Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder and Other True Cases
Page 18
The matriarch of the family was Sylvia Muldavin, who spoiled her younger son, Guy, outrageously, doting on him and taking him on trips and cruises. She found the boy charming and brilliant. In 1936, Sylvia and Guy had taken a cruise to Cuba on the S.S. Iroquois, returning to the Port of New York via Miami on April 21. The ship’s manifest listed their address as 2865 West Twentieth Street in Brooklyn.
Rockwell’s sister-in-law said that Guy had never been in the army because he had an ear condition that made him 4F. Nor had he gone to the University of California. He had gone to boarding school and attended a few months of drama school during the Second World War. At that time, he had changed his name from Muldavin to Rockwell, and added “Raoul” because he planned to have a career on the Broadway stage and it sounded better. He didn’t have even the equivalent of a high school degree, much less a college degree.
“Guy was married once before Manzanita,” his chagrined sister-in-law said. “They had a son, but when they divorced, his first wife got custody of the boy.”
The Michael Muldavins had received a phone call from Guy from San Francisco on either April 6 or 7. That would have been two days after he abandoned Blake Rossler in the Golden Gate city.
“He promised he was coming for a visit,” the woman said, “but he never showed up. He also told us he was going to Ribera, New Mexico, where his mother lives, and he was going to travel with her to New York to visit relatives. But Sylvia says he didn’t meet her as he promised. You really can’t count on Guy—he lies.”
That much the detectives already knew.
They had checked on Rockwell’s Fulbright scholarship and found that it never existed. The Fulbright Foundation had never heard of Rockwell or his amazing collection of Ashanti counterweights.
His sister-in-law promised to notify the Seattle investigators if she heard from Guy Muldavin Rockwell.
But when the elusive antiques dealer surfaced, he was way across the country from San Diego. Just after Thanksgiving 1960, the FBI and New York City Police had located him and arrested him on the grand larceny warrant and other charges.
Sergeant Herb Swindler booked a flight to New York immediately. He believed that if he could engage Muldavin-Rockwell in a conversation, he would be able to elicit a confession that would tie up the double-murder investigation successfully. Although Swindler would be involved in any number of high-profile investigations throughout his long career in law enforcement—including the Ted Bundy case—no one who knew him would deny that tracking “Raoul Guy Rockwell” was the most important case in Swindler’s life.
“I met him in unfamiliar territory,” Swindler told me. “The New York cops were anxious to talk to him, but they gave me an interview room and some time alone with him. He came so close to telling me what I needed to hear.”
It was December 2, and the Christmas lights were glittering on the tall tree at Rockefeller Center when Herb Swindler was at last only a few feet away from his clever quarry. He built up to the hard questions slowly, aware of the big-city detectives waiting their turn in the hallway beyond the small room where he sat with the fugitive.
Swindler spread out the 8-by-10 glossies that his team had taken during their many searches of Rockwell’s property.
“What happened?” Swindler asked. “Can you explain what happened? It’s had us baffled for months now, and you’re the only one who can tell us.”
Swindler was deliberately playing to Rockwell’s massive ego, giving him yet another chance to pontificate—to be the expert, the man with the key to an intricate maze of facts. He could see that Rockwell-Muldavin was tempted to reveal long-held secrets but that he was trying to censor his comments.
“I’m morally guilty of Manzanita’s and Dolores’s deaths,” he said slowly. “I was the only person living with them, and the only person who might have had an opportunity to commit these crimes.”
Swindler waited, but Rockwell stopped talking.
The bulldog detective laid out another photograph; it was a close-up of Manzanita’s severed leg.
Rockwell’s whole body shuddered as he stared fixedly at the terrible picture. “I know what Manzanita’s leg looked like,” he said. “And I know that Manzy and Dolores are dead.”
“You told a lot of stories after they disappeared,” Swindler said. “They didn’t match up that well, but it seems as though you know what really happened to them.”
