Worth More Dead

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