Surprising Serial Killer - Carmel, Maine

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This week, in Carmel, Maine, when a woman disappears off the face of the earth, detectives are told about one suspect who seems to have a history with other missing women, which leads them to an unexpected serial killer and his awful burial grounds.

Welcome to Small Town Murder.

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Small Town Murder. Yay!

Oh, yay indeed, Jimmy. Yay indeed.
My name is James Petrigallo. I'm here with my co-host.
I am Jimmy Wistman. Thank you, folks so much for joining us today on an absolutely bonkers twisty,

crazy, nasty edition of Small Town Murder. Good stuff here.
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It's more dangerous than dueling.

I swear to God, there could be a sport where people literally shoot guns at each other and there'd be less deaths than this cycling. It's nuts how many people die.

Slightly, slightly less bad for your health than making this show.

Yes, than making this show constantly.

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And you get a shout-out at the end of the show. Jimmy will mess your name all up for you.
Don't you worry about that. That said, disclaimer time,

this is a comedy show. We're comedians.
Unfortunately,

the stories and the murders are 1,000% real. Nothing is embellished or none of that garbage for comedic effect.
The point is, you don't have to do that for things to be funny because

people are idiots that want to murder people. That's the thing.

What we do here, though, you go, how do you make murder funny? Well, one thing you do is you never make fun of the victims or the victims' families. Why is that, James? Because we're assholes.
But.

But we're not scumbags. That's how that goes there.
So if that sounds good to you, I think you're going to enjoy this. There's plenty to make fun of.

We make fun of small towns because we're all from somewhere that deserves to be made fun of. Who cares? And we make fun of murderers because why not?

We're comics and we have no other way to get to these people. So this is how we're going to do it.
They deserve it. So that said, I think it's time everybody to sit back.

What do you say here? Let's all clear the lungs and let's all shout.

Shut up and give me

murder.

Let's do this, everybody. All right.
Let's go on a trip, shall we?

Let's do it. Let's do it.
We're going to Carmel, Maine. Here we go.
And it's C-A-R-M-E-L. So it can be Caramel.
It can be Carmel. It can be Caramel.
There's a lot of different.

The Internet says Carmel. That's what they say.
And

the only Caramel that I know is Caramel is Carmel, New York, which is near me where Jimmy was saying, well, they're all Carmel, aren't they? I went, no, that's the point. One by me is Caramel.

So who knows? God damn it. Who knows? This is kind of in central, I guess you'd call it in terms of the coast, central Maine.

If you say central Maine, you think of in the middle of the state, but it's

this is like kind kind of halfway up the coastline is the way to put it. Well, there's very little up in that.
No, there's trees. That's it.
Yeah. The center is.
It's by the water. It's very...

Maine is our Australian. People just live near the ocean.
They live near the ocean. Yeah, the interior, rather than being a desert, is a vast forest full of Stephen King characters.

Cheap as fuck. Full of Stephen King characters.
That's all it is. You got to watch out.
So it's about 20 minutes to Bangor, Maine. It's right outside of that.

Three hours and 20 minutes to Boston, if you want to to go down there. And then an hour and 10 to Litchfield, Maine, which was our last main episode, episode 612, Behind the Murder Mask.

And that was the one where the lady

brought her son's friends in so he would feel better after they moved there. And then it spun out of control.
This is in Penobscot County,

area code 207.

Now, we're going to do the town stuff pretty quick here because this story is deep. I mean, it's a wild story.
The little bit of the history here.

A Martin Kinsley of Hampton bought this township in 1795. He bought the whole area and started selling off lots.
His idea was

to have a town.

So the land that's now Carmel was first bought. This was in 1795, like we said.
The first settlers were Abel Ruggles and Reverend Paul Ruggles,

who named the church.

They named the place to honor the prophet Elijah's experience on Mount Carmel. So, this

yeah, they were very religious, I would say. Mount Carmel? Is that Mount Carmel? Yeah, in the yeah, from biblical things.
Reviews of this town. Okay, let's find out what other people think.

We've never been here before, and we both like Maine.

Love Maine, yeah. This is pretty interesting.
Let's find out what

we're scouting for our future, our future hideouts here. This may be it.
So, here's five stars. The town is small where everyone knows each other.

What could change is a store that is on Route 2 going into Herman. The store needs to be updated.

The store on Route 2 needs to be updated. It exists there already.
It exists. It didn't sound like it from that review.
Right. At first they wanted one.
Now it's there. They just want it better.

I think it's just so crappy. It might as well not exist.
Maybe. That's what they're going for.

Here's three stars. The best part of this town is the rural, quiet plots of land.
You have close proximity to the bustling outer towns around you.

Nothing in Maine can be described as bustling, by the way. Bustling?

Nothing.

Portland's pretty good. Right.

It's downtown.

Right on the water in the middle of summer, maybe.

Otherwise, the rest of the town is pretty chill. Pretty calm.

The town is like

a physical incarnation of whittling. You know what I mean? Just kind of sitting, and that's kind of like what Maine is.

Yeah, it's very quiet. On the porch.
Small town, a lot of outdated businesses, though. I don't know what that means.
Outdated businesses. They only take cash.
They sell beepers.

That's it around there.

A lot of bronchos. A bunch of beeper stores and typewriter repair shops, shoe cobbling.
I don't know. That's maybe.
Yeah, VHS and TV repairmen. Yeah.

Here's three stars. Crime is average for a high-population city, but isn't bad.
This is not a high-population city by any stretch of the imagination. This isn't a city.
No.

People and and police take care of situations, and community is very close. Then we get these people.
I don't know what their deal is, but they apparently don't want to type. They don't like it.

Here's three stars. Summer is great.
Winter is awful. Yes, the whole review.

Yeah, I don't like it when it snows, but I like it when I'm on a jet ski. That's fun.
Yeah.

It's good stuff. Sure, do love swimming.
Yeah.

Here's three stars. Not a lot of restaurants nearby.
That's all? Yeah.

That's it. And then here's two stars.
I have to travel a half hour to work. Yeah, you do.

That's it, though. There's no

backstory.

Wow. And then finally, here is somebody that's a little more voluble.

One star. Stay away from village market.

Oh, is that the root

business? Maybe that's the outdated businesses there. I think this town is probably by far the worst place I've ever lived in my life.

Probably by far.

Probably by far. This town is one of those places where if you didn't grow up there or you're not from there, nobody gives you respect or doesn't even treat you with decency.

The overall worst place here is Village Market. It's a small town.
If you move to a tiny town, they're like, who the hell are you? Yeah.

You got to kind of work yourself in.

Just a minute. Haven't you seen Funny Farm hire the town

together to sell your house, eat a bunch of Rocky Mountain oysters, and

everyone will like you. It's fine.
You hang out with the Criterion Brothers, and there's no problems. Go to the fucking baseball game.
Yeah. The overall worst place here is Village Market.

They had a worker there who it seemed was inbreeded.

Inbreeded. Not inbred.
Inbreeded.

You sound inbreeded. Yeah.

Sir, you are inbreeded with nothing but an attitude problem. If you do stop there, they have some nice workers at Dollar General, though.
That's about it.

The owner of Village Market even followed me to my house because I expressed feelings to them. To your house? How the hell does that work?

From the store? And the Maine state troopers did nothing except serve me and my girlfriend a no-trespassing order when,

in all caps, we felt threatened. Okay.

How does that work? Anyways, if you can avoid this town, do it at all costs. I'm from Maine myself, originally from Bangor.
This town town is 20 minutes away, but no good. Thanks.

Hopefully you guys realize and understand.

You're from Bangor. 20 minutes away.
Down here. These people wouldn't be upset with you.
You're from right there. Who cares? Right there.
Yeah.

People in this town, 2,828. So very small.
Very few. There's this, and then there's Aetna, which is right next to it, which is like 3,000 people.

And then there's Newport, which is a couple thousand people too. These are all the towns all lined up.

Less women than men, which is, we rarely find that. 48.9% women, 51.1% men.
I don't know if there's like lumberjacking going on there or what, but there's some jacking. I know that much.
Yeah.

Call those guys. There's lumber or not.

That goes without saying. So median age here, 40.1, a little bit above the national average, not too far.

Family here, it's 63% married, which is well above the 50-50 national average.

Low number of people that are single with children. So you move here and you stay here and you stay married and with your kids out in the woods.

That's pretty much, I don't know if there's not a courthouse nearby to file anything. So you just say, screw it or what.
Race in this town, 98.9% white.

That's pretty goddamn white.

0.0% black, 0.0% Asian, 0.4% Native American, 0.5% two races or more, and 0.3% other.

0% Hispanic, Black, Asian. I don't know.

24.2% of the people here are religious, which is about half the national average. And the leading one is Catholicism.
It's 11% Catholic, but 11% is hardly anything.

We do know the Catholics are the Baptists of the North, though. They're going to be the highest one.

0.5% Jewish.

Average unemployment. The median household income here is above the national average, which

that's interesting. It's 86,623, which is not bad.
People in Maine are doing well, and I'm not sure what all those people do, but they all have some damn money.

And you're three hours away from a city, so I don't know, like a big city, I guess.

Banger, Portland. I don't know.
Lots of Etsy pages that are killing it. Oh, killing it.
Just

all sorts of Maine crafts, lots of plaid things going out.

Cost of living in this town, $100 is regular average, you know, rest of the country. Here it is $85,000.

And the housing here is a 78 out of 100. Median home cost here,

$275,000, which is lower than the national average. That's not bad.
Not bad if you're making more money. And we've convinced you, damn it.
There we go.

You are going to talk to that inbreed and employee and straighten him right out.

We have for you the Carmel Main Real Estate Report.

Average two-bedroom rental here goes for about $1,330, which is expensive above the national average, which is odd because I'm going to read you the houses and it feels like you could do much better just buying a house.

Here's a three-bedroom, two-bath, 1,720-square-foot house. It's nice, you know, decent regular house,

wood siding, that sort of thing, on three acres.

Also,

inside, it's a little farty. It's a little needs some updating, a little farty.
Most stuff up there is pretty farty.

They have a Pepto-Bismol pink bathroom i mean it is pepto pink from fucking floor to ceiling in there it's wild uh 134 900 for three acres in a house that's not bad at all fifteen thousand dollar price cut very recently by the way uh here is a three bedroom one bath 1008 foot square foot place but it's like a it's a log cabin oh yeah that's like a retreat it's a yeah it's pretty cool so i had to kind of add that in as an option uh this place is on nine and a half acres of woods now we're talking it's beautiful uh very nice very picturesque 269 900 bucks unbelievable with a 25 000 price cut two weeks ago damned not bad and then finally this thing oh man you have sold all the beaver pelts in town and you're doing well four bedroom three bath 4 365 square foot it's a big old house here god damn with a big old pond it's a pond and there's an above-ground pool and they

bury it for that big of a house but it's it's on two acres yeah big place 559 000 bucks for that thing that's pretty decent for the what you're getting yeah for the rest of the country it'd be more expensive and there again sixteen thousand dollar price got on that recently too sure give it a couple of weeks it's gonna come down for come down more things to do here

not it's there's so much like outdoor stuff that people do yeah there's just not a lot of a ton of stuff unless it's kind of hanging out in the street because that's so nice. We have Carmel Days 2025.

This year's theme was, quote, let's party. Yeah.

Okay.

Not bad. Come join us for this free family event.
Oh, boy. Watch the parade that runs through the village.

Then join us at the rec field for food, fireworks, music, entertainment for all ages, which means bad entertainment usually. Yep, sure is.

If a four-year-old and an 80-year-old are both looking at the same thing, it's bad. It's not fun.
It's not good. It's really bad for someone who's 40.
They're going to hate it.

So they said this year's parade has a let's party theme. We encourage you all to consider participating, whether you're a business, a local organization, a family, or an individual.

If you have a special car, truck, or tractor you want to show off, a float you want to design with your family, friends, or co-workers, or a bicycle you want to decorate with a let's party theme, you can do it.

Now, they do have one rule. What is that? From your float or from your whatever the hell you're making there, candy may be handed out, but no throwing candy.
What are they going to do?

Kid lost the fucking procession. Kid lost an eye last year with a thing of sweet tarts.
You can't have that. What are they going to do if I throw it from the parade? They're going to pull me out?

How are you going to get me out? Oh, a mini Snickers took out an old lady's trachea street. The streets are lined with people.
I can't get out now. Couldn't do it.
There's also bands.

They have the Crossroads Main Band.

There's Crossroads Band Main.

Oh, boy. Okay.
DJ Dance Party with Austin Wicket.

So we got that.

By the way, the Crossroads Band Main performs at the highly coveted noon spot, which is what all the bands want to play.

Yeah, let's open it up. Crime rate in this town.
What we are interested in here, property crime is

just above half the national average here. Okay, pretty safe.
Pretty safe. And then violent crime, murder, rape, robbery, and of course, assault.

The Mount Rushmore of crime is about one-third of the average. So

it's very safe. I mean, it's a town in the woods in Maine.
How much crime could there be? One of those things. That said, let's talk about some horrible, horrible murders in this area.

Let's do it. Let's start it out here.
We need to go back in time a bit to get to the beginning of this. This case is going to span

quite a while and quite a couple of bodies here. So

let's start out here on October 16th, 1982.

Okay, on this day. By the way, October 16th, 1982, do you know what the number one song in the country was? 1982.
1982, October 16th. Was it still disco something? No, no.
No? No.

It's all rock shit. No.
It is Jack and Diane by

Little Pink Houses for you and me.

What a great album, though. John Cougar at that point.
Yeah. Wasn't even Mellon Camp yet.
Now he doesn't like the Cougar. Before that,

make up your mind, you fucking jerk. Before that, it was Abra Cadabra by the Steve Miller band, which is a terrible song.
Probably their worst.

Made it great. Well, a little better, yeah.
And then much better, I should say. And then Men at Work with Who Can It Be Now was the next number one, which is also great stuff there.

Number one movie was E.T. in the box office

at this time. Officer and a Gentleman before that.
And And then it'll be, DT will be knocked out by Rambo First Blood. Shit, yeah.
And then Creep Show, which I was like, awesome. Not bad.

Creep Show was number one one time? For a week. Yeah.
No big deal. And then number one TV show is 60 Minutes.

It should be every day. And Dallas.
Okay.

Now let's talk about a woman here, Jerilyn Lee Towers. Jerry Lynn is J-E-R-L-Y-N.
She goes by Jerry sometimes, too.

I think she's born Tibbets, but then she's Towers. She gets married and divorced.
She's born December 2nd, 1947. She's 34 years old at this point in time.

She's born in Maine,

raised in Rome, Maine.

She has

her parents and brothers and sisters. I think she has three sisters and two brothers, so big family, six kids.

She has three children of her own by the time she's an adult, although two of them are primarily staying with their father, which is interesting.

She lives on one side of a duplex in Newport, which is two towns over from Carmel. She lives in a, it's a duplex.
Her parents live on one side, her mother and her stepfather.

Okay, so that's, she's not Tibbetts, she's Towers. So she's born Towers, I believe.
Anyway, her mother and stepfather live on the other side. She lives on one side of the duplex.

She has a boyfriend who's in jail at this point in 1982. Oh, boy.
So things aren't going great, obviously. You know what I mean?

It's precarious, yeah. Boyfriend in jail.
Two of her kids live with their father.

Something, you know, she's obviously had just maybe some issues or maybe instability in housing or whatever the thing is. Maybe she was moving from place to place.

It was easier for the kids to stay with the dads. I'm not sure.

But she was in the process of ending the relationship with her jail boyfriend. Yeah.

She's liked to bowl a lot and she likes to camp. And she's known for two things very specifically always wearing men's tube socks

oh

and keeping a penny in her shoe for good luck which just sounds very uncomfortable yeah you'd be like god damn it imagine having a penny in your shoe all the time slid down into the bridge oh now it's down to the toe christ you gotta kick it around uh she was married she's separated from her husband though uh so she lives with her her parents june and millard well her mom and stepdad i believe here um And she has three teenage children.

Like we said, two of them live, kind of go back and forth and one lives with her. Now, on October 16th, 1982,

June and Millard, her mom and stepfather, brought Jerry and her three children to the Pittsfield bowling alley during the afternoon. And the day was to be a family reunion, basically.

Before that day, her two younger children, son and daughter, had been living with the daughter's father, and he had brought the two kids to visit her the night before.

So she's finally getting this, I don't know how long it's been since she's seen them, but she's getting to see them again, and so they're going to go out and do something.

So she goes with the kids, with mom and stepdad, to the bowling alley. Mom stays in the car, June, Mama June.
She stays in the car while the others go into the bowling alley.

We're going to go in and bowl and drink. And she's like, I'll just stay out here, which is.
I'll sit in the car? Super weird to just sit in the car. She must hate bowling.

Like the sound of the pins must drive her nuts. So

now the stepfather and Jerry, they had a drink while the kids were bowling.

The stepfather then came back to the car a short while later to tell the mom that Jerry had forgotten to bring her money with her and wanted him to go back to the house to get her money. All right.

She didn't have it. He can't spot her, I guess, till they get back to the house.
I don't know.

Seems like a lot of work to for how much is bowling alley beers in 1982? 75 cents? A dollar, yeah.

Tops, yeah.

You can spot her. Now, according to her parents, Jerry had been saving up her change in a mayonnaise jar so that she could pay for this day of bowling with her children.

She's had this like on the clock, on the schedule for a while. Yeah, this is important to her to go out bowling with her kids.

It is.

Otherwise, she had only aid to dependent children, which is a like,

you know, check, like an SSI kind of check, and food stamps on which to support the kids.

So saving up any amount of money was hard for her because she didn't have a lot of money at all.

So the stepdad went to retrieve the money and later, you know, returned after he got it. Jerry and the kids counted out enough to pay the bowling tab, which I'm sure was.

lovely for the people behind the counter. Thanks a lot.
The entire family left the bowling alley.

Now, Jerry's daughter said that Jerry had spent her bowling money on drinks and that she, the daughter, who's a regular bowler in the area, had felt angry and humiliated when her mother had to send for her change and make the kids count it out.

You don't want to do that as a teenage kid. That's embarrassing and nobody likes that.
So, but I mean, what are you going to do? Now, that night here,

Jerry is known to have a little bit of a drinking problem. That's the thing.

So that night, at her insistence, her parents dropped her off at the Gateway Lounge and restaurant.

