Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers (42 page)

Marcia’s marriage had not been serene, according to the Tarot cards; the couple had each felt bondage and restriction, frustration in the marriage.

As Barbara Easton had, Shirley Teabo saw violence on the last day of Marcia Moore’s known existence. She picked it up again and again. “Oddly, I don’t think she’s dead…but I don’t see her alive, either. It’s as if her mind isn’t hers any longer. If she is dead, she’s earthbound.”

A summary of Teabo’s reading has many points of similarity with Easton’s.

1. Trouble in the home.
   
2. A real estate transaction involving a lot of money.
   
3. Great success ahead in Moore’s career.
   
4. Concerns about another woman who was dangerous to her.
   
5. Hospitalization.
   
6. Violence.
   
7. A “death” state.
   

If Marcia Moore was alive, the cards of both psychics suggested that she was incapacitated to the degree that she couldn’t let anyone know where she was. If she was dead, her body had been secreted so carefully that it might never be found.

While Lieutenant Darrol Bemis and Detective Doris Twitchell worked the case from the scientific viewpoint of trained police officers, Dr. Walter Boccaci tried to reach his wife through less orthodox methods. After fasting all day and doing yoga, he injected himself with ketamine at midnight.

“The sole purpose of this is to reach my wife. We were telepathic. We were soul mates. Ketamine is the only way I can get out of my body. And I have been reaching her. I see her so clearly. She’s sitting in a lotus position, lovely and beautiful. But she doesn’t talk to me. I know why. She’s amnesic. That’s the only possibility, don’t you see. The only way that makes sense.”

Dr. Boccaci published one last issue of “The Hypersentience Bulletin,” the newsletter he and Marcia had mailed to their followers. He wrote a “Final Note” to Marcia: “When you walk along the beach and listen to the sound of the waves, listen also to the roar of my voice, reverberating, ‘Marcia, I love you. I’ll always love you…’”

Despite his protestations that his life was over now that his wife was gone, Boccaci remained a suspect in her disappearance—or death…or transformation, whatever had happened. He told Erik Lacitis, a
Seattle Times
columnist, about his troubles. “The tragedy of this whole thing is what’s happened to me. I am just hanging on by the skin of my teeth. I am destitute. I’m surviving by selling furniture and other personal possessions.

“I just spent a whole year of my life devoting all my energy to trying to find my wife…I tried everything. There’s nothing more I can do to find my wife. Now, I’m trying to pick up the pieces of my life. I am forty-two, and I have another forty-two years ahead of me. And I can’t get a job. I have been blackballed.”

Although Boccaci said he had never lost a patient because of anesthesia or even had one with an adverse reaction, he felt he had been unable to find work in his profession because of all the publicity about Marcia’s disappearance, and, perhaps, their ketamine research.

Boccaci left Washington State and took a residency at a Detroit hospital where his story was not so familiar. At length, he
did
find a job as an anesthesiologist at a tiny hospital on the Washington coast. Happy Boccaci wrote to Marcia’s friends that he was finally doing well, jogging five miles a day, and feeling much better.

Marcia Moore’s family members were divided in their opinions of what had become of her. Her daughter recalled how often Marcia had spoken of her dread of growing old. “It bothered her a lot. What do
I
think really happened?” she asked. “I would have to say that she committed suicide in some way.”

But committing suicide without leaving a body behind is not easy to do. If Marcia Moore had leapt from a ferry boat on its way to the San Juan Islands, her body might have sunk—but, more likely, it would have eventually washed up on some spit of land.

It would be two years after Marcia Moore vanished before those who loved her and those who sought her would have at least a partial answer to a seemingly incomprehensible mystery.

A property owner was clearing blackberry vines from a lot he owned near the city of Bothell on the first day of spring 1981. He reached down and almost touched a partial skull that lay hidden there. There was another bone, too. The site was less than fifteen miles from the town house where Marcia and Happy had lived. The skull had well-maintained teeth, and that would help in identifying the remains.

