TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer
Read TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer Online
Authors: Bruce Henderson
Tags: #True Crime, #Murder, #Serial Killers
OTHER BOOKS BY BRUCE HENDERSON
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Fatal North: Murder and Survival on the First North Pole Expedition
Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War
True North: Peary, Cook and the Race to the Pole
TRACE
EVIDENCE
THE HUNT FOR THE I-5 SERIAL KILLER
BRUCE HENDERSON
Trace Evidence: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer
Copyright © 1998, 2013 by Bruce Henderson
eISBN: 978-0-9894675-0-6
Published by: BruceHendersonBooks, Menlo Park, CA
All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without prior written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. For information, address Writers House LLC at 21 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10010.
For legal reasons, some of the names in this book have been changed.
To those highly trained men and women of law enforcement who are entrusted with the profound responsibility of investigating violent death.
And to the loved ones of murder victims everywhere—they who, without ever forgetting, somehow find the strength and courage to go on.
MAY JUSTICE BE SERVED.
Contents
Prologue
JULY
1954
CHULA VISTA
,
CALIFORNIA
It was summertime at the beach.
Palm trees swayed lazily in a steady sea breeze that kept the days balmy and the evenings cool in this San Diego suburb six miles north of the U.S.–Mexico border at Tijuana.
After hanging some clothes out to dry,
Esther Underwood, thirty-six, of 447 Casselman Street went in the house to iron. Around 4:30
P.M.
, she looked out the window and saw that some clothes had apparently blown off the line.
She went outside. Reaching the clothesline, she stood dumbfounded—there were no clothes on the ground, yet garments were definitely missing. The clothespins that had held them in place were still properly spaced on the line.
She looked around the yard but found nothing. Mentally inventorying the clothes still on the line, she realized that her orchid dress was gone, along with two bathing suits. Also, four pairs of nylon stockings.
She hurried into the house and called the police.
A
FTER TAKING A
report from the lady at 447 Casselman, patrolmen
Don Morrison and
Doug Gardner were driving past a nearby park on C Street when they were flagged down by a young girl.
Judy Faureck, age nine, reported that while playing in the park about an hour earlier she had noticed a teenage boy on a green bike enter the park. He had caught her attention because he was riding with a cardboard box on his handlebars and a shovel under one arm. The boy had ridden to a gully next to the public rest rooms, where he parked his bike. Carrying the box and shovel, he crossed to the opposite bank and walked a short
distance along the fence line. He then dug a hole adjacent to the fence, put the box inside, and covered it with dirt and leaves. The boy, whom the young witness described as being around fourteen or fifteen years old, about 5-foot-4, with short brown hair and wearing a white T-shirt and Levi’s, then rode off on his bike.
The officers uncovered the box. Inside, they found the orchid dress and two bathing suits.
The patrolmen contacted a workman they saw cleaning up around the American Legion Hall next to the park. Given the suspect’s description, custodian
Jack Kearns remembered seeing him that day. Kearns didn’t know the boy’s name, but he had previously seen the kid in the park with a boy whose family he did know.
The officers went to the address provided by the custodian. They described the suspect and his bike to the man who answered the door. The man said it sounded like his son’s friend who lived on Casselman.
A
T THE
C
HULA
V
ISTA
Police Department the next day, juvenile officer Leo J.
Kelly read the report filed by the two patrolmen.
The boy who lived on Casselman had admitted to burying the box in the park. While the fifteen year old denied to the patrol officers that he had stolen the clothes, the officers arrested him for petty theft and prowling. They transported him to the station house, where they made out a contact report. As was customary with juvenile cases, the boy was returned home and turned over to his parents, who were informed that the case would be referred to the department’s Juvenile Office for further investigation. The officers had then returned the items of clothing to their owner.
The incident had been the latest in a series of thefts of women’s apparel from clotheslines in the same neighborhood. Any type of crime was such an unusual occurrence in this law-abiding town of seventy thousand residents with a police force that numbered only twenty-three officers that the series of clothesline capers had made the news columns of the
Chula
Vista
Star.
Kelly, a U.S. Navy Seabee during the war, was an imposing 6-foot-3 Irishman and father of six children—five of them boys. In his five years on the force there had been just one narcotics bust in town. Homicides and armed robberies were virtually unheard of. As far as juveniles went, it was usually pretty minor stuff. Truancy, some runaways, a few burglaries. One sixteen-year-old boy had been caught stealing pocket change from the school office and was sent to Juvenile Hall. When the boy got out, Kelly tried
to get him into the Big Brother program but it didn’t happen. When the boy went to see if he still had his drugstore job, he found another kid working in his place. Three days later, the boy hanged himself. Kelly hadn’t been able to shake the tragedy. The juvenile officer with five sons of his own would never forget the boy who had needed help and understanding but found few adults with the time or inclination to give it to him.
