Worth More Dead

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