Body Parts (28 page)

Asked to talk about his trip through Victorville, Wayne said he was on his way to pick up his weirdest load ever—bags of concrete that he was supposed to drop off in Los Banos. When he got to the drop-off point, the warehouse was empty except for a brand-new forklift, which he was supposed to use to unload the bags, all by himself.

“We’re not forklift operators, we’re truck drivers,” he explained. “It’s like some shady deal. A lot of work.”

Along the way, he said, he was driving through town on Highway 18 when he saw a woman standing next to a stop sign, across the street from a park, in the middle of town. He was still some distance away, so he slowed down, thinking she wanted to cross the street. But instead, she waved and flagged him over, lifting up her long white T-shirt to flash her panties at him.

He couldn’t stop and pull his big, heavy truck over that suddenly, so he went around the block and came back, parking in front of a nearby building.

She got into his truck and gave him a price, but she didn’t mention her name. Wayne noticed that she had “a funny nose,” as if it had been broken once. He couldn’t remember the fee she asked for, he said, because at the time he was too distracted with worry that his big truck was blocking traffic.

Gonzales showed him a photo of Patricia Tamez, and Wayne recognized her immediately.

“That’s her,” he said.

Wayne said they started driving toward Lucerne, but they stopped along the way. Before he would give any more details, Wayne wanted to know more about the woman. He wanted to know her name.

“Her name was Patricia, okay? She was from that area, and from the information that we have, just like you had mentioned to me earlier, that she was a prostitute.”

“Seems like an oddball area to have a prostitute,” Wayne said.

Gonzales went on to say that her family lived in the area as well.

“Tell them I’m sorry,” Wayne said.

“I will do that,” Gonzales said.

“Tell them I didn’t mean to.”

Wayne went on, explaining that he stopped the truck in a dirt lot next to a Circle K or 7-Eleven that was on the way to Los Banos so they could have sex in the truck.

Like the other detectives before him, Gonzales started asking Wayne for specifics, aiming to work his way up to whatever Wayne did to kill her.

“I remember we were having sex, and I was, I was talking to her.”

“Okay.”

Wayne asked for another cup of coffee. “I’m trying to pull this out of my head, but it’s not coming,” he said.

Gonzales said he understood that these were difficult things to talk about.

“It’s more than that,” Wayne countered.

“You know, you’re probably right,” Gonzales said.

“No, this is the same point that I can’t, I don’t exactly [know] what happens.”

Gonzales asked if Wayne was blanking out on that part because it wasn’t something good to remember.

“I try,” Wayne said.

Gonzales said that was perfectly okay—people did that all the time—but he needed to go back to this woman’s family and explain what happened to her.

“I was trying to revive her,” Wayne said. “She wasn’t breathing.”

“Adam, what happened to her? How did she get to the point where you had to try to revive her?”

But just as in the previous interviews, Wayne wouldn’t—or couldn’t—go there, and no matter how many different times or different ways Gonzales would ask, Wayne would only say that he gave her CPR, but he couldn’t bring her back.

“Was there a point in time that you knew that she was dead?” Gonzales asked.

“After I got too tired.”

“Too tired of doing what?”

“Breathing, pressing.”

Gonzales tried one more time to try to get Wayne to describe what made Patricia stop breathing.

“I did it. I made her not breathe.”

“You made her not breathe.”

“I must have. I was the only one there.”

“I know we’re at a bad spot now, okay. We’re at a point . . . where it’s not pleasant. But we got to get over that hump, Adam.”

“My mind is not here.”

“Okay. We’ll go back to that.”

“Having sex. Makes it feel better,” Wayne said a few minutes later.

“If what . . .” Gonzales said, trying to coax Wayne into elaborating.

“If you cut off—”

“Cut off their airway,” Gonzales offered.

“No, the blood. The carotid arteries.”

Wayne said he did this while he gave women oral sex— sometimes choking them with his hands and sometimes with a necktie, but he didn’t remember doing that to this particular woman.

When he started giving her CPR, he recalled thinking that this had happened too many times, and that he wanted to take her to the hospital or to the police department.

“After you left the parking lot . . . where did you go?” Gonzales asked.

Wayne said he stopped somewhere along Highway 18.

“What did you do with Patricia?”

“I tried, tried again,” Wayne said. “I knew it wasn’t meant to die. I wanted to—I cried.”

“Why did you cry,Adam?”

“’Cause I didn’t want that to happen.”

“Did you cry because you knew it was wrong, Adam?”

“Yeah. It shouldn’t have happened.”

Gonzales asked what he did next.

“Put her in the water,” Wayne said.

He said he always saw the California Aqueduct while was driving his truck. So he picked a dirt area, where somebody had dug what looked like a grave, near a bridge over the aqueduct on Highway 395. Later, he threw her clothes out the window somewhere, maybe in the desert.

Gonzales asked Wayne if thought he might have injured Patricia by doing CPR too hard. Wayne said he knew that was possible to do, but he didn’t think that occurred in this case, because he couldn’t make hard compressions on his sleeper mattress.

“At any point in time, did she offend you? Did she hit you? Did she do anything like that?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Wayne said. “She was a nice person.”

When Wayne turned himself in, Gonzales asked, “You had something with you, right?”

“It was hers,” Wayne said.

“What was that?”

“Her breast.”

As Gonzales walked Wayne through what happened after he stopped trying to revive her, Wayne told a very disjointed story that was nowhere near chronological.

He was in a hurry to pick up his load of cement bags, so he quickly tied her feet and hands with some rope, then lashed her entire body to the top bunk so that she wouldn’t roll forward when he stopped.

