by Ann Rule
It appeared that eighteen-year-old Georgia Murphy had dated or spent time with any number of dangerous men; her fate seemed almost preordained by the company she kept. As her family had said, Georgia trusted too many people. But she’d been only a teenager, enjoying the excitement in Seattle after growing up in a small town. Obviously, she hadn’t been as wise to the world as they had hoped.
By June 1972, Georgia had been dead for more than two and a half years, her body returned to the place where she was loved—but her killer was neither known nor arrested. If Bernie Pierce was in the Seattle area, Detectives Ted Fonis and Don Cameron could find no trace of him. They had checked all the reputed haunts of the elusive ex-sailor, all the pertinent city and county records. They had even checked with the welfare department records. But Bernie Pierce wasn’t listed anywhere. Chances were that he had long since left Seattle.
The man described as “Sid, the auto-wrecker” had evidently been a red herring; no one else had heard of him.
It looked as though the person who had bludgeoned Georgia Murphy and had thrown her away in the cloudy waters of the Duwamish was going to get away with it. Good homicide detectives hate a “loser” case more than anything so they work harder on them in their scant free time than they ever do on slam-dunk cases.
However, Don Cameron, Ted Fonis and Dick Reed agreed that they had gone as far as they could go without having some new information on Georgia Murphy’s last days.
Kent, Washington, is a small town in the southeast section of King County, a town once situated in the most fertile valley of the county. But by the seventies the valley floor was being paved over for an ever expanding Boeing plant and new shopping malls and businesses. Kent is a half hour’s drive at most from the Duwamish River where Georgia Murphy floated.
In Kent, on the evening of August 11, 1972, a young woman named Marjorie Knope was looking forward to the next day with great expectations. It would be her twenty-fourth birthday. Marjorie was temporarily unemployed and lived with her parents in a small frame house. She was finally getting over an event that would devastate most young women. The man she was engaged to had been suffocated and crushed beneath an avalanche at Snoqualmie Pass eighteen months before. After she lost him, nobody else quite measured up. Her old high school boy friend had wanted to renew their romance, but she couldn’t do it. A lot of men had asked the slender blond woman out, and sometimes she went—but with little interest or enthusiasm. Finally, only a few days before her birthday, she met a man named Jim. She couldn’t explain why, but she knew he was going to be special.
Marjorie stayed home deliberately on the Friday night of August 11, hoping that Jim would call. If he did, she planned to invite him to her birthday party.
She watched television with her parents, keeping one ear tuned to the phone. When “Love—American Style,” ended at ten, the elder Knopes said they were tired and headed for their bedroom. Marjorie said she wanted to watch television a while longer, so her folks shut their bedroom door to muffle the sound of the TV.
Her father slept soundly; he had to be up at six A.M. Her mother fell asleep too, but woke sometime later at the sound of a neighbor’s dog who was barking furiously. She saw a bright slice of light under the bedroom door and wondered why Marjorie was still up. Probably she was just excited about her birthday, or maybe she was disappointed because the call she expected had never come.
Mrs. Knope dozed off again, but it would be a restless night for her. Once more she awoke, too drowsy to know exactly what time it was. She heard voices in the living room, and assumed the television was still on. But then she heard someone walking across the kitchen floor with a heavy footfall. The shoes sounded as if they had rubber heels, and she thought that was odd; Marjorie was either barefoot or wearing thongs earlier in the evening.
Mrs. Knope heard the back door slam, and the roar of an engine revving up nearby. These were the sounds of a summer night, except they were louder than usual. There was a crunch of gravel and the sound of the car backing up and then accelerating toward the Kent-Kangley Road. She thought little of it, and half-smiled. That “Jim” that Marjorie was hoping to hear from must have come over instead of phoning. She was glad; her daughter had grieved long enough over her fiancé.
When Marjorie’s dad arose the next morning, he was startled to find the TV blaring and every light in the house on. More disturbing than that, the back door was ajar. But then they lived so far out in the country in such an isolated spot that they didn’t have to bother about locking doors. Mr. Knope figured that Marjorie had gone to bed and carelessly forgotten to secure the door.
But when her father checked her bedroom, Marjorie wasn’t curled up asleep in her bed. Nor had the bed been slept in.
Puzzled, and with the first flickers of worry intruding, he walked outside in the bright Saturday morning sunlight. Marjorie’s rubber thongs lay in the driveway beside some fresh tire tracks.
This wasn’t like Marjorie. This wasn’t like Marjorie at all. Mr. Knope didn’t go to work after all, and when there was no sign of or word from Marjorie by 9:30, the Knopes began to call her friends. Perhaps she had decided at the last minute to spend the night with a girlfriend. She had done that once before, but when she found out how worried her parents had been, she had promised never to do it again. She was a considerate daughter who would never worry them unnecessarily.
