Worth More Dead

left and they didn’t know where she was.”
    The Plantes gave Hicks the names of dentists their family members had gone to in the Kent-Renton area. Reader and Hicks checked with several dentists who treated the Plante children over the years and finally located a Kent dentist who remembered treating Jackie. He turned over her dental X-rays, which were rushed to the King County Medical Examiner’s office. Reader talked to Dr. Bruce Rothwell, a forensic odontologist, who found that the dental X-rays and charts from the Kent dentist matched up exactly with those taken from the skull and mandible found in the woods near Timberlane.
    There was no longer any question. The homicide victim was Jackie Plante. Detective Reader called the sheriff’s office closest to the isolated ranch in Utah where the dead girl’s parents lived. He asked that a deputy go to Jackie’s mother and father and give them the tragic news of their daughter’s death.
    An hour later, Jackie’s mother called to talk to Detective Reader, hoping against hope that the message about her daughter’s death wasn’t true. He had to tell her that it was indeed true.

    The King County detectives knew now who their victim was. They were on the first rung of a tall ladder, but they had a long way to go. Now they attempted to trace Jackie Plante’s movements from the time she left Utah, happy and excited about a visit to see her boyfriend and her old school friends, to the moment she had vanished. Perhaps somewhere in so many witnesses’ remembrances of her they could find a lead to her killer.
    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