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

by Bruce Henderson

  When he rang back, Steve told her straight out that Roger was in jail for attempted rape of a prostitute.

  Harriet’s legs went weak, and she felt her heart pounding. She had to sit down. Rape? This was the guy who wasn’t interested in it at home, and he was going out picking up prostitutes and trying to rape them! For a moment, she saw the morbid humor in it: You don’t have to rape prostitutes, you big dummy, you only have to pay them.

  Then, she began to cry.

  Steve outlined the steps she needed to go through to get the car out of impound, which she did that afternoon when their relief Public Storage employee gave her a lift downtown.

  Later that afternoon when Roger called again from jail, Harriet threatened not to bail him out. But after she hung up she got to thinking that questions would be asked by their regional supervisor if Roger was gone too long. As it was, she had signed up with an agency for temporary bookkeeping work from time to time as a way to bring in more money. Roger would need to cover for her double dipping, as Public Storage considered her a full-time employee. But a few days in jail wouldn’t hurt him, she decided. Anyway, after his behavior he deserved to cool his heels awhile.

  Four days later, she bailed Roger out after a municipal court judge set bail at $15,000, which they met by signing an agreement to pay a $1,500 premium to a local bail bondsman. She said nothing to Roger inside the police station when they first brought him out like a stray needing a home.

  They walked silently to the car.

  Harriet was still furious about the arrest and the fact that he’d been with a prostitute, and normally she would have been ranting and raving. But she knew that in the best of times, yelling at Roger was like screaming at a brick wall; a sore throat was all she ever got out of it. Why bother now?

  She drove from the jail parking lot with Roger slouched over in the passenger seat. When they hit the first red light, they sat mute, both staring straight ahead.

  Harriet was rolling over in her mind questions she would have liked to ask Roger: How many prostitutes had he picked up? How long had he been doing this? Had he been with prostitutes when they were still sleeping together?

  Finally, without looking at him, she hissed: “Can’t you keep that thing in your pants?”

  Roger said nothing.

  For the next two weeks, Roger stayed close to home. It seemed the ordeal had knocked the wind out of him. He didn’t use the car or go out a single night, and was content to putter around the place, cleaning out and showing storage spaces, doing some painting, and otherwise keeping busy.

  On a Saturday morning the first week of October (1987), Roger and Harriet took a leisurely drive to Lake Tahoe on U.S. 50, passing right by Old Meyer’s Grade Road, where the unidentified young woman had been found nude and strangled seventeen days earlier.

  Steve was to receive an award from his department at a special dinner and had invited them and other family members to attend the ceremony. Roger wouldn’t have missed it for the world. He and Steve were close; about as close, Harriet thought, as two brothers could possibly be. What they talked about and had in common when they were alone she couldn’t guess—the older brother who had been on the wrong side of the law so much of his life, and the younger brother who was the law.

  She knew the brothers had opposite opinions about their late mother, Lorraine, a hospital nurse who had died of melanoma at age forty-three in 1963. By all accounts, Steve worshiped her memory, while Roger, who long felt he was his mother’s least favorite of her three boys, did not. Many of Roger’s stories about his mother had to do with her anger and ridicule directed his way. According to Roger, she always “yelled and screamed” at him, finding fault in everything he did. She hadn’t liked his tendency to stutter when nervous, his disinterest in school, his difficulty with reading, his slow-moving gait, and seeming scores of other minor and major faults she found with him. He remembered her being quick to discipline him and let fly with an open hand. One of Roger’s earliest childhood memories was of his mother beating him until he couldn’t walk for playing with his army toys in her monthly supply of flour—this during World War II rationing. He also had memories of being locked out of the house, naked, as a boy by his irate mother and hiding in the bushes until his father came home. That night he issued his first threat to run away from home. Before long, he was sneaking away in the dark for hours on end; he soon found he enjoyed peeping into neighbors’ windows. His sneakiness grew, and before long he was burglarizing those same homes, and eventually stores.

