Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  To get still another evaluation of the floating legs, they were packed carefully and sent to Dr. T. D. Stewart, curator of the Division of Physical Anthropology at the National Museum in Washington, D.C.

  He found that the radiographic detail of the two femoral ends (where the thigh bones ended at the knees) were so similar that they had undoubtedly come from the same individual. The bones were of a mature person, but still rounded enough at the joints, he said, to verify that the person was in “early adult life”—around thirty-five to forty.

  If this was all that was left of Manzanita—and there was no proof of that—Dolores Mearns was still missing.

  On September 6, Sergeant Herb Swindler and Detectives Bill Panton and Carol Hahn obtained a search warrant for the entire building at 2512 Fairview Avenue. It was the first foray of one of the most sweeping searches the Seattle Police Department had ever—or would ever—carry out.

  As they examined the walls of the kitchen, they detected several dark stains that appeared to be blood near the stairway that led up to the attic. Further investigation disclosed numerous suspected bloodstains on the stairway itself, the cardboard underliner on the steps and other cardboard attached to the walls, the wooden pillar at the bottom of the staircase, and a south wall made of plywood.

  These stains would prove to be human blood when they were tested in the police lab, and the type was O-positive. The manner in which the blood was smeared on the cardboard side of the stairway suggested that a person—or a body—had been dragged up the staircase shortly after a wound had been inflicted. Swindler spotted two small reddish brown hairs and one white hair caught in a large blood smear. They were not human hairs, but rather, they had come from a cow.

  That was an oddity in an already peculiar case. Swindler learned later from the missing women’s friends that the two had shared a favorite brown-and-white cowhide belt, one item of clothing not found with their belongings.

  Swindler did find a long reddish brown hair on the underside of the third step; it would prove to be microscopically alike in class and characteristic to similar hairs taken from Dolores Mearns’s pink hairbrush.

  Manzanita’s red hair was dyed, and some of it was found on the stairs and in her hairbrush. There were also pink and white woolen fibers, as if from sweaters, trapped in the swaths of blood.

  As the searchers reached the attic, they found a virtual abattoir there: drops, smears, stains, soaking blood. Only halfhearted attempts had been made to hide it. Rugs had been piled on top of some stains, and fabric with dark stains had been jumbled together, as if to hide them. Bizarrely, someone had tried to cover up bloodstains by swabbing blue paint over them. When the paint was still wet, scraps of wallboard, plywood, and tar paper had been stacked on top of it.

  If the effort was meant to permanently hide the evidence of massive blood loss, it failed. So much of the red stuff had been shed that the blood seeped through the floor joists onto paper covering the ceiling just below. Just south of the blue-painted area, Swindler found a white enamel pan, its bottom stained halfway up with brownish red stains. There was little question that a body or bodies had been dissected here in the dim attic; there were innumerable particles of dried blood, bits of human tissue, and bone fragments left behind.

  The blood and tissue was all type O.

  A broken tooth, a lower canine, lay near the stairwell. It would be identified as coming from someone about twenty years of age.

  There were empty packages that had once held large plastic bags, the remains of a roll of thick plastic, and some lengths of rope and twine.

  There was no way to look at the dreadful physical evidence except as the handiwork of a mad butcher.

  Friends had told the detectives that Raoul Guy Rock well had plunged into weeks of heavy drinking—unusual for him—during the prior April. Still, he hadn’t appeared to be drunk. Now, during a reinterview Detective Panton had with Karen Yanick, she commented on that. “Rocky said, ‘If I could just get drunk so I could forget it for a while,’ but he never explained what it was he wanted to forget.”

  Karen recalled that Rockwell had moved his bed from the kitchen area to a front bedroom in late April. “He used to use that for a place to refinish furniture, but he said he couldn’t sleep in the kitchen alcove anymore.”

  As Swindler, Panton, and Hahn surveyed the ghastly mess in the attic, they could understand Rockwell’s need to forget. Even if the man was a psychopath, whatever had happened here would give anyone nightmares. It certainly looked as though he had killed both his wife and his step-daughter and dragged them up to the attic, where he dissected their bodies.

