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

by Bruce Henderson

  “I suggest you take a drive up here,” Biondi hissed into the receiver. “We’ve got a gimme for you.”

  David Rundle, it turned out, had not killed Stephanie Brown, Charmaine Sabrah, or Jane Doe. (Several years later, after being convicted of and sentenced to death for the two Placer County murders, Rundle copped a plea to murdering the Filipino woman in exchange for life imprisonment without parole on that charge—saving the state, and himself, the ordeal of another death penalty case. Rundle, with several more years of appeals yet to be exhausted, still sits on Death Row.)

  Biondi had driven home that night from Placer County in a terrible funk. A young woman had been sexually attacked and strangled to death in the shadow of I-5 a few months earlier, yet those two Sacramento P.D. guys had said nothing. He considered it a disheartening example of law enforcement failing to communicate. He didn’t blame the detective as much as the deputy chief, who must have been calling the shots. Biondi knew that working detectives generally had no problem sharing information with those from other departments. But when the bosses became involved, it could be a far different story. He’d seen it before and he knew he’d face it again. It existed not only in communications between separate departments, but also behind the walls of virtually every law enforcement agency in America, with the left hand frequently not knowing what the right was doing. At times, bureaucratic politics was to blame; other times, outright incompetency in middle and upper management. In reality, the only people who benefited from such dissension were the bad guys on the street.

  An article had probably run in the paper back in May concerning the discovery of the unidentified female murder victim, but Biondi didn’t remember reading it. Even if he had, no alarms would have sounded because Stephanie Brown hadn’t yet been abducted on I-5. As soon as he began to suspect that a serial killer was active in the area, Biondi had made a point to reach out to other agencies. And now, after weeks and months, that collaborative effort had been nearly torpedoed by bureaucratic small-mindedness.

  And people wondered why conscientious cops inevitably burn out?

  THREE DAYS after the composite of the I-5 series suspect was rereleased to the media at the press conference—resulting in a flood of new leads called in to authorities—a San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Department squad car on routine patrol in east Stockton braked sharply as it approached a busy intersection to avoid a dark sports car that turned left against a red.

  Deputy Armando Mayoya activated his flashing lights. When he was sure oncoming traffic had slowed or pulled over, he punched it and made a hard, squealing right through the intersection onto the cross street.

  As it was a few minutes before midnight on a Saturday night, Mayoya, a ten-year department veteran, expected soon to be dealing with a tottering DUI.

  The dark blue Datsun 280Z had not raced ahead and had obligingly stopped at the curb.

  Pulling up behind, Mayoya flipped on a powerful spotlight that illuminated inside the vehicle. The driver was alone in the two-seater.

  The deputy jotted down the license number—California 1-Mary-Boy-Victor-4-6-6.

  It sounded familiar.

  Checking a note clipped to his dashboard, Mayoya saw that the plate matched with the one given to him three or four hours earlier by a prostitute who had flagged him down in front of the Capri Motel on what was known as Stockton’s “stroll” area.

  His informant, Janet Nelson, had been, at nearly thirty years of age, older than most of the working girls hoofing their stuff in spiked heels and short skirts hoping a cruising John would stop and make a date. In her rather accelerated career, however, she’d probably seen as many dicks as an over-the-hill urologist. Mayoya would not be surprised later to learn that many of the girls on the street considered Nelson almost a mother figure. Fittingly, it had been she who decided to stop a cop and possibly save a life.

  The story Janet Nelson had told that night was secondhand and Mayoya knew it would never be heard inside a courtroom. Nonetheless, he listened carefully.

  Nelson explained she had been sitting with another prostitute, Sheri Zeller, twenty-one, at a fast-food joint earlier in the evening. As they sipped hot coffee and rested their aching feet, they kept their eyes peeled. When a dark 280Z cruised by slowly, Sheri pointed it out, saying the John had previously offered her $1,000 and some new clothes if she’d take a ride with him to Lake Tahoe. Of course, she had refused—no working girl in her right mind would sign up for such a long journey with a stranger. Especially, as Zeller had added, with one that “looked like the picture of the killer in the paper.”

