Worth More Dead

looking for.”
    The man in the picture was William Gene Scribner, 28. He was no stranger to local law enforcement agencies. He had a police record going back to his early teens. Even back then, he’d had a serious alcohol problem. He had been sent to several correctional institutions for juveniles after he was involved in car thefts and runaways. After he was released from reform school, he joined the army.
    Scribner’s adult rap sheet began with petty crimes after he was dishonorably discharged from the army for being AWOL. He spent time in jail in Yakima, Washington, for drunk driving and failure to answer a traffic summons. Then his crimes escalated to petty larceny and larceny by check. But he escaped doing hard time. The disposition of his cases stipulated that he would make restitution and remain on probation. He was required to hold a job and submit to periodic lie-detector tests and urinalysis to verify that he was avoiding alcohol.
    None of this would have brought him to the attention of King County investigators working on sex crimes cases. However, events in the two and a half years before Jackie Plante’s murder marked William Scribner as a man of perverse sexual impulses, almost always when he’d been drinking.
    Two years before, on March 22, a Renton woman who was acquainted with Bill Scribner agreed to go with him to rural Maple Valley “to cop a lid of pot.” She took her small daughter along. To her shock, Scribner stopped the car in a wooded area and pointed a gun at her head. He wanted her “to perform.” She assumed that he meant he wanted to have intercourse with her. If she didn’t oblige, he would shoot her. But oddly he first insisted she chuga-lug four bottles of Budweiser beer at gunpoint.
    When she finished, he demanded oral sex, roughly grabbing her by the hair and forcing her to fellate him as her tiny daughter screamed in terror.
    The woman told Renton detectives that she finally talked Scribner into unloading the pistol and putting it on the dashboard of his car. He did that, and she breathed a sigh of relief. Then he pointed into the dark woods and told her to “take off.”
    She didn’t know where they were, and it was dark and stormy. If she had been alone, she would have run, but she had her child with her. “Couldn’t you just drive us to the main road,” she pleaded. “My daughter’s sick and it’s raining. I have to get her a ride home.”
    She should have taken her chances, because her request had enraged Scribner. He growled, “You blew it, bitch! You had your chance and you blew it.” Then he dragged her out of the car by her hair and punched her several times in the face.
    Apparently satiated, he pulled her back into the car and drove her and her little girl back to her apartment. She held her breath the whole way, hoping she would be able to grab her daughter and leap from the car if he became angry again.
    The victim said that Scribner was very drunk, but his intoxicated state hardly accounted for his violent sexual attack and the beating that followed.
    When Bill Scribner was arrested, he admitted only to having had an argument with the woman. He acknowledged that he had given her a black eye, but he blamed his behavior on his drinking problem. He begged for help to conquer his addiction to alcohol. He completely denied that he had used a gun to threaten her or that he’d forced her to perform a sexual act.
    There was another attack on a woman later that year. A young Kent woman was stranded in a stalled car late one evening. She looked around for help and noticed a man, Bill Scribner, working on his car near an apartment complex. She asked him if he could take a look at her car.
    “He told me that he didn’t have the tools to fix my car,” she told the police later, “but he offered me a ride to the lounge [the Sundowner] where I was supposed to meet my friend.”
    He seemed like a nice enough guy, but as he drove into the parking lot of the cocktail lounge, he suddenly grabbed the woman and threw her down on the front seat of his car.
    “I’ll bash your head in,” he said between clenched teeth as he ripped her blouse from her neck to her waist.
    Fighting for time and hoping someone would notice what was going on, the frightened woman grabbed the stranger’s keys from the ignition and threw them out the window to the ground. They continued to struggle, and both of them tumbled out of the car onto the asphalt parking lot. At this point, the