When the Snohomish County investigators asked a forensic dentistry expert to compare Marcia Moore’s dental records with the teeth in the skull, they knew, at long last, where she was.

A meticulous search of the area produced nothing more, however. No clothes. No jewelry. No hiking boots.

Could Marcia Moore have walked so far on the freezing night she vanished? Possibly. But she would have had to skirt a busy freeway and pass any number of areas where people lived, shopped, and worked, and no one had ever reported seeing her. Could she have been murdered, and taken to this lonely lot? Possibly. Although the detectives didn’t release the information, there was profound damage to the frontal portion of her skull.

One of Marcia’s close women friends made a pilgrimage to the spot where her last earthly remains had lain. She wrote to a mutual friend who also mourned for their dear friend, and it was both a comforting and a disturbing letter.

“I went over and saw the exact spot where the skull was located,” she wrote. “And it was a beautiful place, on top of a bed of soft, dry leaves, encircled by some very large trees. And growing all around the circle were trilliums beginning to come up. Of course not in bloom yet. My first thought was, ‘Marcia would have loved this place!’ It was almost like a gigantic fairy ring, those big trees in a circle. A little boy showed me the place; he is the son of the man who found the skull. The little boy said there was a hole right in the front of the skull, and I said, ‘That sounds like a bullet hole,’ and he agreed.”

But he was only a little boy, and the investigators were never convinced that Marcia Moore had been shot in the head; her skull was so fragile and it had lain out in the elements for more than two years.

To this day, no one really knows what happened on that Sunday night in January 1979—no one but her killer, if, indeed, she
was
murdered. Marcia had always longed for a glimpse into another, brighter, world. Once there, she sent no messages back to the friends who waited for some sign.

No one has heard from Dr. Happy Boccaci for a long time.

Twenty-five years ago, Marcia Moore’s and Dr. Walter “Happy” Boccacio’s experimentation with the drug ketamine seemed harmless enough—if a bit eccentric.

Today, ketamine (ketamine hydrochloride) is a drug that is being abused by an increasing number of young people who use it as “club drug.” It is often handed out at “raves” and parties, sometimes with tragic results.

Street names for ketamine include: “Special K,” “Vitamin K,” “Kit Kat,” Green,” “Blind Squid,” “Purple,” and “Special La Coke.” It is a rapid-acting dissociative anesthetic used medically on both animals and humans (for pediatric burn cases). Ketamine usually comes in liquid form and the most potent way to use it is by injection. The human response to ketamine occurs so quickly that there is a risk of losing motor control even before the injection is completed. Users respond in different ways—from rapture to boredom. Its hallucinogenic effects impair perception, and it’s quite common for those using ketamine to relate out-of-body or near-death experiences.

The drug prevents all pain, so it is possible for the user to be injured and completely unaware of it. The effects of a ketamine “high” usually last for four to six hours, but may last from twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Hearts seem to beat normally after the user is injected with ketamine, but their breathing can be suppressed.

Marcia Moore’s daily dose of 50 mg was in the low range—which would rapidly have produced psychedelic effects. However, if her use increased, she would have gone into the convulsions, vomiting, and oxygen starvation of the brain and muscles that follows large doses.

As dangerous as ketamine is, it has become the emerging top choice as a club drug in New York, Miami, and San Diego. With the new information about a drug that is legal
only
for medical use, it is clear now that Marcia Moore and her husband were playing with fire. With her long history of daily use of a drug now known to be very, very hazardous, she was undoubtedly psychologically and physically addicted.

Unable to feel or acknowledge pain, Marcia might well have left her home on a freezing night and been unaware of the cold as she wandered miles away. But the hole in her skull has never been explained. In all likelihood, someone
did
shoot her or strike her with a blunt weapon, whether it was a wicked stranger who picked her up on the road or someone who knew her well.