  “But he went ahead with his divorce to bolster his alibi,” Swindler said sardonically, “and it didn’t slow him down when it came to romancing other women. He just went on with his life.”

  There was more evidence to find.

  Swindler and Leonard hadn’t forgotten the information that the Rockwell house’s septic tank cover had been ajar for a short time during the previous spring, and then sealed tightly. When they had collected the thousands of pieces of evidence inside the old house, they knew that the next step was to open up the septic tank, cutting through the freshly cemented seams.

  It was not a pleasant thought.

  But it had to be done.

  Deputy Chief Frank Ramon, who had taken over the intense probe into the fate of Manzanita Rockwell and Dolores Mearns, arranged to have a Seattle City Engineering sludge truck and a skin diver standing by as the septic tank was opened. As the contents of the tank were pumped out, what looked like human body parts came into view. Dr. Gale Wilson would later verify what they were:

  A uterus with a small portion of the vaginal vault attached. It measured 8x5x4.5 centimeters, and it contained numerous small fibroid tumors. (These benign tumors are quite common in young women.)

  The upper portion of the right ear of a human, which had been hacked off clumsily.

  A kidney, with adipocere attached. (Adipocere is a soaplike substance that sometimes forms when human tissue is submerged in water or other liquid for some time.)

  Five pieces of colon, and mesentery (the lining of the inner abdomen).

  One section of lung.

  One section of muscle.

  One partial kidney.

  Two sections of rib, one partially burned, with sawed ends.

  An ulnar bone (one of two bones in the forearm).

  A radial epiphysis (the growth ends of the other forearm bone).

  Four phalangeal bones (hand bones).

  There were also numerous hairs, paintbrushes, and other household debris.

  Dr. Wilson said that it was his opinion that all of the tissue and bones had come from a human female approximately eighteen years old.

  This suggested, of course, that Dolores Mearns had never left the old gray house on Fairview Avenue at all.

  In the twenty-first century, given the amount of physical evidence and the massive circumstantial evidence the investigators had turned up, the case against Raoul Guy Rockwell would quickly result in an arrest warrant. But in 1960, the King County prosecutor’s office hesitated to charge him. Type O blood is the second most common type in humans, and the science of winnowing out sub-categories in crime labs was not done half a century ago. DNA hadn’t even been heard of.

  Hairs and fibers could only be classified as “microscopically similar.” Were the legs found in the Columbia River the earthly remains of Manzanita Rockwell? Were the pitiful bits and pieces of some female body found in the septic tank all that was left of Dolores Mearns?

  With DNA, a criminologist would have been able to say that they definitely were—or were not. But armed only with a common blood type, any prosecutor would face obvious attacks by a defense team, who would surely insist that there was no proof that they belonged to either of the missing women—or that they were actually deceased.

  While searchers continued to scour the Rockwells’ former home, other detectives questioned acquai
ntances of the missing couple in an ever-widening circle. They also reinterviewed those they had talked to before.

  In the weathered building that no longer had any charm at all, given the grisly things they had already located there, detectives wearing protective coveralls and rubber gloves bagged and labeled a mountain of evidence, much of which would be sent to the FBI lab for further examination: hairbrushes from each women (Manzanita’s held strands of her hair that were dyed auburn at the ends but were her natural brown at the roots); panties stained with menstrual blood (Dolores’s—she also had type O blood); a pair of Micro-Mesh nylons still in a package from the H. L. Green Company; women’s shoes sized 7 ½; a .22 caliber expended long-rifle bullet, apparently fired through the box spring of a mattress in the bedroom; a box of .22 caliber bullets; a pair of men’s slippers, size 13, soaked in dried human blood; and a meat-saw frame and two meat-saw blades.

  Human tissue, blood type O, was found in the recesses of the meat-saw frame. A check with the Seattle Blood Bank was lucky; Raoul Guy had donated blood there, and his blood type was the relatively rare type B.

