In October 2000 James Rodney Hicks came home to Maine in custody to dig. For two days he led investigators around the land near his old home in Etna and along back roads in Aroostook County. On October 12 they lifted the remains of Jerilyn Towers of Newport from a shallow grave in Etna, and the remains of his first wife, Jennie Cyr Hicks, came out of the ground a hundred feet away, beside the house where he grew up. The next day, in Folkstown Township, they found Lynn Willette of Brewer, in concrete-filled buckets buried beside a road. All three women had been cut up; he said he had thrown some of the parts into a river.
Hicks was born on April 17, 1951, in Etna. Jennie Hicks, twenty-three, disappeared from the couple's home in Carmel in 1977. For six years there was no charge. Then, in 1982, Jerilyn Towers, thirty-four, a single mother from Newport, vanished after leaving a bar in town with him. With no leads in her case, local and state police went back to the disappearance of his wife, and in 1983 they arrested him for Jennie's murder. He was convicted in 1984 and sentenced to ten years, and served six. Over Towers he was not charged, because the police did not think they had the evidence.
Released in 1990, he went to work at the Twin City Motel in Brewer, where he met Lynn Willette, forty, of Orrington. The two moved into an apartment in Brewer. She disappeared, and he was again suspected and again not charged. Most accounts, and his own later confession, date her death to May 1996; one book on the case gives 1994.
He ended up in prison in Texas, having pleaded guilty to aggravated robbery in Lubbock, and there he found his leverage. He offered Maine detectives a bargain: he would take them to the three bodies if he could serve his time in Maine. On October 4, 2000, he confessed to killing Lynn Willette, saying he had suffocated her in the Brewer apartment. He was returned to Maine and on October 10 charged with her murder, and after the digging a Penobscot County grand jury indicted him on November 1 for the murders of Towers and Willette.
On November 17, 2000, ringed by ten officers in a Bangor courtroom, he pleaded guilty to murdering, dismembering and scattering the remains of both women. Two weeks later he was sentenced to life, which in Maine carries no parole. He did not apologize and did not look up. Jerilyn Towers's daughter, Tammy, spoke to him from the victim impact stand. "I spent my life trying to remember what my mother sounded like, smelled like and felt like," she said. "But my mother didn't abandon me. You killed my mother, cut her up, and discarded her like garbage."
He is held at the Maine State Prison, and is often described as the only serial killer the state has known.