“Let’s not be coy,” Rockwell said sarcastically. “How could those stories be true? You know, too, that they’re both dead.”
Now Rockwell became somber, his face changing into a mask of despair. “I want to die, you know,” he said sadly. “I have nothing further to live for, and I am willing myself to die. I would never allow myself to be in a position to hang. Never.”
Swindler felt he was the only audience for a performance by a consummate actor, a complete con artist. Rockwell told him that he would reveal the entire story of what had happened the prior April, but not during his lifetime. “I will write it all down in my will.”
“Why won’t you tell me now?” Swindler pressed.
“I need advice on several moral issues that are involved.”
It would have been laughable, Swindler thought, if the situation wasn’t so serious. Raoul Guy Muldavin-Rockwell discussing what was moral. He had conned and robbed and undoubtedly killed to get what he wanted, sometimes hurting people for no reason at all except to prove how clever he was. How could he now be discussing morals?
The prisoner dropped tidbits of confessions, doling them out like small prizes, enjoying the power he had to stop talking whenever he chose, knowing that Swindler was so eager to hear the truth. He admitted that he had forged his wife and stepdaughter’s names to endorse the paychecks that came in the mail after they disappeared. Swindler knew that was true from the handwriting expert’s report.
“I sealed the septic tank with cement,” Rockwell said. “After they vanished, there was a terrible, foul odor coming from it.”
Herb Swindler felt they were right on the edge of a full confession when there was an impatient knocking on the door of the interview room.
“We were so close,” he said a long time later. “And those New York cops said they needed the room—right then. I had no choice but to stop the interview at that point. I’ve never been so frustrated.”
On December 5, Swindler and FBI special agents Joe Fox and Frank Donnelly had another shot at Rockwell. Once again, the suspect admitted to “moral guilt” for Manzanita’s and Dolores’s deaths. But he would go no further. “I’ll tell you all about it,” he promised, “as soon as I talk to a Jesuit priest in Seattle.”
And then he shut up.
Returned to Seattle in Swindler’s custody, Raoul Guy Rockwell met with a Jesuit priest on December 7 and December 9. Their conversation was, of course, privileged. What Rockwell said to the priest is unknown.
After conferring with the priest, Rockwell spoke once again to Herb Swindler, this time in the Seattle Homicide Unit. He refused to talk about his probable crimes, breaking his promise to tell everything after he had talked with a Jesuit.
What he did say to Swindler undoubtedly summed up who Rockwell really was, and his total lack of conscience.
“They are dead,” he said forcefully, “and I’m alive, and that’s what’s important.”
Raoul Guy Muldavin-Rockwell was never charged with the murders of Manzanita Rockwell and Dolores Mearns. Nor did he serve time for the theft of $10,000 from the woman who was his mother-in-law for a very short time. He disappeared from the Seattle scene, and few people who live there today even recognize his name. As infamous as he was forty-seven years ago, the winds of time have swept away his dilapidated buildings, his alleged crimes, and his memory.
Public records show that a man named Guy R. Muldavin was married on February 16, 1974, to a woman named Teri in Washoe County, Nevada. And a man named Milo Guy Maltby married another woman named Teri in Clark County, Nevada, on May 4, 1981.
Sylvia Muldavin, Rockwell’s mother, died on July 23, 1972, in Santa Clara, California, at the age of seventy. His brother, Michael, passed away in Ribera, New Mexico, on January 1, 2005.
And unless he pulled off his own disappearing act, Guy Muldavin’s death at the age of seventy-six is recorded as having occurred in Salinas, California, on March 14, 2002. He took a lifetime of secrets with him to the grave, never to be revealed.
Sergeant Herb Swindler rose through the ranks of the Seattle Police Department, eventually becoming the captain in charge of the Crimes Against Persons Unit. Before he retired, Herb gave me a hundred pages that detailed his work on the Raoul Guy Rockwell case.
