Blood Lust: Portrait of a Serial Sex Killer (32 page)

Chapter 22

In the early part of October, the Molalla
Forest Task Force received a telephone tip that one of the
remaining unidentified forest victims could be Nondace "Noni" Kae
Cervantes, twenty-six, originally from Tempe, Arizona. When Turner
checked the National Crime Information Center's computer data banks
to see if she had a criminal record, he learned that she had been
arrested in Canby on July 6, 1979, on a misdemeanor charge of
public indecency, specifically indecent exposure. She had been
arrested again in 1984 in Portland on accusations of trespassing
and assault. Turner contacted the Canby Police Department, and they
agreed to dig out and send him the crime report on the public
indecency charge. The Portland Police Bureau agreed to do likewise
with its trespassing and assault report.

Meanwhile, Turner located one of Noni's
relatives who lived in Oregon. The relative said she hadn't seen
Noni for some time, at least for two or three months. She said she
thought she had last seen her in Portland on July 24, when Noni was
living at a downtown hotel. The hotel was described as a "shooting
gallery," and its primary residents consisted of former prisoners,
drug addicts, and prostitutes.

The relative told Turner that Noni was into
drugs, particularly cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and alcohol. She
was known to inject cocaine and heroin intravenously, but the
relative did not know if Noni worked as a prostitute. The relative
said that Noni had been seen by a psychiatrist when she was
younger.

"I think she just liked the rock groups and
that sort of thing," said the relative. "She was quite adolescent
in her likes, but we all loved her. She was always beautiful. Her
pictures don't do her justice at all. She could have been a
Harper's Bazaar
model, she had such beautiful features. She
was a slender, tall girl."

Turner tracked down an acquaintance of
Noni's, who described the missing woman as wild. She said Noni was
a heavy drinker, and confirmed that she was heavily into drugs and
moved around a lot.

"Noni looked like something out of the
Goodwill box," said the acquaintance, who added that she hadn't
seen her for some time.

A couple of days later, Turner received the
crime report on Noni from the Canby Police Department. Officers
Dale Janzen and Robert Ek had been dispatched to the corner of 2nd
Avenue and Elm Street in Canby on July 6, 1979, after a shocked
citizen reported seeing a female exposer in front of what had
previously been a Baptist church.

When Janzen and Ek arrived, they had observed
a leg protruding from behind a tree in front of the former church.
As they approached, the two officers saw a naked woman lying on the
front lawn of the church. She was face up, massaging her left
breast with her left hand, and she was fondling her vagina,
masturbating, with her right hand. Her eyes were closed, and she
seemed to have been enjoying herself. She wasn't even aware that
the officers had arrived.

When she realized that she was being
observed, she sat up but made no attempt to cover her body. She
appeared very intoxicated, and the officers smelled a strong odor
of alcohol on her breath.

It was a busy intersection, and several cars
had passed by slowly to get a peek at the naked woman. Finally
Janzen and Ek managed to get her into their patrol car and found
her clothes lying in the bushes nearby. After being asked to do so,
she put her clothes back on. She began laughing.

"This is nothing to get upset about," she
said, still laughing. "I do this all the time in California."

"Why were you doing that?" asked Janzen.

"Because I haven't had a fuck in some time.
I'm horny as hell, and you guys came too soon. I didn't even reach
climax."

She added that the first time she ever made
love was inside a church she had broken into, and she felt that the
churchyard was a good place to masturbate.

"What is your name, miss?" asked Janzen.

"Linda Blair," she responded. "And I'm going
to throw up all over you!"

She had no identification on her. However,
after arriving at the police station, she finally told the two
officers that her name wasn't Linda. It was Nondace Kae Cervantes.
She told them that she was an actress and that she wanted to become
a porno queen. She couldn't understand why everyone was making such
a fuss about her masturbating on the church lawn. She said she had
committed no crime, was born nude, and that she did that sort of
thing all the time. She was living in Canby at the time, she
said.

