His first reaction was anger. Jackie had obviously come home, changed clothes (he found the blouse she wore to the kegger in her room), and driven his car as far as the entrance to Timberlane. She hadn’t needed a key; it could be started by turning the ignition slot. But Jackie didn’t know how to drive a standard transmission, and he figured she must have decided to dump his car blocks from his house. Then he found another note she left on the coffee table in the house, saying she was going out to look for him.
It sounded as though she had been worried about him. But he couldn’t understand why she ran out on him at the party in the first place and why she hadn’t come home all night. She was upset about his drinking but not that upset. After all, he paid for her plane fare and bought her a watch for her birthday. Buck said he talked to his brother, who spoke with Jackie when she came back from the kegger. “He said that she only left because she was going to go looking for me.”
All he could figure was that she had gotten a ride with someone after she’d left his car several blocks from his house. It had been in the wee hours of the morning, so it would have to have been someone she trusted, someone who would drive her around to look for him.
Buck waited for a call from her. None came. He spent five days driving around Kent looking for Jackie. No one had seen her. It wasn’t a big city. How could she have disappeared so completely? He said he came to blame himself for being so drunk that he didn’t check on whoever was trying to pick her up at the kegger. There were scores of young people there, many of them complete strangers to one another.
As things stood, Buck Lewis appeared to be a likely suspect in Jackie’s murder. He was with her the last night she was seen alive, and they’d argued about his drinking. It was possible that he wasn’t telling the truth. Maybe he had found Jackie after his friends dropped him off in the wee hours of May 31. They might have argued because she took his car without permission and then ditched it.
That was all within the realm of possibility, but Buck Lewis truly didn’t know what had happened to his fiancée. He cleanly passed a lie-detector test administered on October 1. No, Buck hadn’t killed Jackie. He came to believe that she left him of her own volition. As the summer months passed, he stopped looking for her, figuring that their lifestyles were too different and that she no longer wanted to marry him. He was only 18; she only 17. A more mature man might have worried more, but Buck soon found a new girlfriend, believing that Jackie would write to him from Utah someday and explain why she left so suddenly.
According to their friends, Buck still thought getting drunk was fun, but Jackie had been trying to change. She was no longer interested in smoking pot, and she drank very little. If tragedy had not intervened, Jackie Plante seemed to have been on her way to becoming a responsible adult. She looked forward to high school graduation and a job.
The King County detectives interviewed as many young people as they could find who had attended that kegger near the quarry in Black Diamond on the night of Jackie’s seventeenth birthday. Many recalled the man who tried to pick her up but said Jackie had turned down his advances. “The last time we saw her, she was hitchhiking home to Kent,” said one girl.
Jackie made it safely back to the Lewis home. The investigators knew that. The only conclusion they could draw was that she had thumbed still another ride, this time with a killer. Or perhaps he had forced Buck’s car to the curb and forced her into his vehicle. No one in the family neighborhood saw or heard anything long after midnight. There were no witnesses. No one saw Jackie at all, not for four months, not until her skeletonized body had been found in the wooded copse in late September.
On the chance that there might still be some bit of evidence in the car owned by Buck Lewis, Lockie Reader tracked down the new owner who had purchased it from Lewis. Although they processed the car carefully, they didn’t find anything helpful to the investigation.
Reader did find a young man, Ben Prosser,* who bragged about having dated Jackie Plante. When Reader confronted him, he seemed terribly nervous. He quickly said that he hadn’t even seen Jackie Plante during the summer she vanished.
“I took her to a drive-in movie once,” he said. “That’s all—and that was last summer. I didn’t even know she moved to Utah.”
At the same time that Sergeant Roy Weaver’s team of detectives were investigating the Plante homicide, Sergeant Sam Hicks’s squad was working on two rape-assaults, and several kidnapping cases that were so vicious that they had come close to being homicide cases. Hicks felt a lot of pressure to catch the rapist. He would kill a woman soon if he weren’t stopped; his rage at women was scary.
