Worth More Dead

would almost certainly have killed her. Indeed, Jackie’s skeleton wasn’t even found until six weeks after the attack on April.
    In a grisly ritual that presumably only he understood, the killer had taken both April and Jodi to the very location where he’d left Jackie, apparently planning to create his own macabre private graveyard.
    After the spunky teenager talked the man who raped her out of slitting her throat, he drove April away from the spot, but he failed to notice that the strip of cloth from her jacket had been left behind. When Lockie Reader picked it up, he assumed it was connected to the Plante case. Instead, it was evidence from the Collins case, and it was likely that it would eventually nail the killer to the wall.
    With help from Jodi and April, a police artist made a sketch that the rape victims agreed was a good likeness of the man who kidnapped and attacked them. The King County investigators wanted him, and they wanted him fast. His sadistic teasing with the sharp knife blade, teasing that rapidly escalated to his actually cutting his victims, his preference for teenage girls, and his being the prime suspect in three cases occurring within a four-month period all indicated that he would surely continue his prowling and terrorizing.
    But how could they find one man who looked much like thousands of other men in an area with a population of one million? How do you locate a suspect vehicle when the abductor apparently often changed vehicles? They knew his MO, they knew his basic physical description, but that was all.
    They began what Lieutenant Frank Chase terms “good, old-fashioned detective work.” He figured that any man capable of such violence had a record of similar sex offenses and had probably come to the attention of law enforcement agencies before. “We’ve been lucky enough to have two excellent witnesses,” Chase said. “We’ve got two teenagers who gave us some of the most precise descriptions we’ve ever had. Let’s go with that. I don’t care how long it takes. Let’s go back four years and pull every file we’ve got on sex crimes. We’ll winnow them out each time we get a match on either physical description or the way he operates.”
    Computers were not yet valuable tools in police work; they could have searched through the files with lightning speed. This search was by detectives, who took on the tedious job of reading each file. The sex cases over the previous four years were stacked in as many huge piles, and most of them took hours to look through. Investigators from the Intelligence Unit were called in to help the Major Crimes detectives check through the files for similarities. Each file was compared with a list of similarities furnished by Bob La Moria and Sam Hicks.
    It seemed a thankless and fruitless task at first. What if the killer had moved into the King County area just before the attacks? What if his criminal record lay in dusty files halfway across the country, not in the King County Sheriff’s Records Bureau?
    And yet, steadily, slowly, the stack of files with matches began to grow. Those files were given to La Moria and Hicks to check out further. They then went through the mug shot files and pulled photographs of the men convicted in earlier cases.
    One morning in the first week of October, Sam Hicks came to work to find five cases that had been pulled as “possibles” sitting on his desk. His lieutenant had set them aside because they had interesting similarities to the modus operandi of the nameless man they were all looking for.
    Hicks looked up the booking numbers and went to the mug shot file to check the photographs of these known sex offenders. As he thumbed through the mugs, he was unable to see the booking numbers until he actually removed a mug from the file because they were on the lower edge of each photo. When he came to one picture, he paused. He was looking at a mug shot that was almost a perfect likeness of the artist’s drawing. As he lifted it from the file, he saw that the booking number was the one he was looking for.
    Bob La Moria was sitting at his desk working when Sam Hicks walked up behind him. Hicks didn’t say a word. He simply flipped the mug shot onto La Moria’s desk and waited.
    “The hair on the back of my neck just stood up,” La Moria recalls. “It was him. We grabbed that mug and ran into Lieutenant Chase’s office and said, ‘We got him!’ It was intuition. I knew we’d found the man we were