James R Hicks was born in 1951 and lived in Penobscot County, Maine.
His first wife, Jennie Hicks, twenty-three, disappeared from their home at Carmel in 1977. He was not arrested for it until 1983 and was convicted in 1984. He served six years of a ten-year sentence and was released in 1990.
What produced that arrest was another disappearance. Jerilyn Towers, thirty-four, of Newport, vanished in 1982 after leaving a Newport bar with him. It was the investigation into her disappearance that led police to re-examine what had happened to his wife, and to charge him with her murder. He was not charged over Towers at the time, because the evidence was not thought sufficient.
After his release he met Lynn Willette, forty, of Orrington, while the two of them were working at the Twin City Motel in Brewer. They lived together in a flat on South Main Street, and he later said he killed her there on May 26, 1996. He was suspected of it and again not charged, for want of evidence.
The case was resolved because of a woman who got away from him in Texas. He was convicted at Lubbock of holding a gun to the head of a woman of sixty-seven, making her write him a cheque, sign over the title to her car and write a suicide note. His plan was to drug her and drown her so that it would look like suicide. She escaped. He was sentenced to fifty-five years.
Facing that sentence, he offered Maine a bargain: he would show investigators where the three bodies were if he could serve his time in Maine rather than Texas. It was accepted, and he confessed to all three killings.
He then spent two days digging with investigators around his former home at Etna and at roadside sites in Aroostook County. The remains of his first wife and of Jerilyn Towers were found a hundred feet apart beside the house where he grew up. Lynn Willette's remains were in concrete buckets buried next to a road in Aroostook County. All three bodies had been dismembered, and he said he had thrown some parts into a river.
The remains were identified by their teeth. Forensic dentists were present at the exhumations, because they can recognise small pieces of dental material that matter to an identification, and the state's chief medical examiner said that of fingerprints, DNA and teeth, dental configuration is often the quickest route to a positive identification. Enamel is almost entirely inorganic and outlasts soft tissue and bone, no two sets of teeth are alike, and most people who have been to a dentist have a record.
A Penobscot County grand jury charged him on November 1, 2000 with the murders of Jerilyn Towers and Lynn Willette. He pleaded guilty to both on November 17 in the Penobscot County Superior Court, amid tight security, and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
His age at the plea is given as forty-eight in one report and forty-nine in another. The cause of death in each case is not recorded in anything accessible here, and it is left unstated here rather than guessed at.