  The third Kibbe son, Jonathan Jr., who worked in the aerospace industry in San Diego, was five years younger than Roger. When their mother took seriously ill, her two youngest sons—then grown men—had come to her bedside, but not her eldest. And when Lorraine Kibbe died, Roger had a good reason for not making his mother’s funeral: he was in state prison serving a two-year hitch for burglary.

  Seemingly without an ounce of envy or resentment, Roger idolized Steve, who, in turn, appeared very comfortable in his role as the stable, responsible brother who was always there when his hard-luck older brother needed a lifeline.

  It was a Kibbe family reunion of sorts at Tahoe, with Roger’s father, Jonathan “Jack” Sr., and his second wife, Susan, whom he married a year after Lorraine’s death, and who was also a nurse, coming up from San Diego. Only the third Kibbe brother, Jack Jr., failed to make it.

  At the “Law Enforcement Appreciation” dinner given at the Carson Valley Improvement Club in Minden, Nevada, that night by the Elks, the Kibbes all sat together.

  Steve was not as tall as Roger, who himself was not as tall as their father. More stocky than his father and Roger, Steve had a full head of hair sprinkled with gray and a closely cropped beard. He had a soft and deliberate way of speaking, not unlike Roger. For the occasion, he wore a blue blazer, white shirt with tie, pressed jeans, and, like every Nevada cop worth his weight in sagebrush, cowboy boots.

  When Steve’s name was called, he moved to the front of the room where his boss, Douglas County Sheriff Jerry Maple, waited at the podium. As the sheriff handed Steve his award and shook his hand, polite applause began. Everyone at the Kibbe table, including Roger, beamed with pride.

  Homicide Detective Steve Kibbe had been named “Officer of the Year” the same week that Roger Kibbe had become the prime suspect in the I-5 serial murders.

  Sixteen

  When criminalist Jim Streeter received the pieces of white cord found at the Jane Doe murder scene in El Dorado and in Roger Kibbe’s crime kit, he studied them under a microscope, finding all five pieces to be the same in several important respects.

  Type of fiber: nylon

  Number of fibers running through cord: six

  Color of fiber: white

  Type of weave and pattern size

  Threads per cord: 32

  Shape of cord: hollow

  Streeter could not say that the cordage found at the two locations had once been part of the same length of line. The closest he could get—and all he could testify to in court—would be that the pieces were similar.

  In examining the scissors from the crime kit, he saw the tiny pieces of duct tape on the blades that Kay Maulsby had noticed but was unable to match the fibers stuck to the tape with any of the victims’ clothing. If the fibers were from the last victim Kibbe had killed, they had not yet found her.

  Streeter spent that afternoon checking various hardware and sporting goods stores around Sacramento looking for similar white cord, but found none. On a hunch, he stopped at the Lodi Airport and showed the cordage to the owner of the Parachute Center, who recognized it.

  “What’s it used for?” Streeter asked.

  “Suspension and reefing lines.”

  Streeter had a blank expression.

  “In the construction of parachutes.”

  AT THE wheel of a lurching, smoking motor home, Detective Vito Bertocchini pulled into a shopping center parking lot adjacent to the Public Storage facility on Tupelo Drive i
n Sacramento. Heading for the end of the lot closest to Public Storage, he parked the beast that would be his home away from home for the next two weeks.

  In the passenger seat, Pete Rosenquist studied the terrain through binoculars. “This is good,” he said. “I see the office and the front door. There’s a walkway in back that leads to the storage spaces. We’re covered on both ends.”

  “Pete, do you know where we’re at?”

  “Shit, you’re right!”

  They were around the corner from the beauty shop they’d gone to a year and a half ago to interview Stephanie Brown’s hairdresser about her chopped-off hair.

  Bertocchini knew that Roger Kibbe had not lived on Tupelo Drive then, and he recognized it as simply a strange coincidence. Kibbe had come across Stephanie lost on I-5 south of Sacramento; he didn’t follow her from the beauty shop. Still, it made the detectives feel as if they’d come full circle.

