Knowing that she was dead was extremely important to the murderer whose story follows. He didn’t kill for money or insurance or revenge or out of jealousy. He didn’t even know most of his victims until shortly before he attacked them. They were worth more dead to him because alive they could take away his precious freedom, perhaps even send him to the execution chamber.
And he had every intention of shutting them up.
Forever.
It was close to five on the afternoon of September 25, 1979, when a resident of the Timberlane area east of Kent, Washington, drove slowly down a familiar rutted logging road near his home. It was seldom traveled by anyone other than loggers or residents of the neighborhood. He glanced idly over the vegetation that crept up to the road, much of it just beginning to take on the tinge of fall color. The underbrush was thick as it grew over deadfall logs with tangles of blackberry vines, Oregon grape, salal, and sword ferns. Suddenly, he spotted something light-colored that seemed out of place, and he backed his four-wheel-drive vehicle up and got out to get a better look. The only sounds in the lonely area were his boots crunching through the brush and the cries of crows and hawks. Then he sharply drew in his breath, shocked by what he found.
A skull that was almost certainly that of a human being lay about twelve feet from the road. He paused long enough to see that there were some tattered fragments of clothing, a few swatches of blondish-brown hair, and then he ran back to his rig and drove rapidly to his house, where he could use his phone.
When he reached the King County Police radio dispatcher, he blurted, “I just found a skull and some bones! They’re located approximately one mile northeast of SE 259th and 199th SE. I think that’s just outside the Kent city line. I’ll wait here at my house until you can send a car out.”
Patrol Officer Phillip Orwig was the first deputy to respond to the radio call to investigate “possible human remains.” Although it wasn’t unusual for citizens to call in reports of human skeletons, most turned out to be only the remains of animals. A few were Native American graves, where tribe members had been buried a hundred years earlier, unearthed now by bulldozers, as the cities of the Northwest were more and more enlarged by suburbs.
Orvig’s perusal of the scene told him that this was no coyote or elk. The skull was clearly of human origin. He was joined at the scene by Sergeant Sam Hicks and Detectives Bob La Moria, Frank Tennison, and Dave Reichert and King County Deputy Medical Examiner, Gordon Anderson.
The young investigators, most of them not long out of the Patrol Division, surveyed the scene, where someone had either wandered into the brush and died or, more likely, where a killer had attempted to hide a body. They could see fragments of bone and torn weathered clothing, but the time wasn’t right for an intensive crime scene search. Already the chill of the early fall evening made them shiver, and the setting sun made the woods murky. If they attempted to work the body site now, they might overlook something vital. The body had lain here for at least three months; twelve more hours wouldn’t matter. The detectives left patrol deputies to guard the area until they could return in the morning light to process the scene.
Shortly after eight the next day, Detective Sergeant Roy Weaver and Detectives Lockheed Reader and Frank Atchley arrived at the body site. First, they took many rolls of photographs, then they drove stakes into the ground so that they could always re-create the location of the body parts and any other pieces of physical evidence by using triangulation measurements. At a later date, this precise technique might prove to be vitally important.
Decomposition, animals, and the elements had removed all the body’s soft tissue. The skull was still attached to several cervical (neck) and thoracic (chest) vertebrae, but the rest of the skeleton had been scattered, presumably by animals. A single tennis shoe with a sock and a desiccated leg bone still inside it was on top of two deadfall logs.
Who was the person who had once lain here? The clothing, rotted and sun-bleached, appeared to be that of a young girl. The detectives picked up and bagged each piece: a mint green short-sleeved velour shirt with white trim and the label Cuckoo’s Nest, a hooded sweatshirt with dark blue appliquéd stripes, a pair of flared blue denim jeans, and a white bra.
Next, Reader and Atchley sifted the dirt and leaves in the wooded glen. They turned up more bones, and more pieces of cloth, one being a blue-and-white knotted strip of cloth found close to the dirt road. Twenty-one Explorer Search and Rescue Scouts, under the direction of Lee Hahn and Officer McDowell, fanned out through the woods. They too found more bits of evidence: the other blue tennis shoe, a fingernail with silver polish, some nylon material that proved to be torn panties, a clavicle bone, a rib, and various pieces of material either cut or torn from the victim’s clothing.
But there was nothing that would help identify the body quickly. No purse, no identification. Nor was there anything that might be deemed a weapon.
Dr. Donald Reay, the King County Medical Examiner, arrived to remove the fragments of bone that had once been part of a living human body. The first tentative presumption of just who the victim might have been would have to come from Dr. Reay’s examination.
Forensic pathology is a remarkable science and can give detectives a handle on a case that otherwise seems to be a loser from the start. On this one the King County detectives were at a definite disadvantage going in. They were called to the body site many months after the victim died, they didn’t know who she was or how she had died, and they had no witnesses. The trail was not only cold; it was icy.
Dr. Reay was able to determine many things from his initial examination. A rotting brassiere, its hooks fastened in the back, still clung to the thoracic portion of the skeleton. The front midline of the bra had been cleanly sliced through by some sharp object. Reay also found a linear one-inch cut in the right cup that appeared to have been made by a knife blade or a razor. This slice in the fabric had not been roughened by the rotting material. The right sleeve of the velour shirt was gone, apparently cut off. There was a tear in the green cloth over the right breast portion, and it fit exactly over the cut in the bra beneath.
