James Rodney Hicks was suspected in the disappearances of three Maine women long before he confessed in 2000. In 1984 a jury convicted him of killing his first wife, Jennie Cyr Hicks, who had disappeared seven years earlier and whose body had not been found. The Bangor Daily News has called it the first murder conviction in Maine with no corpse, no weapon and no bloodstains in evidence. He served six years of a 10-year sentence.
He was also the main suspect in the disappearances of two more women: Jerilyn Towers of Newport in 1982 and Lynn Willette, a former partner, in 1996. Without the bodies, police said, there was not enough evidence to charge him. That changed only in 2000, after he was arrested in Texas for attacking and robbing a woman in her home. Facing 55 years in a Texas prison, he struck a bargain with Maine: he would confess and show investigators where the three women were, and in return he would serve his Maine sentence first. In October 2000 he led police to their remains. He pleaded guilty to murdering Jerilyn Towers and Lynn Willette and was sentenced to two life terms. Maine has no parole.
Hicks came from Etna, a small town in Penobscot County, Maine, and news reports described him as "of Etna." His age was reported as 49 when he was sentenced in 2000. Little has been reported about his birth or his early life.
In the 1970s he was married to Jennie Cyr Hicks. They lived in a trailer in Carmel and had two young children, a son and a daughter. Jennie Hicks was 23. William Stokes, the prosecutor who later tried the case, told the Bangor Daily News in 2014 that she was devoted to her family and her nieces and had been making cupcakes for the nieces before she vanished. "She loved her family," he said.
Jennie Hicks disappeared on July 19, 1977. A Bangor Daily News account written while Lynn Willette was missing said she had reportedly been getting ready to move out. Her husband told people she had left him and the children, and the Bangor Daily News reported in 2000 that police did not seriously question that claim at first. A Penobscot County sheriff's deputy, Tim Richardson, was the first to look into her disappearance.
Stokes later put the prosecution's view simply: "It didn't seem plausible that she'd just disappear."
Five years later another woman vanished. Jerilyn Towers, 34, lived in Newport and was the mother of a 13-year-old daughter. On October 16, 1982, she spent the evening at a lounge in Newport and was last seen leaving it with James Hicks, according to a bartender's statement reported by the Bangor Daily News.
James Ricker of the Newport police, the town's police chief by the time the case was solved, investigated her disappearance. Hicks was heavily investigated in connection with it, but no body was found and no charge was brought.
In 1983, six years after his wife's disappearance, Hicks was charged in her death. William R. Stokes, then an assistant attorney general, presented the case. A murder case with no body raises a basic legal hurdle: as E. James Burke of the University of Maine School of Law explained to the Bangor Daily News, the state must prove both that the person is dead and that the defendant killed her, and convictions without a body are "very, very rare." Stokes said he researched the law and helped bring the evidence before a judge to persuade him that the case could go to a jury. In his view such cases are easier to win when the defendant and the victim had an established relationship, as husband and wife do.
In 1984 the jury deliberated for nine hours and found Hicks guilty. The Bangor Daily News, writing in 2014, described the conviction as fourth-degree murder, which it said is the equivalent of manslaughter today. He appealed to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court and lost. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison and served six of them. He never said where his wife's body was, and for years he maintained his innocence; a relative of Lynn Willette later told the Bangor Daily News that he had told Willette he had been "railroaded."
He was released from the Maine State Prison in Thomaston in July 1990.
After his release Hicks worked at a motel in Brewer. There, according to a Bangor Daily News report written while she was missing, he hired Lynn Willette for maintenance work in 1994. Another Bangor Daily News account says they met three or four years after his release. The two became a couple, and he moved into her apartment in Brewer. They lived together for more than a year.
Lynn Willette was 40. Her family described her to the Bangor Daily News as quiet and shy as a child and fiercely independent as an adult. She had served in the U.S. Army as a heavy-equipment operator, had been a licensed paramedic and had worked as a painter, and she had once been accepted to a Disney cartoon school, though she did not go. She could fix almost anything around a house, including the wiring, loved gardening, and was, in her older sister's words, "the family organizer." She had no children; her dog stayed with her family after she disappeared.
In the spring of 1996 she ended the relationship. About May 18 she moved out of the apartment, and she was moving into her mother's home. Her sister said Hicks was unhappy about the move: he helped her move, but called her eight times that night and turned up at the family home most nights afterward.
On Saturday, May 25, 1996, she went to work in the morning and punched out at noon. That was the last time her family heard from her. She had organized a Memorial Day cookout for the next day and had planned a trip to the coast with her sister for Monday. When she did not come to the cookout, her family prepared to call the police, but Hicks made the first call to the Brewer Police Department. Police issued all-points bulletins. Her car was found a week later in Hermon, with nothing in it to explain what had happened. Her sister recalled that Hicks later asked her why Lynn had "taken off," and that he seemed to know about a meeting the two sisters had had with a man for drinks, something she could not explain.
