TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (33 page)

At this point in their relationship, she didn’t much care what Roger was doing on his own time after work, or even whether he was or was not cheating. She preferred not to think about Roger being with other women, of course, but she’d lost all interest in resuming sexual relations with him. Their boundaries had been well defined: They were still together only as a matter of accommodation.

Although Harriet and Roger didn’t subscribe to any newspapers and only occasionally watched TV news, she was aware that the toll of the I-5 killer was mounting. It gnawed at her that Roger had been questioned as a possible suspect. By now, the police had obviously realized their mistake or they would have been back, right? The man responsible for those killings was a monster, the type that Harriet had only read about in the true-crime books she devoured. She knew that vicious, cold-blooded killers existed, of course, but she didn’t know what one looked like in real life. She was certain, however, that they didn’t look and act like Roger. Still, the fact that the police had had some reason to question him in connection with the series of terrible crimes continued to trouble her.

One night in the summer (1987), they were lying in their separate beds shortly after turning out the lights. She asked the question she’d asked him before and would continue to ask him—the question she couldn’t shake.

“Do you know anything at all about these dead women?”

Without the slightest hesitation, Roger answered, “No,” then bade her good night.

Harriet noticed some changes in Roger that summer. He seemed more withdrawn than usual, and at times outright morose. Thinking it had to do with their deteriorating
marriage, she couldn’t blame him. She was feeling similar hopelessness. A marriage that once seemed to have a future had turned into a leftover carcass with no sustenance for either of them. Who could be joyous about it?

Roger had sold his custom-made $2,300 parachute rig, too—for only $800. He’d had it less than a year, and had worked weekends for months packing chutes at the Antioch skydiving center to build up enough money on the books to buy it. The chute was a rectangular para-foil in Roger’s favorite colors: red, white, and blue. He had a jumpsuit to match.

Harriet was bewildered that Roger had parted with his beloved rig. A veteran of more than four thousand jumps since 1966, he now seemed reconciled to giving up the one thing he seemed to enjoy above all else in life. When she asked him why he’d sold the rig, he told her because they needed the money, even though she never saw a penny of it and she paid
all the bills. Things were tight and parachuting was not a cheap hobby, but Harriet would not have asked him to sell his rig—it would have been like asking a weekend fisherman to sell his favorite rod and tackle.

On a hot August evening as they sat in the living room watching a TV sitcom, Roger cleared his throat during a commercial and out of the blue said: “There will come a day when we’ll part company and you’ll be grateful for it.”

It was a veritable speech for him these days.

“What do you mean?” she’d asked.

Harriet was sitting on the couch across from Roger, who was in an easy chair.

“You’ll see,” he said.

On the night of Roger’s arrest for
assaulting the prostitute, Harriet was in the hallway outside the bathroom when he casually announced, “I’m going out.”

She turned to look at him down the long hallway; he was already at the front door with his hand on the knob. In faded blue jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers, he looked like a regular guy heading out for bowling league night—only it was nearing midnight and she’d come to think of him more as a prowling tomcat.

“Oh?” she said as casually as if he’d told her he was going to stay up and read. She’d long given up questioning him about his comings and goings, and all the mileage he put on the
cars, or even caring what he did as long as he didn’t use credit cards or otherwise run up debts.

He turned and left, and she went into the bathroom to brush her teeth for bed. The next time she heard from him was his collect call from jail the following morning.

“What did you do to end up
there
?” she asked.

“I’ll tell you later. Call
Steve and let him know.”

She inquired about the car, and Roger said it had been impounded by police.

They’d sold the Datsun 280Z in February (1987)—deciding to get rid of it because Roger said it looked too much like the car driven in some of the I-5 killings—but not before he’d logged 27,196 miles on it in only seven months. (He’d put 26,755 miles on their previous car, a red Honda, in just eight months.) Since then, their main form of transportation—they also had an old pickup that barely ran—was their white four-door 1986 Hyundai that they’d purchased in the summer of 1986 for Harriet to drive.

