TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (11 page)

Reed was working the case without his usual partner, Detective
Bob Bell, which sometimes happened when accumulated caseloads became so heavy; in this way, two detectives could handle twice as many cases.

When Lt. Ray Biondi received a call at home the previous evening regarding the hunter’s macabre discovery, the homicide chief knew that Reed, the anchor of the four-man Bureau, was unavailable. Although Reed was officially on call, he was attending his wife’s grandfather’s hundredth birthday party in Gridley, a one-horse town 60 miles north of Sacramento. It was unusual for Reed to miss a call out, which was why Biondi had granted his most experienced detective the night off. Biondi decided to assign this one to Reed anyway, although another detective would have to be called to handle the crime scene. Biondi suspected that if Reed had had any notion that a new case would come up that night, Stan’s wife, Roberta, might well have found herself attending the family celebration alone. Stan Reed was that dedicated to solving murders.

Reed had joined the department seventeen years earlier. He had worked Homicide about half that time, participating in more than 300 homicide investigations. Over the years, his waistline had thickened as surely as his now-graying blondish hair had thinned atop his 6-foot frame. He was a tell-it-like-it-is guy. With Stan Reed, you got no flowers, no mind games, no hidden agendas. Because he was so blunt—whether interviewing witnesses or testifying in court—Biondi knew that Reed could at times come off as cold and uncaring. Nothing was farther from the truth. He was simply all business. He was also dependable, covered all the bases, and
never
gave up on his old cases. Biondi considered Stan Reed to be one of the best homicide detectives he had ever known. To a degree, Biondi considered Reed’s ascendancy in Homicide a matter of fate. When Reed joined the department in 1969, at age twenty-five, he was randomly assigned badge 187; in California, “187” is the police code for homicide, as first-degree murder with malice aforethought was a violation of California Penal Code Section 187.

Reed had joined Homicide in 1978. At his first homicide scene, he drew the unenviable job of searching for body parts in garbage cans and Dumpsters in an effort to pick up the trail of Sacramento’s fiendish “
Vampire
Killer.” Reed had not complained or made excuses that day, nor since. Whenever the inevitable telephone call came to respond to another scene of unspeakable violence, whether it was three in the morning or during a holiday dinner, he offered no hint of a night’s sleep cut short or a personal life intruded upon.

Before showing up at the morgue for the autopsy, Reed had driven south on Interstate 5 for half an hour—beyond where Stephanie Brown’s abandoned car had been found and then, a few minutes later, past where Charmaine Sabrah’s car had broken down northbound. He turned west onto Highway 12 at its intersection with I-5. Ten miles beyond where Brown’s body had been found, he came to where Jane Doe had been discovered. Both locations, he noted, were no more than a mile off Highway 12.

Knowing it had been dark during recovery of the body the previous night, he made a careful check of the area for any evidence, but found none.

Taking it all in at the scene, Reed was in his usual attire of wash-and-wear slacks, button-down shirt sans tie, and an old tan corduroy blazer that his wife usually had to peel off him to have cleaned.

Standing on the narrow, sloped levee that separated the river from the road by only 20 feet, Reed figured that the victim had been killed elsewhere and transported here. It looked like the killer had dumped the body
from the road and that it rolled down the embankment before stopping short of the water.

At the autopsy later that morning, the pathologist began by taking a close look at the ligature, which appeared to be an article of
clothing. It had been rolled tightly and looped once around the victim’s neck, with the remaining portion used to bind her wrists behind her back. The material was knotted twice behind her neck.

Reed recalled that Stephanie Brown had died by ligature strangulation. He added this to the list of similarities between the two
cases. But still, he would be careful not to jump to the conclusion that they were the work of the same killer. Not now or any time soon. Stan Reed simply did not operate that way.

Reed was struck by how high the dead woman’s hands and wrists were pulled up behind her back by the taut binding. The closer he looked, the more the angle seemed anatomically impossible. He was somewhat surprised when the pathologist reported no broken bones in her arms or wrists.

