Police and family hold out hope for answers in woman’s 1991 death

Published 1:54 pm Friday, November 28, 2014

FEDERAL WAY — “Loved and unforgotten.”

The message is inscribed on a stone next to the urn in Deborah McDaniel’s home.

Her daughter’s body was found April 22, 1991, in Mountlake Terrace.

Tia Marie Hicks was 20 and a mother of two. Police investigated her death as a homicide, but the case went cold.

Mountlake Terrace police detective Sgt. Mike Haynes heard talk about the death during the 14 years he’s been on the force.

In fall 2013, he started poring through the file.

New interviews, along with advancements in forensic science, have sparked a renewed investigation. Haynes is making progress. He has new theories.

He’s promised McDaniel she’ll be his first call if he gets answers.

McDaniel, and others in Hicks’ family, still hope for answers, and for peace.

***

On a rainy day in late July, McDaniel flipped through family scrapbooks at her apartment in Federal Way.

She’d wanted a unique name for her only child, the baby girl born Oct. 2, 1970.

They called her “Baby Hicks” for weeks, until the right name came along.

As a child, Tia was competitive and outgoing. She loved animals. One photo in the scrapbook shows her as a toddler in a pajama dress, hugging tight to a fluffy cat almost her size. She was a tomboy and she liked climbing trees. She was fast at Double Dutch, and she could be a little feisty at times.

She loved water and swimming, music and dancing.

Pictures show young Tia holding out her pigtails with her hands, posing as Pippi Longstocking, and as a teen, with feathers woven into her braids.

A mother from age 16, Tia graduated from an alternative high school. She gave up her life as a teenager to be with her boys. Her second son was born before her 19th birthday.

She pasted funny scrapbooking stickers in the family’s albums, adding thought bubbles and captions about her young love and her pregnant belly.

“She had a good sense of humor, my baby,” McDaniel said.

When Tia’s boys were born, her aunt Terri Hicks worried whether the young girl could take good care of her children.

She watched her niece. She saw the love in her eyes.

As Hicks’ family talks about the pictures in the scrapbooks, there is joy and laughter in their memories.

Then McDaniel turns another page, and Tia is gone.

There are photos of the family dressed in black.

***

McDaniel knows her daughter was using drugs before she died. It wasn’t long, five or six months. Others stepped in to take care of the boys, but Tia never missed their birthdays and holidays.

McDaniel and Tia had a falling out, as mothers and daughters sometimes do.

Tia hid her drug use from her family, Terri Hicks said.

If they had known Tia was doing something wrong, they would have confronted her, she said. When Tia dropped from sight, the drug use was still just a whisper, speculation.

In early 1991, Terri Hicks realized she hadn’t talked to her niece for a week. That was unusual.

Everyone started calling around. No one had heard from Tia.

They filed a missing person report, but were told there wasn’t much the cops could do. Tia, 20, was an adult.

Tia missed a birthday for one of her boys. Something was wrong. The weeks passed.

McDaniel was living in an upstairs apartment at the time.

She saw two Mountlake Terrace police detectives walking up the steps.

“I just knew,” she said. “I knew in my heart.”

***

Hicks’ body was found in a boat that was sitting in a parking lot along 220th Street SW in Mountlake Terrace.

The boat was in disrepair, and the owner had left it in the lot to avoid paying for moorage. A man who was supposed to fix the boat, to settle a debt with the owner, found the body. He called 911.

Photos from the scene show Hicks face-down on the floor in a walkway in the boat’s cabin, between the table and the sink. Her arms were stretched out above her head, a rope entangled in her arms. A blue tarp was partially under her body. Two inches of rainwater soaked the floor.

She was naked, except for one shoe.

The Snohomish County medical examiner found no obvious signs of trauma or violence. Investigators don’t believe Hicks died in the boat. There was no evidence of a struggle inside.

Doctors estimated Hicks’ date of death as mid-to-late March 1991, weeks before she was found.

The death investigation was complicated by decomposition. The ruling: “cause undetermined after complete autopsy including histology and toxicology.”

The death certificate uses that same word: undetermined.

There was cocaine in Hicks’ system. It may have been enough to be fatal, but there’s no way to know for certain.

McDaniel has been told so many different things over the years, it can be hard to know what to believe.

Investigators searched the boat and the surrounding area. Everything was dusted for fingerprints, but nothing of value was found.

There wasn’t a lot of evidence at the scene, Haynes said. They didn’t find Hicks’ clothing.

They gathered up every cigarette butt. Items were sent to the lab for testing.

“There was nothing that came from any of it,” Haynes said.

Still, the death was suspicious. Why was Hicks naked? How did she get in the boat?

From the beginning, McDaniel was told it would be a difficult case, that she might never know.

***

Haynes keeps the case file on a table in his office at the Mountlake Terrace Police Department.

He compiled the most important documents in an eight-inch binder. Another ream of papers is stacked on top of that.

He’s been looking for anything that may have been missed, anything left to pursue.

Over the years, officers flipped through the pages. Maybe fresh eyes would catch something?

Officers at the small department have not forgotten Tia.

Haynes never was formally assigned the case. In September 2013, though, he decided to take a look.

