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

by Bruce Henderson

  “He gags them with duct tape,” Biondi said. “The tape got caught in Brown’s hair so he cut her hair to get it off. He doesn’t want to leave the tape behind because he knows we can get prints off it. This time he screwed up or was in a hurry and didn’t get it all.”

  So much for the hair fetish theory, Biondi thought, or that Brown’s hair had been snipped off as a “trophy.”

  “Our guy has a fetish, all right,” Biondi said. “A fetish about not leaving behind incriminating evidence.”

  * * *

  AT HOME early the next morning reading the paper over his first cup of coffee, Stan Reed came across a short article, “Few Clues in Case of Missing Woman,” buried on the obituary page of the Sacramento Bee about a young Lodi woman, missing for eight days, whose abandoned car had been found a week earlier. A description of the woman fit the blond victim that had gone to the morgue the previous night as Jane Doe.

  Reed arrived at the office at 7:50 A.M. and immediately called the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Department. He asked for Homicide, and was told that no detectives were in yet, so he left a message.

  Ten minutes later Reed received a call back from a San Joaquin detective who worked with Vito Bertocchini.

  “We’ve got a Jane Doe here who might be your Karen Finch,” Reed said. He gave a physical description from memory, and also described her clothing and jewelry.

  “I’ll get back to you,” the San Joaquin detective said.

  Reed asked for the number of the victim’s next of kin, and was given her parents in Oroville.

  First, he phoned the department of motor vehicles and ordered a copy of Finch’s driver’s license and thumbprint, to be picked up at the counter later that morning.

  Next, he called the Finches, and asked Naomi to describe the jewelry her daughter would have been wearing. It was identical to what Jane Doe had been wearing.

  Reed was not about to tell a mother her daughter was dead based on jewelry. “I’ll call you as soon as I know anything for certain,” he promised.

  Calling San Joaquin back, Reed informed the same detective he’d talked to earlier that the body they had found was wearing jewelry described by Finch’s mother.

  “You have dental charts?” Reed asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you get ’em to me?”

  While Reed worked the phones, his partner, Detective Bob Bell, was at the morgue. Bell made sure that a complete “rape kit” was done prior to the autopsy.

  The victim was found to have multiple contusions to the upper abdomen and chest, as well as the right thigh and forearm. The pathologist also found multiple incised injuries to the front neck, along with secondary insect and predator damage. He described two well-identified slash wounds with secondary transections of major blood vessels of the neck as the primary cause of death. There were also stab wounds to the right chest, just above the nipple, and to the right shoulder—wounds that, in the opinion of the pathologist, could have been made by either a knife or scissors.

  At 11:30 A.M., positive identification was made by a sheriff’s department technician who compared a driver’s license thumbprint with the corresponding thumbprint of the fresh Jane Doe.

  Glen and Naomi Finch received a second phone call that morning from the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department.

  That’s how another set of parents learned their daughter, too, was a homicide victim.

  Eleven

  Four hours after Glen and Naomi Finch had received official notification of their daughter’s death, Detective Harry Machen met with them at their residence to get some background on Karen so that the murder investigation could begin in earnest.

  The Finches explained how all week long they had been expecting the worst and hoping for the best.

  “Every time the phone rang, I was afraid to answer it,” Naomi said softly.

  From Karen’s mother Machen heard about the young woman’s failed marriage to Steve Higgins. Karen had had an affair with a coworker of Steve’s the previous summer. Shortly after that ended, she had become pregnant, and against Steve’s wishes had an abortion. After several tries at reconciliation, Karen had finally filed for divorce. They had made one court appearance, with another scheduled.

  According to the mother, Karen and Steve seemed to have been getting along recently, as long as they didn’t talk about personal things, like finances or rehashing the marriage. When it came to co-parenting Nicole, they did fine.

  “Was there any physical violence between Steve and Karen?” Machen asked.

  “Not that we were aware of,” said her mother. “We never saw any signs of it.”

