by Ann Rule
“He was either on a United flight—#669—or a Trans-Canada Flight—#148—leaving Seattle on the third about 9 P.M.,” Heiman said. “I tried to verify that he was on the passenger list on one or the other of those planes, but they didn’t have his name on their manifests.”
Sergeant Herb Swindler of the Crimes Against Persons Unit was given the chief responsibility to investigate the possible disappearance of Raoul Guy Rockwell. Swindler looked a great deal like actor Richard Widmark, and once he started on a case, he didn’t let go until he found the answers he sought.
When Sergeant Swindler got this assignment, he had no idea that it would consume his life for many years to come.
Swindler arranged to interview Evelyn Emerson Rockwell. Dabbing at her eyes with a lacy handkerchief, she told him everything she knew about her husband’s trip north across the border. “He called me from the airport that night—August 3rd,” she said worriedly. “He told me he was leaving on a 9:05 P.M. plane and he had to rush to get on board. He planned to come home on a fishing boat sometime the following weekend, but I haven’t heard one word from him since he called me from a pay phone at the airport.”
Swindler also checked with the airlines that flew out of Sea-Tac on Wednesday at nine. He learned that if Rockwell was on that plane, he either had reservations under a different name or had missed his flight.
When Herb Swindler contacted Raoul Guy Rockwell’s bank, the Pacific National Bank’s branch near the University of Washington, they remembered him very well. “He recently cashed a $10,000 check written by Mrs. Winkler,” the branch manager said, “and withdrew about $3,000 from his own checking account with us. That left a small balance in the account.”
“He took it out in Canadian currency?”
“No, it was in U.S. money. His wife’s name—Manzanita—was still on the joint account.”
Rockwell’s attorney was surprised to hear that. “After the divorce, I advised him to take Manzanita’s name off that account,” Heiman told Swindler. “She never came back. I understood he’d sold all his antiques at Bushnell’s auction and collected that money, and he wouldn’t want her to withdraw that money from their account. But it looks as if there wasn’t enough left in there for him to worry about.”
Swindler realized that the popular collector of antiques was virtually cutting his ties to Seattle, apparently planning a whole new life with his bride.
But where was he? He was carrying $13,000 in cash, a very large amount of money.
The situation became even more mysterious when the Seattle police investigator checked on Rockwell’s means of transportation. He didn’t own a car; he’d been renting one, and it had been turned in to the rental company at Sea-Tac Airport. But their records indicated it hadn’t been returned on August 3, when Rockwell was supposed to be flying to Canada; Rockwell had driven it to the rental office on August 4, a day after he’d told Evelyn he was running to catch a plane.
And from that point on, he had disappeared.
Where had he been during the previous night? Just in case it hadn’t really been Rockwell who returned his car, Swindler questioned the clerk at the rental kiosk, asking for a description of the man who’d dropped off the keys.
“Very tall, great smile,” she answered. “It was him all right. I know Raoul Rockwell, and I’m positive it was him who brought the car back. And our ledger shows it was the morning of August 4.”
So Rockwell clearly hadn’t gone to Canada Wednesday night. Nor was his name on any flight lists to Vancouver or Victoria the next day.
Swindler suggested that the local newspapers might be helpful in locating Rockwell. Evelyn Emerson Rockwell and her mother, Germaine Winkler, agreed to speak to newspaper reporters in the hope that articles on the front pages of the Seattle Times and the Post-Intelligencer might bring forth some information about Evelyn’s missing husband. Even though it embarrassed her to appear in the papers as an abandoned bride, Evelyn was willing to try anything to find him. She was terrified that he might be lying injured—or worse—somewhere in the fields that surrounded the airport.
With all that cash in his briefcase, Raoul was a prime target for thieves. Just because he’d returned his rental car, that didn’t mean that he ever left the airport area.
Evelyn’s picture appeared in the papers, a petite woman in a pastel dress with satin piping on the sleeves and a modest neckline, a double strand of real pearls around her neck. She begged readers to call her or Jeffrey Heiman or the Seattle Police if they had any knowledge of where Raoul might be. She was a lovely-looking woman, and it was hard to understand why her bridegroom would have deliberately left her alone so soon after their wedding. The reporters who interviewed her tended to think something dire must have happened to him.
