The Deadly Web of Serial Killer James Hicks, Part Two
This is the second in a two-part series. Click here for part one.
Lynn Willette... James Rodney Hicks’ 3rd victim?
Lynn Willette was described by her sister Wendy as a “Jack of all trades. And fiercely independent.” Lynn was “Somebody you could rely on to fix a kitchen sink and maintain a gorgeous garden.” She was a talented artist who was accepted into Disney’s cartoon school in Florida, but turned it down to get married after graduating high school. The marriage, however, was short lived. From there, she joined the army and became a machine operator of heavy equipment in Oklahoma. She received an honorable discharge from the army, and eventually returned home to Maine after working as a paramedic in California, and living in North Carolina with an ex-husband. Lynn had been married and divorced twice. Wendy said, “Lynn was always getting involved with men who wanted to protect her. She hated that. Her marriages always ended on good terms. But she was always the one who left. She had a strong need to be her own person.”
After returning to Maine in 1994 in her late 30’s, Lynn was hired by a man named James “Jimmy” Hicks to be a maintenance worker at the Twin City Motor Lodge in Brewer, Maine. She and Jimmy, who was now 43, started talking, and went out on just a few dates before he told her that he was being kicked out of his trailer, and needed a place to live. The relationship progressed rather fast and he ended up moving in with her at her apartment in Brewer.
But the relationship wasn’t working for Lynn. She felt smothered by the relationship, and unbeknownst to Jimmy, she was preparing to leave him.
On May 18th, 1996, Lynn finally told him she was done. She’d been quietly moving some of her things over to her mother’s house, and told Jimmy he could stay at the apartment. Over the next week, he showed up at the house on an almost daily basis after work, and would call incessantly, sometimes even at 4:30 in the morning.
One week later, Lynn didn’t come home from work.
The next day, Sunday morning, she missed a family Memorial Day weekend BBQ that she had organized. By 1pm, when Lynn still wasn’t at the cookout, Wendy decided to inform the police. But it was James Hicks who made the first call to State Detective Joseph Zamboni.
The search for Lynn
The search for Lynn went day and night. Wendy said that she would sometimes even go out at midnight upon her mother’s insistence to search for her sister. But nothing ever turned up.
A year later, Lynn still hadn’t returned. But since her disappearance, the Jerilyn Tower’s case took priority again. In 1992 the family had Jerilyn legally declared dead after a decade of no answers. Her sister told the Bangor Daily News “It was Jerilyn that led police to arrest Hicks for Jenny’s death, and I’ve always thought that maybe someday Jenny will somehow lead police to solve Jerilyn’s murder.” Chief Jim Ricker was also confident Jerilyn’s case would be solved, and believed the answer was occam’s razer, saying, “Why is it that of all the people in Maine, only the girlfriends of James Hicks seem to disappear?”
“You can’t investigate one of these cases without investigating all three,” said detective Joe Zamboni. He also said investigators recently had taken another look at Jennie’s case to compare notes. The only outlier in the situation was Jerilyn, who only knew Hicks for one night.
New love, new state
Not long after Lynn disappeared, James Hicks found love again in 18-year-old Brandie Mayo, and she was pregnant. Her 43-year-old future husband, James Hicks, was 25 years her senior.
Their baby was subsequently taken by the Department of Human Services. They eventually relinquished all of their parental rights. Later that year, Brandie was pregnant, again, and to avoid having the state taking away their second child, they move to Levelland, Texas, a small town of about 13,000, close to where Brandi’s grandparents lived, thinking this would remedy the situation.
After learning of James’ dark history from investigators in Maine (and allegations of sexual abuse from his now adult children), officials in Texas took their new baby boy on temporary custody.
Despite the allegations against her now husband, Brandie refused to believe that he was a killer. “All I’ve ever wanted was for someone to give me proof,” she said during a scheduled custody hearing at the District Court in Levelland. Two years later, Brandie was pregnant for a third time, and she and James were living a relatively quiet life.
But the underlying rage of a dangerous man can’t stay quiet for long, and a nightmare was about to be unleashed on a sleepy Texas town.
June Moss survives a serial killer
In April of 2000, Jimmy was working independently doing handy work. He’d been working for 67-year-old June Moss at her single-story brick home in West Texas for about 6-months.