  Detectives located the hardware store where the meat saw had been purchased, but the owner did not recall who had bought it. The district manager of the H. L. Green Company verified that the stores had had a special sale on the Micro-Mesh stockings after buying fifty dozen pairs from the Liberty Hosiery Mills in Gibsonville, North Carolina. The closest store to the Rockwells’ home and business was only steps from the corner where Manzanita transferred from one bus to another as she commuted from her bank job. She had probably bought several pairs of hose there in March.

  That information still wasn’t enough to secure an arrest warrant.

  There were no fingerprints—no intact fingers, for that matter, of the missing women. The phalangeal bones found in the septic tank were determined to be from the fingers of a young person—someone under twenty.

  All through the rainy autumn of 1960, the intensive probe into the disappearance of Rockwell’s wife and step-daughter continued. It wasn’t headline news, however. Rather, it meant dreary overtime hours put in by dogged detectives who found out fragments of information that might be helpful.

  The big news that fall was national: John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon had their first televised debate, with Kennedy winning it running away; Nixon’s image without makeup was that of a pale man who needed a shave badly.

  Ted Williams retired from baseball, hitting a 420-foot home run against the Baltimore Orioles in his final game and receiving a standing ovation.

  Nikita Khrushchev made his infamous shoe-banging speech at the United Nations General Assembly, and Clark Gable died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-nine.

  On that very day—November 16—Detective Panton contacted a couple in Vancouver who had been close friends of Manzanita Rockwell’s. Fortuitously, Jim Garner was an anthropologist for the Vancouver City Museum. He and his wife, Bea, had visited the Rockwells at the antiques gallery six months earlier on April 2, 1960. It had been a short visit—only a half hour—that took place about ten-thirty that night. It was a kind of pop-in visit and the Garners were testing the waters to see if the Rockwells would welcome company so late.

  “I could see that it wasn’t a good time for us to drop in,” Garner recalled. “Manzy and Rocky were having a squabble, and they both seemed upset even though they tried to hide it. We just made excuses, saying we had to get on the road north.”

  “Did you ever see Manzanita after that?” Panton asked.

  “Never. Rocky called me about two weeks later and asked if we had seen Manzy. When I said we hadn’t heard from her, he told us that they had had a fight that started that night Bea and I stopped at their place, that Manzy and Dolores left, and they stole a lot of money from him.”

  It was virtually the same story that Rockwell had told everyone who had known his wife. Rockwell had embroidered a bit more on it by saying that he had seen his wife talking in hushed tones to a strange man who had come into their shop, and he believed she had run off with him.

  Because Jim Garner was an anthropologist, he made an excellent witness who could describe Manzanita’s figure—particularly her legs.

  He remarked that they were unusually stocky for a woman with a slender torso and upper body. She had thick ankles, and a large muscular swelling that began on the back of her calf and continued downward.

  “She almost had what people call ‘piano legs,’ ” Garner said.

  Bea Garner nodded in agreement. “She always wore pointy-toed shoes that were too small for her feet, and her skin kind of puffed out over the tops.”

  They both agreed that Manzanita’s legs had been atypical, a feature that most people would remember about her. Jim Garner agreed to look at photographs of the severed legs found in the Columbia River, although Bea Garner demurred.

  Garner nodded. “I think those are Manzy’s legs,” he said. “See there? The thickening in the ankles? The feet are those of someone who wore shoes too small for her, and the toes curl under from wearing pointed shoes.”

  Panton talked with Bill Mearns, Manzanita’s ex-husband. Before he looked at the photographs, he too described her legs as having very thick ankles that hardly narrowed at all below the calf. And he also gave details of her deformed toes. “It looked as though she had bunions on the outside of her big toe joints, and her little toes looked bunched up.”

  When Panton brought out the leg photos, they were exactly as Mearns had described them, just as Jim Garner had described them.

