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Multiple-murder recidivism:

10/13/00 - Maine

Killer Confesses in Bid to Return Home, Cops Say - Texas Convict Wants to Serve Sentence in Maine

ETNA, Maine -- James Rodney Hicks, convicted last year of trying to kill a 68-year-old woman in her Texas home, didn't much care for the idea of spending the next half-century locked up in a Lone Star state prison, authorities said. If he had to spend the rest of his life behind bars, Hicks told authorities, he preferred to do it in his home state of Maine. Even if that meant confessing to two unsolved murders, authorities said. Hicks' relationship with state police in Maine began in 1977 when he was charged and convicted of killing his first wife, Jennie, who was then 23, McCausland said. Her body was never found. Hicks served nearly six years in prison for the slaying, McCausland said. After his release in 1982, authorities say, Hicks met a woman, Jerilyn Towers, then 34, at a Newport bar. The last time anyone saw Towers alive, she was walking out of the bar with Hicks, McCausland said. Although investigators suspected that Hicks might have had something to do with her disappearance, they had no evidence and he was never arrested, authorities said. Hicks again turned up on police radar screens in 1996, when his longtime, live-in girlfriend, Lynne Willette, 40, vanished. Police suspected that she, too, might have been the victim of foul play, but they had no proof. When Hicks decided some three years ago to move to Texas, there was nothing police and prosecutors in Maine could do to stop him, authorities said. The cases remained stalled until last year, when Hicks was convicted in Texas of attempted murder after he broke into a home. On Tuesday, authorities recovered the first set of remains, buried in a shallow grave at a house Hicks once rented in Etna, McCausland said.