He arrived at 9 am on Saturday, April 8th to do some painting and floor work. Later that day, after returning to buy some tiles and paint, he unloaded the van and picked up a beer can, asking “do you care if I drink?” June told him that yes, she did care. She didn’t want him to drink in her home. James reluctantly set the beer back in the van.
As June sat in the den, she saw Jimmy come around the hallway and enter the room. There was something off about him. He was swearing (something June didn’t like), and walked up so close to her until his knees touched hers. Then she noticed the gun that was hanging from one of his hands.
He said, “I can’t do your house. It’s taking too long. It’s just taking too long”. June was frozen with fear, her heart pounding so loudly she could barely hear what he was saying.
She tried to stand up, but he pushed her back down, looming over her. She then reached for the phone on the table that was right by the chair, but he grabbed it from her and disconnected it. James then went into the kitchen, locking the deadbolt, and continued to do the same on the other doors in the house.
He said “I need two things from you. I need your time and your money.” He said he had to get out of the state and that it would take him four hours. He paced back and forth, growing with anger. “I’ve been married four times, I killed my wife, and I can’t see my son because of child protective services.” She begged him to leave her home.
Then, he stopped. June later re-counted that she was shaking, but trying not to let him see her fear.
He calmly walked over to her and told her to get up. She told the Bangor Daily News:
“I said no, and he shouted at me and said ‘get up and go to the bedroom’, and he on pulled my arm and began dragging me to the bedroom. He was pulling on my arm so hard I had a bruise. Then he got behind me, put his left hand on my shoulder and pushed me forward. That’s when he shot the gun. The bullet went right by my right ear and I jumped because I didn’t expect it. I turned around and saw him pointing the gun at the ceiling. ‘Go to the bedroom,’ he said, loudly. So, I started down the hall towards the bedroom.”
He then left the room and came back with a blue department store bag and some beer. As he was drinking the beer, pacing around the room, he demanded the keys to her house, and the title and keys to her car. He then slammed a notepad in front of her. “Write this to your children,” he said. June was sobbing. He made her write what she thought was a suicide note.
He reached into the blue bag and pulled out a 20 oz Diet Coke bottle filled to the brim of a black concoction that definitely wasn’t Coke. “Here—I want you to drink this. It’s cherry cough medicine” He took a swig and handed it to her.
He forced her to drink about half the bottle, as much as she could handle until she started vomiting. The liquid that came back up in the trash can was red. She begged him not to make her drink anymore and he yelled at her to hurry up and finish it, all the while waving a gun in her face. He then left the room and started filling up a bathtub. He kept returning to the den where June sat, shaking and trying to stomach his cherry cough syrup cocktail.
James then went down the hallway, and June heard a familiar sound. The tinkling of wind chimes. He was getting into a closet she’d mentioned to look for guns.
“I have a small set of chimes on the closet door. I heard that sound and I knew where he was and that he was looking for those guns. I jumped up, and I had been sitting for so long I was kind of stiff, but I ran to the door and slid the chain off and turned the door knob, and neither one made a sound, and then I did the deadbolt because I knew that would be louder. I turned that deadbolt, and I ran. I ran over to my neighbor’s door and ran inside, and I was running all over that house trying to find someone. I found their grandson laying on a bed talking on the phone and I told him to lock all the doors.”
Those wind chimes saved June’s life.
Jimmy Hicks is arrested once again
June spent that night in the hospital, drifting in and out of consciousness from the amount of cough syrup she consumed, but she survived. And James Hicks was once again arrested... only this time, it wasn’t looking good.
Jimmy was facing charges of aggravated assault and robbery, and if convicted—because of his status as a felon—he faced 15 to 99 years in prison with no chance of parole. Normally, aggravated robbery brings a lesser charge, but this was also a crime that caused injury to an elderly woman, and Texas takes violent crimes against the elderly seriously.
Officials have a feeling James Hicks will see a good portion of the rest of his life behind bars. “Texas might not have been the best choice. He might have wanted to have chosen another state to live in if he was going to commit a crime,” said Lubbock County Sherriff David Gutierrez.
After spending only a couple of weeks behind bars, Jimmy discovered he didn’t enjoy life inside the Texas jail system. He began working on a plan to get back to Maine, according to a court affidavit. He wanted to strike a deal with Maine authorities.
