Bio

James Rodney Hicks was born on April 17, 1951, in Etna, Maine. He was commonly known as Jimmy Hicks. Public records and later case summaries describe him as a Maine laborer whose crimes occurred across Penobscot County over nearly two decades.

Hicks married Jennie Lynn Hicks, also reported as Jennie Cyr Hicks, and the couple lived in Carmel, Maine, with their children. In 1977, Jennie worked at the Penobscot Nursing Home in Brewer and was studying to become a nursing aide. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court described her as a reliable worker and a loving, responsible mother.

The marriage was troubled before Jennie disappeared. Court records state that Jennie had become dissatisfied with Hicks and had told her sister that he would be moving out or that she would leave if he did not. The conflict worsened after a live-in teenage babysitter reported that Hicks had made sexual advances toward her.

Jennie Hicks disappeared on or about July 19, 1977. Her body was not found at the time, and there was no murder weapon or blood evidence when Hicks was first prosecuted. Even so, a Penobscot County jury convicted him in 1984 of fourth-degree criminal homicide based on circumstantial evidence. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court affirmed that conviction in 1985.

Hicks served six years of a 10-year sentence and was released in 1990. Before and after that first conviction, two other Maine women connected to him disappeared: Jerilyn Towers in 1982 and Lynn Willette in 1996.

After moving to Texas, Hicks committed another violent crime in April 2000. He held a 67-year-old woman at gunpoint, forced her to write a check and sign over a car title, and attempted to make the crime look like a suicide. After he was sentenced to 55 years in Texas, he cooperated with Maine authorities and confessed to killing the three Maine women.

Murder Story

Jennie Lynn Hicks disappeared from her home in Carmel, Maine, on or about July 19, 1977. According to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, the evidence showed that she had made plans with family and friends, cared deeply for her children, needed her glasses and personal items, and was unlikely to have left voluntarily. The court also noted testimony that Hicks gave conflicting stories about seeing Jennie after her disappearance.

At the 1984 trial, prosecutors had no body, no weapon, and no bloodstains. However, the jury concluded that Hicks had caused Jennie’s death. He was convicted of fourth-degree criminal homicide and sentenced to 10 years in prison. This became one of Maine’s rare homicide convictions without a recovered body.

Jerilyn Towers disappeared on October 16, 1982. She was 34 years old and from Newport, Maine. She was last seen leaving a Newport bar with Hicks. At the time, police suspected Hicks, but they did not have enough evidence to charge him with her death. The investigation into Towers’s disappearance helped police re-examine Jennie Hicks’s earlier disappearance.

After Hicks was released from prison in 1990, he later met Lynn Willette, a 40-year-old woman from Orrington. They worked together at the Twin City Motel in Brewer and eventually lived together. Willette disappeared in May 1996. Hicks was again suspected, but no charges were filed at first because investigators lacked enough evidence.

The break in the case came in 2000 after Hicks was convicted in Texas for the violent robbery of an elderly woman. Facing a long Texas prison sentence, Hicks made a deal with authorities. He agreed to lead Maine investigators to the remains of Jennie Hicks, Jerilyn Towers, and Lynn Willette in exchange for serving his time in Maine instead of Texas.

In October 2000, Hicks led investigators to burial sites in Maine. Partial remains of Jennie Hicks and Jerilyn Towers were found in shallow graves in Etna, near Hicks’s former home. Lynn Willette’s remains were found in cement-filled buckets buried near a roadside site in Forkstown Township in Aroostook County. Portland Press Herald reporting stated that investigators believed they had recovered remains from all three women.

Maine State Police records also confirm that Jerilyn Towers’s body was recovered in 2000 from a shallow grave in Etna and that Lynn Willette’s body was recovered from a site in Forkstown Township. The same record states that Hicks pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life.

On November 17, 2000, James R. Hicks pleaded guilty in Penobscot County Superior Court to two counts of murder for the deaths of Jerilyn Towers and Lynn Willette. He had already served time for the death of Jennie Hicks.

The known pattern in the three murders involved women who were personally connected to Hicks: his wife, a woman last seen leaving a bar with him, and a girlfriend/co-worker. Later summaries report that the victims were strangled, and their remains were dismembered or concealed after death. Because the original 1984 conviction involved no body and no murder weapon, the specific physical details of Jennie Hicks’s death were not proven at that trial, but Hicks later confessed and led authorities to her remains.

James Rodney Hicks was ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment in Maine for the murders of Jerilyn Towers and Lynn Willette.