From his four years’ experience working Juvenile, he knew it would be advisable to confront the errant youngster about the stolen clothes as soon as possible.
When Kelly pulled up in front of the residence at 545 Casselman Street, he saw it was one of those small, cookie-cutter stucco houses with slab floors built after the war that sold mostly to returning GIs for something under $10,000 with nothing down. They all had postage-stamp-size lawns, front and back. More than not, each block had at least one flagpole flying Old Glory.
Kelly knocked on the door, and met the father, a recently retired Navy chief working for the post office. He was told the boy’s mother was at work. He asked to speak to the fifteen year old—the oldest of three brothers—alone in his bedroom.
The boy sat at the foot of his bed, head hung low. He was a good-looking all-American type, with a thin face and skin freckled from a summer under the sun.
Kelly pulled up the only chair in the room. The juvenile officer had a deep, bass voice that filled a room, even when he spoke softly, as he did now.
“I need to know what’s been going on, son.”
When no answer was forthcoming, Kelly spoke some more in his fatherly yet firm manner, hoping to draw out this sullen boy who shyly made eye contact but remained mute.
When the boy finally did start to talk, Kelly was not surprised that he stuttered. It fit.
The boy confessed to stealing the clothes.
In fact, he admitted much more. He had been taking women’s clothes off clotheslines in his neighborhood for the past year. He couldn’t say how many times in all but he estimated he had done it about once or twice a week. He usually ended up burying the clothes in the park or throwing them in trash cans.
“Did you take only women’s clothes?” Kelly asked.
“Yes.”
“Did you steal anything else?”
“No.”
“Did you break into anyone’s house?”
“No.”
Not only was the boy monotone, but he was so emotionless that he seemed unmoved by his own confession, or even by the fact that a cop was questioning him in the sanctity of his room. That was strange, Kelly thought. Most kids cornered like this would be sweating bullets.
When Kelly stood to go downstairs and talk to the father, the boy went to his closet. He removed a box from the overhead shelf.
In an apparent act of contrition, he solemnly handed it over to the juvenile officer.
L
EO
K
ELLY HAD
recently received a framed “Good Neighbor Award” from the local Soroptimist Club for his work with juveniles. When he was so honored, Kelly had given a short talk, mentioning that he wanted to get counseling for disturbed kids instead of just shipping them off to Juvenile Hall, but that many families couldn’t afford professional services. Afterward, a woman whose husband was a local car dealer came forward.
“Next time you come across a family that doesn’t have the money to send their child for counseling,” said the well-groomed woman, “I’ll pay for the first three visits.”
In the boy who lived on Casselman, Kelly had an obvious candidate for help. All the warning signals were there, flashing brightly. By any measure, the boy’s family, headed by concerned, hardworking parents, seemed normal. Yet, one of their children obviously had severe problems. When Kelly had suggested counseling for their oldest boy, the parents had voiced concern over the cost.
Kelly contacted the Good Samaritan. She asked him to find out how much it would cost. When Kelly called her back and told her three sessions with a highly recommended San Diego psychiatrist would be $270, the woman came right over to the station house and delivered it in cash.
The boy’s parents took him to see the psychiatrist for the three sessions. When Kelly called the doctor to check on the boy’s progress, he was coolly informed that such information was confidential. Kelly hoped that the parents would see the value in the treatment and find a way to pick up the ball themselves. He later found out, however, that they didn’t.
Kelly remained concerned that something more serious could develop in the future from the type of behavior exhibited by this somber fifteen-year-old boy. Left unchecked, Kelly knew, these disturbing tendencies could escalate. A youthful fantasy that hadn’t yet harmed anyone might one day become a frightful reality.
The juvenile officer was haunted, and would be for years to come, by the contents of the box from the boy’s closet. On top he had found a pair of
scissors, the long-handled kind with an angled cutting edge favored by medical personnel to cut bandages and adhesive tape. The boy’s mother, Kelly had learned, was an emergency room nurse at
Chula Vista Hospital.
Also inside were the most intimate articles of women’s apparel—
panties, bras, garter belts, nylons.
They had all been cut up.
One
J
ULY
1986
SACRAMENTO
,
CALIFORNIA
S
tephanie Marcia
Brown woke with a start before midnight. Something had scared her, but as she lay motionless in the dark, she had no idea what.
A loud, jarring knock on the front door was followed in quick succession by another.
Stephanie was a vivacious soon-to-be twenty year old with many friends, some of whom occasionally kept late hours. She and a roommate her own age shared a two-bedroom duplex, and though the young women often went their separate ways, they understood. That was one benefit of not living at home.
