Body Parts (23 page)

“That’s what family is for.”

“He’s a good brother. I’m okay.”

“Do you have an attorney?”

“No, no, I need, my brother said I shouldn’t say anything without one.”

“Right,” Wolfe said.

Deputy Gainey, who had come in with another sergeant, explained that some people were going to talk to Wayne, but it was up to him to decide how much he wanted to say without an attorney present.

“Obviously, they don’t have access to a mainstream attorney right now,” Gainey said. “But what they’ll do is advise you of your rights, and . . . if I were you . . . you can take the advice of your brother and just say you want an attorney present before you even talk to anyone.”

Wolfe then had Wayne strip down to the buff before he put on a jail-issued orange jumpsuit.

“Adam, I spoke with the other officer that was over in the lobby with us. And he’s with your brother now, and he wanted me to tell you that your brother said he loved you.”

Now dressed in his jail garb, Wayne walked down a hallway with Gainey and into a secure cell by himself. Wayne asked for a Bible.

After talking to Freeman, Rodney asked to speak to Wayne, so the deputies let them talk in the visiting room, where they were separated by Plexiglas. Their conversation was taped by a hidden recorder.

“They were kind of mad I told you to get an attorney, but I had no idea how bad this was,” Rodney said. “I thought maybe you just beat somebody up or broke somebody’s arms or something. Shoot . . . the detectives told me that, unfortunately, at this point, because you do want an attorney, there’s nothing they can do, and that they’re, they’re charging you with—I can’t remember what it was—malicious mischief or something. Because you said, you know, you cut off, had a woman’s tit. I know you don’t want to get out.”

“I don’t belong out, and this is weird,” Wayne said. “This is nuts.”

“I don’t know anything about what an attorney’s going to tell you . . . but if you want to . . . make it right with God, and make it right with yourself . . . ,” Rodney said, trailing off. “They don’t even know if you’re telling the truth or not. . . . They said that that breast is really, doesn’t mean anything, because they don’t know where you got it. . . . It doesn’t prove anything.”

“What do you think I should do?” Wayne asked. “Do you think I should just wait for an attorney?”

“I’m going to go back down and . . . tell them to come back and talk to you again. But you need to let them know if there’s somebody that needs help.”

“I need help.”

“I know you need help.”

They talked a bit more about what the police were going to do next; then Wayne said, “I don’t know. I think I’ll just keep your advice. . . . The attorneys know what to say, but I can’t, I can’t keep things in order.”

Rodney asked if there was someone out there who was hurt and needed help—meaning a woman, one of Wayne’s victims.

“No. It’s too late.”

“So that’s, ah, that’s a done deal.”

“Yeah, I didn’t mean to,” Wayne said.

“I know. I just want you to know I love you. Okay? . . . Hang in there.”

“Yeah. I belong here.”

“Well . . .”

“I do. Because I can’t stop. You know, what’s going on in my head, I couldn’t stop. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“I know this is hard for you. . . . What the most important thing is—I stay here, you know?”

“Yeah. Well . . . the best thing to do is when they do get you an attorney is listen to him and cooperate as much as you can, you know. So that they can . . . figure things out.”

“They got mad at you?” Wayne asked.

“Well, it’s okay.”

“But I heard ’em, when they shut the door, they said, ‘It’s his f***ing brother.’”

“I had no idea of—of how bad this was. I mean, I thought you just, you know, maybe beat somebody up or something. That’s why I said you should get an attorney.”

“Well, I just didn’t think you should know. . . . I didn’t think you really wanted to know. I know that you’re going to find out, but, well, I wanted to spend some time with you.”

Rodney started getting ready to leave, saying he was tired and needed to get some rest.

“Just don’t do anything stupid,” he said.

“I’ve had more than a lifetime’s quota of stupid things, I know that,” Wayne said. “It’s really kind of funny, because I can’t always . . . determine what I should do and what I shouldn’t do. Whether it’s right or whether it’s wrong. Whether it’s good or whether it’s bad. And even when I make up my mind, I can’t keep it made up, okay. I think that this is permanent here. Home.”