No one they called had seen Marjorie since late Friday afternoon. The next hour passed with terrible slowness. Marjorie had to be someplace close by, but they couldn’t find her. Filled with dread, her parents reported her missing to the Kent Police. Although she had been wearing baby-doll pajamas when they’d seen her last, a check of her closet led them to believe she was now wearing blue jeans and a “Captain America” shirt. “Some crazy thing with blue and white stripes,” her father told the radio operator, “and a big white star on the front. And she’s probably barefoot. Her shoes are in the driveway here.” He said his daughter was five feet, five inches tall, but weighed only a bit over a hundred pounds. She needed her glasses to see any distance at all.
While the Kent police checked with the King County police about any accident and injury reports, her parents continued to search the house. Their fears increased when they found her blue jeans and the “Captain America” shirt stuffed in the back of her closet. That meant she was still in her baby-doll pajamas. They were positive that Marjorie would never have left the house wearing only her sheer, shortie pajamas—at least not by choice.
The morning wore on with no news of Marjorie. As the noon sun shone high in the sky on her birthday, a fourteen-year-old boy was taking a short-cut across the football field of Meridian Junior High School, a school located several miles from the Knope home. He was almost across when he noticed something lying on the west side of the field, something he couldn’t identify right away but which seemed out of place. Feeling the little hairs stand up on the back of his neck, the teenager walked cautiously to within twenty feet of the object and tried to make his brain absorb what his eyes were seeing. Suddenly he realized he was looking at the nude body of a woman. She lay, crumpled in a strangely awkward position, at the far edge of the playing field.
The boy drew no closer, but whirled and ran for home. Thinking he had to be imagining things, his mother told him somewhat impatiently to get in the car, and they drove to the junior high school. When she looked where her son was pointing, she believed him. But she was too afraid to go closer. They knocked on the door of a nearby house and the man living there agreed to accompany them to the field.
He walked to the woman who half-lay, half-knelt there. He touched his hand to the sole of her foot, and found it cold to the touch. Next, he tried to find some faint pulse in her wrist and throat, but there was none.
“She’s dead, I think,” he told the teenager and his mother. “We won’t touch anything—I’m going to call the sheriff.”
The first deputies to arrive saw that the young woman who lay in the grotesque
position was indeed dead. She lay half on her side, and they could see that her knees were severely gashed, although there was very little blood. These were probably postmortem wounds.
While the deputies cordoned off the entire field with yellow crime scene tape, King County Detective Sergeant George Helland and Detectives Keith May, John Miller and their supervisors surveyed the bizarre scene before them. It was almost surreal in its brutality. It was obvious that someone had driven a car back and forth across the dead girl’s body, breaking bones and perhaps literally crushing the life out of her. Tire burns, tracks, and axle grease marked her pale flesh. The girl’s knees were cut to the bone where some part of the vehicle’s undercarriage had sliced across them.
There were some clothes lying near the dead girl’s left foot. As they read over the missing report that was only a few hours’ old, they had little doubt that the victim was the missing Marjorie Knope. There was a shortie nightgown, there—just as her parents had described, and there was also a quilted ski jacket.
How Marjorie had come to be on the football field dead—and miles from her home—would be harder to determine.
The detectives photographed the entire scene, taking hundreds of shots from every conceivable angle. Fresh tire tracks were evident in the dirt edging the field and in the grass itself. There were deep indentations in the manicured turf where a car’s wheels had spun. The killer had clearly made at least two passes over the body.
The investigators moved carefully in a circle around the body, staring hard at the grass and dirt there. And then, they found what every homicide detective hopes for but rarely finds. There were two small items half-hidden in the grass. They spied a single Kwik-Set key attached to a ring fashioned to look like a tiny princess phone, and a brass button. The button was distinctive, almost military in appearance, with a design of two dragons etched on its surface. Had they belonged to Marjorie Knope? Or was it possible that the killer had dropped them?
Carefully, they slipped the key ring, the button, and the dead woman’s clothes in separate bags, sealed them and labeled them with the date, time and their initials.
It is the King County department’s habit to triangulate a body site with measurements keyed to fixed points—so that they can reestablish the location absolutely at a later time if they need to. Even photographs are not as precise as triangulation.
Hours later, when the scene had been thoroughly checked out, the victim’s body was released to deputies from the Medical Examiner’s Office. As they gently turned her body over, the investigators saw she still clutched some kind of scarlet material in her right hand. With rigor mortis fully established, it was difficult to pry the cloth from her hand. She had died holding onto a pair of red panties. Perhaps Marjorie Knope had been trying to find her clothes when she was hit.
“It looks almost as if she were kneeling or crawling when she was run over,” George Helland mused. “Maybe she didn’t even see what was going to happen. I hope not.”
They had been working for hours in the hot August sun, but they were far from finished. There were two areas they had to explore at once. Residents who lived near the field had to be contacted to see if they had heard anything during the night. A sadder task was the questioning of Marjorie Knope’s family to see if they could give any reason for her bizarre and brutal murder.
Deputies spread out along the streets that abutted the junior high school property. Most of the residents had heard nothing unusual, but they did provide some information that could very well prove valuable. A man, who had been up with his sick child, recalled hearing a car with a noisy engine and a worn-out muffler on the field about two the previous morning. “I heard car doors slamming,” he said.
