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

by Bruce Henderson

  They drove down Auburn Boulevard a short distance, then crossed over the freeway.

  Debra always made a point of being sociable with her Johns. She could hear herself babbling now—she talked fast normally, but when she was in early withdrawal her words sped up even more. The conversation was one-sided, however, as the man said nothing until they entered a darkened golf course parking lot and he’d parked and turned off the lights.

  He took a long look at her.

  “I’m into photography,” he said softly. “Will you pose nude for me tonight?”

  “All depends. How much?”

  “Fifteen hundred.”

  As ill as she felt, Debra wanted to crack up. Fifteen hundred dollars to photograph what she gave away for fifty bucks every night? Right, and his name is Hugh Hefner and he’s going to make her Playmate of the Year. She thought she’d heard it all, but this guy really took the cake.

  She called his bluff. “I need fifty bucks up front,” she said, fully intending to take whatever money he handed over and stiff the old guy. She knew he would have done the same to her after taking his dirty pictures.

  “I’ve only got twenty-five.”

  “That’s not enough.”

  “Is twenty-five enough for a blow job?”

  Now he was getting down to business.

  “I usually get thirty. But yeah, why not?” As much as she needed the money—she had less than three dollars to her name—she wasn’t going to quibble and lose the John.

  She was sitting so close to the dash that she leaned forward to find the release and move her seat back. She had her hand on the handle, but couldn’t get it to budge.

  She swore, as she was going to have to operate in tight quarters. “Guess that’s as far as it goes.”

  “No, it goes back more.”

  He leaned toward her as if to help. But instead, his left hand in one swift motion grabbed her right wrist and twisted her arm painfully.

  At the same instant, she heard a metallic click that scared her as much as the sudden violence.

  She said, “No!” in the assertive yell of a dog trainer, and in a sharp reflex found the strength to break his grasp and pull her arm back. As she did, she turned toward him and saw he had handcuffs in his other hand.

  Her right hand flew for the door handle. It was locked. She knew she hadn’t locked it when she climbed in—she never did that in case she wanted to bail.

  In the next instant, he grabbed a handful of her long hair and slammed her face hard into his lap.

  She felt the coarseness of his jeans against her cheek, and could smell urine and stale sweat.

  “Please—don’t hurt me.” She was begging now. “You don’t need to do this. I’ll do anything you want. Just don’t hurt me.”

  He had been so timid before he turned, with no sign of weird or hostile behavior, that she hoped he could be reasoned with.

  “Don’t struggle and you won’t get hurt, cunt.”

  A chill cut through her. His voice had taken on a completely different sound. It was the voice of someone who meant business; a mean voice she could never trust no matter what it told her. If she stayed here, she knew she would get hurt. Real bad.

  Fuck begging. She exploded with all the manic energy that had been coursing through her for hours, screaming hysterically, flailing legs and arms—her right hand had not stopped clawing for the door lock—squirming and jerking her head, shoulders, and body like a human bronco.

  At that moment her fingers found the lock. She pulled the lever and the door handle below it. Feeling the door give way, she pushed it open with all her might.

  His hold on her hair was so strong that she thought he would pull out a hunk, but she didn’t care. Ignoring the searing pain, she pulled against him in a tug-of-war for her life. At the same time, she thrust her feet and legs out the open door and willed the rest of her body to follow.

  The man kept his death grip on her hair as Debra Guffie’s screams pierced the night air.

  Thirteen

  Sergeant Charles Coffelt of the Sacramento Police Department was cruising slowly through the darkened maintenance yard in the rear of Haggins Oaks Golf Course.

  Coffelt wheeled into a narrow alleyway between two metal buildings, heading quickly for the front lot. He radioed his location and reported that he was investigating loud screaming.

  A field supervisor on the graveyard shift, Coffelt had a patrol team working under him. Still, whenever possible he led by example. As a detective earlier in the year, he knew about nighttime thefts from the golf course’s maintenance buildings, so he made a point of cruising through the area several times a week to check on security.

  As Coffelt swung his cruiser into the front lot, he saw a light-colored, four-door compact vehicle parked in the dimly lit lot about 150 feet away with its passenger door flung open. A figure was half in and half out of the car.

  He headed his patrol car straight for the compact. It appeared to Coffelt as if a woman was struggling to pull herself out of the car as a man behind the wheel was trying to keep her inside. As they fought, she continued to scream.

  When he had closed to within 75 feet, the beams of his headlights lit up the car. Coffelt could see that the man was holding the woman by her long blond hair.

  Suddenly, she came flying out of the vehicle, with her momentum carrying her several feet away from the car. She fell hard on the pavement on her hands and knees.

  The white car shot ahead, its passenger door ajar.

  The decision to go after the car or first check on the woman’s condition was made easy for Coffelt by the fact that the car was heading toward the rear of the parking lot, where the patrol sergeant knew there was no exit.

  Coffelt rolled up next to the woman.

  “You all right, ma’am?”

  “He—he”—she was hysterical and crying—“tried to handcuff me! He’s—crazy!”

  She picked herself up off the ground.

  “Get that sicko! He would’ve killed me!”

