Opposite the sink, the bathtub was partially filled with clean water.

The forensic pathologist who autopsied Smith concluded from the pattern of her wounds that they were self-inflicted. And from his own attempts to duplicate the near-total amputation using the same knife Mrs. Smith had used, he estimated she had spent two hours hacking at her left shoulder in the bathroom.

He also noted in his report that she had several superficial bruises of recent origin on her right arm.

The victim's family could not conceive of such a horrible rite of self-destruction. They pressed for a fuller explanation from the local police, who called on Hazelwood and Park Dietz to consult in the case.

Roy concurred that amputation is a highly unusual form of killing somebody, or oneself; and that it is especially so for a woman, and particularly in the deliberate way Smith seemed to have gone about it. No one reported hearing a sound from the Smith residence at any time that night, meaning she would have endured epic pain without uttering any cry much above a whimper.

Yet Hazelwood was not primarily interested in the way that June Smith died but in whether she'd killed herself, or been killed. While conceding that pills or gas are a more common way for females to kill themselves, Roy cautioned that women do occasionally inflict horrible injury on themselves. He mentioned in his later report a case in which the victim hacked herself to death with a machete.

Roy emphasizes that the first rule of equivocal death investigations is to never let the severity of the trauma determine the manner of death (i.e., homicide, suicide, or accident).

"Studying the victim," he says, "is the most crucial factor in a.n.a.lyzing equivocal deaths."

June Smith's pertinent history began in her late teens, when she left her family and friends and a comfortable suburban life to marry a fisherman and live with him and his parents in a modest house in a small and isolated coastal village.

Her husband often was gone to sea for months at a time, leaving his wife to make do in an alien culture. June Smith complained in letters of her boredom and lack of privacy.

In 1980, her first son was born. The following year, Smith suffered a miscarriage, then became pregnant again, only to learn the fetus was afflicted with a gross brain abnormality for which death would be the certain consequence within days of its birth. She elected to abort.

Two years later, Smith gave birth to her second son, and immediately went into a severe postpartum depression, according to her in-laws.

Around Christmas, 1984, she began ignoring both her little boys and took up Bible study. Soon thereafter, Smith set several fires in the house, claiming she was combating an evil spirit. She also heard voices calling out to her in the dark, "I want you, I want you."

Mrs. Smith at last was sent to a mental inst.i.tution, where doctors diagnosed her condition as schizophrenia. According to her chart, the staff frequently heard her chanting "I love Jesus" and proclaiming her sinfulness. She was discharged in late January 1985.

A gap in Smith's personal history extends from her release date until late in June 1985. All that Hazelwood could learn of her story over that period was that she quit taking a powerful antipsychotic drug prescribed for her in the hospital, and that her in-laws had taken care of the boys.

Ten days prior to her death, she moved into a duplex. There was no available explanation why. Then her husband set out for a three-month fishing trip, leaving the psychologically fragile June Smith alone, and solely responsible for her children.

On the afternoon of Friday, July 5, 1985, the day before her death, she and the boys paid a surprise visit to the home of a local pastor. All three were neatly dressed, although the pastor noted that Mrs. Smith and her boys were barefoot.

The clergyman later described her as highly distraught. He said she told him that she'd suffered from both AIDS and cancer, but had been cured. She also insisted that G.o.d had led her to him. She was going to die soon, she explained, and wanted to be baptized in some unspecified magical way that would ensure her pa.s.sage to heaven.

He explained that baptism required approval by church authorities, and that he wouldn't be performing any that day. The minister also gave June Smith the Bible later found in her bathroom, and advised her he'd be in touch.

Dr. Dietz wrote in his report that "it is possible to conclude with a reasonable medical certainty that [Mrs. Smith] was psychotic hours before her death."

The forensic psychiatrist additionally observed that "the disarray of her home . . . and the ritualistic and bizarre elements in her head-shaving and arm-cutting are additional evidence that she was psychotic at the time she inflicted the lethal wounds upon herself."

Besides the victim profile he a.s.sembled, Hazelwood's a.n.a.lysis included the observation that Smith had suffered no apparent defensive wounds, and there was no physical evidence that she had been incapacitated by, for example, a blow to the head. He noted the bruises on her right arm doubtlessly were suffered as she stumbled out the door, her b.l.o.o.d.y left arm dangling at her side. She probably fell repeatedly before she collapsed and died from blood loss.

Furthermore, there was no physical evidence of a struggle in the bathroom, or of another person in the house, although June Smith's four-year-old may have witnessed some part of the night's horror. Months after his mother's death, he asked his grandmother if G.o.d owned a knife.

Roy also saw something else at the scene that to him suggested Mrs. Smith committed suicide, behavior that a less knowledgeable or experienced investigator would not have known how to interpret correctly.

It was the plates of food surrounded by garbage bags in the living room, and the two fresh cakes sitting on the stove.

In and of themselves, the two discoveries are of no investigative consequence. But taken together with the rest of the evidence, they pointed away from homicide and toward suicide.

Roy refers to such indirectly corroborative evidence as the "feminine touch."

