Her Last Scream

This story is from Volume II of No Ordinary Evil.

Author’s Note This story is inspired by real events. For the sake of narrative flow, all names, places, and certain details have been fictionalized. While the characters and settings presented here are inventions, the underlying crimes, methods, and tragic scale of the case are drawn from documented history. This work is intended as a dramatic retelling, not a verbatim account. Reader discretion is advised.

At thirty-six, Rachel Mercer decided she was done with being cold.

She spent nearly her entire life in the Northeast, first in upstate New York and later in a tiny New Hampshire town where winters began in October and refused to leave until May. Rachel had always been the one in her family most willing to ignore what other people thought she ought to do. At Catholic school, she entertained her younger siblings with impressions of the elderly nuns who ran the place like prison guards. When she graduated from college with a degree in art education, she horrified her grandmother by walking across the stage beneath her cap and gown wearing enormous hiking boots instead of the required stockings and heels.

Then came the sixties.

Rachel protested the Vietnam War, embraced the counterculture, married without a traditional church ceremony, taught elementary-school art, worked with mentally ill adults, grew vegetables, cooked vegetarian meals, collected stray cats, and eventually learned pottery from the man she lived with after her marriage ended.

Her conservative parents had spent years wondering where they had gone wrong.

Her younger brothers and sister thought Rachel was magnificent.

She was the family trailblazer, the one who proved a person could ignore the rules and still end up somewhere worth going.

By January 1983, Rachel had decided she needed something else.

She packed her VW bug, left New Hampshire, and drove south until winter disappeared in the rearview mirror. Her younger sister, Beth, was already living in the Florida Panhandle with her husband and young daughter, and Rachel followed the Gulf Coast until she found a small beach community called Seabrook Point.

Rachel loved it immediately.

The Gulf was warm and impossibly bluish greenish. The sand looked like sugar. She rode her bike for miles along the beach, found work waiting tables at a popular restaurant called The Mariner, cut her hair short, bought clothes better suited to Florida, and developed the deep tan of someone who had spent thirty-five years trying to make up for lost sunlight.

Men noticed her.

Rachel was five-foot-five, slender and athletic, with dark brown hair and striking blue eyes. She had spent enough years surrounded by flirtation to become very good at reciprocating, or dismissing it.

Then she met Marcus Bell.

Marcus was twenty-nine, seven years younger than Rachel, a native Floridian, and the administrator of a counseling program for Vietnam veterans. He was thoughtful, educated, handsome, and considerably quieter than the men Rachel usually attracted.

Rachel asked him out.

In 1984, an interracial couple could still draw attention in parts of Florida. Rachel was white. Marcus was Black. Most people minded their own business, but not everyone. There were stares in restaurants, pauses in conversations, and occasionally expressions that lasted a second too long.

Rachel noticed them. She didn’t care.

Marcus lived with that kind of side-eyed look long enough to recognize it well before Rachel did. When somebody looked a little too long, he would sometimes squeeze her hand under the table.

“Ignore it,” Rachel would whisper.

“I always do.”

“No, you’re pretending you ignore it.”

Marcus would smile. “And you’re pretending you don’t enjoy making them uncomfortable.”

That always made her laugh.

Within months they were inseparable. They sailed, went to concerts, ate along the waterfront, and spent so many nights together that maintaining two homes became ridiculous.

Marcus owned a modest three-bedroom house in Port Avery, a quiet Gulf Coast town where live oaks shaded narrow streets and older residents took neighborhood security seriously. Sometimes too seriously. Signs appeared on lawns throughout the community.

WARNING: CITIZENS CRIME WATCH AREA.

The house across from Marcus belonged to a young firefighter named Daniel Cross and his pregnant girlfriend, Emily. Daniel had appointed himself unofficial commander in chief of the neighborhood crime watch. He knew which houses belonged to seasonal residents, who worked nights, which cars belonged in which driveways, and who had forgotten to close their garage door.

Marcus considered him helpful. Rachel thought he was a little intense.

“He watches everything,” she once said.

“That’s sort of the point of a crime watch.”

“There’s watching the neighborhood, and then there’s watching the neighborhood.”

Marcus laughed.

By May 1984, Rachel’s life seemed to be settling into place. She had landed a job as a graphic artist with Meridian Technical Graphics, a company that produced technical drawings, schematics, and illustrations for engineering firms. She and Marcus decided she would finally give up her beach apartment and move into his house full-time.

