TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (44 page)

“The
two
reports I filed,” Judy said. She told of having filed the second one on Christmas Eve.

Maulsby would later learn that the Sacramento missing persons report, which she never saw, had been filed with the
Sacramento Police Department. No one there was aware of
El Dorado’s Jane Doe, although news stories concerning the unidentified body had run in Sacramento’s two major daily newspapers.

Watson knew that Darcie Frackenpohl should have been identified sooner. Seattle police should have sent her dental records to
California much sooner than they did. El Dorado had held up its end: DOJ received Jane Doe’s complete dental records from a South Lake Tahoe dentist only five days after her body was found. However, DOJ’s identification section that kept dental and X-ray records on the state’s unidentified dead had not received Darcie’s dental records from the
King County medical examiner until
110 days later
—on January 11, 1988. That same day, a DOJ technician noted that the missing girl had deformed fingers on one hand and matched her dental records with El Dorado’s Jane Doe. Watson had no idea why it had taken Seattle—which was supposed to be the most effective police agency in the country at finding missing persons due to its “
Green River” experience—so long to move. Judy Frackenpohl should not have had to wait four months to learn of her daughter’s death.

Judy told about Darcie’s final call and her last trip home. Also, about her daughter’s teenage rebellion and, before that, the jolt of having lost her father.

“Where’s Darcie now?” Judy asked.

Watson wrote down the name and number of the mortuary in South Lake Tahoe. “If you need help with the arrangements or have any questions,” he said, “please call me.” He gave her his office and pager numbers.

Watson’s concern seemed genuine. For the first time in four months, Judy felt she was dealing with detectives who truly
cared about her loss.

“My daughter was murdered.” It was a statement, not a question, from a mother still trying to come to terms.

Watson confirmed Darcie’s death had been a homicide, although he made no mention of the killing being part of a murder series or of their having a viable suspect.

She pursed her lips and looked up with steely eyes.

“I don’t want to know who did this. Not ever.”

The next day, she called the mortuary.

“The county buried your daughter just after Thanksgiving,” the funeral director said.

“Buried?”

“Six weeks ago. Middletown Cemetery in
Placerville. You’ll be able to have the body exhumed and brought home.”

“She was buried with no name?”

“As Jane Doe. We held her longer than usual because she didn’t fit the homeless/runaway profile. She was well nurtured and had extensive dental work. We knew she belonged to someone.”

“Yes,” Judy Frackenpohl said. “She does.”

“O
UR
investigation into the disappearance and murders of several women is continuing,” Detective Kay
Maulsby told Roger
Kibbe during her third visit to
Rio Consumnes in as many weeks.

“We haven’t been able to eliminate you as a suspect, Roger. It’s difficult for me to understand, if you’re innocent, why you don’t help us clear you.”

He remained silent.

“Give me some dates. Tell me where you were. I’d like to know about the vehicles you’ve driven the last couple of years. Where you’ve gone.”

“I know you have a job to do,” he said softly. They were the first words he’d spoken this day other than “hello” and “okay” since she’d been here. “It’s just I can’t answer your questions about th-those things.”

“Is keeping everything inside you something that you’ve done most of your life?”

He nodded.

“It’s become a lifelong habit to deal with your problems by not talking about them?”

“I’ve never been real good at talking,” he admitted. “I usually keep things to myself.”

“You think that’s a good way of handling things?”

“No.”

“Your problems aren’t going to go away by not talking about them. Have you been thinking about them?”

“I do think about them.”

Maulsby hoped he would continue, and he did.

“But I shouldn’t be talking to you about any of this stuff. They told me not to talk to anybody about anything. I’m not even supposed to talk to you about whether the grass is green outside.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Let me guess. Is it a family member?”

No acknowledgment.

“Advice from an attorney?”

Nothing.

“Can you talk about the offenses you’ve been convicted of? What happened in the golf course parking lot?”

He had previously intimated that the “entire truth” had not come out in court in the
Debra Guffie case since he didn’t take the stand and tell his side of the story.

