TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (24 page)

By the time Biondi arrived, Reed and Bell were already doing their look-don’t-touch close-up of the
scene, with Reed dictating into a micro–tape recorder.

“Approximately 8 feet south of the bridge, just adjacent to the dirt shoulder area, are spatters of blood on the blacktop. These spatters encircle an area about 1 foot in diameter. Continuing approximately 2 more feet in a southerly direction, there is another area that appears to be blood, which is approximately 12 inches by 5 inches.

“Where the blacktop meets the dirt area, there is a pair of what appears to be women’s shorts, blue in color. Approximately 2 feet to the east of the shorts is a bush. Hanging on the bush are pink panties.

“At this point the shoulder of the road drops off at approximately a 45-degree angle, down about ten feet into the ditch area. There is a pathway adjacent to the blue shorts which leads down the embankment to where the body is located. There are a number of areas going down the embankment that have a red substance which appears to be blood.

“Laying at the bottom of the steps, in the ditch area, is a white female with blond hair. She is laying on her back. Her nude breasts are visible. She has a blouse on that is open in the front. This blouse is white and blue in color. The victim is nude from the waist down and shows a bikini tan line. There are a large number of active maggots around the throat area. I now see that the victim is wearing a pink tank top. The top appears to have been cut up the center. Further description of the body to follow after the coroner arrives.”

When Biondi had gotten the call from Dispatch concerning a “female body dump” in a remote area, he had immediately wondered if it could be number four in the unsolved series. When he arrived at the scene, he found Reed and Bell with the same thoughts. After the coroner arrived and the body was pulled onto a stretcher and all the clothes were collected and inspected, they felt even more strongly about it.

They ticked off several similarities:

Clothes cutting

Nude or partially nude victim

Scattering of clothes about the scene

No purse found

Body transported to rural crime scene

Personal identification missing

Although not on I-5, certainly in the general area

Reed had his own entry:
The latest victim had large breasts like all the others.
“This guy knows what he likes.”

It was difficult to tell whether the victim had been strangled. More
than likely there had been some type of open wound in the front of her neck, as maggots usually went for the first blood they could find on soft tissue before invading other orifices. Further analysis of the neck wound and two puncture-like wounds on the upper torso would have to await the autopsy, but, based on what he’d seen, Reed thought the victim had been stabbed.

Given the amount of blood found on the roadway, it seemed likely she’d been mortally attacked, if not killed, up above and her body rolled down the embankment to the ditch. That the victim had bled extensively was
not
similar to the other crime scenes.

“He may have cut her throat,” Reed said.

They knew he hadn’t been a slasher before, but they had also seen plenty of cut clothing, meaning he carried a sharp instrument—likely
scissors.

“He gets mad at this one,” Biondi said, speculating. “Maybe she was able to put up a good fight. He uses what he has in hand to overcome her resistance.”

Biondi knew that
serial killers generally stuck with what had worked before, but sometimes the manner of death could be dictated by the circumstances.

In collecting the victim’s clothing, it was noted that her panties and shorts were stained with fecal matter. As violent death almost always resulted in an involuntary bowel evacuation, Biondi thought it likely that these items of clothing were removed postmortem, or in the very least while she was suffering severe trauma immediately preceding her demise.

The detectives found a 3- or 4-inch length of silver-colored
duct tape stuck to the back of the victim’s head. To remove the tape and preserve it as evidence, it was necessary to cut her long
hair.

Reed and Bell talked about the tape having been used as a gag, due to its position on the head.

Biondi, who had been stooped over the body, suddenly stood up. “Brown’s hair was cut, remember?”

“Just below the ears,” Reed said.

“He gags them with duct tape,” Biondi said. “The tape got caught in Brown’s hair so he cut her hair to get it off. He doesn’t want to leave the tape behind because he knows we can get prints off it. This time he screwed up or was in a hurry and didn’t get it all.”

So much for the hair fetish theory, Biondi thought, or that Brown’s hair had been snipped off as a “trophy.”

“Our guy has a fetish, all right,” Biondi said. “A fetish about not leaving behind incriminating evidence.”

*      *      *

A
T HOME
early the next morning reading the paper over his first cup of coffee, Stan Reed came across a short article, “Few Clues in Case of Missing Woman,” buried on the obituary page of the
Sacramento
Bee
about a young Lodi woman, missing for eight days, whose abandoned car had been found a week earlier. A description of the woman fit the blond victim that had gone to the morgue the previous night as Jane Doe.

Reed arrived at the office at 7:50
A.M.
and immediately called the
San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Department. He asked for Homicide, and was told that no detectives were in yet, so he left a message.

Ten minutes later Reed received a call back from a San Joaquin detective who worked with Vito Bertocchini.

“We’ve got a Jane Doe here who might be your Karen
Finch,” Reed said. He gave a physical description from memory, and also described her clothing and jewelry.

“I’ll get back to you,” the San Joaquin detective said.

Reed asked for the number of the victim’s next of kin, and was given her parents in Oroville.

First, he phoned the department of motor vehicles and ordered a copy of
Finch’s driver’s license and thumbprint, to be picked up at the counter later that morning.

Next, he called the
Finches, and asked Naomi to describe the jewelry her daughter would have been wearing. It was identical to what Jane Doe had been wearing.

Reed was not about to tell a mother her daughter was dead based on jewelry. “I’ll call you as soon as I know anything for certain,” he promised.

Calling San Joaquin back, Reed informed the same detective he’d talked to earlier that the body they had found was wearing jewelry described by
Finch’s mother.

“You have dental charts?” Reed asked.

“Yeah.”

“Can you get ’em to me?”

While Reed worked the phones, his partner, Detective Bob Bell, was at the morgue. Bell made sure that a complete “
rape kit” was done prior to the autopsy.