On the evening after the articles appeared, Sergeant Herb Swindler got another call from Jeffrey Heiman. Heiman sounded as if he had suffered a severe shock. Raoul’s attorney had believed he knew his client well. Now, he wasn’t nearly so sure.
“I just got the strangest phone call,” Heiman told Swindler, “and I don’t know what to think of it. It was from this woman who lives on Queen Anne Hill—her name’s Blake Rossler*—I’ve seen her picture on the society pages often.”
“And?” Swindler asked impatiently.
“And she’s telling me that she flew to San Francisco with Raoul Rockwell on August 4th, and he abandoned her there and disappeared.”
“She’s sure it was Rockwell?”
“She’s positive. She’s known him for a long time.”
“That is strange,” Swindler agreed.
“She’s willing to talk further to me, but she wants me to bring a detective from your unit with me when I go to her house.”
Herb Swindler was busy tracking down more flight lists—this time to San Francisco—so Homicide detective Gail Leonard was assigned to accompany Rockwell’s attorney to Blake Rossler’s upscale home. Despite his name, Gail Leonard was male, and a veteran Homicide investigator.
Blake Rossler was an absolutely beautiful woman, and Heiman and Leonard believed her when she told them that she and Raoul Guy Rockwell had been enjoying an affair for some time, even though she was still “technically” married. She said she had known “Raoul Guy” for five years, and they had become very close friends, sometimes meeting at his gallery, but more often arranging for discreet time alone. She wasn’t embarrassed in the least to admit her infidelity; rather, she was seething over the way Rockwell had tricked her and then abandoned her.
“We were having lunch on the sixteenth of July,” she recalled, “at a restaurant downtown. It was after Manzanita left him. And suddenly Raoul asked me to go to Portugal with him. At first I thought he was joking, but he said he was serious. He asked me to take some time to think about it, and then give him my answer.
“Several days later we went swimming together, and he asked me again about Portugal. I realized then he was very anxious for me to leave my husband and go with him, and I did think about it. When we met for lunch a few days later, I gave him my answer. I was about to leave on a vacation in Palm Springs, but I had decided to go away with him to Portugal if he would agree to wait for me to get back.”
Rockwell had assured her he would wait.
Blake Rossler had returned from her vacation at the end of July.
“I called Raoul to tell him I was back, and we spoke of our plans for the Portugal trip. He told me he would stay in close touch with me.”
Asked about Evelyn Emerson, Blake said that as far as she knew, Evelyn was just another antiques dealer in Seattle, and Raoul had no romantic interest in her. He had been so ardent and persuasive that she couldn’t imagine he might be interested in any other woman.
“You didn’t know they were engaged?” Gail Leonard asked. “That they were married last week?”
Blake looked astounded. “No!” she said. “Of course not. He barely knew Evelyn.”
“When did you hear from Raoul again?” Jeffrey Heiman asked
. Neither he nor Leonard had relished telling Blake that Raoul and Evelyn had gotten married on July 29.
“He called me on August 2nd,” Blake said, her voice trembling with shock. “He had the plane tickets for us to fly to San Francisco. He also called me on August 3rd. We were going to California, where we would pick up his yacht, and we were scheduled to leave the next day.”
“Where was he calling from?”
“Tacoma. I would imagine he had moved out of his place on Lake Union. I’m not sure, though. Everything was happening so fast.”
It certainly was. The men who were questioning her were incredulous that the missing Raoul Guy Rockwell had managed to convince at least two women that he adored them—all within the same time frame. He’d been divorced for only four days, had married Evelyn Emerson, and had obviously been prepared to take Blake Rossler to Portugal with him, by way of San Francisco. But he’d also told Evelyn that the trip to Portugal was to be their honeymoon! And on the night his bride thought he’d left for Canada, he’d apparently been staying in a motel in Tacoma, Washington, twenty-six miles south of Seattle.
