by Ann Rule
As it turned out, they had no significance. Investigators traced those people and found them to be only casual friends of Dorothy’s.
On January 5, Jim Reed and Jack Hickam called on Felicia Brown,* one of Dorothy’s oldest friends. Felicia the truck driver’s wife knew considerably more about Dorothy’s day-to-day life than anyone in the investigation so far.
“Dorothy came by my beauty shop about noon on December 20th,” Felicia recalled. “She often dropped by the shop in the late afternoon to say hi, but we aren’t usually open on Mondays. She just happened to see me. She was very excited about her trip to Texas, and she was on her way to buy a Christmas present.”
Felicia, too, characterized Dorothy Jones as a creature of habit, who kept to her own routines. “Usually, after she stops in here, she gets the paper and goes home to supper.”
“You don’t know that she went home after her visit to you? Hickam asked.
“Not for sure, but she probably did.”
Felicia said that she and Dorothy had gone to the Esquire Club on Sunday night. “We don’t go out often—or rather, I don’t, because I have a family to look after.”
Dorothy, on the other hand, had no children and a husband on the road all the time. Felicia said that Dorothy was an avid horse race aficionado and that she spent a lot of time at Longacres, Seattle’s popular track.
“She always checked the papers for out-of-town results,” she added, “and she went down to Portland Meadows in Oregon, for the races there.”
When the arson investigators asked her about the man rumored to be Dorothy’s lover—Dante Blackwell—Felicia Brown nodded. “She was always talking about Dante. I can’t really say how serious they were. I know Dorothy sometimes had men over for a drink, but that was pretty casual. She used to know a soldier that she wrote to, but I don’t think she’s seen him in years.”
Asked what Dorothy Jones had been wearing on Monday, Felicia recalled that she’d worn white slacks, a silk blouse, a velveteen jacket, and brown shoes. Those were the clothes found folded on the bed in her spare bedroom just after the fire.
Jim Reed wanted to know more about the elusive Dante Blackwell. Reed, Gary Owens, and arson inspector Bill Hoppe called on yet another of Dorothy’s friends—Lita Bowen. Lita said she’d known the dead woman for five years, and that they’d been very close friends for the past year and a half. They attended numerous functions together—bingo, dances, horse racing.
“We went to the dances at the Esquire Club, and we played bingo four nights a week unless something came up. We went Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Dorothy would drive to my house, park, and I’d drive to bingo, or else she’d pick me up. We always called first to make arrangements, and if we couldn’t reach each other, one of us would go first and save a seat. We always got there at six so we could sort the cards before the crowd came.”
Lita Bowen knew Dante Blackwell well. Dorothy had started dating him in September, and sometimes the three of them went out together.
“Dante got married after he started dating Dorothy, but it didn’t seem to bother her, or slow him down,” she said. “Their relationship didn’t change.”
Lita gave her opinion that Dorothy’s marriage wasn’t as happy as Carl Jones claimed. “Dorothy just got tired of him being gone on the road all the time. In fact, she filed for divorce.”
“When was that?” Bill Hoppe asked.
“On November 27th.”
“Did Carl Jones know about Dante Blackwell?”
“I don’t know if he was aware of him, but I’m fairly sure that he knew Dorothy had filed for divorce.”
“Was Dorothy afraid of anyone?” Reed asked.
“Well—I do know at least two people who have threatened her. One night, we were at a dance at the club with Dante, and this man came up to Dorothy on the dance floor. I’ve seen him at the track, but I don’t know who he is. I heard Dorothy say to him, ‘You would be better off to hit your wife or your mother than me.’ Dorothy seemed to be very afraid of him—so much so that she asked me to wait when I took her home that night, and every night after that. You know, wait until she got inside safely. She even asked me to find someone to live with her because she was afraid to be alone.”
“Did she tell you of any threats she received?”
