TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (25 page)

“On the shoulder. It looked like it may have stopped quickly. There were skid marks on the asphalt, about three feet long, one skid mark for each tire. The car had rolled past the marks onto the gravel before stopping.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, there were some tire marks just in front of her car, like someone had been parked there and spun out in the gravel as they were getting back onto the road.”

Reed processed that information. Had Karen Finch pulled up behind a car that had appeared to be disabled, or to talk to someone who had otherwise gotten her attention?

“I saw several large footprints in the dirt around the driver’s door. They looked like tennis shoes.”

“You said the car was locked.”

“Right.”

Given something to do, Larry had perked up during the interview. His law enforcement training was obvious, and Reed considered it helpful. The young man was very observant, and able to describe clearly and concisely what he’d seen.

“When you got the door open, what was inside?”

“There was a Wendy’s cup in a holder near the gearshift, and a pack of gum. Her sunglasses were on the front dash. She had some type of clothing laid out on the passenger seat, and a baby’s bathing suit on top of it. In the back was an emergency roadside kit she always carried, and her sandals.”

No shoes had been found at the crime scene, Reed recalled. If Karen had gotten out of the car barefoot, she probably hadn’t intended to walk very far—even if she had locked the car door after her, which itself would suggest that she hadn’t been forced out of the vehicle but had left of her own free will.

Before he left, Reed had the boyfriend make a detailed drawing of exactly where he’d found Karen’s car.

After trying unsuccessfully to contact Karen’s ex-husband, Reed drove to the location where Finch’s car had been parked. The detective had already called to make sure the vehicle had been impounded, and to request DOJ to process the car—inside and out—for prints and other evidence.

Reed walked the area, searching for footprints or anything else of interest. By now, however, the scene had been trampled by numerous friends and relatives of Karen Finch’s who had come out during the week she was missing in search of clues. The amateur sleuths had turned in, he’d heard, a collection of cigarette butts, empty beer cans, and other roadside trash.

Reed found the skid marks on the blacktop midway between two telephone poles where the boyfriend had said Karen’s car had been parked. But there was no way of knowing if they had come from Finch’s Plymouth.

During its missing persons investigation, Tuolumne County had asked
Steve Higgins if he would be willing to take a polygraph. Detectives explained that he was, after all, involved in divorce proceedings with the missing woman. Although Higgins seemed very forthcoming in lengthy interviews with detectives, he expressed reservations about taking a polygraph. He said he’d heard that they were only as reliable as the person administering the test.

Reed would learn that Higgins had a strong alibi: A male friend who had been visiting for several days could account for Higgins’s whereabouts the night Karen disappeared. As the friend’s fingerprint had shown up in Karen’s car—on a piece of mail that she’d picked up at Steve’s house that Sunday—he had been asked by San Joaquin to submit to a polygraph. The friend took the polygraph four days after Karen’s car was found; he was judged to be truthful in all his responses, including those that cleared Steve Higgins.

Two days after
Finch’s body was identified, Biondi pulled all four of the Bureau’s detectives off their other cases for the day and responded with the entire crew to the
Twain Harte–Sonora area to knock on doors, conduct interviews, and retrace Finch’s movements on the day she disappeared.

Starting at 10:00
A.M.
at the
Tuolumne Sheriff’s Department, the detectives met with local authorities and learned the identity of two suspicious persons who had come to their attention. Both fit in the “sudden departure from the area” category; fleeing the area after a crime was one indicator of guilt looked for by murder detectives. For good reason, someone who has killed doesn’t want to stick around to be questioned. One possibility was a twenty-three-year-old male reported missing from Sonora on the same day as Finch. They were given a copy of the missing persons report. Another was a twenty-nine-year-old weight lifter who had previously been arrested for indecent exposure and who worked out at the same gym as Finch. Initial information was that he had a consistent workout schedule, which he failed to keep the day following her disappearance. In the end, neither man was connected to the Finch case, but in the beginning there was no way to know that without substantial legwork.

