Word: murderously
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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John Ross kept the news under his tan Stetson and went to work. He discovered that right after the murder Kirkes had ordered his coupe repainted, though the garage man insisted it didn't need paint. That same week the big patrolman grabbed an air hose away from a service station man and cleaned out the rear compartment of his car himself. Moreover, a faint mark on the dead girl's legs looked like the pattern of a rear-compartment floor mat found only in Ford coupes. The mat in Kirkes' 1939 Ford was missing...
John Ross huddled with the district attorney; together they confronted Kirkes and accused him of murder. He refused to say anything. Privately, the D.A. shook his head and admitted that he would need a lot more evidence before he could make a case stand up against a man of Patrolman Kirkes' reputation. Kirkes went blithely back to his motorcycle, left town six months later for wartime Red Cross duty in the Aleutians...
...year after Len Kirkes got back to Carpinteria, John Ross was elected sheriff of Santa Barbara county. He and Kirkes would chat together whenever they met, but Ross never took the Senteney murder file off the top of his desk. One day last September, a woman reported that Kirkes had tried to molest her ten-year-old son. The sheriff jailed Kirkes and prayed that some timid murder witnesses might turn up, now that the big ex-cop was locked...
They did. One was a school chum of Margaret Senteney's who had taken a walk on the night of the murder. She had seen Margaret get into a car. "It was Mr. Kirkes' grey car," she said. Another witness, an aged Italian truck farmer, swore to watching the patrolman drive down out of the foothills early on the morning after the murder...
Last week, after listening to Sheriff Ross's evidence and Kirkes' denials, a jury found Kirkes guilty of second-degree murder and recommended no leniency (mandatory penalty: five years to life). John Ross went back to his office in Santa Barbara's stucco courthouse and locked up the Senteney file, which he and Len Kirkes had begun eight years before...