The logical assumption was that someone had stabbed or cut the victim with considerable force and that the knife or sharp instrument had probably continued through the cloth into her flesh, maybe even into her heart or lungs. But there was no body tissue left to confirm that. Oddly, the lower part of the velour shirt had been sliced off horizontally, again by a sharp instrument.
One leg of her blue jeans was turned inside out, and the denim material next to the zipper had been cut. It appeared that the killer had literally cut the clothing from his victim then killed the nameless girl with a stab wound to the right breast. Dr. Reay examined the skull and found no blunt-force injuries, nor did he find any marks on the bones retrieved that might be from a bullet or a knife. Granted, many bones were still missing, but, given those parts he had to work with, the medical examiner could only conclude that the woman had been stabbed to death.
Reay could make certain judgments about the victim’s size and age by measuring the femur bone and studying the growth ends of other bones. He estimated that she had been between 14 and 20 and approximately five feet four inches tall and slender. When the medical examiner unraveled a few tangled hanks of the blondish-brown hair, it measured from six to ten inches in length. The girl’s teeth were in excellent repair. She had polished her toenails with the same silver polish as the lone fingernail.
Somewhere, someone must surely be worried about her. She had to be someone’s wife, daughter, sister. But whose?
The King County Sheriff’s Office immediately issued a nationwide bulletin with the description of the girl as she had been in life, along with photos and a detailed description of the clothing found in the woods. Not surprisingly, they were deluged almost immediately with calls from other agencies. In an era when so many young women hitchhiked and sought out rock concerts and commune lifestyles, there were dozens, scores, hundreds of girls class
ified as runaways or missing persons at any given time.
Ted Bundy had just been convicted of numerous murders in a Florida courtroom. No one had yet heard of Randy Woodfield—The I-5 Killer—or Gary Ridgway—the Green River Killer. But the world seemed to be growing more dangerous all the time.
One by one, missing women in other areas were eliminated. Some were found alive and well. Some were accounted for with the discovery of their bodies in Oregon or California or Iowa or Texas. Dental charts sent from other agencies didn’t match. Or either the hair color, height, and weight were wrong or the dates of disappearance did not mesh with the estimated time of death of the victim. This nameless girl in the woods had probably been killed and left there sometime in late May or in June. Somehow, she had gone undiscovered for three to five months.
In the end, the detective team found they hadn’t needed to look farther than the Kent-Renton area in the south part of King County to discover the name of the murdered girl. When the detailed description of the victim appeared in Seattle and suburban papers, they received calls from teenagers who had wondered about the sudden disappearance of Jacqueline Annette Plante, 17. Jacqueline, whose family had lived in the Timberlane area until the previous February, attended the Thomas Continuation School in the Kent School District. When her family moved to Utah, Jackie went with them. Then, according to friends, she flew into Seattle for a visit in late May.
“She was here just a day or so, staying with her boyfriend, Buck Lewis, and then she just disappeared,” was the story detectives heard over and over. The general description of Jackie Plante matched the description of the homicide victim, but it was only that: “general.”
Detective Lockheed Reader contacted the Thomas Continuation School and learned that Jackie Plante had transferred earlier in the year to Dugway High School in Dugway, Utah. When Reader contacted the principal of the Utah school, he learned that Jackie had attended school there until the end of the spring term. “Her sister’s here, though,” the principal offered to Reader’s surprise. “Do you want to talk to her?”
Reader most certainly did. Talking with her sister, he learned that Jackie had flown to the Seattle area in late May and that the family had not heard from her since the day of her arrival. She said it would be difficult to reach the girls’ parents. They could be contacted only by leaving a message at a toll station near an isolated ranch in Skull Valley, Utah.
On September 28, Jackie Plante’s parents called the King County detectives. Worriedly, they listened as Detective Sergeant Sam Hicks read them the description of the clothes found with the unidentified body. Yes, Jackie had clothes like that, they told him.
Jackie Plante’s parents knew the teenager had arrived safely in Seattle and that she had been staying at the Lewis residence. They had grown increasingly concerned about their missing daughter but had tried to believe she had simply chosen to live in the Seattle area. Her mother explained that she had never reported her daughter as a missing person, even after her calls to Buck Lewis’s home in the early part of the summer elicited only vague answers on Jackie’s whereabouts. The Lewises said only that Jackie had moved out of their house, leaving most of her belongings behind.
Her family tried to convince themselves that Jackie was staying with other friends in the Seattle area and that she would return to Utah to start school in the fall, as she had promised.
“We knew that she got there all right, on May 28,” her mother said, “but they said she’d left and they didn’t know where she was.”