Now you can tell she's got to have a drinking problem if the fact that she's been saving up and wanting to hang out with her kids so bad and she finally has them and then she goes to a bar instead.

You know what I mean? So

that's a problem. That's because you're being drawn there by something, you know?

So she'd been drinking in the afternoon and she decided to stop for a drink at the Gateway Lounge when the family returned to Newport.

So they let her out at the bar, mom and stepdad and kids, and she told her stepfather she would call him later for a ride home. She entered the bar, they watched her, and then they went home.

The parents went to their part of the duplex, and the children went to Jerry's side on the other side. The oldest child, who was 15 at the time,

was watching, you know, the other two kids, basically. So mom, June, Mama June, went to bed before stepdad

here. And

now she's got a daughter, Jerry's sister, who has advanced stage multiple sclerosis at the time.

She's been taking care of him. Stepdad stayed up watching, quote, Stacy's Country Jamboree.

The fuck is that? I don't know, but it was on every Saturday night. So he watched it every Saturday night.
Stacy's Country Jamboree. Well, he was on that shit.

Me neither. Then he heard a vehicle later in that night.
He said June was still awake, the mom, and they both thought that that was Jerry coming home.

Okay. So the next morning, they never got a call to come pick her up.

The next morning, Jerry's oldest son went over to the other side of the duplex, to the grandparents' side, and said, mom didn't come home last night.

She's still not here. So they became alarmed because they hadn't heard from Jerry either, and they knew that she only had $6

on her. So she couldn't have done too much on $6.

And she was also taking prescription drugs for a liver problem.

Huh? What is it going? What? She washes it down with booze. She's already got cirrhosis or something? Good guy.
I don't know. And did not have her medicine with her also.
So $6 and no medicine equals.

She would come home.

Yeah.

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She had recently been hospitalized and her health wasn't too great. So they were like, she'd be home to take her medicine.
So her parents report her missing.

They say she was last seen at the gateway lounge. It was Saturday evening.
They dropped her off about 6.30. You know, they said she went bowling during the day.

She wanted to have a couple of drinks and relax. Stepfather watched TV.
They expected to have to pick her up. They said the call to get her never came.

A vehicle with a loud exhaust pulled into their driveway at about 1 a.m. The driver turned off the headlights.
And at that point,

stepdad turned off the TV and went to bed, figuring, I'm not going to have to pick her up now. He was staying up because he thought he had to go pick her up at some point.

What a nice stepdad, Jesus. Oh, shit.

So, but she never came in. So we have no idea.

So a police officer named James Ricker, who is going to be, you're going to hear about him a lot through this episode. Officer, officer, then detective, then chief Ricker.
Oh, all the way through.

He responds to the call, and they tell Ricker that their daughter went off for short periods of time in the past, but she always let somebody know where she was. She never disappeared.

This time, she didn't contact anybody. So that the Tibbetses here, the parents, also decided to run a notice in the local papers asking for anyone who might have seen her.

Because after a few days, nobody's seen her. Wow.

So they said they received one response and it's from a quote someone who called himself a fortune teller oh yeah a psychic psychic he called to inform the family that he believed jerry was in a river in bingham oh okay now the psychic here

they said that the weird thing they said perhaps the most the uh more disturbing than the communication from the so-called psychic was the fact that ricker could locate no one who admitted to having seen Jerry after she was dropped off at the bar.

So the cop issues a missing person report, including a complete description of Jerry and everything like that.

They said she's 5'6 ⁇ , 200 pounds, brown eye, dark hair, wearing black slacks and a blue checkered button-up shirt. Everyone has flannel on in Maine.

She also had on Maine Dexter shoes. the ones that are made in Maine, and her trademark men's tube socks.

And I'm going to read, by the way, portions out of a book that I'll give you the title for and everything later.

I think it's Tragedy in the North Woods, but I'll give you the author and everything later on as well. She wore a gold double-banded mother's ring set with red, yellow, blue, and green stones.

She had four stones because although she had three kids, she was raising three kids, she had a fourth child who was being raised by another family member. So she has four.
kids total.

Her hair was short at the time. She's described as salt and pepper.
And her weight is above normal for her because of her recent health issues. The medication she's on makes you pack weight on.

Sure, sure. Now, the psychic here, okay,

this guy.

They're contacted by, I guess, Nathan Small. He contacts the police as well as the Tibbets family.
He claimed he had a, quote, special ability to locate the bodies of missing people.

Special ability. He's special, this guy.

Yeah, yeah, he's part German short-haired pointer. That's what he is.

He said he believed that Jerry was dead and her body was floating in the river in Bingham, temporarily trapped by some rocks.

Now, the cops thought he's full of shit, but he's giving a very exact location for the body. He's not saying search the Atlantic Ocean.

He's saying right here, this part of the river where there's rocks, that's where you can find her. So it's specific enough that you can take a look at it.
Because they don't know.

He might be a crazy shit, and he might have killed her and put her there. You know what I mean? Certainly.
You got to take a look at it. So, you know, if there's a,

they have no other leads. So

whatever,

they felt like they had to follow up the call. So the sheriff, within whose jurisdiction the location of the body, according to the psychic, was, had a plane in the air.
And

so they had the pilot check the specified location. No body was found.

Okay. So.
The investigation at this point is

they don't really have much. They have a psychic who responded to a newspaper ad and nothing else.
Pretty much nothing else, which is brutal here. They don't know what to do.
So then

another officer, Robinson, he receives an anonymous phone call claiming a man named Gary Hicks was the last person seen with Jerry at the bar. Okay.
It's an anonymous call.

They ended up interviewing a bunch of bar patrons because this seems like the type of bar where if you go on a Thursday, you can talk to them about what happened on Monday because it's all the same people that were there.

That seems. Because they know.
They know. They were there.
Whoever's there a month later was there a month ago. It's just how it is.

So they go in there, they interview bar patrons, and they find out that there's nobody named Gary Hicks that they can find. When somebody says, I know a Jimmy Hicks,

I don't know a Gary Hicks.

But I know a Jimmy.

Close enough. We'll take whatever Hicks you got.

He might have a brother. Something.
So that's who they come up with.

After a few weeks, all they come up with is a name, James Hicks. That's all they know.

So one of the cops said, when we got into that, they said someone who bore a resemblance to Hicks or was Hicks was seen with her that night.

We had no knowledge at that time at all of anything about that guy. Nothing.

They said that

a witness, a bartender, said that Hicks had indeed been at the gateway bar that night. He came in about 10 p.m.

Now, with $6, I don't know if you can drink from 6.30 to 10.

I mean, if you nurse them. I guess, yeah, yeah, yeah.
If you have a liver disease and you're on medication, maybe.

So they said he sat at the corner of the bar drinking with Jerry.

Okay. Okay.
He paid for both of their drinks.

James did. James did, because

she was out of money by then,

probably.

So they described him as being about five foot eight inches tall, weighing about 150 pounds. He had a beard and was wearing one of those steel chainsaw hat,

which sounds like every guy in Maine

wearing the hat of a chainsaw.

Chainsaw company.

Yeah, the chainsaw company.

She said, this other person at the bar, that Jerry and James had left the bar together, but she didn't know if they gotten into a vehicle together or they just walked outside together. Who knows?

She said that she honestly had not remembered Hicks even being there until he came in again

later on. The next month, we're talking in November, he came in.
And then that's when she connected. Oh, that's the guy that was here that one night.
Otherwise, she didn't remember.

And she hadn't remembered if his name was Gary or James Hicks, but she knew it was Hicks. She said she didn't remember names well.
She remembered faces and drinking choices because she's a bartender.

You see a guy, you know what he drinks. It doesn't matter what his name is.

Most bartenders call call people by what they drink. By their drink, yeah.

To themselves or to the other people that work there. Oh, that's fucking, you know,

that's Guinness over there. Yeah.

So she said that he had consumed bottled Miller beer when he came in in November, same as he did in October, and wore the same yellow steel hat.

Yeah.

Steel logo hat. So,

who the fuck is this guy? Let's talk about him.

This is James Rodney Hicks. He's born April 17th, 1951.
Goes by Jimmy or Jim. That's what everybody calls him.

Born in Aetna, Maine, which is right between Carmel and Newport. That's the town in there.

His family is shitty.

Shit family, poor. Father left when he was very young.

He was reported to have kind of a, I guess, a normal childhood, not any huge behavioral issues or anything like that except that he is known by his friends and people in the area to have displayed acts of cruelty toward animals throughout his childhood

which

who knows if that's being weird or just living in the woods and people do weird taxidermy or i have no idea not even that some people are just cruel to the what they deem to be a pest on their part absolutely that's the other thing but we're not sure exactly what that means but i think it'll become more clear as we go on here so father left early like we said um and here he is basically that's nothing has happened to this guy pretty much he was born he off a little bit and he sits at the bar with a yellow steel chainsaw hat drinking a bottle of miller that's all that's the guy yeah so they go to talk to him and he lives with a woman at this point uh named linda marquis or marquis whatever you want whatever it is marquise mark marquise uh so linda here uh they go to drive to the home and they found him standing by the front door.

They said, hey, how you doing? You, James Hicks. He said, yeah.
They said, we'd like to ask you some questions in reference to a missing person case.

And he said, sure. And they said, you want to come talk in my car, which is weird because we're standing here.
Why can't we talk while we're standing here? Well, it's Maine. What year is it?

What month is it? It could be cold.

It might be cold, actually. No, it's not because he's hot, as we'll talk about.
Oh,

so they tried to read him his rights, and

they believed he was lying when he responded to their initial question. So they started reading him his rights.

So he kept interrupting them, talking about how he knew why they were there, and that everybody thinks I murdered my first wife. I know.
And they're like, huh? What? You're what now?

What? The fuck are you talking about?

Her name isn't Jerry, right? No? Okay. Well, all right.
Well, let's get. Hold on.
Let me get another notebook page open here.

So they were like, what the fuck?

The police were able to finish reading him his rights at some point, and he said he understood them. So they talked to him.

They asked him if he could go into, he said, can I go inside and get a drink of water?

Sure. He said, I think I'm going to faint unless I get a drink of water.
I'm so familiar. I'm so parched right now.
So, so sweaty.

They said he appeared extremely nervous and was sweating profusely and stuttering.

So all three of them went into the house, two cops and him. They're not going to let him go out and come out with a shotgun or something like that.

So he sat in a chair, James does, then rose to get a glass of water. He sat back down, getting ready to take a drink of the water, puts it up to his mouth, and then just pours it all over himself.

Oh, he's that sweaty. I don't need it into the veins.
I need it on him. On me.
And this is in the house, like just water all over the place. Poured it in his good chair? Weird.

So they said his attention seemed to fade in and out during the questioning. And he seemed to have fainted at one juncture.
He's so thirsty, Jimmy. You have no idea how thirsty this man is.

This man fainted and they just keep asking him, asking his

unconscious body questions. He just passed out in his chair and they're like, he'll come to in a minute.
We'll get to the bottom of this. We'll wait on part two of that question.

So he told officers that he might, and that's a big might, might have been at the Gateway Bar on October 6th. And eventually he might have been talking to Geralyn Towers that night.
But he's not sure.

He said, I go to bars. I talk to women in bars all the time.
That's what I do. Wow.
It's my jam. He thought he had...

he said, I think I stayed till the bar closed. Not, I didn't leave it, you know, whenever.
So now he's informed that witnesses had seen him leave with Jerry.

He, quote, stared at the policeman, just stared at them. Yeah.
Which is a weird response to a question when you're seen with a missing person leaving the bar and you just stare at somebody like

you had a stroke just now.

So then after that, he said, well, maybe I walked out at the same time as some girl,

but quote, he didn't think that they were together. I didn't think we were together.
That's what he says. I didn't think we were together, or I don't think we were together.

He then acted confused and said he just didn't know what was going on right now. Why are you asking me this? Where I am?

He was prepared to answer questions about something completely different, about how everyone thinks he killed his wife

rather than this. So he is that.
He turns into somebody else. So now he's flustered.
He's flustered, doesn't know what to do. He's sweating and stuttering and everything.
So

he was living at this time in Aetna on his family's property.

So he replied, you know, like I said, didn't know anything about him, about this, but I don't know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Now, he was being cooperative, they thought, for a while there.

But he also said

during this time that he had never left the gateway with any woman. So he said, I might have left at the same time as her, but I never left with her.

He did, however, say that he had sexual relations at about that time with an unknown woman in the lounge's restroom. Nice.
Okay.

Didn't even get her name? Didn't even get, I don't even know who she was. Just took her in the bathroom and banged her out in there.
It made her hold on to the urinal. Now,

this can't be a huge bar. I've seen a picture of the bar.
It's not a huge bar. A small, small town bar.

At this point,

he was born, what, he's in his 20s, mid-20s at this point, okay, late 20s, something like that. He is not an old guy.
I don't know how to do that kind of thing. Yeah, when else can you? Yeah, right.

I mean, if you do it in your 40s, good on you. If you do it in your 60s, you're going to be like sore for days if you fuck in a bathroom.
You're going to be sore forever if you wait till you're 60s.

And when you're 22, I don't know if you have the game to quite get that accomplished. Well, in your mid-30s, I don't know how you do that

and not be like

mid-act and going, ah, what's

going to turn this green in the morning? Is it going to be red or green? What am I doing myself?

Jesus. Oh, God.
He said he also doesn't know anything about any Gary Hicks. Because they go, maybe there's a Gary Hicks and maybe we're confusing you.
And he's like, I don't know any Gary Hicks.

So, yeah, they don't know. Anyway, so,

okay.

At some point here, they bring up what's up with the wife thing here.

What's up with that?

And he said, Well, yeah, suspected of her. He said, You don't worry about that.
He said,

The problem is people think I murdered my wife, but she's alive. I saw her two weeks after she left the house.
I know she's alive.

That's why I'm not even sweating people saying I killed her because I know where she is. Oh, she's fucking alive.

He said she sends Christmas presents to the kids every year, and that her parents had had contact with her since she left.

So anybody saying I killed her is crazy, and that's just some bullshit thing that's going on. Fair enough.
He said if he had been at the bar on October 16th, he'd stayed till closing time

and had woken up at the Aetna campgrounds at 4.30 a.m. If I did go there, this is what happened, but I'm not sure that's what happened.
If I did, I closed it. I know that.
I know.

Directly before closing.

And I know I just sleep in my car at a nearby campground. I know I don't go home.
Every day I wake up in the campground. So there's the answers.
Yes.

And the officers found out that his car, which was registered to his girlfriend Linda, had a really loud exhaust on it.

Oh.

And which had since been repaired in the last month. Oh, okay.
So it was a muffler problem.

Yeah, loud exhaust, but it had been repaired after October 16th, after Jerry disappeared and stepdad heard a loud car in the driveway.

So the officers asked him why his vehicle had been sighted at 2 a.m. on Jerry Lynn Towers Street.

And he just stared at them.

When he doesn't have an answer, he just stares.

That's his game, game, which works, honestly. It's better than giving a bad answer.
Yeah, I mean, he wakes up in a campground like Trevor in Grand Theft Falls.

Exactly.

Like with gravel in his ear going, what the fuck happens? This is exactly. You son of bitches.

This is exactly the response I think Trevor would give if questioned by the police. You could hear

when you can hear someone blink, that click click of the blink because it's so quiet because they're just staring.

yeah um so a later communication stated that at the time of the interview quote hicks was suspected of nothing other than a fling with a girl he'd met in a bar then during this interview his live-in girlfriend linda came home and ended the interview and kicked the cops out of the house get the fuck out of my wow oh yeah she was done she's aware as ricker explained later on in an interview in 2009 he said quote she asked us to leave and we left i was trying to be discreet but she knew that there was something going on about a woman.

Hicks, he said, had started shaking the moment he was asked where he let Jerry Lynn Towers off that night. Uh-oh.

As they followed up on other leads, how they would die off, and there was still Hicks sitting here being weird and suspicious and staring at him and shit. So it's very strange.

Now, then they do some investigation. Let's find out about this wife and all that.
And they find out he is, in fact, a married man. Oh, right now.
Right now, not to Linda.

Uh-oh. They contacted the Aetna Postmaster and asked if he had a street address for Hicks, and that's how they found him to begin with.

But they replied that the postmaster said that he knew Hicks personally and found him to be rather strange.

You know, it's a small town when the cop can call for an address and the guy goes, oh, I know him.

That's some small town shit right there.

Try that in Salt Lake City. They go, here's his address.
I don't fucking know that guy.

Also, how do you go to the mail? The mailman? He just knows. I've got four mailmen.
I've seen the same mailman in weeks. It's interesting.

Yet someday when we do the Poughkeepsie serial killer one, I am going to quote my mailman because him and all the other mailman, all the other mailmen talked about the smell all the time and all that kind of shit.

Same guy.

Yep, same guy. So they said that

Yeah, he found him rather strange and said that Hicks's first wife had disappeared about five years ago. Oh.

And never to be heard from again. He and everyone else he knew believed that, just like James had said, everyone thinks that James killed his wife and then filed a missing persons report.

So, anyway, his wife, where is she? Well, she's Jenny Lynn Sear,

C Y R is her birth name.

One half of Owl, half a vowel in there. Sear.

She'll be Jenny Lynn Hicks after she marries him.

She's born February 6th, 1954, so about three years younger than him.

Her parents are Myra and Adrian Sear,

and she's born in Danbury, Connecticut. Her family moved to Maine when she was a small child.
She was in the Dixmont school system. She lived in Aetna, Maine, which is a very small town.

As a teenager, she went to Herman High School, which is about 150 students.

Wow. And this high school serves several towns, including Aetna, Carmel, Carmel.
All of them have 150 kids combined. Altogether, the high school has 150 kids.
Wow. So not a lot going on there.

Very small town. Now, when she was a freshman, Jenny met Jimmy Hicks

on a school bus, on their school bus. He was three years older, so he's probably a junior when she was a freshman.
Riding the same route. Yep.

She passed him a note one day asking him to sit with her, which is every 16-year-old boy's dream. Shit, yeah, I'll go sit with a girl.
Awesome. He said, shit, yeah, I'll go back and sit with you.

And they started a romantic, well, teen relationship here. Come back here and I'll tug on you.
Well, he didn't have to tug on her.

She didn't have to tug on him because she let him put it in her because she's pregnant by the time she's 16. Oh my God.
Yeah, he knocks her up at 16 and they decided to get married. Yeah.

