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The last woman to be hanged in Britain

Ruth Ellis - The last woman to be hanged in Britain

Circumstantial evidence is not enough To convict, juries need hard evidence
By David Cocksedge

THE COSMOPOLITAN City of Seattle, USA awoke to the scene of a brutal homicide on the Wednesday morning of 2 June 1976. Marcia Perkins, a nurse at the University of Washington Hospital was discovered raped and murdered in her upper apartment house on East Madison Street.

Marcia was 24 years old, slender and 1.75m (5'9") tall. She looked a lot like rock star Cher with her miniskirts and waist length jet-black hair. Marcia was estranged from her husband and enjoying a new life in which she dated several men, including her husband, which whom she was still on good terms. He had tried to call her many times over the Memorial Day weekend of 29-30 May, and by Wednesday was concerned - he knew that she had to be back at work in Seattle on Tuesday. He visited her apartment block that Wednesday morning, and getting no answer to his knock, asked the apartment manager to open the door with his passkey. They could hear a radio blaring inside, but there was no answer to the doorbell. When the manager opened her door, both men could immediately she why Marcia had not answered her phone. She lay spread-eagled between the kitchen and living room of her usually neat apartment. There was no question that she was dead. The shocked men backed out and ran to call Seattle police.

Crime scene detectives Duane Homan and Benny DePalmo and a forensics team spent hours gathering every possible piece of evidence and also photographed the scene from every angle. Time was their enemy - ideally, they hoped to get to a homicide as quickly as possible whilst everything was fresh. But they were running behind. It was obvious that Marcia Perkins had been dead for many hours. Rigor Mortis, the rigidity that comes soon after death, had come and gone, a natural process that takes several days. There was also considerable 'skin slippage' on the victim's body because of decomposition.

Marcia had suffered a beating, although she had put up a terrific fight against her attacker. Dark purple abrasions marred her face, throat and left knee. She had died from manual strangulation at the hands of a powerful killer: her eyes showed the burst blood vessels (petechiac) that is characteristic of death from strangulation. A pair of blue bikini panties lay crumpled by the doorway, and her shoes lay close by with both straps broken.

Marcia had been entertaining her attacker just before being killed. Two cups of instant coffee were on the kitchen counter, and there was a pan of water on the stove. A partial bottle of rum was also on the counter. Since the kitchen was otherwise immaculate, it appeared that Marcia had been serving refreshments when someone had come up behind her, seized her, and literally yanked her out of her shoes as the attack began.

Her killer had to be a man of great strength - and cunning. Someone had made great efforts to wipe away all traces of himself from the premises. There were no fingerprints on any of the lateral surfaces, which would be expected to reveal latent prints. He had also yanked the phone cord from the wall, although the phone was already off the cradle. All the drapes were tightly closed, shutting off Marcia's apartment from the world outside, and the radio had been left on. Money had been taken from her purse that lay on the living room floor. On the bed was an empty can of Miller Lite beer. A man's ring was found in the bathroom, and this later proved to belong to Marcia's husband. He was quickly eliminated as a suspect, because he had been with their two children over the entire holiday weekend, and could account for all his movements during that time.

The building manager remembered that someone had buzzed his intercom at 6am on Saturday, 29 May. "It woke me up," he said. "I answered and talked to man who sounded drunk. He asked for Marcia and I told him that he had made a mistake and to buzz the correct apartment." The manager had heard the ensuing conversation: the man was pleading very insistently to be let in. "He said, 'Please little sister. Let me in'", said the manager. After a few minutes, Marcia let the man in. The timeframe fitted. Marcia had been dead for over three days. This unknown person had to be the killer. Other people from the apartment block remembered a stocky man in a denim jacket and cap lurking near the entrance to the building in the early hours of that morning.

On 3 June, Marcia's husband reported to DePalmo and Homan that a man named Melvin Jones had called on him at 10 o'clock the previous night to discuss Marcia's murder. Jones had oddly and fervently denied any involvement in her killing. Her said he had not seen Marcia since 27 May, when he had stopped by to collect a stereo set that belonged to him. He left his telephone number with Mr. Perkins, "just in case I needed him for anything." When the detectives discovered that Melvin Jones had also called at Marcia's apartment on 3 June, they questioned him. He was a huge, muscular man (1.94m tall and 90 kg) aged 25 with a handsome but soft face. He said that he had lived with Marcia and her sister since the previous October, and was romantically involved with her sister before she moved to Montana. He said that he and Marcia were 'buddies', and that he was devastated at the news of her death. Jones had no idea who might have wanted to harm her. He also proudly told the detectives he had been working out with the Seattle Seahawks football team, and had always kept fit.

The two homicide cops had a gut feeling about Jones, and a check on his 'rap sheet' confirmed their fears. He had been convicted of rape in 1969 and served six years in Monroe state prison for the crime. But since then he had a clean record.

Marcia's sister Tina, who had flown to Seattle for the funeral, had more vital information. She said that her ex-boyfriend (Melvin Jones) had taken to referring to Marcia as "sister dear", and that he had been pestering Marcia since she herself moved away to Montana. She confirmed that Jones liked Bacardi rum and Miller Lite beer, which he often drank together. "He does weird things when he's drunk", she also said.