After the meeting, the five detectives from Sacramento went off in separate directions, some to Twain Harte and some to its next-door neighbor, Sonora.

Biondi first stopped in at the local newspaper, the
Union Democrat
, and updated a reporter as to the investigation. He asked the paper to help solicit reports from residents of any suspicious or unusual activity that may have occurred around Twain Harte.

Biondi drove into Sonora and interviewed a liquor store proprietor who had called to report having seen Karen Finch in her store on the Sunday she disappeared. She identified a picture of Finch. A little girl was with Finch, said the store owner, and they bought a small carton of milk and a can of soda. The owner put the time at noon.

Next, he interviewed the neighbors of
Larry Blackmore; the couple owned the house Blackmore rented. They remembered seeing familiar cars parked out front on the Sunday Finch disappeared, but recalled nothing that aroused their attention. Both identified a picture of Finch—they remembered her visiting their tenant, Blackmore, and jogging in the area on occasion.

The other detectives conducted similar interviews, none of which shed any light on Finch’s disappearance. By all accounts, she’d had a relaxing day with her daughter, visited her boyfriend’s mother, stopped for frozen yogurt with her little girl, dropped
Nicole off at
Steve’s on time, and left town.

Probably an hour or so later and after driving nearly 50 miles, she pulled her car off the road for some unknown reason. She got out, apparently barefoot and carrying her purse, which was never found, and locked the car with keys that were never found either. The car was full of gas and operable when authorities hot-wired it days later.

A few days after the canvass of the Sonora area, the most viable suspect lead in the case surfaced through a phone call to
Tuolumne detectives from a police investigator in Merced, some 40 miles south. The investigator was inquiring about
Rick
Gerson, a registered sex offender who was believed to have moved from Merced to Sonora. Tuolumne authorities knew nothing about Gerson, and were glad to get the tip on him. If he was in the area, he had broken the law by not properly registering. The investigator mentioned that Gerson had, ten years earlier, used a knife to kill a young woman, for which he’d served time in prison. Tuolumne thought the information interesting enough to pass on to Sacramento.

Stan Reed began a paper background on Rick Gerson. He was in his mid-thirties, 6-foot, 175 pounds, with graying brown hair. A check with the department of motor vehicles revealed that two vehicles were registered to him: a 1986 Nissan pickup and a 1972 Ford Pinto.

After running a criminal check on Gerson, Reed called the
Merced Police Department and spoke to a detective familiar with the murder Gerson had been convicted of.

One night around 8:00
P.M.
, Rick Gerson had entered a small retail business and robbed it at knifepoint.

“A sixteen-year-old salesgirl was working alone,” the detective explained. “He went through her purse and took some money. He found a nightie she was carrying for a sleepover that night. He cut it into strips, and bound and gagged her. Then he put her on the floor, took off her jeans and panties, and sexually assaulted her.”

“Go on,” said Reed, taking notes.

“The pathologist was sure of penetration because of severe bruising,” the detective continued, “but Gerson didn’t have an orgasm that way. He didn’t get off until he started cutting on her, and then he came all over the floor.”

“Did he cut her throat?”

“Oh, yeah. Stabbed her six times in the throat and neck. Her carotid artery and jugular vein were severed. Know what the guy does then? Puts a ‘Closed’ sign out, goes home, takes a shower, and changes. Then he comes
back
and ransacks the place to make sure he got all the money and everything else of value. Just calmly stuffs everything in his backpack. He even cut the bindings off the victim and put them in his pack. Then he strolls out the back door. That’s the point we got lucky. Someone saw him that time. When we got our hands on him later that night, we found the money, the murder weapon, and the bloody bindings in his backpack.”

The detective told Reed that Gerson had been convicted of murder, served seven years, and was paroled in May 1985. In the year since, Gerson had been a “good suspect” in another San Joaquin Valley town in the rape-strangulation of a twenty-two-year-old woman, although there hadn’t been enough evidence to charge him.

Reed next called Gerson’s parole agent. As Gerson was no longer serving parole, the agent didn’t have a current address on him. When Reed told him of the Karen Finch case, the parole agent said, “Yes, he would be capable of that.”

