On April 29, 1996, four months before his trial for the Huffman murders was due to open and with prosecutors preparing to ask for his execution, Jack Owen Spillman III pleaded guilty. He also admitted a killing nobody had charged him with until that day. Penny Davis, nine years old, had been missing from Tonasket since September 1994.
Penny’s body had been found about six months after she disappeared, in a shallow grave roughly twelve miles from her home in Okanogan County. She had been left posed. Okanogan County authorities were never able to determine how she died, and Spillman, in admitting the killing, gave them no details that would settle it. Later accounts of the case say he returned to the grave after burying her; none of them identifies where that claim originates.
Rita Huffman was forty-eight, divorced, and sold cars. Her daughter Amanda, whom family and friends called Mandy, was fifteen. They were killed in their house in East Wenatchee on the night of April 12, 1995, and found the next day by Rita’s older daughter, who went to the house when her calls went unanswered. There was no sign of forced entry. Rita had been stabbed thirty-one times, in the chest and neck; Mandy had been beaten with a blunt instrument and stabbed. Both had defensive wounds, both had been raped, and both bodies had been sexually mutilated and posed after death. A broken watch put the attack at about half past eleven.
The absence of a break-in told investigators something. Either the killer knew the family or he had watched the house long enough to know how to get in through the rear door. It was the second: he had been watching the household for months, and it was Mandy he had been watching.
The evidence gathered quickly. A black pickup like his had been seen in a parking lot near the house that night, and an East Wenatchee officer had stopped his truck in the lot of a nearby VFW hall the same evening. A twelve-inch knife covered in blood was later recovered there, and it matched a set from the Huffman home. Detectives who had him under watch then saw him get rid of a ski mask. There was blood around the opening cut for the mouth, and it matched the victims. He was arrested on April 19, 1995, six days after the bodies were found.
He had been born Roy Wilson in Spokane on August 30, 1969, and later took the name Jack Owen Spillman III. He left school in the ninth grade. His record began in 1982 and ran through indecent exposure, theft, malicious mischief, assault and rape. In 1993 he and another man were arrested after a woman who had accepted a ride home from them, having met them in a bar, reported that Spillman held her down while the other man assaulted her.
Investigators had questioned him about Penny Davis before the Huffman killings, and had nothing strong enough to charge him. His cellmate, Mark Miller, later told authorities that Spillman had said he wanted to be “the world’s greatest serial killer.” He had told people he thought of himself as a werewolf and hunted the way an animal does, and his sisters had watched wolf memorabilia accumulate around him and found it strange long before they had any reason to fear it.
The physical case went beyond the knife and the mask. Animal hair and bite-mark comparison were both part of the forensic work that tied him to the scene, which is why the case is cited in the literature on forensic technique as well as in true crime.
Superior Court Judge Carol Wardell sentenced him to life without the possibility of parole for Rita Huffman, seventy years for Mandy and forty-five and a half years for Penny Davis. The split sentence matters: it is the court’s own indication that the three counts were not treated alike, although later accounts describe all three as aggravated murder. When he pleaded he still faced first-degree rape and robbery charges over an attack on a woman in a Kent business two years earlier, and a burglary charge in Spokane County. Some later accounts say the Kent charges were dropped. What became of them is not in the published record.
He is fifty-seven. Reporting in 2022 placed him at the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla.