TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (8 page)

As Stephanie
Brown had been a
Sacramento County missing person and a
San Joaquin County murder victim, either county could have legally assumed jurisdiction in the case. Biondi brought this up when Vito Bertocchini and Pete Rosenquist came to his office.

“I don’t want you guys to ever say we were quick to unload a case on you,” Biondi said lightheartedly.

Rosenquist shrugged. “You’ve got the missing persons report, the car, and the abduction. But we’ve got the body.”

Characteristically, Bertocchini spoke with more intensity. “We did the crime scene and the autopsy. This is our case, Ray.”

Biondi agreed, even though there was a strong possibility that a serial killer was stalking the roads of
his
jurisdiction. He was impressed with the two San Joaquin detectives; they seemed capable and were taking it very seriously, as working homicide detectives are inclined to do. Biondi could only hope that they would get the support they needed in terms of man-hours and other resources from their bosses. Biondi pledged to assist the San Joaquin detectives in any way possible.

As usual in the beginning stages of a homicide investigation, there were a multitude of facts and pieces of information to sift through; they were looking for pertinent leads while eliminating the worthless ones. It took old-fashioned legwork, and a lot of it.

Take the loud knock at the door of Stephanie’s Sacramento home the night she was killed, as reported by her roommate. Had it meant anything?
Probably not, detectives had concluded. Door-to-door interviews with neighbors had not resulted in any reports of suspicious persons lurking about. Moreover, if someone had been waiting outside to harm her, he likely would have attacked her when she stepped out the door, alone and in the dark, rather than follow her vehicle around town, striking only after she had become lost on the highway.

There were also the obscene phone calls that Stephanie and her roommate had been receiving for some weeks. The caller was male, and
Patty Burrier reported that he knew her name (but apparently not Stephanie’s). This wasn’t so ominous given that they had a listed phone number in Patty’s name. Also, it was a mighty big jump from obscene caller to kidnapper-rapist-killer. To the detectives, it seemed highly unlikely that these calls, disturbing as they had been for the young women, had any connection to the murder.

Detectives also uncovered a burglary report that had been filed by Stephanie five months earlier. Arriving home shortly after 8:00
P.M.
, she had heard noises in the back of the house. When she walked into her bedroom, she found that someone had pried open a window. The burglar had fled. Although no property was missing, the television had been unplugged and pulled away from the wall. There was nothing to suggest, however, that this aborted burglary had anything to do with her murder.

Biondi remained convinced that Stephanie’s abduction had been carried out by someone unknown to her who happened upon a victim of opportunity. He found Bertocchini and Rosenquist in complete agreement.

Based on the facts of the case and what he had learned about the condition of the crime scene, Biondi speculated that they were looking for a serial killer who was at least in his thirties (most were). He was patient rather than impulsive, and experienced. Biondi assigned the killer these attributes due to the fact that the crime scene had been amazingly devoid of any incriminating evidence. Clearly, he was a hands-on killer (strangulation), as are most serial killers, with NewYork’s “
Son of Sam” the notable exception.

Biondi believed that the killer had killed before and was looking to do it again. He was a cool customer, and he knew how to cover his tracks. He had to be a consummate prowler, driving long stretches of road late at night, searching for the right situation and victim. He had found her in Stephanie Brown, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her killer had no doubt developed a taste for all of it—the adventure, the manipulation, the craving to act out his fantasies, and the ultimate
power he felt in deciding when someone would die by his hands. Chances were very good he would not stop on his own.

A press bulletin released by the
Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department urgently requested that residents—particularly individuals who had traveled I-5 on the night Stephanie was abducted—contact either Sacramento or
San Joaquin investigators if they had any information concerning the Brown case. But detectives did not wait for the phone to ring.

In an unusual joint operation by both sheriff departments, with the assistance of the state road department and the
California Highway Patrol, a
roadblock went up on
Interstate 5 at the
Hood Franklin off-ramp at midnight on July 29, 1986.

