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

by Bruce Henderson

  • It could be he is familiar with the difficulty law enforcement agencies experienced in multijurisdictional investigation.

  Some of the recommendations of the profilers the locals had already done, such as making a concentrated media plea to generate hard suspect leads and also to increase the pressure on the killer.

  But there had been no major media coverage in months, Biondi pointed out. “I think we need to keep more pressure on him.”

  “Yeah, he might be getting comfortable again,” the FBI’s Bill Hagmaier said. “He might think he can kill without fear of the cases being connected.”

  Maulsby wanted to know if there was a danger in more media coverage. “Will it result in more murders?”

  Hagmaier said that although some serial killers were known to have coveted media attention, there was no reason to believe that the frequency of the I-5 murders would increase in proportion to the media coverage. The profiler suggested it was more likely the opposite would happen. “Increased public awareness would mean he would have to work that much harder to find his victims along the roadside.”

  “In the real world,” Biondi said, “the more leads we get, the more manpower we need to work them. Not having enough people has been a problem for us all along.”

  Biondi explained he had only two detectives, Maulsby and Dean, working on I-5 full-time, and that San Joaquin had its own investigation going with three detectives assigned full-time for the past month.

  “Green River is doing it right,” one of the profilers said. “Their task force is from five jurisdictions and under one roof.”

  “How many people do they have now?” Biondi asked.

  “Right now, forty.”

  Biondi was momentarily speechless. He was thinking what he could do with half that.

  “By the way,” Hagmaier said, “your actual body count could be three or four times greater than it is now.”

  “You mean there could be twenty bodies out there?” Maulsby asked incredulously.

  “I certainly do think there are others out there you haven’t found,” Hagmaier said. “And may never.”

  Biondi agreed with Hagmaier. “Considering the rural dump sites, we were lucky to find some of the ones we did.”

  Biondi’s beeper went off; it was Dispatch. He went to his office phone, and found out about a new homicide that looked like a gang murder but would turn out to be a well-staged domestic killing (wife killed by husband). He called Stan Reed and Bob Bell, asking them to respond.

  When he returned to the conference room, Biondi explained what the call had been about.

  Hagmaier, his interest piqued, started asking questions about the fresh murder that Biondi couldn’t answer.

  Finally, Biondi said, “Look, Bill, you wanna go take a look?”

  Hagmaier had the expression of a Little Leaguer throwing out the first pitch on opening day. “I sure would.”

  Off they went, the “real world” detective to show the expert profiler from Quantico that murder looked a lot different up close and personal than it did on paper.

  Late the next afternoon when Maulsby stopped by the office after having spent the day in the classroom, she found a Sacramento Police Department report on her desk, along with a note from Bobby Armstrong saying she might want to take a look at the attached report of an assault on a prostitute.

  The report, dated three weeks earlier, started off routinely enough. Hooker gets into a guy’s car, agrees to give him a blow job for $25, then the guy tries to handcuff her. They struggle, she gets away, guy drives off but is pulled over by a city unit. He’s booked on assault with intent to commit rape and driving without a valid driver’s license. He refuses to make a statement to the arresting officer. At the end of her statement, the victim says: “That guy was weird. He would have killed me if that policeman hadn’t come along. I want to press charges even if I have to go to jail for my warrant.” She had signed a complaint form, and was placed under arrest for an outstanding warrant.

  The name of the suspect didn’t mean anything to Maulsby. He was listed as being forty-nine years old, 5-foot-11, 180 pounds, brown eyes over black graying hair. At the time of his arrest, he was wearing a T-shirt, blue jeans, and white sneakers. He had given a Sacramento address and no phone.

  Maulsby kept reading. Listed under the physical evidence recovered at the scene were some very curious items. At that point, the report stopped being routine for Maulsby.

  She called the Sacramento Police Department and spoke to a clerk in the property room. She gave him the crime report number and explained that she was interested in seeing all the booked property as soon as possible.

  Maulsby appeared at the Sacramento Police Department’s property room at 8:00 A.M. the next morning. After showing her ID, she waited at the counter as the property clerk behind the wire cage went back to search the stuffed shelves. When he came back, he was carrying a large manila evidence folder, which he gave to Maulsby.

  She checked the evidence tag to make sure it was from the right case, then opened it where she stood.

  The first thing she saw was an empty plastic Ziplock Baggie with chalky smudges still on it; obviously it had been dusted for prints.

  Everything else had been put into a separate evidence bag. She opened it and let the contents slide out onto the Formica-covered counter-top. Each item was secured in individual plastic bags and tagged.

  Maulsby caught her breath.

  Even though she’d read a description of the items in the crime report, seeing them with her own eyes made her feel very much like a voyeur parting a dark shroud and peering into a secret, filthy place she wasn’t meant to be.

  First, there were the handcuffs found by officers in the golf course parking lot. They didn’t have a serial number, but “Taiwan” was stamped into the metal.

  Next came the items from the plastic Baggie that had been found in the parking lot near the handcuffs.

  Two handcuff keys, said to fit the cuffs.

  White plastic vibrator, the battery-operated type.