Former Newport Police Chief Jim Ricker told Murder, She Told:
“He immediately gets on the phone with Detective Zamboni and wants to confess to all his crimes in Maine. But the deal is, he wants them to drop the charges in Texas and he’ll come back here and admit to murder if we’ll take him back to serve a life sentence in Maine.”
Zamboni reminded him that there were no outstanding warrants for his arrest in Maine, and he couldn’t just bring him back so that he could confess here. He pried Hicks, saying that he didn’t know what Hicks was going to tell him, if and when he was ever brought back to Maine. He needed something good. “You know exactly what I’m going to tell you.” James responded.
He agreed to tell them where the bodies were if he got to come back to Maine to serve his time.
But two out of the three families of the victims said they would sacrifice knowing where their loved one was if it meant James Hicks would stay put in Texas, knowing how much he hated it there.
Denise Clark, Jennie’s sister, said “Jimmy Hicks has controlled the situation the whole time. He has always had his way. Now, he still trying to control it by getting to come up here because he doesn’t like it in Texas. Let him stay there. He hates it there, from what I understand, so I think that’s a good place for him to spend the rest of his life.”
James Hicks returns to Maine
Jimmy pled guilty to aggravated robbery, and as part of a bargain, agreed to cooperate with Maine State detectives in a deal that would allow him to return to Maine to reveal where his secrets were buried.
On October 4th, 2000, during an interview with detectives, James Hicks finally confessed to killing Lynn Willette in May of 1996. He said he’d suffocated her at the apartment in Brewer they used to share. He agreed that once he returned to Maine, he would show detectives where the remains of Lynn Willette, Jerilyn Towers, and Jennie Hicks were located.
Upon his return to Maine, on October 10th, James Rodney Hicks was formally charged with the murder of Lynn Willette. This was the only confession so far, and he couldn’t be charged again with Jennie’s murder.
Bringing Lynn, Jerilyn, and Jennie home
That same day, Jimmy led investigators to two separate sites to begin the search for remains; one in Etna where his family’s farmhouse used to stand, and the other up in Forkstown Township in Aroostook County. Forkstown is very remote and sparsely populated; it’s part of an unorganized territory with other surrounding townships. Forkstown is also part of the Haynesville Woods, notoriously known to be one of Maine’s most haunted stretches. The Haynesville Woods is mostly only seen by long haul truckers, and was made popular in 1965 by Maine country singer Dick Curless with his song, A Tombstone Every Mile, referencing the frequent accidents that happened and the lives that were taken along Route 2A. The Haynesville Woods is probably the perfect place to hide a body in Maine.
The family of Lynn Willette accompanied investigators to the Forkstown dig, though they didn’t find anything on the first day and planned to reconvene the following. The site they were working at is a turnaround that’s used for snow plows and to dispose of unwanted dirt that was dug up from ditch creation.
The first body was discovered beneath an apple tree along the tree line of the property. The following day, they found a second body just behind a small shed to the right of the abandoned tar-shack. By late afternoon both sets of remains had been removed and taken to the medical examiner’s office in Augusta.
It was clear that Jerilyn had been dismembered and mostly buried in one place. Jennie was also dismembered under the apple tree, with only 6 inches of soil above her. He indicated that in some spots he buried parts and others he disposed of them on top of the ground, giving the team a slim likelihood that a complete skeleton will ever be found.
Back in Forkstown, investigators were still searching for the remains of Lynn Willette with no success. Because the soil was much softer, they speculated the remains might be deeper and more difficult and find. The team used heavy machinery to dig buckets of dirt from the ground, but Lynn’s sister Allison said “I wish they’d bring Jimmy Hicks out here with a spoon and make him do this.”
Finally, after 2 days of digging along roadsides in Forkstown Township with no success, the remains of Jimmy’s third known victim were discovered. Lynn had finally been found. She had been dismembered and put into cement filled buckets that Jimmy claimed to have used as a grave marker.