The idea was to stop and talk to motorists on the same day of the week and at approximately the same hour that Stephanie Brown had been abducted two weeks earlier. Had a truck driver or late-night commuter who traveled the route regularly seen anything suspicious that night? Had anyone seen the young woman sitting in or standing next to her car? Or a second vehicle? Or another person? Could their memories be jogged by the right questions?

Interstate 5, it has been written, is “a Mississippi without romance.” Cutting a direct swath through the flattest and most vapid portions of the otherwise picturesque Golden State, the highway carries 10 million travelers a year along its 853 miles of California roadway. Yet, it is undeniably the quickest route from one end of the state to the other—from the warm beaches of the south through the vast agricultural heartland to the rainswept north.

Within days of Stephanie Brown’s murder, Vito Bertocchini had phoned Biondi with the idea of an I-5 roadblock to conduct a “witness canvass.” It was a long shot in terms of coming up with any eyewitnesses, Biondi figured. But he saw it as an opportunity to advertise the case further through the media in the hope that the publicity might generate some new leads in a case that he sensed was in imminent danger of reaching a dead end. The randomness of the terrible crime and the likelihood that Stephanie had been killed by a complete stranger meant there was no link between her and her killer for detectives to uncover, no matter how hard they worked.

The logistics of northern California’s second freeway roadblock—the first, some 30 miles northwest of Sacramento, had gone up a decade earlier to find the fugitive killers of two California highway patrolmen—had fallen to Biondi because Hood Franklin was in his county. He had tried to set it up in time for the one-week anniversary of the crime, but the state
road department had balked. It would take days to move into the area the equipment and personnel required to pinch off the state’s major north-south arterial. The volume of traffic, even at that late hour, would be heavy.

It was clear at midnight on July 29, and cooler than it had been the night Stephanie was killed. A stiff Delta breeze whipped the jackets of the nearly two dozen lawmen who had gathered.

Bertocchini and Pete Rosenquist had shown up with several other San Joaquin detectives. From one of their cars they unloaded a large stainless steel urn filled with hot coffee brewed at their jail. As the road crews were finishing up, the first thing everyone else did, cops being cops, was to grab a cup.

When the
roadblock was finally activated, motorists were met with more than a mile of lighted cones and several large trailers with flashing arrows—enough wattage to light a major runway and bring in a 727. Beyond that, flashing red-and-blue police car lights winked angrily astride the broad freeway.

Biondi was there with his crew of detectives. Standing on the hard, asphalt surface of southbound I-5’s right lane, he hoped very much that the drivers behind the line of headlights coming their way would obey the lights and temporary “One Lane Ahead,” “Merge Right,” and “Stop Ahead” signs. Normally, this was no place for anyone without a death wish to be loitering, flashlight and notebook in hand.

Among the first to be stopped were a station wagon from Los Angeles packed with a family headed for an Oregon camping vacation, a semi out of Fresno loaded with tomatoes, and another 18-wheeler sagging with lumber. They kept coming, despite the lateness of the hour, at a clip of two to three vehicles a minute.

“Do you travel this road regularly on Monday nights or Tuesday mornings?” drivers were asked. “Were you driving along here two weeks ago at this time?”

If they answered no, they were motioned on, although not before their license numbers were noted.

If they answered in the affirmative to either question, they were directed to a second area off to the shoulder of the highway where another group of detectives was waiting to question them more carefully.

At one point, the CHP officers up the line began hollering and waving their flashlights.

“Incoming!” someone yelled.

A car containing two elderly ladies had whizzed through the mile of flashing lights and signs without slowing down at all. At the last possible
moment, the driver noticed a truck stopped in front of her and slammed on the brakes. The brakes locked up, and the car skidded for the last 200 feet through the slow lane before coming to a stop, sideways, some 10 feet short of the rear of the big rig.

By then, there wasn’t a detective in sight. They’d all bailed from their positions, scattering like fallen bowling pins to the road’s shoulder. There was a lot of loud grumbling after that about how anyone in their right mind would want to be a highway patrolman.