So this is a school bus marriage, man. I hope it wasn't on the bus.
God, I hope so. Those buses are gross enough anyway.
Who knows what's going on? You don't have to even move on those

suspension and those old fuckers. They'll move you.
Do all the movement for you. Absolutely.

So, according to a lot of people, Jenny had some issues with her parents at the time, teenage bullshit here.

And she thought that getting married and having a child of her own would make her an adult with freedom, and everything would be better now because her parents aren't telling her what to do.

Not really.

And her parents did not approve of this marriage, obviously.

Clearly. With a pregnancy.
Yeah. So 1970, they have a daughter named Veronica here.
Jenny drops out of high school. Of course.

And they move in with her parents, which is real comfortable for old Jimmy Hicks to hear as well. Damn it.

You're going to move in with these people who hate you and know that you're fucking their daughter. That sounds great.
Really pleasant here.

And you have those like adult complaints where you sit down and you're like, ah, the wife and the kids. Ah, Christ.
Yeah.

Wife and kids. Jesus.
You know how that goes.

Let me do my math homework.

Pass me a beer, would you? Oh, Jesus. Pass me a beer.

Pass me a beer in my chemistry textbook, if you would.

So they have the baby in 1973, and

they get married. Jimmy finishes his senior year of high school and finds a job working at a local woolen mill.
No, it says local woolen mill.

I don't know if he's making wool products or the whole mill is made of wool. I'm not sure.
They call it a woolen mill. Or perhaps he's just sheer and sheep.
Maybe. I don't know.
You know,

that's got to be part of the process at some point, right? It's the only way to get it, right?

Can't greet you. Yeah.
He moved on to a job with a construction company and actually got into a labor union, which is good. Oh, nice.
We can make some decent cash here.

Jenny finds work at a local skating rink. I don't know if it's the same skating rink as Jerry went to, or that's, no, that was a bowling alley.
It was a bowling. Yeah, bowling bowling out.

So over the years here, James is going to work a variety of jobs as a union laborer,

paper mills he works in.

At one point, Jimmy and his father-in-law, Adrian, Jenny's dad, worked for the same employer, and the two families moved farther north so that the men could be closer to their jobs.

They stayed there for a few years, then returned back to the Carmel. Carmel, Aetna area.

And that's from. Adrian.
Adrian hooked that up, I'm sure. I think so, yeah.

By 1974, though, in the midst of all this, Jimmy and Jenny are getting a divorce. Oh, not going so great, huh? It is not little pink houses for you and me when it comes to these two.
All right.

It is not. So

now,

they're having a lot of problems. Jimmy admitted to numerous affairs he's been having.
That's part of the problem because he's fucking everybody.

Seems like the type. And that he had also made sexual advances toward Jenny's sister, Denise.
Nice. Which will get you divorced quickly.

So Jenny and Jimmy ended up putting their divorce proceedings on hold because they found out that Jenny was knocked up again. Oh, my God.

So she gives birth to their second child, a boy, in December of 74, and they pull the divorce papers and decide to try to make a go of it.

Stop trying to fuck my sister.

You got it. Here, I'll put it in you and leave it in you.
Stop trying to fuck our kid's aunt. Yeah.

Stop trying to fuck Aunt Denise, please.

So by 1977,

Jimmy and Jenny are living at the TNN Trailer Park. TNN? TNN.
Not TN. Yeah, so the trailer park in Carmel, Maine.

It is on Route 2 in Carmel, where that store that needs to be updated was, according to that reviewer. It's right down the street.
Route 2 was a quiet road. It stretches from Bangor to Newport.

So it goes through Carmel Aetna and then to Newport. And also through Herman, where the couple, both of them had went to high school, and ends up in Newport.

Now, the trailer park's a small trailer park, two rows of trailers, one of those. We've talked about that, like on the way to Massachusetts when we saw that little trailer.
Barely a park.

Barely a park. We had a show a couple weeks ago that had a trailer park very similar to this.

The Hicks family here lives in the second row, the one farther from Route 2, from the main road. It's the second trailer on the the west side of the court, lot number 28.

The court features single-wide trailers,

little rooms, those little tiny windows that had cranks on them. Remember those?

Bad trailers. Yeah.
Little tiny yards. I do like the ones with the panel windows.
Those are cool. Like lures.

Yeah. Like an 84 Dodge Charger would have in the back of it.

Yeah.

Like a Florida home. Like a Dodge Daytona from 87 would have those.

Yeah, Florida home. That was a fun fucking car.
They were cool. I like those.
Yeah, those are so cool. Those are cool.
I want to say my Shelby one's bad fucking car. Oh, they were awesome.

I'm going to shop for one of those. They got to be $1,200 now.

Or they're $38,000. One of the two.

It might be like a Supra, you know what I mean? Where they're just so expensive.

Who knows?

But the motors were useless. They're

fast for about 2,000 miles and they explode.

Then it's a Dodge from the 80s. It's an American 80s car, which are not not a good era.
Loved that car, though. So

for work in 77, Jimmy is working with the Paul Lawrence Construction Company,

and he's working in Woodland, Maine that summer, driving three or four hours each day for 115-mile commute. He's working hard.
He was get out of bed that summer by 4.30 a.m.

each day and leave the trailer by 5.15 so he could start work at 7.30. Okay.
So that's a two-hour and 15-minute goddamn drive. That's rough.
That was long, man. That is long in the morning.

He said he made the long commute so he could be with his wife and children in the evenings, whereas most of the men just stayed at the job all week. They stayed out there.

He said he came home to spend time with the wife and kids because he's a family man. He's a good man.
Now, Jenny does stuff, too. She does, she's very good at cakes.

She makes elaborate, creative cakes that she's very good at. Early.

Yeah, she is like an early adapter of cake boss shit. Like, if she had a TikTok channel, she could have crushed crushed it.
She killed it. Crushed it.

Unfortunately, she just had a trailer in Maine that she made cake. 40 years too early.
Very much, yeah.

Yeah, almost 50 for Christ's sake at the end of it. So

yeah, at least 40. So she did all of that.

She made a Greyhound bus cake for her best friend's father, who, I guess, retired from Greyhound.

Also, for additional income, she did this, or sometimes she just did it for people as gifts.

She also started working as a, quote, as a kitchen kitchen helper or a tray person, they called her, at the Penobscot Nursing Home in Brewer.

Now, she worked part-time split-shift position and, you know, was a good employee there. In order to take the job, though, she had to find a babysitter.
Sure.

So she's got a friend named Linda Elston who lives next door to her in the trailer park.

And she volunteered to babysit for the kids until Jenny could work out a better arrangement.

I'll temporarily so you can start this job. I'll I'll do it.
Jenny was also arranging to start CNA courses, certified nursing assistant courses as well at the nursing home to further her career.

She also would require child care for that. So she needs like a permanent babysitter.
She needs like a live-in au pair, which you don't find those a lot at the TNN single-wide trailer park. No.

You know,

not really.

So

it's a problem. So anyway, Linda and Wayne Elston live next door.

Well, Elston or Alston? I'm not sure. Either way, it doesn't matter.
Linda and Wayne. Linda's good friends with

Jenny, and Wayne has known Jimmy since kindergarten. How about that? They all live, yeah, they live there.

Wayne was serving in the army, and Wayne was transferred to Bangor until after his mother's death. The couple had two daughters.

The oldest was the same age as the Jenny and Jimmy's daughter, and their youngest was about the same age as their son. So it's an easy watch, basically, for her.
She's doing all the same things.

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So they knew Jenny well, this couple. Linda considered herself Jenny's best friend.

Their house wasn't in the trailer park, but it was across a short dirt drive in the park and a few hundred yards down their house is there. So it's a two-minute walk.

It's like across the street, pretty much.

So she said, quote, this is Linda, said,

either I was at her house or she was at mine every day, mostly while Jimmy was at work. And they would often go shopping and all that.
And

he said that Wayne said that he's known Jimmy since kindergarten. They'd been friends.
He was mainly friends with Jimmy's brother rather than Jimmy.

He said that Jimmy's brother was involved in sports and so was Wayne, while Jimmy, quote, pretty much did himself during school, quote unquote.

Just whacked it. I get what he means, but he pretty much did himself.

After he graduated from high school, he said Jimmy didn't seem to hang around with any of the friends, and he would spend his time with his family like his brother's father and his wife.

None of the other kids are married with a child, probably, is why. Yeah.
He's a goddamn father, for Christ's sake. Man.
So, Wayne said about Jenny, she was just a very nice person.

She would do anything for anyone. And Linda said she's an awesome mother, an awesome woman, a mother to die for.

Weird way. Again, strange way of putting it.
So they're living, they have two kids, Jenny and Jimmy.

Jenny is, we described Jimmy before physically. Jenny is described as 5'7, 125,

dark blonde hair, and everyone said at the time, worn in a style similar to Farah Fawcett. The late 70s.
As shit. Farah Fawcett do thing.
Yeah.

So anyway.

Jenny here, they said, you know, she wore glasses. They said she was attractive, long, light hair.

Her glasses, she needs badly. She is blind.
Oh, boy. Terrible eyesight.
Terrible, terrible, terrible here. Not good at all.

Now, Dwayne, the neighbor, said Jenny seemed to be living two or three different lives.

He said one when she was with other people, one a good life with her kids, and the third, a terrible life with Jimmy. Oh.

Yeah, he said the marriage clearly had trouble, but she would never tell anyone what it was all about.

Now, here's a story from Jenny's mom, Myra.

She said Jenny's marriage, quote, seemed all right, but then later stated that her daughter went out one night with a young man while Jimmy stayed home with the children.

Jenny never came home that evening.

And Myra, the mom, said she saw her daughter in a car the next day, and she said, quote, I yelled at her and said, what kind of mother are you for staying out all night like that?

So she got yelled at by her mom for staying out. In traffic.
In traffic, in public.

So they're in need of a babysitter, a permanent Linda can't do it all the time. So they end up coming across the perfect situation.
What's that? A 15-year-old named Susan Matley. Uh-huh.
Okay.

Now, Susan, you'd think, oh, maybe she's a neighbor kid and she has a lot of free time. Right.
No. No, not at all.

She's actually a ward of the state of Massachusetts who ran away from her foster home and hitchhiked to Maine with two of her friends.

A fugitive.

Otherwise known as a child fugitive. That's crazy.
Wow. An absconder.
Yep.

The guy who gave them a ride to the Carmel area said when they arrived, Susan, who is a small and slender girl with blonde hair and blue eyes,

decided to stay there with the guy who gave them a ride.

She hitchhiked and was like, I'll just stay with you.

Since you're being so generous today with a ride, have you a room?

Have you a bed and room in Bowen, please? This is a guy named Dwight Overlock, and Overlock and James Hicks went to school together, but weren't close friends.

Now, his family introduced Jenny to Susan, and they agreed, I got this 15-year-old girl in my house. I don't know what to do with.
You need a babysitter. What if we move her into your house?

Perhaps we could traffic her.

Perhaps I could sell her to you. What is going on?

Perhaps I could sell you a sophomore. Would you enjoy a child?

And she said, sure. Now, at the time, Susan was describing Overlock, who was at least in his mid-20s, as her boyfriend, by the way.
Oh, my God.

Okay, now I don't know if he's trying to get rid of her or what here. So they, quote, hire her.
Now, this is how they hire her.

Okay, okay this is crazy um yeah it is in return it gets crazier in return for watching the kids when jenny was away susan earned her room and board as well as cigarettes so they're gonna pay a child in cigarettes we're gonna pay a child in prison it's cigarettes and a roof it's prison we're gonna pay a child in cigarettes that's crazy

Pay a child who's our high school friend's girlfriend

in cigarettes. Okay.

She slept on the top bunk in the children's room, too. She slept with the kids, just smoking away.
I just picture her up there smoking away in that bunk. Just smoking cigarettes on the top.
That's it.

Oh, boy. Oh, man.
This is hilarious. So while the other kids slept on the bottom bunk, so they slept together on the bottom bunk.
She slept in the top bunk by herself.

I got top. Jimmy,

not surprising to anybody, quickly made advances on her, obviously. Is that right? Of course.
Why not?

You're already committing a multitude of crimes of child endangerment and other things. Why not throw trying to fuck her in there, too? Disgusting.

So apparently one afternoon when Jenny and the kids were away, he kept grabbing and pinching her and backing her into the refrigerator.

Pastor. This has turned into the accused now.
This is horrifying.

So Susan fled the kitchen, takes off. Jimmy would follow her.

And we don't know if it was on purpose or or not, or Susan doesn't know if it's on purpose or not, but he burned her neck with a cigar after throwing her onto a bed. Oh, boy.
This is a 15-year-old.

Yeah. Threw her on a bed and burned her with a cigar.
What the fuck? She started crying for him to let her go, so he did.

Now,

here's the thing, though. This is in July, July 6th.
That was July 1977. On July 16th, 1977,

Susan told Jenny about what happened. Oh.
Jenny is not happy at all. No.

And so they argued about it.

Jenny was upset, obviously, about this and argued

to Jimmy saying, one of us is going to move out of the house because this isn't going to work. You're trying to fuck our sophomore babysitter here.

So they've had, apparently, these fights are not a novel thing for them. They happen all the time.
Yeah. That blow up into your leaving or I'm leaving.

But Jimmy had always been able to convince her not to go. But this time, he seemed like he fucked up too bad to fix.
So it's bad. Jenny was not letting this go.

Sunday, July 17th, Jenny, Jimmy, and their little boy went for a long drive. I don't know why they left the daughter home, but whatever.
They stopped in a small town of, whoa,

Kendus, Kendiskee?

K-E-N-D-U-S-K-E-A-G.

Then Kendisky? Kenduskeg, yeah. I don't know.
And Jenny and Jimmy argued further about the situation. Sure.
They decided Jimmy's going to be the one to leave

because, you know, I'm here with two kids. So, you know, you should probably leave.
Jenny would keep the kids.

Anyway, Jimmy said, told people he thought he'd be able to change her mind before the end of the month when he had to get out. Yeah.

So the couple went home, and on Monday morning, July 18th, Jimmy got up and went to work as usual.

Jenny and the kids went to see her sister Denise that Monday morning. You know, the one he tried to fuck when they lived with the parents.

So after the visit, Jenny headed to Bangor to buy some ingredients to make cake for the neighbor Linda's nephew.

Cake ingredients.

So they decided that the daughter would stay with the sister Denise. So the sisters made plans to meet the next day for Jenny to take Denise to a dental appointment in the afternoon.

Okay,

that's how this goes here.

The scene is set. Now, July 18th,

that's the day where this is all going on. The 18th, they're going here because, no, that was the Sunday.
Okay, that was what they did. Now, the 18th is the day of the dental appointment.

Jimmy's at work. Jenny leaves with her children to visit her sister, then go to Bain for the shopping trip, like we talked about.

After returning home, she called Linda. her friend Linda, and asked if she wanted to go to Bangor with her tomorrow, but Linda says she can't go.

She tells Linda she finished making the cake and they had plans to take the cake to Bangor the next day. And Jenny called and asked if she could come over, but Linda said she couldn't.

She didn't have anyone to watch her kids. So Jimmy here, Linda said about Jimmy, quote, we couldn't just sit and talk when he was around.
She didn't seem to quite dare to say anything.

Once when she had tried to visit Jenny in the evening,

Jimmy Hicks had sat there listening and suddenly announced, I'll give you a ride They're in the middle of talking.

Imagine you're there with your wife and she's talking to one of her friends and he's like, well, you're getting the fuck out now. Let's go.
I've done enough of this. Yeah,

I'll give you a ride home.

So

Jenny just shook her head as if basically saying, don't go with him, which she didn't. So July 18th, spent the rest of the day with her kids, her sister, and her friend.
But

at some point, he comes home from work. Jimmy comes home from work.
Now that that night at 2 a.m.,

neighbors hear Jimmy and Jenny arguing around the trailer because this is a small trailer park, a single one. It's a two-row trailer park.

You might as well put your fucking lips up to a bullhorn and start arguing because you're in a tin speaker.

Yeah. That's all it is.

Just go shout at each other in your neighbor's bed. It's easier.
Yeah. That way they can hear it clearly.

Stop. Stop.
They're listening. Yeah.

A little bit of insulation in between you and their ear. Yeah.

So then the next day, Jimmy says, Jenny's gone. She's missing.
She took off.

Yeah, gone.

She's reported missing by both Jimmy and Linda, the neighbor here. Oh.

So Jimmy, the cops, come to take a report. Jimmy tells the cops that she, quote, probably ran off with a truck driver.
Probably. You know how that goes.

When you can't find your wife, what do you think? Fucking a truck driver, probably, right? That's what I think.

Jenny's parents said she's not fucking any truck driver. She wouldn't leave her kids, is what they said.

They said she would have never run off and left her kids behind, nor would she have not contacted us to tell us what was happening. She would have called us and said, I left.

Can you go get the kids or whatever? So it made no sense.

So Jimmy said, Yeah, I've been looking for her, can't find her. And the parents said, I looked for her, I can't find her either.
So

they talked to Jimmy here, and basically, in his version of the events, Susan, the babysitter, went out on a date that night, the night that they argued and Linda disappeared, and Jenny disappeared.

She'd gone out on a date that night with Dwight, Overlook, Overlock, the guy who gave her a ride and then took her in.

He and Jenny watched television

were watching television. When Susan returned from her date at about 11 o'clock, he said he didn't talk to her because he was angry about what she told Jenny.

She told on me. I'm not talking to that bitch.
Yeah, she read me out. He said Jenny did speak to Susan briefly.
The couple stayed up a little longer talking and then went to bed.

Then Jenny brought the son into the bed with them, and the three slept together until he got up and got ready for work in the morning.

He drove the family car to work as he needed to have some repairs made to his truck. That's what he said.
So they talked to Susan, the babysitter. She said, I got home from the date at 4 a.m.

Not at 11 o'clock.

How old is she that she's staying out till then? 15. Well, she's already working for cigarettes.
So at this point,

she's pretty worldly.

Yeah, this is crazy. She's like, pay me and Benson and Hedges, everybody.
So

she said she remembers seeing Jenny lying in a peculiar position on the love seat at one end of the trailer while James watched television at the other end of it. She said that she

was, I guess,

was approached by police, and she said Jimmy Hicks was there and told me not to give any information. That's what she told the police.
Yeah.

She said that, yeah, she wasn't supposed to do that.

