UBC: Rule, Smoke, Mirrors and Murder

Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


If this collection doesn't cure you of that abhorrent coinage The [Male Noun]'s [Female Noun], nothing will.

"The Deputy's Wife": Seattle WA 2001: Just when I think the bar can't get any lower . . . Bill Jensen, a former King County Deputy, conspired while in prison awaiting trial on charges of felony domestic abuse to have his wife, his sister-in-law, and his two children murdered either so that he could (a) inherit a fortune he believed his wife and his sister had inherited (even though he had squandered most of his wife's share already) or (b) so that he wouldn't have to go through divorce proceedings and admit to his wife how much money he'd lost gambling. (Murder is cheaper than divorce.) Jensen was bullying, spiteful, vindictive, selfish, poisonously egotistical, abusive, and finally just irredeemably cruel. Fortunately, the man he approached about the hit on his family decided he didn't actually want to be a murderer for hire, and when Jensen made the final arrangements, he made them to an undercover cop wearing a wire. Poetic justice is sometimes deeply satisfying.

"The Antiques Dealer's Wife": Seattle WA 1960: Raoul Guy Rockwell was something else. He murdered his wife Manzanita and his 18-year-old stepdaughter Dolores, dismembered them in his attic and disposed of the bodies so that only parts of them were ever found (fragments of Dolores were discovered in the septic tank of their home; Manzanita's legs were fished, one at a time, out of the Columbia River). Six months later, before anyone knew what had happened to Manzanita and Dolores, he divorced the woman he'd murdered, claiming she'd left him and taken thousands of dollars with her (thousands of dollars which, arguably, the Rockwells , and within four days had married another woman, Evelyn Emerson. He conned Evelyn's mother out of $10,000 to buy First Nations artifacts from Canada (itself a venture that was semi-legal at best), then convinced a third woman (who didn't know he was married to Evelyn) to abandon her husband and go with him to Portugal. He abandoned that woman in San Francisco and vanished. He was eventually found, but he was never tried for Manzanita & Dolores' murders.

"The Truck Driver's Wife": Seattle WA 1976: This may or may not be a case of spontaneous human combustion. If it isn't, it is truly difficult to come up with an explanation of Dorothy Jones' death.

"The Convict's Wife": Salem OR 1971: Every time I try to summarize this case, it comes out sounding like a John Steinbeck novel. So, career criminal George Light takes his wife Doris Mae and his five small children from Illinois to Salem (Oregon) where they squat in an abandoned farmhouse. George's brother Larry gets out of Joliet and follows them to Oregon. Larry has a long-held grudge against George for sending him up the river, and he doesn't like the way George treats Doris Mae. Within a few months, the inevitable happens: Larry kills George and buries him in a shed behind the house. Doris Mae was an accessory, in that she held the door for Larry to drag George out. Larry then gets arrested for brawling, and Doris Mae gets evicted because the house is unsafe. (Nobody realized until much later that she had no actual right to be there.) Larry gets out of jail; he and Doris Mae and the children disappear. Three years later, Larry--in prison in Illinois again--gets an attack of conscience and confesses, directing police to the location of the body, which they would never otherwise have found.

"The Chemist's Wife": Seattle WA 1975: Every Woman's Nightmare: This man abused, stalked, and terrified his teenage, common-law wife. When he realized that she really meant to leave him, he kidnapped her and drove her from Texas to Seattle, just in time for Christmas with her grandparents. When he started to abuse her again, her grandfather tried to stop him. The abusive stalker nutjob murdered her grandfather, nearly murdered her grandmother, and fled, taking his wife with him again. Mercifully, he was apprehended before he could hurt anyone else. He was convicted of second-degree murder.

The only time I've ever seen Rule commit the Blame the Victim fallacy is in her introduction to this case: "In the end, this [domestic abuse] seems to be an insoluble problem, one that might be avoided only if women could see beyond the romantic facade of a suitor who promises her the world while he is steadily separating her from her family and her friends" (284). The victim isn't the one responsible here (and the victim isn't always a woman, either--Rule says in her introduction to the last case that she had a guy call her on that (although that case is actually the same old familiar pattern of male abuser/female victim up until the woman picks up a shotgun)--nor is the relationship always heterosexual). It's not her job to avoid being abused. It's his job to not abuse her. I'm all in favor of cooperation here: self-reliance and accepting responsibility for oneself. But don't put the blame for the situation on the victim's failure to avoid it. Put the blame where it belongs, on the person (male or female) committing abuse.

"The Painter's Wife": Pasco WA 1978: Michael Anderson escaped from prison and hid in the basement of a middle-class family's home. When he was discovered, two days later (!), he tied up the woman's two teenage sons (and a friend), beat her mostly unconscious, and kidnapped her. He threatened to, but did not actually, rape her. He imprisoned her in her own trunk. Then he decided to rob a big box store, and did so, taking the store manager hostage as well. The store manager, Doug Parry, was a former EMT who'd changed careers because he was tired of getting into high-risk situations. (Irony punches you in the face. Roll D20 for damage.) Parry kept his head and talked Anderson into getting a motel room instead of killing them. He then managed to alert the desk clerk without tipping off Anderson, which meant that Anderson was apprehended and neither hostage was killed. Anderson was given multiple life sentences, to run consecutively, meaning that he might actually spend, or have spent, the rest of his life in jail.

"The Minister's Wife": Selmer TN 2006: Mary Winkler killed her husband Matthew, a minister in the Church of Christ. She shot him in the back with his own shotgun, most likely while he was sleeping. The big unanswerable question is why. There's certainly evidence that Matthew was domineering and abusive, emotionally if not physically. Mary Winkler had gotten herself involved in an email scam; their bank account was overdrawn by $5,000 they did not have and (although I do not understand the ins and outs of it, she herself had done something illegal). Mary claimed that she'd only been acting on Matthew's instructions, and that she killed him (a) because she couldn't stand his abuse and his sexual kinks any longer (Matthew liked anal sex; Mary did not. Matthew liked pornography; Mary did not.), (b) because she couldn't stand his way of shutting up a crying baby any longer (she claimed he pinched their infant daughters' noses shut and suffocated them into silence, which, if true, means that Matthew Winkler probably very narrowly avoided committing infanticide at least once), and (c) in a fugue state, without fully understanding what she was doing. It's really hard to see how she could have gotten the shotgun down from a high closet shelf without fully intending to commit homicide with it. Her defense largely hinged on learned helplessness: she claimed she didn't understand the check kiting scheme--it was all Matthew's fault; she claimed she didn't know how the shotgun worked and was shocked when it went off in her hands.

The other way to look at it is: Matthew was domineering, all paterfamilias Father Knows Best asshole and into kinks Mary did not share. She was up to her eyeballs in a bank fraud, and the day she murdered Matthew was the day they were both supposed to show up at the bank to discuss the matter. The Church of Christ does not sanction divorce, and as a minister, Matthew would certainly never have agreed to it. She wanted him gone and she made it happen.

It's like one of those optical illusions. Is it a vase or two profiles? To what degree was Mary genuinely not responsible for the disaster she made of her life and to what degree was she a cold-blooded murderer?
There is no case in this collection called "Smoke, Mirrors and Murder."



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