TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (3 page)

E
ARLIER
that morning,
Allen Dakin, fifty, had bicycled toward his favorite fishing hole along a slough of northern California’s great freshwater delta, fed by endless tributaries that snaked down far-off mountains.

The supercharged heat that radiates off the ruler-flat Central Valley floor in midsummer was already warming to the task. The land was fertile here south of Sacramento due only to the miracle of irrigation. Days before, the thermometer had soared within a notch or two of a quarter-century-old record for that date of 110 degrees. It would be another scorcher today—the best fishing would be early, the fisherman knew. By midday, he planned to be sitting in his pint-size mobile home with a tall cold one after a fish fry.

Dakin stopped at a flooded irrigation ditch off a seldom-used two-lane road adjacent to a cultivated cornfield. It was his cache for live bait: fat crawdads that bass often hit on. He climbed off his bike, and was working his way down the ditch checking his crawdad traps when he spotted her.

Though the body was floating facedown, he knew it was female by her shape—too, the only thing she had on above the waist was a pink bra.
He also knew there was no point in trying to pull her out. She had obviously been there for a while, and was surely dead.

At that point, the middle-aged man panicked. Jumping on his bike, he pedaled away furiously, leaving his fishing rod and tackle on the ground. Not stopping at the nearest farmhouse about a mile away, he passed a dozen more farms as he rode all the way home to call the authorities.

Deputies from the
San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Department and an emergency crew from the local fire department were the first to respond to the scene at 8:45
A.M.
With irrigation water from an adjacent field pouring into the ditch nearby, they used a long gaff to push the body to the opposite bank, where they could better prevent it from drifting downstream.

Two San Joaquin Sheriff’s detectives, based in Stockton, some 35 miles south of Sacramento, arrived half an hour later. From the passenger’s side of the unmarked car emerged
Pete Rosenquist. A trim six-footer, he was handsome in a classic Paul Newman way, with sandy-colored hair and sky-blue eyes. With sixteen years on the force and seven in Homicide, Rosenquist, nearing forty, was the wise veteran. A strong, quiet type, he had a been-there-done-that confidence that didn’t come off as cockiness. He was willing to be a team player, but was just as comfortable working alone. This fit the style of San Joaquin’s five-member Homicide Bureau, where individual detectives were assigned to murder cases, rather than teams of two partners as in most departments. Whichever detective wasn’t tied up in court or was otherwise least busy with “unsolves” would get the “fresh one.” If someone needed help with a
crime scene or interviewing a difficult witness or making an arrest, he’d ask whichever detective had time to come along.

The driver, David “Vito”
Bertocchini—big, barrel-chested, 6-foot-2, under thirty, black hair and matching mustache—was as tough as he looked. On the force six years, he’d been the type of street cop who relished a good bar fight to break up. Now that he was working detectives—he was brand new to Homicide—he missed the action of Patrol. Bertocchini was no fashion plate: he favored nylon windbreakers, polyester pants from Sears or JCPenney, and rarely a tie. Nobody could say, however, that he wasn’t impassioned about his work. An old hand like Rosenquist only had to point and get out of the way—the irrepressible Bertocchini would find a way to get the job done, no matter what.

By luck of the draw, this new case had been assigned to Bertocchini. It would be only his second homicide—the first had been the shooting of a drug dealer, still unsolved. Rosenquist was along because he was between
court appearances on another case and had offered to help out. These two were opposites, and not just in appearance. Rosenquist could at times be as laconic as Calvin Coolidge, while Bertocchini, with a born salesman’s gift of gab, was always on full volume. Yet, in Rosenquist, the sagely Homicide veteran, newcomer Bertocchini would find his mentor.

Before allowing the body to be removed from the water, the two detectives went down the steep bank to take a look. Floating facedown in the water, the shirtless victim’s back was exposed. They could see some long twigs and leaves caught under her bra strap. Her back and shoulders were dirty, as were her white shorts. Her legs were not visible in the murky water.

Back at the top, the detectives made a cursory search of the immediate area for any type of evidence. The ditch was surrounded on all sides by tall grass and weeds. There was a makeshift trail of freshly matted-down grass leading down the embankment on the side of the ditch where the body had first been discovered. Midway down the slope the detectives found a woman’s leather sandal. A matching one was at the waterline. The shoes were photographed and taken as evidence.

