Worth More Dead

clothes. In this venue, he looked harmless, even sympathetic.
    But the jurors didn’t buy it. On March 8, 1980, they returned verdicts of guilty of first-degree murder, attempted murder, and two counts of rape.
    Lieutenant Frank Chase commended his detectives and gave credit to the prosecutors, Mary Kay Barbieri and Rebecca Roe. He particularly singled out the survivors.
    “I can’t say enough about those two teenage girls. They were smart and were two of the best witnesses our detectives had ever encountered. They were a major part of solving this case. They remembered everything— everything —and they helped us to find the guy and bring him in.”
     
    And yet, some twenty-five years after the terror, so much damage remains. As so often happens, victims of long-ago crimes contact me, still needing something to free them from their nightmares. The teenage girls that William Scribner attacked are now women in their early forties. Even though he is still locked behind prison walls, the horror of what he did to them hasn’t gone away. It clings like silky cobwebs to an old brick wall.
    Jodi Lukens never hitchhiked again after the night that Bill Scribner picked her up. Although her memory was perfect shortly after she was attacked and during his trial six months later, her recall gradually clouded over, the mind’s own defense.
    Some twenty-five years later, Jodi is still fearful of Bill Scribner, but she remembers only scattered bits and pieces of the actual attack. She recalls that he forced her onto the floor of his vehicle and that somehow she managed to get the passenger door open, fall out, and run for help.
    She can no longer remember where the woods are where she got away from him. However, she was recently driving with friends when a terrible feeling of dread washed over her. Although she could never have retraced the route to the place where she almost died, she knew that they must inadvertently have stumbled upon that awful site where he had taken his victims. It brought the nightmares back again.
    Jodi remembers Bob La Moria, the King County detective, now retired, who along with Sam Hicks was responsible for catching Bill Scribner. “He was the only one who told me that none of it was my fault,” she says today. “His caring about my feelings meant so much to me.”
    One of Jodi’s close friends has signed on to Washington’s Victims Watch Program so that she can be aware of where Bill Scribner is at all times. It is important to Jodi to know that he is not out on the streets, trolling for more victims.
    Scribner is now fifty-three years old and still in prison, currently at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. His earliest parole date is June 14, 2047. If he is still alive by then, he will be in his nineties and presumably no longer much of a danger as a sexual predator.
     
    Most of the King County detectives who tracked William Scribner have retired. Tragically, on June 17, 1982, Sam Hicks and Leo Hursh walked into a fusillade of bullets as they approached a farmhouse in Black Diamond to question the resident there about the murder of a Seattle rock musician. The man inside had sworn he would never go to prison. Caught in the open, Hicks was killed instantly and Hursh was wounded.
    Dave Reichert, one of Hicks’s closest friends and a frequent partner on investigations—as on the night they staked out William Scribner just before they arrested him—was grief-stricken. Many years later, Reichert went on to become the sheriff of King County, and he was also one of the prime investigators into the Green River murders for which Gary Ridgway was eventually arrested. Today, Reichert is a Republican Representative from Washington State.
    Ironically, Scribner’s crimes were very like those that Ridgway began to carry out two years after Scribner was convicted. They operated in the same general area, took their helpless victims to lonely spots, and trolled the Pacific Highway south of Seattle. Fortunately, William Scribner was caught before he could run up a toll as high as Ridgway’s.

Old Man’s Darling

This case came to me almost accidentally. I happened to be signing books in a Sam’s Club in Denver, Colorado, when Captain Joseph Padilla of the Denver Police Department stopped to introduce himself and have his copy of Green River, Running Red signed. Like all cops and former cops, we started telling “war stories,” and Padilla told me of a strange shooting he and his