“Tell me your side,” she said. “I’m willing to listen to whatever you have to say.”

“No, they told me not to discuss anything about that either.”

She stood suddenly, went to the door, and rapped hard. Spinning back toward him, she said in her most detective-like voice, “If you ever want to talk, you should remember my name and give me a call.”

She had wearied of the emotional hand-holding.

Maulsby had believed at times during their sessions that he might at some point open up and allow her to peek inside. But those cracks in the wall quickly closed up almost as soon as they appeared. Most of the time, she felt as she did now as she walked out the main gate of Rio Consumnes.

Roger Kibbe was going to keep his evil secrets.

W
HEN
criminalist Faye Springer transferred to DOJ’s Sacramento lab in late January 1988, her colleague Jim Streeter saw it as a lucky break for the I-5 investigation.

As a
trace evidence specialist,
Springer was a legend—not just within DOJ or California, but throughout the rather elite community of forensic scientists in the United States.
Streeter concurred with his brethren: Springer was among the best in a very specialized field.

Criminalistics was divided into three distinct fields:
serology
, Streeter’s specialty, which was advancing almost daily through rapid DNA technological advances;
ballistics
, the analysis of firearms and their ammunition;
trace evidence
, a catchall category for everything else, so named because of all the tiny things that were hard to see with the naked eye.

Streeter, well versed in the I-5 evidence, knew that neither
blood typing nor
DNA analysis would solve the murder series. Most of the bodies had been too decomposed for biological evidence to be recovered. In the two cases with
semen evidence—Stephanie Brown and
Karen Finch—there had been problems. All that had been determined with the minute amount of semen in Brown was that it could have been provided by 4 percent of the Caucasian population, a relatively wide net that included Kibbe. There hadn’t been enough of a sample to do a full complement of tests to further narrow the genetic characteristics. In Finch, matters were complicated by the fact that she’d had consensual sex with her boyfriend their last night together; Kibbe “could not be excluded” as a second semen donor. So much for DNA.

As for more generalized blood typing, Kibbe had type O, the most common
blood type, which he shared with 50 percent of the U.S. population. He was also a nonsecretor—along with 20 percent of all Caucasian males—meaning that his bodily fluids such as semen and saliva did not contain blood-type indicators. As a result, it wasn’t possible through blood typing to include or eliminate him as a possible donor.

Streeter had done everything he knew to do with the evidence. Serology had proved inconclusive, as had fingerprinting; forensic science had come up with no direct
physical link between any of the dead women and Kibbe. As the criminalist had reported to
Kay Maulsby, he was “winding down on the evidence” and had “nothing positive to report.”

Streeter had telephoned Springer several times seeking advice on I-5 while she had still been working at DOJ’s
Riverside lab in southern California. What she did better than anyone was “particle analysis” of trace evidence; she could find the puniest pieces of evidence when no one else could, then figure out their origins and significance. It was tedious, time-consuming work done under high-powered microscopes that took experience, knowledge, and patience—before Springer’s arrival, not a single criminalist at DOJ
Sacramento was doing what she did best.

Streeter had mounted some slides from I-5 tape lifts and looked at them under a microscope but hadn’t gotten very far. With limited trace evidence experience, he had no idea what he should be looking for or, at times, even what he was looking at. He’d found before him a magnified view of microscopic debris from countless sources—how could it be sorted out, separating the junk from the gems? At 500 mag power—things looked different in size, shape, color. It was not his world.

With Faye Springer working in the same lab, Streeter hoped it would be possible to draw her into I-5, an investigation that, from an evidentiary standpoint, was dead in the water. In fact, he had a plan for just that: He’d requested that Springer—in her first week on the job before she was assigned her own cases—work with him preparing tape lifts off some of the victims’ clothing. “She’s a valuable resource,” he’d told the lab director. “It would be a shame for us not to use her.”

He greeted Springer on her first day in the large, hospital-white criminalistics lab they’d both be working in. Several items of clothing were laid out on the lab tables.