And she said that also, I guess they talked about she shouldn't, Jimmy specifically told her that she shouldn't mention that Jenny left her eyeglasses behind when she left because it, quote, might give the wrong impression.

Oh. Now, here's what she saw when she came in.

She said, quote, I opened the door and seen Jimmy sitting down in a chair and Jenny was laying down on the love seat and I asked him, I said, is Jenny asleep? And he said, yes. How was your night?

I said, fine. And I walked into the bathroom.
Then I climbed onto the top bunk, the bed, and I was scared, nervous. I was listening.

Now, when asked why she had been afraid, she said, quote, things didn't seem right. Yeah.
But very important that this is 4 a.m. and not 11 a.m.
Because people heard them arguing at 2 a.m. 2 a.m.

Which wouldn't have made sense. This story story makes no sense unless she comes home at 4.
She said that things didn't seem right.

She said Jenny was wearing her blue bathrobe and laying down in the love seat, but her feet were scrunched up and her head was like one eye and half of her nose and her hair was more or less covering her face.

She said Jenny's arms were kind of like in a different, in different weird positions. She looked like she was in an uncomfortable position.
Not a natural yeah, like you wouldn't lay down like that.

She's going to be in pain when she wakes up.

Exactly. Yeah.
So she said it was real awkward. I guess Jimmy told Susan that Jenny was asleep, but Susan feared that Jenny was not well.

So she said after she went to her room, she got into bed and heard slippers scuffling across the floor and then heard the trailer door open.

She said she was afraid to investigate what she heard and she hid under the covers and eventually fell asleep. Why? Because she's a child.

And she knows that this is bad and just doesn't know why this is bad. What do children do when they're scared? They pull the covers over their heads.

That's That's why you know you shouldn't be fucking them.

That's how you know. Working for cigarettes.
Or should be working for cigarettes. So people close to Jenny said that her vision was so poor, she never went anywhere without her glasses.

One of her friends said that on one occasion, her sister,

this woman's sister, had removed Jenny's glasses from her face in jest, and it made Jenny very nervous because she couldn't see anything and it freaked her out.

Another one said that her sister also said that she only removed her glasses to sleep or to take photos. That's it.
Yeah. Because she had some big old glasses on her.

She had the glasses like that the chick on the wire had who was dancing. Freeman's girl.
She had the wires that...

The big old fucking grandma glasses with like a chain around the neck to keep them on. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. That De Niro wears at the end of Casino.
Yeah, the Nan glasses. Yeah.

And another guy that we know.

So

anyway, Jimmy said Jenny had left her glasses and purse at the trailer. That's what he told the cops.

Susan stayed home alone at the trailer for at least a few hours while he said he drove around looking for Jenny. Jimmy stopped at his mother's house and left his son with the mother.

Then Jimmy's brother left the mother's house with him. After a couple hours, the brother supposedly returned to the trailer, picked up Susan, and took her to a fair in Bangor.

We can't find Jenny. Let's go to the fair with the sophomore.
Get in, Susan. Why? When the three returned, a light was on inside the trailer.

Jimmy went inside, then came out again, claiming that the glasses were now gone. Oh, now the glasses are gone.
So Jenny must have came back and got them. Yeah.

Jimmy Hicks returned to Denise's home later that night and told her that both Jenny's glasses and purse were gone. So she must have come back while I was gone.
I don't know.

I can't help it. Now, the babysitter said she saw, Susan said she saw Jenny's glasses and her purse at the trailer on July 19th, but didn't see Jenny.

So at some point, Susan called Linda and asked if she knew where Jenny was.

Neither thought anything was seriously wrong because they'd been fighting and they knew that he tried to diddle the babysitter, but they didn't know where she was either.

When Jimmy came home from work, Susan told him that she had not seen Jenny all day. Jimmy then went out to look for her and make some telephone calls.

He also called or visited Linda and Wayne, the neighbors and friends there, and visited Jenny's sister Denise, Denise, as we talked about, and went to her parents' house as well.

And finally, his own mother's house.

He took the son with him on the last visit. The son had stayed home with Susan for some of the evening.
The daughter was still with Denise.

So we don't know exactly which where he went when, but that's the whole totality of where he was.

Now, the Sheriff's Department, looking into the missing persons case, finds a neighbor who tells the officers she overheard a fight between Jenny and James Hicks on July 18th,

that night, where

he says the babysitter came home at 11, and she says it was 4 a.m.

So she said that she heard the fight and stated that it was not any worse than numerous others she had overheard, meaning this is normal for them.

Susan also stated that Jenny and James Hicks fought after Jenny went to visit her sister earlier in the day on July 18th, but also that she had witnessed similar arguments, but this this last altercation involved pushing and shoving.

Uh-oh. People put hands on each other.
They're putting hands.

Now, mom, Jenny's mom, Myra,

said that three days after Jenny was gone,

she was told by Jimmy Hicks

that he had seen Jenny in a car in Newport.

He told her mom that Jenny didn't want to talk to him and that she only asked for her clothes. So mom said, quote, Newport's a small town and I walked all over and never ran into my daughter.

She was like, if she's in Newport, I'll find her.

I'll see her. Now, one week after the disappearance, there's a woman named Linda Dunifer, not Linda, not the other Linda, the neighbor.
This is a different Linda.

This is a friend of Jenny here, said that a week after she disappeared, a woman called her on the phone and identified herself as Jenny. She called and said, hi, it's Jenny.

The caller wouldn't say where she was, only that this Linda was to tell Jimmy Hicks to deliver her clothes from the trailer. And they said, Well, where do I tell him to go?

And the caller told this Linda that Jimmy knows where I am and where to bring my clothes. Oh.

Around the same time,

Jimmy calls Jenny's employer and demanded that they release Jenny's last paycheck to him,

which is highly odd. If someone leaves you, you don't try to take their paycheck.

And you don't.

I mean,

she's

if someone died,

if someone died and there's a death certificate, if your wife died, you go give your last paycheck.

She didn't even quit her job. No, that's what I mean.

They said, we can't do that. So he yelled and screamed over the phone, then showed up at the nursing home the next day angry.
Yeah. So he was denied the check again.

So he cursed them out and said, I'll be coming back with the police

to get her check. What are you going to do? Because they're involved in this somehow.
Yeah, right. Now, late July of, so months have gone by here.
Late July rolls around. Right.

James Hicks reported that he saw his wife about a week or so after she disappeared at the Gateway Bar near Newport. Remember that? Oh, yeah.

The Gateway Bar obviously would later come in handy, come into a big thing here.

But no one could find any evidence that Jenny had actually been at the Gateway Bar in late July 1977 when he said he saw her.

According to James, he had been with his brother that day when he saw his wife sitting in a car in front of the gateway with a tall, dark-haired man.

Supposedly, Jenny told Jimmy that she was staying with this man, a friend of hers, and his parents in Waterville, Maine, and she claimed that she was planning to go to Florida with them in their Winnebago.

She did ask how the kids were doing. They good? Okay, great.

I gotta go. And everyone's like,

no, she was obsessed with her kids. She wouldn't be like, I'll be in the Winnebago.
Kiss the kids for me.

P.S. Hope they're all right.

So Jimmy also tells everybody that Jenny's fine, tells other people that I not only saw her there, I've heard from her. I saw her in Augusta, in Waterville, in Newport.

She's also been seen in New Hampshire and down in Florida. She's around.
Don't worry about it. August 15th, 1977, there's an article here in the newspaper.

There's a picture of Linda, by the way, for you. Okay.

They said relatives and friends said they're seeking information as to her whereabouts.

She's been missing from a trailer park, and they give all of her major stats and say that she wears her dark blonde hair in the style of actress Farah Fawcett Majors.

She was married to Lee Majors at the time.

September 1977,

I guess Jimmy says he spots Jenny and a chase ensues. Oh.

Yes.

Apparently,

this is Wayne, the friend, neighbor.

He and Jimmy and Jimmy's brother, George, drove into Bangor, where Jimmy hoped to find someone he thought who lived on Ohio Street.

Wayne Elston said he was not made aware at the time of the reason for the trip nor the identity of the person that Hicks was trying to find. But when James Hicks

was told that the person had moved from this apartment they went to just two days before, the three of them drove away. And Wayne said eventually they stopped at a set of lights near Harlow Street.

Wayne said at that that moment, James said he just had just seen Jenny drive by in a car. I seen her.
I seen her.

So he then turned around and pursued her up Harlow Street and slowed down when Wayne cautioned him against driving past the speed limit.

So then the pursuit ended and Wayne said he didn't know which car Hicks was even chasing and that he didn't see Jenny drive by, but it was just Hicks went, there she is.

you know, flipped a bitch. So February 1988, Jenny's mom writes a letter to the main secretary of state asking whether her daughter has renewed her driver's license by the time of her birthday.

She knew it was up.

Oh, it was about to expire. So if she renewed it, then

the chase is on. Yeah.
Yeah. And she also indicated that she believed her daughter's disappearance was either the result of foul play or, quote, self-destruction.

She said, quote, she has two children, a girl, seven, and a boy, three.

And she is a very shy girl who would never leave the house by herself, especially walking like her husband said she did between four and six in the morning with no clothes or pocketbook or her glasses.

She's nearly blind without her glasses.

What I would like to know is if she renewed her license this year, I realize, yeah, he could have done it to keep us from looking for her, but if she has a new address, she most likely would have it on her license.

She said,

I'm her mother and very concerned about her whereabouts.

If you can tell me if she's renewed her license and the change of address, I would very much appreciate it. At least I would know she was all right, and perhaps someday she will come back.

It's a sad letter.

It is. Now, April 25th, 1978, 78.

Years gone by.

Jimmy gets arrested for speeding and operating a motor vehicle under suspension of his license, and he's fined $30.

Wow, that's a $30 fine. $30.

October 1978, Jenny's parents run into Jimmy on the street. Okay.

Yes. This was in Madawaska, where they were living, the parents here.
She met Jimmy on the street and asked about Jenny. She said, quote, he said she was in Florida.

She said that she told Jimmy that she checked into Jenny's whereabouts and that she was not in Florida. So mom said that Hicks then told her that she's in New Hampshire living with a boyfriend.

Same thing. You know, New Hampshire, Florida, same place.
Yeah, tropical New Hampshire. You know, now mom said, quote, I think that's a lie.
I think you killed her and hid the body.

And at that point, he replied, quote, you'll never prove that.

What? And that was the end of the conversation.

Okay.

Not that, again, this guy either stares at you or says some crazy incriminating shit. One of the two.
Say you'll never prove it. You'll never prove it.
Oh, what are you, a comic book villain?

What the fuck? What the fuck? December 6th, 1978, Jimmy is again arrested, this time for operating a motor vehicle while under the influence. He's fined $200 for that.

That'll cost you $10,000 nowadays in Arizona. One of those.

Never mind, $200. And your life.
It'll ruin your life. Yeah, ruin your life.
Now, Linda,

this is when, remember, Linda Marquis.

Marquis, whatever. Yeah.
This is when he gets together with Linda in 1978. Yeah.
Jimmy's moving on. They're in love.
They're going to have two more kids together. Wow.

So in addition to they have her two kids, his two kids, and now their two kids.

Yours, mine, and ours. She said, I call them his, mine, and ours.
Hey, there it is. There you go.
That's what she said while laughing.

So, okay. Now he ends up living with Linda.

It goes totally cold with Jenny. They don't know.
So then late 82, early 83, this is in the midst of the Geralyn Towers investigation, how he got where we are in the first place. Right.
Okay.

So the matter at this point of Geraln Towers, because this is just all what they discovered through going back over everything.

Geralyn Towers here, the matter came to the attention of the state police when the Newport Police Department was investigating this unrelated matter that had nothing to do with any of this, and then came up with information that indicated foul play in the disappearance of Jenny Hicks.

They're investigating Geralyn Towers and they come up with all this. Right.

So this is interesting.

They said looking back on it, the cops say at the time the disappearance of Jenny was treated by law enforcement officials as a missing person, not a homicide investigation or anything like that.

They looked around. She wasn't there.
She's an adult. Fuck it.
She's gone.

Now, Jenny's mom

at that point, they go back and talk to her more.

And they're thrilled. They have gotten nothing from the cops for years.
No one has talked to them. Their daughter just has vanished off the face of the planet.
Wow.

So she is happy to tell him, I ran into him on the street. I accused him.
He said, he'll never prove it. And Jesus Christ, they had fights all the time.

And on several occasions, Jenny had been hospitalized due to these fights. Good Lord.
It's hard to do. Has he hit her? Yes.

Yeah. Jenny was also treated for various other injuries, injuries she thought Jimmy had deliberately inflicted on her daughter.

So they request her her medical records, and they find there's a whole bunch of little things, a scar here, crack thing here, little, you know, broken bones where you'd find that you could identify her with if you found a body.

So then they also interview other neighbors, former next-door neighbors of the Hickes here when they lived in that trailer at the TNN Park.

And she said, this neighbor said that she had seen Jenny with black eyes and a bruise on her thigh before. She'd also seen Jimmy, quote, chasing Susan around the trailer.
I don't know what that means.

She said that on the last night anyone had seen Jenny, she heard yelling. And at one point, Jenny had screamed, stop, please stop.
You are going to kill me. Oh, my God.

Doesn't get any clearer than that, folks. No, that's it.
Hey, by the way, I know, listen, I'm the mind-your-business guy. Yeah.
I've called the cops once in my life. Like,

I'm your business guy.

Once because at 32nd Street and Bell in Phoenix by that jack in the box, I was online and there was a guy absolutely beating the living shit out of a woman in the next parking lot while she screamed for her life.

Oh, my God. Holding her by the hair.
And it was like 100 yards away. Like, I was like, I called the cops.
I was like, what the fuck am I going to do over there? I don't know who these people are.

So I called the cops and yelled at the guy. Hey.
Stop. The cops are coming.
You fucking idiot.

It would have taken me forever to get there. So, and it was 110 degrees out.
Anyway,

even mind your own business guy will call the cops in this situation.

Yeah, you can't let a lady get beat by a man. That's just how it is.
If you hear a woman yelling, stop, please stop, you are going to kill me.

When the kill word comes in, that's when you can go ahead and call the cops. They're not doing it.
Fair enough. Unless they're rehearsing for a play, I think you're good.

Unless they're rehearsing for 12 angry men. Yeah.

And about a week after Jenny disappeared, there had been severe septic problems in the trailer park, especially near their lots.

Uh-oh.

So they interviewed other people,

mainly other neighbors. A couple of children supposedly told older members of their family they had heard screams that night that Jenny disappeared also, but their memories weren't very clear by 1982.

A relative of Dwight Overlock, the babysitter fucker there,

allegedly, or whatever, reported that he had seen Susan with a black eye at some point after Jenny had disappeared and thought that Jimmy Hicks had done something to Susan too.

So now he's beating up the sophomore on top of it.

Wow. One particular deal here was there's one of Hicks' girlfriends named Fern.

Fern, who's five years younger than Hicks, told police that in early February 83 at her home in Gilman's Trailer Park in Newport, she had been with Hicks for some time.

She'd started dating him not long after Jenny had gone missing and been in a relationship with him for well over a year. He's been living with Linda, having kids for five years.

So while this woman was with him, Hicks had remodeled the trailer that he'd shared with Jenny,

and she said she didn't know why he'd redone the mobile home because it, quote, already looked pretty good to her.

You know, take out rugs and carpets and all that.

He also gave her his furniture and then sold the trailer. Oh.
He gave his marital mattress and box springs to his mother, but they ended up going to the dump.

This woman said she had seen the mattress and that there was, quote, a great big blood stain on the mattress that was about 18 inches in diameter. That's a great big bloodstain, all right.

Not a nosebleed. No.

Now, either Jimmy or his mother had explained that at some point in their marriage, they had been arguing and that Jenny had either fallen or he had hit her or somehow she cut her back.

You know, how that goes. Cut her back.
Cut her back.

Wide the fuck open.

I would say so. Now, they said that they had they wanted to get rid of the mattress, no matter what the source of the blood.

She said she'd been living or staying at the trailer with Jimmy and that he initially

refused to get rid of the blood-soaked mattress, and they had slept on it together.

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Jesus. She said that they had a normal sex life.

However, he was often rough, including when she was very pregnant with their daughter.

He knocked her up, too.

You can't be rough with a pregnant woman. That's crazy.

She also said Jim is manly. He swears and cusses a lot.
She said she didn't know anything about.

Is that manly? That's manly.

We're men, Jimmy. Holy fuck am I.

I'm such a man.

I'm just a man.

So she also said she didn't think that Jimmy had been very close to his brothers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. She said he was a hard guy to get close to.

Now, the state of the investigation, the criminal division of the Attorney General's office had become involved with this case after the Towers,

Geraldyn Towers case. So did the Maine State Police.
So everybody combines together to try to figure this out, essentially.

They figured out that the disappearance of Jenny Lynn, law enforcement, had conducted a botched investigation. That's a quote from their report.

That seems right. They were just like, well, oh, well.

So they said police had never investigated the Jenny Lynn case as a homicide or even a missing person. They just accepted Hicks' story that she just left.

Now, Ricker, remember Officer Ricker who started all this?

Yeah, yeah. Is he an investigator now? Yeah, he got the call about Geralyn in the beginning.
He said when they were re-examining it in 82, I can't even describe the excitement of the Sear family.

It was all bottled up in them. Why hasn't she,

hasn't anyone listened to us? It was just unbelievable. Some of the people who became involved with Jimmy Hicks were, for lack of a better word, victims of society.

The case was not more rigorously pursued because Ricker believed, quote, because of the type of people they were. Trailer trash.
These were all trailer trash. You know what it is.

That's exactly what they were drunks and trailer trash. Low-income alcoholics.
He said, to some, some, they simply seem like the kind of people who would just leave.

But he said, but Jenny was not that kind of woman at all. She was working on his career and very reliable with her kids and not the type of person who isn't some trailer trash alcoholic.

You know, that's not her.

So

they're looking into Jenny Lynn's disappearance again here. And

October 5th, 1983, after all this, although no body has been discovered,

he is indicted on murder charges for Jenny, not for Jerilyn, for Jenny. I think it's time we stop saying nobody, no crime.
Nobody, no crime. I think it's time

everybody shuts the fuck up about it because it can be done. In the trailer park.
Yeah, it can. If there's no body, we can prove that they are dead either way.
In the TNN trailer park.