  Until Panton’s trip to Vancouver, the Seattle detectives had believed that Manzanita and Dolores had probably been killed on March 31, on the evening after they had come home from work and college.

  But the Garners had visited them two days later. Bea Garner felt guilty, she said. “I had the feeling that Manzy wanted to tell me something that last night—but she never did.”

  Bea recalled that her friend had been wearing a rose-colored sweater, a light skirt, nylons, and black shoes. That was important because the search of the stairway up to the attic had turned up those odd pink and white fibers under a step’s edge that hadn’t been explained.

  Now, detectives suspected that Manzanita had been killed shortly after the Garners left on April 2, undoubtedly dragged up the stairs either before or after death, her sweater and skirt catching on the rough wooden steps.

  Charles O. Carroll, a onetime football great at the University of Washington, had been the King County prosecuting attorney for many years. It was an elective office, and Carroll had proudly maintained a conviction rate of well over 95 percent in all those years. There were times when detectives took cases to the prosecutor’s office, only to be disappointed because they were sent back to find out more. While they were willing to take a chance on an acquittal, the prosecutor hesitated to risk that; if a killer should be acquitted, double jeopardy would attach and he could never be tried again. And then there was the political angle, too: a winning prosecutor is more likely to get reelected.

  In the Rockwell case, there really were no bodies—at least not bodies that could be absolutely established as belonging to Manzanita Rockwell and Dolores Mearns. A murder conviction without a body had not yet been accomplished in Washington State. Indeed, it would be forty years or more before that happened.

  Instead of a murder warrant, Charles O. Carroll filed a grand larceny charge against the still-missing Raoul Guy Rockwell, on the evidence of the bunco scheme that robbed Mrs. Winkler of $10,000.

  If Rockwell should ever be picked up, that charge would hold him.

  There were times when Herb Swindler wondered if Rockwell was dead, perhaps a suicide when the apparitions of what he had almost certainly done appeared in his dreams. Nobody had heard from him.

  And then, on September 29, 1960, Detective Gail Leonard received a two-page letter that had been mailed to the Winklers. It was dated way back in March, and was signed by someone named Major John Riley.

  Riley
waxed enthusiastic as he described Raoul Guy Rockwell as a “great man” and he listed various outstanding honors he had received in the past, and spoke of a distinguished background. A handwriting expert examined the letter, whose postmark was blurred and unreadable, and declared that the signature purported to be Major Riley’s was actually that of the man known as Raoul Guy Rockwell. Maybe Rockwell was planning to return to his disillusioned bride. But he didn’t show up in Seattle.

  Additions to the murder investigation case continued to pile up in October and November, but they were mostly affirmations of earlier statements. Yes, Manzanita and Dolores had both worn the distinctive wide brown-and-white cowhide belt, Manzanita’s toes were very strange, and she had told several people she had type O blood. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police tested Bill Mearns and his surviving daughters for blood type, and they all had type O. Manzanita had been dyeing her hair auburn for about eight years.

  Some would argue that there was more than enough evidence to convince a reasonable potential juror that the missing Raoul Guy Rockwell was responsible for the deaths of his wife and his stepdaughter, and that he had employed extraordinary means to cover up his crimes.

  Charles O. Carroll did not agree with that point of view.

  Herb Swindler, Gail Leonard, Bill Panton, John Leitch, and the rest of the Seattle Police Homicide detectives were not really surprised at the information they got when a California woman contacted them. She explained that she knew Raoul Guy Rockwell well, although Rockwell was not his real name. “His name is Muldavin,” she said. “I’m married to his older brother, Michael.”

  The family name had always been Muldavin, and Raoul Guy had been born Guy Muldavin on May 8, 1925. Sometimes he gave his birthday as October 27, 1923, but that was a lie. He wasn’t in his mid-forties; he was only thirty-five. He hadn’t been born in Saint-Tropez, France, either, but in Brooklyn, New York. Michael Muldavin was three years older and was currently living with the female informant in San Diego, California.