The roadblock was covered by the television and print press, which had been tipped off earlier in the day with the caution not to release advance notice to the public. In a roadside interview that night, Biondi called the canvass a “valuable exercise that may help to develop more information on a viable suspect.”

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

In all, 296 vehicles were stopped between midnight and 2:00
A.M.
, when the roadblock was shut down.

The resultant publicity led to dozens of phone calls from local residents over the next several days. No one interviewed by police, however, reported seeing the young woman or her abductor on I-5 that night.

On August 4, not quite a week after the roadblock, Bertocchini and Rosenquist went back to the ditch that they had gotten to know so well. They hoped that another search might turn up more evidence.

The detectives would like to have drained the ditch, but that proved impractical with the continuous irrigation going on until harvest, still two months away. So, they returned with Bertocchini’s chest waders and, this time, a pole with a large magnet secured on the end. The water depth was the same as it had been every other visit to the
scene: about three feet.

In the area where he’d found Stephanie’s tank top, Bertocchini soon pulled up a pair of muddy
scissors caught by the magnet. Wiping them off, he could clearly read “Primstyle, chrome plated.” They were about 8 inches long overall, with 3-inch cutting blades. They didn’t have a spot of rust on them.

Bertocchini felt certain they had found the scissors used by the killer to cut Stephanie’s
hair and tank top, although it would turn out there was no way to positively match the cut marks on either with the surface of the cutting blades.

When he took the scissors to a sewing and fabric shop, he was told by the proprietor that they were a right-handed model not favored by serious material cutters as they lacked an angled edge. “You’ll find these in any variety store,” the man added.

The sewing shop owner would be proven wrong, however, as the detective was unable to find a single retailer on the West Coast who carried the brand. He eventually tracked down the manufacturer to the Como region in Italy. With the help of a deputy D.A. friend who visited Lake Como while on vacation, the detective learned that the company, with only a dozen employees, didn’t sell many scissors to the U.S. market.

Bertocchini decided to keep the discovery of the scissors hush-hush.

F
OR
C
HARMAINE
Sabrah, twenty-six, and her mother,
Carmen Anselmi, fifty-two, it was supposed to be a fun night.

Saturday, August 16, 1986, was a rare evening outing for Charmaine—a working, single parent who attended
Sacramento City College part-time—since delivering her infant son nine months earlier. Her mother, who had arranged for a sitter at her place, was looking forward to the mother-daughter night out, too. She hoped it would be a needed break for Charmaine.

After making sure that the sitter and baby were doing well together, they left shortly after 7:00
P.M.
for Stockton and the
Molino Rojo Night Club, where Charmaine’s sister’s fiancé,
Carlos Gonzales, was appearing with his band.

Charmaine drove her two-tone brown 1973 Pontiac Grand Prix, which she had gotten out of the garage the previous week—at a cost of $145 in repairs—after having the car towed in when it had failed to start one morning.

A blue-eyed blonde with medium-length wavy hair, Charmaine had lost the weight she had put on while pregnant, and was back down to 120 pounds—well-proportioned over her 5-foot-3 frame. Dolling herself up for the night on the town, she looked stunning in a black-and-lavender blouse, a dark lavender two-thirds-length skirt, and faux alligator heels.

Shortly after they arrived at the club and found a table near the front, the band began playing. It wasn’t more than a few minutes before Charmaine got the first of countless offers to dance. As the beautiful Charmaine twirled and spun across the dance floor under shimmering colored lights, Carmen realized it had been a long time since she’d seen her daughter looking so joyous and alive. Carmen knew she fretted more about Charmaine than her other offspring—no doubt lingering maternal insecurities going back to Charmaine’s childhood when she had suffered cardiac difficulties that had necessitated open-heart surgery. She still carried a long scar that started under her shoulder blade and wrapped around her left side.

Life, at times, had not been easy for Charmaine. Her estranged husband
had taken their two oldest children, ages two and four, to his native Sudan for a visit the previous year, and never returned. The sorrow and uncertainty of the whole situation had led to a stressful pregnancy. All of it had taken its toll.