It's true. This is, by the way,

they're going to try to make this the first case in Maine history with a conviction without a body. Wow.
Because back then, it was no body, no crime. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, now we can just get DNA and all that. We don't need the body.
We have

a paper trail and so they have no fucking money

wherever they are, and that's impossible.

Yep. So he's taken to jail.

They said that he was indicted for the murder of his wife, Jenny,

when they press asked the cops, where's the body? And they said it hasn't been recovered. And they were all like, huh? What the fuck?

We find out he is eligible for bail.

Really? Yeah, I'll read from the paper, the Bangor Daily News, an unprecedented main court action.

Two men and a woman, all facing murder charges, not in this case, two separate people besides him, were made eligible to be released on bail following hearings at the County Superior Court.

Superior Court Justice Jesse Briggs set bail at $60,000 with up to three sureties for these three people, including James Hicks.

Yeah, the prosecutor said, I've been prosecuting since September 1973, and it's the first capital case I'm aware of in which bail has been set. Oh.
So they don't understand.

I guess following these hearings, the judge said that last year's Maine Supreme Court decision regarding accused murderer Nancy Ferdett had given the lower courts discretion in establishing bail for those charged with murder.

She said it's not an automatic bail right, but you could do it.

So he is granted a bail of $60,000 with three sureties, but he's unable to post it anyway, so he's held at jail. Doesn't matter.
March 1984 is the trial for Jenny's murder.

Seven-man, five-woman jury.

Opening statements. The prosecutor, Fernand La Rochelle, here

he says he's going to produce a witness who can testify that a fight took place in the trailer the night of the 18th, and that witness, a neighbor, heard a woman yelling and sounds that sounded like hitting and saying, don't, you're going to kill me.

The witness also will testify that after a brief silence, she heard what sounded like someone chopping wood outside the trailer.

Oh, my God.

The state's case will also hinge on testimony from Susan, the babysitter,

the runaway who they've tracked down here.

She, you know, has all of her things. They describe how she saw her with the,

she saw the glasses and the purse, how she was laying in an awkward position. The prosecutor said Jenny had poor vision and did nothing without her glasses.
There you go.

So the defense, by the way, the blue bathrobe she was wearing that night is also missing. So she left in her bathrobe with no glasses or purse.

That's not

she left like Steve Martin in the jerk, but didn't take any stuff with him. Didn't need his paddle ball or his remote control.
She's Tony Soprano, just getting the newspaper. Yeah,

and she just kept going.

Kept walking.

Kept walking, getting everybody's newspaper. Not even getting hers.
She kept walking right by it. The paper was still there, damn it.

So the defense is that,

no. They said there's no fight in the trailer.
There was no broken furniture, no bloodstains, no sign of a struggle, nothing to indicate death.

They said the key element here will be the character of Jenny herself. So they're going to try to.
rip the victim.

The fundamental, this is a quote, the fundamental point of this case is simply whether you will believe to find it in yourselves to convict someone of murder if you don't even know a death occurred.

There is no solid evidence that a death occurred.

He said, we're going to show that Jenny was involved in an unsatisfying marriage, that she experienced two undesired pregnancies with him, and that she was generally dissatisfied with her life.

And for the last five years, James Hicks has been living with Linda, the mother of his two children, and they've, you know, all that. He said, he's not a murderer, quote, Jim Hicks is a family man.

Oh, boy. From all I've heard, that's one thing he's not.
If anything else, it's not that. So, the prosecution, their case, they get Denise, who is Jenny's sister.

Um, she says that she had come to see her the day of that she disappeared, and that you know, she returned to the trailer and you know, all that kind of shit. She said what we said before.

She said about Jenny, quote, she was happy with her kids, she was very close to her children.

She said, Jenny was upset at the time, and that she told her either Jimmy would move out the following week, or I'm going to move out and I'll go live with mom and dad, basically.

That's what she said. Jenny's parents testify, obviously.
They testify about her eyesight, how she never went anywhere without glasses. They have to establish

all this here. And they said that

they didn't believe it when they heard him say that the glasses were there, then they weren't, all that shit. So cross-examination on mom here.

She admits, mom said she admits that she did did not try to find her daughter in Florida, even though James Hicks told her that she was in Florida.

She said, quote, I know I've lost my daughter. I'm not out for revenge.
I just want to know where my daughter's body is.

Because they said, what is your feelings toward the defendant? And she said, not out for revenge. I just want to bury my child.
Just give me closure. I'd like to have a funeral, you know.
Yeah.

That'd be nice. When asked by the defense attorney why she hadn't informed police of James Hicks's claims that he had seen Jenny.
She responded, the police didn't do anything from the beginning.

So it was pointless to ask them, basically.

Dumb. She said that when James first told her of the disappearance, he said, I'll find her.
She'll have some explaining to do or I'll kill her. That was his quote to them.

Now,

they said also,

you know, they said, you said in your letter to the state that she was dissatisfied with her marriage and her life and that she might, she could have committed suicide, she could still be alive.

You said in your letter, you don't know what happened. And she said,

I just wanted them to come out and investigate. I wrote it to cover any possibility.

But they're using it like, if you didn't even think she's dead, why should the jury think she's dead? You're her mom. You know what I mean?

Then they get Susan up on the stand and she testifies, the babysitter, that she found that Jenny in that weird position on the love seat. James had told her his wife was asleep, and that

both Jimmy and Jenny had disappeared sometime the following morning, leaving her new eyeglasses and her pocketbook behind in the trailer.

And the pocketbook reportedly contained credit cards and Jenny's driver's license as well.

Wayne, the friend,

Wayne Elston, there,

the neighbor, said that Hicks told him one time that he had heard from Jenny and that she was in Newport.

Elston here said that Jimmy told him on another occasion that he had heard from his wife in New Hampshire and another time he heard from her in Florida.

Linda Dunifer, not Linda Alston, a different Linda, she testified that a week after the disappearance, a woman called and identified herself as Jenny and said that my, yeah, James knows where I am and helped tell him to bring my clothes.

So then they asked this Linda, the prosecutor asked, if, did you believe you were speaking to Jenny Hicks? Yeah. And she said, at the time I thought I was.

I mean, before there was a murder trial and all. But now I don't, obviously.
Yeah.

She said, the only impression I got was she was kind of irritated with me because I kept pumping her for information and she couldn't get off the phone fast enough. Yeah.

So we don't know who that call was from, though. She said she called mutual friend, the other Linda.
So both Lindas were on the phone and told, not a lot of women named Linda anymore. You notice that?

Not a lot of 20-year-olds named Linda out there. I had a couple of girls in high school named Linda.
Two of them, matter of fact. And then it was good.
Because they're in their 40s now.

Yeah, and that was fucking weird. That was like a mom name then.
It was

fucking bizarre to call a 17-year-old Linda. Linda sounds like a secretary, not a

child.

I don't remember. Well, one of them had a few boyfriends, but it's

tough to be like, dearest Linda.

Yeah. It's weird to look at a baby and go, Linda.
Linda. You know what I mean?

It's like looking at a baby and going, Arthur. Like, really?

Clarence. Edmund.
Really? That's what you're naming this fucking kid? Clarence?

Even Edward.

Edward is even weird. Anything with that in it.
So

anyway, she said she didn't relay the information to James or any other member of the family about the phone call.

So Jimmy takes the stand. Here we go.
Yeah, I mean, I don't even know if this is smart. I was going to say it.
I don't even know if this is smart or not.

Because normally you go, oh, they have all this stuff. They have bodies.
You have to force them to prove it. Force them.
Yeah, don't say shit and force them to prove it.

I guess that would be the legal strategy anyway.

Now, he says that Jenny had threatened to leave him numerous times with their two young children, so that would keep him from, quote, going around partying.

Oh.

He also said that he had not seen.

that he had not seen his wife in a car in Bangor after she disappeared, which contradicted the earlier statement by Wayne, who said he was with him when that happened. Remember? Right.

He said that never happened. They're like, okay.

Other people said so.

He said that he and his wife argued the night before she disappeared, and that sometime during the argument, she told him that she felt tied down, quote unquote, in their marriage. He said,

She said she was going to stick me with the kids so that I couldn't go around partying. Stick me with the kids.
Gonna stick you with them.

Fuck my whole life up. God, she can't have that.
Jenny's, yeah. So in later testimony, he says that he was approached by Wayne Elston, who said he had the address of someone who might help in locating

Jenny. James, his brother George, and Wayne Elston drove to an Ohio Street apartment in Bangor.
That's where they were going, apparently.

But member Wayne said, I didn't even know why we were going on the trip or who we were going to see. Oh.
This guy's saying he went here.

James is now saying he went to this apartment at the direction of Wayne.

Okay.

So someone's lying.

So he said that later at a stoplight near State Street, one of his two companions said he saw Jenny drive by. I said, I didn't see Jenny drive by.
Wayne said. You saw one of her friends.

No, in the car. The guys in the car with him said Jenny just drove by.
So he just turned around and started chasing the car.

Meanwhile, Wayne said he was the one who said he saw her. Right, right.
He said he

chased the car several blocks, but at no time saw Jenny in the car.

And Wayne had countered that by testifying that he was the one with the address, and James was also the one who spotted Jenny and Bangor and pursued her.

Cross-examination on Jimmy should be fun here.

It's a lengthy one, by the way, as you might imagine. He related a marital history of infidelity, frequent arguments, two unplanned pregnancies, and plans for a divorce.

It's every marriage. Get over it, you fucking pussy.
Come on.

Who plans pregnancies? Give me a fucking break. Gross.
What are you, the royal family? No one's planning pregnancies. At age 16, Jenny became pregnant.

And then, you know, that's when he was a high school senior. They got married, you know, blah, blah, blah.

He said that Jenny's parents suggested an abortion and possibly they might send her daughter to a convent school. He said, you're going to get an abortion and go to a nunnery.

That's what's going to happen. Instead, he took a night job and Jenny dropped out of school.
And

they got married. He said, Jenny and I were both having problems talking about married life later on.
He said, she fooled around, and I fooled around.

That's why the couple's divorce proceedings began in 1974. She was pregnant, and he said, We decided to try again for the kids' sake.
It's for the kids. It's for the children.

The day before her disappearance, Jenny had told him that she knew he had been making advances to the 15-year-old live-in babysitter Susan.

An argument ensued, and the couple went for a drive that lasted almost three hours. Shortly after midnight, he, Jenny, and the babysitter retired to separate rooms,

which,

first of all, I don't know how there's three bedrooms in a single wide.

And

second of all, she said she got home at four.

Yeah. And why do you have to qualify where the babysitter went?

My wife and I went to separate rooms. Who cares where the fucking babysitter went? As long as it wasn't in a room with you.

Pretty irrelevant unless she came to bed with me and then the wife went somewhere else. He said when he left for work in Woodland in about 4.30 a.m., his wife was just lying in bed.

He said his wife owned two pairs of glasses at the time. One was an old pair of insufficient subscription.
The other was a new pair.

He said he discovered the older pair missing after her disappearance. Oh.
She must have been wearing them. Yeah.
So the jury, again, seven men, five women, they deliberate for more than nine hours.

God damn. There's a lot of going back and forth here.
And they end up finding him guilty

of fourth-degree murder, murder, which I didn't know existed. What is that?

That is,

I think that is you sold someone a hamburger 10 years before they had a heart attack, I believe. That's fourth-degree murder.

Fourth-degree murder is

that exactly. I own.
It's reckless endangerment, essentially. I owned antifreeze, and they came to my garage and jugged it.

I think it's Maine's version of negligent manslaughter type of deal is what it is.

It's a lesser conviction carrying a much lesser prison term than obviously first degree murder or second degree murder.

I guess because the crime occurred in 1977, older Maine statutes will provide James with the opportunity for parole because it's back then.

They found that he was acting with reckless intent in causing his wife's death. That's fourth-degree murder.
Now, reactions to the verdict here.

The defense attorney said, quote, I will say I was somewhat surprised at the verdict. He said, we'll definitely appeal and all that.

And, you know, he felt that it was an unusual case and a difficult one to defend. He said, you know, they said, is this a difficult case to defend? And he said, that would be a mild assessment.

It's difficult.

I just found out about fourth-degree murder. I didn't even know that shit existed.

And I'm a lawyer. I mean, what are you supposed to know? Jimmy then speaks at his sentencing.
Okay.

He says, quote, I am not guilty, but someday it will be proven. I'll accept what the court gives me for now.
now.

Oh. And he said, no problem, Chief.
You, sir, may fuck off 10 years in prison. Okay.
That's all he gets. Yeah, 10 years to free yourself.
Yep.

It's the maximum that can be imposed for the crime of fourth-degree homicide. Not bad.
He's available for parole in five years.

Eligible for parole, taking into account the six months he spent in county jail. I guess if you murder somebody in Maine, just make sure it's buddy.

Well, make sure it's 1977 when you do it.

Yeah.

So then this is the most mind-blowing thing of all. Yeah.
They set a bail for him pending appeal.

The bail is for 30,002 sureties. His bail when he was just accused of murder before he was actually convicted of it was 60,003 sureties.
This is 30,002.

Well, that's because it was the possibility that he was a first-degree murderer. Could have been a first-degree guy.
Now he's only a fourth-degree.

Wow.

Yeah. The sentence, the defense attorney said about the sentence, I wasn't surprised by it, but I thought there was room for latitude because of the exemplary nature of his record.
Exemplary, right?

He's got DUIs and banging chicks all over the place. He's not a great guy.
So he's going to prison. But this is the thing.

This whole thing didn't start out looking to convict him for Jenny Hicks' death. Do we remember how this started? Yeah.

Geralyn fucking Towers. What about her? Where's she at? That's the point.

Imagine you're there, parents. You do this whole investigation and the guy that connects this to that ends up being convicted for something totally different.

And they're like, what about our daughter? And we got nothing. Yeah.
We got who gots on this guy. So anyway,

they said that the case is still open. Investigators are stymied.

The state police lieutenant said it's just one of those things where we hope something will break.

We hope something will break. We did two cases simultaneously.
We ran dead end on Geralyn Towers and went ahead on Jenny Hicks.

Holy shit. That is remarkable.
They said that the Gerilyn Towers case has been gathering dust. This guy said, we felt we exhausted everything we could do on it when we had the Hicks case.

We really had nothing that could develop on the thing. Fuck.
Dead ends other than I think I saw him that night. Now, if he just stares at you and doesn't give you an answer, you're done.

You got nothing to go on. What are you going to do?

you don't have proof you don't have any kind of evidence and you have a person who thinks they saw him that night and he just won't confirm or deny that don't even talk about it he might have her in the bathroom is what he says so maybe yeah i can't remember yeah um

so anyway they just thought it was very odd uh this whole thing they said that uh he said just to take off and leave kids that's an unusual occurrence where a woman would desert her children like that sure so they don't expect that gerilyn ran away too.

They said though they're still on the case and if the smallest whisper comes up, we'll jump on it.

Now, her parents, though, believe she's dead. They think she's dead by now.
They said, quote, this is mom, quote, of course, nobody expects to ever see her again.

Anybody who knew her knew that the first week, that she wasn't going to run away from her kids. She was excited to see them that night.
Yeah. This couple still lives in Newport, but they say her son,

who was 17 when his mom disappeared, is now 20 and finishing a two-year stint with the U.S. Army.
Her second son is 18, and her daughter's 15, and they're going to high school and doing all that.

They said last spring, their daughter moved into the section of the house where Jerry had lived. Jerry's belongings, everything she left behind was moved to a storage area.
So they waited.

years, couple years to move her shit.

The mom said that the family hasn't spoken to a police officer about the case in more than two years. Said, quote, we haven't heard anything, not a word, not a thing.

So basically, they did the initial investigation and then they left Geralyn behind and just went down the Jenny track.

They said the family doesn't talk about her very often, but she thinks about her very often. Mom said there's always something.
You go to bed at night and you think about the girl.

You don't have any hope.

In fact, I don't have any hope, but you still think about her her all the time.

Now, August 7th into August 8th here, two different days of newspaper articles. Is Jimmy going to be a groom?

What? Yeah. Okay, article.
State asks convicted man to admit slain wife's death is the headline in this article. This is fucking, this is the most circular argument anyone's ever going to have.
Yeah.

It's awesome. Okay, he's sentenced to 10 years in jail, but he is still technically married.

He found that out when he recently applied at the town office near his hometown in Carmel there for a license to remarry.

The officials said, you can't get a license because you're never divorced. You're already married.
And even though he is convicted for her murder, there is no death certificate for Jenny. Oh,

which is crazy. The only way he can get a license is to sign a statement admitting that his wife is dead.
All right.

So basically, the state has convicted him of murder and then said, said,

you can't marry this other person because we don't know that she's dead, even though the state convicted him of murdering her.

So you better be pretty sure she's fucking dead. Yeah, let's get a death certificate for that family.
Not that I give a shit whether this guy's allowed to get married or not, but

I'm a person that lack of logic drives my brain crazy. Yeah, that's stupid.
You as a state can't say, well, she could still be alive.

You can't, you got to divorce her, say she's dead when you convicted him of killing her. Are they trying to get him to

admit it? Is that all it is? Yes. That's part of it.
That's the way to do it.

Hicks said in a recent letter to the newspaper that if the state convicted him, that should be proof enough he's no longer married.

He said, no matter what, I know I had nothing whatsoever to do with my wife's disappearance. The state, not me, says she's deceased.

The state, not me, should issue the appropriate documents of their convictions or set me free if she's alive.

What the fuck here?

Now,

obviously, he's appealed his conviction and everything else like that. His lawyer, Jimmy's lawyer, said that he shouldn't be forced to sign a statement acknowledging his wife's death.

He said it would be a direct conflict to his moral beliefs.

This guy's moral beliefs.

Wow. It's not something he wants to do.
He believes she's very much alive and is going to walk in someday and clear the air.

He's going to come back doing great. The next day, August 8th, killer's remarriage stalled because because wife can't be found.

So they're talking about he can't be found. And while in state prison, he's decided to marry Linda, a woman with he's been living with for the last five years.
She can't get a license.

He's got to sign papers. It's crazy.

The whole thing's crazy. They said if they prosecuted for bigamy, they would have so much egg on their face, it would be an embarrassment.

Basically, Hicks' attorney said, you should just fucking get married, basically, because if they prosecute you for for bigamy, I'll be happy to defend that case. 100%.

That you convicted him of murder. And yeah, he said, I know I had nothing to do with her disappearance, though.