The confessions
James said he killed Lynn Willette when she returned to the apartment they used to share to get some of her things. As she was leaving, he strangled her from behind with a cord. He said that he kept Lynn’s body in a homemade wooden box for several days in the maintenance room at the Twin City Motor Inn before dismembering and disposing of her remains in Holden, Ellsworth, and Forktown Township. He told them that he drove her car to Dysart’s in Hermon the same day that he killed her, abandoning it in the employee parking lot before riding his bike back to Brewer.
More details were also revealed about what exactly was found buried in the ground in Forkstown. It was Lynn’s head, embedded in a cement block inside one of the buckets, and her hands and feet in another.
He said he met Jerilyn Towers at the Gateway Lounge in 1982 that fateful October night and they enjoyed each other’s company over drinks and had a good time. He said that after he left the bar, he saw Jerilyn at a gas station and offered to give her a ride home.
An argument ensued in the car, and he snapped. James said he strangled her from the backseat with his hands. He then dismembered her body, wrapped it in a plastic sheet, and buried her in the dirt floor of a shed that used to be a chicken coop. Jerilyn’s rings were found still on her skeleton fingers.
On the night of July 18th, 1977, James and Jennie Hicks got into an argument after she told him she was leaving. He decided that she wasn’t, so he removed his belt and strangled her with it until she was dead. Like the other women, he then dismembered her, scattering her remains throughout Carmel and Etna... except for one part. Jennie’s head. He placed it in a plastic bag inside a cooler and filled it with cement, leaving it around the trailer. Former members of the trailer park remember seeing Jimmy carting the cooler around as if surreptitiously putting it on display. But perhaps the most horrifying part? James Hicks used it as a chair at the table, and made Jennie’s children sit on their own mother’s head inside a cement filled cooler while they ate breakfast.
Eventually he removed the cement block and buried it near the apple tree in the backyard of his mother’s old house. That’s what investigators discovered that day. The rest of her remains were never found.
James Hicks never gave a reason for the killings but said it seemed that something just comes over him. Zamboni told the Lubbock Avalanche Journal before his confessions, “I looked at him one day and said you know you have to go to jail or another woman is going to die. He said yeah, I think you’re right.”
A life sentence
On November 17th 2000, surrounded by 10 officers in the Bangor courtroom arraignment, Hicks pleaded guilty to murdering, dismembering, and scattering the remains of two women. At sentencing two weeks later, he was given a life sentence, which in Maine, has no option for parole.
He gave no apology and didn’t show any signs of remorse. In fact, he didn’t even look up.
Jerilyn’s daughter, Tammy, spoke in court during a victim impact statement, saying “I spent my life trying to remember what my mother sounded like, smelled like and 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.”
To hear more from this episode including a first hand account interview with former police chief, Jim Ricker, tune in to part two of The Deadly Web of James Hicks on Murder, She Told wherever you get your favorite podcasts.
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Lynn Willette
Lynn Willette and her mom
James Hicks in Court (Bangor Daily News)
Search for James Hicks’ victims in Etna, Maine
Sources For This Episode
Bangor Daily News Articles by Renee Ordway
A Sister Searches for Answers, October 7th 1996
Killer May Reveal Details of 3 Murders, October 1st 2000
Hick Admits Brewer Killing, October 1st 1996
Murder Suspect Returns to Maine, October 10th 2000
Hicks Leads Search for Victims Remains, October 11th 2000
Two of Hicks' Victims Found, October 13th 2000
Grand Jury Charges Hicks with 2 Murders, November 7th 2000
Two Families Mourn Hicks' Victims, November 13th 2000
Hicks Gets Two life Terms for Slayings, December 5th 2000
Bangor Daily News
James Hicks Out on Bail Awaiting Appeal by A Jay Higgins, December 20th 1984
Hicks Saga Revealed in Confession by Jeff Tuttle, October 15th 2000
Locals Find Grave of Hicks' Third Victim by News Staff October 15th 2000
Additional Sources
Oxygen’s Buried in the Backyard
Hicks Sentenced to 55 years By Linda Kane, Lubbock Avalanche Journal, January 7th 2000
Newspaper and court photos mostly from Bangor Daily News
Additional photos from Buried in the Backyard & Tragedy in the North Woods by Trudy Irene Scee
Episode Credits
Production, writing, research, audio, and editing by Kristen Seavey
Murder, She Told was created by Kristen Seavey
This episode was also co-produced by AKA Studio Productions.