“The only one I know of came from one of Dante Blackwell’s ex-girlfriends,” Lita said. “It was around the week of December 13th to the 19th. This woman told Dorothy to keep away from Dante or she’d kill her. But Dorothy just laughed about that, knowing he had a wife too! She wasn’t worried about some woman who was all mixed up about who to be jealous of.”
Asked about the woman’s name, Lita Bowen didn’t know it. All she knew was what Dorothy had told her.
Lita said that she had thought a lot about something that had happened on Sunday night/Monday morning, only about fourteen hours before Dorothy Jones died.
“I went out Sunday night, and Dorothy had plans to go to the Esquire Club. When I got home at four in the morning, there was a message that Dorothy had called me at three. I didn’t call her back because I was exhausted and I figured she’d just called to tell me that she’d had a good time or something. I decided to call her when I woke up. Well, she called my apartment again at three on Monday afternoon to say she wanted to talk to me. She told my roommate to tell me she’d gone to see about some shoes for Carl and would be back shortly. I called her at five, five-thirty, and five-forty-five. But nobody answered. I figured she’d changed her mind about going to bingo so I went without her. I didn’t find out she was dead until the next day. Now, I really wish I’d called her at 4 A.M. on Monday morning. Maybe I could have saved her life or something.”
Witnesses had seen Dorothy Jones about to enter her house at 5 P.M. on Monday afternoon. Yet she didn’t answer any of the calls made to her between five and six. Someone had picked her phone up once during this time—at about 5:20—but whoever did that didn’t say anything, and the receiver had been replaced. Was someone waiting inside for Dorothy—perhaps someone who would not permit her to answer her phone?
Lita Bowen verified further that Dorothy Jones was almost paranoid about keeping her doors and windows locked. She reiterated that Dorothy didn’t smoke and discouraged smokers. “She said, ‘You can smoke—but don’t blow it in my face,’ so nobody felt comfortable smoking in her house. And she never allowed ashtrays upstairs in the bedrooms.”
It was January 11 when Inspector Jim Reed found Dante Blackwell, the man rumored to be Dorothy Jones’s lover. Blackwell, forty-three, was a handsome and expensively dressed businessman, somewhat flamboyant and very confident. He didn’t deny that he and Dorothy had been intimate friends. He said he had been dating her for four months and paying some of her bills.
“I gave her $300 to buy her plane ticket to Texas,” he said. “She was very excited about the trip. She had lots of friends there, and she loved to travel.”
“When did you see her last?” Reed asked.
“Monday—that last Monday. She came into my store. We’d been to the Esquire Club until two-thirty the night before. She was on her way home when I saw her in the store. She said she was going to see the shoe man and said she wanted to buy me a pair of shoes, too. When I told her I didn’t want any, she said she could buy me a present if she wanted to, so I told her to do what she liked. Then she left, but she called me from home about five. She was upstairs and I could hear the TV. We only talked a minute or two.”
Blackwell said that Dorothy was afraid of something, and that she planned to have her door locks changed. He didn’t know, though, specifically what she feared. Asked about the man who’d threatened her at the club, Blackwell shook his head slightly. “I think that was just a guy who wanted to date her and she told him to forget it, but I don’t think she was upset about it—or scared.”
Blackwell said that man had a reputation as a woman beater, and Dorothy didn’t like him.
Dorothy had told Dante that she
planned to place her valuables in the trunk of her car and park it at his house while she was in Texas over the Christmas holidays.
Blackwell, too, said that Dorothy was a very modest woman who never walked around naked. “She wouldn’t even walk from the bedroom to the bathroom without slipping on a robe.”
Lita Bowen had said that Dorothy hadn’t allowed ashtrays in her bedrooms, but Blackwell explained the one arson investigators had found next to her burning bed.
“She put it there as a favor to me,” he said. “I like to smoke—after…well, you know.”
Dante Blackwell said that Dorothy had had three expensive diamond rings that she routinely wore. This was surprising because she certainly hadn’t been wearing them when she died, and they had not been found in her jewelry chest. For some people, rings worth a few thousand dollars might have been enough motive for murder.