So he and Linda, though, have been living together since 1978.

The couple said that Jenny's disappearance created problems for their marriage plans.

Since divorce and probate proceedings were too expensive for them to pursue, Hicks won't sign the death certificate because he doesn't believe she's dead.

The town clerk will not issue this until he gets that, and that's how it goes. Apparently, he couldn't afford to do the publication necessary.

He tried to get it to do a divorce the official way. And if you can't serve someone with papers,

I was a process server, so I know this. You can serve by publication, which is

a number of announcements in the newspaper on several different dates. Okay, and you just have to have a paper of record.
Okay, all right.

And he couldn't afford afford to put these little ads in the paper, he said. All right.
So

that's why he's in this shit of a mess now.

Here is a random letter to the editor of this newspaper both these articles are in.

Editor, if James Hicks truly believes his wife, Jenny, is still alive, why is he trying to get a marriage license? Shouldn't he be trying to get a divorce?

Or fixing his marriage. Or fixing his marriage.
He's in prison for ending. Well,

I think at that point, he would have just said,

I figure that it's dissolved since I'm convicted of murder. Or worse off, if the police can't find her, how the fuck am I supposed to? That's the other thing.

Well, he said they're not looking for her. They're just trying to blame me.

December 20th, 1984, he is released on bond pending appeal. Whoa.

Out awaiting fucking appeal. He was released on $15,000 double surety bail while awaiting appeal of the state's case.
It's December 20th.

He got out and said, quote, it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas, Christmas, he told his lawyer. Jesus Christ.

So he appeals to the Maine Supreme Court, which in Maine, I believe, consists of three lumberjacks, a jet ski, and a badger. Wearing a bottle of Antonimus.
Wearing a little tie. Yeah.

And Mrs. Butterworth herself is there.

So he's challenging the conviction based largely on the basis that it was circumstantial evidence that was inadequate to support his conviction in superior court and he contended the jury should have been instructed on fifth degree homicide what the

fifth there's a fifth

what is that i think fifth degree is when you accidentally shoot them while hunting no not either that would be at least you shot them

i think fifth degree is uh they were around your car exhaust too long and got a disease in the future or something fifth degree is when they're wearing all the reflective clothing and you still shoot them.

You still, yeah.

That would be first degree.

So he said that the fourth degree conviction was barred by the statute of limitations and that they shouldn't have admitted into evidence certain statements he made and testimony concerning his wife's character as a loving mother.

Shouldn't have been able to say she was a good mother. That's bullshit.
You say that.

You're

weighing this shit against me. Now, this was the first case in the history of Maine where a homicide conviction was obtained obtained without a body.

The first no body, no crime there, which they're saying

that's an appealable thing right away on that. So if it's the first one, then all the others

should have gone through. And if they didn't, then mine was.
There's a reason. Yeah, there's a reason why he didn't charge all those other people and convict them.

So he says we're, this is his lawyer, James's lawyer, we're in the position now of considering the appropriateness of an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

He said he was waiting to read the opinion from the Maine Supreme Court to see if there might be any grounds for petitioning the high court on this. So

he said there's never been a confession. They said there, you know, they said there's been several murder cases without bodies around the country, but in

every or in virtually every other case, he said, there's been a confession at least. Oh, and I didn't.

Yeah. We can't find the body.
There's a confession. So that's something.
This is nothing. You don't have anything.
You got no confession. You got nothing.
You're just saying I did it.

And the jury agreed. Yeah.

um he said that in one of their the

direct or other cases there's been direct evidence of the death he said in one uh a the bodiless case in massachusetts they found brain tissue in the defendant's pocket which is a pretty good sign something happened yeah i don't have i have like you know like three nickels and a lighter and some keys in my pocket but i don't have any brain tissue check for brain tissue empty i've got my wallet but yeah no brain tissue it's all dry in there weird

dry. All dried up.
He said in this case, there was no affirmative evidence of a death, no blood, no stains, no murder weapon, no tattered clothes, nothing.

So the court here, the Maine Supreme Court denies this appeal.

Maine Supreme Court does, in a unanimous decision.

He said among the circumstantial evidence cited by the court was Hicks' declaration to her sister that she would leave her husband if she did not move out, but that she would never leave the children with him.

So Denise had said, she told me the day before she disappeared, I'll move out, but I'm not leaving the kids with him. Fuck that.

Her intention to deliver a cake to a close friend the following day, which she told several people about, and made the goddamn cake. So.

Yeah.

And a neighbor's testimony that she heard screams and noises that sounded like wood being chopped. They said, that's enough.
I hate that.

I hate that. Oh, that's so bad.

The court said the jury could have concluded that Hicks killed his wife, put her hair over her face to conceal her injuries, dragged her out of the trailer, and disposed of the body somewhere in the many miles he traveled to work in Woodland, and that he inadvertently left her glasses and purse behind in a rush to accomplish these ends.

The evidence could adequately have supported the higher charge of intentional or knowing homicide, the court said. You could have.

They said the evidence is actually higher than what the jury convicted on. Yeah.

They said the several classes of homicide which were available to the prosecutors at the time of the disappearance were eliminated in revisions of the Maine criminal code.

So there is no more fourth and fifth degree murder. Now it's manslaughter and

intentional.

Yeah.

So he has to turn himself in for prison now because his appeal got denied. He was on bail awaiting appeal to the Maine Supreme Court.
So Linda accompanies him to jail. She stays with him.

1985, July 16th, 1985, guess what they still don't have? Her body. A death certificate.

What the fuck? They still can't get married.

Why can't they just produce a death certificate? I don't know.

It's crazy. Even the Supreme Court says she's dead.
She's fucking dead. As far as the state of Maine is concerned, this lady's dead.
Wow. Super fucking dead.

So this article says, Linda Marquise is waiting, waiting for a special piece of paper to be delivered so that someday soon she can become Linda Hicks.

The dream of becoming Linda Hicks. She said she's patient and they call her the patient and persevering fiancé of James Hicks.

Linda said on Monday that she called the state office earlier that day and spoke to a secretary in the criminal division about the death certificate.

Linda said she said that they would issue one this week. Oh.
I said I would like to have it in writing because I believe it when I'll see it. And she said, well, you'll get it sometime this week.

I hope I can hold them to their word. If not, they'll hear from me me again.

So, yeah, they've been unable to get married, obviously.

She said she's not been able to visit Jim Hicks, but has spoken to him twice since his incarceration and hoped to visit him in prison in the next week because he was getting transferred from jail to prison.

She said she expected they would be married in the near future. She said, we'll be patient a little while longer.
We'll get things rolling.

We've got to get some rings and dresses, make it proper.

She said she wouldn't mind the possibility of getting married in prison. She said it doesn't matter because I love him and that's the main thing.
We've wanted to be husband and wife for a long time.

She said she's happy that they're going to issue the death certificate, but she didn't want to have to go about it this way.

She said she would have preferred that a waiver be issued from the state's Bureau of Vital Statistics to allow the marriage.

She said the death certificate only reinforces the state's claim that she's dead, something that she and Jimmy still don't accept.

She said she'll be found. She'll be found.
That's what she said. Okay.

Yeah.

She's going to be able to allow to visit Hicks in prison for about five hours a week.

She said that they're interviewing her in her house, and she points to a photo of Jim taken in April at a birthday party. And she said, does that look like a killer?

Look at him.

He's wearing a party hat, for Christ's sake, holding a baby.

Once I got to know him, I knew he wasn't. He's never, in all the years we've been together, abused me or even verbally threatened me.
He never even threatened to break my neck. Right.

You know, like every guy does, right? No, that's good. They're not supposed to threaten you.
Right.

They said they convicted him with no body, no weapon, and they never even found one bloodstain in the whole place. They based everything on

an ear witness, not even an eyewitness,

which is the next-door neighbor.

And also she said, by the way, the next-door neighbor hearing, you're going to kill me and chopping sounds, quote, if you heard that kind of noise going on, wouldn't you call the police right away?

She never did.

She also said she is certain that Jenny is alive. And with the help of the Child Keepers,

K-E-Y-P-P-E-R, Keepers,

a Florida-based organization that sounds like it molests children. That sounds terrible.

Tries to locate.

Good God. They try to locate missing children.

They say 20,000 pictures of Jenny Hicks are being posted around the country, and the agency plans to age a photo taken of Jenny Hicks about, you know, some time to show how she would currently look.

They said, well, how are the kids doing?

And she said that the 14-year-old, the first daughter from Jenny and Jim's marriage here,

was six years old back then. She said she won't talk about it.

She seems to keep everything bottled up inside.

But she said, my mission is, this is Linda, to find Jenny, bring Jim home, and stay sane through all of it.

She said, I never rest. I sleep about five or six hours a night.
If that's never resting, then I am never resting because I would love to get six hours. You never slept a day in your life.
Fuck me.

I won't rest until he's home again.

She said that

she's hoping that with

her numerous contacts with the news media and the help of the child keepers that Jenny Hicks will be found and this whole nightmare will be over.

So they say, how do you get by?

And she said she relies on aid to families with dependent children, which is like, I guess, like a child welfare type situation.

The family's benefits will be reduced from $845 a month to $560 a month starting the next month. She's unable to receive anything for Hicks' two children because the couple are not married.

She said, I've raised them since Jenny left and I'm not giving up.

She said the job turned into a love affair because she said she began,

okay, she said she met Jimmy about a year after Jenny disappeared when she began working as a babysitter for the children. Oh, boy.
She said, the job turned into a love affair. He's got a type.

Babysitters. He said, we were in the middle of remodeling when Jim went back to Thomaston.

I don't like living like this, but things will get better. The Lord is on our side.

I don't think that's true.

If there is a God, he seems to be against you, obviously, because you got convicted of something no one else in the history of the state's been convicted of. So,

you know, August 24th, 1985, they get married in a ceremony at prison. Yeah.

They get married, absolutely.

What's she wear?

She got a dress, apparently. Yeah.

Yeah. He said, I know he's innocent.
That's why I married him. That's why I stayed with him.
If I have known or suspected he was guilty, I wouldn't be staying with him.

Duh.

Jesus, what do you think here?

Yeah, so that's what she's doing. She's talking about the childkeepers again, and

Jenny's in Florida. She said there's a lot of facts and truth to come out.
It was only about two or three weeks after she left that Jim saw her. She was in a van headed for Florida.
Oh, boy.

Okay.

1990.

James Hicks is released from prison

after having been described to have displayed modeled behavior. Oh.
Model behavior. Perfect in prison.

Now,

while in prison, his behavior with his wife wasn't modeled because his marriage falls apart. She did all that shit.
Over nothing. For nothing.

I'll read from this book here, quote, always a man to overlap relationships, Hicks had already started seeing another woman, Karen Gom.

The two were married while Hicks was in prison and divorced in 1991. So he got divorced from Linda and married again while in prison.
Wow.

Karen had met James Hicks through his sister, Melinda, who was married to James Hicks' brother, through her sister, Melinda, who was married to James Hicks' brother, Steve.

So this is James' sister-in-law, sort of, anyway. Fuck, man.
Okay.

James was in a pre-release program in Bangor, and he met Karen and started their relationship through correspondence, this Karen. Karen had two young children.
Great.

Bring a convicted convicted murderer to your house.

When she began her relationship with him, the Maine Department of Human Services removed the children from her custody

after that, duh, an action she blamed on him.

Yeah. The children went to live with their father.
Karen and James's marriage had numerous problems.

At times, when they fought, he would say to her, I'm not going to tell you if you did kill, or I'm not going to tell you if I did kill Jenny, but

I'm not going to tell you I didn't either.

Like, beware of me, basically.

And then he would laugh, she said.

She said there was an element of violence in the marriage, and perhaps Hicks wanted his wife to be afraid of him and what he might be capable of doing to her.

They separate three times before finally divorcing. Okay.

Now, that doesn't matter because guess what? He's already involved with another woman.

Of course. It's fine.

I guess he has during the wow

with Linda and Karen, he's

he's got apparently he's got a with Karen here, he's got a woman named Louise Robertson that he met while he was an employee at the Twin City Motel.

He started this affair in late 1990 with Louise while he was still with Karen. They met at the Brewer Twin City Motel where they both worked.

So now she knew that he was married to Karen at the time, this Louise, and she said that she was suspicious of some of the things he did, but he was never physically abusive to her.

She said he did have, quote, an enormous sexual appetite. Oh.
And at the end of the relationship, he started getting rough with her. She lived in a mobile home park in Bangor with him for a while.

They broke up a few times, then separated for good after he began seeing another woman, as we'll talk about. Wow.
Lynn Willette, who was also an employee of the motel.

Robertson, of course, had a daughter with Hickses, too. He fucking has to get every goddamn, he has to pass his shitty genes down through every fucking woman he meets.

Imagine being, it's a man's world. How do you do this? And convince some raw dog.
And

no control for children at all.

No.

All these women think they're going to be with him for the rest of their lives. Yeah.
But he's always got his dick in somebody else. Idiot.

He did not acknowledge, by the way, that the child was even his until he was forced to take a blood test by the court, which came up positive for paternity, of course. Obviously.

This relationship with him lasts about four years, from about 90 to 94, on and off.

Now,

he told her about Jenny. This is what he told this girl.

That's between me and God.

Which is not what you want to hear from a guy. What happened to your wife that you got convicted of murdering? That's between me and God.
Oh, okay. I'll be packing my shit now.

He did tell her he had another daughter in Bangor who had been molested and murdered.

Oh, really? He said somebody molested and murdered his daughter. Oh, no.

He showed her a photograph of some girls in a Bangor school and said the girl in question would have been born between 83 and 84 and died in 89 or 90.

She also stated that Hicks was a petty thief. He was always stealing supplies and items from vending machines, and that he became paranoid at the sight of blood.

Interesting.

Weird. So they interviewed both Louise Robertson and Karen Grom, Hicks, I guess, because they're married in the 90s, because they were continuing their investigation of James.

Linda, his ex-wife, was present at one of the police interviews with Karen Hicks.

She was also present at one of the interviews with Louise Robertson. She was present because she had become afraid of James and had developed relationships with some of the other women in his life.

And Linda had finally come to believe that he actually did kill Jenny. Oh, boy.
So the cops talking to Linda here.

Yeah, I guess apparently they check out. People have been looking at his property over the years, looking for these bodies.

Tammy Price, I don't know if that's her real name or not, but the book uses that name, who is Jerry's daughter, drove out to the property by herself one night just to look around.

She felt like her mother was there, she said.

She said in an interview in 2009, I went to pull into his driveway and slipped off into the ditch. She panicked, thinking that he had come to the door or someone had, and, you know, she didn't know.

So she was scared. She got her car out of the ditch and drove off before anything further happened.
But she said she had gone several other times, too.

About the same time that she was investigating the property, James Ricker, the officer who's still working on this, interviewed Linda after learning from about the divorce.

In 1991, it took place at the police office, and he said in his report, quote, Linda had come to my office to set the record straight for any problems we may have had during the first investigation.

I initiated the conversation by asking Linda if she could give me some type of personality profile of James Hicks. She stated that he was very possessive, extremely jealous, and had a severe temper.

She stated that

she was never allowed to wear makeup or go outside the home unless she was with him. They're They're fucking Amish or something.

Really?

The only place she was allowed to go was a ceramics class. No dudes there.
I'm fine.

She said she'd previously lied to the police as well. James Hicks had told her to tell authorities that on the night Geralyn Towers disappeared, that he had arrived home at 1 a.m.

However, she stated he actually returned home at 4 a.m.

Oh.

He had told her to say this before he was convicted of homicide and the death of his wife during the trial and after his conviction. She said she had lied in order to protect him.

Linda also told Ricker that the car James Hicks had been driving that night in October 82 was still in the backyard of his property. If you want to take a look at it,

she said that he had removed the entire interior of the car, including the carpet and headliner.

Who does that? Who the fuck does that? Unless you're restoring the fucking car. Yeah, or you've had a pulp fiction accident in there.
Yeah.

You shoot Marvin in the face by accident. That'll happen.

According to Linda, the car had been, as far as she knew, still running when he drove it to the rear of their property and stripped it. So why would that happen?

1994.

This is Lynn Ann Willette, another woman, 39 years old, born in Bangor. Parents, Jane and Vincent Hinks.

Her sister describes Linda as someone you could rely on to

fix a kitchen sink and maintain a gorgeous garden. Oh.
They said she could do anything she put her mind to type of thing. She does a lot of different things.
She's a real man.

She's an artist who was accepted into Disney's cartoon school in Florida. Nice.
But turned it down to get married after graduating high school.

Marriage was short-lived. Then she joined the Army, as most artists do.
I meet her around my house. She sounds amazing.
She can get some shit done, I feel like.

She became a machine operator of heavy equipment in Oklahoma after that, after after the Army. She received an honorable discharge and

eventually returned home to Maine after working as a paramedic in California and living in North Carolina with a husband that she divorced. She's fucking incredible.
She's awesome. She was married,

divorced twice,

which was actually four times, somebody said. They said Lynn was always getting involved with men who wanted to protect her.
She hated that.

Her marriage always ended on, marriages always ended on good terms, but she was always the one who left. She had a strong need to be her own person.

So, 1994, she applies for a job at the Twin City Motel in Brewer, Maine. Remember that place? Yeah, he worked there.
Well, he works there.

He is the maintenance supervisor, and he interviews her and hired her to work with him doing maintenance.

So, he also moves in with her, of course.

Of course he does. As you do.
So, they worked together at the motel throughout 1995. They had a pit bull named Felon.
That's what you, they got it together and he named it Felon. All right.

And a bunch of other dogs and other animals as well. They shared an apartment that was located behind two others in a two-story house.

It faced the Penobscot River with a few hundred yards of business and industrial property in between.

That's where they lived. Autumn of 1994,

Linda. granted permission to James Ricker, who's now the police chief in Newport, by the way.
Oh. He's gone from officer to chief.
He's

done his well, done his his job well. Fuck you, he got a conviction on a nobody case.
Yeah, that's true.

Gives him permission to remove the 1973 Plymouth from the property. She turned over the car to him, and the crime lab here

isn't going to be able to obtain evidence from a car so many years after the incident. It was what a crime guy, crime lab guy told him, crime lab guy told him.

So he asked her, can you think of anything else?

So

then there's Vance Tibbets Tibbetts and Gene Worthley, who are the brother and sister of Geralyn Towers. They contacted the Newport Police Department.
They did that in February 94.