He has seen several cases where women have cleaned house or washed and ironed the family's clothes before killing themselves. Such behavior usually is not a.s.sociated with murder or accidental death. Roy also noted that in the case of the woman who hacked herself to death with a machete, the victim first cleaned her house, washed and ironed clothes, bought a new dress, and had her hair styled.

In June Smith's case, Hazelwood theorized that the garbage bags placed around the plates of food in the living room were a matter of maternal tidiness. Mrs. Smith had set them out in the middle of the night, he believed, so as to catch crumbs and other debris from messy eaters, her two little boys, whom she meant to consume the milk and food when they awoke.

The two recently baked and untouched cakes were his second example.

In Roy's opinion, Mrs. Smith may have been deeply disturbed, intent on taking her own life, but she was still a mom.

That left her grisly wounds, her shaved head, and the scene in the bathroom to interpret. Hazelwood believed explanations were to be found in the Bible.

June Smith clearly was preoccupied with religion, a well-doc.u.mented obsession underscored by the cross and Bible she'd brought to the bathroom scene of her autoamputation.

From the bloodied facing pages of Psalms 22 to 26 propped in front of her that night, the psychotic Mrs. Smith might have symbolically reenacted verse 20 of Psalm 22: "Deliver my soul from the sword."

If suicide was her intent, then she was delivering her soul via the sword, her knife.

In the familiar Twenty-third Psalm, the phrase "He leads me beside still waters" was reflected in the partially drawn bathtub, where she might also have intended the baptism denied her by the neighborhood minister.

Later, "Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies" could have inspired her to arrange the plates and forks on either side of the bathroom sink. June Smith certainly perceived enemies in her disordered world, the unseen evil spirits that threatened her in her in-laws' house.

"Thou anointest my head" may have precipitated the decision to shave hers. Head-shaving traditionally is a.s.sociated with penitence.

Finally, June Smith could have read "and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever" to mean the promise of immortality for the amputation, in her tortured mind an ultimate act of expiation.

Her death officially was ruled a suicide.

Homicide or suicide also was the issue in another of Hazelwood's equivocal death inquiries where victimology once again proved a decisive factor in Roy's a.n.a.lysis.

In this case, Hazelwood questioned the official view that eighty-two-year-old Andrew McIntyre* took his own life. Roy and the victim's family believed a killer might be on the loose.

Andrew McIntyre lived alone in a small town for nineteen years, ever since his wife died of cancer.

He was deeply religious and very active in his church. McIntyre was also a model of probity and restraint, deliberate in everything he did, from dating grocery cans and boxes as he purchased them to making sure that his dog never left the house unleashed.

He was a kindly old man, according to his friends, family, neighbors, and acquaintances.

They described McIntyre to Hazelwood as "a very calm, loving, and gentle man," "very quiet, but friendly," "like family," "one of the most dependable men I've ever met," "considerate," and "a very G.o.dly man who lived what he believed."

McIntyre was security conscious, too. Five weeks before his death, he installed a motion detector on his front porch. A similar device already had been installed in his garage.

On June 4,1995, his youngest daughter, Joyce,* drove her father to a doctor's appointment. McIntyre recently had been very ill, which kept him in bed and unable to eat for days. The old man was depressed by his lingering incapacity. "I just wish I could die, but I can't," he told Joyce.

Yet by June 4 McIntyre had regained his vigor and good humor. He asked his doctor if he might resume his daily one-mile const.i.tutionals.

"Sure, just take it easy," said the physician.

Andrew McIntyre had no other medical problems that his doctor knew of.

On the morning of June 5, he spoke by telephone with his friend and neighbor, Mabel Lowe,* who fixed Andrew his late-afternoon supper most days. Lowe would remember McIntyre saying he felt stronger, better.

Later in the day, he went into town to buy a get-well card for his ailing pastor, and also mailed an RSVP for his grand-daughter's wedding in three weeks. Also on his forward calendar was another granddaughter's dance recital on June 18, and the father-son dinner scheduled for the eighth at his church.

At about 5:30 that afternoon, McIntyre spoke by telephone with his daughter Carla,* who lived nearby with her husband. Dad seemed in good spirits to Carla.

His next reported contact was a brief conversation with Mabel Lowe. The two spoke for maybe half an hour in the alley between their houses. Andrew inquired about Mabel's eye, which had been bothering her. She a.s.sured him it was better.

About ninety minutes later, around 8:00, Lowe heard again from McIntyre, by telephone. Once again he asked about her eye, which seemed odd to Lowe, and he made no reply whatsoever when she explained again, that her eye was okay. In retrospect, Mabel Lowe believes Andrew McIntyre was trying to send her some sort of signal with the call.

Joyce McIntyre was scheduled to leave on a business trip the next morning. That evening she expected her father to call her as he always did just to say, "Have a good trip! I'll be praying for you."

When she did not hear from him, she called at approximately 8:15.

No answer.

Joyce then remembered that Wednesday night was prayer meeting night.

Well, he must have felt pretty good tonight, so he went to the prayer meeting, she thought to herself.