After that, he went to the cement plant in Lucerne and loaded more than one hundred pounds of cement bags onto his flatbed. The whole time he was loading, no one at the plant knew he had a body in his truck. Wayne said he had a lot of trouble loading that day, and it took more than four hours—putting on bags and taking some of them off—to get the weight right.

“I told him ‘I quit.’ I told him, ‘I’m not coming back here no more.’ I was upset. I was mad. Things were just not going right. I was really . . . messed up—that’s what it was,” Wayne said.

After he picked the spot along the aqueduct, he laid a tarp on the ground, then pulled the body out of the emergency door so she was feetfirst and faceup. He cut some rope so he could drag the tarp over to the canal, then used a Kershsaw hunting knife with a sawtooth blade, eight or ten inches long, with a black handle, to cut off her left breast.

“Why did you do that?”

“I think I wanted to turn it in. . . . I don’t know that I planned it.”

He explained that he kept the knife in a pocket on the truck’s passenger-side door when he wasn’t planning to use it, and on the driver’s side when he was. That day, it was on the passenger side.

He said he wanted to put her in the water, not to conceal her, but “so she wouldn’t smell.” He was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to roll her body down the cement. He also thought he might fall in if he went down and tried to push her in, so he took the rope and tied it around one of her breasts, thinking she would roll like a yo-yo. But things didn’t go as he’d imagined.

“I removed the breast when she didn’t roll,” he said.

Gonzales asked Wayne how she ended up with such severe back injuries. At first, Wayne said he had no idea, but then said it might’ve happened when he pulled her out of the truck.

Wayne said he didn’t try to support her body and lay her on the ground, he just pulled and down she came. That’s because he was in a hurry. There were lots of cars going by and his truck was in the way.

He managed to get her body close to the water, but then he had to figure out a way to get her into it.

“I know this isn’t very respectful—I kicked her down into the water . . . not really kick, you know, pushed, pushed.”

He got back in his truck and drove back up to the highway, from the 58 to the 5 to the 152, stopping at the truck stop in Four Corners, where he tried to sleep, but couldn’t.

“Why do you think this happened?” Gonzales asked.

“Something wrong with me.”

“What do you think that is, Adam?”

“I wish I knew. If I knew, it wouldn’t be wrong with me.”

Wayne said he went out into the woods in Trinidad because he didn’t want to see or hear anything anymore, or to think about things that caused him pain, but he still couldn’t stop thinking about his wife. So instead of going to get her, he called Rodney. He asked his brother if he should stay in the woods or turn himself in. His brother told him to do the latter.

“I don’t want to see babies anymore,” Wayne said. “I don’t want to see any more women.”

“Because this might happen again?”

“Yeah.”

Gonzales asked Wayne if he had left any other victims in San Bernardino County. Wayne said he didn’t know, but he would look at a picture.

It was getting close to 2:30
A.M.
, so Gonzales decided to stop the interview and let Wayne get some rest. They would pick up again in the morning.

When Wayne cried during the interview, Gonzales believed that they weren’t tears of remorse for the victim, but rather an expression of sadness for how his acts were affecting his own life.

“I do think that Ford was driven by his ex-wife. Something to do with his son . . . he lost reality and turned to this. But did he have any deep sorrow for these victims? No, because they were prostitutes and they weren’t important to him. They were the way to get back at his personal life.”

CHAPTER 19

“H
E
A
LWAYS
K
EPT
H
IS
T
RUCK
C
LEAN
”

By the morning of November 5, reporters from all over California had descended on Humboldt County. The number of media had increased by at least fourfold, with more than a dozen satellite camera trucks encircling the square-block perimeter of the courthouse.

As Detective Frank Gonzales was leaving the station later that day, he and his sergeant had to walk through a gauntlet of reporters. Gonzales was toting a Styrofoam ice chest that contained Patricia Tamez’s breast and one of six vials of blood that Toby Baxter from the DOJ lab had drawn from Wayne for DNA matching.

But the reporters were oblivious. None of them asked about the chest’s contents.

“Mike,” Gonzales whispered, “if they only knew what I was carrying, they’d be all over me.”

“Well, bro,” Lenihan whispered back, “don’t say anything.”

The AP ran a story that morning, updating the huge news story that cast a rare spotlight on the typically quiet coastal town of Eureka: “A trucker who walked into the Sheriff’s Department here, pulled a severed breast out of his pocket and said he killed four women, was under investigation Thursday in as many as six slayings throughout California, authorities said.”

As is often the case with early news reports that are hastily assembled and put out on the wire, some details turned out to be wrong. The AP report said the four known victims were female hitchhikers; it also said the breast in Wayne’s pocket came from a victim other than Patricia Tamez.

Reporters spent the day scouring the area for people to interview: the bartender from the Ocean Grove Lodge, coroner’s and sheriff’s officials, forensic psychologists, and Wayne’s boss, coworkers, and trailer park neighbors.

“The fact that he turned himself in makes this case highly unusual,” psychologist John Podboy told the
Eureka Times-Standard
. “He wanted to be stopped, which is not the case with most serial killers.”

Edeline dispatcher Mike Peters told the AP that he’d taken an immediate liking to Wayne. He’d brought him home to dinner, gone to bars with him, and had taken him on family trips and car races. He went so far as to say that if he’d had a sister, he would have set her up with Wayne “in a heartbeat.”

Dennis Keehn, Wayne’s boss, was equally baffled: “How the hell do you trust anybody who does his job that well and he turns out like this?” he told the AP. “If you went down Eureka or Arcata at night, you would see some characters that might make you wonder about packing a firearm, but this guy, you wouldn’t worry about him.