“The car is
impounded
?” she said. “That’s just great. What am I supposed to do without a car?”

Harriet realized that to an outsider it might have sounded as if she was more worried about the car than Roger.

She called Steve and broke the news, explaining that Roger wouldn’t tell her what he was in jail for.

Steve promised to make some calls.

When he rang back, Steve told her straight out that Roger was in jail for attempted rape of a prostitute.

Harriet’s legs went weak, and she felt her heart pounding. She had to sit down.
Rape? This
was the guy who wasn’t interested in it at home, and he was going out picking up prostitutes and trying to
rape
them! For a moment, she saw the morbid humor in it:
You don’t have to rape prostitutes, you big dummy, you only have to pay them.

Then, she began to cry.

Steve outlined the steps she needed to go through to get the car out of impound, which she did that afternoon when their relief Public Storage employee gave her a lift downtown.

Later that afternoon when Roger called again from jail, Harriet threatened not to bail him out. But after she hung up she got to thinking that questions would be asked by their regional supervisor if Roger was gone too long. As it was, she had signed up with an agency for temporary bookkeeping work from time to time as a way to bring in more money. Roger would need to cover for her double dipping, as Public Storage considered her a full-time employee. But a few days in jail wouldn’t hurt him, she decided. Anyway, after his behavior he deserved to cool his heels awhile.

Four days later, she bailed Roger out after a municipal court judge set bail at $15,000, which they met by signing an agreement to pay a $1,500 premium to a local bail bondsman. She said nothing to Roger inside the police station when they first brought him out like a stray needing a home.

They walked silently to the car.

Harriet was still furious about the arrest and the fact that he’d been with a prostitute, and normally she would have been ranting and raving. But she knew that in the best of times, yelling at Roger was like screaming at a brick wall; a sore throat was all she ever got out of it. Why bother now?

She drove from the jail parking lot with Roger slouched over in the passenger seat. When they hit the first red light, they sat mute, both staring straight ahead.

Harriet was rolling over in her mind questions she would have liked
to ask Roger:
How many prostitutes had he picked up? How long had he been doing this? Had he been with prostitutes when they were still sleeping together?

Finally, without looking at him, she hissed: “Can’t you keep that thing in your pants?”

Roger said nothing.

For the next two weeks, Roger stayed close to home. It seemed the ordeal had knocked the wind out of him. He didn’t use the car or go out a single night, and was content to putter around the place, cleaning out and showing storage spaces, doing some painting, and otherwise keeping busy.

On a Saturday morning the first week of October (1987), Roger and Harriet took a leisurely drive to Lake Tahoe on U.S. 50, passing right by Old Meyer’s Grade Road, where the unidentified young woman had been found nude and strangled seventeen days earlier.

Steve was to receive an
award from his department at a special dinner and had invited them and other family members to attend the ceremony. Roger wouldn’t have missed it for the world. He and Steve were close; about as close, Harriet thought, as two brothers could possibly be. What they talked about and had in common when they were alone she couldn’t guess—the older brother who had been on the wrong side of the law so much of his life, and the younger brother who was the law.

She knew the brothers had opposite opinions about their late mother,
Lorraine, a hospital nurse who had died of melanoma at age forty-three in 1963. By all accounts, Steve worshiped her memory, while Roger, who long felt he was his mother’s least favorite of her three boys, did not. Many of Roger’s stories about his mother had to do with her anger and ridicule directed his way. According to Roger, she always “yelled and screamed” at him, finding fault in everything he did. She hadn’t liked his tendency to stutter when nervous, his disinterest in school, his difficulty with reading, his slow-moving gait, and seeming scores of other minor and major faults she found with him. He remembered her being quick to discipline him and let fly with an open hand. One of Roger’s earliest
childhood memories was of his mother beating him until he couldn’t walk for playing with his army toys in her monthly supply of flour—this during World War II rationing. He also had memories of being locked out of the house, naked, as a boy by his irate mother and hiding in the bushes until his father came home. That night he issued his first threat to run away from home. Before long, he was sneaking away in the dark for hours on end; he soon found he enjoyed peeping into neighbors’ windows. His sneakiness grew, and before long he was burglarizing those same homes, and eventually stores.