  Scissors, about 6 inches long with blunt ends, the kind that nurses use when bandaging wounds. Examining them, Maulsby could see remnants of tape adhering to the blades, and what looked like fibers stuck to the tape.

  Two rubber hair bands.

  Two identical pieces of wooden doweling, about 6 inches by one-half inch, and strung between them white nylon cord about a foot and a half in length, each end looped around a dowel and knotted.

  Another longer piece of the same cord.

  With chills chasing each other up and down her spine, Maulsby realized she’d seen the cordage before—

  It was the same type of nylon cord that had been found lying next to Jane Doe at the El Dorado crime scene.

  Fifteen

  Minutes after recognizing the cordage in the sadistic “crime kit,” Detective Kay Maulsby sprang into Lt. Ray Biondi’s office with the news. She first summarized the circumstances of the assault case and all the other physical evidence recovered before telling Biondi about the cord.

  “What’s the suspect’s name?” he asked.

  Maulsby looked down at the assault report.

  “Kibbe,” she said. “Roger Kibbe.”

  “He’s number one on our hit parade,” said Biondi, sounding like his usual unflappable self. Inside, however, a voice was screaming, “Holy shit! Is it possible the criteria worked beyond our wildest dreams and the killer is actually at the top of the list?”

  Biondi told Maulsby how Kibbe had received the highest score on the DOJ “Tip List” printout months earlier. “I had Gritzmacher and Carter ready to work their way down from the top,” he said, “before they got hung up on blue Nissans.”

  Maulsby remembered having seen the DOJ list early on. She went to the I-5 boxes, found the printout, and returned to Biondi’s office, reading along the way.

  “Kibbe was a suspect in a female abduction three years ago in Contra Costa County,” she pointed out.

&nbs
p; “That’s something Vito found,” Biondi said.

  He told her of Bertocchini’s bringing Kibbe in for questioning the previous December after he’d been stopped by the San Joaquin patrol deputy who thought he resembled the composite.

  “Vito thought Kibbe was dirty from the get-go,” he went on, “but there really wasn’t anything to connect him. He was driving an older white Maverick at the time of Heedick, but Driggers and Carmen Anselmi didn’t pick him out of a photo lineup.”

  Biondi knew how important individual initiative was when it came to working a murder series. Without it, important leads and tips had a way of falling by the wayside. The way that Maulsby had alerted Vice and then made sure not to let the assault report slip through a crack was more than rookie luck.

  They agreed to get the cordage over to the DOJ crime lab right away so Streeter could take a look at it.

  “But based on what I saw with my own eyes,” Maulsby said with conviction, “that cord was the same. This is the guy.”

  VITO Bertocchini was not a happy trooper.

  Displeased it had taken his department so long to establish an I-5 task force to work the unsolved series, he was also frustrated that a heavy workload had kept him away from the Stephanie Brown and Charmaine Sabrah cases for months. He hadn’t forgotten the faces of those innocent victims and their grieving loved ones, nor would he any time soon.

  Most particularly, Bertocchini was highly vexed that he hadn’t been able to spend any appreciable time investigating the man he felt certain was the I-5 killer.

  In a meeting with fellow homicide detectives Pete Rosenquist and Larry Ferrari and their sergeant, Bertocchini laid it on the table.

  “I want to work Kibbe real hard,” he said, turning up the bass. “I think we should set up surveillance on him.”

  The sergeant looked uncomfortable. Surveillance meant long hours and overtime, which meant budget overruns.

  Just an hour earlier, Bertocchini had talked to a deputy district attorney about whether they could get a search warrant for Kibbe’s home and vehicles. The D.A. heard him out but nixed the idea of going to a judge until they had more probable cause as to Kibbe’s involvement in murder. They would also need a list of what specific items they’d be looking for, as no judge would give them carte blanche.

  Another detective stuck his head in the room.

  “Phone for anyone working I-5.”

  Ferrari got up to take the call.

  Bertocchini was glad to have Ferrari on the team. He was only in his late twenties; however, he was a seven-year veteran of the department and a skilled interviewer. Likable and enthusiastic, he genuinely cared about people and struck up friendships easily. Although of Italian ancestry, the 6-foot-1 blonde had the fair features of a California surfer and the slender build to match. A stylish dresser, he wore all the latest fashions and came off very debonair for a cop.

  Ferrari returned showing a boyish grin. “Vito, Christmas is early. That was Kay Maulsby. Guess what she found this morning on your old friend Kibbe?”

  Bertocchini perked up as Ferrari told him about Kibbe’s assaulting the prostitute and having thrown from his car the crime kit that was found to have his fingerprints.

  “Kay says it’s the same cord she saw two weeks ago at a murder scene up in South Lake Tahoe,” Ferrari said.

  Bertocchini pounded the table with gusto.

  “Goddammit! I knew he was killing women!”

  He jumped up and left the room.

  Vito Bertocchini had a deputy D.A. to find.

  IN THE MONTHS since Roger had been brought into the Homicide Bureau and questioned by detectives, he and Harriet Kibbe had not seen or heard from the police.