On May 19, Rachel and Marcus spent the day at the beach with Beth and her family. Rachel talked about the new job, the move, and the possibility that their mother might eventually relocate to Florida too.

For once, everything seemed to be moving in the right direction.

There was only one thing Rachel was not looking forward to. Marcus had to leave Monday morning for a work conference in Virginia.

“You’ll be fine,” Beth told her.

“I know.”

“You lived alone before.”

“Yeah, but not lately.”

Rachel had become accustomed to having somebody beside her at night. The house felt different when Marcus was gone.

“I’ll finish moving,” she said. “By the time he gets back, he won’t recognize the place.”

Tuesday evening, Rachel loaded the last boxes from her old apartment into the Volkswagen and drove to her friend Nora Ellis’s house for dinner. Nora made vegetable stew. They drank white wine and talked until after midnight.

At the door, Rachel hugged her.

Nora laughed. “I’m gone for three days, not three years.”

“I know.”

“Then what’s this for?”

Rachel squeezed her again and said nothing.

Shortly after midnight, Rachel pulled into the driveway of the house she now shared with Marcus. His car was parked beside hers. He had left it behind for his work trip.

Across the street, light spilled from Daniel Cross’s garage.

Rachel carried boxes of plants inside, locked the door, and began unpacking.

She had been home less than an hour when a scream tore through the neighborhood.

A woman several houses away woke immediately. Another neighbor sat upright and listened. Someone else thought it might have been an animal.

Across the street, Emily Cross heard it too.

“Daniel?”

Her boyfriend was in the garage working on his motorcycle with the radio playing.

Daniel stepped outside. He looked up the street. Then down. Nothing moved.

A few moments later, he went back inside.

“It’s fine,” he told Emily. “I checked everything outside.”

No one called police.

A day passed.

Then another morning came.

Marcus had been trying to reach Rachel from Virginia. He called friends, relatives, hospitals, and eventually the Port Avery Police Department.

Nobody had seen her.

Finally, he called a neighbor named Amy Collins.

“Can you check the house?”

Amy looked through her living-room window.

“I can see Rachel’s car.”

“Will you knock?”

She crossed the street and tried the side door.

No answer.

At the front of the house, Amy noticed broken panes in the screened porch door. Around the side, she found a bedroom window open.

The curtains moved in the breeze.

Amy pushed them aside and looked inside.

Seconds later, she stumbled back toward her own house crying.

She grabbed the telephone.

Marcus was still on the line.

“Amy?”

She could barely speak.

“Amy, is Rachel there?”

“Marcus...”

“What?”

“It’s horrible.”

At 8:39 that morning, twenty-two-year-old Port Avery police officer Allison Ward climbed through the open bedroom window.

She had been a police officer for five months. Nothing had prepared her for the hallway.

Rachel lay partly undressed on the carpet in a pool of dried blood. The stiffness of her body and the smell inside the house made it immediately clear she had been dead for some time.

Within minutes the quiet corner lot was surrounded by police cars.

Port Avery had not handled a major murder in decades. The medical examiner requested assistance from state crime-scene technicians.

Investigators quickly determined that robbery was unlikely. There was no obvious forced entry at the front door and nothing important appeared missing.

Rachel had probably known whoever came inside.

What happened after that had been extraordinarily violent.

Blood began in the bedroom and continued into the hallway, living room, front porch, and bathroom. Investigators found broken glass near the porch door and strands of Rachel’s hair caught around the shattered panes.

They reconstructed part of the struggle.

At some point, Rachel had nearly escaped. She had reached the porch. She had opened the outer door.

That was probably when the neighborhood heard her scream.

Her attacker caught her before she could get outside, dragged her back through the broken glass, and continued the assault.

There were other clues.

Rachel’s bare feet were clean.

But investigators found bare footprints pressed into blood on the carpet and a partial heel print on the bathroom tile.

Those belonged to the killer. So did bloody handprints found on Rachel’s body.

The medical examiner also determined Rachel had been sexually assaulted, but investigators did not have the modern DNA techniques that could have made such evidence decisive. Too much time had passed before her body was discovered, and biological evidence had deteriorated.

The scream bothered detectives almost as much as anything else. More than a dozen neighbors had heard it.

Nobody had called.

The medical examiner believed Rachel had survived for some period after the attack and might have had a chance if police or paramedics had arrived quickly.

No one ever knew for certain.

Across the street lived Daniel Cross.