Jones must have been the man buzzing doors at the apartment building on 29 May, most likely the night that Marcia died. But there was no vital physical evidence to tie him in to her murder. And now Jones changed his alibi. He said that he had spent the weekend with a pretty American Indian girl named Jeanie Easley, had got very drunk at a party at her place, and returned home on 30 May. He agreed to a polygraph test, which revealed nothing. Jones had taken a painkilling drug for his back pain, and his responses to questions were just horizontal lines across the tracing paper. He apologized for that, but in practical terms, he might just as well have been hooked up to a hollow log. But now he admitted that he had in fact called at Marcia's apartment at 6am on 29 May on his way back from Jeanie's place, but Marcia had not let him in. With every questioning session, his answers changed slightly. But other people interviewed confirmed that Jones had indeed been at the party at Jeanie's place just as he had stated. And he had left on the morning of 29 May, in a highly intoxicated state.

Then on 22 June, the body of Jeanie Easley, aged 21, was discovered at her apartment on Bellevue Avenue East. She had been brutally raped and then manually strangled, and the apartment had been trashed. A mammoth split-leaf philodendron plant had been thrown over the naked corpse. Clothing and bed sheets lay all over the living room as someone had torn through the apartment after killing the beautiful slender American-Indian woman. And a radio played loudly over the scene. It was eerily very similar to the murder of Marcia Perkins. Homicide detectives were not slow to home in on one vital link - Melvin Jones had known both women.

This time the forensics team was able to bag a lot of vital evidence, which included two distinct palm prints on the east wall of Jeanie's apartment. Jeanie Easley had been about to serve someone some food when she was killed - two cooked hamburger patties rested in congealed grease on a plate on the kitchen counter. She had last been seen alive by her mother on Monday 21 June 1976.

When the palm prints in Jeanie's apartment proved to belong to Melvin Jones, the detectives had probable cause for an arrest. Minutes after getting the information, Homan and DePalmo called in at Jones's house and took him in. The big man seemed calm and under control during questioning, but when he was informed that his palm prints had been found at the second murder scene, he broke down. But he still insisted that he had not killed Ms Easley. "I already told you guys that I was in her apartment once - on 28/29 May", he said. "The prints could date from back then." This was a possibility. As an alibi, Jones said that he was away on a fishing trip at Moses Lake from 19 to 21 June.

But evidence was now stacking up against him. Jeanie's boyfriend identified Jones as a man who had been lurking around her apartment at around 5pm on 21 June from a 'lay down' of photos, known as 'mug shots'. (Under state law, detectives must show an array of photos of different suspects to a possible witness. Identification from a single photograph will not stand up to rigorous cross-examination in court).

Jones was now asked to draw a sketch of Jeanie's apartment, and he duly obliged, proving to be an adept artist. But he made one error fatal to himself. He included the split-leaf philodendron plant in his sketch - and Jeanie had not bought that plant for her home until 15 June. Melvin Jones was placed under arrest for suspicion of both murders and booked into King County Jail. Detectives armed with a search warrant removed items of clothing and a pair of tennis shoes from Jones's bedroom. Multi-colored fibers still clung to the treads of the shoes. Using electron microscopes, forensic experts determined that fibers from Jeanie's living room and kitchen carpets matched exactly to the filaments that Jones had carried away on his shoes. Even soil from Jeanie's plants had lodged in his trousers and shoes. Every criminal takes something of the crime scene away with him (or her) - no matter how minute, just as every criminal leaves something of himself (or herself) at the crime scene - again no matter how minute. Melvin Jones had taken a plethora of infinitesimal bits of his victim's home away from her murder scene without even knowing it.

He also took another lie-detector test, and polygraphist Norman Matzke reported that he had given deceptive responses on several questions. The pens had moved in wide arcs on the questions, "Did you kill Jeanie Easley?" and "Did you have sexual intercourse with her?", and also "Was she alive the last time you saw her?"

Maztke reported, "His responses went right off the page. He blew ink all over the walls."

Although the similarities between the murder scenes of Marcia Perkins and Jeanie Easley were numerous, there was a basic but essential difference. There was direct physical evidence in the latter case, but in Ms Perkins case, there was only circumstantial evidence.

During Melvin Jones's month-long trial, Senior Deputy Prosecutor Roy Howson gave the jury a crash course in understanding hair and fiber evidence and on the make-up of potting soil. He outlined the multiple connections between Maria Perkins and Melvin Jones, and the similarities between the two women's murders. In this way, the commonalities in the MO (method of operation) used in both murders was like something from a serial killer's game plan. The man who had buzzed Marcia's apartment on the morning of 29 May had called her "little sister" just as Jones always had, and evidence of brands of rum and beer were discovered at the scene - alcoholic beverages that Jones habitually drank together.

But no one could tell how the jurors were thinking. They listened patiently to all the evidence and on 26 October 1976, they retired to ponder their collective verdict.

After five hours, the jury signaled that they had reached a decision. When they returned to the courtroom, the foreman announced that they had found Melvin Earl Jones guilty of first degree murder in the death of Jeanie Easley. But they found him not guilty in the violent death of Marcia Perkins.

Later, jurors admitted that they could not come back with a guilty verdict in Marcia's case because of the lack of physical evidence in her apartment. Although Seattle detectives were disappointed in the second verdict, they were not surprised. They knew all too well the weight that a tiny piece of physical evidence can carry.

Melvin Jones was sentenced to life in prison, incarcerated in the Washington State Reformatory in Monroe. He was finally released on 5 June 2001 after 25 years in custody. His boyhood ambition to play football for the Seattle Seahawks had been forever stalled by the consequences of his career as a rapist and killer.

"Show me a homicide where we don't pick up any meaningful physical evidence and I'll show you a 'loser'," said DePalmo after the court case. "It doesn't matter how much circumstantial evidence we have, what our gut feelings are, or even how much probable cause we have to arrest. You still have to show a jury something substantial that they can actually see."

(Research: 'A rage to kill' by Ann Rule, Pocket Star Books, 1999).

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