mystery.
One of the subjects Marcia and Happy discussed at length was the capability of drugs to alter the mind. Marcia was still trying to find a way through the looking glass of life. She mentioned a relatively little known drug, ketamine, to Happy and he surprised her with his familiarity with it. She shouldn’t have been so surprised; as an anesthesiologist, he had used it on children and in animal experiments.
Normally, ketamine was used in such strong doses that it would produce unconsciousness, but Marcia felt ketamine had properties that could unveil age-old secrets of the psyche if it were taken in much smaller quantities.
Happy wondered if she might be right. She was exquisite, brilliant, and she seemed to have, almost within her grasp, the answers he sought.
Marcia Moore became more and more convinced that ketamine was the answer to what she was seeking, and Dr. Boccaci soon was almost as enthusiastic about the mind-expanding properties of the drug as she was. Boccaci was convinced that ketamine would one day be recognized as one of the brightest tools in psychotherapy. He called it “ketamine psychotherapy.” He left behind the job at the hospital that was paying him $47,000 a year, to prove his theories.
Walter and Marcia received government approval to research ketamine. They called their research “the samadhi therapy.” They set up a foundation and lived off the $1,400 a month that Marcia received from the family trust fund. They began to call ketamine hydrochloride “the goddess Ketamine.”
Marcia charted their experiments, and wrote of her reactions to her first 50-milligram injection of ketamine.
“. . . I became aware of a tingling warmth and a sense of relaxed well-being . . . In this and subsequent ketamine voyages, my impression was one of making the circuit of a vast, multi-dimensional wheel. Walter! I repeated the name and the syllables shone forth like a glowing crown of light . . . ‘Walter, flower, power.’ I kept on chanting the words, watching the equivalent images blossom forth.”
Both Happy and Marcia were injected with the drug daily for about six months, but Boccaci soon found that he wasn’t getting the insights that Marcia was. He said later that he felt he didn’t have her mind, her psychic capacity or the spiritual growth that she had possessed before he met her. So he stopped.
But Marcia Moore continued. For fourteen months, Marcia took the drug daily—the only human on earth known to have ingested it with such regularity.
One of Marcia’s friends, an author himself who had written a number of books about the human mind, begged her to stop. He told her that he had experimented with it, too. He warned her that he had become addicted to it. “Marcia,” he pleaded, “my wife found me face-down in the swimming pool. I barely survived. I’m telling you, you are a damned fool to mess with ketamine . . .”
Marcia wouldn’t listen. She was even able to convince a few of her close friends to try ketamine, but none of them liked the sense of falling away from themselves that resulted.
Marcia and Happy invited Elise to spend the night with them in their duplex. “It was a small town house,” Elise remembered, “but it was attractively decorated with all the treasures that Marcia had purchased on her travels to the East.”
Although she had never been much of a homemaker before, Marcia cooked a lovely meal of stir-fried vegetables and tofu. “The two of them were just like little kids telling me about their plans with ketamine,” Elise remembered. “They felt that they were a perfect duo—he an anesthesiologist, and she with her background in psychology. It was as if the sixties had passed them by and they thought that ketamine could do what Leary thought acid would do with psychotherapy.”
Elise didn’t want to hurt their feelings, but she felt they were deluded. “I thought it was all nonsense.”
Undeterred, in 1978 Happy and Marcia published Journey into the Bright World, a book about ketamine. Everything seemed to be working beautifully for them. Marcia’s capacity for creative work had always been high, but now she had multiple projects going. She was writing a book using astrological projections about the Kennedy family for her brother’s publishing company. It would be timely, considering the upcoming presidential elections. Marcia confided to her brother that Ted Kennedy must not run for president, that his karmic involvement was such that he didn’t deserve to win, couldn’t win, and would be destroyed trying.
She was also working on another book that unveiled the beauty secrets of Cleopatra, whom Marcia felt she had known in a past life.
Marcia Moore was thrilled with what she had discovered; she felt she had something to tell the world, and wondered, “Can it be that the so-called common man is as deserving of a mystical experience as he is of the opportunity to take a plane trip?”
And so, by January 1979, Marcia Moore appeared to finally have reached the happiness that she had sought for half a century. She was fifty-one, still beautiful, wealthy, married to her one love for fourteen months, and engaged in work that consumed her.
What happened on January 14 is as inexplicable and eerie as anything Marcia Moore ever visualized as a psychic or experienced under the effects of ketamine.
On that Sunday evening, Happy Boccaci asked his wife if she cared to see a movie with him. She shook her head and smiled, he recalled, saying that she was going to get up early the next morning to begin work on a new book. He left her cozily ensconced in their apartment and went to the show alone.
