Body Parts (27 page)

Jones asked how long he did that, but Wayne said he had trouble with time.

“Was it about five minutes, ten minutes?” Jones asked.

“Long time.”

“It seems like a real long time, especially when it doesn’t seem like things are working,” Jones said, using the compassion technique to the hilt.

“Wasn’t.”

“It wasn’t working, was it?”

“No.”

Jones said that must have been difficult for him, but he knew Wayne had tried his best. “What did you do then?”

“Went crazy,” Wayne said.

Asked to elaborate, Wayne said he didn’t remember. All he knew was that she was dead and he needed to secure her body, using the ties and ropes he kept in the truck, before he headed to Arizona to make a pickup.

He’d already been up all night and knew he’d be driving for the next twenty-four hours, so he stopped to get some coffee and a burrito to keep him going.

“Part of me says she got out of the truck and walked away,” Wayne said.

“Is that because you wanted her to get out of the truck and walk away?” Jones asked.

“I do. I wished.”

“But she didn’t get out of the truck and walk away.”

“She didn’t . . . I don’t know what happens.... That’s why I came here. I don’t know what’s going on. . . . I end up with these problems. I know I cause them. I’m not sure exactly . . .”

“Exactly how,” Jones finished for him.

“I know that I play rough sometimes.”

Jones asked if Wayne had ever choked anybody when they were having sex, not meaning to hurt them, but because he wanted to increase the orgasm’s intensity. “Is that what you mean when you say you play rough, or do you do a lot of other things?”

“I always try to get them off,” Wayne said.

“How do you try to get them off?”

“Whatever they like the most.”

Jones rattled off a series of common sex acts, encouraging Wayne to open up by saying he’d seen all kinds of things working in the sex crimes unit. Then he delved into the kinkier sex practices, where he knew Wayne liked to go.

“Some women, I’ve been told, like to be choked up when they’re having sex. Okay? What did she like?” Jones asked, waiting for Wayne to answer. “Do you remember what she liked, Adam?”

“No. I think I hurt her.”

When Jones tried to delve deeper, Wayne changed the subject again.

“She’s beautiful,” he said.

Prodded by Jones to refocus on the relevant details, Wayne explained how he propped her up, secured her with some rope, and wrapped her in a blue tarp that he bought at a truck stop in Kingman, Arizona, on his return to California. Then, he tied her to the top bunk in the sleeper—only she fell down.

“What you mean she fell?”

“She fell forward. I pulled and I pulled and I pulled and I couldn’t get her back up. Fell in between the bunk and the front seat. And her foot was sticking out, behind the front seat,” Wayne said, gesturing.

He said he noticed that her head was a darker color than the rest of her body, even using the correct technical term—“lividity”—to describe it. Initially, he said, she was on her back, but she turned upside down when she fell in between the seats, so that the top of her body was resting against the truck floor, which got very hot. When her body started leaking, he wiped up the fluid with paper towels and threw them out the window.

Before he got to the weight station at the Grapevine on Interstate 5, he pulled the curtain down to try to cover her up. After he pulled up to the scales, an officer got into the cab next to him, and Wayne was sure he would figure out what was behind that curtain. Wayne even hoped that he would.

“How long did you keep this girl in the cab with you?”

“Too long,” Wayne said. “I should have taken her straight to a hospital.”

Jones asked if he started noticing “something about her.”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“[It’s] not very nice to talk about someone like that,” Wayne said.

“She start to smell, real bad? . . . So, what you do with her?”

It was nighttime, Wayne said, when he put her in the water along State Route 12, somewhere around a Texaco truck stop off State Route 99, across the street from a grain silo. He put on a pair of leather gloves, pulled her out through the emergency exit, dragged her along the dirt, and put her into the ditch next to a big tree. He left the gloves and tarp in the ditch and threw her clothes out the truck window somewhere else—he didn’t remember where.

Jones showed some of the crime scene photos, and Wayne confirmed that was the spot where he dumped her.

Herrera asked if Wayne saved anything of hers to remember her by (a common practice of serial killers so they can enjoy their crime all over again—and relive the sexual pleasure of it), but Wayne said no.

