TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (18 page)

Biondi considered
Bell and Stan Reed to be the finest homicide team in the department’s history. But with such different personalities and ways of conducting business (a plus in that they had all the bases covered no matter what the challenge), both seemed ready for a change. Biondi had
an idea that Bell and Maulsby would be a very good fit as permanent partners. Like Maulsby, Bell had had an excellent reputation (working Burglary) before coming to Homicide two years earlier. Bell, whose wife had an important job in state education, didn’t have a chauvinistic bone in his body and was meticulous about his work in the way that Biondi knew Maulsby was. He would do well, Biondi had no doubt, teaming with the Bureau’s only female homicide detective. But would it ever happen?

Maulsby was always good about not taking up too much of his time. She had stood and was now at the doorway.

“I don’t have any reason to be optimistic,” Biondi admitted as he came to his feet. “But check back anyway.”

She smiled sheepishly. “I will.”

Biondi knew she would, too.

Eight

A
t 5:30
P.M.
on Monday, December 15, 1986, Harriet
Kibbe, a fortyish blonde whose pale blue eyes and blanched complexion suggested Scandinavian blood somewhere in her ancestry, answered a knock at the door of her ground-floor apartment in northeast
Sacramento.

The occupation of the two beefy men at her doorstep was so apparent that they might as well have been sent over by Central Casting.

“Mrs.
Kibbe?” asked the big, dark-haired one in the windbreaker.

“Yes.”

“I’m Detective Bertocchini of the
San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Department.”

He handed her his business card.

“Yes, we’re expecting you.” Looking down at the card, she saw it was like the one left on the screen door of their former residence a week earlier.

“This is Detective Reed of the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department,” he said, gesturing to the poker-faced middle-aged man next to him in a corduroy jacket.

At the time they had found the detective’s card with the message “Please call” scrawled across it, Harriet and her husband, Roger, were in the midst of moving from their home of eight years in Oakley—a quiet Delta community about 40 miles from Sacramento. Harriet had no idea what the police could possibly want, and Roger told her he didn’t either. Busy with the move, she hadn’t called the number for two days. When she did, she was shocked that “Homicide” answered. “What is this about?” she asked Bertocchini when he came on the line. He explained that he wished to set up a time to talk to her husband about an “ongoing investigation.”
When she pressed for more information, the detective told her that her husband looked similar to the composite drawing of a
suspect.

Harriet promised to speak to Roger and get back to the detective. She was shaken by the call. It seemed like a cruel rerun from hell. Eight years earlier, Roger had been questioned in the disappearance of a young woman in suburban
Walnut Creek, across the bay from San Francisco. Roger had steadfastly denied knowing anything at all about the incident, but the cops had persisted, going so far as to interview their neighbors about his activities. Apparently, an eyewitness had seen the young woman getting into a multicolored van that resembled Roger’s. He had insisted to Harriet that it was pure police harassment—he’d been out of the joint only a few years, and obviously they still had his name on file.
Was this more of the same?
she wondered.

Roger assured Harriet he knew nothing about any murder. Nervous about dealing directly with the cops, he sought
advice from his brother, Steve, who lived at Lake Tahoe, on how to handle the situation. Even though Roger was the eldest, he had always turned to Steve, two years his junior, whenever he was in a pinch. Steve urged him to meet with the detectives as soon as possible, and he personally called Bertocchini to set up an interview.

Harriet invited the detectives in. Roger appeared, cup of coffee in hand. After brief introductions, Bertocchini explained that he’d been sent a report filed by Deputy
Mayoya after Roger was stopped in Stockton the previous month for a traffic violation.

“I got the report because the deputy thought you resembled the composite in one of my
cases.”

Roger shrugged, but said nothing.

Without further ado—the cops didn’t take Harriet up on her offer to sit down—Bertocchini asked Roger to accompany them downtown.

Harriet was taken aback when the detectives wouldn’t let her come with them—there was plenty of room for the four of them in the unmarked car. The detectives told her she could follow, which she did.