When he returned at one A.M., he was a little alarmed to find that Marcia was not in their duplex. Her purse, her wallet, and all of her cash were there. Her passport was still in their home too. He expected her to pop in at any moment; perhaps she had gone to visit a neighbor in one of the other units. Boccaci searched the place inside and out, and then, even though it was a bitterly cold night, he walked over to the nearby Floral Hills Cemetery to look for her there. Unlike less hardy and more fearful women, Marcia often enjoyed solitary walks in the huge, well-kept cemetery. But she was not there. She wasn’t anywhere that Happy Boccaci looked.
Early in the morning, Boccaci called the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office, and reported that his wife was missing. Sheriff Bob Dodge, a retired long-time Seattle police officer, dispatched investigators to check the Boccaci duplex. There was no sign that anything criminal had taken place. The doors and windows showed no evidence that they had been forced, and there was absolutely nothing that would indicate a struggle. The ground outside was frozen hard, and would not have held any impressions from shoes or tire treads.
Dr. Boccaci wasn’t sure what clothing his wife was wearing, but detectives found her k
imono lying on the floor of her closet, something friends would say wasn’t at all like her. She was almost compulsively neat.
Marcia Moore became a “missing person.” Lieutenant Darrol Bemis took over the probe personally, assisted by Detective Doris Twitchell. For detectives trained in scientific investigation, the search for Marcia Moore would be a whole new experience.
It was not out of the scope of rational reasoning to suspect that Marcia Moore might have been kidnapped. Her family was both well-known and extremely wealthy, but no requests for ransom money came in. And kidnapping the woman without trying to collect for her safe return didn’t make sense.
Suicide? How? And where?
A woman whose life’s work involved writing about life and those areas beyond life would certainly have left a note. Moreover, Marcia Moore believed devoutly in reincarnation. And for believers, suicide is the worst possible death. Suicide destroys the natural karmic pattern. At best, the individual would have to come back again and start all over, making the same mistakes, suffering the same disappointments and agonies of the life they have just left. At worst, some proponents of reincarnation believe that a suicide is doomed in every life hereafter. Moore’s friends said that Marcia had espoused the latter theory. For her, suicide would be sentencing herself to endless lifetimes of misery, with no hope of spiritual growth.
Could she have been abducted by a killer? Possibly. It was unlikely that she would have allowed a stranger into her home, but she could have gone for a walk in the cemetery and been attacked there. But, if that were the case, where was her body? Most murder victims turn up sooner or later. Most—not all. Snohomish County was full of rivers, lakes, much of it on the shores of Puget Sound. There were abandoned mine shafts, and mountain passes covered in deep snow.
Could Marcia have decided to leave of her own accord? Neither her husband nor her brothers felt she would do that. She was happily married, involved in her work. And she was very considerate of her elderly parents. “She would communicate with us if she were able,” attorney John Moore insisted. “She wouldn’t do that to the folks.”
Robin Moore concurred. “My sister and I were quite close. She would not have disappeared without letting me know. She was writing a book for my publishing company. If there’s one thing she had, it was a very strong sense of deadlines. She would have called.”
Most of her friends were baffled by Marcia’s disappearance, but Elise felt an ominous cloud that had nothing to do with her skill at astrology. “I watched Marcia deteriorate very rapidly after she started experimenting with ketamine,” she said. “She had complained of pain in her hip. That was why she took walks around Floral Hills. The paths were a flat surface on which to walk. She didn’t want to talk about her hip, but she did say that someone was ‘bewitching’ her . . .”
But Elise didn’t think Marcia would have gone walking in the cemetery at night.
Robin Moore’s wife had spoken long-distance with Marcia on Saturday, January 13. She had found her sister-in-law very enthusiastic about her new projects, if a little repetitive and “slightly confused” about her theories.
Robin Moore, himself familiar with police investigations and mysteries from research on his books, had two theories about his sister’s fate. “I really think it’s at least a fifty-fifty chance she was kidnapped, but not by an ordinary kidnapper. It would be a grotesque kidnapping by one of the people who knew [of] this very unorthodox spiritualism she was involved in.
“Then maybe her husband is right. Maybe the ketamine caught up with her. Maybe something snapped and she took off walking.”
Agonized, Dr. Boccaci said he had come to that theory as a possibility. Although he had never seen any profoundly detrimental effects from the drug, he realized that Marcia was a special case—the only human in the world known to have ingested so much for so long.
Could she have suddenly been gripped by amnesia without his seeing its approach? The PDR (Physicians Desk Reference) warned that a side effect of ketamine is “confusional states” during a patient’s recovery from surgery. Temporary amnesia was a possibility.
But Marcia’s dosage had been far less than that used for surgical anesthesia. If she had been building cumulative residuals of ketamine, a physician of her husband’s experience would surely have noted it.
