Free To Hatred Turned by Ken Englade

of them that Rozanne’s case appeared hopeless. Larry and Paula had discussed the situation and decided to ask that the equipment be turned off.
    Lightly holding Rozanne’s arm since her hands were still covered with plastic bags in an attempt to preserve microscopic evidence that might help investigators identify her attacker, Larry whispered, “Rozanne, you told me if you were ever on one of these machines to take you off. Well, that’s what we’re here for.”
    When he said those words, Larry recalled later, Rozanne lifted her left hand and moved it toward the back of her head in one of her characteristic gestures. She then turned toward him and her eyes opened briefly. Tears ran down her cheeks as she died.
    Not surprisingly, the mainstream Dallas news media did not immediately place a lot of emphasis on the attack on Rozanne. On October 5, the day after the incident, the Dallas Morning News and the Times Herald were understandably more interested in the state’s effort to execute a killer named James David Autry. The attempt had been postponed after Autry already was strapped to a gurney and the intravenous tubes, designed to carry the lethal drugs into his system, had been plunged into his arm.
    However, the Richardson newspaper, the Daily News , reported Rozanne’s attack on the front page in a story headlined “Details Sketchy on City Shooting.” The major source for the unsigned article was a neighbor of Rozanne’s, who called the newspaper with the tip. The next day, Thursday, October 6, the Daily News fleshed out its account, identifying Rozanne and pinpointing the site of the attack. But there was little hard news to report because the city’s police department had spread a curtain of secrecy over the incident.
    On that day, Dallas’s two daily newspapers were still unaware of the Richardson case. Instead, the Morning News and the Times Herald were much more concerned with a killing in the Casa Linda neighborhood in Northeast Dallas, a considerable distance from Rozanne’s. Ironically, the two crimes had much in common. In Casa Linda, early on Wednesday, October 5, less than twenty-four hours after Rozanne was shot, a ten-year-old girl went to wake her mother and found her murdered. The woman, Margie Jo Wills, had been bound and strangled. It was the Richardson newspaper that first brought out the similarities of the attacks, noting that four comparable incidents had occurred in northeast Dallas since March.
    The Morning News did not report the attack on Rozanne until after she had died, and then it was in a five-paragraph story buried deep inside the suburban edition.
    On Friday, October 7, just a little more than twelve hours after she died, Rozanne’s body was wheeled into the morgue at the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences, near Parkland Hospital, for the required postmortem examination.
    Conducting the autopsy was Dr. M. G. F. Gilliland, a petite, birdlike, humorless woman with a low tolerance for anyone who disagreed with her.
    Methodically, Gilliland ticked off Rozanne’s particulars: “brown hair…brown eyes…five-feet-five inches tall…127 pounds…no significant scars…natural teeth in good repair…”
    Moving systematically down Rozanne’s body, Gilliland lifted her right hand and gazed at a ring encircling the pinky finger. The pathologist described it as a “yellow metal serpent ring with two red stones.” It was the only thing in the report that hinted that the stiffening body with the shaved head and the half-open eyes—officially case number 2749-83-1299—had ever been a living, vibrant woman.
    In stilted medical jargon, Gilliland recorded the physical facts of Rozanne’s primary injury: “There is a history of a gunshot wound of the back of the head, slightly to the right of the midline at the torcula [ sic ]…There is additional history the inshoot was surgically resected as was the underlying skull…No powder or tattooing are mentioned in the description