TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (19 page)

Bertocchini knew that route would have taken Kibbe within a mile of where Lora Heedick’s body had been dumped, and only a stone’s throw from the ditch where Stephanie
Brown’s body had been found floating facedown.

Bertocchini remembered the pitch-black night five months earlier when he and Pete Rosenquist had stood above the ditch and concluded that Stephanie’s killer, in order to find such an isolated spot, would likely have known the area.

The detective asked Kibbe if he was familiar with the Ione area in
Amador County—where Charmaine Sabrah’s body had been found in a field off the road.

“Yeah, I know it.”

“Did you ever drive through there to get to your brother’s place?”

“That w-would be the long way to Tahoe.”

Kibbe said he used to have a friend who lived in Ione whom he visited occasionally. He said it had been three or four years since he’d been in the area.

“Do you ever stop to pick up hitchhikers or to aid stranded motorists?” Bertocchini asked.

“No.”

“Roger, we’d like to take your photograph and get your fingerprints,” Bertocchini said. “Would that be all right?”

Kibbe shrugged. “I guess,” he said, asking if he could see his wife now.

“Sure, I’ll go get her.”

Summoned from the spartan waiting room where she’d been sitting flipping through year-old fishing magazines for something to do, Harriet thought Roger looked defeated sitting alone in the interrogation room.

“Everything go okay?” she asked.

He seemed to be staring at the tip of his shoe.

“I’m not going home,” Roger said flatly.

Harriet was floored. “Of course you are.”

“No, I’m not.” He hung his head so low she couldn’t see his eyes.

A detective suddenly appeared, startling them. They were ready for Roger in the Identification Section. She stayed with him while he was fingerprinted and then photographed. Her mind raced as they went through the procedures she had seen before only on TV crime shows.

She well remembered Roger being taken in for questioning years earlier; how frightened she’d been and how cocky Roger had acted. The year had been 1978. Employed in an accounting office at the time, she’d been working late one afternoon when he called from home—a cookie-cutter tract house they owned in industrial Pittsburg, 20 miles northeast of Oakland—to say that two detectives were in their living room and wanted to take him in for questioning. A few days earlier Roger had told her he thought the cops were following him and taking pictures of his van. He didn’t speculate as to why, and Harriet assumed it had to do with his prison record. After that, she’d spoken with a couple of their neighbors, who reported that police were asking questions about Roger and his multicolored van in connection with the
case of the missing young woman who had been in the news and the subject of flyers up around town for more than a month. They’d taken Roger to the
Contra Costa County D.A.’s office in Martinez, where she had met up with them. When she had
planted herself in front of the detectives and demanded to know what it was all about, one of them whirled on her and said: “Would you like me to book
you
now?” She had moved aside. As Roger went by, she saw a smirk on his face. He said loud enough for the cops to hear, “We have nothing to worry about.” She’d been taken aback at how calm and reassuring he sounded.

Why was he acting so differently this time?

Roger had claimed he didn’t know anything about any missing woman back in 1978 or about any murder case now. He said he’d done nothing wrong, and she believed him. She’d never known Roger to hurt anyone—in fact, he always went out of his way to avoid confrontations. There were times when if she’d been a man she would have punched someone’s lights out—like when a former employee walked into their office and stole Harriet’s Rolex right off a table. Roger saw it happen; he told her about it the next morning when she couldn’t find her watch. But what had he done about it at the time? Much to her exasperation: nothing. Roger avoided showdowns of any kind.

She’d begun her life with Roger aware of his troubled past. In fact, he’d been out of state prison only a short time when they met in 1972. That two-year stay behind bars, an earlier conviction (1963–65), and another one in 1974 for which he served a year had all been for property
crimes like petty theft, burglary, grand theft. He’d done really dumb things like taking wood from a lumberyard and tools from a garage. It wasn’t as if he profited from his thievery, or even needed what he stole. She knew he had sometimes stolen to get even with someone he was mad at—blind-siding rather than confronting
was
Roger’s way—but other times he didn’t know his victims at all. Like the time years ago back in his hometown when he’d parked a couple of blocks from an army surplus store he intended to loot late one night, broke a window, and waited at the corner bus stop to see if the place had a silent alarm. When the police showed up a few minutes later, Roger had calmly given them a description of “two men who ran that way,” then climbed aboard a city bus, which he rode only to the next stop and then circled back to his car. He’d clearly relished telling the story of how he’d “outsmarted the cops.” Harriet came to realize that thievery had been a kind of mind game to him. He wasn’t motivated by profit—he had no drug or other expensive habits to support. True satisfaction for him was fooling the cops and getting away with it.

