TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (16 page)

Then, he requested that a Technical Services deputy respond to his location for the purpose of taking pictures of the vehicle he had pulled over. This, in other than major injury accidents, was very unusual.

He did so because Roger Kibbe bore a striking resemblance to the suspect in the composite Mayoya had on the front seat of his patrol car. He saw that the driver’s age (DOB 5/21/39) fit, as did the other details such as his graying hair, build (5-foot-10), weight (180 pounds), and large nose. Even his car fit the bill.

As he wrote out the citation, Mayoya tried to keep the chatter going. Although Kibbe was not exactly talkative, he answered the deputy’s questions. After the pictures were taken—Kibbe seemed not the least interested in why his car was being photographed—Mayoya had him sign the citation.

There was to be a last bit of bad news for Roger Kibbe: the records check had revealed that Kibbe’s driver’s license had been suspended for failure to appear on a minor fix-it citation (broken tail lamp).

“For that reason,” Mayoya said, “I’m confiscating your driver’s license tonight. I suggest you get off the road and stay off until you deal with this.”

“Okay, thanks,” Kibbe said, hurriedly scrawling on the signature line and accepting his copy of the ticket before driving cautiously away.

As he resumed patrol, the deputy kept thinking about the stop, a
report of which he would send to Homicide. Roger Kibbe had been nervous, although he seemed to be trying hard to appear calm and nonchalant.

It had been the first time in his career, Deputy Armando Mayoya realized, that he’d ever been thanked for confiscating someone’s license.

J
ANE
D
OE
, found dead on the shore of
Brannan Island in
Sacramento County three months earlier, reclaimed her identity the first week of December 1986.

She was Lora Renee
Heedick, twenty, a petite blue-eyed blonde reported missing in April from the Stanislaus County community of Modesto, an hour’s drive south of Sacramento.

Identification of the badly decomposed body had been delayed because the
Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department had not gotten around to asking Heedick’s family for the name of her dentist until November, then hadn’t picked up her dental charts until early December.

Once DOJ’s
Missing Persons Unit received the X rays, technicians immediately searched their records of more than one thousand unidentified dead. Within days, the X rays were matched to Jane Doe’s dental work.

Why the delay by the local cops?

The Lora Heedick disappearance had a low priority due in part to the usual doubt that plagued adult
missing persons cases as to whether or not a crime had actually been committed. Another factor: Heedick, according to her boyfriend, had gotten into a stranger’s car for the purpose of committing an act of prostitution. No one in authority would ever state publicly that a young woman who placed herself in such jeopardy deserved to disappear, but there had been an apparent casualness about the case ever since she had been reported missing the next day by her boyfriend’s mother. Even when there had been no sign of Heedick after weeks, police made little effort to reach out beyond Modesto by reporting it to neighboring law enforcement agencies or DOJ. A single news story, seven paragraphs long, had run in the local newspaper
two months
after her disappearance. All in all, there seemed to be a nonchalance about Lora Heedick’s disappearance that would probably not have been present had the missing young woman been a local cheerleader or honors student.

Sacramento County Sheriff’s Detective Stan Reed brooked no such nonsense. Murder was murder in his book. What had once been Stanislaus County’s missing persons case had become his homicide investigation. Now that the victim had a name, he had a place to start. Even though the circumstances of her death had already strongly suggested that she could
be a victim of an active serial killer, Reed never wore blinders when he worked a case, preferring instead to go where the evidence took him.

In this instance, it led him to the poor side of
Modesto, a dusty, sunburnt Valley town dominated by agricultural industries whose biggest employer was
E. and J.
Gallo—endless rows of stainless steel tanks with up to one-million-
gallon capacities made the huge winery look more like a refinery—and whose richest residents were Ernest and Julio.

Reed learned that Heedick’s ex-con boyfriend, James Driggers, thirty-two, was the last person to see Heedick alive. The detective met the scruffy, tattooed Driggers at a dumpy place on 13th Street, not far from where he claimed his girlfriend had ridden away in an older, white two-door car driven by a middle-aged man.

