Trace Evidence: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer

by Bruce Henderson

  The victim was wearing designer blue jeans, black suede–type loafers, and gray socks. Checking the pockets and finding nothing, the pathologist slit the jeans up both sides to remove them. Underneath were bikini panties.

  The autopsy took less time than usual. The skull contained no brain matter at all, and when the pathologist opened the abdominal cavity he found it swarming with maggots and devoid of any major organs.

  Given the delay in discovery of the body and the degree of decomposition, biological specimens such as blood, semen, and saliva could not be recovered. As a result, there would be no rape kit done or lab work to conduct. The only specimens taken from the body were strands of brown hair: head and pubic. These were sealed in an envelope and, along with the victim’s clothes, marked with the case number and placed for the time being in a coroner’s locker.

  In his report, the pathologist described the body as a “well-developed, well-nourished adult white female about nineteen years old, plus or minus two years.” She was estimated to have stood about 5-foot-4. The cause of death, he concluded, had been ligature strangulation.

  A dentist on contract with the coroner’s office showed up at the morgue the next day and charted the victim’s teeth and dental work. For identification purposes, he also made impressions of her bite. Later that same day, a Sheriff’s Technical Services deputy came to fingerprint the victim. Due to the deteriorating condition of the flesh, he was afraid the usual method of inking each finger and rolling it over a print card wouldn’t work. So, he asked a coroner’s technician to snip off the fingers at the first joint. Returning to his lab at the sheriff’s department with the collection of fingertips, the deputy made plaster casts of each one. From the casts he was able to make readable print impressions.

  Twelve days after the autopsy, a Sacramento County criminalist removed the hair samples from the secured locker. Also, because he knew that prosecutors liked having the murder weapon, he took the tank top used to strangle the victim. The remainder of her clothing was left behind in the coroner’s locker.

  Upstairs, he placed the hair samples and the tank top in freezer storage for safekeeping. Before doing so he wrote on an oversized manila envelope that now held the tank top: “Item 3—Ligature around neck to hands.”

  The criminalist didn’t notice that the tank top, when unfolded, had numerous cuts in it unrelated to the two well-documented slices made by the pathologist in removing the ligature.

  Neither had anyone else.

  STAN REED considered it a tragic commentary on our times that female body dumps were so common, and that the great majority of unidentified murder victims in America were women.

  Each day his Jane Doe remained unidentified, Reed knew the chances of ever solving the case were reduced. It was a rare individual who wasn’t missed. More likely, she had been reported as missing by someone, somewhere. The trick was to find that report wherever it might be, and match it to the unidentified remains at the morgue.

  Reed checked with Detective Sergeant Harry Machen to see if there were any persons reported missing to their department within the last few months who fit Jane Doe’s general description. Finding no likely candidates, he broadened his search to include the extensive files of the Missing Persons Unit of the California Department of Justice (DOJ), which was set up as a statewide clearinghouse to try to match the unidentified dead—through dental charts and fingerprints—with reported missing persons. However, the system for reporting to the DOJ was strictly voluntary, and this posed problems. Many agencies, including Reed’s own department, did not always submit their missing persons reports to DOJ in a timely manner. Some agencies never turned them in at all, while others resisted taking the reports in the first place, knowing that a majority of adult missing persons would one day surface on their own. Why spend valuable investigative man-hours when a crime might not have been committed?

  Even when a report did get to the DOJ, the odds were against a missing person being matched with an unidentified body. At the time, DOJ had on file the dental charts and fingerprints of approximately 1,400 unidentified dead. Each year, DOJ makes only ten to fifteen matches of unidentified dead with missing persons.

  When Reed received the list of missing young women from DOJ, he went down the list looking for individuals who would seem to fit the description of his Jane Doe. Working the phone, a detective’s most valuable tool, he learned that a large number of possibles were no longer missing. He crossed them off.

  Of those young women still missing—

  Cindy Stites, twenty-three, of northern California, was eliminated by comparing her driver’s license thumbprint with Jane Doe’s prints.

  Lisa Beckham, nineteen, of Florida, believed to be on her way to California when she disappeared, was eliminated because it turned out she was several inches too short.

  Angelica Lee, nineteen, believed to be California-bound from her native Georgia, was eliminated by fingerprint comparisons.

  Two California women in their early thirties—Glenda Ward and Renee June—who seemed too old were looked at nonetheless before being eliminated on fingerprint comparisons.

  About then, the Homicide Bureau found itself deluged with a number of new murders. Reed caught the case of Vickie Skanks, an eleven-year-old girl who was sexually assaulted and smothered to death in her family home. He quickly identified a strong suspect but, much to Reed’s dismay, he couldn’t be charged with murder due to problems with the DNA evidence. While refusing to give up on that investigation, Reed’s caseload grew as Sacramento County’s murder rate kept climbing that summer and fall.

  Still, it wasn’t in Reed to forget Jane Doe.

  MIDWAY between Stockton and Sacramento on a clear, gusty night one month after Charmaine Sabrah’s disappearance, an older sedan traveling the speed limit northbound on Interstate 5 braked to a stop on the shoulder.

