Body Parts (30 page)

“You just put her out to the side or something?” Fidler asked.

“Yeah, she rolled a little farther than I wanted her to.”

The detectives showed him more photos of missing women, but Wayne said he didn’t recognize any of them.

“Did you have a certain kind of girl you usually picked up?” Fidler asked.

“She had to be attractive to me.”

“You ever pick any black girls?”

“No.”

“What about Mexican girls?” Taylor asked.

“A couple of times, but one of them I left on the 71.”

“When you left her, was she breathing?” Taylor asked.

“She was fine.”

Wayne said he tied the women’s hands and feet separately, then tied them together, behind their bodies.

“How many of those girls you think you left like that?” Fidler asked.

“Ten.”

“Why would you tie them up?” Fidler asked.

“’Cause everything just went wrong.”

“You didn’t want them to tell on you, or something? What do you mean, ‘everything went wrong’?”

“I scared them and I didn’t want to.”

Fidler asked how he knew they were scared. “They would cry,or something,” Wayne said.

Fidler said he wondered why none of these women ever reported this. Wayne pointed out that the woman from Santa Rosa did—referring to Rachel Holt—because the incident was in the newspaper a week later. He heard some of the guys joking at the truck stop that one of their trucks matched the description.

“They weren’t joking about mine, because mine didn’t fit the description anymore,” Wayne said. “It had a different trailer when I picked her up.”

He said he’d had rough sex with the one from Santa Rosa, tied a tie around her throat. She stopped breathing, but he “got her started.”

“How was that?”

“She screamed.”

Asked whether he’d tied up the girl from Las Vegas, Wayne said he didn’t know. “This is sickening, isn’t it?”

Fidler said he just wanted to make sure there were only the four who quit breathing.

“Four. Sometimes I think . . .”

“More?”

“Yeah.”

“Could be more—if some—some that you tied up and left alongside the road, and nobody found them.”

“I know,” Wayne said.

Asked when all of this started, Wayne said it was after he saw Max in October 1997.

“That’s when things just changed. That’s when . . . it started, when the first girl. It, I couldn’t get her started breathing.... I stopped remembering things.”

Wayne said that was one of the four women he’d told them about.

“But I want to know if I’m responsible for some other ones,” he said, offering to look at more photos, ropes, or ties to see if they were his.

After the interview, Taylor said Wayne was not the kind of man he’d expected to meet.

“He was a pretty decent guy when we talked to him. He was apologetic as to what he had done,” Taylor told the AP. “He was pretty open. He gave us information on our homicide that only he would have known.”

Detectives Joe Herrera and Mike Jones from San Joaquin County had another shot at Wayne a couple of hours later.

Herrera asked if Wayne had used any instrument to hit these women.

“I used a belt,” Wayne finally said. He said he preferred using a tie, because he didn’t want to hurt the woman, and a tie didn’t chafe the skin.

“It doesn’t leave marks?” Herrera asked.

“It doesn’t hurt her.”

Herrera asked if he got more aggressive when he grew sexually aroused.

“I don’t remember being really aggressive. If the girl likes it, then I do it. She doesn’t like it, then I don’t do it. She likes it, I like it. If she doesn’t like it, I don’t like it.”

“That’s why you do this, because you think they may like it and they tell you or show you that they like it, so you do more, is that right?”

“Right. Sometimes . . . I think that they’ll change their mind and they’ll start crying and I don’t want anybody to be scared.”

Jones asked if it made Wayne feel like these women were having a more intense orgasm when he reached his hand up to their neck as he was performing oral sex on them.

“They are,” Wayne said.

“Can you describe what their body does when they’re doing this?”

Wayne did not respond, so Jones offered, “Their body shakes?”

“Yeah,” Wayne said.

“Trembles?”

“Yeah.”

“What happens to their eyes?”

“Usually, I can’t see their eyes. They just get real intense and then they’re relieved.”

“What happens when they’re relieved? Is that when they go unconscious?”

“Sometimes. . . . That’s happened, yes.”

“Did that happen with these girls that you couldn’t bring back?”