  Not long after that conversation, Nelson had explained to Mayoya, the same dark 280Z pulled over on the stroll for her. She approached the vehicle, but only close enough to get the license number. Then, she spun around and went back the opposite way. “See, I don’t know what he looks like myself,” Nelson had told the deputy. “All I know is what Sheri told me.”

  Mayoya had thanked his informant and kept the license number. He knew that when a composite in such a high-visibility case got media play it could generate lots of citizens’ reports—most proved to be a waste of time. But with every uniform in five or six northern California counties looking for the man in the composite, who was he not to take a tip seriously?

  Mayoya exited his cruiser with a long black flashlight in one hand, and the other on the cold butt of his .357 Magnum service revolver.

  The mix of feelings Mayoya experienced as he approached the lone occupant of the vehicle in the dead of night—not knowing if he was coming upon a serial killer or Joe Citizen who’d had a few too many brews—was something that could not be easily explained in an academy lecture. The sweet familiar adrenaline rush had begun, but for someone with Mayoya’s experience there was a definite routineness to it all. Curiosity had a strong pull: Who or what would he find in the car?

  Deputy Mayoya intended to write up the driver for blowing the light. Beyond that, being the good beat cop he was, he would play it by ear.

  * When the Unabomber suspect was arrested in 1996 after being turned in by his brother, who had read the bomber’s long manifesto published in The New York Times, Biondi knew how fortuitous it was that copies of the manifesto had been sent directly to the media. There was no doubt in his mind that had the manifesto gone only to the FBI, it would not have been made public and the Unabomber might have kept on killing for years. Biondi would always wonder how much sooner the Unabomber suspect might have been turned in—and how many of the sixteen bombings might never have happened, which of the three persons killed (including a second Sacramento man, a timber industry lobbyist, in 1995) might have been spared, how many of the twenty-three people injured could have avoided their suffering—had the FBI only released the letters, documents, photographs, and other information it had so zealously withheld over the years in what turned out to be the most expensive criminal investigation in this nation’s history.

  Seven

  As he had done a hundred times before, Deputy Armando Mayoya stopped short of the driver’s door and directed the beam of his flashlight inside the vehicle. He could, in this way, watch the driver without making himself an easy target.

  The driver’s window was already down.

  “Evening, sir. License, please.”

  Without a word, the driver reached into the back pocket of his jeans and took out a thin wallet. With hands that shook slightly, he removed his license and handed it to the officer.

  Placing the license close to the light, Mayoya saw it was issued to a Roger Reece Kibbe, with a street address in Oakley, a small town about 30 miles west of Stockton.

  The deputy clipped the license onto his citation book.

  “Do you know why I stopped you?”

  “Not really,” said the driver, craning his neck to look up into the light toward Mayoya.

  Mayoya observed that the pupils of the driver’s eyes were not dilated; he was clean.

  “You made a left against a red light, Mr. Kibbe. I a
lmost hit you.”

  The driver appeared to nod in agreement.

  Mayoya made a slow sweep of the car’s interior with his light. On the floor behind the driver’s seat he saw something that upped his heart rate considerably.

  The deputy silently slipped his gun from its holster, and placed the weapon next to his leg—to decrease his reaction time by a split second or two.

  “Sir, I’m going to ask you to get out. Do so slowly and keep your hands where I can see them.”

  The driver complied.

  Mayoya holstered his weapon and frisked the driver. When the deputy was convinced the man was unarmed and posed no immediate threat, he had the driver step back away from the vehicle. The deputy reached inside the car behind the driver’s seat and found that the gun butt he’d seen was in fact a pellet gun.

  “Why do you have this?” the deputy asked, holding the weapon up.