  The driver of the white car had realized his dilemma and whipped a U-turn near where Coffelt’s patrol unit had charged through the two maintenance buildings like the 7th Cavalry.

  The white car zipped past them, accelerating as it headed for the only way out of the parking lot.

  “Stay here,” the patrol sergeant barked.

  Coffelt went after the car, which after clearing the lot turned onto the surface street and headed for the freeway overpass. Activating his red lights, he tucked in behind the fleeing car at the overpass.

  The car turned right at the first intersection they came to, pulled over to the shoulder, and stopped, with Coffelt right behind.

  Coffelt illuminated the suspect car—a new Hyundai bearing California plates—with his spotlight. He put out on the air the license number, their location, and a request for backup. He could see that the driver had remained upright behind the wheel.

  Given the circumstances of the chase, Coffelt decided to conduct a high-risk vehicle stop. He opened his driver’s door, crouched behind it, and drew his service revolver. Aiming his gun at the Hyundai, he would stay where he was until other units arrived.

  It didn’t take long.

  This was a busy location, with the freeway a dividing line between Sacramento city and unincorporated county—everything on one side belonged to the city and everything on the other to the county. Two sheriff’s patrol cars, monitoring Coffelt’s transmissions, happened to be closest and arrived first.

  One unit pulled up to the left of Coffelt’s patrol car, throwing more light on the Hyundai. The other unit came up behind him and turned his lights out so that Coffelt would not be silhouetted.

  The deputy on the left crouched behind his door, with his weapon pointed at the Hyundai. The deputy in the back was watching the opposite side of the Hyundai with his gun drawn, too. In this way, each deputy had a line of fire that did not go through Coffelt.

  In this situation, it was standard procedur
e that the officer initiating the stop, regardless of rank, was in command and directed the activities of the other officers. It kept things safer that way, rather than having someone new to the situation arrive and start making wrong decisions.

  Even though none of his own troops had arrived yet, Coffelt was ready. Over his loudspeaker he ordered the driver of the Hyundai to turn off the engine and throw the keys out, then keep his hands in sight outside the window.

  The driver obeyed.

  “While still keeping your hands out the window,” Coffelt’s voice boomed through the rooftop speaker, “open up the door using the outside handle.”

  In this way, Coffelt would not lose sight of the suspect’s hands. He didn’t want the guy reaching down into the darkened car and coming up with any nasty surprises.

  When the door was open, he told the driver to exit the car and walk up the street for about four or five feet.

  The driver did as he was told.

  “Now get down on your knees and lie on your stomach with your hands extended out to the sides of your body.”

  Coffelt started his approach, not taking a direct route to the suspect but walking alongside his own unit, then going to the rear of the suspect’s car, where he could see inside the vehicle for anyone else.

  In a crouch, he came around the driver’s side. As he did, he dragged the palm of his hand across the trunk lid to feel for movement inside.

  When he reached the suspect, Coffelt ordered him not to move. He took one of the man’s hands and held it behind his back, which would aid him in controlling the suspect should he try to get up off the ground. He then directed the man to put his other hand behind his head.

  Coffelt slapped the cuffs on the suspect.

  By then, several of Coffelt’s patrol officers had arrived. Coffelt helped the suspect up off the ground, and patted him down for weapons.

  “What’s your name?” Coffelt asked.

  The suspect, a middle-aged man with graying hair, kept his head bowed and said nothing.

  Coffelt handed him off to another officer to place in the secured rear seat of a patrol car.

  The sergeant leaned inside the Hyundai, sweeping the powerful beam of his flashlight across the seats and floorboards. When he turned around, he was surprised to see the young woman from the parking lot.

  “I was afraid to be alone back there,” said Debra Guffie, nervously eyeing the man in the backseat of the patrol car.

  She explained that she had run from the lot and followed the flashing lights. As she spoke, she was trying to light a cigarette but her hands trembled so much that she was having great difficulty. Finally, she got it lit and took a couple of puffs, which seemed to steady her a bit.

  “He pushed me out of the car when he saw you,” she explained. “Threw my purse and jacket out, too.”

  “You said he had handcuffs,” he said. “You sure?”

  “What do you mean?” Her voice cracked, and she seemed ready to cry again. “He was gonna put ’em on me! Fuck, yes, he had handcuffs!”

  Coffelt brought one of his officers over to take a full statement from the shaky victim. Then, he directed another officer to go back to the parking lot and search it.

  “What am I looking for, Sarge?”

  “Handcuffs.”

  UNDER GAUDY chandeliers in the main ballroom of a Nashville, Tennessee, hotel, Lt. Ray Biondi stood at the podium beside several display boards with poster-size pictures of Stephanie Brown, Charmaine Sabrah, Lora Heedick, Karen Finch, and articles of cut clothing, along with maps showing the locations of the abductions and dead bodies.

  In his presentation to more than 200 homicide detectives from thirty-five states attending the National Conference on Serial Killing, Biondi laid out the pertinent facts of the unsolved series, including the peculiar “nonfunctional” clothes cutting found in three of the four cases.

