TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (38 page)

“Does Harriet dominate Roger?” Bertocchini asked.

“Oh, without question. She makes all the decisions. Although he was the one who wanted to go into the furniture business, she made it work for as long as it did. He would have been nowhere without her.”

“Do they argue?”

“Harriet’s anger is extremely explosive but it doesn’t last long. I’ve never heard Roger argue in any way with Harriet or raise his voice to her even when she’s screaming at him.”

“What would he do?” Bertocchini asked.

“Leave. At least a couple of times a year, after Harriet has yelled at him, he’ll jump in the car and go away. Typically, he’d be gone for two or three days at a time, and end up at Steve’s.”

As he and the other detectives had first suspected while on surveillance, Bertocchini was hearing from someone who should know that Roger’s relationship with Harriet could be, at times, the catalyst that sent him forth.

“Harriet would phone Steve to make sure Roger had shown up,” Helen said. “Then he’d drive home and things would return to normal.”

“Why do you think their marriage has lasted?”

“My sister is a very insecure person. Always has been. She relies heavily on Roger, and I know he relies on her. I don’t think she’d leave him for any reason. She didn’t leave the others and they treated her like a doormat.”

“What else can you tell us about Roger?” Ferrari asked.

“He’s an extremely artistic person who likes to paint and draw,” she said. “You should see some of the beautiful furniture and wooden toys he’s made. But I’ve always found him to be a little strange.”

“In what way?” said Bertocchini.

Helen seemed a bit embarrassed. “His background is not unlike mine. He’s spent considerable time in institutions. That does something to someone. He’s so quiet you don’t know what he’s thinking. I’ve always felt a little sorry for him.”

“Do you think he’d stop for a stranded motorist?” Bertocchini asked.

Helen looked quizzical for a moment. “I doubt it,” she said. “Roger’s not the type to get involved.”

Bertocchini explained they were heading to San Diego to do further background interviews on Roger.

“You should talk to his other brother, Jack, who lives there,” she suggested. “And his father, of course.

“Roger adores his father.”

“Y
OU
’
RE THE
one who called a few days ago?” asked the
Chula Vista Police Department records clerk.

Before leaving for southern California, Detective Vito Bertocchini had phoned to see if the department still had a file on Roger
Kibbe.

Kibbe’s rap sheet revealed that three of his first four arrests as an adult—starting in 1957 when he was eighteen years old—had been made by his hometown police force. Old reports might contain valuable history on him.

Without even checking, the clerk had told him that the department didn’t keep records that ancient. When he got off the phone, Bertocchini was chastised by
Pete Rosenquist. “It’s easier to say no over the phone than to someone’s face,” he said. “The best way to deal with clerks and bureaucrats is to go in person.”

So, the first stop on their first day in Chula Vista—the day after he and Larry Ferrari had interviewed Helen Pursel in prison—was the local police station.

“Like I told you on the phone,” the clerk said, “there’s no way we’re going to have records that old.”

“I was just hoping,” Bertocchini said. “We’ve got this multiple-murder investigation going.”

She nodded understandingly. “I saw this big pouch of old microfiche reels a while back. I can look.”

“I’d sure appreciate it.”

She returned half an hour later with a sheaf of papers in hand. “I don’t know why we still had this. Those reels should have been thrown out ages ago.”

The clerk had copied all forty-one pages of Roger
Kibbe’s file from microfiche.

On their way out, Bertocchini said to Ferrari, “Remind me to thank Uncle Pete for this.”

They jumped in the car and headed for nearby San Diego, where they had an appointment to interview Kibbe’s father. Bertocchini drove, and Ferrari read the reports.

The packet contained juvenile contact reports going back to the mid-1950s, arrest and booking reports, and various supplemental reports. It was a vivid portrait of a young life going astray from which there would be no return.

“The earliest one is dated July 17th, 1954,” Ferrari said. “Suspect: Roger Kibbe. Address: 545 Casselman. Hair: dark brown. Height: five-foot-four. Weight: One forty. Age: fifteen. Report of crime: Received call of theft of clothes from clothesline located at 447 Casselman. On arrival victim stated she had been ironing in front room and had made several trips to check clothes on the line. At approximately 4:30
P.M.
she discovered clothes missing from line. Description of missing clothing: one orchid dress, two bathing suits, four pairs of hose.”