“I don’t know.”

“It happened with the girls that you brought back?”

“Yes . . . it doesn’t make any sense, does it?”

“No, it makes sense.”

At the end of the interview, Wayne tried one last time to tell the detectives that he really didn’t mean to kill anyone.

“I picked up a lot of girls,” he said. “I didn’t plan on hurting anybody.”

Wayne was scheduled to be arraigned that afternoon in Judge W. Bruce Watson’s courtroom.

Watson told Kevin Robinson, an attorney with the alternate counsel’s office, that Wayne was indigent and could not afford a private attorney, so he would need a public defender to represent him. Watson appointed Robinson.

Deputy District Attorney Worth Dikeman told the judge that Wayne wasn’t “immediately available” and asked to push the arraignment back a day.

Watson agreed and set the hearing for 10:00
A.M.
the following day.

However, when Robinson went to visit Wayne at the jail the next morning, he was surprised and frustrated to hear the same thing he’d heard in court the day before—that Wayne was “not available.”

Robinson returned to his office and typed up a letter to Chief Deputy Ben Doan, commander of the jail, letting him know that he had been denied access to his client.

“I want Mr. Ford to know that he has counsel seeking to meet with him,” Robinson wrote, copying Judge Watson and Dikeman on the letter. “I would request access to Mr. Ford and direct that all contact with Mr. Ford not authorized by me cease.”

Robinson later learned that Wayne had been “unavailable” that morning because he was being interviewed—for the fourth consecutive day without an attorney—this time by Eureka police detective Dave Parris and Frank Jager, the Humboldt County coroner.

Wayne, who broke down in tears several times during the three-hour interview, took a polygraph examination after revealing some interesting perceptions about himself.

“Most of the time . . . I’ve been alone,” he said. “Until recently, I didn’t realize that the way I felt wasn’t normal . . . because I thought that being alone was normal. . . . There’s something not tangible but valuable about being around other people.”

Wayne said he usually had one really good friend at a time, but while he was in the Marine Corps and was singing karaoke, he felt as if too many people liked him.

“There’s people that—that wanted to be around me and I didn’t . . . like them. They wanted something, but I didn’t know what they wanted. But now I know they didn’t want anything. They knew more than I knew.”

About his son, Max, he said, “I can’t tell you why he needs me. He does. I don’t know what it is. But he’s going to grow up just like me. . . . Whatever it is that my baby needs, he’s not getting it.

“I’ll be dead before he’s an adult,” Wayne said. “If he doesn’t ever know me, it’s best.”

They moved on to other topics, such as Wayne’s vehicles and jobs, but Parris was most interested in determining whether Wayne was responsible for the disappearance of Karen Mitchell, the missing Eureka teenager.

“Do you think it’s possible that you picked up Karen and you’re not quite remembering it?” Parris asked.

“I would have said no,” Wayne said. “But there’s things I don’t remember.”

Wayne said the hitchhiker he’d picked up was different from the others because she wasn’t a prostitute. Nonetheless, she still wanted to have sex with him.

“I don’t think she really wanted sex with me—just wanted sex, I guess,” he said, adding that it was also possible that she wanted something else—like love or a relationship or just not to be alone.

Wayne said he stopped to get cigarettes at the market in Eureka, and as he was getting into his car, she asked which way he was heading. He told her he was going north to Arcata and she asked if he could take her to Clam Beach.

Wayne agreed that she looked similar in the face to Karen Mitchell, only heavier. Wayne said he figured that the investigators could tell whether they were one and the same girl from “the parts that were recovered.”

“Well, we don’t know that yet,” Parris said. “Although, obviously, we don’t have her head, as . . . you’re aware.”

Parris said Karen Mitchell wasn’t a transient or a runaway. “She was very dependable. Something interrupted her—her path that day.”

Wayne said the girl he met “was like I am now—not . . . not mentally cohesive, I guess you can call it. But not clear, not focused.”

He said he’d met a lot of women with that kind of disorder. “They’re not all there. That’s what it is. It’s just that they’re not present.”