Vance Tibbets said while serving time as a convicted felon for attempted murder in Maine State prison, he'd met with fellow inmate James Hicks to try to determine if Hicks killed his sister. Oh.

The warden and assistant warden were, according to Tibbets, present at the meeting. This wasn't like in the cafeteria or whatever.
This was in an actual office at a meeting.

Apparently, Tibbets said that, among other questions, he specifically asked Jim if he had killed Gerilyn.

Hicks, Tibbets alleged, told him that Gerilyn had left the gateway lounge that night with a truck driver, which is his standard answer.

These women can't resist the vibrations of the 18-wheeler. They have to get in there.
That diesel, it just, ah, goddamn. Whoa.

He then refused to answer any more questions or submit to a lie detector exam and asked to leave the room.

And they can't hold him. I mean, you know.

Subsequent records state that Tibbets had contacted the deputy warden requesting the meeting with Hicks.

It was granted. And yeah, they said Hicks acted extremely nervous, even with all the prison personnel and prison guards present.
He wouldn't look Vance Tibbets in the eye.

So just the, you know, she left with a trucker.

Linda also says Jimmy contacted her

and told her that missing girl in Newport, her brother called Karen and was asking all kinds of questions. Oh.
Karen is the one before

Linda. Yeah.
Or before. After Linda.

Yeah. Yes.
So, okay.

Jesus Christ. So many Lindas.

He said that they are trying to put me back in jail. The two of them talked about what time Hicks had gotten home that night in 1982.
Hicks insisted that she knew he had been home at 1 a.m.

She told him that it had been 4 a.m.

She told Ricker she was afraid that Jimmy might do something to hurt her because he thinks that she has this evidence that'll put him away.

Yet in 1982, Hicks had once stated he woke up at the campground at 3.50 on the morning of the S disappearance, remember? Yeah.

And went home. But then he had her say one.
So he's got conflicting things on that already. 1995, James Hicks believes he's being stalked.

He calls the Brewer Police Department and makes a complaint against Vance Tibbets, Geralyn's brother. Right.
Yeah.

He tells the sergeant that Tibbets had just gotten out of jail and was following him all around.

And so this cop contacted Tibbets and he said, yeah, I've been fucking following him. He killed my fucking sister.

And he said, he told the police department if that, if

I'm ever missing, by the way, Hicks is a good suspect. Definitely look at him.

So then the Brewer Police contacted one of the detectives from the Maine State Police to ask about Hicks. And

yeah, they said Hicks was complaining about Vance Tibbets. And this detective continued, I went to see Vance.
He said that he would hound Hicks till the day he died.

I told Hicks about Vance Tibbets, this is not someone to mess with. He will kill you.
Yeah.

Don't fuck with this guy. He wants you dead.
He's a bad man. No, no, he told Hicks about Vance.
Oh.

Yeah.

He said, I told you. He told Hicks, bro, this guy's going to kill you.
He's stalking you. He wants to, and I don't blame him.
I'm not going to stop him from doing it. I'm not doing anything about it.

He's a lion right now.

And he asked him to take a polygraph, and he wouldn't.

This detective, Detective Zamboni, by the way, which is the most fun name ever.

Detective Zamboni said, approaching Hicks, he said he knew that Hicks would shut down if he came at him accusatorily.

So he said he had to take a more of a, we're partners in this approach. Like, you got to help me.
It's me and you. We're the only ones that can solve this.

So in February 96, Detective Zamboni, which sounds made up, conducted an interview with Hicks at the Twin City Motel.

And that was about maybe taking a lie detector test. And Hicks told Zamboni that he talked it over with his mother, who was in the hospital, and with his girlfriend Lynn.

According to Hicks, Lynn told him that, quote, he didn't have to prove anything to anybody and that he didn't want to take the test. He did want to take the test, but not right away.

Maybe sometime in the summer. More of a summer polygraph guy.
Anything after Memorial, before labor, you know,

somewhere in the barbecue season. What's the sucker? So during this, Lynn Willette pops up into the room because it's at the motel.
And Zamboni talks to her about the polygraph.

She looked at Hicks and told him, You're a big boy. It's up to you.
Do whatever you want. Don't tell him I'm telling you not to.

So Zamboni told him that he'll check in with him a little later, and then he took off. 1996.

Yeah.

She,

Lynn Willett, decides to leave Jimmy due to his possessiveness. She started moving her belongings to her mother's house in Orrington.

She took her dog there after building her a safe enclosure and stayed with her mother while continuing to move out of the apartment.

She had her own car, a blue 88 Toyota Turcell, and James Hicks was driving a red Chevy Blazer.

May 26, 1996, on a Sunday, James calls the Brewer Police Department and reports Lynn Willette missing.

What?

He told told them that Lynn had failed to show up for a family cookout that day and hadn't been seen since Saturday.

He told the police that although they had split up, he and Lynn had left the motel together at about noon the previous day and gone to the apartment on South Main Street.

He said they had sexual relations, spent the afternoon together, and had eaten sandwiches from the nearby Big Apple store.

They had gone shopping and for a long drive in the country. Then

that night after the drive, he had let Lynn off at their apartment and she had gotten into into her car and drove away, but never made it to her mother's house.

He says, I don't know what happened to her. I didn't do anything to her.
He said she'd been depressed and insinuated more than once that she might have been suicidal. Oh, boy.

Although Lynn's writings, because she was taking a class and doing a lot of writing, indicate she may have been despondent over the previous months, her decision to move away from Hicks and to keep her dogs have indicated that she was probably resolving some of these issues.

He describes her multiple tattoos, a green heart on her shoulder, a green chain going down her chest, and a green and pink flower on her wrist.

Neighbors interviewed the following days said they had seen Hicks exit his red blazer and enter the apartment alone on May 25th, shortly after he punched out of work.

They never saw Lynn Willett arrive, which is what he said. They spent the whole day together,

which is interesting. They also said they saw...
Hicks' vehicle between noon and 1 o'clock, and

the guy said he had to make a telephone call and asked Hicks if she could use his phone. He said she could.

Police searched the area extensively for any sign of her vehicle. They can't find it.
They even searched back roads and gravel pits, everything. They did air searches.

Friday, May 31st, her car was found locked and parked in a back row of Dysart's truck stop in Herman, just off the I-95 and Route 2, her car.

So they recovered her car. When they did, Hicks asked, what was in it?

And he said, nothing.

And Hicks said, no, there should have been stuff in there. There should have been this stuff and that stuff.

He stated at that point, well, yeah, she clearly ran off with a truck driver. Oh.
And they keep leaving me for these guys. She's at a truck stop.

She parked her car and said, I'm leaving my life behind for this 18-wheeler. You know what me and truck drivers have in common? Everything but the career.

And they found a man with the career every goddamn time. Every damn time.

And also, after that, though, Lynn's bank account is not used, her paycheck's not cashed, and she never made any financial arrangements for her car loan either. So

Brewer and the main detectives now are just watching. They're stalking, too, James Hicks.
He's got many people stalking him now, but they can't get any evidence.

They said they wanted to give him an opportunity to talk and fuck up, but they couldn't get him to say anything.

So he said that, you know, all I have is the same story. By late 1996, only four months after Lynn had vanished, he moves in with an 18-year-old girl named Brandi Mayo.
Oh boy, Brandy.

Who moved here from Texas. By November, they were already arguing, and Hicks was refusing to let her leave the relationship.
Wow.

Joey Zamboni, that's his name, by the way, Detective Joey Zamboni.

Hey, Joey Zamboni, he contacted Brandy's mother, Ann, to tell her of the situation and what this guy is and who he is.

She said they, you know, Brandy was working at the Twin City Motel as a chambermaid, but, you know, she said that her daughter's a good kid but suffers from some self-esteem issues and was concerned about her weight.

She thought James was brainwashing her child. She also said she's seen bruises on her daughter, but Brandi told her that Hicks had not caused the bruising.

The mom knew that Hicks could be verbally abusive and had heard him abuse Brandi when she was on the telephone with him. So

she said that Hicks made Brandy stay home when he was at work and she wasn't supposed to let anyone at work know that she was living with him.

Jesus Christ.

Pattern. By the end of the year, the mom had heard through a family member that Hicks was beating Brandy, had kicked her in the ribs and was otherwise abusing her.

That family member talked to Joey Zamboni.

She informed him that Brandy was only allowed to call at certain times and that Hicks, while drunk, had taken Brandy to a certain location and told her, this is where I took the girls and this is where they still are.

But then later denied it when he was sober. Okay.

He met with Brandy, Zamboni does, to try to warn her, but he said, I got nothing. So I got the brewer PD to pick her up.
She filed a complaint. Hicks is going crazy, but he can't stay away.

This is a lot of pressure on the guy. It's pressure, but it's friendly pressure.
It's strange pressure.

He said that he compared Hicks to a moth that couldn't stay away from the flame.

Okay. Now, Brandi stayed with Hicks and became pregnant the following year.
Nice. The Maine Department of Human Services removed the baby girl.
Oh, really? Oh, yeah, because of Hicks. The state.

From her custody, like from her, yeah, yeah, not from her body. You can't have this ever.

The state, through DNA testing, proved that Hicks was the baby's child, even though it was the baby's father, even though he denied it. The baby was placed in foster care.

Brandy had for some time denied that he was the biological father, but at this point, you really can't

do that. He's about 46 years old, and she's 18.
What the fuck, man? He then married Brandy in November 1998. They resided in a motel for a while.

Then they moved to 1st Street in Bangor, just off Route 2, for a brief period. Then they had another child, a son.
Fucking class. Fucking class.
And they moved to Texas

to avoid having the Maine Department of Human Services remove the child from his custody.

Psychological evaluation, by the way, for the childcare stuff, diagnosed Hicks as having disruptive psychotic behavior and probable delusions of persecution.

He was angry, resentful, prone to hostility, and projects blame onto others. He's likely to feel that he had gotten a raw deal and have periods of overly paranoid behavior.

He was judged to be a recluse or to be reclusive, probably shy, an introvert, unlikely to seek treatment, and unlikely to cooperate in any treatment he might receive.

So, the state of Texas, alerted to the events in Maine, brought a permanent removal case against Brandi and James that went to trial in April of 2000.

State of Texas requested that Joey Zamboni provide testimony about James's background in criminal investigations regarding him. So, they yanked that kid away.
Good lord. June 1999, Texas.

June Elizabeth Moss, 67 years old, lived in Lubbock, Texas. She needed work done on her home and called a contractor.
He and his workers, one of them James Hicks, painted the exterior of her house.

She wanted additional work done, noted that Jimmy was a good worker and asked him if he did work on the side. He said he did on weekends.
They reached an agreement, yada, yada, yada.

She paid him $100 for the completed work and agreed to pay him $750 to paint her inside walls and $250 to lay tile in two bathrooms. So he painted one or both of the bathrooms and some cabinets.

Then she had a family illness, had to stop it for a while here.

Just after the custody trial, when he lost his son, she called him again to finish. This was April 8th and 9th, 2000, to finish the work.
He arrived at the house.

There was some back and forth about you have to give me the money ahead of time so I can get the supplies, whatever. He goes and he ends up going and picking up the paint for the house.

He supposedly also bought the tile, but told her that it would not be delivered until Monday.

He returns to the Moss household, June Moss, her household, backed his van up to the garage door and unloaded the paint. They noticed, she noticed that he was drinking beer.

He asked if she minded, and she told him that she didn't want him drinking in her house. He told her that even though he wasted most of the day running around for supplies, he'd start right away.

She went in the house and sat down, heard the front door open and close. He brings in a blue bag.
He comes over, stands in front of her, and he's holding a gun in his right hand. Oh.

And says, this is real.

I'm not going to fucking work for you anymore.

All right, just leave then. Yeah.
She said his whole personality changed. He was red in the face and angry.
Jim

made me give him my glasses. Jim was talking very loud, you know, so you can't see.
Yeah. And usually, he's usually soft-spoken.
I tried to stand up and he pushed me back down in the chair.

He then went on a tirade about his life and job. He told me that he wasn't able to see his son anymore because CPS took his baby.
Her,

him.

Y'all have any fiestas?

He said that, I'm not going to finish this fucking job. It's taken too long.
I should have finished it a month ago, but I've had problems and you've had problems, but I've got to get out of here.

She tried to get to the phone, but he grabbed the phone and yanked the wires out of the wall, wrapped the cord around the phone, and placed it on the couch.

He then locked all the doors, disconnected the kitchen phone, and ripped out the bedroom phone wires. Oh, boy.
He then told her, I've been married four times.

I killed my second wife and did 10 years in Maine, and I'm not going back there. I've got to get out of town, out of state, but it takes fuck four fucking hours to get out of Texas.

I'm not going to kill you because I like you. And besides, in Texas, they put you on death row.
Then he grabbed her by the arm and told her, we're going to the bedroom.

She said, no, I don't want to go in there. Let's stay in here.
He yanked her and then fired the gun. Oh, boy.
He said, she said, we walked into the bedroom. Then she was all ready to go.

Let's go to the bedroom. Hey, let's go to the bed.
I got an idea. We walked into the bedroom and he told me to sit.
So I sat down on the bed.

Jim wanted to know if I had any money, and I told him that I don't have very much money. Then he asked me about jewelry, and I told him he could have whatever he wanted.
Just don't kill me.

So he ordered her back into the den and asked her if her husband had a German Luger. She told him no.
He had gone to war, but not to Germany. He asked if she had a pistol.
She told him she didn't.

She had some rifles. He asked where they were.
She went with him to a front bedroom and pointed to a closet where she kept the guns. Then he sent her back to the den.

He came back, locked, came back, locked locked the front door, and told her to write him a check. She informed him that she had written her last check earlier in the day.

So then they're bitching, going back and forth about money.

He's looking through her purse and discovered she had recently cashed a check for $200.

And he told her that amount should be about what you owe me for the work anyway. Next, he said, give me the title to your car.

So in the end, he asked her to turn it over so she said she'd need her glasses back. He took her glasses out and gave it to her.

She said when she asked who to write on the papers, he told her James Rodney Hicks.

And the two went outside to get the current mileage on the car, and she sat down and finished filling out the title. He then had June write a note to her children.

He wanted her to write that she was giving him the car and money and other items of her own volition. He dictated, Dear Susan and Steve, I'm sorry, but there's nobody to take care of me.

I'm giving Jim my car and the washer and dryer. Oh, boy.

Oh, man. So at this point, when he told her to sign her note to the children, she signed it June E.
Moss, just as she signed everything else that day.

And she said that Hicks wouldn't notice that she wouldn't have signed her full name on the, that she would not have signed her full name on the note to her children.

She would have signed it mom, not June E. Moss.

So she did that to tell the kids, basically, in case you killed her. He then started pacing.
He took out a beer from his blue bag and a Coca-Cola bottle.

He took the top off, the 33-ounce soda bottle, and told June to drink its contents. She asked him if it was poisonous.
He told her it wasn't,

and he took a drink to prove it. Oh, okay.
She said, Jim gave me the bottle and said, drink. I asked him again if it was poison.
He said, no, it's cherry cough syrup. I put a bottle of regular in it.

I asked him again if it was poison. He said, no, I got it at the dollar store.
It's not poison.

So she's forced to drink this. She starts spitting some of it out.
He yells at her. He then finishes his beer, opens a second, says, furry up and finish the cough syrup.

Jesus Christ. So

he then left her in the den, went to the bathroom, and turned the water on. She didn't understand if it was the sink or the bathtub.

Either way, she returned to where this was happening and ordered her to drink more, left the room briefly with a stack of washcloths, and then said, that was a stupid thing for me to do, to leave you in here by yourself.

She was able to escape the room when he went to check on the water level in the bathtub. She ran to a neighbor's house.

He found her missing, went looking for her, and then ran, got in the van, and ran off. Yeah, because he's now caught.
Yeah. So they,

anyway, they end up finding him, pulling him over. They found a gun, a photograph of June's daughter, and some torn paper.

The paper would prove to be the car title, and the weapon was a Daisy CO2 BB gun. Ah!

Fucking jerk. So they arrest him.
They take him to the Lubbock County Jail for processing.

Okay.

Held on $250,000 bond on aggravated robbery of an elderly person.

It's at this point he contacts a TV station in Maine by letter and tells the broadcaster he's got a story to tell him and asks him, do you want to be in the end, middle, or beginning in getting the story?

And he said, it will cost you the story. The reporter contacted, you know, said, I don't pay for news stories and contacted Joey Zamboni about the offer.

At the same time, he says,

okay,

he said, I want to tell my story, the entire story. He said he wanted to do it his way and be certain that the whole truth came out.

Okay.

Brandy files for divorce, by the way, after he's arrested for this.

So he's charged in Texas, like we said. He says, listen, listen, I'll tell you everything.
I got a deal for you.

He says, I won't do it in Texas. You take me back to Maine and I'll tell you everything you want to know.
And they said, about what? He said, you fucking know what I'm talking about.

So he said, I don't won't do it in Texas because I don't trust anyone down there. And he believes if he tells a story in Texas, he'll be left there till he dies.

He said he wants to, quote, serve out his sentence in Maine because he doesn't get along with the Hispanics in the Texas jail and his friends and family are unable to visit him.

He admitted to robbing June Moss, planned to plead guilty.

They said, well, Maine doesn't have an arrest warrant out for you presently. And he said, well, when I tell you what I'm going to tell you,

you'll have plenty of arrest warrants.

And then, so he said, okay. So they go down to interview him.
And

here we go.

He admitted to killing Lynn Willette. in their brewer apartment.

He says, all I'm going to say is that I'll admit to a crime in Maine, the missing person case on Lynn.

That I know where she is and stuff like that. But as for giving physical evidence or any evidence at all this time, I'm not giving any.

He said, do I have to use the word death? And the cop said, yeah, you do.

And he said, yes. And the cop said, you're not doing this because of the goodness of your heart.
You're doing this because you want to go to Maine to do your time.

And he said, yeah, I want to be sentenced in Maine and do my whole time in Maine, not come back to Texas at all. When I get to Maine, I'll cooperate and show you evidence and everything.

So he said, well, be more specific. He goes, I can show you everything that I know about the cases.
You've investigated these cases for over 20 years and no evidence.

I've learned by watching television and reading detective magazines while I was a kid and talking to people. If you're going to do a crime, do it alone.

Then instead of the three main cases, he asked him about five cases. A few other women had come up missing in Maine over the years, two of them the same time Jenny had disappeared.
And

he said, five? There's just three.