Driggers, who had gotten the news the previous day of his girlfriend’s body having been identified, anxiously told Reed that he’d known all along that something like this had happened.

“Why?” Reed inquired.

“She wouldn’t have left like that with some guy she didn’t know.”

“Let’s start at the beginning,” Reed said, taking out his notebook. “How long did you know Lora?”

“Three years, off and on.”

“Did she have any problems with anyone or any enemies that you know of?”

“No, she got along good with people. She did the prostitution stuff, you know, only once in a while. When we needed the bread.”

“How often?”

“Once a month or something.”

“What happened that night?”

Beads of sweat began to pop out on Driggers’ forehead. He admitted that he and Lora had been using “uppers” in the park that Sunday night. When they ran out about 11:00
P.M.
, they’d gone down to the strip on 9th Street so that Lora could make some money for a local dope deal. Driggers described her as strolling up the street in designer jeans and tank top while he waited in front of a 7-Eleven, talking to a couple of other “dopers.” He eventually lost sight of Lora.

After about forty-five minutes, he started walking up the street in the direction she had gone. Soon, the white car pulled over with Lora inside. “She told me to get in,” Driggers said. “That we were gonna get a room.”

Driggers explained that Lora scooted over to the middle to give him room in the front seat. He said after he was inside he reached over and
shook hands with the driver, whom he described as forty-five to fifty years of age with graying hair, close to 6-foot, with large hands.

“Isn’t it unusual for a John to stop and pick up a girl’s boyfriend?” Reed asked pointedly.

“She must have told him to pick me up so we could party. We had an open relationship. I wasn’t jealous or nothing. We’d partied with people before. I’d take a walk or whatever.”

The driver went up to the next intersection and made a U-turn,
Driggers continued, then pulled up in front of the Sahara Motel a short distance away.

“The guy said he could score some drugs at his shop. He said it wasn’t far away. I asked Lora what I should do. She said for me to wait outside the motel and they’d be right back. Then they drove off.”

Driggers said he went to a store across the street and bought a bottle of wine, returned to the motel, then waited next to the phone booth. “Lora knew the number,” he added.

“I stayed there until morning, maybe ten or eleven o’clock. Lora never came back or phoned. That’s when I went to my mom’s and told her.”

“Why didn’t you contact the police?”

Driggers said he’d asked his mother to file the report because he feared there might be an old warrant out for him. “When I heard there wasn’t, I went down and gave them a statement.”

“The initial information you gave about Lora’s disappearance wasn’t accurate, was it?”

“No. I made up that stuff about her going to see some friends and not coming back. What was I going to tell my mom—that Lora was out hooking?”

With only those exceptions, Driggers’s story had not deviated from his initial statement to authorities in April, a copy of which Reed had reviewed. Yet, Reed could see that Lora’s boyfriend was as skittish as a downed canary in the path of an approaching tomcat. Was it jangled nerves from the finality of her body being identified, or something more sinister?

In trying to check out Driggers’ alibi, Reed found no witnesses who saw Lora Heedick get into a white car or any car on the night of her disappearance, nor anyone at the motel who remembered seeing Driggers waiting at the phone booth or anywhere in the vicinity.

Driggers didn’t have a car, which worked in his favor since Heedick’s body was found 50 miles from Modesto. He occasionally borrowed vehicles, including his mother’s. However, after more legwork, Reed was not
able to place Driggers at the wheel of a car (borrowed or stolen) that night, leaving the unanswered question: If Driggers had killed Lora, how had he transported her so far?

Heedick’s mother reported that her daughter and Driggers had not been getting along recently. Driggers’s own relatives reported that he beat Lora. Members of both families told police they feared he might be responsible for Lora’s death. An ex-wife of Driggers’s came forward to claim she had been physically abused in their marriage, and that Driggers had forced her on more than one occasion to take part in three-way sex with other men.