Ferrari paused.

“Keep reading,” Bertocchini said eagerly.

“Officers were contacted by a nine-year-old girl who saw the suspect entering a park carrying the box, which he buried. Officers found the box and recovered the missing clothes. They contacted Roger and his parents. Report submitted to the juvenile division.”

Ferrari flipped a page.

“Here’s a juvenile contact report,” he said. “Officer Leo
Kelly goes out to the Kibbe house. Roger admits he’s been taking women’s clothes off clotheslines in the area near his home for the past year. Does not know
how many times but states ‘once or twice a week.’ Takes them off the line and puts them in his pockets or under his shirt and carries them either to the park or throws them in the first trash can he comes to.”

Ferrari read silently for a minute.

“Jesus Christ!” he exploded.

“What?”

“Roger hands the juvenile officer a box of stolen women’s clothes hidden in his closet. They’re
cut up
!”

“No way.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Bertocchini practically wrecked the car getting over to the side of the road so he could read the report himself. When he finished, he was certain they’d just made a key connection in the I-5 serial murder case.

“Cutting up women’s clothing was a ritual for Roger at fifteen years of age for Christ’s sake,” Bertocchini said incredulously. “And thirty years later he’s still at it. Only now he’s graduated to cutting up clothes while the women are still in them.”

“R
OGER
’
S
been in trouble most of his life,” said his father, Jack Kibbe Sr., seventy-three, a tall, Ichabod Crane—type with sagging jowls and sloped shoulders.

Detectives Vito Bertocchini and Larry Ferrari were seated on a lumpy couch in an add-on room at the back of Jack Kibbe’s San Diego home on a quiet suburban street, where he and his wife, Susan, had lived for more than a decade.

The detectives had told the senior Kibbe that they were investigating his eldest son in connection with his recent arrest for assaulting a prostitute.

“Roger had a miserable
childhood,” he said, reclining in a black vinyl La-Z-Boy. “His mother was a bad influence in his life. She didn’t like him very much.

“Lorraine was a nurse and she usually worked the twelve-to-eight shift at the hospital. When she came home at night she would scare Roger just by her presence. She had beaten him when he was young. I was in the Navy and away a lot during the war, and I didn’t know what was happening until I came home.

“I’d been away for nearly two years when I got dropped in front of the house by a taxi in ’45. We were living in Navy housing at the time on 32nd Street in San Diego. During the war that area was the biggest whorehouse in town with all those young, lonely Navy wives. Roger was out
front. He was about six years old. He looked at me with big eyes and said, ‘Are you my daddy?’ That shook me up.”

The senior
Kibbe was reminiscing about a period of his son’s life that was of minimal interest to the detectives, but they weren’t about to cut him off.

“A week or so later we were taking a drive. Roger was standing up on the backseat looking out the window. We passed 28th Street and he said, ‘Here’s where we picked up Uncle Howard.’ Lorraine never came out and admitted it but I found love letters. I would have divorced her but I didn’t want some other guy bringing up my children. So we stayed together. I don’t know if Roger knew what was happening.

“Whenever I was around I’d intervene between Roger and his mother so he wouldn’t get hit. But I made the Navy a career and didn’t retire until 1953. I was gone a lot.”

“What about Roger’s school days?” said Bertocchini, realizing he was being drawn into the life story.

“He had difficulties in that department. He was a poor reader. The other kids called him ‘dumbbell.’ In high school, he’d get up in the morning, get dressed, and after breakfast head out the door like he was going to school. The first we knew he wasn’t going to school was when we went for a parent-teacher night. They thought we’d moved away. Roger quit his junior year of high school. But he was talented in other ways. He’s real good at woodworking and drawing. One night he was sitting at the kitchen table drawing a plan for a building. I was impressed with his detail. His mother arrived home from work. Without saying a word, Roger gathered up some of his papers and left the room. He was always trying to steer clear of her. As he was leaving, she began to yell at him for the ‘mess’ that he’d made.”