  Life had gone back to a kind of dysfunctional routine for them. In May (1987), they had moved to another Public Storage facility, also in Sacramento, and were living in its one-bedroom managers’ apartment adjacent to the rental office. By day, they ran the business. In his spare time, Roger, who had grown a full beard, did odd jobs around the place. Harriet continued to work on the accounting program she hoped would bring her financial independence.

  They were living together like platonic roommates with no claim to the other. On Roger’s nights out, he returned late or sometimes not until early morning. Only once did he offer any information as to where he had gone. He came home one morning in late August (1987) and stood outside the bathroom, which Harriet was busy cleaning. When she looked up from the tub, she saw he had a black eye. Standing there like a child explaining his tardiness at school, he said he’d been at a video arcade and gotten in the middle of a fight between some guys. There was a time she would have scolded, but that time had passed. It seemed odd to her that Roger would become involved in any kind of a physical altercation, which she knew was much too confrontational for his liking. But she shrugged it off and went back to scrubbing the tub.

  At this point in their relationship, she didn’t much care what Roger was doing on his own time after work, or even whether he was or was not cheating. She preferred not to think about Roger being with other women, of course, but she’d lost all interest in resuming sexual relations with him. Their boundaries had been well defined: They were still together only as a matter of accommodation.

  Although Harriet and Roger didn’t subscribe to any newspapers and only occasionally watched TV news, she was aware that the toll of the I-5 killer was mounting. It gnawed at her that Roger had been questioned as a possible suspect. By now, the police had obviously realized their mistake or they would have been back, right? The man responsible for those killings was a monster, the type that Harriet had only read about in the true-crime books she devoured. She knew that vicious, cold-blooded killers existed, of course, but she didn’t know what one looked like in real life. She was certain, however, that they didn’t look and act like Roger. Still, the fact that the police had had some reason to question him in connection with the series of terrible crimes continued to trouble her.

  One night in the summer (1987), they were lying in their separate beds shortly after turning out the lights. She asked the question she’d asked him before and would continue to ask him—the question she couldn’t shake.

  “Do you know anything at all about these dead women?”

  Without the slightest hesitation, Roger answered, “No,” then bade her good night.

  Harriet noticed some changes in Roger that summer. He seemed more withdrawn than usual, and at times outright morose. Thinking it had to do with their deteriorating marriage, she couldn’t blame him. She was feeling similar hopelessness. A marriage that once seemed to have a future had turned into a leftover carcass with no sustenance for either of them. Who could be joyous about it?

  Roger had sold his custom-made $2,300 parachute rig, too—for only $800. He’d had it less than a year, and had worked weekends for months packing chutes at the Antioch skydiving center to build up enough money on the books to buy it. The chute was a rectangular para-foil in Roger’s favorite colors: red, white, and blue. He had a jumpsuit to match.

  Harriet was bewildered that Roger had parted with his beloved rig. A veteran of more than four thousand jumps since 1966, he now seemed reconciled to giving up the one thing he seemed to enjoy above all else in life. When she asked him why he’d sold the rig, he told her because they needed the money, even though she never saw a penny of it and she paid all the bills. Things were tight and parachuting was not a cheap hobby, but Harriet would not have asked him to sell his rig—it would have been like asking a weekend fisherman to sell his favorite rod and tackle.

  On a hot August evening as they sat in the living room watching a TV sitcom, Roger cleared his throat during a commercial and out of the blue said: “There will come a day when we’ll part company and you’ll be grateful for it.”

  It was a veritable speech for him these days.

  “What do you mean?” she’d asked.

  Harriet was sitting on the couch across from Roger, who was in an easy chair.

&nb
sp; “You’ll see,” he said.

  On the night of Roger’s arrest for assaulting the prostitute, Harriet was in the hallway outside the bathroom when he casually announced, “I’m going out.”

  She turned to look at him down the long hallway; he was already at the front door with his hand on the knob. In faded blue jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers, he looked like a regular guy heading out for bowling league night—only it was nearing midnight and she’d come to think of him more as a prowling tomcat.

  “Oh?” she said as casually as if he’d told her he was going to stay up and read. She’d long given up questioning him about his comings and goings, and all the mileage he put on the cars, or even caring what he did as long as he didn’t use credit cards or otherwise run up debts.

  He turned and left, and she went into the bathroom to brush her teeth for bed. The next time she heard from him was his collect call from jail the following morning.

  “What did you do to end up there?” she asked.

  “I’ll tell you later. Call Steve and let him know.”

  She inquired about the car, and Roger said it had been impounded by police.

  They’d sold the Datsun 280Z in February (1987)—deciding to get rid of it because Roger said it looked too much like the car driven in some of the I-5 killings—but not before he’d logged 27,196 miles on it in only seven months. (He’d put 26,755 miles on their previous car, a red Honda, in just eight months.) Since then, their main form of transportation—they also had an old pickup that barely ran—was their white four-door 1986 Hyundai that they’d purchased in the summer of 1986 for Harriet to drive.

  “The car is impounded?” she said. “That’s just great. What am I supposed to do without a car?”

  Harriet realized that to an outsider it might have sounded as if she was more worried about the car than Roger.

  She called Steve and broke the news, explaining that Roger wouldn’t tell her what he was in jail for.

  Steve promised to make some calls.