  The man shrugged, apparently happy to say nothing more. But finally, he added: “I put it in and forgot it.”

  It wasn’t against the law to have a pellet gun, but it was to brandish a pretend gun as a real one. Realizing he didn’t have much to work with, Mayoya asked the driver what he had intended to do with the pellet gun.

  “Nothing. I don’t want it. You can take it.”

  “Okay, sir, I will.”

  Mayoya did not conduct a field sobriety test because it was apparent that the driver had not been drinking. However, the deputy put out the driver’s name over the radio for a records check that would pick up any outstanding wants or warrants. This was routine.

  Then, he requested that a Technical Services deputy respond to his location for the purpose of taking pictures of the vehicle he had pulled over. This, in other than major injury accidents, was very unusual.

  He did so because Roger Kibbe bore a striking resemblance to the suspect in the composite Mayoya had on the front seat of his patrol car. He saw that the driver’s age (DOB 5/21/39) fit, as did the other details such as his graying hair, build (5-foot-10), weight (180 pounds), and large nose. Even his car fit the bill.

  As he wrote out the citation, Mayoya tried to keep the chatter going. Although Kibbe was not exactly talkative, he answered the deputy’s questions. After the pictures were taken—Kibbe seemed not the least interested in why his car was being photographed—Mayoya had him sign the citation.

  There was to be a last bit of bad news for Roger Kibbe: the records check had revealed that Kibbe’s driver’s license had been suspended for failure to appear on a minor fix-it citation (broken tail lamp).

  “For that reason,” Mayoya said, “I’m confiscating your driver’s license tonight. I suggest you get off the road and stay off until you deal with this.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Kibbe said, hurriedly scrawling on the signature line and accepting his copy of the ticket before driving cautiously away.

  As he resumed patrol, the deputy kept thinking about the stop, a report of which he would send to Homicide. Roger Kibbe had been nervous, although he seemed to be trying hard to appear calm and nonchalant.

  It had been the first time in his career, Deputy Armando Mayoya realized, that he’d ever been thanked for confiscating someone’s license.

  JANE DOE, found dead on the shore of Brannan Island in Sacramento County three months earlier, reclaimed her identity the first week of December 1986.

  She was Lora Renee Heedick, twenty, a petite blue-eyed blonde reported missing in April from the Stanislaus County community of Modesto, an hour’s drive south of Sacramento.

  Identification of the badly decomposed body had been delayed because the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department had not gotten around to asking Heedick’s family for the name of her dentist until November, then hadn’t picked up her dental charts until early December.

  Once DOJ’s Missing Persons Unit received the X rays, technicians immediately searched their records of more than one thousand unidentified dead. Within days, the X rays were matched to Jane Doe’s dental work.

  Why the delay by the local cops?

  The Lora Heedick disappearance had a low priority due in part to the usual doubt that plagued adult missing persons cases as to whether or not a crime had actually been committed. Another factor: Heedick, according to her boyfriend, had gotten into a stranger’s car for the purpose of committing an act of prostitution. No one in authority would ever state publicly that a young woman who placed herself in such jeopardy deserved to disappear, but there had been an apparent casualness about the case ever since she had been reported missing the next day by her boyfriend’s mother. Even when there had been no sign of Heedick after weeks, police made little effort to reach out beyond Modesto by reporting it to neighboring law enforcement agencies or DOJ. A single news story, seven paragraphs long, had run in the local newspaper two months after her disappearance. All in all, there seemed to be a nonchalance about Lora Heedick’s disappearance that would probably not have been present had the missing young woman been a local cheerleader or honors student.

  Sacramento County Sheriff’s Detective Stan Reed brooked no such nonsense. Murder was murder in his book. What had once been Stanislaus County’s missing persons case had become his homicide investigation. Now that the victim had a name, he had a place to start. Even though the circumstances of her death had already strongly suggested that she could be a victim of an active serial killer, Reed never wore blinders when he worked a case, preferring instead to go where the evidence took him.

