R. Toyne, Chief of Detectives, Even before Moore and his escorts arrived in Creston, the strangler had already migrated southward to Kansas City, Missouri, where, within twenty-four hours, he added three more victims to his tally. At approximately 2:00 P.M. on Monday, December 27, a twenty-eight-year-old workman named Raymond Pace returned to his home at 3920 Hammond Street after cashing a $7.50 paycheck for a construction job he had completed that morning. The instant he stepped through the front door, he was greeted by a feeble cry from the bedroom of his son, Victor, an alarmingly frail six-year-old who suffered from a tubercular spine. “Mamma fell down the stairs,” the bedridden boy whimpered when his father hurried to his side. Pace rushed to the stairwell, but his wife, Bonnie—a slender, twenty-three-year-old brunette—was nowhere in sight. He found her in an upstairs bedroom, her body sprawled across the mattress, her house dress yanked above her hips, ugly bruises on her throat.