  It was no coincidence that the driver, a thirty-five-year-old woman, had pulled over very near where Charmaine’s Grand Prix had come to a stop.

  After turning on the emergency flashers, the woman climbed out of the car and stood at its rear bumper, illuminated by the winking red lights.

  Although passersby saw what appeared to be a disabled vehicle with a lone female needing help, there was nothing wrong with the car at all. And, as for the woman, she was far from alone.

  San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Detective Joyce Holloman was, in fact, live bait placed in a trap to entice a serial killer.

  Detectives in four unmarked vehicles were close by—up on the next exit, under the freeway overpass, and on the frontage road. They were in radio contact with each other, and one of the cars monitored Detective Holloman’s every utterance via a remote wire she wore under her jacket.

  Then there was Vito Bertocchini with a portable radio, hiding none too comfortably in the brambles nearby, within earshot of Holloman. The decoy officer was under strict instructions not to get into anyone’s car, and the burly homicide detective was close by to make sure nobody tried to snatch her. As he had promised the nervous Holloman, he would be the “mugger” or the “shooter”—whatever was required to protect her.

  When a vehicle stopped, the plan was for Holloman to send the license number out over the wire. If someone stopped who looked like the composite, she would alert the others. Then, she would try to get him to leave—“Thanks for stopping, my husband is on the way.” Once he left, the detectives would stop the car down the highway.

  It was nearly two hours before the first vehicle, a black-and-silver pickup, pulled up behind the sedan. The man did not resemble the composite, and his offer to render assistance seemed genuine. Holloman got rid of him by saying that help was on the way.

  The second vehicle, a Volkswagen with Florida plates, didn’t stop until 3:00 A.M. The driver, a college-age male who looked young enough to be the son of the man in the composite, also seemed sincere. So much so that he insisted on raising the hood of the undercover vehicle and tinkering with the engine under the beam o
f his flashlight. Holloman quickly got behind the wheel, and the car started right away. The young man seemed very pleased with himself.

  For Bertocchini, the big rats scurrying about him in the bushes were the worst part of the assignment. They refused to leave him be. “If you hear gunshots,” he radioed the other detectives at one point, “it’s gonna be me taking out a few of these freaking monsters.”

  At 3:45 A.M., the operation was shut down. Of an estimated 350 vehicles to pass Detective Holloman in four hours, only the pickup and VW had stopped.

  The detectives were back out on I-5 the next night from 11:30 P.M. until 3:30 A.M. Two vehicles, a van and a white Toyota, stopped within the first half hour. A station wagon pulled over the second hour, and two big rigs stopped the final hour. Five would-be Good Samaritans out of 400 vehicles. Once again the license numbers were duly logged, even though no one who stopped looked at all like the composite. At least this night went a little better for Bertocchini: he brought along a big stick to beat back his tormentors.

  The next day, Bertocchini was ordered by his supervisor to shut down the decoy detail. He was sorely disappointed, not so much with the lack of success in only two nights but at not being able to continue. He had known, going in, that they would be incredibly lucky to snare a killer in just a night or two. He had hoped they could stay with it for a week or ten days.

  He filed a one-page report on the decoy detail. The unsuccessful operation that had tied up six detectives for two nights revealed, Bertocchini knew, just how desperate they were for viable leads.

  Bertocchini submitted all the pertinent details of Stephanie Brown’s abduction and murder to the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, Virginia, to see what the profilers could come up with in terms of painting a likely picture of the killer.

  They responded in writing quickly:

  The location and condition of victim’s vehicle when found was puzzling. This vehicle was found with the light switch in an “on” position, both doors unlocked, and the driver’s window down. This indicates to us the victim was pulled over or stopped without evidencing any apprehension or fear.

  In all probability, the victim was lost, or at least going in the wrong direction when confronted by her assailant, as indicated by the direction of the vehicle.

  No indication of struggle by the victim could be an indication of her experiencing extreme fear or suffering physical restraint.

  There is nothing to support the concept of two assailants involved in this crime.

  The victim died of choking and the body showed no evidence of her attempting to frantically remove the ligature. This supports that she was restrained by some method which limited the movement of her arms and hands.

  The cutting of the victim’s blouse and hair could have been a form of intimidation, control, or degradation.

  In our opinion, the assailant was familiar with the dump site because of the remote location of same. The method of body disposal suggests that the assailant was without any remorse.

  Although we are unable to determine the time of the victim’s last consensual sexual activity, the amount of sexual activity evidenced does not reflect the presence of two assailants.

  Some assailants are known to engage in choking during their sexual activities. This choking enhances their sexual stimulation. It is possible that the strangulation suffered by the victim may have been the result of that type of sexual activity.

  Was this how it had come down? Reed wondered.

  WHEN THE phone rang at home on the afternoon of Sunday, November 9, 1986, criminalist Jim Streeter of the California Department of Justice Crime Laboratory in Sacramento had a feeling it might be work.