Oh,

yeah, I didn't do five. This was a way to try to trick him into saying exactly what he said.

So he said, it's likely after you cooperate, the remains of the other two will be found also. And he said, what other two? I don't even know what you're talking about.
What do you mean?

What do you mean the other two?

And he said, not just the Lynn Willette case. And he said, yes.
He said, you're going to cooperate on Jenny and Towers. And he said, yes, I will.

Oh, boy. So here we go.

Also, Zamboni identified one of the women in an exchange because he continued to assert he didn't know anything about cases other than the three which he already agreed to help.

The detective stated that the other two were women that were missing in the Newport area. He identified one of the women, Ellen Choate, and the exchange continued.

He said, yeah, no, the only thing I know about was what I read in the papers. And they said, you had nothing to do with that.
And he said, no.

He said, there's another girl, Leslie Spellman, was hitchhiking on Route 2 and found on Mount Desert Island. You had nothing to do with that.

And he said, I have, no, I have enough problems with the women I know, let alone going out and picking up women I don't know.

So he said that Lynn died at the apartment and she'd gone there willingly. He said, oh, she picked up some mail that came there, one letter from the school and everything.

I told her I could bring it to her like that, and she said she'd come get it.

I told her that Friday, I think it was Thursday or Friday, and she said she'd pick it up because we're going to be at work Saturday. So she stopped at my house.

We talked for a while and then went for a ride and everything. And we came back and everything.
And one thing led to another, and I guess I just snapped. Oh, boy.

He said the sex was willing, but he said he just snapped.

He said

Lynn didn't want to get in a fight when her sister got out of work or something to

go by like that and see that she was there because she already told Lynn. Lynn had told her sister about my past.
So she didn't want her sister. to know that she was there, basically.

Wendy was so upset, and Lynn figured my past would outweigh hers and get her to forget her problems. Okay.

So

anyway, yeah, he said that he had not actually seen Lynn in the car the day before she died, rather had read about it.

Hicks had told Zamboni that he had seen them in the car and even told him where the driver of the car lived. Okay.

Hicks also said he didn't remember ever having ever told Zamboni there being a problem in the motel with a light in one of the rooms or that he'd gone back to the office or that Lynn might have forgotten her pocketbook or something else.

They said, how did Lynn die? And he said, suffocation. Oh, boy.

He said, they said, well, where is she? Or where is everybody? He said, it's at the other end of the Haynesville Woods, just before Halton. It's almost in Halton, I guess.
I can show you.

So, yeah, he demonstrated it's all around Route 2.

He said that near a field where I figured the town or somebody has took and made a place where they made a dump for salt and everything, you know, dirt from the winter.

It's a place where they dump stuff like that.

They said, what are we going to find there? And he responded, you'll find a five-gallon bucket with cement in it. Should have her two hands and the head in it.

He stated that the bucket would be white, have a cover on it, and be sort of buried. He said, I dropped it over the bank and threw some dirt over on top of it.

I didn't have no shovel, so that's why it's only down as deep as whatever dirt they put on it. He also said it would have sunk into the ground a little bit too, because it was a little wet.

He said, okay, where might they find the remainder of of Lynn's body? And he said, I don't know the name. That was Jenny is what he said there.

He said, I don't know the names of the roads and everything.

He said, well, first place we would probably go would be down Ellsworth Road. And he explains this very,

you know, intricate thing here. And he said, you'll find, he said, you'll find

Lynn's torso there, and more precisely, her arms and legs.

So they said, you hacked her into pieces. And he said, pieces.
Well, her legs cut at the joint, at the torso. What do you call it?

At the hip is what the word you're looking for here. He admitted that he had not taken the time to bury what might have been the remains of Lynn's body.

Rather, he put her torso in a heavy-duty garbage bag, and he did with her arms and legs, and dropped it in between two rocks.

He thought that he had put the knife he'd used under a flat rock in this general area, but he might have actually been thinking of an arm, not the knife. He wasn't sure.

Oh, boy.

He continued to ask questions. He said,

how long had Lynn had been dead before he cut up the body? And he said, I'm going to say three or four days, I guess. The blood in her hadn't started drying up yet.

He said, well, where did you dismember the body? He said, at the maintenance shop at the motel.

As you walk in straight down, you're going to go like into a paint room. You go past the bathroom.
There's a walkway that goes to the left. It's right there.
He put her body.

He said that her body had been in a small wall partition for about a day, a paneled partition through which the part of the motel's cooling system passed.

He wrapped her body in a blanket, then wrapped plastic around it.

And he said, They said, you had a confrontation with her and strangled her, right? And he said, Yeah.

And he said, with your hands? He said, no, I used, what did I used? Huh, you got me on that one. They said, used.
What did I use? He said, you don't remember, but you did strangle her.

He said, yeah, I think I had something in my pocket. I'm not sure.
They said, something like a cord or a rope. He said, rope or something like that, because I was always playing with ropes and stuff.

Okay, that's a scary sign right away.

He said, I transported her to the motel. I put her in a wooden box and made for my tools.

He said that he was going to store his own tools because I didn't want the motel owners taking over and thinking that they were theirs.

So into the storage box, he put Lynn's body.

Wow. He said her body was intact and clothed.
He said that he moved her body one night.

late night after going out to get beer and that when he cut into her body there'd been so much blood that he blacked out from the sight of

he said he mixed some cement put some in a bucket and placed lynn's head in it along with her hands and added more cement disposed of a bloody blanket in the dumpster at the supermarket in banger disposed of the bags with lynn's body parts one day then perhaps the next day he took the bucket to the north halton area wow um wow um

they imagine hearing that imagine yeah just a scumbag saying that and you're the first person to hear it yeah

well he said he took Brandy to the site a couple of times, although he made it clear that Brandy never knew anything about it, but she wasn't lying. Yeah.

Gerilyn Towers, then they talk about.

And he told officers that he talked with Gerilyn at the gateway lounge the night she disappeared, and that he bought her a few, a few, her and a few other women drinks.

At closing time, they left the gateway. He said Gerilyn was just ahead of him as they walked out.
In the parking lot,

he had to open his car door via the passenger side doors. The driver's door didn't open from the outside when locked.

He said Towers was standing on the sidewalk, and when I unlocked the door, I got out to shut it and asked her if she wanted to ride. She said no, she was going to walk.

She started walking toward Flood's store down toward the lake that way, and so I got in the car.

So he said he noticed that he's almost out of gas and decided to stop at Flood's to purchase more gas.

While he was getting gas, Jerry came out of the store and said, all right, fine, I'll take the ride.

So he said that they went to Newport swimming hole and parked between the sawmill and the lake. He said they talked for a while.

Then he said, quote, for some reason I got in the back to get something or do something.

She told him to get back in the front. He thought he had told her, wait a minute or wait a second or something like that.

According to Hicks, the next thing I remembered, well, the next thing I knew, she was strangled and she was dead. I don't remember doing it.
Oh, boy.

He said that

it wasn't done with a rope or anything like that. He said, but it wasn't no cloth.
Must have been with my hands like that because there wasn't no cloth or nothing.

He said, things were just,

they just happened. It just happened.

He said, when I realized what happened, I just froze for a few minutes and like that. I don't know how long it was.
Then I got back in the front seat, made sure she was dead like that, and I drove.

Actually drove through Newport and got on Ridge Road. Well, I stopped there because I thought she was making noise or something, like gurgling or something, thought she might have been alive.

So I checked to see if she was alive, and I couldn't find any pulse or nothing like that. So I put her in the back seat, laid her down on the back seat, and just drove from there.

His girlfriend, Linda, was asleep when he got home, but she woke up. He told her he had to go down to the field or make some similar excuse to get back out of the house.

So he said there was some debris nearby. So I laid her body down beside the woods and left a bunch of and laid a bunch of cardboard and wood like that, woods, wood, and stuff stuff like that over her

wow

he said hicks started to tell the officers that one weekend when linda and the children were away he went down to the field not knowing what he was going to do then he changed his story he said i got to back up here after i at the night it happened on the road in newport i put her in the back in the trunk and i drove home and left the next morning and went down to work at peasants island or seabrooks i can't remember which one i was working at and i go through the security guard gate and come back again uh with that without them checking on me.

And she was in there. And when I got home that night, that's when I took her down to the field and left her.

He said he waited for about a week to cut her up because the blood was all like dried up like Jenny's.

And he said it didn't run hardly at all. He said he went down to the field, put her down on the field, put stuff over her.

A week later, he came back, cut her up, put her in grain bags, and dug a hole and put her in it.

He thought that the body, he had cut her body with a knife and used cutting insulation and similar materials

wow he said it was like a filet knife or something like that

he said that uh it's not even that i guess he wanted a he cut her body into more easily movable pieces and buried them in a four by four area he said it's not even that big because when i dug a hole like that i dug it inside of a building and no one could see me um

So he said then he went, took an exit off the highway, put her clothes in a dumpster, said there was no blood on the clothes and she wasn't wearing any jewelry.

He said he didn't have to take,

he didn't take any jewelry off of her, which he did because she was wearing shit when she left. Then it's Jenny, the first one.

He said that the children were home asleep when their mother died. He said that he also, which is the daughter was at the sister's house.

It's interesting. He said that Susan did come home about 11, the babysitter.
She wasn't lying. He said she was drunk, not drunk drunk, but you know, she'd been drinking.

It was about half to three quarters of a sheet in the wind. And he said he talked to her for a short time.
She went to bed. And then he said, Jenny was standing.

I'm going to say probably three feet from me, like at the foot of the bed or on the side of the bed. And I was standing on the other side or the foot of it.
And she was standing with her back to me.

And then we was like talking, like I said, like that. And the next thing I know, she was lying on the bed and she was strangled.
You don't want to search shit like this, Jeffrey fucking Dahmer.

Then I just don't know what happened. He's just his head was in a pot.
I don't know what happened. He's dead, and then he's in the floor of my shower.
I don't know. Yep.

He said he thinks he wore a used a belt to strangle his wife.

They said, What happened then? He said, Now it's they're all basically the same. It's like, I don't know how it happened.
I don't remember exactly. I don't know why.

Don't know what I was doing.

But within a couple hours, he'd wrapped her in a blanket and he left for work, left the body in the trunk of his Dodge charger on the the way home from work that day with Louvers, I'm sure.

Yeah, it would have been July

RT, so it was probably early 70s. Yeah, cool one.
He said he stopped along the road. He said,

you know, all this, he was figuring out what he was going to do. And he said that he drove back and forth to work a couple times with the body in the trunk.
Wow.

He said it parked it in the car in the driveway. I wouldn't let anyone use it.
He still had to figure out what he was doing.

He said, now,

what did you do with the head and hands? Because he chopped her up.

He said, put them in kind of an ice box, put cement in it. And he has a big chest cooler, a Coleman cooler, is what he said.
The cooler was white and green.

And he'll show you

where he buried it.

They said, nowhere, nobody is where anyone else is, he responded. Nobody is where anyone else is.

He said, no, well, Towers and Jenny's, Jenny's head and stuff like that and Towers is probably within a couple hundred feet of each other. God damn it.

So they go out and,

yeah, with Jenny, he said, I had a belt on at the time. He said, and the next thing I remember, she's dead.
He said that he had messed around on Jenny and,

you know, all that stuff.

So he said, Lynn was the one that really haunts me. I always think of Jenny because of the kids, but Lynn was the one he felt the strongest about.
He said, Lynn's the hardest.

It's not that I didn't love Jenny. I did, but it seemed like she knew me, how to make me feel better, and it was the same thing with her.

She said that,

yeah, he just said that that was, you know, he was very upset about it.

Now, he's going to be charged for sure down in Texas.

In Texas, he pleads guilty, and he's sentenced to 55 years down there. Okay.

So then he's charged with Lynn Willett murders, and he's expected to be charged with the Geraldin Towers murders, and he is.

They do find the victims in the Haynesville woods outside of Halton, just where he said.

He tells them everything. The police were out there for a couple days, but then there was a neighbor, a local, just watching, never said a word.

After everyone left, he wandered over, found two buckets, and said to the cops, I think I found what you're looking for. Found some buckets.
So

they looked for more bodies just in case. Yeah, amazing.
But they never found anything else.

The bodies are finally ID'd about 10 years later, and he pleads guilty to murdering, dismembering, and scattering the remains of two women. Wow.

At sentencing, Geralyn's daughter said, I spent my life trying to remember what my mother sounded like, smelled like, felt like, but my mother didn't abandon me.

You killed my mother, cut her up, and discarded her like garbage. I won't let you destroy my life, James Hicks.
Today, my roller coaster ride stops and I get off leaving you behind. Suck it.

Judge said, you, sir, may fuck off two consecutive life sentences, no parole. Super suck it.
Eat all the dicks. So that's what he gets.

The book, by the way, is Tragedy in the Northwoods, The Murders of James Hicks by Trudy Irene Ski, S-C-E-E.

A lot of info in there as far as police reports and stuff that quotes that weren't anywhere else. So there you go.
Got to get through this real quick. We're way late here.

Definitely. If you like this show, head over to whatever app you're on.
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You get it all.

You get all the shows we put out ad-free and you get a shout out at the end of the regular show, which is right now.

Jimmy, hit me with the names of, well, patreon.com slash crime in sports, by the way.

Hit me with the names of the people who would never, ever dismember us and leave us buried in a field. Jimmy, hit me with them right now.
This week, Executive Producer, Sarah Group, Groupe, maybe?

Gary Howard is in Olith. Olath or Olathay.
How do they say that? I think it's Olathe. Olath.
Olath. Something like fucking Kansas.
Olith. Assholes.

No one knows how you pronounce that.

Elena Zemmel. Zemel.
Zemmel. Elena.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
Andy Frisch celebrating 31 years with Jennifer. Wow.

Married.

Happy anniversary, YouTube.

Rock on it. 31 years.

They got to be in their fucking 90s, right?

I'm sure it was each of their fourth marriages. Yeah, right.
That's got to be our oldest listeners, right?

I think so. Jason Bo Basin, thank you.
And

the fuck you looking at? Whoever that is.

You guys are the best. Thank you.
You, motherfucker. That's a fucking answer.

You're amazing. Other producers this week.
Peyton Meadows, Janice Hill, happy hours in Nolins for Thanksgiving.

That's brutal.

That's got to be cold, right? He just ordered a new fucking truck.

The new trucks, oh, they're so amazing. The over-the-rig, over-the-road truck,

they look like old ones, like from the 80s. They're boxy and shit.
And it is so badass. I'm so jealous of it.
I wish I knew how to pull shit with those. Jamie and Chris Metz, Sue Sadie, Saldy,

Sadie.

I could probably drive it. That's a great point.
I could probably drive it, just figuring out where it goes. Not parking this thing.
I don't know what. Yeah.

Kristen Hooper, Michael Song, Jen Maximachuck Benda. Maximchuk.
Rachel Eicher. Iker.
Fox 10. Gail McLaughlin.
Heather West. Katie Eklund.
Fatter Mike. Okay.
Bridget Erickson.

Josh Howard. No, that's Ward.
It's just Josh Ward. Melissa Steidel, Monsters with no last name.
JP and M, random person. All right.
Amethyst Morton, Patty with no last name. Nick Schneider's kid.

Do we know Nick Schneider? I don't know. Apparently, he's got a kid.
He slipped off past the goalie. Good for you.

I'm going to Google him next. Julie Edbond, Smurt Monkey.
Smirt Monkey? Kristen Swinehart. Sweinart.
Andre Belyakov.

Christopher Romero. Squirrely's Bar and Grill, wherever that is.
Mitzi M, Rodney Thompson. Dustin with no last name.
Melody Harris. Jessica Trant.

Woody's mom, Rick with no last name, Jennifer Modrall, Andy with no last name, James Stonebarger. Yep, that's right.

Randy, nope, that's Brandy Brotherton, Holly with no last name, Luke Howard Bath, Maria Hollander, Dana with no last name, Ryan with no last name, Bradley Nussbaum, George Burroughs, Samuel Wood, Danielle Tish, not Daniel Tosh, Dana Sinclair, Ken Scheckler, Seckler, Sessler, Jessica Bellwood, Erica Brown, Emily Rose Ramsvatan,

Kemp, Ramsvatan, Pamela, Czech Patreon. Oh, that's what I made a little note here.
Pamela with no last name, Czech Patreon. You signed up twice.
Make sure you want both of those.

Anna with no last name, Mo with no last name, Gigolo Tony, the ghetto salt, and the ghetto soldiers. Is that somebody that we it's a doo-op group from the 50s?

They sang around a burning garbage can, I believe.

Are they playing Flat Top Tony in the purple canoes? I believe that's similar to them. Blake R.
Stepper, Kat Marsden, Cute Jelly, gross.

June, Gene, Gene Russin, Rusen, Colton Graybill, Ashley Hilliard, Hilliard, Kevin Kelly, Bobby Raines, Melissa Kamer, Kamer, whoa, Crystal Hughes, Sver Sverski.

Is that real? Sver? Sver verskij? I don't know. Arlene McGee,

Catherine Whitworth, Walter M. Bethany Bolt.
Who the fuck is calling me today?

Kim with no last name. Christina Cook, Scott Ozen,

Ownsurge, Ownzorge,

what? Christopher Lutz, Carlos Spicy Wiener.

Yeah, of the

owner's joke. We all know those guys.
Yeah, we all know. Rob Bond, Aaron Squires, Chris Moore, Brad Loxley.

Isn't that the, what's his name?

Robin's last name? Oh, it's of. That's why.

Tyler Young. Brent Bivens.

Oh, Michiel Marcus. Angelina with no last name.

Angelia?

I may have missed the end. Happy.
Thank you. Jamie Muntz with no last.
That is the last name. Emily Heidi,

the camo.

This is the mess.

Zach Shakur. Dawn with no last name.
Phillip with no last name. Carrie Jones.
I think that's Jones. That's got to be a mistype.
Kristen with no last name. Samantha with no last name.
Carolyn Emerson.

Charlotte Fishwick, L.D., Gus Messer, Allie with no last name. Chris with no last name.
And obviously all our patrons. You guys are the best.
Thank you. Thank you so much, everybody.

You fantastic, wonderful bastards. We can't tell you how much we appreciate you.
Get those tickets. Keep signing up for Patreon.
Keep hanging out with us.

And until next week, everybody, it's been our pleasure. Bye.