TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (26 page)

Biondi had been promised more than once that help was on the way, only for it not to materialize. But in early July, the promise was finally kept: four detectives from other bureaus were authorized to transfer to Homicide for temporary assignment to work I-5.

He had lobbied so long and hard for reinforcements, when they finally came to pass, Biondi felt neither jubilation nor surprise. “It’s about time,” he offered grimly. There would be, he knew, other aggravating struggles ahead: Where were the new homicide detectives going to work and what were they going to drive, for example, as no office space was available in Homicide and no spare cars existed in the entire division?

Why was help finally on its way? In retrospect, the big
press conference
held the same month as the sheriff’s election had pinned down the department. After the ballyhoo, and given that the body of another young woman (Karen Finch)—abducted, no doubt sexually assaulted, murdered, and dumped—had since been found in Sacramento County, common sense dictated that something had to be done. Also, to Biondi’s pleasant surprise, in Captain
Frank Wallace he’d found himself with an irascible if effective new ally who managed to sell the top brass on the fact that the staffing of Homicide was insufficient to handle its cumulative caseload and, at the same time, conduct an aggressive investigation into the rash of unsolved female murders. Too, maybe all the paper planes zinging out the windows had helped. Whatever the reasons, Biondi would finally have the live bodies he needed to launch a serious investigation.

Biondi knew the four new detectives were totally unfamiliar with the cases and would need time to review all the reports and organize the files. Once they were comfortable with the cases, he had some ideas of directions to send them, but he also wanted them to be free to follow their noses. There being no time to train rookie detectives, three of the four selected had previously done stints in Homicide. The fourth, Biondi phoned to give the good news.

“Just wondering,” he deadpanned, “you still interested in coming to Homicide?”

“Heavens, yes!” Kay Maulsby said.

A year nearly to the day after Stephanie Brown was abducted on
I-5, strangled, and dumped in a ditch 20 miles away, an
I-5 task force had finally been born.

The hunt was joined for an elusive serial killer.

Twelve

W
hen DOJ criminalist Jim Streeter received the clothing
evidence in the Karen
Finch case two weeks after her body had been discovered, it didn’t take him long to recognize that the cutting was the same as what he’d seen in the Stephanie Brown and
Charmaine Sabrah cases.

Some articles of clothing were cut completely through, as if to remove them. Other garments were cut in the telltale teasing patterns, or what Streeter had labeled “nonfunctional” cutting in the Brown and Sabrah cases.

Finch’s pink tank top was sliced down the front in a series of jagged cuts that would have exposed the victim’s breasts. But there were also slits of one-quarter to one-half inches in length coming off the center cut, slits with no discernible function. The top was also cut from under the victim’s left arm down toward the bottom of the garment, but stopped short of the hem. At the shoulder seam was another cut—approximately one-half inch in length—that went nowhere. The left shoulder strap was almost cut through, but not quite.

The blue shorts and pink panties were cut in an identical pattern, suggesting that the victim had been wearing them both when cut. They were cut completely through in the front, beginning on the left side seam and running across the crotch down to the hem of the right leg.

The shorts were splattered with blood that turned out to be the victim’s type A. To Streeter, it appeared that the victim was wearing the shorts—or at least they were nearby—when she received her violent stab wounds. They had been found on the road, near copious amounts of type A blood.

At the autopsy, no sperm had been detected by the pathologist when he examined the
rape kit swabs under a microscope. This didn’t deter Streeter, as it was not uncommon for a trained criminalist to find sperm after a pathologist had failed to do so. At the DOJ lab, specimens were routinely subjected to histological stains, a process that makes different cells easy to identify. In the case of sperm, what was commonly referred to as the “Christmas tree” stain was used; the heads of sperm cells became red and the tails turned green. When Streeter microscopically examined two slides marked “cervical” and “introital”—the latter swabbed from the opening of the victim’s vagina—they both lit up in a brilliant red-and-green collage.