She had been hogtied so securely that Reed could picture the killer cinching the binding tighter and tighter before finally tying it off. At that point, he could have stood back and watched, as any effort by the victim to try to lessen the strain on her arms would have pulled the loop around her neck that much tighter. She may well have ended up strangling herself.

How quickly death came, no one, not even the pathologist, could say for certain. However long it had been, Reed knew it wasn’t quick enough. Her agony was frozen on the death mask: a blackened tongue extended out from her mouth torturously, clasped firmly between her teeth.

The pathologist cut the ligature at two places to remove it. Deep ligature marks were found embedded in the skin at the front of the neck. The filthy, coiled material turned out to be a pink, ribbed tank top. To document how they had fit together, the pathologist meticulously strung the now three separate pieces together with twine.

The victim was wearing designer blue jeans, black suede–type loafers, and gray socks. Checking the pockets and finding nothing, the pathologist slit the jeans up both sides to remove them. Underneath were bikini panties.

The autopsy took less time than usual. The skull contained no brain matter at all, and when the pathologist opened the abdominal cavity he found it swarming with maggots and devoid of any major organs.

Given the delay in discovery of the body and the degree of decomposition, biological specimens such as
blood,
semen, and
saliva could not be recovered. As a result, there would be no
rape kit done or lab work to
conduct. The only specimens taken from the body were strands of brown hair: head and pubic. These were sealed in an envelope and, along with the victim’s clothes, marked with the case number and placed for the time being in a coroner’s locker.

In his report, the pathologist described the body as a “well-developed, well-nourished adult white female about nineteen years old, plus or minus two years.” She was estimated to have stood about 5-foot-4. The cause of death, he concluded, had been ligature strangulation.

A dentist on contract with the coroner’s office showed up at the morgue the next day and charted the victim’s teeth and dental work. For identification purposes, he also made impressions of her bite. Later that same day, a Sheriff’s Technical Services deputy came to fingerprint the victim. Due to the deteriorating condition of the flesh, he was afraid the usual method of inking each finger and rolling it over a print card wouldn’t work. So, he asked a coroner’s technician to snip off the fingers at the first joint. Returning to his lab at the sheriff’s department with the collection of fingertips, the deputy made plaster casts of each one. From the casts he was able to make readable print impressions.

Twelve days after the autopsy, a Sacramento County criminalist removed the hair samples from the secured locker. Also, because he knew that prosecutors liked having the murder weapon, he took the tank top used to strangle the victim. The remainder of her clothing was left behind in the coroner’s locker.

Upstairs, he placed the hair samples and the tank top in freezer storage for safekeeping. Before doing so he wrote on an oversized manila envelope that now held the tank top: “Item 3—Ligature around neck to hands.”

The criminalist didn’t notice that the tank top, when unfolded, had numerous cuts in it unrelated to the two well-documented slices made by the pathologist in removing the ligature.

Neither had anyone else.

S
TAN
R
EED
considered it a tragic commentary on our times that female body dumps were so common, and that the great majority of unidentified murder victims in America were women.

Each day his Jane Doe remained unidentified, Reed knew the chances of ever solving the case were reduced. It was a rare individual who wasn’t missed. More likely, she had been reported as missing by someone, somewhere. The trick was to find that report wherever it might be, and match it to the unidentified remains at the morgue.

Reed checked with Detective Sergeant Harry Machen to see if there were any persons reported missing to their department within the last few months who fit Jane Doe’s general description. Finding no likely candidates, he broadened his search to include the extensive files of the Missing Persons Unit of the
California Department of Justice (DOJ), which was set up as a statewide clearinghouse to try to match the unidentified dead—through dental charts and fingerprints—with reported missing persons. However, the system for reporting to the DOJ was strictly voluntary, and this posed problems. Many agencies, including Reed’s own department, did not always submit their missing persons reports to DOJ in a timely manner. Some agencies never turned them in at all, while others resisted taking the reports in the first place, knowing that a majority of adult missing persons would one day surface on their own. Why spend valuable investigative man-hours when a crime might not have been committed?