Blake said she had packed in a hurry, prepared to walk out on her husband on the fourth of August, leaving just a note to say good-bye. She said that she hadn’t wanted to leave him in a precarious financial position, though, and that Raoul had promised to give her $1,000 so her husband could cover some debts she had run up recently.
“Raoul called me early the next morning and asked if I could be ready to leave my house by 10:45 A.M.—that was Thursday, the fourth. I was all packed so I told him I could do that, and I took a cab to the airport. We caught a twelve-thirty United flight to Portland.”
“Under Rockwell’s name?” Gail Leonard asked, his normally serious detective’s voice betraying his own incredulity. This guy Rockwell was amazing the way he played women—like puppets on a string.
Blake shook her head. “No, he bought our tickets as ‘Mr. and Mrs. Rogers.’ I assumed that was in case my husband tried to follow us.”
After spending three hours in the Portland, Oregon, airport, they had boarded another flight—this time on Western Airlines, bound for San Francisco. Rockwell had given Blake a $50 gold coin and a wedding band—which was far too small for her. “He told me we could get it sized to fit me later,” she said.
Still using their aliases as Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, Raoul had checked them into the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, where they occupied a posh suite, but only for one night. The next day, they moved to the St. Francis Hotel, but again to a lovely room.
“It was 1127,” Blake said, her voice a little faint now as she seemed to absorb that she might be the victim of a major hoax.
The romantic trip began to disintegrate when Blake became ill with a severe sore throat. “Raoul took me across the street to a doctor,” she recalled, “who thought I needed to be seen by a specialist.”
Raoul had agreed. “The next morning,” Blake said, “Raoul told me that he had made an appointment with a Dr. James Whitman, who was on the staff of the University of California at Berkeley. His medical offices were supposed to be in the Alumni Building there.”
Blake said that she felt ill and feverish as her lover called a cab, gave her $6 for the fare, and told the driver to take her to the Alumni Building.
“I was supposed to wait in front of that building until Dr. Whitman contacted me. I did think it was odd that I wasn’t just supposed to go up to the throat specialist’s office, but I did as Raoul instructed. I stood there on the street from 10 A.M. until 11.”
No one came up to her, and when she went into the building, she couldn’t find a Dr. Whitman on the directory posted near the elevators. Confused and feeling more ill all the time, Blake Rossler took a cab back to the St. Francis Hotel.
When she went up to room 1127 and opened the door with the extra key the desk clerk had given her, Blake said she’d been stunned. Raoul wasn’t there, and he hadn’t even left her a note.
It was almost like the familiar story of a couple who check into a hotel in a strange city or foreign country. When one leaves for some errand or other, the other comes back to find the lover missing. In this scenario—made into several movies over the years—no one admits to ever having seen the lover.
But the staff at the St. Francis Hotel acknowledged that they had seen “Mr. Rogers” when he and Blake had checked in the previous night. They had also seen him when he had left the building with her and put her into a cab a few hours earlier.
Blake said she’d found their room virtually empty of any sign they’d been there. Raoul had taken all of his clothes, except for a few soiled items left behind. He had also taken the gold coin and the wedding ring he’d given her.
She had no choice but to gather up her own things, slip out of the hotel because she had no money to pay the bill, and call her husband to ask him to wire money so she could buy a plane ticket home.
At the airport in San Francisco, Blake dropped all the dimes she had into pay phones as she called the hotel room where she had spent a lovely night with Rockwell. The phone rang emptily for the first half-dozen calls.
“Finally, on my last try,” Blake recalled, “a woman answered the phone. She had a youngish voice. When I asked for Raoul, she said she had never heard of Raoul Guy Rockwell. I suppose it could have been a newly registered guest, but now I even wonder if he picked up some other woman and brought her back to the room.”
Blake said she had hung up the phone and boarded the plane for her return trip to Seattle—ill, disappointed, and apologetic. Since she’d been gone only two days, she’d been able to come up with an explanation about why she’d gone to San Francisco.
