Worth More Dead

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