Blackwell had a solid alibi. He said he had been at his store continually from the time Dorothy stopped in in midafternoon on Monday, and until after the fire was reported. His employees would substantiate this. He also agreed to a lie-detector test about his relationship with Dorothy Jones.
The next step for Jim Reed was to locate “the shoe man” whom Dorothy planned to visit on the afternoon she died. He found a dealer who sold shoes from his home, located a few blocks from Dorothy’s house. The man verified that she had been there sometime around three-thirty on Monday afternoon to pick up some shoes for her husband’s Christmas present. She had told him she was leaving for Texas on December 23 and would be gone for a week.
So the timetable tightened up. According to statements of those who had seen Dorothy Jones, it went like this:
Noon: She visited Felicia Brown in her beauty shop, and then left the shop to pick up a Christmas present.
2:30: She visited her lover at his store and left to buy shoes.
3:00: She called to leave a message for Lita Bowen, but didn’t talk to her.
3:30: She picked up shoes for her husband.
3:00-4:30: She bought fried chicken for one, and the evening paper.
5:00: She was seen entering the driveway of her home.
5:00-5:10: She called her lover and talked a few minutes.
5:18-5:20: Her aunt in-law called Dorothy’s home; someone answered without speaking and then hung up.
6:24: The fire was reported. Dorothy was declared dead fifteen minutes later.
Sometime during Monday afternoon, Dorothy Jones had engaged in an act of sexual intercourse, either willingly or by force. This could have occurred between noon and three, or even after she arrived home. Her schedule left little time for an assignation—unless her partner was lurking in her home when she arrived there or was someone she knew well enough to admit willingly.
Still, it seemed doubtful that Dorothy Jones had been a willing partner for a sexual assignation; if she had been, she surely would have turned off food cooking on the stove before she walked upstairs to the bedroom.
In any homicide case, detectives look first at those closest to the victim. In this baffling case, they learned that her husband had been distraught over Dorothy’s free-spending shopping and her obsession with gambling, but he had never been known to make any threatening statements about her. Carl Jones apparently had had no knowledge that his wife was seeing another man. He found that out only after her death.
Further, a check with his employer, a cross-country moving company, elicited records that verified that Jones had been on the road constantly in the past thirty days—and when she died. There was simply no way he could have detoured to Seattle at the time Dorothy died in their house fire. Carl Jones had been en route from Alexandria, Virginia, to Dallas, Texas.
On February 8, Jones gave a taped statement to Inspector Jim Reed about his marriage. He wanted to be frank. He said he hadn’t seen Dorothy since before Thanksgiving. He admitted now that things had gone very wrong in his marriage. In fact, the last time he’d been in Seattle, he’d stayed at a friend’s house due to their strained relationship.
“I was the one who filed for divorce—and that was before Thanksgiving,” he said with a sigh. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that before, but I guess I thought all along that we’d make up.”
Asked if his wife’s life had been insured, Jones shook his head. “She only had about $1,100 worth of insurance—not even enough to pay for her funeral.”
On February 11, Jones passed a lie-detector test.
Reed verified that Dorothy Jones had only minimal insurance. She had had a couple of savings accounts. Her husband was unaware of these accounts; their balances totaled a few thousand dollars. Still, she hadn’t made the payments she was supposed to make on Carl Jones’s semi rig.
Dorothy had had numerous charge accounts, and she apparently had plenty of money available to her to buy clothes, go to the horse track, and to dance clubs. Dante Blackwell had given her money; maybe someone else had.
Carl Jones told the investigators that he had uncovered some rumors that his wife had been a “pickup” girl for marijuana sales, but he hadn’t learned any names of the people she had allegedly dealt with in illegal drug sales. No one else who knew her had linked her to drug trafficking, and she herself certainly had not been a drug user.
It seemed like a red herring.