  They checked in by radio with two unmarked cars, driven by Sacramento detectives Bob Bell and Harry Machen, that had followed. After they found parking spaces nearby, Bell and Machen joined the party in the Winnebago, owned by the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office for use on major drug surveillances that had been known to last for weeks.

  The morning went by quietly with no activity.

  At 1:30 P.M., they sent a sheriff’s department records clerk into the Public Storage office to make contact with Roger Kibbe. She did, pretending to be interested in renting space, and came back out to report that the suspect worked from 9:30 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. Although the white Hyundai was parked in front, Harriet did not appear to be on the premises.

  The detectives had met earlier that morning at the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department Homicide Bureau to establish ground rules in their attempt to keep an eye on Kibbe during his every waking moment until a search warrant could be served.

  Luckily, there was a window between new murder cases in Sacramento—the last one, ten days earlier, was solved right away with the arrest of the victim’s boyfriend. As a result, Lt. Ray Biondi was able temporarily to divert the entire Bureau to the Kibbe investigation.

  Biondi put Stan Reed to work on the crucial affidavit in support of a search warrant, which would be reviewed by a judge prior to a warrant’s being issued. The key new development in terms of probable cause was, of course, the nylon cordage. Reed would describe, in addition, other physical evidence, each crime scene, the criminal acts that had occurred, list the specific items they would be searching for at Kibbe’s residence, as well as offer his learned supposition as to what he thought had happened (“Based upon my training and experience, it is my opinion that …”). The affidavit would take a week to write, and run nearly seventy pages.

  The Sacramento detectives had joined forces with Bertocchini, Rosenquist, and Larry Ferrari from San Joaquin in setting up the Kibbe surveillance, considered essential if for no other reason than to keep the I-5 suspect from killing again. However, the detectives all hoped to develop new promising leads in the process—perhaps Kibbe would unwittingly lead them to where he’d stashed the victims’ purses?

  The detectives had discussed that morning how far to let Kibbe go before stopping him. What if they saw him pick up a potential victim and drive off with her?

  “You’ll have to stop him right away,” Biondi said.

  They couldn’t take any chances trying to follow Kibbe and possibly losing him, Biondi counseled. After all, they were after more evidence, not more victims.

  On the first day of surveillance, October 16 (1987), Kibbe didn’t leave the facility all day. At 6:00 P.M., Harriet arrived home in a Chrysler with another couple, who came inside the residence. An hour later, the two couples came out and left. They were followed by Machen and Bell to a nearby restaurant, where they had dinner. They arrived back at 9:00 P.M. The other couple stayed until after midnight, then left. Lights in the residence went out at 1:34 A.M. Forty minutes later, with Roger Kibbe home in bed, surveillance was concluded.

  The next day featured more of the same, with Roger home alone and Harriet gone. The detectives whiled away the time in front of a 10-inch TV watching the opening game of the World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals, whom they all hated for having beaten the San Francisco Giants for the National League pennant that year, and the power-hitting Minnesota Twins. Someone went out for cold beer and munchies.

  Harriet came home at 3:30 P.M.

  The Twins won 10–1.

  Roger and Harriet left at 5:30 P.M.

  As detectives ran to their parked cars and tried to set up on the Hyundai, they lost it in traffic. Although their pride was injured, the cops took some consolation in the fact that Roger was not alone. They returned to the motor home and awaited the couple’s return. Roger and Harriet came home at 10:00 P.M., and their lights went out an hour later.

  The following afternoon, a Sunday, Roger took a walk over to the shopping center. Detectives followed him on foot. He picked up a few things at Payless, then stopped at Taco Bell for a Coke before returning home. Later, he and Harriet went grocery shopping. They turned in at 11:00 P.M.

  The next morning a unit followed Harriet to a cellular phone company, where she spent the day working in the office. When she got home that night, she and Roger went clothes shopping. Their lights went out early, at 9:00 P.M.

  Detectives had noticed some things in the hours they’d spent watching Kibbe. Obviously, he really wasn’t going anywhere. Whenever he did go somewhere, it was with Harriet, and she always drove. Of course, Roger’s driver’s license had been revoked, although that hadn’t stopped him from cruising the stroll the previous month when he’d picked up Debra Guffie. Still, when they walked together Harriet always led, with Roger lagging behind a step or two.