In any case, as far as she knew, Roger had never hurt a soul. So why then, she wondered, was he worried about not coming home?

*      *      *

B
ERTOCCHINI
was still the new kid in Homicide, but as a skilled street cop he knew about judging people by their words and demeanor. And he had a strong feeling about Roger
Kibbe, a real
bad
feeling.

Throughout the hour-long interview,
Kibbe had remained outwardly calm, although Bertocchini sensed that he was squirming.
Kibbe had not made any obvious admissions or slipups or incriminating statements, however, and answered all the questions put to him.

Before
Kibbe departed, Bertocchini had asked if he’d be willing to take a polygraph if it could be arranged for the following day.

Kibbe said he wanted to call his brother.

Bertocchini showed him a phone.

When he was done, Kibbe said he’d think about it and get back to Bertocchini.

“You’ll call me in the morning and let me know?” Bertocchini pressed.

“Yes, we will,” Harriet said.

After the Kibbes had left, Bertocchini went into
Biondi’s office, where Biondi and Reed had watched the interview on a closed-circuit television monitor.

“What do you guys think?” Bertocchini asked.

Reed and Biondi were noncommittal.

“This is weird, I know,” Bertocchini said, running a hand through his mane of thick black hair. “I mean, I’m not exactly Mr. Experienced Homicide Investigator, so tell me if I’m off base here. But sitting across from this guy, he sent chills down my spine. The way he talked about women—it was like they’re his playthings. And he’s on I-5 a lot and he’s familiar with all the locations of our women. He’s got the
cars, too.”

Verifying the informati
on Bertocchini had obtained from DMV, Kibbe had said he bought the Datsun 280Z in June (1986)—two months before Sabrah disappeared in what her mother described as a “dark two-door sports car.” Prior to that, Kibbe said he drove a white two-door 1972 Ford Maverick, which he’d sold in July (1986)—three months after Heedick disappeared. The Kibbes had registered a white four-door 1986 Hyundai, apparently to replace the Maverick, in July (1986).

Turning to Reed, Bertocchini asked, “Wasn’t Heedick picked up in an older white two-door?”

“That’s what
Driggers says,” Reed answered.

Bertocchini pointed out that Kibbe had had his furniture shop in the truck-stop town of Ceres, “about three miles from the main drag of Modesto.” Also, that Kibbe and his wife had rented a townhouse nearby,
while subletting their Oakley home to friends at the time of Heedick’s disappearance.

Days earlier, Bertocchini had run Kibbe’s name through the DOJ for a
criminal record and come up with his lengthy rap sheet for burglary and theft. His record was notable, Biondi had thought this evening as he reviewed it, in that there weren’t any crimes of violence or previous sexual misconduct listed.

“His wife said something interesting,” Bertocchini continued. “When we got here she wanted to know if she should hire an attorney. She said Roger had previously been questioned in
Contra
Costa County by police in the disappearance of a young woman from a shopping center because his van was similar to a van that was used in the crime. It had caused them a lot of grief and she didn’t want to go through that again.”

Biondi thought Bertocchini might be getting too worked up about Kibbe. The homicide chief realized that the two detectives sitting in his office were exact opposites. Reed always had his feet planted firmly on mother earth, and evaluated people and information in a careful, almost detached way. Bertocchini, on the other hand, seemed to put substantial weight in hunches and spinal chills.

The fact of the matter was that there had been a deluge of “
persons of interest”—or POI’s, as Biondi had taken to calling them—in the I-5 investigation. POI’s differed from suspects in that there was no evidence or information linking them to a specific crime. A POI was investigated, rather, due to a variety of less tangible factors, such as: They looked like the composite, they drove a similar car, they had a violent criminal history that included rape, they frequented the geographic areas the victims were abducted from or where their bodies were dumped, they had been reported to police by suspicious friends or relatives.