She kept calling at half-hour intervals. When her father still wasn't home by 10:00, Joyce guessed that a fellow parishioner had invited him out for a piece of pie, a not unlikely possibility.

However, when her father still did not answer at 11:00, Joyce began to worry. She called Carla at 11:15.

"Have you seen Dad, or talked to him?" she asked.

Carla, who'd been asleep, told Joyce of her 5:30 conversation with their father.

"Well, he's not answering the telephone," Joyce said.

"Do you want me to drive over and see how he is?" asked her sister. Carla had made similar checks in the past, each time discovering nothing was amiss with their father.

"I don't know," Joyce said. She considered calling the police, but decided against it.

If they go driving up there with their lights and sirens, it'll frighten him, she thought.

Joyce told Carla she didn't think the trip was necessary.

She continued trying to reach her father for another two hours as she packed for her trip. At one point, she called the local telephone company to ask if there was trouble on the line. Joyce was told that such checks no longer were done.

Finally, trying to put her mind at ease, she hit on a possible explanation.

The previous day, Andrew McIntyre had told his doctor in Joyce's presence that he was having trouble sleeping, and wondered if it was okay for him to take Tylenol PM. The physician had said yes.

Driving home, Joyce had asked her father how many Tylenol PMs he took. Two, he had answered.

"That's what he's done," she said to herself. "He's taken two Tylenol PMs and gone sound asleep."

The next morning at 7:30 Carla telephoned their father. Still no answer. Fifteen minutes later, she arrived at the old family house. The front door was closed but unlocked, which was completely out of character for Andrew McIntyre. His dog was loose in the house, and highly agitated.

Deeply concerned, Carla walked outside to the detached garage, also unlocked. Again, unusual. She opened the door, looked up, and finally found her father. He was dead, hanging by his neck from the rafters.

Andrew McIntyre, dressed in gray trousers, black belt, blue socks, an undershirt, and underwear, still wore his gold wedding ring.

A stepladder stood next to the body. The dead man's shoes rested alongside a box in the front of the garage. His gla.s.ses lay atop it.

His daughter was stunned speechless-"in a state of shock," she says. Carla was barely aware of telephoning Joyce, or of summoning the police at 7:55 that morning.

The single officer who responded to the call arrived six minutes later. There was no suicide note, and no signs of foul play or physical struggle in the house. After what Carla describes as a perfunctory look around the residence, the officer said, "Well, it's obvious what happened here," meaning suicide.

Not to Andrew McIntyre's family. He simply was not the sort of person to kill himself, they believed, and certainly not in the way the police thought McIntyre had killed himself. For one thing, his body was hanging in front of a windowed door, so that anyone pa.s.sing by that morning could easily have seen him.

McIntyre was as private as he was proper. His family knew Dad never would allow himself to be discovered in that way. Moreover, he had been in an automobile accident not long before, and had suffered a shoulder injury which made it very difficult for him to raise one arm above his head. Joyce believed it was physically impossible for her father to have attached the ligature to the rafters unaided.

Yet who could have murdered him? McIntyre had no enemies. There was no evidence of a robbery. No one in the family stood to gain by his death.

Later that day, however, as his children and their families prepared to gather at his house, another possibility was raised. Carla's husband telephoned Joyce to remind his grieving sister-in-law of something she'd shared with the family many months before.

In late 1995, Joyce's then-husband, Mike Jones,* had threatened to kill her father, she claimed. George now reminded Joyce of the incident, and asked her to think about reporting it to the police.

Andrew McIntyre's death overwhelmed Joyce so completely that she hadn't thought of her ex-husband, or the threat, until the moment Carla's husband mentioned it.

Once reminded, however, she needed no time for reflection. "There's no thinking about it," she said over the telephone. "I'll call the police right now."

"You need to take my father's death very seriously," Joyce told the police, "because his life was threatened by my husband."

The story begins in a restaurant bar.

Joyce was visiting an out-of-town friend, and the two were enjoying a meal together when a strange man several years Joyce's junior "zoned in on me," as she puts it. "He wasn't bad-looking, although he had big ears."

Joyce was not interested in a relationship. She had married her first husband at age nineteen. Three years later, he died accidentally. A second marriage lasted sixteen years before she filed for divorce. Highly dubious of men under any circ.u.mstances, Joyce had vowed at the time she definitely was through with marriage.

But she hadn't reckoned with the likes of Mike Jones.

That evening, Jones told Joyce and her friend that he was a professional and produced a business card that said so.

The following night, he took both women out to dinner. Then the three of them took a day trip together.

Joyce had hoped Jones would focus his considerable energies on her friend. However, she was hardly home and back to work the next week when Mike started calling, frequently. Soon they were chatting together for three or four hours a night. He told her he'd graduated from a prestigious midwestern private college, and that he was a former soldier with top-security clearance. Mike had the papers and card that seemed to prove these claims, too.

Weekend visits soon began.

"I said I'd never get married again, but I guess he knew what I needed to hear," says Joyce. "He played me like a violin."

Joyce married Mike within months of their first meeting. In retrospect, she says she should have sensed something was a little wrong when none of his relatives or friends attended the wedding.

But Joyce was blinded.