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

by Bruce Henderson

  Why was he acting so differently this time?

  Roger had claimed he didn’t know anything about any missing woman back in 1978 or about any murder case now. He said he’d done nothing wrong, and she believed him. She’d never known Roger to hurt anyone—in fact, he always went out of his way to avoid confrontations. There were times when if she’d been a man she would have punched someone’s lights out—like when a former employee walked into their office and stole Harriet’s Rolex right off a table. Roger saw it happen; he told her about it the next morning when she couldn’t find her watch. But what had he done about it at the time? Much to her exasperation: nothing. Roger avoided showdowns of any kind.

  She’d begun her life with Roger aware of his troubled past. In fact, he’d been out of state prison only a short time when they met in 1972. That two-year stay behind bars, an earlier conviction (1963–65), and another one in 1974 for which he served a year had all been for property crimes like petty theft, burglary, grand theft. He’d done really dumb things like taking wood from a lumberyard and tools from a garage. It wasn’t as if he profited from his thievery, or even needed what he stole. She knew he had sometimes stolen to get even with someone he was mad at—blind-siding rather than confronting was Roger’s way—but other times he didn’t know his victims at all. Like the time years ago back in his hometown when he’d parked a couple of blocks from an army surplus store he intended to loot late one night, broke a window, and waited at the corner bus stop to see if the place had a silent alarm. When the police showed up a few minutes later, Roger had calmly given them a description of “two men who ran that way,” then climbed aboard a city bus, which he rode only to the next stop and then circled back to his car. He’d clearly relished telling the story of how he’d “outsmarted the cops.” Harriet came to realize that thievery had been a kind of mind game to him. He wasn’t motivated by profit—he had no drug or other expensive habits to support. True satisfaction for him was fooling the cops and getting away with it.

  In any case, as far as she knew, Roger had never hurt a soul. So why then, she wondered, was he worried about not coming home?

  * * *

  BERTOCCHINI was still the new kid in Homicide, but as a skilled street cop he knew about judging people by their words and demeanor. And he had a strong feeling about Roger Kibbe, a real bad feeling.

  Throughout the hour-long interview, Kibbe had remained outwardly calm, although Bertocchini sensed that he was squirming. Kibbe had not made any obvious admissions or slipups or incriminating statements, however, and answered all the questions put to him.

  Before Kibbe departed, Bertocchini had asked if he’d be willing to take a polygraph if it could be arranged for the following day.

  Kibbe said he wanted to call his brother.

  Bertocchini showed him a phone.

  When he was done, Kibbe said he’d think about it and get back to Bertocchini.

  “You’ll call me in the morning and let me know?” Bertocchini pressed.

  “Yes, we will,” Harriet said.

  After the Kibbes had left, Bertocchini went into Biondi’s office, where Biondi and Reed had watched the interview on a closed-circuit television monitor.

  “What do you guys think?” Bertocchini asked.

  Reed and Biondi were noncommittal.

  “This is weird, I know,” Bertocchini said, running a hand through his mane of thick black hair. “I mean, I’m not exactly Mr. Experienced Homicide Investigator, so tell me if I’m off base here. But sitting across from this guy, he sent chills down my spine. The way he talked about women—it was like they’re his playthings. And he’s on I-5 a lot and he’s familiar with all the locations of our women. He’s got the cars, too.”

  Verifying the information Bertocchini had obtained from DMV, Kibbe had said he bought the Datsun 280Z in June (1986)—two months before Sabrah disappeared in what her mother described as a “dark two-door sports car.” Prior to that, Kibbe said he drove a white two-door 1972 Ford Maverick, which he’d sold in July (1986)—three months after Heedick disappeared. The Kibbes had registered a white four-door 1986 Hyundai, apparently to replace the Maverick, in July (1986).

  Turning to Reed, Bertocchini asked, “Wasn’t Heedick picked up in an older white two-door?”