  In this instance, it led him to the poor side of Modesto, a dusty, sunburnt Valley town dominated by agricultural industries whose biggest employer was E. and J. Gallo—endless rows of stainless steel tanks with up to one-million-gallon capacities made the huge winery look more like a refinery—and whose richest residents were Ernest and Julio.

  Reed learned that Heedick’s ex-con boyfriend, James Driggers, thirty-two, was the last person to see Heedick alive. The detective met the scruffy, tattooed Driggers at a dumpy place on 13th Street, not far from where he claimed his girlfriend had ridden away in an older, white two-door car driven by a middle-aged man.

  Driggers, who had gotten the news the previous day of his girlfriend’s body having been identified, anxiously told Reed that he’d known all along that something like this had happened.

  “Why?” Reed inquired.

  “She wouldn’t have left like that with some guy she didn’t know.”

  “Let’s start at the beginning,” Reed said, taking out his notebook. “How long did you know Lora?”

  “Three years, off and on.”

  “Did she have any problems with anyone or any enemies that you know of?”

  “No, she got along good with people. She did the prostitution stuff, you know, only once in a while. When we needed the bread.”

  “How often?”

  “Once a month or something.”

  “What happened that night?”

  Beads of sweat began to pop out on Driggers’ forehead. He admitted that he and Lora had been using “uppers” in the park that Sunday night. When they ran out about 11:00 P.M., they’d gone down to the strip on 9th Street so that Lora could make some money for a local dope deal. Driggers described her as strolling up the street in designer jeans and tank top while he waited in front of a 7-Eleven, talking to a couple of other “dopers.” He eventually lost sight of Lora.

  After about forty-five minutes, he started walking up the street in the direction she had gone. Soon, the white car pulled over with Lora inside. “She told me to get in,” Driggers said. “That we were gonna get a room.”

  Driggers explained that Lora scooted over to the middle to give him room in the front seat. He said after he was inside he reached over and shook hands with the driver, whom he described as forty-five to fifty years of age with graying hair, close to 6-foot, with large hands.

  “Isn’t it unusual for a John to stop and pick up a girl’s boyfriend?” Reed asked pointedly.

  “She must have told him to pick me up so we
could party. We had an open relationship. I wasn’t jealous or nothing. We’d partied with people before. I’d take a walk or whatever.”

  The driver went up to the next intersection and made a U-turn, Driggers continued, then pulled up in front of the Sahara Motel a short distance away.

  “The guy said he could score some drugs at his shop. He said it wasn’t far away. I asked Lora what I should do. She said for me to wait outside the motel and they’d be right back. Then they drove off.”

  Driggers said he went to a store across the street and bought a bottle of wine, returned to the motel, then waited next to the phone booth. “Lora knew the number,” he added.

  “I stayed there until morning, maybe ten or eleven o’clock. Lora never came back or phoned. That’s when I went to my mom’s and told her.”

  “Why didn’t you contact the police?”

  Driggers said he’d asked his mother to file the report because he feared there might be an old warrant out for him. “When I heard there wasn’t, I went down and gave them a statement.”

  “The initial information you gave about Lora’s disappearance wasn’t accurate, was it?”

  “No. I made up that stuff about her going to see some friends and not coming back. What was I going to tell my mom—that Lora was out hooking?”

  With only those exceptions, Driggers’s story had not deviated from his initial statement to authorities in April, a copy of which Reed had reviewed. Yet, Reed could see that Lora’s boyfriend was as skittish as a downed canary in the path of an approaching tomcat. Was it jangled nerves from the finality of her body being identified, or something more sinister?

  In trying to check out Driggers’ alibi, Reed found no witnesses who saw Lora Heedick get into a white car or any car on the night of her disappearance, nor anyone at the motel who remembered seeing Driggers waiting at the phone booth or anywhere in the vicinity.