Even when a report did get to the DOJ, the odds were against a missing person being matched with an unidentified body. At the time, DOJ had on file the dental charts and fingerprints of approximately 1,400 unidentified dead. Each year, DOJ makes only ten to fifteen matches of unidentified dead with missing persons.

When Reed received the list of missing young women from DOJ, he went down the list looking for individuals who would seem to fit the description of his Jane Doe. Working the phone, a detective’s most valuable tool, he learned that a large number of possibles were no longer missing. He crossed them off.

Of those young women still missing—

Cindy Stites, twenty-three, of northern California, was eliminated by comparing her driver’s license thumbprint with Jane Doe’s prints.

Lisa Beckham, nineteen, of Florida, believed to be on her way to California when she disappeared, was eliminated because it turned out she was several inches too short.

Angelica Lee, nineteen, believed to be California-bound from her native Georgia, was eliminated by fingerprint comparisons.

Two California women in their early thirties—
Glenda Ward and
Renee June—who seemed too old were looked at nonetheless before being eliminated on fingerprint comparisons.

About then, the Homicide Bureau found itself deluged with a number of new murders. Reed caught the case of
Vickie Skanks, an eleven-year-old girl who was sexually assaulted and smothered to death in her family home. He quickly identified a strong suspect but, much to Reed’s
dismay, he couldn’t be charged with murder due to problems with the
DNA evidence. While refusing to give up on that investigation, Reed’s caseload grew as Sacramento County’s murder rate kept climbing that summer and fall.

Still, it wasn’t in Reed to forget Jane Doe.

M
IDWAY
between Stockton and Sacramento on a clear, gusty night one month after Charmaine
Sabrah’s disappearance, an older sedan traveling the speed limit northbound on Interstate 5 braked to a stop on the shoulder.

It was no coincidence that the driver, a thirty-five-year-old woman, had pulled over very near where Charmaine’s Grand Prix had come to a stop.

After turning on the emergency flashers, the woman climbed out of the car and stood at its rear bumper, illuminated by the winking red lights.

Although passersby saw what appeared to be a disabled vehicle with a lone female needing help, there was nothing wrong with the car at all. And, as for the woman, she was far from alone.

San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Detective
Joyce Holloman was, in fact, live bait placed in a trap to entice a serial killer.

Detectives in four unmarked vehicles were close by—up on the next exit, under the freeway overpass, and on the frontage road. They were in radio contact with each other, and one of the cars monitored Detective Holloman’s every utterance via a remote wire she wore under her jacket.

Then there was Vito Bertocchini with a portable radio, hiding none too comfortably in the brambles nearby, within earshot of Holloman. The decoy officer was under strict instructions not to get into anyone’s car, and the burly homicide detective was close by to make sure nobody tried to snatch her. As he had promised the nervous Holloman, he would be the “mugger” or the “shooter”—whatever was required to protect her.

When a vehicle stopped, the plan was for Holloman to send the license number out over the wire. If someone stopped who looked like the composite, she would alert the others. Then, she would try to get him to leave—“Thanks for stopping, my husband is on the way.” Once he left, the detectives would stop the car down the highway.

It was nearly two hours before the first vehicle, a black-and-silver pickup, pulled up behind the sedan. The man did not resemble the composite, and his offer to render assistance seemed genuine. Holloman got rid of him by saying that help was on the way.

The second vehicle, a Volkswagen with Florida plates, didn’t stop until 3:00
A.M.
The driver, a college-age male who looked young enough to be
the son of the man in the composite, also seemed sincere. So much so that he insisted on raising the hood of the undercover vehicle and tinkering with the engine under the beam of his flashlight. Holloman quickly got behind the wheel, and the car started right away. The young man seemed very pleased with himself.

For Bertocchini, the big rats scurrying about him in the bushes were the worst part of the assignment. They refused to leave him be. “If you hear gunshots,” he radioed the other detectives at one point, “it’s gonna be me taking out a few of these freaking monsters.”