Marcia Moore would have been seventy-five by now, possibly still searching for answers to age-old questions of this world and the next. Dr. Happy Boccaci has disappeared. If he is alive, he is close to sixty-five.

U
ntil the
Patty Hearst kidnapping, the mass suicides of Reverend Jim Jones’s followers in Guyana, and, more recently, the cult deaths in Waco and southern California, people thought of brainwashing as something that happened only in Korean or Vietnamese prison camps. It’s easy to be smug and confident in the safety of one’s own living room or at a cocktail party and say, “I could never be programmed to do something like that. There are just some things I would never do.”

But the mind is an incredibly complex entity and, given the right circumstances, virtually any mind will crack and begin to believe that black is white, that wrong is right, and that reality no longer has any validity. Brainwashing can take place in an hour or over many days. It is a strategy used in many hostage situations. When ordinary people are held prisoner in banks or planes, some of them will eventually begin to think their captors are good and kind people
simply because they haven’t killed them.
When their plans are interrupted, captives move from outrage to fear to passivity and finally to a belief that their captors must possess at least a few tender places in their hearts. When they survive, many hostages feel they owe their lives to the bank robbers or skyjackers. This curious phenomenon is known as the Stockholm Syndrome.

For brainwashing to occur, a human being must be exposed to four basic elements:

1. A severe traumatic shock
   
2. Isolation—being taken away from the people and surroundings where the person feels secure
   
3. Programming—hearing what the mind controller wants the subject to believe, over and over and over and over
   
4. The promise of a reward—often the subject’s very life
   

When all four of these components come into play, the stage is set. Every one of these elements is vital in unravel-ing the story of Robin* and Hank Marcus* and their seemingly benign meeting with a stranger in the woods.

It was Thursday, July 22, 1976, when Robin and Hank set out from their home in Canby, Oregon, for a camping trip along the Clackamas River near the foothills of Oregon’s majestic Mount Hood. The trip was to be a celebration of their first wedding anniversary. Robin was only sixteen, her husband five years older, but they were so much in love that her family didn’t object when their beautiful raven-haired daughter wanted to marry. They knew Hank loved Robin and would take care of her. The young couple’s happy first year of marriage showed everyone that their decision had been the right one. The trip into Oregon’s idyllic wilderness would be like a second honeymoon for the couple.

Hank and Robin lived on a shoestring. They had only sixty dollars to spend on their trip; that immediately eliminated motels and restaurants. They would have to sleep out under the trees or in their car and cook over a campfire. At first they planned to leave Rusty, their collie, with Robin’s grandmother, but she was ill. They certainly couldn’t afford to put him in a boarding kennel, so they decided to take him along.

A sense of fatalism would run through all of Robin’s eventual recollection of the events of that bizarre weekend. Call it karma, destiny, or what you will. If they had made even some small decisions differently that weekend, Robin’s and Hank’s lives might have gone on without incident for another fifty years.

Robin initially wanted to go to the Oregon coast, where she and Hank had spent their honeymoon, but Hank chose Austin Hot Springs in the Oregon mountains instead. He wanted to teach her how to fish; it was one of his passions, so she finally capitulated. That made him happy, and they could always go to the coast another time.

But Robin had terrifying dreams the night before their trip. Something indefinable frightened her and she woke knowing only that her nightmares had something to do with their planned outing in the mountains. The next morning she mentioned her fears to a girlfriend, who suggested she take her Bible with her on the trip. “If you have your Bible with you,” she said, “you know everything will be all right.”

Robin tucked her much-read Bible into her backpack, but she was still afraid. She told Hank about her dreams, and he too admitted that he felt a presentiment of danger, something that was totally unlike him. Just to be on the safe side, he suggested they stop and ask a friend of his to go along with them for the weekend, but the friend wasn’t home. They left him a note which read, “We were by to ask you to go to the mountains with us. Sorry you missed the fun!”

The sun was shining, the weather was perfect, and Robin and Hank tried to shake off their forebodings. They bought fishing licenses and canned food, and they gassed up their car. That left them with about twenty dollars to cover any emergencies.