  “That’s what Driggers says,” Reed answered.

  Bertocchini pointed out that Kibbe had had his furniture shop in the truck-stop town of Ceres, “about three miles from the main drag of Modesto.” Also, that Kibbe and his wife had rented a townhouse nearby, while subletting their Oakley home to friends at the time of Heedick’s disappearance.

  Days earlier, Bertocchini had run Kibbe’s name through the DOJ for a criminal record and come up with his lengthy rap sheet for burglary and theft. His record was notable, Biondi had thought this evening as he reviewed it, in that there weren’t any crimes of violence or previous sexual misconduct listed.

  “His wife said something interesting,” Bertocchini continued. “When we got here she wanted to know if she should hire an attorney. She said Roger had previously been questioned in Contra Costa County by police in the disappearance of a young woman from a shopping center because his van was similar to a van that was used in the crime. It had caused them a lot of grief and she didn’t want to go through that again.”

  Biondi thought Bertocchini might be getting too worked up about Kibbe. The homicide chief realized that the two detectives sitting in his office were exact opposites. Reed always had his feet planted firmly on mother earth, and evaluated people and information in a careful, almost detached way. Bertocchini, on the other hand, seemed to put substantial weight in hunches and spinal chills.

  The fact of the matter was that there had been a deluge of “persons of interest”—or POI’s, as Biondi had taken to calling them—in the I-5 investigation. POI’s differed from suspects in that there was no evidence or information linking them to a specific crime. A POI was investigated, rather, due to a variety of less tangible factors, such as: They looked like the composite, they drove a similar car, they had a violent criminal history that included rape, they frequented the geographic areas the victims were abducted from or where their bodies were dumped, they had been reported to police by suspicious friends or relatives.

  Some weeks earlier, Bertocchini himself had been called to the scene of a traffic stop in Stockton where a look-alike was being detained. John Samples certainly resembled the composite, and was the right age, height, and weight. He was driving a dark red MGB, and a search of the vehicle found a loaded flare gun. Samples admitted he often took “joy rides” on I-5 to Sacramento. Although he was an unemployed mechanic, he denied ever stopping to assist females with disabled cars. Bertocchini had felt so strongly about Samples that he had deputies take him downtown for further questioning, and also had Mrs. Carmen Anselmi brought out to the scene to view the car. Although some things were similar, she finally concluded that it wasn’t the vehicle she had ridden in that night. After further questioning, Bertocchini established that Samples had been elsewhere on the date of Charmaine Sabrah’s disappearance.

  As for the Stephanie Brown case, Bertocchini’s sometime partner, Pete Rosenquist, had investigated a Chester Simmons, who had been released from prison in December, 1985, and had been taken back into custody for rapes in the Sacramento area a month after Brown’s death. Simmons would stop vehicles at gunpoint and threaten to fire through the window if females did not comply. He also choked his victims while raping them. Simmons denied having anything to do with Brown’s death, but without a confirmed alibi he had to be considered a serious contender.

  The previous month, Stan Reed had spent several days trying to locate Jack Browner, a look-alike who drove a dark green Triumph, even searching his apartment—the rent was in arrears by several months—before finally locating him. As a traveling salesman, Browner frequently used I-5. He admitted to fifteen previous felony arrests going back to the 1960s when he was a Hell’s Angel. On one occasion, he’d been picked u
p for questioning in a first-degree murder.

  Also in November, Reed had spent time investigating Richard Taylor, a southern California airline pilot who had been the suspect (arrested and released) in five female murders in Hawaii. The victims were usually picked up at bus depots, tied up, strangled, and dumped along freeways. Reed could not place Taylor in the Sacramento area for any of the murders; also, he was eliminated as a suspect in the Brown case because he had had a vasectomy and most likely could not have left the sperm detected on the vaginal slide by the DOJ lab.