One rape had occurred on August 18, the other on September 26, only one day after Jackie Plante’s body was discovered.
The two detective squads met with Lieutenant Frank Chase, commander of the Major Crimes Unit, to discuss both the sexual assaults and the murder case. There were enough similarities to make sheriff’s investigators wonder if there might be a connection. All of the crimes against women had occurred in the South King County area.
Sometime between 7:30 and eight on the evening of August 18, April Collins,* 15, set off with her pet dog to walk to a girlfriend’s home south of Renton. The petite dark-haired girl noticed a maroon car as it drove slowly by her. The driver seemed to be looking for an address. But then he turned his car around and came back. He called to April, asking for directions to the Aqua Barn in Renton. April walked over to the car so that she could look in the window and see whom she was talking to. The moment she got close enough, the driver grabbed her by the arm and held her fast.
“I’ll cut you with this knife if you scream,” he threatened. He was very strong and pulled her into the car. Her dog jumped in beside her. April was forced to lie with her head down on the front seat, and the man pinioned her body with one leg as he drove away.
She was too shocked and frightened to cry out for help. And then he took the utility knife with a single-edged razor blade in it, and held it to her back, threatening again to cut her if she made a move. Terrified, April obeyed.
The man drove to an isolated area off the Kent-Kangley Road east of Kent. There he dragged the teenager roughly out of his car.
Then, surprisingly, he reached into the car and handed her a can of Budweiser beer.
“Drink it,” he ordered.
“No,” she refused. “I don’t drink.”
He told her to lie on the ground on her stomach. Then he straddled her. Using the utility knife, he sliced a band of cloth from the bottom of her sweatshirt. He used that strip of cloth to tie her hands behind her back.
Next, the man pushed April into the trunk of his car. He began to cut the leg of her jeans, apparently enjoying himself as he cut off her clothing with the razor blade that fit into the slot of the utility tool. Without thinking, she told him to stop, “These are my best pair of jeans!”
This annoyed her captor, and he ran the blade along her leg until blood welled up all along the cut. Then he slammed down the lid of the trunk.
April was trapped in the pitch-dark trunk, and she was bounced and jostled cruelly as the car plunged over rough roads. She could think of no way to get out or even to signal to other drivers. Even if she could have, she sensed they were in a lonely place where there were no other drivers.
At length, the car slowed and then stopped. She waited, terrified, to see what he would do next. She heard the driver’s door open and slam shut and then approaching footsteps.
The stranger opened the trunk, pulled her out, untied her, and barked, “Take off your clothes!”
April Collins was an exceptionally bright and brave young woman. She knew it was futile to fight the man who held her captive, so she did as she was told, knowing that she was about to be raped and knowing that there wasn’t a thing in the world she could do about it. She hoped now only to survive with her life. He led her to the front seat and pushed her down.
Even as she endured the sexual assault, she studied the rap
ist, determined to memorize everything she could about him. He was slender but fairly muscular and quite tan. She thought he probably worked out of doors. He had wild, wavy light-brown hair, light blue eyes, and a mustache and hadn’t shaved for at least a week. She thought he might be as old as 35 to 39, but it was hard for her to judge age. He was old enough to be her father.
When the man was done with her, he told April to put her clothes back on, all but her blouse. She thought that he was going to let her go now.
She was mistaken.
“Stand in front of the car,” he commanded. “Now lie down right there, on your back.”
The man sat on top of her chest, while he took her blouse and held it against her throat.
“What are you doing?” she gasped.
“I don’t want to get blood on me if it spurts out when I cut your throat,” he replied in a strangely flat voice.
April hadn’t fought him until then. It had seemed utterly useless to try, but she realized in horror that he did mean to cut her throat as he actually drew the blade deeply into the right side of her neck, moving it down toward her shoulder…one inch…two inches. Suddenly, she was galvanized into action by a tremendous will to live. With every bit of strength she could muster, she knocked the knife from his hand.
