Manifest Injustice Read Online Free PDF

a definite judgment of Ernest Valenzuela: “This is an exceedingly dangerous young man and whatever possible legal means are available to keep him under observation, such means should be evoked.… [If] released on bond, we are dealing with a potential homicide in a lad who is rather devoid of conscience and feels little or no remorse. This case deserves intensive investigation.”
    Despite this warning, authorities—on the very day Tuchler wrote his letter—released Valenzuela after just five days in jail. The records document no follow-up or evidence that detectives ever connected Valenzuela with the statements made by Linda Primrose two years earlier.
    As the months passed, investigators still chased odd tips, always in vain. In May 1969, seven years after the killings, another clue of sorts emerged. The Sterrenberg and McKillop families notified the sheriff’s office that at times when they visited Tim and Joyce’s side-by-side graves, they found roses placed on them. For a while, deputies staked out the cemetery to see if they could catch a remorseful killer, and the lovers’ lane killings became known as the Rose Petal Case. Journalists once again came to interview Tim’s and Joyce’s parents. “Neither Cliff nor I bear any malice against whoever did it,” Jim McKillop told them. “We’d just like to know why. That’s the question: Why?”

 
    CHAPTER 2
    Memories of Days Now Gone
    AUGUST 1935–AUGUST 1974
    When Bill Macumber thinks back to his years of freedom—to what he calls “memories of days now gone”—his mind fills mainly with images of his three young sons and the fun things they did together. The ball fields, the lakes, the forests, the desert. Hunting and fishing, hiking and climbing, swimming across ponds, the boys tied to inner tubes, his youngest tiring and rolling over so that Bill had to pull him the rest of the way. One summer, he built them a full replica of the Apollo space capsule, right in their backyard, and wired a remote-control panel in the house. The boys had space suits and knew all the stages of liftoff. Bill liked to say, Being a dad — ain’t nothing like it.
    He came from Davenport, Iowa, born there at Mercy Hospital in August 1935. He had one brother, Robert, two years younger, and a first cousin, Jackie, who was always at their house, living with them at times. The extended family—Grandma and Grandpa, Grandma’s sister, uncles and aunts—took driving trips together. Tomahawk Lake, the Black Hills of South Dakota, Mount Rushmore, Wild Bill Hickok’s saloon and a whole bunch of fishing cabins that quickly filled with pounds of bluegill, bass, walleye, northern pike and pickerel. The year after Pearl Harbor, Jackie came down from Cedar Rapids for an extended stay, and Bill’s father, Harold, bought all the children silver World War I–type helmets with American flags painted on the front. Harold went to work at the Rock Island Arsenal around then and joined its marching band. On weekends, he also played in a small dance band, handling the sax, clarinet and banjo, and the whole family would accompany him to performances—at the Lions and Elks Clubs, Turner Hall, all over Scott County during the Christmas season. Bill and his brother would sometimes get up and dance, and one or both together would often sing with the band. On V-J Day in 1945, Harold’s band set up at Third and Harrison in Davenport and played all afternoon and night, the streets barricaded, everyone wildly celebrating, beer and liquor flowing, drunks everywhere but no one arrested. Bill, age ten, watched with wide-eyed wonder.
    The Macumbers, like everyone else they knew in the Midwest heartland, were avid hunters. Bill’s dad began taking him pheasant hunting when he was six years old. For his twelfth birthday, Harold bought him the finest present he’d ever received: his own, brand-spanking-new Stevens 16-gauge shotgun. The gun kicked like a Missouri mule, but Bill never said a word, despite