The hairs in the victim’s pubic combings were similar to her own light brown pubic hairs plucked at the morgue by a coroner’s assistant, Streeter noted. And he observed nothing remarkable—no blood, tissue, etc.—in the scrapings from underneath her fingernails recovered at the morgue as part of the rape kit examination.

A piece of
duct tape found on the road turned out to be different from the duct tape found stuck to the victim’s hair. A latent print analyst could find no fingerprints to lift off either length of tape.

Always, Streeter came back to the
cutting. Obviously, the act meant something so important to the killer that he carried
scissors to the crime scene and repeated the ritual again and again.

After his initial analysis of the Finch evidence, Streeter called Biondi. “I’m looking at lots of nonfunctional cutting, more than Brown and even Sabrah,” the criminalist said. “Cuts that go nowhere—up, down, sideways.”

Even when they did find the killer, Biondi knew they might never learn the culprit’s inner thoughts and feelings as to why he did what he did. Why he killed whom he killed, why he cut their clothing, why anything. With
serial killers, the authorities and the families of victims rarely got answers to those kinds of troubling questions.

Biondi didn’t think that the I-5 killer was a rapist who happened to be killing, or even a killer who happened to be raping. He exhibited signs of a true serial killer; his motive was no doubt psychological, with his perverted acts having meaning only to him. At the scene of any serial killing where the victim had been raped, it would be correct to say the motive was sexual assault. But it usually went deeper than that. What was the killer actually accomplishing in acting out his fantasy? Almost always it came down to power and control, with the crimes committed by individuals who were otherwise powerless in their daily lives, or
thought
they were. It was about control of the situation, control of the moment, controlling who would die, controlling how and when. The crime was an elaborate dance
for the killer that prolonged his power over the victims. He felt superior to someone, maybe for the first time in his life; his ability to end a life whenever he decided to do so gave him the power so long denied him.

But Biondi wasn’t interested in becoming an amateur psychologist. He preferred to get on with the investigation. From a detective’s point of view, motive wasn’t the most important thing. Sure, in a cop’s ideal world it would be nice to know the motive every single time. But much more important was identifying the killer and developing the evidence that linked him to the murder. Cases were solved and successfully prosecuted all the time where motive was never known.

“It’s clear to me he’s psychologically torturing his victims,” Streeter continued.

“Could be a big turn-on for him,” Biondi said matter of factly.

Biondi knew that regardless of a serial killer’s psychological demons, his reasons for killing might be a lot simpler than forensic experts, psychological profilers, and true-crime writers would sometimes have the world believe.

He’d known plenty of serial killers who had killed simply because they enjoyed it so damn much.

K
AY
M
AULSBY
had finally made it.

Life at the
Homicide Bureau, however, did not start out as she had pictured. For starters, she and the other three detectives assigned temporarily to the
I-5 investigation had no place to work, no desks, no phones, nor were they assigned cars.

First things first: Maulsby made arrangements to borrow an unmarked car from Vice, where she’d previously worked, while the other “newbies” had to borrow a set of wheels every time they wanted to hit the pavement.

With no available work space for them in Homicide, the four new detectives put down roots in a combination conference and storage area down a short hallway. Cardboard boxes filled with old case files were stacked chest-high and three-deep against one wall. Most of the remainder of the floor space was taken up with a conference table, a variety of hard and cushioned chairs, and two old metal desks that were placed top-to-top and pushed into a corner. A window looked out over the Detective Division’s parking lot.

The
I-5 investigation consisted of several cardboard boxes containing assorted charts, maps, loose documents, and the all-important case volumes, which included crime scene reports, autopsies, and interview reports.

The first thing Maulsby did was to pin the maps on the wall that showed the widespread locations of the abductions and body dumps. Then, she and the other detectives emptied the boxes onto the conference table, and sat down to sort through the files and begin reading.

An hour later, they were busily taking notes and discussing the cases when a group of detectives with their lieutenant in tow showed up to have a scheduled meeting around the conference table.