  DOJ’s Sacramento lab served fourteen mostly small, rural counties in northern California that did not have their own crime labs, or criminalists on the payroll. Criminalists—skilled forensic scientists trained in the identification, collection, and preservation of physical evidence—are most often called in to assist in serious criminal cases such as murder, bombings, and arson. They conduct lab tests on the evidence, prepare reports, and testify as expert witnesses.

  A criminalist usually has a special area of expertise. In Streeter’s case, it was serology. However, Streeter, who had gone to work for DOJ directly out of college thirteen years earlier, had undergone intensive FBI training in processing crime scene evidence and handling serial murder investigations. As a result, he was sent out to a lot of crime scenes—over the years he had worked seven serial killer cases and countless other murders. He much preferred going to the scene to waiting back at the lab.

  A criminalist’s function at a crime scene varied from collection (or merely helping with the collection) of evidence to the interpretation of physical evidence such as trajectories of bullets, blood splatters, position and location of bodies, drag marks to determine how the victims came to those positions, and what exactly happened to them leading up to their murder.

  One reason Streeter preferred being on the scene himself was that evidence collected by others could be innocently contaminated by people who didn’t know any better. Also, he would never really know its relationship to the crime scene as a whole. He could be shown photographs, but they were nothing more than a one-dimensional moment in time, usually well after the crime. His own senses of sight, sound, smell, and touch could tell him much more. Had the article of clothing found behind a tree been dropped there or was it thrown? Was the body meant to be found or had there been an attempt at concealment? All of it might mean something when it came to catching a murderer.

  Streeter, hearing the voice of a colleague on the phone, knew he’d guessed right.

  “Wanna go to Amador County today?”

  “What’s up?” Streeter asked.

  “Human remains found by a deer hunter.”

  “Sure, I’ll go.”

  In spite of his years on the job, Streeter, in his mid-thirties and with the sinewy build of a marathon runner, remained enthusiastic about his work. The day he burned out was the day key evidence might slip past him—the day cold-blooded murderers might walk because of his mistakes. Sincere to the core, Streeter had promised himself that would never happen.

  Amador County, on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, was in the heart of California’s gold country, where forty-niners flocked to stake a claim and strike it rich panning in rivers and digging in mines. And some even did. Today, with a scant 29,000 residents dispersed over 600 square miles ranging in elevation from 200 to 9,000 feet, Amador was still the frontier. Gold Rush hamlets like Buckhorn, Pioneer, Fiddletown, Big Bar, Dry Town, and Sutter Creek might have become forgotten ghost towns elsewhere. But here, they lived on, as did fourth- and fifth-generation descendants of hearty, self-reliant prospectors who refused to give up even after the boom ended well before the turn of the century.

  It took Streeter forty-five minutes to reach the Sacramento-Amador line. Continuing another 10 miles through tree-studded rolling hills, he then went south on Highway 124 toward the town of Ione for about five miles before spotting several patrol cars parked on the shoulder next to a fenced field.

  Gathering his equipment, including a camera, Streeter clipped an ID badge onto his shirt pocket and climbed over a sagging section in the barbed wire. Not seeing anyone, he zigzagged through scrub oak to the crest of the first hill over pastureland baked brown by the summer’s heat. A short distance down the other side of the knoll he came to a group of uniformed deputies at a clearing near the rotting trunk of a huge oak that had been down for some time.

  “DOJ,” Streeter said to no one in particular.

  A deputy pointed to a sizable grease spot on the ground. In the middle of the stain were skeletal remains, including a human skull, that appeared to have no flesh or soft tissue remaining.

  As Streeter studied what was clearly a torso, he realized there was something wrong. There were no long bones—no arms or legs.

  He saw what appeared to be a black bra around the area of the rib
cage. Her dark shirt was open and pulled up. Some type of black material seemed bunched up at her neckline. About 10 feet away he found a pair of panties.

  Streeter began to take pictures.

  About then, a private pathologist arrived. Some deputies greeted him as “Doc.” Balding, potbellied, and sporting a snow-white goatee that looked sharpened at the chin, the sixtyish pathologist returned the greetings with a thick German accent.

  Searching the immediate area, Streeter found more remains scattered randomly about—a 12-inch straight bone, a ball joint that might have been an elbow, and an 18-inch straight bone with a ball socket at one end. All these bones were picked clean, too, and several had bite marks. Foraging animals, at some point, had shown more than a passing interest in the find.

  Pronouncing the remains as human, the pathologist wanted them moved off the ground. A sheet of corrugated metal was slid under the bones. With a deputy at either end, the remains were taken to a sheriff’s pickup parked about 100 yards away.

  In the interest of preserving evidence, Streeter would have preferred that the body be carefully bagged and not carted through the field. But he understood the politics of law enforcement: this crime scene belonged to the locals and was not his to run. And when it came to the body, the pathologist was in charge.

  Streeter continued to photograph the scene and assist a civilian technician process the evidence. When they finished, he went over to the pickup, where a deputy was videotaping the pathologist’s examination.

  The remains had been laid out on the open tailgate. Doc, gloveless and puffing on a fat cigar, was measuring various bones. He had already concluded that the body was that of a female in her mid-twenties.