Worth More Dead

blondish-brown hair, it measured from six to ten inches in length. The girl’s teeth were in excellent repair. She had polished her toenails with the same silver polish as the lone fingernail.
    Somewhere, someone must surely be worried about her. She had to be someone’s wife, daughter, sister. But whose?
    The King County Sheriff’s Office immediately issued a nationwide bulletin with the description of the girl as she had been in life, along with photos and a detailed description of the clothing found in the woods. Not surprisingly, they were deluged almost immediately with calls from other agencies. In an era when so many young women hitchhiked and sought out rock concerts and commune lifestyles, there were dozens, scores, hundreds of girls classified as runaways or missing persons at any given time.
    Ted Bundy had just been convicted of numerous murders in a Florida courtroom. No one had yet heard of Randy Woodfield—The I-5 Killer—or Gary Ridgway—the Green River Killer. But the world seemed to be growing more dangerous all the time.
    One by one, missing women in other areas were eliminated. Some were found alive and well. Some were accounted for with the discovery of their bodies in Oregon or California or Iowa or Texas. Dental charts sent from other agencies didn’t match. Or either the hair color, height, and weight were wrong or the dates of disappearance did not mesh with the estimated time of death of the victim. This nameless girl in the woods had probably been killed and left there sometime in late May or in June. Somehow, she had gone undiscovered for three to five months.
    In the end, the detective team found they hadn’t needed to look farther than the Kent-Renton area in the south part of King County to discover the name of the murdered girl. When the detailed description of the victim appeared in Seattle and suburban papers, they received calls from teenagers who had wondered about the sudden disappearance of Jacqueline Annette Plante, 17. Jacqueline, whose family had lived in the Timberlane area until the previous February, attended the Thomas Continuation School in the Kent School District. When her family moved to Utah, Jackie went with them. Then, according to friends, she flew into Seattle for a visit in late May.
    “She was here just a day or so, staying with her boyfriend, Buck Lewis, and then she just disappeared,” was the story detectives heard over and over. The general description of Jackie Plante matched the description of the homicide victim, but it was only that: “general.”
    Detective Lockheed Reader contacted the Thomas Continuation School and learned that Jackie Plante had transferred earlier in the year to Dugway High School in Dugway, Utah. When Reader contacted the principal of the Utah school, he learned that Jackie had attended school there until the end of the spring term. “Her sister’s here, though,” the principal offered to Reader’s surprise. “Do you want to talk to her?”
    Reader most certainly did. Talking with her sister, he learned that Jackie had flown to the Seattle area in late May and that the family had not heard from her since the day of her arrival. She said it would be difficult to reach the girls’ parents. They could be contacted only by leaving a message at a toll station near an isolated ranch in Skull Valley, Utah.
    On September 28, Jackie Plante’s parents called the King County detectives. Worriedly, they listened as Detective Sergeant Sam Hicks read them the description of the clothes found with the unidentified body. Yes, Jackie had clothes like that, they told him.
    Jackie Plante’s parents knew the teenager had arrived safely in Seattle and that she had been staying at the Lewis residence. They had grown increasingly concerned about their missing daughter but had tried to believe she had simply chosen to live in the Seattle area. Her mother explained that she had never reported her daughter as a missing person, even after her calls to Buck Lewis’s home in the early part of the summer elicited only vague answers on Jackie’s whereabouts. The Lewises said only that Jackie had moved out of their house, leaving most of her belongings behind.
    Her family tried to convince themselves that Jackie was staying with other friends in the Seattle area and that she would return to Utah to start school in the fall, as she had promised.
    “We knew that she got there all right, on May 28,” her mother said, “but they said she’d