BY PEPPER FISHER
Port Angeles – New details on the murder of a Port Angeles woman on Saturday, September 28.
Police say 51-year-old Rebecca Rule-Cowles’ suspected killer, 26-year-old Marquise Hagans-Moore, turned himself in to Tacoma Police the following day and confessed to killing his roommate, saying he needed to go to jail and was “trying to do the right thing.”
The probable cause report, obtained from the Clallam County Prosecutor’s Office, describes a suspect under extraordinary stress leading up to the homicide. Moore’s aunt, who accompanied him to the Tacoma jail, told officers Moore had learned on the day of the murder that his ex-wife’s father had committed suicide. She said Moore was the one who went to the man’s house and cut him down from the rope.
The police report says Moore then took his ex-wife’s two siblings (whose names and ages were being withheld) to his home on Whidby Avenue in Port Angeles to let the children get some sleep. The report says he arrived to find his roommate hosting a group of people and making a lot of noise. Moore said he asked his roommate to be quiet while the children sleep, and the roommate refused. After some time, the victim told Moore that her company had left and it was time for him and the children to leave. Moore refused to remove the sleeping children from the residence and an argument ensued. Moore told his aunt that he doesn’t remember what happened next, just that he “emptied the clip on her.” The victim is reported to have been shot 17 times.
Moore then drove the children to a stranger’s in Tacoma and called his aunt around 4 or 5:00pm on Saturday, saying he was turning himself in to the Tacoma Police.
Soon after police took him into custody, Port Angeles police were alerted to do a welfare check at the home on Whidby Avenue where the body of Rule-Cowles was discovered.
Detectives took Hagans-Moore into custody at the Tacoma Police Department and transported him back to Clallam County where he was booked into the jail on Sunday.
The two children were later interviewed. They told detectives that Moore confessed to them and to family members over the phone that he had killed the victim and needed to get the children to a safe place. After sleeping at the stranger’s house, Moore took them to the Capitol Mall in Olympia, bought them something to eat, gave them $50, and put them in a Lyft back to Port Angeles before turning himself in to the police.