Noni was convicted of indecent exposure in
Canby Municipal Court and placed on bench probation for one year.
Basically, all that meant was that she had to report in regularly
to a probation officer and stay out of trouble.

When Turner checked Noni's police record in
Arizona, he came up empty-handed. She had no arrest record with the
Tempe police, none with the Phoenix police, and none with the
Arizona Department of Public Safety (state police).

On Wednesday morning, October 14, Turner
received a call from Dr. Larry Lewman, acting state medical
examiner. Lewman told him that one of Noni's relatives from Arizona
had called him and was concerned that Noni might be one of the
Molalla forest victims. He said the relative mentioned that Noni
had had jaw surgery several years ago and that she might very well
be Body #3.

"I don't know how the relative heard about
the Molalla killings in Arizona," Lewman told Turner. "But she said
Noni had been missing and the height, weight, and so on fit pretty
well, particularly the surgery she'd had on her left jaw."

Turner promptly called Lieutenant Colleen Aas
at the Oregon State Police Identification Bureau. Aas was trying to
match the fingerprints of the Molalla forest victims to prints of
missing females, and Aas told Turner that she had obtained fairly
good prints from the hands of Body #3. After Turner filled her in
on the latest developments concerning Noni Cervantes, Aas agreed to
coordinate identification efforts with law enforcement authorities
which had Noni's fingerprints on file.

Later that same afternoon, Aas informed
Turner that she had made a match. Body #3 was in fact Noni
Cervantes, making Noni the first of the Molalla forest victims to
be identified through fingerprints.

As he reflected on the case, Turner recalled
that Noni was the victim that had been eviscerated and had likely
died so horribly. Not that the others hadn't; they, too, had died
slow and painful deaths. It was just that it was so hard to
visualize someone, even a maniac, inserting a knife blade, possibly
a machete, into a woman's vagina and then ripping her all the way
up the middle. He also considered it ironic that Noni had lived in
Canby, not too far from where Dayton Leroy Rogers had lived.

Chapter 23

At 9 A.M. on Monday, November 2, detectives
Turner, Machado, and Strovink, accompanied by Criminologist John
Gilliland, met Oregon State Police Criminologist Bob Thompson at
the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office property room, essentially a
large warehouse-type structure located adjacent to the county jail.
They were there to execute a second search warrant on Dayton Leroy
Rogers's light-blue Nissan pickup.

The reason for the second search warrant was
simple. The first time the truck was searched had been in
connection with Jenny Smith's murder. Since then the Molalla forest
bodies had been discovered, along with an abundance of evidence
that linked Dayton to those crimes as well. Since they were
essentially investigating two cases, the lawmen had to have a
second search warrant that stipulated what they were searching for
with regard to the second case. Everything was going to be done by
the numbers on this one. There could be no room for slipups.

First, they disassembled and removed the
bench seat from the pickup. Then they removed the left and right
door panels and took out the floor covering. Numerous blood samples
were collected and hair and fiber samples were obtained by vacuum
sweepings from the now-bare interior locations. What appeared to be
some kind of larvae husks were collected from a blood-soaked
portion of the underside of the floor mat. From the pickup's
exterior, they removed elastic cords and ropes that were strewn
about the bed, and soil samples were collected from the wheel
wells. The effort took most of the morning.

At 1 P.M., the yellow Mustang that Dayton's
wife formerly owned was brought to the sheriff's office by its new
owner, who had agreed to allow Turner to collect fiber and hair
samples from its interior. Because so much time had passed since
Dayton had used the vehicle, it was doubtful that anything useful
would be obtained. But since Turner had gone to the trouble of
tracing the car down, he figured he might as well collect potential
evidence from it. As suspected, though, he soon realized that the
effort had been futile.

At 1:10 P.M. Machado received a call from
Deputy Dave Broomfield, who informed him that Body #1 had been
positively identified as Reatha Marie Gyles, sixteen. The missing
person report that Reatha's mother had filed on July 29 had
surfaced in Broomfield's computer as a possible Molalla forest
victim, and a comparison of Reatha's dental charts to the teeth of
Body #1 had matched. There were other identifying factors as well,
such as the distinctive pelvic and hip surgery that Lewman had
noted during the autopsy on Body #1. Reatha, it turned out, had
gone through several such surgeries at Portland's Shriner's
Hospital while growing up, due to congenitally dislocated hips.