Daniel was twenty-two, a firefighter, and the unofficial head of the neighborhood crime watch. He voluntarily came to the police station and wrote a detailed statement.

He told investigators he had been in his garage working on his motorcycle. His radio had been playing when he heard what he described as a faint scream.

He stepped outside, checked the street, didn’t see anything suspicious, and went back inside.

He had even reassured Emily. Everything seemed fine.

Daniel also gave police two leads.

One involved the man who cut Marcus’s grass.

The other was more interesting.

The evening after Rachel’s murder, Daniel had seen a man pull up in a van, walk to Marcus’s house, knock, then leave a note beneath the windshield wiper of Marcus’s car.

Police found the note.

It was signed by Peter.

The man turned out to be Peter Colson, host of a local radio program and a friend of both Rachel and Marcus.

Peter called the house while police were still processing it. He said he had stopped by to give Rachel a cassette tape and confirm dinner plans.

When detectives brought him in, they noticed a scratch on his hand.

Then they reread his note.

Stopped by about 7:15 or so but saw no signs of life.

The phrase bothered them.

No signs of life? Rachel had been dead inside.

Peter also appeared to have been romantically interested in her. Suddenly, the friendly radio host became a serious suspect.

Police questioned him repeatedly. He eventually hired a lawyer.

For a while, Peter Colson looked like the best lead detectives had.

Turns out he wasn’t.

His fingerprints didn’t match those from the house. Neither did his biological samples. His roommate supported his alibi.

The lawn-care worker was eliminated too.

So was a man who had repeatedly asked Rachel for dates while she worked at The Mariner. Another coworker who had shown unwanted interest also went nowhere.

Marcus returned from Virginia and voluntarily submitted to questioning. Conference attendees confirmed he had remained hundreds of miles away throughout the relevant period.

Still, detectives investigated him. Could he have flown home during the night and returned before anyone noticed? Records and witnesses made the theory increasingly implausible. Marcus also passed a polygraph.

By autumn, the case was collapsing. Worse, some of the best physical evidence had effectively been lost.

After state investigators finished processing the house, friends of Marcus had been allowed to clean it. They meant well. They did not want him returning to rooms covered in Rachel’s blood.

They scrubbed walls. Vacuumed carpets. Washed floors. Within hours, the crime scene was gone.

Detective Thomas Avery, the most experienced investigator in the small department, kept returning to the remaining evidence. He reconsidered fingerprints. He asked specialists to examine the footprint. He followed reports of a prowler seen around Port Avery at night.

He also kept speaking with Daniel Cross.

Daniel was useful.

He was a firefighter, a public servant, and the crime-watch guy. He knew the neighborhood. He knew who had been awake and which cars had passed.

Avery liked him.

In December, Avery even attended Daniel and Emily’s wedding at the fire station.

Then came a Christmas farewell party for Port Avery’s retiring town manager.

An off-duty officer was talking with a city bus driver who lived several blocks from Rachel and Marcus.

Somehow, the conversation turned to the murder.

“I’ll never forget that scream,” the woman said.

The officer looked at her.

“You heard it?”

“Everybody heard it.”

“From your house?”

“Clear as day, could have been the house next to me.”

“How far are you from the Bell house?”

“Three blocks, maybe.”

The officer thought about Daniel Cross. Daniel lived directly across the street. Yet he had described Rachel’s scream as faint.

Detective Avery went back to Daniel.

“You had the radio on that night?”

“Yeah.”

“How loud?”

“I don’t know. Normal.”

“A woman three blocks away heard Rachel clearly.”

Daniel shrugged.

“Maybe the wind.”

Avery watched him.

“Maybe.”

Daniel began remembering new things.

In his original statement, he had stepped outside after hearing the scream and seen nothing. Now he remembered seeing a man standing near Rachel and Marcus’s property.

“What man?”

“Some guy.”

“You didn’t mention him before.”

“I didn’t think it mattered.”

Daniel described the man’s clothing. His height. His build.

Avery arranged a reconstruction. At night, from the entrance of Daniel’s garage, officers placed a man where Daniel claimed the stranger had stood.

Daniel couldn’t possibly have seen the details he had described.

When Avery confronted him, Daniel changed the story again.

He had actually walked closer.

Then why hadn’t he told police?

The mystery man had threatened him. Threatened his family.

Each new answer created another question.

Polygraph tests that Daniel had once approached confidently began going poorly.

Then Daniel made the mistake that changed the case.