"She would never have done this," her sister told the Bangor Daily News nearly four months later, when the case had stalled. Her mother, then 73, said simply: "She was my baby, you know. She's gone." Hicks declined to be interviewed for that article; he said he believed she had simply left and would come home someday.
Maine State Police Detective Joe Zamboni took up the case in 1996 and stayed on it for the next four years. Police again had a suspect and no body, and Hicks was not charged.
Hicks later left Maine for Texas. By 2000 he was living in Levelland and working as a handyman for an older woman. Zamboni later said he believed Hicks moved there to get away from the constant questions of Maine investigators. When Hicks moved to Texas in 1999, Ricker, the Newport police chief, alerted Texas authorities to his background.
In April 2000 Hicks held the woman he worked for at gunpoint in her home and robbed her. She escaped from the house. He was arrested in Lubbock. Because of the robbery and his earlier conviction in Maine, he faced 55 years in a Texas prison. Zamboni, the lead Maine investigator, said he believed Hicks would have killed her.
The Texas arrest gave Maine investigators the leverage they had lacked for years. Zamboni told Hicks that he had to go to prison or another woman would die, and Hicks agreed. Under the arrangement, Hicks would confess to the three Maine killings and lead investigators to the women's remains; in return, he would serve any Maine sentence before any time in Texas. With a life sentence close to certain in Maine, it meant in practice that he would not serve his Texas sentence at all. His confession, recorded on tape, ran nine hours.
He admitted strangling all three women. He gave no reason for any of the killings. Zamboni said that the urge seemed to "come over" him, and the Bangor Daily News reported that Hicks had told investigators he would probably kill again if he could.
In October 2000 Hicks showed police where to search, in Etna and in Aroostook County. The Maine State Police recorded that the remains of Jerilyn Towers were recovered in Etna on October 12, 2000, and that the remains of Lynn Willette were recovered in Forkstown Township, in southern Aroostook County, on October 13. The partial remains of Jennie Hicks were found in Etna the same month.
Hicks was charged with Lynn Willette's murder, and police said they expected to charge him with Jerilyn Towers's murder as well. The finds also sent investigators back to other unsolved cases. Stephen McCausland, a spokesman for the Maine Department of Public Safety, told the Portland Press Herald that nothing pointed to Hicks in any other death, but that police would reexamine the files of three women found dead in Maine between 1977 and 1980, in unsolved cases. "We would be remiss if we did not at least re-look at those files to see if there was any connection," he said. State detectives and the medical examiner's office planned further searches, with cadaver dogs, at places in Hancock and Penobscot counties that Hicks had shown them. No charges against Hicks in any other case were reported.
After autopsies and forensic tests in Augusta, the remains were released to the families. Jennie Hicks was buried in Auburn beside her father after a small private graveside service. Her mother had waited 23 years to bury her. The family of Lynn Willette held a private memorial at her sister's home in Orrington. "Finally," said the minister who led it. "Lynn has been brought home." Her sister said the family would not bury her, and her mother said she was not ready to put her daughter back in the ground. Jerilyn Towers was to be buried in a cemetery in Rome, Maine.
A Penobscot County grand jury indicted Hicks for the murders of Jerilyn Towers and Lynn Willette. On a Friday in 2000, in a second-floor courtroom of the Penobscot County Superior Courthouse in Bangor, he pleaded guilty to both murders before Justice Andrew Mead. Security was tight. Sergeant Al Jamison of the Penobscot County Sheriff's Department, who ran court security, said there had been intelligence reports about threats against Hicks and that officers had to act on them.
William Stokes, the same prosecutor who had tried the 1984 case, set out the state's evidence. Hicks's lawyer, Jeffrey Silverstein of Bangor, said Hicks did not object to the accuracy of the state's account. Speaking of the women, Stokes said, "I don't think he takes rejection well."
For Jerilyn Towers's daughter, the pleas brought some relief. "He's no longer in control," she said outside court. "Now we have her back, and he's lost all of his control." She called the return of the remains "a symbol that these women are finally spiritually free."
At sentencing in Bangor, Chief Superior Court Justice Andrew Mead gave Hicks two life sentences, to run concurrently. Stokes recommended life. "I don't recommend life sentences very often," he told the court. He said Hicks's guilty pleas and his help in finding the remains could count in his favor, but he was "not very impressed": in his view Hicks had acted out of self-interest. Through his lawyer, Hicks said he had come back to Maine for "closure," not for easier prison conditions. Outside court, Stokes dismissed that as "a bunch of baloney." Silverstein said there would be no appeal, and that Hicks understood that "somebody else might get hurt" if he were not kept in prison for life.
Hicks never apologized. He appeared relaxed in court, smiling and whispering to his lawyer. He asked to talk with Zamboni, the detective who had worked on the case since 1996 and whom, the Bangor Daily News reported, Hicks liked and trusted.
