Laurie Renee Lucas, 24
One thing I’ve noticed way too frequently since I began writing this blog six years ago this month: killers are often the stereotypical wolf in sheep’s clothing.
In 1990, 24-year-old Laurie Renee Lucas was seen with just such a wolf. Since Laurie parted with William James Bannister, she was never seen or heard from again by parents, acquaintances, neighbors or friends. She just vanished.
Bannister has a track record for ingratiating himself with people unfamiliar with his background, according to numerous news reports in Colorado and California.
Like many of his kind, he was always eager to help strangers, especially in caring for their children.
Bannister was a charming, deferential neighbor.
Overburdened with details like working and raising a child alone, sometimes people make mistakes about who they trust with the safety of their own children.
Bannister was a thin man. He had thick brown hair and a bushy mustache. In the winter of 1986, he lived in a trailer next door to Debra Ann Youngs and her 7-year-old daughter April in the Woodchuck RV Park in Temecula, California, which is 93 miles Southeast of Los Angeles.
“I had no indication of anything odd,” Youngs would tell a reporter nine years later. “He seemed very stable. Just a single father, raising a son.”
Bannister, Youngs and each of their children had shared turkey on Thanksgiving a few weeks before April’s disappearance. Bannister’s 12-year-old son Justin was often seen wearing a Civil War uniform complete with a sword.
On Dec. 13, 1986, Youngs had some car trouble. She and April hitchhiked 11 miles to the Temecula thrift store where she worked. Bannister, who had worked as a trucker and leathercraft worker when he wasn’t in prison, entered the store that day.
“He casually asked if I wanted him to take April off my hands,” Youngs told the reporter for The Press-Enterprise of Riverside, Ca. “I started feeling guilty. Here’s this poor little girl having to spend her day with me at work.”
Youngs asked her daughter what she wanted to do and April said she wanted to go back to the mobile home park that was also a camp ground.