When the detectives gave the word, a bare-chested fire department captain with a rope around his waist went down the embankment and strapped the body into a wire-type gurney used for emergency evacuations. The gurney was then pulled up to the road.

The detectives could now see red abrasions at the front of the dead woman’s neck, and a band of purplish discoloration around her neck—the telltale markings of ligature strangulation. Whatever had been used to garrote her was gone.

About then, a paunchy, bespectacled private pathologist on contract with the county arrived. He took the core temperature of the body by making an incision in her back and inserting a probe directly into the liver. It registered 81 degrees. He found varying degrees of rigor mortis in the jaw, the legs, and the upper extremities. He also measured the temperature of the water and the air to assist in calculating the approximate time of death.

Nothing would be official until after the autopsy, of course. But at this point, it was an apparent homicide.

The body carried no identification, and no purse or wallet was found. For now, she was “Jane Doe.”

From experience, Rosenquist knew that it was all but impossible to solve a murder when the victim was unidentified. Most investigations, when the killer was unknown, had to start with the victim; her movements
in the last hours and days, lifestyle, known associates and enemies, etc. Trying to solve a murder without knowing the identity of the victim was like trying to survey a plot of land with a blank measuring tape. Left to making wild guesses, you had to get real lucky. Like maybe the killer walks into the nearest sheriff’s substation and confesses. Or a witness to the abduction comes forward with a description of the suspect or his vehicle. Even better: the killer gets tanked and brags to the wrong person on the next barstool. What a homicide detective hopes for, every hour of every day as he tries to cover as many bases as possible, is for the victim to be identified, so that the real murder investigation can begin in earnest.

After the young woman’s body was removed from the scene and on its way to the county morgue in Stockton, Bertocchini and Rosenquist made a wider search of the area on both sides of the ditch, and on the other side of the dirt road. They drove down the narrow lane until it ended within a mile at a deserted farm labor camp. Finding no other evidence, they departed around noontime.

They had a postmortem to attend.

O
N THEIR
downward trek to the Pacific Ocean, two great white-water rivers, the
Sacramento and the American, flow from the Sierra Nevada Mountains into the Sacramento Valley floodplain. At the confluence of these rivers lies the city of Sacramento, the California state capital, settled a century earlier by an influx of farmers, ranchers, gold miners, and railroad laborers.

Today, downtown Sacramento, the center of political power in the nation’s largest state, is anchored by a cluster of low-slung skyscrapers, much of their impressive square footage taken up with the day-to-day running of state business. This is home to the state legislature, a sometimes corrupt and often gutless body (to alleviate prison overcrowding six years earlier the legislature cut many sentences in half) with a dismal record for failing to pass meaningful laws, thereby leaving one tough call after another up to the citizens or special interests to pursue via the ballot initiative process.

Notwithstanding Sacramento’s nickname, the “City of Trees,” so ordained because of old-growth trees that provide street-side canopies of foliage, a more accurate moniker today would be “Los Angeles Jr.” Clogged freeways, stifling smog, street gangs, an increase in violent crime, and a seemingly unconquerable homeless problem are among the social ills shared by California’s first and fourth largest cities.

Sacramento’s surrounding suburban communities—with sun-kissed
names like Citrus Heights, Rancho Cordova, Orangevale—sprawl outward in three directions for a thousand square miles, making up greater
Sacramento County. The climate, and nearby camping, boating, fishing, hunting, and snow skiing, as well as the close proximity of Reno and San Francisco (both two-hour drives), coupled with a huge employment pool at several once-thriving military bases, have helped to attract a million and a half residents.

At 2:10
P.M.
on July 15, 1986, the
missing person report generated by Stephanie
Brown’s mother hit the desk of
Sacramento County Sheriff’s Sergeant Harry Machen of Homicide at headquarters downtown.

Machen was up to his eyeballs more than usual, as the other three detectives in the Bureau were out on a new double homicide, which meant that everything else came his way. But noting that the report was barely an hour old and had been hand-carried from Patrol up to the third-floor Homicide Bureau, he looked at it right away. In charge of Adult
Missing Persons, Machen had set up the reporting procedures, even designing the succinct but detailed forms used department-wide. Six hundred missing persons reports came into the
Sacramento Sheriff’s Department every year, and Machen carried out the majority of the investigations himself. A lot of them involved juvenile runaways, errant spouses, and other individuals who didn’t want to be found. Then, there were the others—those who dropped out of sight involuntarily for more ominous reasons.

