Lynn Ann Willette was a talented and fiercely independent woman, a person her sister described as a “Jack of all trades” who you could rely on to fix a kitchen sink or maintain a beautiful garden. A gifted artist, Lynn, a 40-year-old female, had once been accepted to Disney's cartoon school but chose to get married after high school instead. In 1994, after returning to her home state of Maine, she took a maintenance job at the Twin City Motor Inn in Brewer.
It was there she met a man named James "Jimmy" Rodney Hicks, who would irrevocably alter the course of her life and the lives of her family.
The relationship with Hicks, who was her supervisor, moved quickly. After only a few dates, he told her he was being evicted and needed a place to stay, so he moved into her Brewer apartment. But the relationship soon soured for Lynn, who felt smothered and was preparing to leave him. On May 26, 1996, she disappeared. Hicks, her live-in boyfriend, reported her missing to the Brewer Police Department, claiming he had no idea where she was and had done her no harm. Lynn’s car was later found abandoned in the employee parking lot of a truck stop in Hermon.
For years, Lynn's family, particularly her brother, relentlessly pushed the police to keep investigating, convinced that Hicks was responsible for her disappearance. Their suspicions were well-founded. Hicks was not just a controlling boyfriend; he was a convicted killer. In 1984, he had been convicted of manslaughter for the 1977 death of his first wife, Jennie, whose body was never found. He served only six years of a 10-year sentence and was released in 1990. Police had also long suspected him in the 1982 disappearance of another woman, Jerilyn Towers, but lacked the evidence to charge him.
The break in Lynn's case came four years after she vanished, and from an entirely different state. In 2000, Hicks was arrested in Lubbock, Texas, for the aggravated robbery of a 67-year-old woman. He had held her at gunpoint, forced her to write him a check and sign over her car title, and even made her write a suicide note as part of a plan to drug and drown her. The woman managed to escape. Facing a 55-year sentence in a Texas prison, Hicks decided to negotiate.
On September 28, 2000, Hicks confessed to a Maine State Police detective that he had murdered Lynn Willette. He offered to lead investigators to her remains, and to the bodies of Jennie Hicks and Jerilyn Towers, in exchange for being allowed to serve his sentence in Maine. He admitted he had killed Lynn in their apartment on the day she went missing, strangling her with a cord from behind as she was trying to leave him.
In a series of grim excavations, Hicks led police to the secret burial sites of his victims. He had kept Lynn's body for several days in a homemade wooden box in the motel's maintenance room before dismembering her. Her remains were found in cement-filled buckets that Hicks had buried along a roadside in Aroostook County. The remains of Jennie Hicks and Jerilyn Towers were found buried about 100 feet from each other near the home where Hicks grew up.
On November 17, 2000, in Penobscot County Superior Court, James Rodney Hicks pleaded guilty to the murders of Lynn Willette and Jerilyn Towers. Having already been convicted of manslaughter for his wife's death, he could not be tried for her murder again. The judge sentenced Hicks to two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.
The resolution of the case, brought about by a violent crime hundreds of miles away, finally brought a measure of peace to the families who had waited for decades. Lynn Ann Willette, the capable and artistic woman who was planning a new chapter in her life, was finally brought home and laid to rest, her killer imprisoned for the remainder of his life.