Wayne asked if they could take a break and get some coffee, because he was really tired. “How long do you think it’ll take to put me to death?” he asked.

“Well, that’s not a decision that we’re in a position to make,” Parris said.

Jager said they were trying to get information to give closure to the families involved.

“Will my attorney know more?” Wayne asked.

“Yes,” Parris said.

“Then how come I haven’t talked to him yet?”

“You’ll be going to arraignment this morning . . . probably in about two hours. And then you can ask those questions of him.”

Before taking the polygraph test, Wayne said it seemed that if somebody wanted to lie, they could do so by controlling their breathing.

“I’m going to know . . . if you’re doing that,” Jager said. “I hope you’re not going to try and do that with the test. You have no reason to, if you’re telling us the truth, do you?”

“No, absolutely not,” Wayne said.

After the interview, Jager, who had worked in law enforcement in Humboldt since 1971, told the
San Jose Mercury News
that Wayne was different from most of the homicide suspects he’d interviewed.

“He struck me as being very remorseful and very ashamed of what he had done,” he said.

Furthermore, Jager said, he thought Wayne was telling the truth.

A group led by Gary Philp, the chief deputy in charge of the jail, escorted Wayne to the courtroom for his arraignment later that day.

While they were waiting outside in the security hallway, Wayne told Philp about his trip to the river with Freeman and Dawson, saying he felt that the officers hadn’t looked thoroughly enough for Jane Doe’s head. Wayne asked Philp if he could make sure they went back and looked again.

“I told him that we would be going back to that location and doing as thorough a search as possible,” Philp, who had become sheriff by the time Wayne’s trial started, testified later.

Judge Watson’s courtroom was packed with more than a dozen television cameras and dozens of reporters who came from all over the state to cover Wayne’s arraignment on a single count of murder.

“Sir, do you understand the charge?” Watson asked Wayne.

“Yes.”

“Do you have an attorney in the matter?”

“I keep asking for one.”

“Would you like to speak to an attorney?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you have money to hire an attorney? Money available?”

“I can’t hire an attorney.”

Robinson was officially appointed and introduced to his new client. Wayne entered a plea of not guilty. The judge set bail at $1 million and scheduled the preliminary hearing for November 16.

The media presence at the courthouse that morning created “the kind of spectacle seldom witnessed in Humboldt County,” the
North Coast Journal
reported. “Questioned by media outside the courtroom, public defender Kevin Robinson appeared miffed when a microphone narrowly missed hitting him in the jaw.”

At a hearing a few days later, Watson granted Robinson’s request for a gag order preventing all attorneys, investigating police agencies, and court personnel from speaking to the media.

In addition, Watson directed all jail employees to disallow media interviews with Wayne. Anyone who violated this order, he decreed, “may be punished as a contempt.”

Watson said he’d received a “significant number” of requests to film or photograph the preliminary hearing. After Robinson asked to limit the number of cameras to “one or none,” Watson said media pooling seemed a good way to address the defense’s request. (Pooling generally means that only one still camera and one TV camera are allowed in the courtroom, and then must feed their broadcast footage and still photos to all like outlets.)

That afternoon, the sheriff’s department received a call from Bill O’Neill, a supervisor at Arcata Readimix, who wanted to report that one of his workers had found a bone, wrapped in pink plastic, lying on a pile of rocks on the riverbank.

In light of Wayne’s arrest, O’Neill said he felt he should alert the authorities because Wayne used to go down to the riverbank after work and drink beer with his coworkers.

Chris Rodriguez, another Readimix worker, told authorities that he’d also found a few small white bones while running a machine that washed and screened out impurities during the cement mixing, and had saved one of them in the equipment shack.

The items, along with another bone and part of a shoe that turned up on the riverbank, were collected and analyzed. However, the bones turned out to be of animal, not human, origins.

By Saturday, November 7, news of Wayne’s confessions hit the papers in Las Vegas, where they were of local interest because Tina Gibbs had worked there, Wayne had been a driver for the North Las Vegas Cab Company, and Wayne’s ex-wife and son still lived in the area.