“It’s something I’ve always been intrigued by,” he said.

Detectives had talked to Hicks’ family and friends in the years after her death.

At the time, their prime suspect was Scott Cox, a long-haul truck driver who later was convicted in the murders of two women in Oregon and suspected in dozens of other attacks.

The truck driver’s route took him through 220th Street SW in Mountlake Terrace.

Back then, a team of detectives from throughout Western Washington was tracking Cox, looking for links to other homicides.

Cox may have been in Mountlake Terrace around the time Hicks went missing.

Before Cox was released from prison a couple of years ago, he was offered immunity for any information about Hicks.

“Ultimately, he talked to them (investigators), but he flat-out denied any involvement in her disappearance or her death,” Haynes said.

Cox said he might have seen Hicks before but he wasn’t sure.

Though Cox has not been ruled out as a suspect, Haynes estimates that his trip through Mountlake Terrace may have been three months before or after Hicks’ death.

To him, the timeline didn’t add up. Also, Cox was a violent killer. His victims were beaten and stabbed. Hicks wasn’t. The boat owner and the boat mechanic weren’t suspects. Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, also didn’t fit the profile.

The Hicks case was never closed, but it also wasn’t active.

“Everything just kind of dried up,” Haynes said.

***

Haynes hoped additional interviews might jog someone’s memory, produce some new clue.

He started tracking down the names in the file.

“Some people were cooperative,” he said. “Some were not.”

Haynes went to Seattle and asked about Hicks in Pioneer Square and at homeless shelters. He was told that toward the end of her life, she’d been living at a motel at the intersection of Highway 99 and 220th Street SW in Edmonds, two blocks from where her body was found.

The woman who’d been the motel manager in 1991 talked with Haynes. She remembered Hicks and three of her friends from that time. Haynes found one of them, a woman, homeless in Seattle. She was too strung out on drugs to be of any help.

He found another, a man, serving time in an Oregon prison. Haynes interviewed him in February.

Around the time of Hicks’ death, the man had been renting a house in the area of Highway 99 and 224th Street SW.

The man was friends with Hicks and the others. The group started hanging out at his house when they were kicked out of the motel.

The man wasn’t sure if Hicks was living there in early 1991. He’s not considered a suspect.

That area used to be woods, before the Interurban Trail was built. There was a footpath through the trees that connected the rented house and the parking lot with the boat.

The pieces seemed to click.

Haynes weighed possible scenarios, based on what he knew.

It is still “absolutely possible” that Hicks was the victim of a homicide, he said. He also hasn’t ruled out the possibility of an overdose, that her body could have been moved to the boat to avoid questions from police.

***

Haynes met with the police department’s evidence manager, the medical examiner and state crime lab experts. They went through all the evidence in the case.

He knew that DNA technology advancements over the past 20 years could make a difference. Other cold cases, most recently the 1995 murder of Patti Berry, have been solved because of DNA discovered on old evidence. Killers have been put behind bars, decades after their crimes.

Haynes sent everything back to the lab. Most of it came back negative for DNA.

There was a breakthrough, though.

Male DNA was found from samples collected from Hicks’ body.

The sample was small, fragile. It may not be enough material to produce a genetic profile for a specific person, but at least it was something.

Haynes had to consider whether re-testing the sample now might damage it too much for testing it another time in the future, when there may be additional forensic advancements. That could take another 20 years. He thought about that.

“It definitely needs to be done,” Haynes said. “This is something that happened 25 years ago. What it comes down to is Tia has a family. She has a mother who deeply, deeply wants answers.”

Haynes has another suspect in mind, a man in prison in California.

After the DNA test results come back, Haynes plans to pay the man a visit, to see if he’ll talk.

***

Tia Hicks’ sons are grown now. The oldest has a 4-year-old daughter.

The girl looks just like Tia did at that age, McDaniel said.

On that afternoon in July, the family watched the child play in her sparkly princess shirt.

Talking about Tia still brings McDaniel to tears.

As she cried, her great-grandaughter climbed onto her lap and put her arms around her neck.

After 23 years, the pain is still day-by-day.

McDaniel tries to be strong, for her grandkids and great-grandkids and for Tia, who is voiceless.

“I’m on the emotional roller coaster,” McDaniel said. “Sometimes it can just hit me. I’m stronger. I’m better. I’m trying to surround myself with positive people.”

It’s been so long now, some parts are hard to remember.

When McDaniel dies, she wants her and Tia’s ashes to be spread in Lake Washington. Tia loved the water.

McDaniel knows her grandsons may have a different plan. They’ll work it out, as a family.

Tia Hicks’ urn is inscribed with McDaniel’s favorite passage from the Bible, the 23rd Psalm: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …”

At Tia’s son’s house, Tia’s baby picture is hung next to his daughter’s baby picture.

Two little girls, both loved.

Rikki King: 425-339-3449; rking@heraldnet.com.

Can you help?

Anyone with information about the 1991 death of Tia Hicks, 20, should contact Mountlake Terrace police at 425-670-8260 or mhaynes@ci.mlt.wa.us. Detectives would like to talk to anyone who may have seen her or talked to her.