There, I found that every piece of evidence his team had picked up was listed carefully in Swindler’s own handwriting, all the overtime hours he had worked. The single-spaced typed summary of Case #60-495-379 that he wrote about the mysterious double-murder case is on lined paper, yellowing with age now, and curled at the edges, but it is all there, bringing back the grotesque horror of 1960. The detectives who searched the somehow-haunted building that housed Guy Rockwell’s antiques store marked the pages with their initials. I’m sure that all of them remembered this case for the rest of their lives.
I promised Herb Swindler that one day I would write about Raoul Guy Muldavin-Rockwell, the killer who got away. And now I have. Sadly, Herb passed away in 2005 without ever seeing a truly satisfactory ending to the case he wanted so much to solve. But he gave “Rockwell” a run for his money, and the city of Seattle was rid of one of the most outrageous con men ever to settle there.
And of course, neither Manzanita nor Dolores ever came home again.
The
Truck Driver’s
Wife
During the years I wrote for True Detective and several other fact-detective magazines, it sometimes seemed that I spent half my life in Homicide units around America. I attended the King County Sheriff’s Office’s Basic Homicide School for two weeks, and I went on many ride-alongs with various law enforcement officers: the Washington State Patrol, Seattle Police Department, Pierce County Sheriff’s Office, and even the Seattle Fire Department’s Arson Unit: Marshal 5.
It was the best way I could understand what cops and investigators actually did when they left their offices and headed out into the field after Roll Call or Show-up. As any other civilian must, I had to sign forms that said I wouldn’t sue any of these departments if I should be injured during my ride-alongs.
Fortunately, I never got hurt, but I often came home smelling of smoke after riding a shift with Marshal 5’s arson investigators. For years, I carried a card, issued by the fire chief, that gave me blanket permission to enter any burning building I chose to. After my first experience inside a fire site that had been “tapped” (fire extinguished and situation under control), I didn’t relish entering an arson site. Even when the flames were out, the smoke was almost suffocating. The men who investigated possible arson fires had once been firefighters themselves and seemed inured to the acrid fumes as they hastened to check the premises for signs that a fire had been deliberately set.
But I never got used to the smoke—not even after I rode with Marshal 5 for more than three hundred hours.
The men who had spent years in the fire department sometimes tested my gullibility with anecdotes and stories that couldn’t possibly be true. I usually caught on quickly, but there were times I wasn’t sure if they were teasing or telling the truth.
Like Homicide detectives, arson investigators look for minute clues that will give them something they can prove in a trial. They have the added challenge of sifting through burned material that is often unrecognizable. They begin at the roof and work down, removing layer after layer of what were ceilings, walls, curtains, furniture, rugs, floors, papers, trash, and—if they are lucky—gasoline cans or candles not quite burned, which mean a clumsy and stupid arsonist has been there.
Marshal 5 investigators taught me about professional arsonists who could set up a fire that would start long after they were on a plane out of town. They explained that neophytes were often seriously burned—or even killed—when they threw a lighted match into a room doused with an accelerant, thinking they could slam the door before the inferno got to them.
They didn’t expect the instant explosion that usually followed.
I think the most intriguing tales involved human beings who simply caught fire for no explainable reason. Was it possible that some chemical change occurred within a living body that caused it to burst into flames without any outside cause?
Some of the old-timers said it was, and recalled finding the remains of people who had apparently caught fire while they sat in an easy chair. They died quickly as tremendous heat was generated.
The story of Dorothy Jones may be a case of spontaneous combustion. I have pondered it for many years, and I am still not sure what happened to her.
At the age of forty-four, Dorothy Jones was the envy of many of her friends. She was an extremely attractive African American woman with an exceptional figure that any twenty-five-year-old would have been proud of. She had a longtime husband and there were rumors that she also had an attentive lover. She had a wide circle of friends, both trusted female friends and business associates who admired her. They were loyal to her. Initially, none of them were anxious to talk about Dorothy’s private life when detectives came around asking questions.