“If . . . you . . . believe in God . . . ,” Rodney said.

“I believe in God,” Wayne said.

“ . . . and believe in, in letting him help you. . . .”

“It’s up to him. I sure don’t know what to do.”

“If you want to stay in here, I mean, if you don’t want to be let out, you’re going to have to help him to help you.”

“You mean they’re going to try to let me out of here?” Wayne said, astonished.

“Well, they don’t have anything.”

“It wasn’t
mine
,” Wayne said, apparently referring to the breast in his pocket.

“I know, I know,” Rodney said. “Just read the Bible and do what you think is best.”

“That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to talk to an attorney. If they let me out—I’ll just come back in, because something’s . . . got to stay still. And I don’t want my baby to be an orphan. You know, he’s lost his father.”

The two of them debated the issue a bit longer.

“You told me today that . . . you’ve been a coward, right?” Rodney asked.

“Yeah,” Wayne replied.

“Don’t be one anymore.”

“You don’t think I should wait for an attorney?”

“I just think that there’s other people out there that are probably hurting because they don’t know. You know what I mean?” Rodney asked, referring to the victims’ families.

“Yeah.”

“And it would be like me losing one of my daughters and not knowing. . . . I mean, an attorney legally is going to get you the help you need. But still, right now, on your own, you should help them so that they can help the rest of the people . . . because that’s what . . . God would want you to do.”

“Okay,” Wayne said. “You want me to do that, I’ll do that.”

“So, if I go down there and tell them to come back and talk to you, I mean for them to take you seriously, I mean, you’re going to have to tell them some things that they can—”

“Okay.”

“Wouldn’t you want to know?” Rodney asked.

CHAPTER 16

“I H
AD
T
O
M
AKE
H
ER
S
MALL
”

After Rodney told Freeman that Wayne was ready to talk to him again, the detective brought Wayne to one of the jailhouse interview rooms that was essentially a ten-foot-square echo chamber, made out of cinder block, with a round table and several chairs in the middle. He also brought Gainey and a small portable tape recorder with him.

Based on the tenor of this interview and those that followed in the next couple of days with detectives from the three other counties involved, Wayne appeared to be of two conflicting minds. On the one hand, he wanted to get an attorney to protect himself legally, because he did not feel confident enough to do so on his own. But at the same time, he seemed to want to say enough to satisfy his brother and the detectives, and his reported desire to do the right thing by God, regardless of the circumstances. He seemed to know up front, no matter what he said, that he was going to be punished and that life as he knew it had ended.

What remains unclear is Wayne’s understanding of his rights under the law, and whether he was simply too confused—or mentally unstable—to decide when to stop talking without an attorney present, because once he got started, he just kept going.

Years later, Joe Canty, Wayne’s defense attorney, would argue, citing an opinion by a psychologist retained by Wayne’s first attorney, that “the defendant’s mental state was significantly impaired” at the time of the interviews. Canty noted that Wayne was being held in a “safety cell,” where he was, essentially, on suicide watch.

Deborah Davis, a psychology professor from the University of Nevada in Reno, and an expert in police interrogation tactics, testified at a hearing in 2003 that after reading transcripts of these sessions, she determined that Wayne was tired, confused, and coerced by investigators.

“Everything he said was consistent with him not being able to think clearly,” she said.

But the investigators and prosecutors—with whom the court would subsequently agree—maintained that Wayne understood enough to waive his right to an attorney during the initial interviews.

It was 9:12
P.M.
when Freeman started their second interview.

Wayne was so soft-spoken at times that Freeman could barely hear him. Other times his words disintegrated into tears and became inaudible. As a result, the transcriber often couldn’t make out what Wayne said on the tape, which left gaps in his statements.

When asked about a topic he didn’t want to discuss, such as the specifics of how he murdered these women, he’d look down and avoid Freeman’s gaze, his affect depressed and his voice flat. He became more animated, however, when he talked about details unrelated to the women’s deaths.

