Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers (41 page)

Could she have been abducted by a killer? Possibly. It was unlikely that she would have allowed a stranger into her home, but she could have gone for a walk in the cemetery and been attacked there. But, if that were the case, where was her body? Most murder victims turn up sooner or later. Most—not all. Snohomish County was full of rivers, lakes, much of it on the shores of Puget Sound. There were abandoned mine shafts, and mountain passes covered in deep snow.

Could Marcia have decided to leave of her own accord? Neither her husband nor her brothers felt she would do that. She was happily married, involved in her work. And she was very considerate of her elderly parents. “She would communicate with us if she were able,” attorney John Moore insisted. “She wouldn’t do that to the folks.”

Robin Moore concurred. “My sister and I were quite close. She would not have disappeared without letting me know. She was writing a book for my publishing company. If there’s one thing she had, it was a very strong sense of deadlines. She would have called.”

Most of her friends were baffled by Marcia’s disappearance, but Elise felt an ominous cloud that had nothing to do with her skill at astrology. “I watched Marcia deteriorate very rapidly after she started experimenting with ketamine,” she said. “She had complained of pain in her hip. That was why she took walks around Floral Hills. The paths were a flat surface on which to walk. She didn’t want to talk about her hip, but she did say that someone was ‘bewitching’ her…”

But Elise didn’t think Marcia would have gone walking in the cemetery at night.

Robin Moore’s wife had spoken long-distance with Marcia on Saturday, January 13. She had found her sister-in-law very enthusiastic about her new projects, if a little repetitive and “slightly confused” about her theories.

Robin Moore, himself familiar with police investigations and mysteries from research on his books, had two theories about his sister’s fate. “I really think it’s at least a fifty-fifty chance she was kidnapped, but not by an ordinary kidnapper. It would be a grotesque kidnapping by one of the people who knew [of] this very unorthodox spiritualism she was involved in.

“Then maybe her husband is right. Maybe the ketamine caught up with her. Maybe something snapped and she took off walking.”

Agonized, Dr. Boccaci said he had come to that theory as a possibility. Although he had never seen any profoundly detrimental effects from the drug, he realized that Marcia was a special case—the only human in the world known to have ingested so much for so long.

Could she have suddenly been gripped by amnesia without his seeing its approach? The
PDR (Physicians Desk Reference)
warned that a side effect of ketamine is “confusional states” during a patient’s recovery from surgery. Temporary amnesia was a possibility.

But Marcia’s dosage had been far less than that used for surgical anesthesia. If she had been building cumulative residuals of ketamine, a physician of her husband’s experience would surely have noted it.

Boccaci described the immediate effects of the drug in small doses by injection. “After the first two or three minutes, you begin to feel the initial effects, like hearing the chirping of crickets. Then, after five minutes, you begin to leave your body behind. There is no cognition of the fact that you have a body, but you are aware that you are still alive. You have a center point of consciousness. You go out of the planet of Earth and into the astro planes.”

This is the opposite reaction to the street drug known as “angel dust.” With angel dust, the ingester feels dead and those who have overdosed are convinced that they are, indeed, dead.

Some of Marcia’s friends told the Snohomish County investigators that, with deep meditation, there were documented cases where the “soul” had gone so far out into the astro planes that the body left behind had died. But, even if it had succumbed without its “soul,” it was still there. Marcia Moore’s body was nowhere—nowhere where anyone could find it.

Lieutenant Darrol Bemis had to take a crash course in the psychic world, spending half his nights reading Marcia Moore’s books and others like it, “so I can understand the terminology psychics use,” he told reporters.

He was deluged with tips from mystics who believed they knew what had happened to Marcia Moore. In a case with no clues, the investigative team tried to remain open-minded and consider every possible source of information carefully, no matter how far-fetched it might be.

The phone bills run up in the probe were astronomical. Lieutenant Bemis and his team called every telephone number they could locate in the missing woman’s duplex, without finding anyone who had heard from Marcia. Marcia Moore’s family on the East Coast never heard from her. No one in Ojai, California—where she had scores of friends—heard from her.

There was one strange incident that might have had bearing on her disappearance. On either January 15 or 16, the twelve-year-old daughter of one of Marcia’s closest friends answered the phone and a woman with a Boston accent like Marcia’s asked, “Is your Mummy there?”

The child said she was not and there was no number where she could be reached, and the caller said she would call back later. She never did.

“If she were in trouble, that would be the time she would call me,” the friend offered. “She has called me to her side several times in the past when she needed me.”

The search for Marcia Moore grew eerier and eerier. Some psychics maintained that the ghosts of the dead were able to use phone lines to get messages through, even years after they passed over. Was it possible that Marcia Moore would try to contact someone from the other side? Bemis and his fellow investigators found themselves considering the most bizarre possibilities when regular detective work netted them nothing at all.

Marcia and Happy Boccaci were to have attended the International Cooperation Council’s Rainbow Rose Festival in Pasadena, California, on the weekend of January 27 and 28 as featured speakers. This was America’s largest gathering of psychics and it was a function that Marcia would never have missed if there was any way she could be there.

One of the festival organizers had a theory on Marcia’s disappearance. “I guess this sounds kind of far out, but a lot of psychics here think she dematerialized. In the Indian philosophy, you can raise your consciousness, keep developing yourself like Jesus Christ and some of the gurus, and reach a point where you just zap out.”

Bizarre? Of course. But then the whole of Marcia Moore’s life had bordered on the bizarre, and there were no rational explanations about where Marcia had gone.

Marcia had also written a speech that she planned to present at the World Symposium on Humanity in Los Angeles in April. Happy Boccaci went in her place. He wrote to Elise, “I just got back from L.A. where I delivered Marcia’s brilliant speech, entitled, ‘Where is the reincarnation movement heading today?’ And I got a lot more people praying. I don’t have much to say except I am terribly depressed and ever so lonely. I do cry a lot. Again, thank you for your note and do keep praying…Light and love, (not so) Happy.”