  After the divorce, Karen had gone through a state of depression, according to her mother. “She had gone to counseling and had worked through the depression and guilt. It seemed that she was getting her life back together.”

  “When was the last time you heard from her?”

  Naomi said it had been on the afternoon of Saturday, June 13—the weekend Karen disappeared. “She called just to say that she loved us and to thank her father and me for helping her move the previous weekend. She said she loved her new job and her new apartment. She had Nicole that weekend, and was enjoying her.”

  On the workdays she had Nicole, Karen drove her into Sacramento and placed her in day care close to work.

  “I asked her about her long commute because I was a little concerned,” Naomi said. “She said she didn’t mind because she had time alone with Nicki, and also that the driving helped her unwind. I wasn’t quite as concerned as I would have been if she had still had her old car, which used to break down a lot.”

  “How did she sound?” Machen asked.

  Naomi managed a bittersweet smile. “She sounded really up. She was in a very positive frame of mind about getting on with her life.”

  “What was her temperament like?”

  “Karen had a way of making friends with everybody. All her patients loved her. She never flew off the handle, although she didn’t let people push her around either.”

  Machen asked how Karen might act around a stranger who needed help or seemed stranded on the road.

  “She would stop and help anyone that she knew or felt comfortable with,” Naomi said. “If it was a stranger she would be very reluctant. I don’t think she would stop or go too far out of her way.”

  “Do you know if she carried duct tape in the car?”

  Naomi looked at her husband.

  “As far as I know,” Glen said, “the only tape she carried was adhesive tape in the first aid kit that she always kept in the car.”

  Machen asked about Karen’s finances, her friends, and where she hung out. When there was nothing further that the Finches could add, the detective handed them his card and asked them to call if they thought of anything.

  Meanwhile, Detective Stan Reed was 60 miles away in Sonora interviewing Karen’s boyfriend, Larry Blackmore.

  Reed knew that Blackmore had been cleared by both Tuolumne and San Joaquin as a suspect in Finch’s disappearance. He had an airtight alibi for the night Finch had disappeared—his superior officer at the correctional facility had confirmed Blackmore had worked a sixteen-hour shift until 10:00 P.M. Also, Tuolumne County, as part of its missing persons investigation, had routinely asked Blackmore to take a polygraph and he’d agreed. He was found to be telling the truth about having nothing to do with his girlfriend’s disappearance.

  Reed noted that the young man seemed crushed. Shaking his head sadly, he looked at the detective with glassy eyes that sought an explanation.

  They had met five months earlier, Larry began, at a pizza parlor where Karen had worked nights and weekends for a short while to help make ends meet. For the last two months, he said, “we were inseparable.”

  He told of their last weekend together, then not being able to get ahold of Karen Sunday night. He explained how his sister had called to report she might have seen Karen’s car, and his attempts to check the license plate number. />
  When he had gone out to look at the car himself that night, the boyfriend had done the right thing: As soon as he realized it was Karen’s car, he used a pay phone to call the San Joaquin Sheriff’s Department. When a cruiser arrived an hour later, Larry told the deputy that his girlfriend was the subject of a missing persons report in Tuolumne County. The deputy asked his dispatcher to call Tuolumne and see what they wanted done with the car. They waited another forty-five minutes before getting an answer that was less than satisfying. No one at Tuolumne seemed to know anything about the case, and they said just leave the car where it was. At that point, the San Joaquin deputy seemed ready to sluff off the whole thing as not being his problem. Larry, however, insisted on having the car towed to the next town; he was afraid it would be stolen or stripped if left at the side of the road. As the deputy made the necessary arrangements, Larry searched as best he could the adjacent walnut orchard but found nothing. When the tow truck arrived, he assisted the driver in jimmying open the driver’s door. Then Larry got in and knocked the gearshift into neutral with his flashlight. He even ended up paying for the tow.