Then she began to talk, asking him, “Why? Why are you doing this to me?”
“I have to,” he said simply. “If I let you live, you’ll be able to identify me. I’ll get caught.”
April had an advantage over the man. Not in strength but in IQ points. When he asked her what her name was, she told him. “I’m telling you the truth,” she said. “If you don’t believe me, look in my wallet. It’s right over there. You can look in and get my address and everything. If I told anyone, you could come back and kill me. See, you’d have that power over me, so I wouldn’t dare tell.”
He seemed to be mulling that over. April kept talking; she could see the man was getting confused. “I’m going to be sixteen next week,” she said. “I don’t want to die before I have my sixteenth birthday. I want to see what my presents are. I deserve to live that long. Can’t you see it’s not fair to kill someone who hasn’t even had a chance to live yet?”
“Well, I don’t know…”
April’s neck throbbed with pain, and she could feel the blood coursing down her breasts from the deep cut in her neck, but she couldn’t think about that now. She had to keep talking, keep the man off balance. She could see that he wasn’t able to think as fast as she could.
“I swear I won’t tell,” she repeated. “I just want to be sixteen. I’ve been looking forward to it for so long.”
He seemed to have taken the bait. “If you tell, if you even tell anyone, I’ll have this,” he said, holding up her learner’s permit from the Department of Motor Vehicles. “I know who you are and where you live. I’ll come back and finish the job. I’ll kill you.”
“Yes, I know you will. Yes, yes, yes. See, you could do that,” she repeated. “You know I wouldn’t dare tell anyone.”
Incredibly, the brave little teenager had outfoxed her attacker. He put her back into his car and drove her to a street near a junior high school. There he told her to get out. As soon as the car disappeared, April ran to a nearby home and called her parents. They called an ambulance and told them where April was. Then they headed there themselves.
April Collins was rushed to Valley General Hospital south of Renton, where surgeons stitched up her deep neck wound and the long vertical cut on her leg. They agreed that the weapon had been razorlike, and that it could well have been the utility knife April described. It was the kind of knife that workers who install linoleum or wallboard use. A blade is replaced by a fresh one whenever it becomes dull. The blade used on April’s neck had not been dull; the wound actually extended into the muscle tendons. Just a bit more pressure and she would have died quickly from hemorrhaging. As it was, she had suffered profound loss of blood.
Lieutenant Frank Chase rushed to the hospital and talked to the brave young victim. She was a remarkably good witness. She was able to describe the car as a late sixties white-over-maroon Ford Fairlane or Falcon or a Chevy Nova. She was able to describe the site where she had been taken first but was not as sure about the isolated place where her captor had taken her while she was in his trunk. “I could recognize it if I saw it again,” she said, “but I couldn’t see the roads he took to get there.”
April was more worried about her dog than she was about herself. The stranger had put her pet out of the car after the first stop. She was heartbroken that it was probably so lost that it would never find its way home.
Part of the MO used by the rapist—the way he cut away the strip of April’s clothing—was very similar to the way Jackie Plante’s clothing was cut. Her jacket was also sliced at the bottom, presumably to get strips of cloth to be used as bonds for her hands.
The second unsolved rape followed the same MO. On September 26, Jodi Lukens,* 16, was hitchhiking on Highway 99 in front of the Rain Tree Restaurant-Disco at 8:30 PM. At the time, the news of the discovery of the skeletal remains in nearby Kent was featured in newspapers and on television, but Jodi—like so many teenagers—didn’t think anything could happen to her. She laughed at friends who warned her not to hitchhike.
A yellow Dodge “Charger-type” car passed Jodi, turned around, and came back. Jodi hopped in. The driver, a slender man with bushy light-brown hair, drove south along the highway for about five miles and turned into the parking lot of the sprawling Sea-Tac Mall in Federal Way. Then he changed his mind and drove back to the spot where he’d picked Jodi up. He told her that he needed some change, gave her a five-dollar bill, and sent her into a small convenience store to get five ones. She returned with the change and then agreed to go with the stranger to “a friend’s house in Kent” so he could pick up some marijuana.