The third
Kibbe son, Jonathan Jr., who worked in the aerospace industry in San Diego, was five years younger than Roger. When their mother took seriously ill, her two youngest sons—then grown men—had come to her bedside, but not her eldest. And when Lorraine
Kibbe died, Roger had a good reason for not making his mother’s funeral: he was in state prison serving a two-year hitch for burglary.

Seemingly without an ounce of envy or resentment, Roger idolized Steve, who, in turn, appeared very comfortable in his role as the stable, responsible brother who was always there when his hard-luck older brother needed a lifeline.

It was a
Kibbe family reunion of sorts at Tahoe, with Roger’s father, Jonathan “Jack” Sr., and his second wife, Susan, whom he married a year after Lorraine’s death, and who was also a nurse, coming up from San Diego. Only the third Kibbe brother, Jack Jr., failed to make it.

At the “Law Enforcement Appreciation” dinner given at the Carson Valley Improvement Club in Minden, Nevada, that night by the Elks, the Kibbes all sat together.

Steve was not as tall as Roger, who himself was not as tall as their father. More stocky than his father and Roger, Steve had a full head of hair sprinkled with gray and a closely cropped beard. He had a soft and deliberate way of speaking, not unlike Roger. For the occasion, he wore a blue blazer, white shirt with tie, pressed jeans, and, like every Nevada cop worth his weight in sagebrush, cowboy boots.

When Steve’s name was called, he moved to the front of the room where his boss,
Douglas County Sheriff
Jerry Maple, waited at the podium. As the sheriff handed Steve his award and shook his hand, polite applause began. Everyone at the Kibbe table, including Roger, beamed with pride.

Homicide Detective Steve Kibbe had been named “Officer of the Year” the same week that Roger Kibbe had become the
prime suspect in the I-5 serial murders.

Sixteen

W
hen criminalist Jim Streeter received the pieces of
white
cord found at the Jane Doe murder scene in El Dorado and in Roger Kibbe’s crime kit, he studied them under a microscope, finding all five pieces to be the same in several important respects.

Type of fiber: nylon

Number of fibers running through cord: six

Color of fiber: white

Type of weave and pattern size

Threads per cord: 32

Shape of cord: hollow

Streeter could not say that the cordage found at the two locations had once been part of the same length of line. The closest he could get—and all he could testify to in court—would be that the pieces were similar.

In examining the
scissors from the crime kit, he saw the tiny pieces of
duct tape on the blades that
Kay Maulsby had noticed but was unable to match the fibers stuck to the tape with any of the victims’ clothing. If the fibers were from the last victim Kibbe had killed, they had not yet found her.

Streeter spent that afternoon checking various hardware and sporting goods stores around Sacramento looking for similar white cord, but found none. On a hunch, he stopped at the Lodi Airport and showed the cordage to the owner of the Parachute Center, who recognized it.

“What’s it used for?” Streeter asked.

“Suspension and reefing lines.”

Streeter had a blank expression.

“In the construction of parachutes.”

A
T THE
wheel of a lurching, smoking motor home, Detective Vito Bertocchini pulled into a shopping center parking lot adjacent to the Public Storage facility on Tupelo Drive in
Sacramento. Heading for the end of the lot closest to Public Storage, he parked the beast that would be his home away from home for the next two weeks.

In the passenger seat, Pete Rosenquist studied the terrain through binoculars. “This is good,” he said. “I see the office and the front door. There’s a walkway in back that leads to the storage spaces. We’re covered on both ends.”