  “How was the car parked?” asked Reed, who considered it unfortunate that a detective hadn’t responded to the scene, and yet he understood what a low priority most departments give to a new adult missing persons case.

  “On the shoulder. It looked like it may have stopped quickly. There were skid marks on the asphalt, about three feet long, one skid mark for each tire. The car had rolled past the marks onto the gravel before stopping.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Well, there were some tire marks just in front of her car, like someone had been parked there and spun out in the gravel as they were getting back onto the road.”

  Reed processed that information. Had Karen Finch pulled up behind a car that had appeared to be disabled, or to talk to someone who had otherwise gotten her attention?

  “I saw several large footprints in the dirt around the driver’s door. They looked like tennis shoes.”

  “You said the car was locked.”

  “Right.”

  Given something to do, Larry had perked up during the interview. His law enforcement training was obvious, and Reed considered it helpful. The young man was very observant, and able to describe clearly and concisely what he’d seen.

  “When you got the door open, what was inside?”

  “There was a Wendy’s cup in a holder near the gearshift, and a pack of gum. Her sunglasses were on the front dash. She had some type of clothing laid out on the passenger seat, and a baby’s bathing suit on top of it. In the back was an emergency roadside kit she always carried, and her sandals.”

  No shoes had been found at the crime scene, Reed recalled. If Karen had gotten out of the car barefoot, she probably hadn’t intended to walk very far—even if she had locked the car door after her, which itself would suggest that she hadn’t been forced out of the vehicle but had left of her own free will.

  Before he left, Reed had the boyfriend make a detailed drawing of exactly where he’d found Karen’s car.

  After trying unsuccessfully to contact Karen’s ex-husband, Reed drove to the location where Finch’s car had been parked. The detective had already called to make sure the vehicle had been impounded, and to request DOJ to process the car—inside and out—for prints and other evidence.

  Reed walked the area, searching for footprints or anything else of interest. By now, however, the scene had been trampled by numerous friends and relatives of Karen Finch’s who had come out during the week she was missing in search of clues. The amateur sleuths had turned in, he’d heard, a collection of cigarette butts, empty beer cans, and other roadside trash.

  Reed found the skid marks on the blacktop midway between two telephone poles where the boyfriend had said Karen’s car had been parked. But there was no way of knowing if they had come from Finch’s Plymouth.

  During its missing persons investigation, Tuolumne County had asked Steve Higgins if he would be willing to take a polygraph. Detectives explained that he was, after all, involved in divorce proceedings with the missing woman. Although Higgins seemed very forthcoming in lengthy interviews with detectives, he expressed reservations about taking a polygraph. He said he’d heard that they were only as reliable as the person administering the test.

  Reed would learn that Higgins had a strong alibi: A male friend who had been visiting for several days could account for Higgins’s whereabouts the night Karen disappeared. As the friend’s fingerprint had shown up in Karen’s car—on a piece of mail that she’d picked up at Steve’s house that Sunday—he had been asked by San Joaquin to submit to a polygraph. The friend took the polygraph four days after Karen’s car was found; he was judged to be truthful in all his responses, including those that cleared Steve Higgins.

  Two days after Finch’s body was identified, Biondi pulled all four of the Bureau’s detectives off their other cases for the day and responded with the entire crew to the Twain Harte–Sonora area to knock on doors, conduct interviews, and retrace Finch’s movements on the day she disappeared.

  Starting at 10:00 A.M. at the Tuolumne Sheriff’s Department, the detectives met with local authorities and learned the identity of two suspicious persons who had come to their attention. Both fit in the “sudden departure from the area” category; fleeing the area after a crime was one indicator of guilt looked for by murder detectives. For good reason, someone who has killed doesn’t want to stick around to be questioned. One possibility was a twenty-three-year-old male reported missing from Sonora on the same day as Finch. They were given a copy of the missing persons report. Another was a twenty-nine-year-old weight lifter who had previously been arrested for indecent exposure and who worked out at the same gym as Finch. Initial information was that he had a consistent workout schedule, which he failed to keep the day following her disappearance. In the end, neither man was connected to the Finch case, but in the beginning there was no way to know that without substantial legwork.