She had a good income, and she and her husband shared a neat and comfortable house in the south of Seattle. They had no children.
Five days before Christmas 1976, Dorothy was busy running a number of errands. She was looking forward to a trip to San Antonio, Texas, to spend the holidays with relatives there. Her husband was an over-the-road truck driver, and her friends thought she would probably meet up with him at his mother’s house in the Alamo city. He’d been gone on a long trip—more than a month—and he was to deliver a load of furniture in Texas, and then they would reunite for a leisurely holiday.
But that wasn’t going to happen. Dorothy never made it to Texas. Somewhere in Dorothy’s complicated life, a killer waited for her. Whether it was a human murderer who had his or her own reasons to want Dorothy dead, or a more amorphous killer—some sort of natural or unnatural phenomenon—would be the question.
The death of Dorothy Jones was one of the strangest occurrences I ever encountered.
There is no question at all that she was seen alive and vibrant on the evening of Monday, December 20, 1976. Less than an hour and a half later, she was dead, literally roasted, on the charred bedroom of her home.
What happened to Dorothy seems impossible. It could not have happened.
And yet it did.
The Seattle Fire Department received the first call on the 911 line at 6:24 on the evening of December 20. The caller blurted that flames were belching from an upstairs window of a house on Thirty-first Avenue South. Firefighters from Battalion Number 5 leapt aboard their waiting engine and roared to the address with sirens keening. They arrived within a few minutes. They could see the smoke pouring from the upper windows and curling around the roof when they turned the first corner, but when they entered the house, the downstairs looked completely normal, untouched by either flames or smoke.
Firefighter Gordon Ochs ran through the downstairs the truck driver’s wife rooms and followed wisps of smoke up the stairway. That stairwell was full of superheated air.
As Ochs approached the bedroom on the west side of the center stairway, he saw that the door to that room was open approximately eight inches. But as he pushed on it, he felt so much resistance that he had to put his shoulder against the door with great force in order to gain entrance.
The smoke in the room was thick and black; no one could have made it past the top of the stairs without a mask. Ochs’s eyes swept the room ra
pidly, and he saw that the three windows in the smoke-clogged room were unbroken. When he opened the nozzle on the inch-and-a-half hose line he carried and cold water hit the room, the windows shattered.
He was able to extinguish the fire in the room rapidly; the flames seemed to have been most concentrated on and around the king-size bed. The fire had been intense and fast-burning, so hot that the plastic cabinet of a TV next to the bed had literally melted into a grotesque caricature of what it once was.
The bedroom walls were blackened with clear-cut fire Vs rising above the bed’s headboard, but their lower portion was untouched.
Now Ochs could make out the form of a woman who lay just inside the door. She was totally naked. She rested on her back with her left leg wedged between the seat and the base of a swivel chair, her face turned slightly to the right.
There was no question that she was dead. Indeed, a postmortem examination would show that her body—particularly her full breasts—had literally been cooked by the fierce heat in the room.
With the discovery of the woman’s nude body, the fire on Thirty-first Avenue took on new dimensions. Marshal 5, the arson squad, always responded to fire death scenes to determine whether the cause was accidental or deliberate. Now, Inspector Jim Reed and Seattle Police detective Bill Berg, who was on special assignment with Marshal 5, were alerted. They headed up Seattle’s Yesler Street toward the fire site. Seattle Police detective sergeant James Whalen of the General Assignments Unit that handled arson cases joined them.
The flames were gone, but the house still reeked of smoke as Jim Reed walked through the front door. He saw that there was no fire damage at all on the first floor. The home was nicely decorated and immaculately kept. It was almost eerie; from the appearance of the downstairs rooms, it seemed that whoever lived here had stepped away for only a moment or so. The living room was very neat. Reed looked automatically for ashtrays and found them, but they had been emptied and washed. The evening paper lay unopened on a chair near the front door.