“Welcome to I-5,” Streeter said enthusiastically. “We’ve got a task force going.”

“How many guys?” she asked.

She had brown eyes and shoulder-length hair to match. Her complexion was pallid from so much time spent indoors in windowless laboratories. At 5-foot-4, she was solidly built and carried herself with the gait of someone anxious to get where she was going. Makeup and hairdressers were low on her priority list, and she wore sensible shoes. Her one indulgence: a lick of hair on her forehead that she was constantly whisking back. It was difficult to know what kind of dresser Springer was because whatever she had on was always covered, as it was today, with a white lab coat.

“One full-time detective,” Streeter said. “Kay Maulsby of Sac County. San Joaquin had three guys, but they’re shutting down this month.
DOJ is really behind this.”

A bit more skeptically, Springer wanted to know how many criminalists were assigned to the case.

Streeter grinned. “Me. I’m almost full-time.”

They worked side by side that day. A few minutes before quitting time the lab director came in to say that the lab could ill afford to have two of its thirteen criminalists on one case when there was so much other work to do. Streeter would follow I-5 to completion, with Springer consulting as needed.

It was no big deal to
Springer. In fact, she had burned out on serial murders, which was one reason she had sought a transfer to Sacramento.
Riverside seemed to be a veritable dumping ground for L.A. killers. Besides the “
Hillside Strangler” case, she had worked the “
Trash Bag Murders” and “
Freeway Killer” series, with more than twenty victims each, and countless smaller series of two, three, and four victims. She had worked on more than 300 homicides.

Springer’s forte was the collection and analysis of “
exchange evidence” that could link a suspect to a victim or a crime scene. Under the
Locard Exchange Principle, the basis for the study of trace evidence, it’s not possible for someone to come in contact with an environment without changing it in some small way, whether by adding to it or taking something away. When an individual came into contact with a person or location, certain small, seemingly insignificant changes occurred. The longer and more extreme the physical contact, the more exchange evidence would be left behind. Sherlock Holmes had known this; modern-day forensic criminalists like Springer who studied trace evidence had simply gone one better in their sleuthing for tiny evidence, replacing a handheld magnifying glass with high-powered microscopes.

In one Riverside case, she had testified against a drug dealer who was subsequently convicted, largely through trace evidence. As a result, she ended up number three on his hit list, after his own attorney and the prosecutor. When the list was discovered, Springer had found it a bit unnerving that the guy actually had her home address. But it was not the first time she’d been on such a list, and she’d noticed that the prosecutor was always ahead of her. She figured as long as the prosecutor was still breathing, she was probably okay.

Nevertheless, Faye and her husband, Fred, who also worked for DOJ, had decided on a change of scenery. They had opened the Riverside lab together in 1972. It had been a two-person operation in the beginning, so cozy that Springer told friends she was “either going to have to file sexual harassment charges against my co-worker or marry him.” She did the latter in 1975; they now had three children ranging from four to nine years of age. Together they had sought the transfer, and together DOJ had moved them—in the process, kicking Fred upstairs to administration. They had bought and settled into a large English Tudor home in a suburb of Sacramento, and commuted twenty minutes to work—in the morning, she drove while he read the newspaper aloud, and in the evening he drove.

As Springer went to work on other cases, Streeter was undeterred. So much for the direct approach; he’d just have to be more subtle. He had an
idea that if the I-5 case ever got Springer’s attention, she’d work on it no matter what the higher-ups decreed.

One afternoon after Springer had already left for the day, Streeter placed a slide under her microscope; it was a tape lift off an I-5 victim. When he came in the next morning, Springer was studying the slide. He didn’t say anything. A few hours later, she asked to see more.

She was amazed at the amount of physical evidence in the I-5 investigation—all those clothes that could potentially be so rich in trace evidence—and at the same time astounded that nothing had yet turned up. Experience had taught her that the most critical aspect of any trace case was deciding which of the hundreds, even thousands, of
fibers,
hairs, and other debris picked up in the tape lifts were relevant to the case. It was a long process of elimination that could take weeks, even months.