  The first week of December, Reed had brought in for questioning a particularly interesting POI: a Sacramento cabbie named Wayne Welborn, who had kidnapped, raped, and murdered a thirteen-year-old girl a decade earlier. That a convicted rapist-murderer had been freed after serving only five years (he’d raped and sodomized the teenager before shooting her in the chest with a shotgun, for which he’d been allowed to plead guilty to second-degree murder) might have come as a surprise to the head of the local PTA, but not to Reed. He was well aware that rapists and murderers walked the streets; he dealt with them all the time.

  Welborn, the son of a prominent physician, had regularly bragged to his state department of corrections staff psychologist at a parole outpatient clinic about his violent fantasies involving women. Welborn had continued to see the psychologist weekly after he’d been released from parole several months earlier. In December, he had appeared to be so agitated and ready to explode that the psychologist had phoned the Sex Abuse Bureau of the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department to advise them that Welborn would be a very good suspect in any unsolved rapes. “I still don’t always know when he’s fantasizing or telling the truth,” she admitted. “He could just be getting off telling me about ‘pretend’ rapes. I don’t know. But he claims to have raped at knifepoint twenty to twenty-five women since he got out of prison three years ago. He said most of them were hitchhikers he picked up.” Sex Abuse had passed the information along to Homicide.

  Reed had spent an hour interviewing Welborn, a handsome, well-spoken Ivy League type who had a fixation on emergency services—he liked to monitor police calls and make false reports. After killing the teenage girl, he’d even called police to report finding the body, then watched from a distance as officers conducted their crime scene investigation.

  Welborn had claimed he was working the nights that Brown and Heedick had disappeared. When Reed asked if he’d submit to a polygraph, Welborn flinched. He told of his girlfriend’s recently flunking a polygraph regarding a stolen VCR that she didn’t steal. “She had knowledge of the theft and that’s what affected the results,” he said.

  “Are you saying you have knowledge of these murders?” Reed asked, his interest piqued.

  “Yes, I might.”

  “What do you know, Wayne?”

  Welborn clearly enjoyed the attention. “The type of personality involved here,” he began, as if lecturing to a college psychology class, “fits a guy I did time with. His name is Chuck Anderson, and he’s from Sacramento. While I was in prison with him, he attacked a female officer with a pair of scissors. He hates women and he would be capable of doing something like this.”

  “Do you have any specific information that he’s involved in these killings?” Reed asked.

  “No, I do not.”

  Reed suspected Welborn was playing games, but he jotted down the information anyway.

  Before he left Homicide, Welborn made a point of stopping to meet Lt. Ray Biondi, whom he said he’d seen a lot of on television. Acting as if it was an honor to be brought in for questioning in a murder case, Welborn noticed a stack of Little League cookies Biondi was selling for his sons, and bought twenty bucks’ worth.

  It turned out that Chuck Anderson was still behind bars. As for Welborn, his alibi was confirmed by his taxi logs, his manager and fellow drivers, and several fares he had picked up on those two nights.

  As far as Biondi was concerned, there were lots of POI’s, some much better would-be suspects than Kibbe, given their records of sex-related violence. But suspects were not the first thing on Biondi’s mind at this point. Although he always hoped for an easy break like a “magic phone call” identifying the culprit, he knew that without some serious organization in this multijurisdictional investigation, the killer’s identity might show up as a lead or in a report but not be recognized as such by detectives. Someone, somewhere might even have interviewed him, but the report might have been buried in voluminous paperwork and unless a new piece of information caused a second look, no one might ever focus on him again.

  Biondi considered the main thing that had been done right in the investigation so far had been the centralization of all physical evidence with the DOJ crime lab. But the real payoff in terms of scientific analysis of the evidence would not come until they could get sufficient manpower to follow up on the hundreds of unworked leads and otherwise work the growing number of unsolved homicides in a coordinated fashion.

  Bertocchini’s enthusiasm was not to be extinguished. “I tell you, this guy is killing women. Everywhere we have dead bodies, this guy has a reason to be there,” he told Biondi before leaving his office that night.

