Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (23 page)

Even as she endured the sexual assault, she studied the rapist, 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 away 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.

All of the crimes occurred in the same general area, and Jodi Lukens was driven to the site where Jackie had been left. If she hadn’t managed to escape, her corpse, too, would probably have ended up there.

It was possible that Jackie was hitchhiking when she met her killer. More likely, her killer might have been the man she met at the kegger. He could have followed her to Buck’s house, then grabbed her as she walked away from Buck’s car when she couldn’t figure out how to work a manual transmission.

Jodi had definitely been hitchhiking, sure that she could tell the good guys from the bad before she accepted a ride. The cars were different, but the descriptions of the rapist given by the two surviving victims matched right down the line.

The clinching connection came when Sam Hicks and Bob La Moria checked through the dozens of envelopes of evidence picked up at the site of Jackie Plante’s body. Among those bits of cloth, those pieces of clothing sliced by the sharp knife, was one knotted strip of cloth that matched none of Jackie’s clothes. But it did match April Collins’s jacket.

The blue-and-white strip with the zipper attached matched up perfectly with the bottom of April’s jacket. It seemed unbelievable, but April had to have been taken to the spot where Jackie’s body lay undiscovered for almost three months. Luckily, April had not seen Jackie’s remains or her attacker would almost certainly have killed her. Indeed, Jackie’s skeleton wasn’t even found until six weeks after the attack on April.

In a grisly ritual that presumably only he understood, the killer had taken both April and Jodi to the very location where he’d left Jackie, apparently planning to create his own macabre private graveyard.

After the spunky teenager talked the man who raped her out of slitting her throat, he drove April away from the spot, but he failed to notice that the strip of cloth from her jacket had been left behind. When Lockie Reader picked it up, he assumed it was connected to the Plante case. Instead, it was evidence from the Collins case, and it was likely that it would eventually nail the killer to the wall.

With help from Jodi and April, a police artist made a sketch that the rape victims agreed was a good likeness of the man who kidnapped and attacked them. The King County investigators wanted him, and they wanted him fast. His sadistic teasing with the sharp knife blade, teasing that rapidly escalated to his actually cutting his victims, his preference for teenage girls, and his being the prime suspect in three cases occurring within a four-month period all indicated that he would surely continue his prowling and terrorizing.

But how could they find one man who looked much like thousands of other men in an area with a population of one million? How do you locate a suspect vehicle when the abductor apparently often changed vehicles? They knew his MO, they knew his basic physical description, but that was all.

They began what Lieutenant Frank Chase terms “good, old-fashioned detective work.” He figured that any man capable of such violence had a record of similar sex offenses and had probably come to the attention of law enforcement agencies before. “We’ve been lucky enough to have two excellent witnesses,” Chase said. “We’ve got two teenagers who gave us some of the most precise descriptions we’ve ever had. Let’s go with that. I don’t care how long it takes. Let’s go back four years and pull every file we’ve got on sex crimes. We’ll winnow them out each time we get a match on either physical description or the way he operates.”