The Plantes gave Hicks the names of dentists their family members had gone to in the Kent-Renton area. Reader and Hicks checked with several dentists who treated the Plante children over the years and finally located a Kent dentist who remembered treating Jackie. He turned over her dental X-rays, which were rushed to the King County Medical Examiner’s office. Reader talked to Dr. Bruce Rothwell, a forensic odontologist, who found that the dental X-rays and charts from the Kent dentist matched up exactly with those taken from the skull and mandible found in the woods near Timberlane.
There was no longer any question. The homicide victim was Jackie Plante. Detective Reader called the sheriff’s office closest to the isolated ranch in Utah where the dead girl’s parents lived. He asked that a deputy go to Jackie’s mother and father and give them the tragic news of their daughter’s death.
An hour later, Jackie’s mother called to talk to Detective Reader, hoping against hope that the message about her daughter’s death wasn’t true. He had to tell her that it was indeed true.
The King County detectives knew now who their victim was. They were on the first rung of a tall ladder, but they had a long way to go. Now they attempted to trace Jackie Plante’s movements from the time she left Utah, happy and excited about a visit to see her boyfriend and her old school friends, to the moment she had vanished. Perhaps somewhere in so many witnesses’ remembrances of her they could find a lead to her killer.
Several of Jackie’s girlfriends in the Kent area told the detectives unsettling stories about young men who had hit on Jackie during the first few days she was back in Washington. Several of them were extremely insistent that she date them. The most frequent rumor was that Jackie had attended a “kegger,” a beer party held near a quarry in the deep woods near Timberlane, on the night of May 30. Although she went to the party with Buck, her longtime steady boyfriend, others at the kegger recalled that a strange young man hassled Jackie, making suggestive remarks.
“We told Buck about it,” one girl said, “but he said she could take care of herself.”
The obvious place to start unraveling the sequence of events in late May was at the Lewis home. Detective Reader and Sergeant Weaver contacted Buck Lewis’s father.
“I wasn’t here when Jackie flew up from Utah,” the father recalled. “I was over in eastern Washington, but my family said Jackie only stayed a few days. I thought maybe she’d gone over to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where she had friends. My boy, Buck, said she left his car parked way up at the entrance to Timberlane. And then, she just took off.”
Buck’s older brother remembered that Buck sent Jackie a plane ticket to come to Seattle because it was her birthday. “He bought her a watch, too. She only stayed a couple of days, and I heard she took off for eastern Washington. I can show you the stuff she left behind.”
He led the detectives to a basement bedroom and showed them a box full of Jackie’s clothes and shoes. Even her purse was there. Her wallet was missing, and there was no money in her purse, but her address book was there.
Buck Lewis’s stepmother also corroborated that Jackie Plante had flown into Sea-Tac Airport shortly before her birthday; Jackie was going to turn 17 on May 30.
Weaver and Reader had a feeling that Jackie Plante had probably lived for exactly seventeen years. The investigators hadn’t found anyone who actually saw her after she was at the beer bash in the woods. May 30 might well prove to be both the date she was born and the date she died.
While “Lockie” Reader was taking a statement from Buck Lewis’s stepmother, Buck himself arrived home. He talked to Sergeant Weaver about his last recollection of the girl he had hoped to marry. “I picked her up at Sea-Tac on Monday, May 28, about 9:30 PM, and we drove straight to my folks’ place near Timberlane,” he said.
Buck said they slept late the next morning then spent the next day visiting friends in Kent. That evening, Jackie called her mother to let her know she had arrived safely in Washington. Then the couple had made a round of parties in Kent. Early in the evening, they went to a birthday party for a mutual friend. Lewis admitted that Jackie was critical about his drinking at the party. “She said I’d changed for the worse, but she said she still wanted to marry me when she finished school in Utah in the fall.”
On May 30, Buck and Jackie had spent most of her birthday lying out in the sun. Then they went to visit friends again. That evening, they attended the kegger at a gravel pit near Black Diamond. Buck admitted that he’d been dr
inking a lot that day and was quite drunk when they arrived at the party.
“Jackie had only one or two drinks,” he remembered. “We got separated about ten PM. I was standing next to the bonfire talking to two friends, and Jackie wandered off into the dark someplace. She was talking to some people I didn’t know. We sat down by the fire drinking, and some guy came up to me and said, ‘Your girlfriend is being hustled,’ and I said she could handle herself okay. I figured if she was in any trouble, she would come over and get me. So we drank the keg down to the bottom. When it was time to leave, I went looking for her, but everybody said she’d left.”
Buck said he drove his car home and his two friends followed in their car. They had all had a lot to drink. He intended to go right to bed, but his friends wanted to go out to eat.
“I left with them in their car,” he said. “I left my car parked in front of our house.”
“What time was that?” Weaver asked.
“Maybe one or two AM. We headed for the Jack in the Box in Kent. But I was too wiped out to eat, and I fell asleep in the backseat of my buddy’s car.
“So it’s about two hours later when my friends woke me up. We were at the entrance to Timberlane, and my car was parked out there. I don’t know why it was parked so far from my house. The guys dropped me off, and I drove my own car home and went to bed.”
Buck told Weaver that the next morning he found a piece of cardboard torn from a beer carton on the windshield of his car. It was a note from Jackie. It said, “Buck, I drove your car down here. Jackie.”