Some weeks earlier, Bertocchini himself had been called to the scene of a traffic stop in Stockton where a look-alike was being detained.
John
Samples certainly resembled the composite, and was the right age, height, and weight. He was driving a dark red MGB, and a search of the vehicle found a loaded flare gun. Samples admitted he often took “joy rides” on I-5 to Sacramento. Although he was an unemployed mechanic, he denied ever stopping to assist females with disabled cars. Bertocchini had felt so strongly about Samples that he had deputies take him downtown for further questioning, and also had Mrs.
Carmen Anselmi brought out to the scene to view the car. Although some things were similar, she finally concluded that it wasn’t the vehicle she had ridden in that night. After further
questioning, Bertocchini established that Samples had been elsewhere on the date of Charmaine Sabrah’s disappearance.

As for the Stephanie Brown case, Bertocchini’s sometime partner, Pete Rosenquist, had investigated a
Chester
Simmons, who had been released from prison in December, 1985, and had been taken back into custody for rapes in the Sacramento area a month after Brown’s death. Simmons would stop vehicles at gunpoint and threaten to fire through the window if females did not comply. He also choked his victims while raping them. Simmons denied having anything to do with Brown’s death, but without a confirmed alibi he had to be considered a serious contender.

The previous month, Stan Reed had spent several days trying to locate
Jack
Browner, a look-alike who drove a dark green Triumph, even searching his apartment—the rent was in arrears by several months—before finally locating him. As a traveling salesman, Browner frequently used I-5. He admitted to fifteen previous felony arrests going back to the 1960s when he was a Hell’s Angel. On one occasion, he’d been picked up for questioning in a first-degree murder.

Also in November, Reed had spent time investigating
Richard
Taylor, a southern California airline pilot who had been the suspect (arrested and released) in five female murders in Hawaii. The victims were usually picked up at bus depots, tied up, strangled, and dumped along freeways. Reed could not place Taylor in the Sacramento area for any of the murders; also, he was eliminated as a suspect in the Brown case because he had had a vasectomy and most likely could not have left the sperm detected on the vaginal slide by the DOJ lab.

The first week of December, Reed had brought in for questioning a particularly interesting POI: a Sacramento cabbie named
Wayne
Welborn, who had kidnapped, raped, and murdered a thirteen-year-old girl a decade earlier. That a convicted rapist-murderer had been freed after serving only five years (he’d raped and sodomized the teenager before shooting her in the chest with a shotgun, for which he’d been allowed to plead guilty to second-degree murder) might have come as a surprise to the head of the local PTA, but not to Reed. He was well aware that rapists and murderers walked the streets; he dealt with them all the time.

Welborn, the son of a prominent physician, had regularly bragged to his state department of corrections staff psychologist at a parole outpatient clinic about his violent fantasies involving women. Welborn had continued to see the psychologist weekly after he’d been released from parole several months earlier. In December, he had appeared to be so agitated and
ready to explode that the psychologist had phoned the Sex Abuse Bureau of the
Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department to advise them that Welborn would be a very good suspect in any unsolved rapes. “I still don’t always know when he’s fantasizing or telling the truth,” she admitted. “He could just be getting off telling me about ‘pretend’ rapes. I don’t know. But he claims to have raped at knifepoint twenty to twenty-five women since he got out of prison three years ago. He said most of them were hitchhikers he picked up.” Sex Abuse had passed the information along to Homicide.

Reed had spent an hour interviewing Welborn, a handsome, well-spoken Ivy League type who had a fixation on emergency services—he liked to monitor police calls and make false reports. After killing the teenage girl, he’d even called police to report finding the body, then watched from a distance as officers conducted their crime scene investigation.

Welborn had claimed he was working the nights that Brown and Heedick had disappeared. When Reed asked if he’d submit to a polygraph, Welborn flinched. He told of his girlfriend’s recently flunking a polygraph regarding a stolen VCR that she didn’t steal. “She had knowledge of the theft and that’s what affected the results,” he said.