Herrera asked Wayne how he felt, being responsible for this woman’s death.

“I’d feel better if you’d shoot me,” Wayne said.

“In other words, you’re not glad that this happened?”

“Right.”

“Are you sorry this happened?”

“Sorry.”

“Course you’re sorry,” Herrera said. “That’s one of the reasons why you came into the sheriff’s office here, to try to make things right. Or, why did you come in?”

“That’s another decision that I have trouble with. I think it’s for one reason and then I think it’s for another. . . . It just keeps happening.”

“You want it to stop?”

“Yeah, and if I can just get away from it. Don’t want to see any babies. Because every time I see a baby, I just lose it. . . . I can be driving down the road and doing just fine . . . but then I see a baby.”

“Or you begin to talk about it. I noticed every time you talk about it, you get upset, is that right?” Herrera asked.

“Yes.”

“Is that what got you upset the day when you met this girl, when she began talking about her babies? And you thought about your . . . baby?”

“Uh-huh.”

Wayne explained that’s why he called his brother, because he wasn’t sure how he was going to stop otherwise. “I think that I would have went after my wife,” Wayne said.

“You didn’t want to do that?”

“No.”

“That was a smart move.”

Herrera asked if all the women Wayne had hurt had talked about babies, and Wayne nodded. Jones tried to get Wayne to be more specific about his motivation—what he was thinking when he hurt them, but he wouldn’t answer.

“How long have you wanted to hurt your ex-wife?” Herrera asked.

“I don’t know.”

Wayne tried to deflect once again.

“My dad was into violence,” he said. “And he wanted me to be, so I was for a long time. Then I decided I didn’t want to be treated like that.”

Herrera pulled him back to the women, asking if he’d ever considered taking Lanett home so that he could cut her up like the other women.

“No,” Wayne said.

Herrera asked if Wayne got rough while the two of them were having sex and that made her stop breathing.

“I think I stopped her from breathing,” Wayne said.

“And you do not remember how, or are you afraid to say it, or what is it?” Herrera asked.

“I don’t clearly remember. Sometimes I just have to tell things stop. . . . Can’t think, can’t do anything. . . . Just want everything to stop.”

Herrera asked if Wayne had learned about choke holds and carotid restraints while he was in the service. Wayne said no, it was at the Institute for Better Health, before he entered the marines. Herrera asked if he might have used a carotid restraint on this girl or any of the others.

Wayne sat silently, so Herrera asked again.

“I don’t know,” Wayne said. “There’s a beginning and there’s an ending. There’s no middle.”

Herrera asked him to explain.

“I remember being with her. I remember trying to make her breathe again. . . . Sometimes that’s the hard part, seems all I can remember.”

Wayne said that he was able to revive some women and let them go, the last one being a hooker from San Francisco.

Jones asked if he’d ever done the carotid move with any girlfriend or wife. Wayne said he’d tried it once with his second wife, tying a red robe belt around her neck so that she lost consciousness for a second.

“I wouldn’t hurt her. She didn’t want [to have sex], and it made me a little mad, so I guess I ended up getting rough with her in sex.”

Jones asked if this was something she wanted or asked him to do.

“No. I did it. She didn’t protest it.”

“Did she seem to enjoy it?”

“At the time, she seemed to, but she later on said that she didn’t.”

Jones tried to walk Wayne through the pathways that his mind took with each of these women.

“Do you see your ex-wife’s face when you’re talking to these girls? Does it become that you’re not talking to these girls, that you’re talking to your ex-wife?”

“Yeah,” Wayne said.

Jones asked Wayne to visualize what happened when these women talked about babies and he started thinking about how his wife took his son away from him.

Wayne said he wanted the women to stop talking. “Just freeze. Stop her.”

“She’s talking about her babies and she’s making you think about your babies.”

“Yeah. I don’t want to think about my baby now,” Wayne said.

Nonetheless, he proceeded to tell Jones about the time he spent the day with Max, when he took him to the toy store. He said Max didn’t want him to leave the child care center, so he figured he would wait for his wife to come and get their son.