From what he read, it struck Machen that there were very suspicious circumstances surrounding Stephanie
Brown’s mysterious disappearance. He called Communications and requested that Deputy
Acevedo, still on patrol, be radioed to contact him immediately.

Just shy of 6 feet and powerfully built, Machen was an immaculate dresser who always looked neat and distinguished, no matter how much overtime he’d put in. A seventeen-year veteran of the department, his blondish hair had already been tinged with gray at the temples when he arrived at Homicide three years earlier. Being the only sergeant in Homicide, Machen was officially second in command. In addition to overseeing things when the lieutenant wasn’t around, he not only handled missing persons but also worked as many homicide cases as any other detective in the Bureau.

Machen went into an adjoining office: a small, cramped space painted government beige that was dominated by a metal desk of the same color shoved up against the wall and a matching bookcase laden with snappy titles like
Practical Homicide Investigation, Techniques of Crime Scene Investigation
, and
Forensic Pathology.
At the desk, his back to the door, which almost
never closed, Lt. Ray
Biondi sat in a faded yellow Naugahyde-cushioned chair.

A trim man pushing fifty,
Biondi stood several inches over 6 feet. A mop of thick, wavy black hair and full mustache had surprisingly little gray, despite his more than two decades with the department. In every way a cop’s cop, Biondi was a no-nonsense
manager who had little use for the myopic, bean-counter types that had come to dominate the higher ranks of law enforcement in these days of shrinking municipal budgets. He was skilled at running interference for the detectives who worked for him, so they were left alone to do their jobs, thereby earning their unwavering loyalty. If a detective needed to fly somewhere to further an investigation, Biondi wouldn’t hesitate to short-circuit the memo-driven bureaucracy by seeing that the detective was on the next plane, and afterward, fight the often ugly battle to justify the expense to higher-ups. The danger in writing memos asking for something, Biondi had learned long ago, was that someone could say no.

Not given to pulling rank, Biondi considered himself a detective first, and a boss last. He had made it a ritual for he and his crew of detectives to lunch together, an act of social bonding over countless burgers, Philly cheese sandwiches, and bowls of chili that regularly turned into valuable brainstorming sessions about unsolved cases.

Handing Biondi the missing persons report, Machen said succinctly: “Last seen by roommate twelve hours ago. Doesn’t figure she took off with a guy.”

Biondi read the report through half-moon reading glasses, then flipped them up onto the top of his head and massaged the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.

Few cases received by detectives are as perplexing as missing persons cases. In most other investigations, including homicides, it’s generally known at the outset what specific crimes are involved. Not so with missing persons. It’s not even certain
any
crime has been committed. For that reason, many law enforcement agencies traditionally wait twenty-four hours before doing any real work on an adult missing person. Statistically, only a small fraction of them end up victims, with most returning home on their own. Missing persons, for these reasons, are not given a high priority by most law enforcement agencies.

Biondi, however, was keenly aware that through the years there had been many unsolved homicides that began as local missing persons cases that had not been investigated at the time, or had been improperly handled during the critical early stages when leads were most fresh. Previously,
all missing persons (adult as well as juvenile) had come under the jurisdiction of a separate bureau in the department. One 1980 case, in particular, had led to all adult missing persons cases being transferred to Homicide. Twenty-one-year-old
Kathy Neff had left her car at a
Sacramento automobile dealer for servicing and disappeared while walking the half mile to her home. Although the case had all the earmarks of a stranger abduction, it had not been worked as a possible homicide. Three weeks later, Neff’s body—clad only in socks—was found in an agricultural ditch not far from Interstate 5. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled. It wasn’t like Biondi to claim that his detectives could have solved this still-open case had they gone to work on it right after the woman’s disappearance. Still, he knew that the investigation would have been handled very differently from the beginning. Veteran homicide detectives would immediately have canvassed the neighborhood where the young woman had disappeared seeking possible witnesses to anything unusual, and they also would have taken alibi statements from anyone in the area who could not be eliminated as a suspect. They did all these things after the body was found, of course, but a cold trail is more difficult to follow. Such foul-ups were why all adult missing persons cases now went to Homicide.