  Biondi showed the hefty printout of the computerized suspect list recently compiled by DOJ. “The identifiable suspects we’ve been able to find have been interviewed at least once,” he said. “Some more than that.”

  Suggesting that the computer was a good way to organize and prioritize suspect leads in a series that lent itself to thousands of tips called in from the general public, he reviewed the criteria that were developed to give weight to various factors relevant to the murder series.

  “Of course, these are only suspects we know about. I’m sure there are other viable suspects we don’t know about. Is our killer on this list? I can’t tell you. Check with me after we catch him and I’ll let you know.”

  Biondi made his presentation on the first day of the four-day conference, and the I-5 display stayed up along one wall of the ballroom for the next three days. He also attended a workshop involving female murders associated with freeways, and heard of an unsolved series along Interstate 10 in a southern state in which all the victims were redheads. He also learned of a couple of cases in which clothing had obviously been ripped or cut for quick removal from the victim. However, he never once came across similar nonfunctional clothes cutting—not during other presentations or countless coffee breaks or over evening cocktails in the hospitality room, where the most valuable inside information was always dispensed at cop conventions over free drinks. Nowhere in the country had there been a case with the consistent and baffling signature of the I-5 killer.

  Biondi boarded a plane to return home on the afternoon of Thursday, September 17, 1987.

  Although he wouldn’t know it for another twenty-four hours, that same day a fifth body was found.

  FIRST THING the next morning, criminalist Jim Streeter received a call from a deputy in the South Lake Tahoe substation of the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Department, which didn’t have its own crime lab and contracted its forensic science work to DOJ.

  Streeter was told that an unidentified nude female homicide victim had been found the previous afternoon off a closed service road adjacent to Highway 50, four or five miles west of Lake Tahoe. He was asked to respond to the sheriff’s substation in South Lake Tahoe, and from there he’d be taken to the mortuary. They wanted him to check the body, before the autopsy, for any fibers or hairs that at some point might be matched to a suspect.

  El Dorado was Sacramento County’s immediate neighbor to the east. From downtown Sacramento to South Lake Tahoe it was 100 miles on U.S. Highway 50, with the first portion of the drive through the suburban sprawl of Sacramento County and the rest through rugged El Dorado, a 65-mile-long county that extended from rattlesnake-rich foothills where gold was discovered at Sutter’s Fort nearly 140 years earlier into pine-studded High Sierra country, ending at the western and southern shores of Lake Tahoe, the largest alpine lake in North America.

  On a Sunday drive with his family, Streeter would have taken his time and enjoyed the changing scenery—most of it national forest—but not today. With thoughts of murder and dead bodies on his mind, he made the trip in under two hours, walking into the South Lake Tahoe sheriff’s substation at 11:30 A.M.

  Told by a lieutenant that he’d have to wait for the arrival of the detectives, who were still at the crime scene, Streeter cooled his heels for half an hour.

  When the detectives showed up, they explained that the nude body of a young adult female was discovered in the woods by a woman jogger who decided to investigate a strange odor she’d been noticing in the area for several days. The victim had obviously been strangled with a ligature that was still around her neck.

  Streeter was told that the victim’s clothing had been strewn about the area. He was shown several garments that had been recovered from the crime scene.

  Each article of clothing was sealed in a plastic bag, and Streeter left them in place so as not to lose any possible trace evidence prior to a more thorough exam at the lab. He moved the material around under the plastic until he found what he had hoped he wouldn’t, and yet exactly what he expected to find. A chill went down his back.

  “Heard of the I-5 series?” he asked,
his eyes riveted on the plastic evidence bag still in his hands.

  The answer was no, even though a detective from El Dorado’s main office in Placerville, the county seat 40 miles west of South Lake Tahoe, had attended the I-5 meeting held a month earlier at DOJ. It was another instance of miscommunication, even in such a small department as El Dorado (120 sworn officers), which had only eleven detectives total to handle all types of investigations: eight assigned to Placerville and three at the South Lake Tahoe substation.

  “This killing appears similar,” Streeter said, not looking to get into a lengthy explanation.

  The criminalist, however, picked up the nearest phone and called the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau to speak to Lt. Biondi, whom he found out to lunch. He left word that he would call back.

  Streeter was taken to the nearby mortuary where Jane Doe was due to be autopsied later that day.

  The body, greenish in appearance due to decomposition, was lying on a gurney in an embalming room.

  After a visual examination of the body, Streeter plugged in a handheld laser, which was really just a fancy black light. He slipped on a pair of yellow goggles and snapped off the overhead light. Under the pale gray beam of the light, the body was bathed an eerie yellowish green.

  The object of the laser examination was to try to find objects that under normal light would not be seen. In a head-to-toe examination of the corpse, Streeter found three fiber fragments—they showed up in various fluorescent colors under the black light. He collected them from the victim’s right arm, right breast, and pubic hair.

  Whitish stains were illuminated on several areas of the body, possibly indicating semen. Streeter used a black felt pen to outline the areas on the victim’s right breast, across her chest extending down toward her left hip, and on her left leg shin. None of these areas, however, would test positive to acid phosphatase, the medium used to detect the presence of seminal fluid.