BANGOR – The case of Maine serial killer James Hicks will be featured next week in a one-hour episode of A&E’s “Investigative Reports Cold Case Files.”

The show will air at 9 p.m. Tuesday, June 19, on the A&E cable TV network.

Hicks, 48, of Etna, was sentenced last winter to two life sentences for the murders of 34-year-old Jerilyn Towers of Newport in 1982 and 40-year-old Lynn Willette in 1996. He already had served six years in prison for killing his first wife, 23-year-old Jennie Cyr Hicks, in 1977.

The bodies of the three women were not discovered until last fall when Hicks confessed to all of the killings and led police to the remains. He confessed after he was arrested in Lubbock, Texas, in April 2000, for robbing and assaulting a woman there. He was facing 55 years in prison in Texas and opted to confess to the Maine killings and lead police to the remains in exchange for being allowed to serve his time in a Maine prison.

He is now imprisoned at the Maine State Prison in Thomaston.

Hicks was returned to Maine last fall and led police to the bodies of the three women. All three had been suffocated and their bodies dismembered. Hicks led investigators to two shallow graves behind his former homestead on Route 2 in Etna, where Jennie Hicks and Towers were buried.

Willette’s body parts had been embedded in buckets of cement that were buried at a roadside site deep in the Haynesville Woods in Aroostook County.

Though the FBI labeled Hicks a serial killer, he remained free until his arrest in Texas. Without the bodies, police said, there was not enough evidence to arrest and convict him of murder.

The details of the case attracted the interest of the A&E Network, and a crew spent several days in Maine last February interviewing Assistant Attorney General William Stokes, who prosecuted Hicks, several police investigators, and family members of Hicks’ three murder victims. They also interviewed the woman in Texas who survived the attack by Hicks, according to the series producer, Michael Harvey.

Harvey said the crew went to the Maine State Prison in Thomaston and met with Hicks, but he chose not to do an interview with them.

The hour-long show typically features two half-hour segments exploring two cases. The Hicks case was so complex and spanned such a long period of time that the show’s producers chose to devote the entire hour to the case, Harvey said.

Harvey said the show would feature interviews with former Penobscot County Sheriff’s Deputy Tim Richardson, who initially investigated the disappearance of Jennie Cyr Hicks. She vanished from the couple’s trailer in Carmel in 1977, but Hicks was not arrested until 1982 when he became a suspect in Towers’ disappearance. He was convicted of what was then fourth degree murder and became the first person in Maine convicted of murder with no evidence of a dead body.

Newport Police Chief James Ricker also is interviewed on the show. Ricker investigated Towers’ disappearance and notified Texas authorities of Hicks’ background when Hicks moved there in 1999.

Maine State Police Detective Joe Zamboni, who was in charge of the Hicks investigation, also is interviewed, Harvey said.

Willette’s sister Wendy Allison was interviewed, as were Jennie Cyr Hicks’ sister Denise Clark and her mother, Myra Cyr. Towers’ sister and brother, Jean Worthley and Vance Tibbetts, were interviewed as was Towers’ daughter, Tammy Price.

The show also will include segments of Hicks’ nine-hour taped confession to police, Harvey said.

“This is not a re-enactment,” Harvey said. “Basically what we do is retell the story using the real evidence and real footage. We talk to the actual detectives and tell the story from the viewpoint of the investigators. It’s about detectives and family members who would not give up and would not allow the victims to be forgotten.”