The FBI’s four-page rap sheet on Lora Heedick’s boyfriend began in Florida at age eighteen with driving under the influence, reckless driving, possession of marijuana, and attempting to elude police. Arrests for crimes such as prowling, carrying a concealed weapon, burglary, as well as a conviction for petty theft, followed over the next several years. After a 1984 conviction for burglary, he escaped from jail. Recaptured that same year, he was subsequently sent to state prison. In the months since Heedick’s disappearance, he had been arrested in Stanislaus County in the theft of a bicycle and shotgun, but avoided prosecution by providing information about a stolen property ring.

While his checkered past did not make him a murderer, Driggers’s lifestyle didn’t win him any citizenship points with Reed. The detective saw in Driggers a habitual criminal who was more than willing to have his young girlfriend hook for drugs, a good indicator that he considered her not much more than a commodity to be used. Was she also one to be discarded at will?

Reed shared his dilemma with Lt. Ray Biondi. “I really don’t think this is a boyfriend-girlfriend murder but I can’t get Driggers out of the
case.”

Even though the DOJ lab had not found any clothes cutting in the Heedick case, it had been included on the list of suspected serial killings due to evidence of bindings, strangulation, and transportation of the victim. Those same factors all continued to suggest that Heedick had been the victim not of a lovers’ quarrel but of the same methodical serial killer who had murdered Brown and Sabrah.

“The scene was all wrong,” Reed grumbled. “Heedick was tied up. Driggers wouldn’t have had to control her like that. And the garrote—that’s not heat of passion.”

Biondi had been to enough domestic murder scenes to know there are usually signs of tremendous anger directed at the victim, such as beatings delivered with fists or feet or clubs, multiple stab or bullet wounds,
etc. Strangulation was too neat, too controlled. The garrote suggested a killer efficiently disposing of someone to whom he had no emotional ties—stranger on stranger, without the disorder typically present at the scene of passion murders.

“And why would Driggers have brought her all the way up to
Brannan Island?” Biondi wondered aloud.

“Even if he could get his hands on a car,” Reed added.

“It had to be calculated,” Biondi said flatly. “The guy who took Heedick all that way had some kind of master plan.”

Biondi didn’t need to tell his most senior detective what had to be done. Reed knew the drill. He had to find evidence that either implicated James Driggers in the murder of Lora Heedick, or that cleared him.

If Driggers had not done in his girlfriend, then valuable time was being diverted from catching the real killer.

A
S
L
T
. R
AY
Biondi had hoped, the public plea for clues in the I-5 series had resulted in an overwhelming response in the weeks following the joint press conference.

The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department alone received more than 300 leads concerning the murders; most involved possible
suspects. The other departments, like
San Joaquin, had gotten a flood of responses, too.

Biondi had been talking to his detectives for some time about the importance of
prioritizing leads. The way it was now, individual detectives at various law enforcement agencies who happened to answer the phone when a new lead came in would make an on-the-spot decision as to whether or not it was important. If deemed unimportant, the tip likely wouldn’t be passed on—Sacramento wouldn’t give it to San Joaquin, Vito Bertocchini wouldn’t give it to Stan Reed, and so on. Thus, a lead that could have proven vital in identifying the killer when connected to other information might be lost forever.

Now, with an avalanche of new leads, it was more important than ever to find order in the chaos. Biondi had an idea that his detectives, up to their eyeballs in cases, were shining him on with platitudes: “Yeah, Ray, I’ll think about it,” and “Sure, boss, we’ll come up with something.”

When Reed and Bob Bell came around one afternoon to see if Biondi wanted to take a late lunch with them, Biondi sprung to the attack.

“Sit down, guys,” he said after shutting the door behind his top detective team. “Let’s come up with a way to prioritize. Come on, Bob, make us look smart.”

Bell, who had a degree in geology, liked a good mental challenge. As he went on about criteria and rationales, Reed threw out pertinent one-liners in his patented growl. With a legal pad on his lap, Biondi caught it all.

Soon, a plan had taken shape; they would prioritize suspect leads based on a point system:

• 20 points if a suspicious person’s identity was known or if they had an ability to trace him;

• 10 points if he had access to a dark, two-seater vehicle;

• 10 points if he was known to have a hair or cutting fetish or had once owned Italian scissors;