HERE is another attempt at a perfect crime, this one in real life, that failed because of just one little thing:
Shortly after five o'clock on Friday afternoon, July 1, 1938, Charles F. Butte entered his Seattle apartment and found his wife dead in bed, murdered.
Within a few minutes detectives were at the scene. A bloodstained sheet covered the face of the woman. A rigid leg, protruding from the covering, indicated that rigor mortis had already set in. The apartment had been ransacked.
“I didn't touch anything,” Butte informed the officials. “The only thing I did was to cover her with a sheet to hide her poor face.” He shuddered.
Hardened detectives recoiled when they turned back the sheet. Mrs. Butte was not a pretty sight. Her head had been battered.
Butte could offer little information. He had left the apartment early that morning while his wife was still in bed. They had planned to leave that afternoon on a holiday trip and she was to meet him at four o’clock at the bus terminal. Butte waited there for over an hour. He made several calls to his home but received no answer, and finally he returned to the apartment to see what was causing the delay. He told the officers that he and his wife had just become reconciled after an estrangement. The trip had been planned as a second honeymoon.
Detectives were able to reconstruct the crime from the physical appearance of the apartment. The killer had entered after Butte left, surprised Mrs. Butte in bed and killed her to prevent any outcry.
After the murder he ransacked the place.
Butte’s story was checked as a matter of routine, and attendants at the terminal told how they had seen him waiting impatiently.
The body was turned over to Dr. Gale W. Wilson, medical examiner for the coroner’s office. The physician glanced at the body and at the bloodstained sheet. He asked for Butte and was told the husband was at headquarters.
“Good,” the M. E. replied.
“Then you have the killer.”
The startled sleuths smiled grimly at his explanation and left for the stationhouse. There, Butte was indignant. “What makes you think
that I killed my wife?” he demanded, white-faced.
“Because you told us,” was the unexpected reply. “You said that when you came home from the bus terminal and found your wife dead you covered her face with a sheet. She had been dead for hours by that time, yet we found the sheet bloodstained. You covered her all right, but at the time you killed her—a sheet does not absorb clotted blood.”
Stunned by the sudden collapse of his perfect murder plot, Butte admitted killing his wife early that morning. He said that just before his wife died she looked up at him and asked him to kiss her. He leaned down and kissed her and, in that moment of twisted tenderness, pulled the sheet up over her face. For Butte it was a kiss of guilt, and he was sentenced to life imprison-ment.
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