An hour later Turner and Machado drove to the
Gyles residence and delivered the bad news. For-tunately, the
pastor from the church that the Gyleses attended was there visiting
when the detectives arrived. Although the pastor's presence seemed
to be comforting to the family, it didn't make it any easier for
Turner and Machado to tell them that Reatha had been murdered.

The family revealed that they knew that
Reatha was a prostitute. They told the detectives that she normally
worked 82nd Avenue near Powell Boulevard. Except for a girl they
had heard of only by the name of Dee Dee, they didn't know the
names of any of the other girls Reatha had associated with on 82nd.
Dee Dee, they thought, was older than Reatha, about twenty-one, and
they thought that she hung out with Reatha at the Game Room, a
popular teen gathering spot on 82nd.

Family members identified a jewelry pendant
that Turner had brought along as Reatha's. It was two Playboy
bunnies facing each other, and she normally wore it on a gold
chain. They also identified a pair of underpants found at the
Molalla forest site that had "Thursday's Child" stitched into the
fabric. They also thought that a pair of jeans found at the site
had belonged to Reatha.

When Turner tracked down Reatha's boyfriend,
Leonard Todd Thornton, at a Washington State Job Corps center, he
confirmed much of what Reatha's family had told him and Machado.
Leonard said that he last saw Reatha alive on July 21, when he
dropped her off on 82nd Avenue so she could look for a customer. He
explained that he wasn't Reatha's pimp, that she didn't have one.
He said he didn't like the fact that Reatha worked as a prostitute,
but the money attracted him. Leonard identified the pair of blue
jeans and the metal Playboy bunny pendant found at the Molalla
site. He said he had given Reatha the pendant. When Turner
mentioned Reatha's acquaintance, Dee Dee, Leonard immediately
identified her as Cynthia Diane DeVore, another prostitute.

When Turner had crime analyst Broomfield run
Cynthia's name through his computer, nothing came up. There had
been no missing person reports filed on her, but she did have a
police record. She had been arrested twice in Multnomah County on
accusations of unauthorized use of a motor vehicle in December 1985
and again in June 1987. In the latter case, she had told police
that she had been hitchhiking and was picked up by a man who was
driving a stolen car, but the follow-up investigation indicated
that her involvement was more than what she had acknowledged. At
the time of Turner's inquiry, according to Portland Police Bureau
Detective David Simpson, Cynthia was wanted on a warrant for
failing to show up in court to answer to the charges. Turner listed
her as a possible Molalla forest victim, along with hundreds of
other missing women.

Much of December entailed more of the same
for the task force detectives, namely interviewing area hookers who
claimed to have had contacts with Dayton Leroy Rogers. They were
also called out to the Molalla forest area on several occasions to
investigate shoes and articles of clothing that had been discovered
by area residents, and to look into reports of strange and unusual
odors that some said smelled like decomposing flesh. However, they
failed to find the sources of the odors, and the shoes and clothing
had been dumped in the area quite some time ago. They were in fact
rotten, and there was nothing to indicate that they had any bearing
on the case. In short, the calls amounted to a wild goose chase,
but it had been necessary to check them out just the same.

It wasn't until December 28 that anything new
that was of particular significance surfaced. At 4:55 P.M. that day
Detective Strovink was contacted by a concerned citizen who also
happened to be a longtime friend of Dayton Leroy Rogers's family.
The caller identified himself as Clifford Shirley and offered what
Strovink considered vital information to the case.

Shirley told Strovink that he had received
information during the Christmas holiday that had been shared
between his wife, Sherry Shirley, and relatives of Dayton's. He
said that his wife had been told that Dayton had confessed to his
mother and a sister that he was responsible for the murders of
Jenny Smith and the Molalla forest killings. The information was
passed on to Turner, who followed up on it the next day.