Boccaci described the immediate effects of the drug in small doses by injection. “After the first two or three minutes, you begin to feel the initial effects, like hearing the chirping of crickets. Then, after five minutes, you begin to leave your body behind. There is no cognition of the fact that you have a body, but you are aware that you are still alive. You have a center point of consciousness. You go out of the planet of Earth and into the astro planes.”
This is the opposite reaction to the street drug known as “angel dust.” With angel dust, the ingester feels dead and those who have overdosed are convinced that they are, indeed, dead.
Some of Marcia’s friends told the Snohomish County investigators that, with deep meditation, there were documented cases where the “soul” had gone so far out into the astro planes that the body left behind had died. But, even if it had succumbed without its “soul,” it was still there. Marcia Moore’s body was nowhere—nowhere where anyone could find it.
Lieutenant Darrol Bemis had to take a crash course in the psychic world, spending half his nights reading Marcia Moore’s books and others like it, “so I can understand the terminology psychics use,” he told reporters.
He was deluged with tips from mystics who believed they knew what had happened to Marcia Moore. In a case with no clues, the investigative team tried to remain open-minded and consider every possible source of information carefully, no matter how far-fetched it might be.
The phone bills run up in the probe were astronomical. Lieutenant Bemis and his team called every telephone number they could locate in the missing woman’s duplex, without finding anyone who had heard from Marcia. Marcia Moore’s family on the East Coast never heard from her. No one in Ojai, California—where she had scores of friends—heard from her.
There was one strange incident that might have had bearing on her disappearance. On either January 15 or 16, the twelve-year-old daughter of one of Marcia’s closest friends answered the phone and a woman with a Boston accent like Marcia’s asked, “Is your Mummy there?”
The child said she was not and there was no number where she could be reached, and the caller said she would call back later. She never did.
“If she were in trouble, that would be the time she would call me,” the friend offered. “She has called me to her side several times in the past when she needed me.”
The search for Marcia Moore grew eerier and eerier. Some psychics maintained that the ghosts of the dead were able to use phone lines to get messages through, even years after they passed over. Was it possible that Marcia Moore would try to contact someone from the other side? Bemis and his fellow investigators found themselves considering the most bizarre possibilities when regular detective work netted them nothing at all.
Marcia and Happy Boccaci were to have attended the International Cooperation Council’s Rainbow Rose Festival in Pasadena, California, on the weekend of January 27 and 28 as featured speakers. This was America’s largest gathering of psychics and it was a function that Marcia would never have missed if there was any way she could be there.
One of the festival organizers had a theory on Marcia’s disappearance. “I guess this sounds kind of far out, but a lot of psychics here think she dematerialized. In the Indian philosophy, you can raise your consciousness, keep developing yourself like Jesus Christ and some of the gurus, and reach a point where you just zap out.”
Bizarre? Of course. But then the whole of Marcia Moore’s life had bordered on the bizarre, and there were no rational explanations about where Marcia had gone.
Marcia had also written a speech that she planned to present at the World Symposium on Humanity in Los Angeles in April. Happy Boccaci went in her
place. He wrote to Elise, “I just got back from L.A. where I delivered Marcia’s brilliant speech, entitled, ‘Where is the reincarnation movement heading today?’ And I got a lot more people praying. I don’t have much to say except I am terribly depressed and ever so lonely. I do cry a lot. Again, thank you for your note and do keep praying . . . Light and love, (not so) Happy.”
The husband of a missing woman is always suspect. So was Dr. Walter “Happy” Boccaci. Marcia’s family considered him the prime suspect in her disappearance, although he stood to gain nothing financially in case of her death. He would actually be poorer because her trust fund wouldn’t go to him—but to her three children.
Boccaci seemed remarkably sanguine about the suspicions of the Moore family. “I realize that if my daughter were suddenly to marry somebody on the East Coast that I had never met—and six months later she disappeared, I would say, ‘Damn it. It’s the husband who did it. He’s the culprit!’ That’s just a natural thing to believe.”
Her family used Marcia’s trust fund to hire private detectives. They came to the Northwest, and had no better results than the Snohomish County investigators. Although they looked hard at Dr. Happy Boccaci, and reportedly tried to trick him into believing he would get an inheritance if Marcia’s body was found, he told them what he had told everyone: “I wish I knew where her body was, her soul, whatever. But I don’t.”
* * *
Because Marcia Moore was herself a psychic, I consulted two psychics whom I knew to be amazingly accurate in their assessments and predictions. What would happen when the cards were thrown down a year after her disappearance and questions were asked about Marcia? Would there be two diverse opinions—or would they agree?
Barbara Easton, a well-known Northwest psychic who reads ordinary playing cards, did several spreads on Marcia Moore. She knew only a little about the case. She was asking the question, “What were the circumstances around Marcia Moore’s disappearance?”