They drove the twenty miles from Molalla to Estacada, and headed south. Somehow though, they missed the turn leading into the Austin Hot Springs campground and turned instead into the road leading into Bagby Hot Springs. They drove deep into the wilderness before they realized they were heading in the wrong direction. “This road is so much spookier than I remember it,” Hank commented when he failed to recognize any landmarks. “In fact, it’s so spooky, it gives me the creeps. It’s like no other road I’ve ever been on.”

Once they realized they’d taken a wrong turn, they retraced their path. By then they had used up a quarter of a tank of gas, they were running late, and they finally arrived at the Austin Hot Springs campground just as the gates were being locked for the night. All the camping spots were taken.

The park ranger told them they could park outside and walk back in. “You can cook your supper, take a dip in the hot springs, and you can fish, just so long as you don’t camp inside the park tonight.”

Robin and Hank cooked dinner, laughed at some people who were skinny-dipping, and took Rusty for a walk in the woods. They felt better and their spooky feelings now seemed silly.

Still, they didn’t want to camp alone; they wanted to park near other campers, and they finally found an enclave of Russian families and parked their sedan close to them. They slept in the car with the doors locked. They were having a restless night with Rusty jumping on them and whining. They finally got up, made their way down to the Clackamas River by flashlight, and gave the dog a drink of water. Then they returned to the car and settled down for the night.

They woke at six the next morning. It was Friday, July 23. The park ranger said there was a spot available inside the park now and he directed them to the campsite. Robin cooked breakfast while Hank fished. But he had no luck, and they swam in the hot springs instead. There were people all around them, including the families they’d met the night before, and Robin felt safe enough when Hank headed farther upriver to try his luck again.

The only bad moment she experienced was when a man yelled at her for letting Rusty swim in the springs. “They’re for people, not dogs,” he complained. “You could get slapped with a $500 fine.”

“He’s probably cleaner than you, most likely,” she’d called back, as she tugged the collie out of the water.

Hank was gone fishing a long time, at least two hours, and Robin began to worry. When he finally showed up, he was grinning and soaked to the skin. “You almost lost me,” he laughed. “I was helping some of those Russians ford the river with a rope and I hit a sinkhole and started going under some white water—until I grabbed a branch and got my footing.”

Robin had been so worried that she was mad at him at first, but she relented. “I’m sorry I yelled at you,” she apologized. “I thought something had happened to you, and I got scared.”

Hank Marcus was a big man—6 feet tall, 185 pounds. He was fully capable of taking care of both of them. He soothed Robin, pointing out all the people around them, saying there just wasn’t anything for her to be so afraid of. She was timid without him, though, and tended to worry far more than she needed to.

It was a good afternoon. They frolicked in the hot springs and talked to the Russian families. One of the men made a pass at Robin as he carried her across the river and she deliberately stepped on his boat, swamping it. Later, Hank laughed when she told him what she’d done. He wasn’t jealous of her; he had no need to be.

But Hank was disappointed with the trip so far; he still hadn’t caught any fish, so they broke camp and headed up the road to give it another try. Robin cooked a late lunch while Hank tried out the new fishing spot. They said grace before they ate, as they always did.

That evening, while it was still light out, they drove farther and farther downstream looking for signs of fish in the river. They passed a lone man fishing and asked him if the fish were biting. He shrugged and said, “I haven’t caught anything all day.” So they kept on driving.

They came upon another fisherman, who told them he had only caught three fish all afternoon, “and they weren’t keepers.” But he told them he’d heard that a truckload of fish had been dumped into the Colawash River earlier in the week. “Ask about that up at the ranger station,” he suggested.

Hank and Robin were undecided whether to stay or head home. Their gas was getting dangerously low now, and they hadn’t found any good fishing at all. For Hank’s sake, Robin suggested they try just one more spot before going home.