  After the meeting, the five detectives from Sacramento went off in separate directions, some to Twain Harte and some to its next-door neighbor, Sonora.

  Biondi first stopped in at the local newspaper, the Union Democrat, and updated a reporter as to the investigation. He asked the paper to help solicit reports from residents of any suspicious or unusual activity that may have occurred around Twain Harte.

  Biondi drove into Sonora and interviewed a liquor store proprietor who had called to report having seen Karen Finch in her store on the Sunday she disappeared. She identified a picture of Finch. A little girl was with Finch, said the store owner, and they bought a small carton of milk and a can of soda. The owner put the time at noon.

  Next, he interviewed the neighbors of Larry Blackmore; the couple owned the house Blackmore rented. They remembered seeing familiar cars parked out front on the Sunday Finch disappeared, but recalled nothing that aroused their attention. Both identified a picture of Finch—they remembered her visiting their tenant, Blackmore, and jogging in the area on occasion.

  The other detectives conducted similar interviews, none of which shed any light on Finch’s disappearance. By all accounts, she’d had a relaxing day with her daughter, visited her boyfriend’s mother, stopped for frozen yogurt with her little girl, dropped Nicole off at Steve’s on time, and left town.

  Probably an hour or so later and after driving nearly 50 miles, she pulled her car off the road for some unknown reason. She got out, apparently barefoot and carrying her purse, which was never found, and locked the car with keys that were never found either. The car was full of gas and operable when authorities hot-wired it days later.

  A few days after the canvass of the Sonora area, the most viable suspect lead in the case surfaced through a phone call to Tuolumne detectives from a police investigator in Merced, some 40 miles south. The investigator was inquiring about Rick Gerson, a registered sex offender who was believed to have moved from Merced to Sonora. Tuolumne authoriti
es knew nothing about Gerson, and were glad to get the tip on him. If he was in the area, he had broken the law by not properly registering. The investigator mentioned that Gerson had, ten years earlier, used a knife to kill a young woman, for which he’d served time in prison. Tuolumne thought the information interesting enough to pass on to Sacramento.

  Stan Reed began a paper background on Rick Gerson. He was in his mid-thirties, 6-foot, 175 pounds, with graying brown hair. A check with the department of motor vehicles revealed that two vehicles were registered to him: a 1986 Nissan pickup and a 1972 Ford Pinto.

  After running a criminal check on Gerson, Reed called the Merced Police Department and spoke to a detective familiar with the murder Gerson had been convicted of.

  One night around 8:00 P.M., Rick Gerson had entered a small retail business and robbed it at knifepoint.

  “A sixteen-year-old salesgirl was working alone,” the detective explained. “He went through her purse and took some money. He found a nightie she was carrying for a sleepover that night. He cut it into strips, and bound and gagged her. Then he put her on the floor, took off her jeans and panties, and sexually assaulted her.”

  “Go on,” said Reed, taking notes.

  “The pathologist was sure of penetration because of severe bruising,” the detective continued, “but Gerson didn’t have an orgasm that way. He didn’t get off until he started cutting on her, and then he came all over the floor.”

  “Did he cut her throat?”

  “Oh, yeah. Stabbed her six times in the throat and neck. Her carotid artery and jugular vein were severed. Know what the guy does then? Puts a ‘Closed’ sign out, goes home, takes a shower, and changes. Then he comes back and ransacks the place to make sure he got all the money and everything else of value. Just calmly stuffs everything in his backpack. He even cut the bindings off the victim and put them in his pack. Then he strolls out the back door. That’s the point we got lucky. Someone saw him that time. When we got our hands on him later that night, we found the money, the murder weapon, and the bloody bindings in his backpack.”