During another interview, he told Avery that after seeing the mysterious stranger leave, curiosity had gotten the better of him. Daniel claimed he had gone inside Rachel’s house and found her dead.

Avery listened carefully.

“What did you see?”

Daniel described the blood.

The hallway.

Then he mentioned the wound across Rachel’s throat.

Avery stopped writing.

That injury had never been made public.

In fact, when Rachel was discovered, the wound had been almost completely obscured beneath blood from the other injuries. Even some of the first officers at the scene had not realized it was there.

Only the killer, the medical examiner, and a handful of investigators knew.

Avery looked across the table.

“How did you know about her throat?”

Daniel’s face changed.

“I saw it.”

“You just told me that.”

“I went inside.”

“You never told us you went inside.”

“I was scared.”

Avery closed his notebook.

The helpful firefighter across the street was no longer helping.

Detectives began rebuilding Daniel Cross’s life.

His first wife described violence. During one argument, Daniel had put his hands around her throat and squeezed. She also described his fixation on women and his habit of staring at them.

Investigators began wondering about the reports of a peeping tom in Port Avery.

Then they returned to one piece of evidence the state laboratory had failed to identify. The bloody footprint.

Avery asked the FBI for help.

The print was sent to specialists who enhanced the image and compared its ridge and shape characteristics with Daniel’s foot.

The result came back.

Match. The heel print in the bathroom matched Daniel Cross. So did the bare footprints left in Rachel’s blood. The man who lived across the street. The firefighter. The head of the neighborhood crime watch.

Detectives now believed they knew what had happened.

Shortly after Rachel returned home from Nora’s dinner, Daniel had been in his garage and saw her unloading boxes from the Volkswagen.

Marcus was away. Rachel was alone. Daniel crossed the street.

When he knocked, Rachel probably asked who it was.

“It’s Daniel. From across the street.”

A familiar voice. A firefighter. The man who watched the neighborhood.

Rachel unlocked the door.

Daniel told her he had noticed her arriving home late and wanted to make sure everything was okay.

She let him inside.

Whatever friendly pretense he had used did not last long. Daniel made a sexual advance. Rachel rejected him. When he touched her, she pushed him away.

Something in him changed.

He produced a knife.

The attack moved into the bedroom. Daniel sexually assaulted Rachel and then began stabbing her when she fought back.

Rachel fought hard. She broke free and ran down the hallway.

Daniel followed.

She reached the porch door. Opened it. And screamed.

It was loud enough to wake people three blocks away.

Across the street, Emily Cross heard it from inside the house.

Daniel caught Rachel before anyone came. He dragged her back through the doorway, smashing glass as she fought against him.

Rachel broke away again and reached the bathroom. Daniel followed her onto the tile.

His bare heel came down in blood.

Rachel made it back into the hallway.

That was where Daniel finally killed her.

He stood over her afterward, breathing hard, his bare feet surrounded by blood.

Then he remembered where he lived. Across the street.

He climbed through the bedroom window, leaving bloody marks behind, crossed back to his house, and washed himself outside.

A few minutes later he went inside. Emily was frightened.

“What was that scream?”

Daniel told her he had checked. Nothing was wrong. The neighborhood was safe.

For more than thirty hours, Rachel remained inside the house while the man who killed her lived directly across the street.

He watched Marcus’s friends come by.

He watched Peter Colson leave the note that temporarily transformed an innocent radio host into a murder suspect.

Then, when Rachel’s body was finally discovered, Daniel became one of Detectives most cooperative witnesses.

He gave statements. Suggested suspects. Helped explain the neighborhood.

The crime-watch leader helped police hunt for himself.

On March 15, 1985, detectives arrested Daniel Cross for Rachel Mercer’s murder.

After a lengthy legal process, he was convicted of first-degree murder and sexual battery and sentenced to life in prison.

Marcus Bell left the house in Port Avery. He continued his work counseling veterans, but the life he and Rachel had just begun building was gone.

Rachel’s family returned home carrying memories of the woman they had always known as the rebel among them. The sister who wore hiking boots to graduation. The woman who protested wars, changed her own name, abandoned northern winters, and crossed whatever lines other people drew around her life.

She had spent years refusing to be frightened by other people’s expectations.

In Port Avery, she had also believed that a neighborhood filled with crime-watch signs and public servants living across the street might offer some measure of safety.

On the night she died, nearly everyone heard her ask for help.

The man who answered was already inside her house.

And the man responsible for keeping watch lived just across the street.