The state department of motor vehicles had an old address on Gerson, too. Nine traffic citations had been issued to him by various jurisdictions in the past eighteen months. Reed contacted the traffic courts to see if Gerson had given a more current address at any of his appearances. In this way, Reed found Gerson’s Sonora address, which he’d supplied to the court some months earlier.

The address sounded familiar. Reed flipped through the Finch file until he found what he was looking for. The slasher murderer, Rick Gerson, had lived two doors from the apartment Karen Finch had first moved to after she separated from her husband.

Reed sat face-to-face with Rick Gerson, not long after, in an interview
room of the Stanislaus County Jail, where he’d been booked several days earlier on a misdemeanor.

Reed asked the ex-con if he was willing to assist in eliminating himself as a possible murder
suspect.

“Yes, I’d be glad to help,” said Gerson, a big, muscular guy with Elvis sideburns and tinted glasses.

“Do you remember where were you on Sunday, June 14th?”

“June 13th was my birthday,” he said. “On Sunday, I was in Sonora. I dropped my fiancée off at work around 2:30
P.M.
I picked her up that evening after work about 10
P.M.
”

Gerson said that in between driving his fiancée to and from work he was home alone, meaning he had no alibi for the hours during which Finch had apparently disappeared.

Until recently, Gerson had worked for a courier service, which assigned him regular routes that had taken him, at various times, to Modesto, Fresno, and Sacramento on Highway 99 and I-5, sometimes until as late as 2:00
A.M.

Reed went over some other dates, starting with the date
Lora Heedick disappeared.

“Were you in Modesto on April 20, 1986?”

“No, I was making deliveries to Fresno then.”

Reed asked about July 15, 1986—“Were you driving on I-5 south out of Sacramento late Monday night or very early Tuesday morning?”

“In July I was driving the Fresno route. If I wasn’t on the road, I would have been home in Sonora.”

Reed asked Gerson if he’d been driving on I-5 toward Sacramento early in the morning of August 17, 1986, even though he looked nothing like the composite of the man whom Carmen Anselmi said her daughter had ridden off with.

“Man, that was a year ago,” Gerson said, scratching his head. “August—no, I wasn’t going to Sacramento then. I was working farther south. What day of the week was that?”

“Sunday.”

“I didn’t work Sundays. I don’t know where I was.”

“Are you familiar with the I-5 series of murders?”

“Yes, it’s on the nightly news all the time. I’m an ex-con and with this type of crime, I watch out. If I can mentally place myself somewhere else at the time that these events occurred, it helps.”

“Are you responsible for any of these murders?”

“No.”

“Were you responsible for the murder you were previously convicted of?”

“No, but the evidence was strong against me.”

For Reed, Rick Gerson would be one of those monstrous thorns in the side that periodically came with a case—a guy who could be “good” for the deed but who can’t be placed at the scene. For months, his name would keep popping up in connection with Finch. Although no evidence ever built up against him, with so many intriguing coincidences—like his having lived two doors from Finch—he was never really cleared either. He hung around like a freeloading houseguest who arrived for the weekend and spent the summer.

Just one more murderer walking the streets, Rick Gerson would, in the end, prove to be simply another distraction to be dealt with in pursuit of a serial killer.

A
S OF
June 1987, the
Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department Homicide Bureau had received five hundred suspect leads in the I-5 series via the
media. Of those, Lt. Ray Biondi counted twenty individuals as viable suspects who should be investigated; “should be” were the operative words.

The Bureau was handling, on average, one new murder a week. In the first six months of the year, detectives had twenty-two homicides, all but one of which had been solved. Ten unsolved cases were carried over from 1986, as were eight even older cases that had new, workable leads. The Bureau also received an average of three missing
persons cases a day, and at midyear had ten cases that were being investigated.

For nearly a year Biondi had been firing long memos up the chain of command requesting help. He had visions of his memos being folded into paper airplanes and launched out upstairs windows. He was convinced he’d become known within the department as the world’s biggest whiner.