Bizarrely, many pictures of Dorothy Jones had emerged. The wife who had been happy in her marriage for many years—at least until recently; the good friend and considerate relative; the immaculate housekeeper; but also the gambler, the glamorous seductress, and possibly even the drug runner. She had been a complicated woman.
And it was quite possible that there were facets of her daily life that she revealed to no one. Still, neither the arson investigators nor the Homicide detectives had found anyone who had a compelling reason to want Dorothy dead.
Jim Reed talked again to Dante Blackwell, and brought forth new information. Before Blackwell got married, Dorothy had been a frequent visitor to his home. During that period, Blackwell recalled, he had received a number of weird phone calls.
“When I answered, a man’s voice would say, ‘Where’s your girlfriend? Did she dump you?’ When Dorothy answered, there would only be breathing.
“I figured that the man was probably someone whose voice Dorothy would have recognized.”
On March 10, Dante Blackwell took several polygraph examinations and he, too, passed them all cleanly. Just like Carl Jones, he clearly knew nothing more than he had told the investigators.
If the fire in the Joneses’ home had burned even ten or fifteen minutes longer, Dorothy Jones’s death would probably have been listed officially as accidental. But the fire was discovered in a short time, thanks to her neighbors. Arson investigators felt it was a deliberately set fire, although they were not sure exactly how that was accomplished. Their most likely method was a candle or match or other heated object held underneath the mattress of her bed.
Somehow, someway, Dorothy had been unable to leave the room, where she died of smoke inhalation. How she was rendered incapable of saving her own life would remain a huge question—even until today, some three decades later.
Her autopsy revealed the slight bump on her head. Perhaps she had been given a drug that could not be detected in the postmortem exam or in all the tests afterward, something that crime labs rarely tested for.
The most likely drug that would have quickly paralyzed her and been difficult to detect on autopsy (because small amounts are normally present in the human brain) would have been succinylcholine. It is a drug routinely used in surgery to relax muscles so that a ventilating tube can be inserted into the windpipe. But it also takes away the ability to breathe or move, so oxygen must be available instantly, administered by an anesthesiologist.
It would have been almost impossible for anyone other than a medical professional or someone with access to a hospital to obtain. In the history of crime—distant and current—there are several infamous murder cases involving succinylcholine, all of
which were carried out by medical professionals.
It is one of the cruelest ways to kill someone. Although the victims of succinylcholine poisoning cannot move even to blink an eye, they are fully conscious. They cannot will their lungs to expand and draw in air, and they suffocate.
Dr. Carl Coppolino, a Florida anesthesiologist, served twelve years in prison for the 1965 murder of his wife, Dr. Carmela Coppolino. He had allegedly used succinylcholine to render her powerless. In 1984, Genene Jones, a San Antonio, Texas, nurse who became known as “the Angel of Death,” was sentenced to 159 years in prison for the murder of a toddler in her care and the poisoning of several other children, who survived. Her drugs of choice were succinylcholine and heparin (a powerful blood thinner).
More recently—in July 2006—a critical care nurse in Nevada named Chaz Higgs was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife, Kathy Augustine, who just happened to be the elected controller of the state of Nevada, a powerful and very attractive woman. Reno detectives said that Augustine had died after being injected with succinylcholine, although it was first believed that the popular forty-two-year-old politician had suffered a heart attack.
The mark of an injection of this drug can be hidden in a mole or birthmark, and certainly, Dorothy Jones’s burned flesh would have obliterated it.
But it was just a theory; as far as anyone knew, she had no intense involvement with a doctor or any other person in the medical field.
Still, it was only natural to look for far-out methods in the death of Dorothy Jones. The common methods just were not indicated. There were none of the eye and lung hemorrhages that would have pointed toward strangulation. And she had not fought a killer; her long, well-manicured nails were unbroken.
And why was Dorothy nude? She had had sexual intercourse on the afternoon she died, but with whom? In 1974, of course, it wasn’t possible to extract DNA from the ejaculate her partner left behind.