Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (24 page)

Computers were not yet valuable tools in police work; they could have searched through the files with lightning speed. This search was by detectives, who took on the tedious job of reading each file. The sex cases over the previous four years were stacked in as many huge piles, and most of them took hours to look through. Investigators from the Intelligence Unit were called in to help the Major Crimes detectives check through the files for similarities. Each file was compared with a list of similarities furnished by Bob La Moria and Sam Hicks.

It seemed a thankless and fruitless task at first. What if the killer had moved into the King County area just before the attacks? What if his criminal record lay in dusty files halfway across the country, not in the King County Sheriff’s Records Bureau?

And yet, steadily, slowly, the stack of files with matches began to grow. Those files were given to La Moria and Hicks to check out further. They then went through the mug shot files and pulled photographs of the men convicted in earlier cases.

One morning in the first week of October, Sam Hicks came to work to find five cases that had been pulled as “possibles” sitting on his desk. His lieutenant had set them aside because they had interesting similarities to the modus operandi of the nameless man they were all looking for.

Hicks looked up the booking numbers and went to the mug shot file to check the photographs of these known sex offenders. As he thumbed through the mugs, he was unable to see the booking numbers until he actually removed a mug from the file because they were on the lower edge of each photo. When he came to one picture, he paused. He was looking at a mug shot that was almost a perfect likeness of the artist’s drawing. As he lifted it from the file, he saw that the booking number was the one he was looking for.

Bob La Moria was sitting at his desk working when Sam Hicks walked up behind him. Hicks didn’t say a word. He simply flipped the mug shot onto La Moria’s desk and waited.

“The hair on the back of my neck just stood up,” La Moria recalls. “It was him. We grabbed that mug and ran into Lieutenant Chase’s office and said, ‘We got him!’ It was intuition. I knew we’d found the man we were 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 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 black primer coat.

“He’s headed for Highway 18 and probably in your direction,” Reichert advised.

Four minutes later, the newly painted Dodge pulled into the driveway of Scribner’s residence. Hicks and La Moria contacted the radio operator and asked that a call be placed to Scribner so that he would be on the phone and therefore less likely to grab a weapon when the two detectives knocked on his door. Minutes later, Hicks, La Moria, Hursh, and Reichert went to the door and arrested William Scribner without incident.

He was advised of his rights and informed that he was under arrest for suspicion of murder and rape. When the detectives looked at the black car, it was obvious that it had recently been yellow. A relative of the suspect appeared to ask what the county sheriff’s cars were doing there. When he was told about the charges, he was cooperative, revealing that Scribner had painted his car black only a week before. This put the sloppy paint job within a week of the rape and abduction of Jodi Lukens.

Scribner was booked into the King County Jail. He declined to give any statements without the presence of his attorney.

On October 12, Detective Sergeant Harlan Bollinger contacted William Scribner’s estranged wife. She told him that her husband had changed cars frequently over the summer. In late May, when Jackie Plante vanished, he drove a red Pontiac Le Mans. He sold that car, and the investigators tracked the new owner through the Department of Motor Vehicles. The new owner gave them permission to process the Le Mans but he said he had cleaned it thoroughly when he took possession. If there had been any evidence of Jackie La Plante’s murder there, it had long since disappeared.

Scribner’s second car that summer was a white-over-maroon Dodge Dart; he traded the Le Mans for it. La Moria and Hicks processed the Dart, vacuuming up several hairs from the trunk area. These proved to be microscopically alike in class and characteristics to April Collins’s hair. They were probably left there when she was held captive on August 18. But this wasn’t absolute physical evidence; it was only “highly probable.” If it had been ten years later and if the hairs had been yanked from April’s scalp, they would have had “tags”—roots—on them, sufficient for DNA comparison. But it was still a decade too early for that kind of DNA analysis.

The yellow Dodge used in the abduction of Jodi Lukens also gave up hair samples. These matched Jodi’s. Moreover, Jodi’s descri
pt
ion of the Dodge’s interior was as accurate as if she had had a camera to photograph it. Scribner’s hurried paint job on the exterior had accomplished virtually nothing to throw the detectives off track.

Deputy Leo Hursh drove April Collins and her brother to the Timberlane area to see if she could pinpoint the spot where her attacker raped her and held her down as he attempted to cut her throat. Hursh was careful not to give her any body language signals that might let her know where Jackie Plante’s body or the strip of cloth from April’s jacket were found. In truth, he was chosen for this trip because he didn’t know the exact spot, either; he knew only the general region. Still, as they drove north on 199th then turned onto a gravel road at SE 259th and up a steep hill, April tensed. She was sure they were now very close to where she had been assaulted.