The road they chose took them deep into the woods as the long shadows of evening closed over them. They came upon a small boat-launch area near the North Fork Dam and stopped to watch some children playing in the river. They were parked at the side of the road when a red pickup pulled up. It was an old truck, road-worn and mud-covered, with a broken tailgate and a crumpled bumper. The lone occupant was a short youngish man. He left his engine running as he got out and ran up the fish ladder.

Hank Marcus went over to talk to the stranger. Robin waited in their car; the windows were open, and she could hear snatches of their conversation. Hank was telling the man that the fishing prospects seemed to be nil in the area. “All we found were a couple of suckers,” he said.

The stranger didn’t even turn to look at Hank. He mumbled something and kept staring out at the river. But when Robin got out of the car and walked toward the two men, the man turned to look at her and she felt his eyes burning into her. “It was almost as if he’d never seen a woman before,” she recalled. “He lit up like a Christmas tree.”

Suddenly he smiled and turned back to Hank. “I know where they just dumped a whole truckload of fish,” he said. “I was just up there working when they dumped them off the bridge. That’s where I’m headed.”

Since the other fisherman had also told them about the fish dump, it seemed reasonable that this stranger, who said his name was Tom, was telling the truth. Hank was really tempted, but he worried about his nearly empty gas tank. Tom told them that it wasn’t that far—they had more than enough gas to make it, adding, “Besides, I can go to town in the morning and bring back gas if you run low.”

They decided to follow Tom to the place where he said he’d seen the fresh dump of fish. The two-vehicle caravan wended its way slowly down the deserted road. At one point, Tom pulled the truck over and suggested that they ride with him so that they wouldn’t run out of gas, but Robin shook her head, and Hank shrugged. She wanted to stay in their own car; the feeling of uneasiness that had plagued her for the past two days had returned.

“Just where is this spot?” Hank asked.

“Just beyond the Bagby Hot Springs Road.”

Hank and Robin looked at each other; that was the road that had frightened them when they’d taken it by mistake the day before. It had given them both goose pimples on a hot day. They whispered to each other about turning back, but they finally decided to go on. “It’s silly for us to be afraid of a road,” Hank reassured Robin.

They passed a man and his daughter they’d camped with the night before, and Robin felt better; they were nice, normal people and seeing them here on this road allayed her fears.

Hank looked over at Robin and grinned. “See, things always work out. It’s neat that we met Tom. If we hadn’t been at the dam at that precise minute, we wouldn’t have had this chance to catch some fish. We probably would have just gone home and lost the whole weekend.”

Up ahead, Tom turned onto an old dirt road that was bumpy and deeply rutted. They could no longer see much of the landscape because the sun had dropped below the horizon, and it was that time of evening between dusk and full dark. They pulled in behind the glowing taillights of Tom’s red pickup.

They lit a fire, and Tom pulled out a bottle of liquor and offered them a drink. To be polite, they each took a little sip. Then Tom pulled something out of his truck. It was a milk carton with a dead bird in it. “See this?” he bragged. “I picked it off on the way down here.”

Robin felt her stomach turn over. “We don’t believe in killing things for sport,” she murmured. “Not unless you have to—for food.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Tom said. “I plan on eating it.”

After they ate, Tom grabbed a rifle from his truck and called to Hank and Robin to join him on a walk. They came to a clearing in the midst of the lowering pine and fir forest and Tom told them that this was where he did his hunting. “If we got a deer, we could eat only the hindquarters. We could be wasteful masters,” he said. It was an odd term. Robin had never heard it before.

“That’s illegal,” Hank said.

Tom only laughed and shrugged.

They shared Tom’s binoculars, and there was just enough light to see a deer foraging in the clearing and, farther on, some bear cubs playing. Tom raised his gun, sighting in on them, but he didn’t shoot. Robin heard him cock the gun, and she quickly turned her back in disapproval and horror. She tugged on Hank’s arm and pleaded, “I want to go back to camp right now. If he shoots a cub, the mother will kill all of us!”