For months now, Harriet Kibbe had been extremely worried about her eleven-year
marriage. She still loved Roger, but she’d been unhappy for a long time.

It wasn’t that he mistreated her; he’d slapped her exactly three times in their marriage. He’d cheated on her only once as far as Harriet knew, although she was aware that he had an eye for the ladies and knew he came off as charming in a cuddly sort of way even though he seldom wore his upper-front denture plate, which he found uncomfortable. On their
first wedding anniversary, he’d left her for a woman from work. Their only separation lasted two weeks before he returned, asking Harriet what she wanted to happen next. “I want my husband back,” she said. He went out and bought her red roses, which he delivered with a solemn promise never to stray again—“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said with bowed head.

Compared with her other spouses (Roger was her fourth), Harriet considered Roger a decent husband. He had a kind side to him that came out especially around children (they were childless; a decade earlier Harriet had lost custody of her young son from a previous marriage, and Roger had a grown daughter from his first marriage) and animals (he adored their three cats). He made friends easily, always had a job, and never failed to bring his paycheck home, too. Because of his steady work they’d been able to save up and buy a home. He wasn’t macho, demanding, or bossy. And he was a teetotaler, which meant a lot to Harriet, having been raised by parents who drank a lot. (She and Roger had once ordered iced tea at a pizza parlor and he was mistakenly served beer. So unaccustomed to alcohol was he, Roger had complained, “They gave me vinegar,” when he tasted it.) Although they were scrimping these days, they didn’t quarrel about finances like many couples she knew.

Harriet understood that she and Roger fulfilled powerful needs in each other. She was dominant and needed to lead and protect, and he was submissive. It was a dynamic that had seemed to work for them. Roger’s father had recognized it shortly after their marriage: “Thank God for you, Harriet,” he had whispered to her at a family gathering. “You’re just the kind of woman Roger needs.” Harriet knew Roger wanted her to be not only a wife but a mother to him as well, someone to replace the one he’d never gotten along with, who had died of cancer in the early 1960s.

Harriet knew that whenever anything went wrong, like when their furniture-making business went under in June (1986) and they lost $35,000, she got the blame. She understood this came with her wife/mother role. She knew people looked at Roger, the follower, and thought, “How could it be
his
fault?” They didn’t know that when things got tough Roger was often among the missing. Like in June when they’d faced the imminent loss of their business: He’d walked out like he didn’t have a care in the world, driving up to Lake Tahoe to
visit his brother for several days and leaving her with a fully loaded furniture delivery truck broken down on the highway, an unhappy landlord looking for his overdue rent, and a stack of bills to pay. Soon after, foreclosure proceedings began on their Oakley home, avoided only at the last minute by a bargain-basement sale
of the property arranged by Harriet. Although Roger was adept at solving mechanical problems, he deferred to her on running everything else in their lives—money, business, property, etc. Typically, it was she who had found their new situation managing a large storage facility, for which they both were paid a salary and lived for free in the managers’ apartment. It would, Harriet hoped, give them a needed breathing spell.

Still, their marriage was unraveling. Thinking that Roger surely wanted out, she had asked him the month before to stay with her for another year. He’d agreed with no comment or discussion—not even “Why?” or “What do you mean?” Secretly, she had hoped he’d say something reaffirming like “I don’t want us to break up” or even “Let’s try to work this out.” But he hadn’t. And really, she knew he wouldn’t.

Her plan favored logic over emotion: they could use the time to get back on their feet a bit financially before parting ways. Harriet, who had previously had her own bookkeeping service, intended to use the intervening time to develop a proprietary accounting program she hoped to sell to small businesses in and around Sacramento. At forty-four, she didn’t like the idea of being on her own—after leaving an abusive home at age sixteen, she’d gone from one man to another. But if she was to be alone, she was determined to be able to support herself.

It wasn’t that Roger came to her and said he was unhappy—that wasn’t his style. He expressed it in other ways: by going deeper into his impenetrable shell, by staying out all night, by not sleeping with her.