“She didn’t show up,” Wayne said. “Took Max in and all he could say was ‘No, Daddy. No, Daddy. No, Daddy.’ He’s crying. . . . I didn’t want to leave him, so I took him in there . . . laid there on the floor, told Max to go to sleep. I laid him on my chest . . . and he laid there for an hour or two, never moved a muscle. His eyes are wide open. He wasn’t going to sleep, he wasn’t saying nothing . . . didn’t want me to leave. Just wanted to be content. Just wanted to be secure. I finally had to leave.”

Wayne said he sat outside in his grandparents’ car, upset that there was only one girl inside, taking care of ten little kids—but not really paying attention to them—and feeding them watered-down Kool-Aid and stale bread with peanut butter.

He said he hadn’t gone back to see his son since that day.

“I can’t. Because I wouldn’t leave him. I’d take him,” Wayne said, adding that he knew that wouldn’t be right.

Herrera asked Wayne again if he was sorry the woman they’d been talking about earlier was dead.

“I didn’t mean to kill her. I killed her—I didn’t try to kill her. I don’t want her dead now, I didn’t want her dead then.”

Herrera asked Wayne to explain what was involved in a carotid restraint, and again, Wayne answered very technically, switching to his instructor’s voice.

“It’s where you cut off two—the two carotid arteries. Both sides of your neck supply blood to the brain.... You apply pressure . . . you’d use a hold, standing off to the right. You can use a rope or something.”

Herrera asked how many women—Wayne had had sex with and then revived with CPR.

“Fifty,” Wayne replied.

“When you saved them . . . what would happen after that?”

“They’d leave.”

In his wrap-up questions, Jones asked Wayne again how many days he kept Lanett’s body in his truck before dumping her.

“Two or three. Couldn’t figure out what to do.”

With that, they ended the interview. It was 11:55
P.M.

From the way Wayne was mumbling, Jones later said, he got the sense Wayne was “somewhat remorseful” and possibly even ashamed about what he’d done to these women—so much so that he couldn’t bear to hear himself say it out loud.

“I honestly think he didn’t want to keep doing it,” Jones said.

Still, Jones said he didn’t believe Wayne’s excuse—that his actions were triggered by the women’s talk of babies—nor did he believe that Wayne was mentally ill.

“He knew what he was doing at the time he did it,” and knew it was wrong, Jones said.

Jones wondered if Wayne might have been hoping he’d get a sympathetic jury that felt prostitutes deserved to die because of their lifestyle. Or maybe he simply hoped that if he told the truth, he would go to a mental hospital instead of prison.

“I think there was a lot of acting on his part,” Jones said. “He realized his life is over and he has to do everything he can to try to make the best of it.”

Herrera agreed. He said Wayne seemed fine when he was remembering details that weren’t criminal, describing how Wayne would hesitate, rub his head, and sit silently, overcome by “amnesia.” Herrera figured that Wayne was ashamed and therefore reluctant to explain in detail how he’d killed these women.

“I felt at the time, during the interview, that he did remember, but he didn’t want to go there,” Herrera said later.

The detectives gave Wayne a break of less than ten minutes before handing him over to Gonzales and Staggs.

Gonzales was concerned that Wayne’s defense attorney might later take issue with such a prolonged period of questioning, but he went ahead with a nearly two-and-a-half-hour interview to get what he could out of Wayne before stopping for the night.

“I wanted to establish a relationship with him from the outset with the hopes of reinterviewing him the next day,” said Gonzales, who came well-equipped with eight 60-minute tapes for his handheld recorder.

As the interview proceeded, however, Gonzales grew increasingly concerned about “the fatigue factor.” Wayne looked tired and frazzled, his hair a mess.

Apparently, Wayne was not used to seeing a sheriff’s detective wearing a suit.

“You FBI?” he asked Gonzales before they got started.

“Oh, no,” Gonzales replied. “I’m just from San Bernardino County.”

The next thing Wayne asked was whether they would take off his handcuffs, which were fastened in front.

“I’m not a danger,” Wayne said. “That’s why I’m here. I don’t want to be a danger. . . . If I was going to run, I wouldn’t have turned myself in.”

Wayne said he’d been increasingly losing his ability to think on the road over the past year. “I don’t know why, just been getting worse and worse,” he said. “That’s why I came home.”