“I wouldn’t say he felt remorse, but I do think he felt bad,” Freeman recalled later.

Freeman tried to keep Wayne talking by maintaining an air of compassion, understanding, and sympathy.

“I was called by jail staff and they told me that you had decided that you wanted to talk to me,” Freeman said. “Is that right?”

“My brother told me I should talk to you,” Wayne said.

Freeman read Wayne his Miranda rights—his right to remain silent and his right to an attorney—and Wayne said that he understood them.

“Okay,” Freeman said. “And do you still want to talk about what happened?”

“Yeah.”

“So the question is . . . who does that breast belong to that you brought in here?”

Wayne said he didn’t know, mumbling something about the 395 and 15 freeways and the California Aqueduct. “That’s where the rest of her is.”

Wayne explained that there was a truck stop close to the area where he put her body, near Adelanto or Victorville or Hesperia, in southern California. He said he didn’t know her name, but she was a prostitute. As he was trying to remember more about her, he blurted out something else that grabbed Freeman’s attention.

“There was a girl in the slough.”

“In Eureka? That was you?” Freeman asked. “That was the one that was found a year ago.”

Freeman left the room with Gainey for a second and came back with a California map, so Wayne could help them locate exactly where he’d dumped the woman with the missing breast.

“But you just told me that there was a girl in the slough, correct? Is, is that right, Wayne?”

“Yes.”

“That was you that killed that girl?”

Wayne mumbled something.

“It’s okay,” Freeman said.

“I didn’t mean to.”

“You didn’t mean to? . . . Was it an accident?”

“Sort of.”

Wayne said he didn’t know who the first woman was, only that he had picked her up on Broadway in Eureka, and that she had some sort of nickname he couldn’t remember. He couldn’t recall exactly where she was from, but he said it was out of state.

“I hope this helps,” Wayne said.

With a little more coaxing, Wayne said she was white, weighed about 150 pounds, and was about five feet six inches tall.

Freeman explained that he knew this would be difficult for Wayne, but it was very important that he describe what he did to the woman he put in the slough so that Freeman could verify that Wayne didn’t just read about her in the newspaper.

“Whoever killed her did some things to her that only I know about and the person knows about,” Freeman said. “So you mind telling me?”

“I had to make her small so she would fit better.”

“Okay.”

“I cut her head off. I cut her breasts off. Her arms, her legs. I tried opening things up.”

“You tried to open her up? Okay, and how did you do that?”

Wayne said he cut her down the middle with a razor blade, then cut off her arms, legs, and head with a knife, which was now at his campsite in Trinidad. He said he stored the thighs in his freezer until recently, when he buried them at the foot of a stump about thirty feet from his tent and covered the hole with leaves.

Freeman asked if the arm found on Clam Beach several months later was from the same person.

“I think so. The funny thing is . . . it washed off the island there. And I don’t know who else is doing what else around here, you know,” Wayne said, suggesting there might be another killer at work in the area.

“Hasn’t she come up as somebody missing?” Wayne asked.

Freeman said he’d looked at thousands of missing persons reports over the past year. “Actually, the ‘Torso Girl’ was my case. I’ve been working on it ever since she was found.”

“What, are you a homicide detective?” Wayne asked.

“Yes, I am. I thank you and I thank God . . . because it’s really been bothering me for a year. My wife and I have both been praying every night that this case gets solved. And we both knew that it would be nothing great that I did, it would be that whoever . . .”

“God did it,” Wayne said, interrupting.

“God would send the responsible party. And he did, and I—I thank him for that, ’cause I think that’s his work.”

“It is,” Wayne said. “I hope you can identify her.”

Wayne added that she was about twenty-five years old, had a tattooed band of roses around her ankle, and seemed like she was on drugs. “I really think her brain was fried.”

Wayne also said she looked like the Eureka teenage girl who had gone missing around the same time.

“It’s not Karen Mitchell?” Freeman asked.