The husband of a missing woman is always suspect. So was Dr. Walter “Happy” Boccaci. Marcia’s family considered him the prime suspect in her disappearance, although he stood to gain nothing financially in case of her death. He would actually be poorer because her trust fund wouldn’t go to him—but to her three children.

Boccaci seemed remarkably sanguine about the suspicions of the Moore family. “I realize that if my daughter were suddenly to marry somebody on the East Coast that I had never met—and six months later she disappeared, I would say, ‘Damn it. It’s the husband who did it. He’s the culprit!’ That’s just a natural thing to believe.”

Her family used Marcia’s trust fund to hire private detectives. They came to the Northwest, and had no better results than the Snohomish County investigators. Although they looked hard at Dr. Happy Boccaci, and reportedly tried to trick him into believing he would get an inheritance if Marcia’s body was found, he told them what he had told everyone: “I wish I knew where her body was, her soul, whatever. But I don’t.”

Because Marcia Moore was herself a psychic, I consulted two psychics whom I knew to be amazingly accurate in their assessments and predictions. What would happen when the cards were thrown down a year after her disappearance and questions were asked about Marcia? Would there be two diverse opinions—or would they agree?

Barbara Easton, a well-known Northwest psychic who reads ordinary playing cards, did several spreads on Marcia Moore. She knew only a little about the case. She was asking the question, “What were the circumstances around Marcia Moore’s disappearance?”

The answers came swiftly. “Just before she vanished,” Barbara said, “she received a long-distance phone call from a woman concerning a contract in which a lot of money was involved. There is a man involved, too—a man concerned about a real estate contract on which a great deal of money hinged.”

According to the cards, Marcia Moore’s marriage had been in trouble, and she was in the process of making a decision to get rid of emotional ties that had never worked. She had been very disappointed and frustrated. Moreover, she had recently heard from a man out of her past and received an invitation which had made her happy.

“The cards tell us that she wanted a divorce—even if no one was aware of it,” Easton said, shaking her head.

Easton spread the cards four times, and each time the ace of spades (the death card) appeared side by side with the nine of hearts (the wish card).

“I think she’s dead,” Easton sighed. “Someone wished her dead, but the cards indicate that she was also blessed with very good women friends who were lucky for her, women she had turned to in the past for help.”

Easton also picked up repeatedly on “hospital” and “court (or trial)” as she did further spreads of cards. Could Marcia Moore be in a hospital some place where no one knew who she was? Could there eventually be a trial for her murder?

The blonde psychic explained that, although death showed repeatedly in Marcia’s cards, these could also be interpreted as the death of the personality as it has been known. “She could have been so enlightened by the drug that her known personality died—leaving her body. There’s possibly a five percent chance that she’s hospitalized or sitting on a mountain top some place—meditating,” Easton said. “It’s called going to the void.”

The elements of Marcia Moore’s disappearance, then, that Easton elicited from the cards again and again were:

1. Marital problems, disappointments, frustration.
   
2. A renewed relationship with an old love.
   
3. A real estate transaction involving a lot of money.
   
4. Concern over another woman.
   
5. Phenomenal success ahead for Marcia in her work.
   
6. A hospital.
   
7. Death. Violent death.
   
8. A court trial.
   

“I think the decision was made for Marcia Moore to die,” Easton summed up flatly.

Another popular psychic based in the Northwest, Shirley Teabo, read Tarot cards. Like Easton, she had a high success rate.

Shirley Teabo was not told about Barbara Easton’s reading on Marcia Moore, nor did she know more than the bare facts about the woman’s disappearance.

Could a second psychic home in on whatever astral projections Marcia Moore’s entity was sending? Would Teabo’s interpretations be entirely different from Easton’s?

Teabo was able to pinpoint the date of Moore’s disappearance (without knowing when it was) as between December 20 and January 20, 1979. “At that time, there was a passage away from difficulties—a journey over water,” she said. “A journey over water far enough to leave the state of Washington. I see her on a ferry boat and I see the rays of a lighthouse crossing over her. She has—or had—a woman friend who was very good for her, someone from the past.”

Teabo picked up a “retreat, a meditative state, a convalescent state after much anxiety.”

“For some reason, I pick up the San Juan Islands. She has ties there, but I pick up a sunny day and she is happy. It may be something that has happened in her past.”

The next card was not so cheerful; it was a coffin, a sarcophagus—a sign that someone is buried. “Sheets and things are wrapped around her,” Teabo said. “Her ‘fear’ card revolves around a real estate transaction—something involving a great deal of money.”

The psychic spread cards asking about what had happened in Marcia Moore’s home on the last day she was seen. These cards showed the end of a cycle, a finishing-up. “She was preparing for a change, and she was well able to protect herself.”

Oddly, Teabo, too, saw trouble with another woman—a woman of a violent nature who could have caused Moore real problems. “One woman is her friend—the other was a danger to her.”

According to Teabo’s reading, Marcia Moore had been about to advance tremendously in the world of her art. The books she was working on would have been highly successful. “But I see an illness…a hospitalization. She may be in an institution.”

According to Shirley Teabo, Marcia Moore had been subjected to great stress. “Quarrels over money, over land, and someone was trying to make away with something that belonged to her.”

Marcia’s brother Robin had theorized that, if she had been kidnapped, it would have been because of the “unorthodox spiritualism” she was involved in. Teabo turned up cards that indicated that this might very well be true. Twice in succession, the anti-religion and cult cards turned up side by side. “She was at a crossroads and the path she chose was faulty, dangerous.”