Worth More Dead

disheveled woman managed to break free and run to the lounge for help. She spotted a man she knew, and he hurried out to the parking lot with her.
    “There,” she said, pointing. “That’s his car.” The man who had attacked her wasn’t in it, and he didn’t seem to be anyplace close by. The assault victim’s friend removed a wire coil from under the hood of the car so it could not be driven. Then he drove the woman around the neighborhood looking for her assailant. It had happened only five minutes before, and she soon spotted the man who attempted to rape her.
    Her protector, a husky man, stopped Scribner and detained him until the police arrived. They smelled beer on him, but he didn’t appear to be really intoxicated.
    The woman had obvious finger marks on her neck from the attempted strangulation, a bruised face, and contusions all over her body. Even so, the man, whose identification said he was William Scribner, once again had an explanation for everything. According to his version of the story, he had only been trying to help a lady in distress. When he couldn’t start her car without jumper cables, he had offered to give her a ride to the Sundowner. Yes, he admitted that he had put his arm around her and asked her for a date. “She told me, ‘Maybe Friday night.’ ”
    Scribner became vague when the police asked him why she became angry at him and ran into the tavern. He had no idea why she suddenly flipped out. He hadn’t hurt her, he insisted, and hadn’t said anything disrespectful to her.
    He couldn’t get his car started, so he got out and started walking home. At that point, the woman came back with “a big guy” who grabbed hold of him and made him wait until the police drove up.
    Scribner was charged with one count of assault and one count of simple assault and was again back in the criminal justice system. He was ordered to talk to counselors and psychiatrists. They tried to find out why he felt so much anger toward women when his impulses were released by imbibing alcohol. He repeated his version of his life history as he had often done before. He constantly blamed his troubles on alcohol, never on himself.
    Bill Scribner was the eldest of five children and had been married twice. He married first when he was twenty-two; that lasted fifteen months. His second marriage was three years later; after three years that wife left him, too.
    The psychiatrist who examined William after the two violent attacks on the women who managed to get away from him found personality traits which are all too common in recidivist criminals. His diagnosis was that Scribner suffered from “severe antisocial personality disorder and chronic alcoholism.” The report continued, “In my experience with antisocial individuals, good intentions reflect more the anxieties and concerns of the immediate moment than any basic change in personality. The defendant suffers not from lack of good intentions, but from the gross inability to conform his behavior to the norm in the face of conflict, and [from] severe social disorganization.”
    In layman’s terms, the psychiatrist was saying that William Scribner was sorry only because he had been caught and that he was likely to repeat his violent behavior in the future. When Scribner pleaded guilty to the two assault charges, he was sentenced to ten years on one count and one year on the second count (to run concurrently). It sounded as though he would go to prison for ten years, but in the convoluted machinations of sentencing, he ended up serving only ten months in the King County Jail and several months more in the Cedar Hills Rehabilitation Center.
    He hadn’t been rehabilitated long before Jackie Plante was murdered.
    Detectives showed mug laydowns of several men—including one of Bill Scribner—to April Collins. She picked Scribner’s photo immediately. “That’s him! That’s the man!”
    Sam Hicks and Bob La Moria learned that Scribner was working as a roofer and living in a home some four miles away on the West Valley Highway south of the city of Kent. On October 10, Hicks and La Moria sat on a stakeout at Scribner’s residence while Deputies Leo Hursh and Dave Reichert parked near the roofing firm.
    At ten minutes to five that afternoon, Hursh and Reichert notified La Moria and Hicks that a Dodge—jacked up in the rear as described by victim Jodi Lukens—had just left the roofing company. The car was not yellow; it had been painted over with a