“Anything else?” Deputy Glenn Christian asked.
“The car’s engine sounded like a small motor,” he said. “It definitely wasn’t a muscle car or anything like that.”
A woman nearby told the investigators that she had been extremely conscious of time the night before. “I was waiting up for my teenagers because they had missed their curfew,” she said.
The woman said she had seen a small, dark-colored car drive into the school yard at 1:20 A.M. Since her husband worked for the school district, she had watched the vehicle carefully, wondering if it was someone planning to break into the building. After it disappeared from her line of sight, she had still been able to see reflected headlights from somewhere behind the school.
“Then,” she told Detective Keith May, “I heard a car start up again—precisely at 2:10 A.M. Seconds later, it reappeared at the north end of the school in the parking lot. It accelerated out of the lot and went south at a rapid pace. At this time, I could see it was like a car my son used to own—a 1961 Ford Falcon. Clean. Dark-colored. Big round tail lights, and, I think, a hole in the muffler. The car disappeared, but it was heading toward Kent on S. E. 240th.”
The witness was a detective’s dream, good on time and detail.
Marjorie Knope’s stunned parents were at a loss to explain why she would have left their house the night before. They were having great difficulty absorbing the fact that she had been safe in her own home, only a dozen feet away from them, and now she was dead. Murdered.
Mrs. Knope went over her memory of hearing a visitor during the night, the slamming of the back door, and the sound of a car leaving. Although she had been half asleep when she heard the sounds, she was sure she would have wakened at once had Marge called for help.
The detectives checked the Knopes’ yard. In front of the house, they noted that the freshly plowed dirt next to the driveway was disturbed as if a struggle had taken place there. There was also a mark that looked as if someone had dropped to one knee in the dirt. At a cursory look, the tire tracks in the driveway were similar to those at the play field—new tread on the front wheels and worn snow tires with a zig-zag pattern on the back.
Why, the detectives asked, would anyone have wanted to hurt Marjorie? Had she been afraid of anyone in her life? Was she in a relationship marked by quarrels?
“No,” her parents said. “No, not at all.” They said she had been mourning her lost fiancé for a year and a half, and had not dated anyone seriously since his death.
It was therefore difficult to form a motive, but the investigators reached for the most unlikely dynamics. Perhaps one of Marjorie’s suitors had come to her parent’s house in the wee hours of the morning and forced her to leave with him.
“He would have had to force her,” her father said adamantly. “She would never have gone along willingly. She was little, but she was strong. And she had been working out.”
It appeared possible that Marjorie Knope had allowed someone to enter her parents’ home briefly, after throwing on a ski jacket over her nightie. She might even have walked him (or them) to his car. At that point, the unknown visitor had apparently grabbed her with such force that she was literally lifted out of her shoes. This theory was bolstered when the detectives found her wire-framed glasses in the dirt of the driveway. She wore her glasses all the time, even to have her picture taken.
What struck her parents as strange was that anyone who didn’t know them pretty well could have even found their place. “Unless you have directions, it’s almost impossible to find our house,” her father said.
* * *
The King County detectives knew what had happened to Marjorie Knope on her twenty-fourth birthday, but they still had no idea who might have killed her—or why.
Detective Keith May was embarking on his first homicide probe and he was joined by a veteran investigator, Detective Ted Forrester. The two detectives and Sergeant Helland checked Marjorie’s background meticulously, and talked to several of her girlfriends.
Her friends verified that she had no steady boyfriend. They said she dated quite a lot, but only casually. She and her friends frequented two taverns where dancing and beer-by-the-pitcher were featured. One was the Ad Lib and the other was called The Blarney Stone. They were the kind of tave
rns where young women could go in a group and know they were among friends. Nobody would bother them. They fed the juke box and listened to “American Pie” and Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman.”
Her friends told the detectives that Marjorie had met a man at the Ad Lib on Thursday night. “Marge was in a very good mood,” a good friend told the detectives. “This person was named Jim. He had long hair—medium-brown, a beard, and a mustache. He was about five foot ten, and weighed around 160 pounds. They left together, along with another couple we know.
“Marge really liked him and she told me later that he’d promised to call Friday—the night she disappeared—about a Saturday date. The last time I talked to her that day, he hadn’t called.”
Marjorie’s girlfriend told Ted Forrester that she had had some trouble shaking a boyfriend she wasn’t interested in. “His name is Scott Benti*. She told me he took her up to the mountains one day and put the make on her. She wasn’t interested at all and he got mad. She said he wouldn’t speak to her all the way home. And I heard that he told another one of our friends that he ‘was going to have Marge—one way or another.’ ”
“Do you know what he meant by that?” Keith May asked.
“I don’t know for sure, but it kind of scared Marjorie when she heard that.”
George Helland talked to another girl who had been Marjorie Knope’s best friend since they were both in the seventh grade. She nodded when he mentioned Scott Benti. “Yes, she was kind of afraid of Scott. She told me he said ‘I’ll get you in bed one way or another,’ and that the look on his face when he said it scared her. That was the reason she was turned off about him.”