The unresolved issues between them had mounted through the years. They remained unsettled because whenever Harriet needed Roger the most, he would completely disconnect from her and refuse to open up, not even answering her direct questions. He would act like she wasn’t even in the room, ignoring her so completely that she felt invisible. Whenever he went inside himself and pulled down the shades, it was as if no one was home. “Are you trying to drive me crazy?” she’d ask in frustration. He didn’t seem to understand that normal hurts, fears, and resentments didn’t evaporate through neglect, but grew larger and more imposing until they filled a room, and a marriage, like a 900-pound gorilla.

“Please care enough about me to talk to me,” Harriet would plead. “Please care enough about me to show some emotion.” In response to her cries for spoken acknowledgment, Roger, his face impassive, usually left the room.

Harriet, who had always had a bad temper, now had a backlog of anger she could summon at any moment. With the least provocation, she could fly off the handle and rant wrathfully—but only in Roger’s presence,
not at work or among friends. She knew exactly what she was doing. Her mantra:
If I’m going to be miserable because he won’t talk to me, then by God, I’m going to see to it that he’s miserable, too.

Yet, Harriet was never seriously able to consider leaving the marriage. Even now, with so little marital intimacy left, she was still waiting for him to pack up and leave her. That was the way it worked. Her previous husbands had all been mean-tempered guys who ran around on her until the day they were finished with her. Then they had left.

She had never in her life left a man (or cheated on one). Her worst fear imaginable was being abandoned, and yet it had happened time and again. All she’d ever wanted was to be accepted for who she was—no need to be taller, skinnier, smarter. But from the beginning of her life, things had been out of kilter. Her father had died a month before she was born, and her young widowed mother wasn’t ready to be saddled with another child (Harriet had an older sister). She felt her mother hadn’t wanted her, and as she grew up her stepfather came to want her in ways he shouldn’t have.

The two-car caravan left I-5 at J Street and headed down tree-lined streets bracketed by high-rises.

Harriet followed closely; she didn’t want to lose them and have Roger think he’d been—
abandoned.

Harriet was protecting her husband as she had always wanted to be protected, but never had been.

W
HEN THEY
arrived at the third-floor offices of the
Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department Homicide Bureau, Roger
Kibbe was ushered into a small
interrogation room enclosed by four windowless, whitewashed walls. He settled in a hard chair beside a veneer-topped rectangular table shoved against one wall.

Vito Bertocchini, alone in the room with Kibbe, sat directly opposite him with nothing between them.

The detective began by wanting to know the location of Kibbe’s recent residences, where he worked, and what type of vehicles he had driven in the past year.

Bertocchini already had obtained some of this information by way of a thorough records check. However, he wanted to hear it directly from Kibbe.

After Kibbe’s recitation, Bertocchini, whose eyes never left Kibbe, asked out of the blue: “Were you soliciting prostitutes in Stockton when you were stopped by Deputy
Mayoya?”

“Yeah.”

“Had you done this before in the area?”

Kibbe nodded.

“How long had you been doing it?”

“Couple of w-weeks.”

The stutter was slight, but apparent. “How much did you usually spend?”

“I don’t spend money. I’ve never really been with a h-hooker. We just talk and they leave.”

That’s a new one
, Bertocchini thought.

The detective asked Kibbe where else besides Stockton he had gone to seek prostitutes.

“Oakland and Sacramento.”

“What kind of prostitutes interest you?”

“They have to be white.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“Not really.”

Bertocchini asked Kibbe if he’d taken Interstate 5 when he traveled to and from his former residence in Oakley and his business near Modesto—a round-trip of some 120 miles.

“Yeah.”

“Do you travel on I-5 to Sacramento?”

“When I visit my brother in Tahoe.”

That route would have taken him in the direction Charmaine Sabrah was driving the last night of her life and past where her car had broken down.

“From Oakley,” Bertocchini went on, “how would you pick up I-5?”

Kibbe said he’d take the Antioch Bridge, go into Rio Vista, then out Highway 12 east to I-5.