The I-5 investigation quickly went back into the boxes, and the four nomad detectives making up the special task force to find a killer had to get lost for a while.

So it went, every day, several times a day.

Homicide had been given the extra personnel to work the series, but little else. Everyone knew it was a ridiculous way to run a major investigation. Ideally, they should have had a “war room” equipped with desks, phones, and filing cabinets; a place where all the files were organized and easily accessible and where detectives could sit side-by-side, exchanging ideas, opinions, and observations.

But Maulsby was not looking for excuses. Like the good cop she was, she’d make do with what she was provided.

After she’d read the cases and visited all the crime scenes, she paired up with one of the other detectives assigned temporarily to Homicide:
Joe Dean, a forty-year-old sergeant from the Jail Division who had worked Homicide for a couple of years before getting his stripes, which resulted in his transfer. Built like a linebacker at 6-foot-2, 200 pounds, Dean was a hard-nosed Joe Friday kind of cop who tended to see things in black-and-white with no shades of gray.

The last week of July, Maulsby came into Biondi’s office to talk about the
Heedick case.

In Biondi’s opinion, the best homicide detectives were very idealistic, and he had recognized this quality in Maulsby. What drove them forth in nearly impossible situations for extremely long hours had to be their unshakable belief that every murder could be solved. To be comfortable with anything less was unacceptable.

Based on what she’d read, Maulsby explained earnestly, she felt that
James Driggers was a viable suspect in the murder of Lora Heedick and he needed to be worked.

Maulsby noted that
Rita Driggers’s phone bill had confirmed collect calls from the pay phone that Driggers claimed he had waited at that night, but also on the bill was another Modesto number called from the pay phone and charged to Rita’s number that had never been identified.

“I think we should get a warrant and go to the phone company and find out who else he called,” she said.

Biondi appreciated that theirs was a fresh objective. He told them of the difficulties experienced by Stan Reed—he’d gone back to the rotation and was handling new murders—in getting Driggers out of the case. Driggers had lied to his mother about the circumstances of
Heedick’s disappearance, caused her to file a police report with false information, failed a
polygraph, had a rap sheet as long as his leg, and it went on.

Still, Biondi added, “I’ve always felt this one was part of the series even without the signature clothes cutting.”

The mission Biondi had handed the four new detectives was clear: solve these four murders, whether they were linked or not to the series or to one another. If Maulsby and Dean felt Driggers needed to be worked, then so be it. After all, according to FBI statistics, 28 percent of female murder victims were killed by their husbands or boyfriends.

He advised them not to concern themselves with
jurisdictional matters: Stephanie
Brown, for example, was as much their case as San Joaquin’s, even though her body had been found in the other county. He recommended that they touch base with the other departments, of course, and keep them informed. But everyone wanted the same thing: results. Given that three of the four new detectives had previously solved murder cases—the same three were also sergeants, and of course Maulsby was an ex-sergeant—Biondi believed that the high hopes he was placing in them to make progress in the investigation were not unrealistic.

Maulsby and Dean conducted numerous interviews in Modesto—in some instances reinterviewing people Reed had talked to earlier. If anything, the contradictions surrounding James Driggers only deepened.

When they met with Lora
Heedick’s boyfriend, it was in an interview room at the Stanislaus County Jail, where he was awaiting transportation to state prison on a strong-arm robbery conviction. “I have nothing to hide,” Driggers told them. “I feel this is the loss of a loved one. I don’t have no violence in me.”

He declined, however, to go over his activities on the night his girlfriend had disappeared, claiming he was too tired from working out in his cell the previous day and not getting much sleep. He promised to talk further if they returned the next day. They did, but Driggers passed word through a guard that he didn’t wish to see the detectives.

From the phone company, they got a name and address for the other number that was called from the pay phone on the night of Heedick’s disappearance. It turned out to be a house inhabited by a group of dopers;
one of them said he knew Driggers, but no one knew or had heard of Lora Heedick.