“Did he have close friends?” Bertocchini asked.

“No, he was a loner. Other children picked on him a lot. I remember dropping him at a matinee and before I even pulled away the other kids had started in on him. When he’d get to stuttering, the kids teased him even more. I did as much as I could with the boys. Used to take them camping. Roger especially really enjoyed the outdoors.”

Asked when he’d last seen Roger, the senior Kibbe told of going to Tahoe for Steve’s ceremony the previous month and seeing Roger and Harriet there.

“What do you think of Harriet?” Bertocchini asked.

Harriet’s father-in-law said at first he thought she would be good for
his son. “But marrying her has turned out to be the worst thing that ever happened to Roger. Harriet blames him for everything that goes wrong. She’s domineering and mean.”

“Before Tahoe,” Ferrari asked, “how long had it been since you’d seen Roger?”

“A year ago. Maybe a year and a half. I remember it was hot so it must have been summer [1986]. Roger drove down and stayed four or five days. His furniture business had just shut down. He told me he was going to start working out of his garage, making wooden toys and whatnot.”

“What was he driving?”

“Some kind of dark sports car.”

“Could it have been a Datsun 280Z?”

“Yeah, that’s what it was.”

“What did Roger do while he was here?”

“Stayed around. Several nights he went out.”

“Did he say what he was doing at night?”

“He was trying to find some woman he’d known years ago from skydiving. Told me he never found her, though. After four or five days, he left for home one night around ten o’clock. Said he wanted to drive when it was cooler.”

“Could you come up with the dates he visited?”

“I don’t know. I’ll ask Susan when she gets home.”

“Sir, we thank you for your time,” Ferrari said, standing. “I’m going to leave my card.”

Bertocchini stood, too. “Just one more question, Mr.
Kibbe. As his father, how would you describe Roger?”

“Timid. Not a mean bone in his body.”

That same day the detectives met Jack Jr., forty-three, the youngest of the three Kibbe boys. He was bigger than his brothers and sandy-haired.

The detectives met him at his suburban San Diego home shortly after he’d gotten in from work. He operated an assembly machine that drilled holes and shot rivets into the wings and fuselages of new aircraft, a job that had to be done right the first time and took considerable skill and concentration. He’d worked for Rohr Industries, the largest employer in Chula Vista, for two decades and planned to stay until retirement. Every bit as settled in his home life, he was happily married and the father of two children.

In a statement concise enough for an epitaph, Jack Jr. said: “Roger is a kleptomaniac. He stole stuff of no value just to be stealing, and he lied a lot.”

Bertocchini nodded. “He got in trouble early.”

“Yes. We had no discipline in the family. My brothers and I could come and go as we pleased. There wasn’t any type of curfew.”

“What’s Roger like?” Bertocchini asked.

“Calm, quiet, slow-moving. He used to stutter a lot when he was young. He still stutters when he begins to lie.”

Jack explained that he’d last seen Roger the previous summer. “He called first and I gave him directions to the house. When he got here he told me he’d come down for a visit because he’d gotten into a fight with his wife.”

Bertocchini asked if there were any old friends of Roger’s in the area to whom they might want to speak. Jack gave him the name of an ex—police officer from Chula Vista with whom Roger was friends growing up.

“Anything else you can tell us about Roger?”

“I know he’s got a weak stomach and doesn’t like the sight of blood,” Jack said. “To this day he won’t go into a hospital and refuses to see a doctor or seek medical attention of any kind.”

Perhaps to balance his other comments about his brother, Jack made a point of saying that shortly after Roger left on the day of his visit, their daughter, Denise, called from the paint store where she worked.

It seemed Uncle Roger had stopped by with a beautiful bouquet of fresh flowers for his young niece.

“T
HE CASE
of Roger
Kibbe will be forever etched in my memory,” said Leo
Kelly, the former Chula Vista juvenile officer who had confronted Roger Kibbe, age fifteen, three decades earlier over the clothesline theft of women’s clothing.

“Not only were the circumstances of the crimes so bizarre,” said Kelly, a tall man with receding steel-gray hair, “but I was certain that this type of behavior from a youngster would result in a lot more serious acts down the road if something wasn’t done.”