The victim was found to have multiple contusions to the upper abdomen and chest, as well as the right thigh and forearm. The pathologist also found multiple incised injuries to the front neck, along with secondary insect and predator damage. He described two well-identified slash wounds with secondary transections of major blood vessels of the
neck as the primary cause of death. There were also stab wounds to the right chest, just above the nipple, and to the right shoulder—wounds that, in the opinion of the pathologist, could have been made by either a knife or scissors.

At 11:30
A.M.
, positive identification was made by a sheriff’s department technician who compared a driver’s license thumbprint with the corresponding thumbprint of the fresh Jane Doe.

Glen and Naomi Finch received a second phone call that morning from the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department.

That’s how another set of parents learned their daughter, too, was a homicide victim.

Eleven

F
our hours after Glen and
Naomi
Finch had received official notification of their daughter’s death, Detective Harry Machen met with them at their residence to get some background on Karen so that the murder
investigation could begin in earnest.

The
Finches explained how all week long they had been expecting the worst and hoping for the best.

“Every time the phone rang, I was afraid to answer it,” Naomi said softly.

From Karen’s mother Machen heard about the young woman’s failed marriage to
Steve
Higgins. Karen had had an affair with a coworker of Steve’s the previous summer. Shortly after that ended, she had become pregnant, and against Steve’s wishes had an abortion. After several tries at reconciliation, Karen had finally filed for divorce. They had made one court appearance, with another scheduled.

According to the mother, Karen and Steve seemed to have been getting along recently, as long as they didn’t talk about personal things, like finances or rehashing the marriage. When it came to co-parenting Nicole, they did fine.

“Was there any physical violence between Steve and Karen?” Machen asked.

“Not that we were aware of,” said her mother. “We never saw any signs of it.”

After the divorce, Karen had gone through a state of depression, according to her mother. “She had gone to counseling and had worked through the depression and guilt. It seemed that she was getting her life back together.”

“When was the last time you heard from her?”

Naomi said it had been on the afternoon of Saturday, June 13—the weekend Karen disappeared. “She called just to say that she loved us and to thank her father and me for helping her move the previous weekend. She said she loved her new job and her new apartment. She had Nicole that weekend, and was enjoying her.”

On the workdays she had Nicole, Karen drove her into Sacramento and placed her in day care close to work.

“I asked her about her long commute because I was a little concerned,” Naomi said. “She said she didn’t mind because she had time alone with Nicki, and also that the driving helped her unwind. I wasn’t quite as concerned as I would have been if she had still had her old car, which used to break down a lot.”

“How did she sound?” Machen asked.

Naomi managed a bittersweet smile. “She sounded really up. She was in a very positive frame of mind about getting on with her life.”

“What was her temperament like?”

“Karen had a way of making friends with everybody. All her patients loved her. She never flew off the handle, although she didn’t let people push her around either.”

Machen asked how Karen might act around a stranger who needed help or seemed stranded on the road.

“She would stop and help anyone that she knew or felt comfortable with,” Naomi said. “If it was a stranger she would be very reluctant. I don’t think she would stop or go too far out of her way.”

“Do you know if she carried
duct tape in the car?”

Naomi looked at her husband.

“As far as I know,” Glen said, “the only tape she carried was adhesive tape in the first aid kit that she always kept in the car.”

Machen asked about Karen’s finances, her friends, and where she hung out. When there was nothing further that the
Finches could add, the detective handed them his card and asked them to call if they thought of anything.

Meanwhile, Detective Stan Reed was 60 miles away in Sonora interviewing Karen’s boyfriend,
Larry Blackmore.

Reed knew that Blackmore had been cleared by both
Tuolumne and
San Joaquin as a suspect in Finch’s disappearance. He had an airtight alibi for the night Finch had disappeared—his superior officer at the correctional facility had confirmed Blackmore had worked a sixteen-hour shift until 10:00
P.M.
Also, Tuolumne County, as part of its missing persons
investigation, had routinely asked
Blackmore to take a polygraph and he’d agreed. He was found to be telling the truth about having nothing to do with his girlfriend’s disappearance.

Reed noted that the young man seemed crushed. Shaking his head sadly, he looked at the detective with glassy eyes that sought an explanation.

They had met five months earlier, Larry began, at a pizza parlor where Karen had worked nights and weekends for a short while to help make ends meet. For the last two months, he said, “we were inseparable.”

He told of their last weekend together, then not being able to get ahold of Karen Sunday night. He explained how his sister had called to report she might have seen Karen’s car, and his attempts to check the license plate number.

When he had gone out to look at the car himself that night, the boyfriend had done the right thing: As soon as he realized it was Karen’s car, he used a pay phone to call the San Joaquin Sheriff’s Department. When a cruiser arrived an hour later, Larry told the deputy that his girlfriend was the subject of a missing persons report in Tuolumne County. The deputy asked his dispatcher to call Tuolumne and see what they wanted done with the car. They waited another forty-five minutes before getting an answer that was less than satisfying. No one at Tuolumne seemed to know anything about the case, and they said just leave the car where it was. At that point, the San Joaquin deputy seemed ready to sluff off the whole thing as not being his problem. Larry, however, insisted on having the car towed to the next town; he was afraid it would be stolen or stripped if left at the side of the road. As the deputy made the necessary arrangements, Larry searched as best he could the adjacent walnut orchard but found nothing. When the tow truck arrived, he assisted the driver in jimmying open the driver’s door. Then Larry got in and knocked the gearshift into neutral with his flashlight. He even ended up paying for the tow.

“How was the car parked?” asked Reed, who considered it unfortunate that a detective hadn’t responded to the scene, and yet he understood what a low priority most departments give to a new adult missing persons case.