Jodi hoped to get a ride all the way to Tacoma, about fifteen miles south of where they were. She told the driver that she didn’t mind the detour as long as it wouldn’t take too long.
She didn’t know that April Collins had been driven to Kent and up the Kent-Kangley Road six weeks earlier and had barely escaped with her life. Still Jodi became nervous as the driver turned onto narrow roads that seemed to be further and further away from a populated area. They finally ended up on a lonely gravel road that led into a deep woods.
She knew she was in trouble when the driver grabbed her by the hair and forced her down on the front seat. He quickly reached into the backseat and produced a utility knife with a razor edge. He pushed Jodi out of the car and demanded that she perform oral sex on him.
When he was finished with her, he began to methodically slice away her clothing with the knife. To get better leverage, he forced her to the ground and sat on her while he cut the bottom edge of her blue jacket away in strips. Then he used the cloth to tie her hands behind her, all the time threatening to slice her throat if she resisted.
The rapist had his vicious MO down to a well-thought-out plan by now. He pushed Jodi back into his car and told her to keep her head down as he drove to another location. Each time she tried to lift her head up to see where they were going, he grabbed her by the hair and knocked her back to the seat.
“I’ll bash your head in,” he snarled. She didn’t doubt that he would.
Jodi managed to get just a glimpse of where they were at one point; they were east of the Timberlane area off of 199th and SE 259th. She had no way of knowing it, but they were extremely close to the area where Jackie Plante’s body was discovered. Jodi had never heard of Jackie nor of April, either.
Convinced that this man was going to kill her as soon as the car stopped, Jodi managed to free one of her hands from its bonds. She might have a slight chance to live if she could just get out of the car. Surreptitiously, she managed to unlock the door on the passenger side. As they pulled into the rutted road to the woods, her abductor became agitated at the sight of a car parked there. His attention drifted a
way from Jodi for a moment as he slowed down, preparing to turn around.
Jodi grabbed her last chance. As she pushed the door open, the rapist tried to slash her leg with his knife, but she grabbed the knife by its handle. They struggled until Jodi was able to knock the knife to the floor. She tumbled backward out of the passenger door of the slow-moving car, not knowing what she would hit or if the driver would turn and run over her. But the yellow car sped away, and she ran toward the lights of a house in the distance. There she asked the residents to call the police.
Just as April Collins was, Jodi Lukens was an excellent witness, her ordeal having left her memory crystalline. As she lay on the front seat of what she believed was a Dodge Charger, she had observed everything within range of her hearing and vision.
“The car was jacked up in the rear,” she told Detective Bob La Moria, mentally ticking off all the details she had memorized while she wondered if she was going to live to tell someone. “And it had a loud exhaust,” she continued. “There was a CB radio under the dashboard, bench seats, light-colored interior. Automatic transmission. The glove box opened up instead of down, and the car had a column shift lever.”
She had remembered everything. “The man drank Budweiser beer with tomato juice while we drove around,” Jodi said, “and he smoked Marlboros. He wore brown trousers and a dark, reddish shirt.”
One other thing that Jodi recalled was that the man who kidnapped her told her that his younger brother had recently been killed in an automobile accident.
“He said his brother had either been drinking or doing drugs and he was in a car crash,” Jodi said. “This guy kept telling me about it.”
There were just too many factors that linked Jackie’s murder and the two sexual assaults to be mere coincidence. Both the rape victims and the homicide victim had had their clothing sliced with a sharp knife. Although the bonds had been removed from Jackie Plante’s wrists by animals as her body decomposed during the long hot summer months, knotted bits of fabric found at the site were almost identical to those sliced from the jackets of the two rape victims.