Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (22 page)

Several of Jackie’s girlfriends in the Kent area told the detectives unsettling stories about young men who had hit on Jackie during the first few days she was back in Washington. Several of them were extremely insistent that she date them. The most frequent rumor was that Jackie had attended a “kegger,” a beer party held near a quarry in the deep woods near Timberlane, on the night of May 30. Although she went to the party with Buck, her longtime steady boyfriend, others at the kegger recalled that a strange young man hassled Jackie, making suggestive remarks.

“We told Buck about it,” one girl said, “but he said she could take care of herself.”

The obvious place to start unraveling the sequence of events in late May was at the Lewis home. Detective Reader and Sergeant Weaver contacted Buck Lewis’s father.

“I wasn’t here when Jackie flew up from Utah,” the father recalled. “I was over in eastern Washington, but my family said Jackie only stayed a few days. I thought maybe she’d gone over to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where she had friends. My boy, Buck, said she left his car parked way up at the entrance to Timberlane. And then, she just took off.”

Buck’s older brother remembered that Buck sent Jackie a plane ticket to come to Seattle because it was her birthday. “He bought her a watch, too. She only stayed a couple of days, and I heard she took off for eastern Washington. I can show you the stuff she left behind.”

He led the detectives to a basement bedroom and showed them a box full of Jackie’s clothes and shoes. Even her purse was there. Her wallet was missing, and there was no money in her purse, but her address book was there.

Buck Lewis’s stepmother also corroborated that Jackie Plante had flown into Sea-Tac Airport shortly before her birthday; Jackie was going to turn 17 on May 30.

Weaver and Reader had a feeling that Jackie Plante had probably lived for exactly seventeen years. The investigators hadn’t found anyone who actually saw her after she was at the beer bash in the woods. May 30 might well prove to be both the date she was born and the date she died.

While “Lockie” Reader was taking a statement from Buck Lewis’s stepmother, Buck himself arrived home. He talked to Sergeant Weaver about his last recollection of the girl he had hoped to marry. “I picked her up at Sea-Tac on Monday, May 28, about 9:30
PM
, and we drove straight to my folks’ place near Timberlane,” he said.

Buck said they slept late the next morning then spent the next day visiting friends in Kent. That evening, Jackie called her mother to let her know she had arrived safely in Washington. Then the couple had made a round of parties in Kent. Early in the evening, they went to a birthday party for a mutual friend. Lewis admitted that Jackie was critical about his drinking at the party. “She said I’d changed for the worse, but she said she still wanted to marry me when she finished school in Utah in the fall.”

On May 30, Buck and Jackie had spent most of her birthday lying out in the sun. Then they went to visit friends again. That evening, they attended the kegger at a gravel pit near Black Diamond. Buck admitted that he’d been drinking a lot that day and was quite drunk when they arrived at the party.

“Jackie had only one or two drinks,” he remembered. “We got separated about ten
PM
. I was standing next to the bonfire talking to two friends, and Jackie wandered off into the dark someplace. She was talking to some people I didn’t know. We sat down by the fire drinking, and some guy came up to me and said, ‘Your girlfriend is being hustled,’ and I said she could handle herself okay. I figured if she was in any trouble, she would come over and get me. So we drank the keg down to the bottom. When it was time to leave, I went looking for her, but everybody said she’d left.”

Buck said he drove his car home and his two friends followed in their car. They had all had a lot to drink. He intended to go right to bed, but his friends wanted to go out to eat.

“I left with them in their car,” he said. “I left my car parked in front of our house.”

“What time was that?” Weaver asked.

“Maybe one or two
AM
. We headed for the Jack in the Box in Kent. But I was too wiped out to eat, and I fell asleep in the backseat of my buddy’s car.

“So it’s about two hours later when my friends woke me up. We were at the entrance to Timberlane, and my car was parked out there. I don’t know why it was parked so far from my house. The guys dropped me off, and I drove my own car home and went to bed.”

Buck told Weaver that the next morning he found a piece of cardboard torn from a beer carton on the windshield of his car. It was a note from Jackie. It said, “Buck, I drove your car down here. Jackie.”

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.