Jerilyn Towers's daughter, who had been 13 when her mother disappeared, spoke at the sentencing. Her mother, she said, "didn't abandon" her, and she would not let him destroy her life. Jerilyn Towers's brother and Lynn Willette's niece also spoke. Jennie Hicks's family attended, but because Hicks was not being sentenced for her death they could not address the court; her sister sent a written statement about the family's loss.
The court ordered Hicks to pay $3,300 to the Towers family for funeral costs and an amount still to be set to the state Victim Compensation Board, which was expected to cover Lynn Willette's cremation and memorial. The payments were to come from any prison earnings. The FBI wanted to interview him about serial killer patterns; he reportedly agreed, but no arrangements had been made at the time.
He was held at the Penobscot County Jail until his transfer to the Maine State Prison in Thomaston.
Hicks had pleaded guilty in Texas to aggravated robbery. In state district court in Lubbock, Judge Cecil Puryear sentenced him to 55 years. The woman he had robbed told him in court that he had been hurting people for more than 20 years and now faced the consequences, that people would no longer have to fear him, and that God would judge him. Asked by the judge whether he wanted to speak, Hicks declined. Shackled at the hands and feet, in jeans and a shirt marked "jail" on the back, he smiled and chatted with his lawyer as the hearing ended. Because of his Maine life sentences, the Bangor Daily News reported, he was expected to die in a Maine prison rather than serve the Texas term.
Months after the sentencing, the A&E series "Investigative Reports: Cold Case Files" devoted an hour to the case, including segments of his taped confession and interviews with Stokes, Zamboni, Ricker, Richardson, the Texas survivor and relatives of all three women. The crew filmed in Maine that February. "This is not a re-enactment," the series producer, Michael Harvey, said, describing a program built on real evidence and footage. Hicks declined to be interviewed. When the program was announced, the Bangor Daily News reported that he was in the Maine State Prison in Thomaston. In 2014 the Bangor Daily News again recalled the case as the first no-body murder conviction in Maine, alongside a 2012 conviction in another case. Little has been reported about his later years in prison.
The exact name of the 1984 offense differs between accounts. The Bangor Daily News described the verdict in 2014 as fourth-degree murder, the equivalent of manslaughter today, and, in its report on the A&E broadcast, as "what was then fourth-degree murder." Its 1996 and 2000 reports say only that he was convicted of murder or of killing his wife. The same newspaper's reports place the conviction variously in 1982, 1983 and 1984; its account of the trial and the later court coverage give 1984, and the charge was brought in 1983.
Jennie Hicks's age is given as 23 in most reports and as 22 in one. Lynn Willette is described by the Maine State Police as "of Brewer," where she had lived with Hicks, and by the Bangor Daily News as "of Orrington," where her family lived. The township in Aroostook County where her remains were recovered is spelled Forkstown by the Portland Press Herald and Folkstown on the Maine State Police homicide list. Accounts also differ on when Hicks met her: a report written while she was missing says he hired her in 1994, while the report on his guilty pleas places their meeting three or four years after his release in 1990.
Hicks pleaded guilty to two murders and was convicted of a third killing. Police reexamined three other unsolved deaths in 2000 and said nothing linked him to any of them; no further charges against him were reported. The FBI, according to the Bangor Daily News, labeled him a serial killer while he was still free.
July 19, 1977: Jennie Cyr Hicks, 23, disappears from the family's home in Carmel, Maine.
October 16, 1982: Jerilyn Towers, 34, is last seen leaving a lounge in Newport with Hicks.
1983: Hicks is charged in his wife's death.
1984: A jury convicts him after nine hours of deliberation; sentence of 10 years. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court later rejects his appeal.
July 1990: He is released from the Maine State Prison in Thomaston.
1994: He hires Lynn Willette at a motel in Brewer, according to the Bangor Daily News; they later live together.
May 25, 1996: Lynn Willette, 40, is last seen after leaving work in Brewer. Her car is found a week later in Hermon.
1999: Hicks moves to Texas; the Newport police chief alerts Texas authorities.
April 2000: He is arrested in Lubbock, Texas, after robbing a woman at gunpoint in her home.
October 2000: He confesses to three killings and leads police to the remains; he is charged with Lynn Willette's murder.
October 12, 2000: The remains of Jerilyn Towers are recovered in Etna.
October 13, 2000: The remains of Lynn Willette are recovered in Forkstown Township, Aroostook County.
2000: A Penobscot County grand jury indicts him for the murders of Towers and Willette; he pleads guilty to both before Justice Andrew Mead in Bangor and is sentenced to two concurrent life terms.
After the Maine sentencing: Judge Cecil Puryear in Lubbock sentences him to 55 years for aggravated robbery.
After the sentencing: The A&E series "Investigative Reports: Cold Case Files" devotes an hour to the case; he is reported held at the Maine State Prison in Thomaston.