  Bertocchini drove home on I-5 that night excited, and also frustrated. He wondered if he was out of his depth. Maybe he was better suited to being a street cop than a detective. All this endless jawing and inaction got to him. He much preferred slapping the cuffs on a bad guy and lighting up a cigar to celebrate.

  If he had his way, Kibbe’s Sacramento residence would have been staked out round-the-clock beginning immediately. But the consensus was that while Kibbe was worth knowing about and his picture should be shown to witnesses, with hundreds of other leads to follow up on, who could get overly worked up?

  Anyway, the veteran detectives knew Kibbe’s brother, Douglas County Sheriff’s Department Detective Steve Kibbe, from the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, 80 miles due east of Sacramento, as they had all worked cases with him over the years.

  What were the chances that the brother of a homicide detective would turn out to be a serial killer?

  Nine

  The morning after Roger Kibbe was questioned by Homicide, Harriet went into the bathroom to take a shower. When she emerged ten minutes later, Roger had vanished. Checking the bedroom, she found that he had taken most of his clothes with him. He had done so in a great hurry; socks and other items were scattered about the floor.

  She could have kicked herself: Roger hightailing it was so damn typical she should have seen it coming.

  Still in her robe and with her hair wrapped in a towel, she dropped listlessly to a chair in the bedroom. She sat with arms folded and rocked slowly back and forth.

  Upon their arrival home from the police station the previous evening, an obviously shaken Roger said he couldn’t trust the cops not to rig the polygraph against him. Chalking up his distrust to his past troubles with the law, Harriet empathized rather than argued. Without the slightest doubt of her husband’s innocence, she’d said, “If you don’t want to take it, don’t. If they bother us, we’ll go see a lawyer.”

  After that, they had gone to bed, sleeping separately, as they had for the past eight months. In the Oakley house they’d each had their own bedroom, but in the new apartment they slept in the same room: Harriet in a king-size bed in the center of the room, Roger in a single bed shoved into a corner.

  They had slept together for a decade of married life, and as far as Harriet was concerned their sex life had been just fine. Roger never was a romantic, but once between the sheets he was always sensitive to her needs. Their conjugal bed, in which he functioned well and with obvious confidence, was the one place he took over—much to the delight of Harriet, who willingly let go. Throughout the years, they had averaged a good three times a week; she was missing it and she couldn’t understand how he wasn’t.

  Whenever she dwelled on the start of their separate sleeping arrangement, she thought it seemed totally unnecessary. Howeve
r, she blamed the impasse on Roger. Allergic to fleabites, she didn’t like sleeping with their cats. At night they customarily put the cats out or closed the bedroom door. One night, however, Roger declined to do so, saying he wanted to sleep with the cats. Feeling that he’d made his choice, Harriet stormed into the spare bedroom. That had been in April (1986), and since then they’d slept separately and had not been intimate. Harriet had wondered if having one bedroom (from which the cats were banned) in the apartment would change things, but it hadn’t.

  Harriet understood the episode with the cats had been only a symptom, not the disease. She and Roger had been coming undone for so long it was difficult to remember when the first signs of disharmony had appeared. In truth, they had surfaced even before they were married. But after living together for three years, getting married had seemed the thing to do. Besides, she’d had such a troubled family life growing up that a little trouble seemed normal. And now, no one could say she had given up easily. The past summer, she’d even jumped from an airplane trying to save her marriage.

  Roger had long enjoyed woodworking in his garage workshop and skydiving on weekends; neither hobby had ever included her. Anxious to find something they could do together, Harriet had signed up for her first parachute jump. Roger had been supportive, and seemed to get a kick out of watching her make practice landings off the couch. She’d made the tandem jump with an instructor from 7,500 feet—frightened to death the entire time—and that had been the end of it. Roger hadn’t invited her back out to the jump zone with him, and she hadn’t volunteered.