  Having a lot of time on their hands, the detectives batted around various scenarios. Concluding that Harriet was the dominant one in the relationship, they wondered if she had grounded Roger since his arrest. Speculating further, they theorized that perhaps it took a big fight with Harriet for Roger to make his move. Could they orchestrate such a donnybrook?

  The next morning, Kay Maulsby, who had completed the two-week homicide school, was briefed on the surveillance effort. Biondi shared with her the conclusions of the detectives who had been watching Kibbe, and directed her and Joe Dean to drop in unexpectedly on Harriet at the cellular phone company and “jack her up.”

  Their purpose, Biondi made clear, was to irritate her. “She might be the trigger that sends Roger off. She comes home and takes her anger out on him. We’ll watch to see what he does.”

  Maulsby and Dean dropped in on Harriet after lunch.

  They first talked to her boss, finding out that Harriet had been employed for two weeks as an accountant through a temp agency. Maulsby explained they wanted to speak to Harriet “about her husband,” and made a point of saying that she was not the subject of their investigation.

  The detectives were shown into a private office, where Harriet soon joined them. They showed her their badges.

  “Are you married to Roger Kibbe?” Dean asked.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Do you reside at 6380 Tupelo with him?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “We’ve got some questions about your husband,” Maulsby said in her best tough-guy voice.

  Harriet glanced out the plate-glass wall; a couple of office employees quickly turned away.

  “You came here to talk to me about Roger?” Harriet asked, her cheeks reddening. “I’ve just started working—”

  “Your husband was recently arrested for assault on a prostitute,” Dean said, cutting her off. “This is serious.”

  “We want to know about his comings and goings,” Maulsby said, even though she felt they were sailing steerage on the Titanic without a life jacket.

  Although Maulsby was new to Homicide, she knew about getting information out of people. This was no way to proceed. Coming here plainly to embarrass Harriet and get a rise out of her so she would
go home and lambast Roger was shortsighted. Suppose Harriet had valuable information about Roger to share with them? No one believed she was a serial killer, only that she was married to one. Her life could be hellish right now. A much better tack, Maulsby thought, would have been to approach Harriet in a quieter way, coming to her sympathetically, not confrontationally.

  Harriet lifted a shaking hand. “There’s the door.”

  “We told your boss you aren’t in trouble,” Dean said somewhat lamely.

  “Get out!” Harriet barked, a fury in her voice. “You think I don’t have any feelings or any rights here? Don’t come back either because I won’t tell you a thing.”

  Maulsby and Dean looked at each other, and left.

  In terms of pissing off Harriet, Maulsby knew they could consider it mission accomplished. But if they’d really accomplished something, why did she feel so lousy?

  That afternoon on surveillance at Tupelo Drive, detectives eagerly anticipated Harriet’s arrival home.

  It was Bertocchini’s thirtieth birthday, and he was hoping for a special present that Roger Kibbe could best give him—a slipup of some kind, new physical evidence, maybe Roger going cruising for another victim. Bertocchini would dearly have loved to slap the cuffs on him in the act.

  Harriet came home at 5:10 P.M.

  Half an hour later, Roger came out and walked to the back of the lot holding a white plastic bag, which he dropped into the garbage can, and went back inside.

  “Harriet must be really pissed,” Bertocchini deadpanned. “She made him take out the garbage.”

  At 6:22 P.M., they observed Roger mopping the floor of the office.

  The detectives howled.

  Roger then went to work cleaning the countertops.

  As Kibbe went about his chores, the cops watched the third game of the World Series. At one point, Rosenquist ran over to Payless with a roll of film he had previously shot of Roger walking through the parking lot. When he turned it in for developing, the salesgirl told him he could get two prints for the price of one, and also a free pair of nylons. Rosenquist picked up a pound cake, and back at the motor home they celebrated Bertocchini’s birthday. Rosenquist gave him the nylons, which Bertocchini complained weren’t his size.