Worth More Dead

really weird looking at my own grave.”
    It most assuredly would have been April’s grave. She came so close, and yet somehow she managed to confuse her abductor enough to convince him to let her go.
    Sergeant Sam Hicks obtained a search warrant for Scribner’s house. Hicks and Bob La Moria found several utility knives with slots for razor blades and two newspaper clippings describing the automobile accident in which Scribner’s brother was fatally injured, just as he described it to Jodi Lukens. They also found a pair of brown pants and a wine-colored shirt—the clothing that Jodi said her attacker wore—a CB radio, a door panel from the maroon Dodge Dart, and, most important of all, the two pieces of denim cloth that were cut from April Collins’s jeans.
     
    On November 1, two King County deputy prosecutors, Rebecca Roe and Mary Kay Barbieri, a duo known for their determination to convict men who committed violent sexual assaults on vulnerable women, brought formal charges of first-degree murder, attempted murder, and two counts of rape against William Gene Scribner. His bail was set at $100,000.
    It seemed right that this man charged with crimes against women face female prosecutors, who would now speak for the dead girl who could no longer speak for herself. Gently, they would elicit testimony from the brave teenagers who had been able to think quickly enough to escape the same fate. Barbieri and Roe had a strong case. They were armed with both physical and circumstantial evidence, brought to them by detectives who spent countless overtime hours to snare William Scribner. They had April and Jodi’s testimony, and both the prosecutors and the detectives deemed them “fantastic witnesses.”
    William Scribner’s lawyers based his defense on his alibis. He always had an alibi, no matter how far-fetched it was. Whenever he was accused of beating and sexually assaulting women, he concocted reasons why he was either far away from the scenes of the crimes or why the women could not be telling the truth.
    This time, however, his alibis collapsed of their own weight, even though his most recent wife testified that he had been with her a half hour after midnight on the night of May 30–31 when Jackie Plante vanished. She told the jury that Scribner went to bed at her house and was there all night. Testimony by women romantically involved with defendants is rarely convincing, and the ex-Mrs. Scribner had no way to delineate that particular night from any other during the summer.
    Scribner had no shortage of intimate female friends, a frequent circumstance with rapists. He was not sexually starved, but he apparently enjoyed the thrill of the hunt and the sense of power he felt when he attacked helpless women. Now, the women who had enjoyed consensual sex with him spoke up on his behalf.
    One of his girlfriends testified that he had been with her at her home since six on August 18, when April Collins was attacked at 7:45 PM . She recalled that he had a headache and had fallen asleep on her couch. She said she was positive that he had remained there until four AM .
    In rebuttal, the prosecutors produced their own witness, a friend of the girlfriend’s son. He testified that Bill Scribner hadn’t been at the woman’s house at all on August 18. He had been there a day later, on August 19.
    The final attack, Jodi Lukens’s case, occured at 8 PM on September 28. Again, Scribner’s former wife gave him an alibi. She said she had received a collect phone call from him around midnight on that date. The call had originated in Ellensburg, Washington. The defense put forth that Scribner could not have driven across Snoqualmie Pass to Ellensburg in four hours. But that was ridiculous. If it had been winter, the pass might well have been blocked for hours by avalanches, but on September 28, the I-90 freeway was clear, and he certainly could have reached Ellensburg in less than two hours. Ellensburg was only ninety-five miles from the place where Jodi was assaulted. That would have taken about an hour and a half, even driving at the speed limit. Detectives checked traffic records just to be sure. There were no accidents on the pass that night. This alibi had negligible impact.
    Dismissing all the arrows that pointed again and again to William Scribner in the three cases, the defense attorneys maintained that it was all a case of mistaken identity. Scribner was a good-looking man, who dressed for court in conservative