“My husband didn’t ask too many questions, and he forgave me for leaving without telling him where I was going. He may not have wanted to know…”
Blake said she had no idea where Raoul Guy Rockwell was now, but she certainly hoped he was someplace uncomfortable. Gail Leonard told her that she wasn’t the only woman he had left behind. Beyond Evelyn Emerson, the investigators had heard rumors of other betrayed women. Blake was astonished.
“I thought I knew him,” she said bitterly. “I guess I didn’t know him at all.”
“Maybe none of us did,” Jeffrey Heiman concurred.
Evelyn Emerson Rockwell was even more shocked than Blake Rossler had been. She had been agonizing over what might have happened to her new husband, and now she knew that he’d deserted her for another woman—and abandoned that woman too. From the moment they’d met in his shop in February, she believed that she was special to him, and she’d never doubted his intentions. He had told her how miserable his marriage was, and that he was doing his best to leave his wife without hurting his stepdaughter too much. She thought he was a man who didn’t want to hurt anyone, even his “selfish wife.”
But now it dawned on Evelyn—and on Germaine Winkler—that Rockwell had disappeared with $10,000 of Germaine’s money!
Evelyn had known him only six months. Looking back now, she realized that she knew virtually nothing about his background, his birth family, whether he’d been married before Manzanita. She felt horrible about her mother losing so much money and that they’d both been made fools of. It had been like a lovely dream—one that turned into a nightmare.
Herb Swindler learned that Rockwell had done some shopping on July 30. He bought a set of expensive luggage at a downtown Seattle store, and three days later—just a day before he said he was going to Canada to collect the Indian artifacts—he spent $80 on a pair of silk pajamas and some underwear for himself. He also spent $49.50 on a woman’s handbag and asked to have it gift-wrapped. If he didn’t give it to Evelyn Emerson or to Blake Rossler, who had he given it to?
There was undoubtedly a third woman in his life during that hot summer of 1960, but she never came forward. If, indeed, she could come forward. Every bit of information that turned up about Raoul Guy Rockwell sparked even more questions.
Things got worse for Evely
n Emerson Rockwell, the devastated bride.
Of course, Gail Leonard and Herb Swindler began to wonder about what had really happened to Manzanita Rockwell and Dolores Mearns. It seemed odd that Manzanita hadn’t taken any money from the Rockwells’ bank account, although Raoul had told everyone that she had. The records at the Pacific National Bank showed that the only withdrawals in the past five months had been made by Rockwell himself. The couple’s friends hadn’t heard from Manzanita or from Dolores. The bank where Manzanita worked was given no notice, and Dolores left school without withdrawing, losing all the tuition she had just paid. It was as though the earth had swallowed them up sometime near the end of March.
Bank records showed that Raoul and Manzanita had opened their account on December 11, 1958. On March 29, 1960, the balance was $199.73. On April 4, Rockwell had deposited $147.88, bringing their balance up to $347.61. There were no large checks drawn on the account, although Raoul had cashed the check from Bushnell’s Auction for the sale of his antiques stock at his bank in early August. If Manzanita had wiped him out, how had she done it?
On September 2, 1960, Manzanita’s former husband, William Mearns of Vancouver, Canada, filed a missing persons report on his ex-wife and daughter. He and Manzy had three daughters together; the younger two girls were in his custody, while Dolores had gone with her mother after their divorce. Their divorce was amicable, Mearns said, and Manzanita had faithfully visited her younger daughters at least once a month.
“But they haven’t heard from her since March 12th,” Mearns told Seattle’s Missing Persons detectives. “Ordinarily, she would have come up for a weekend in mid-April, but they didn’t hear from her at all. One of our girls called the Rockwell house in early May and talked to Raoul. When she asked about her mother, he said she was away on a trip, and he asked to have me call him. But when I did, he told me that Manzy had taken Dolores out of college and the two of them had left him.
“He said she had called him the next day,” Mearns continued, “and that she asked him to pack all of her clothes and send them to Bekins Warehouse to put in storage, but he said his lawyer told him not to do that.”