A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases by Ann Rule

bring Leona Henderson's family a better life.
    "When I was growing up, you could leave your house open," Vern recalled.
    "And no one would go in it. And if someone did, we all knew who it was.
    We knew who the bad people were. Later, when I was on [police] patrol, I knew who the bad kids were, but now, you don't know who they are, and that makes it real hard to investigate." There was no father in Vern Henderson's world, and while Morris Blankenbaker did have his father, Ned, in town to go to in a pinch, basically both Morris and Vern were being raised by their mothers. Athletics and the friendship of two of his peers, Les Rucker and Morris Blankenbaker, filled in most of the empty spaces in Vern's life. They were family to him.
    "I met Morris at Washington Junior High," Henderson recalled. "He showed up in either seventh or eighth grade." That would have been when Olive left her court job in Vancouver, Washington, and headed back to her hometown. Vern said that Morris lived with his mother and his grandmother out near the river. Morris had always been blind to the color of anyone's skin. He had played with Indian boys when he was smaller, and if you had asked him what color Vern Henderson and Les Rucker were, he probably would have had to think a moment to come up with "black." There weren't many blacks living in Yakima four or five decades ago. Vern remembered that he was one of only six at Washington Junior High and that there were eight black students at Davis High School when he attended. Over the years, many races would move into Yakima, but in the midfifties, there were very few Mexicans and the Indian population mostly lived south of town in Toppenish on the Yakima Indian Reservation. At Davis High, when Morris, Vern, and Les attended, out of the three hundred teenagers registered there was a total of twenty mixed-race students: blacks, Indians, and, perhaps, two or three Chinese. Yakima was a typical small-town orchard and farming community where it was "normal" to be white, and unusual to be any other color, unless you happened to be there to harvest the fruit or work in the fields, and then move on to another migrant worker camp. But the migrant kids rarely got a chance to attend school, they headed south with the first cold snap. While Morris treated everyone the same and didn't notice that his school was mostly white, Vern Henderson did, he had come out of the Deep South to a far better life, just as his grandfather had promised, but he was still aware that he was a member of a minority race, and that he was truly in the minority at Davis High School. His mother had found them a house in the northeast area of town, an exclusively Caucasian section of Yakima "Everything north of Yakima Avenue was white then," he said. "South was where other races lived....
    I even played on a baseball team where I was the only black, because all my friends were white." In Yakima, Catholic teenagers went to Marquette High School, and all the rich kids who went to public school went to Eisenhower High School. Jerilee, several grades behind Vern and Morris, would go to Eisenhower. Later, Vern Henderson remembered that she had lived in a big house up near Thirty-second and Inglewood. "There were no poor people up there." Morris and Vern met Gabby Moore for the first time at Washington Junior High. He was the assistant wrestling coach then and they viewed him as the hero figure that most boys see in their coaches. They were twelve or thirteen, and Gabby was about twenty-one.
    The near-decade between them, of course, made a tremendous difference at that stage in their lives. Vern and Morris were awe struck by everything Gabby told them. "I remember," Vern said, "that he taught us to always look our opponent in the eye to let him know what we were thinking, and that we weren't afraid of him, and that we could beat him." When Morris and Vern moved up to Davis High School, Gabby was their coach there too, he had a better job, coaching on