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

by Bruce Henderson

  “In these cases up in Washington”—Kohn wasn’t giving up—“you indicated that the bodies were dumped in a remote area, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “In rural areas?”

  “Well, more remote than rural. A lot of the bodies were along the Green River off the highway.”

  “But certainly not in an area where the body would be easily located?”

  “Correct, heavy underbrush.”

  “Not unlike the cases you described on the chart?”

  “Yes.”

  “In these cases up in Washington, are you familiar with whether the killer would have crossed jurisdictional lines as you indicated the ‘I-5 Killer’ did?”

  “I believe there was crossing of jurisdictional lines; city and county boundaries in that series.”

  “When you talk of jurisdictional lines in the I-5 cases, what are you talking about?”

  “County boundaries.”

  “It is your opinion that the reason it was done in these cases is to avoid detection because two agencies would be involved, is that correct?”

  “That’s one of the reasons,” Biondi said. “As I said, I also feel it was ritualistic in that it allowed some time for the suspect to be with the victim.”

  “Did the Green River investigators, if you know, attempt at some point to link their cases to some murders down in San Diego?” Kohn asked.

  “Yes.”

  Kohn asked about what type of cases San Diego had, and Biondi summarized what he knew.

  Curiously, when the Green River killings stopped in 1985, the San Diego series began—and there were similarities. Due to Roger Kibbe’s familial connections to the San Diego area, Biondi had also talked to San Diego detectives during the I-5 investigation. San Diego had ended up with forty-one victims—ironically, the same number credited to the “Green River Killer”—mostly prostitutes picked up in downtown San Diego. Their bodies were found 35 to 45 miles away in the rural Pine Lake area. There had been no evidence of clothes cutting. Unlike I-5 but similar to Green River, the body-dumping sites had been clustered; bodies repeatedly dumped in the same area, some within yards of where another body had been previously found. San Diego had a city/county task force that predictably became embroiled in politics and infighting, and disbanded. Eventually, a suspect was arrested and convicted of two of the murders; however, San Diego detectives became convinced they had more than one series overlapping and that there were at least two killers, maybe more. Yet, by 1989 the killings had stopped.

  Moving on, Kohn speculated aloud that if a killer was looking for women to abduct, control, and kill, “as you’ve indicated these cases are about,” he could easily find a prostitute to get in his car, without looking for stranded motorists. “There would be no guarantee,” he went on, “that Brown and Sabrah would end up stranded on the road.”

  “No guarantees. In their cases, it was happenstance.”

  “Doesn’t that distinguish Sabrah and Brown from Heedick, Frackenpohl, and Guffie?” Kohn asked.

  “They were all victims of opportunity.”

  “They were,” Kohn agreed. “But Brown and Sabrah were victims of an opportunity that was happenstance.”

  “By design,” Biondi countered, “if the killer also cruised the highway looking for just such opportunities.”

  “But you don’t know that?”

  Biondi looked hard at the defense attorney. “That’s exactly what occurred in Brown and Sabrah,” he said.

  Interestingly, it was Kohn who brought up the name Karen Finch. “There was a woman named Karen Finch who was stabbed to death?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were there cuts on her clothes?”

  “Yes.”

  Biondi understood why the prosecutor had excluded Finch from the list of I-5 victims, but he had not liked it. The fact that they had a serial killer known to use a sharp instrument as part of his ritual didn’t make it so surprising that one victim ended up stabbed. And in every other way, Finch had fit the victim mold.

  “She is not part of the group of deaths you have identified here, is that correct?” Kohn continued.

  “That’s correct.”

  “The Finch case has never been solved, is that correct?”

  “There’s been no one charged in that case,” said Biondi, who certainly did believe the Finch case had been solved.

  On redirect, Drossel asked if Biondi had taken into consideration in his analysis that the killer had come across different circumstances from one victim to another, thereby leading to slight variations in each case.

  “Sure, because we’re dealing with human behavior here,” Biondi said. “One victim may be a fighter, another one may be very passive. One victim may require more control. In the case of Darcie Frackenpohl, perhaps she was a screaming, struggling type, which might account for why she was gagged. That’s not unusual in other serial murder cases I have seen. Some victims require more control than others.”

  “Would a person known to cruise highways and visit prostitution areas fit the type of killer you believe is responsible for these cases?” the prosecutor asked.

  “Yes. At least two of the cases occurred on Interstate 5. That would require the suspect to traverse that highway until he came across an opportunity. When more came to light about Roger Kibbe, we factored in that he had a number of vehicles with unexplained high mileage, and a reputation for driving great distances.”

  Drossel had a last question.

  “How do you interpret the common threads in these four murders and the assault case?” the prosecutor asked.

  “In my opinion, with the categories we have up there and the analysis that has been done, there is a signature of one killer in these cases.”

  It wasn’t quite enough.

  “And again, the categories you’ve used to determine this ‘signature’?”

  “The nonfunctional clothes cutting and the miles transported are the two primary categories. But the cause of death, the body crime scene, the sex motive, just across the board it is a very unique criminal signature.”

  “No further questions.”

  “All right,” said Judge Finney. “The witness is excused. People rest?”

  Drossel had remained standing. “People rest.”

  THE DEFENSE of Roger Kibbe was notably brief.

  In his opening statement, defense attorney Phil Kohn told the jury: “Mr. Kibbe has met with his counsel and he’s decided not to testify. Nothing is worse in a case than for everyone to sit in the courtroom and wait anxiously for someone to testify, and then the defense rests its case. We are not going to do that. Mr. Kibbe is prepared to rely on the state of the evidence as put forth by the prosecution and by the four witnesses that the defense will present today.”

  Robert Shomer, a licensed psychologist, former Harvard professor, and expert on eyewitness identification, took the stand in the defense’s effort to debunk the prosecution’s witnesses who had pointed the finger at Roger Kibbe—Carmen Anselmi, James Driggers, Carol Stockton.

  “What are the major ways in which eyewitness identification has been studied?” Kohn asked.

  “It’s involved people seeing things, remembering what they had seen, and being tested to see if they can identify something. ‘Identification’ is a fairly simple word but it has a very complex meaning.”

  It came out that Shomer’s own testing of eyewitnesses had involved mostly his own college students, and was theoretical in nature. In fact, he had not met or talked to any of the I-5 eyewitnesses.

  “In terms of how good people are at remembering faces and identifying them later on,” Shomer said, “on average we get about 80 percent accuracy under ideal conditions. So, people are still not acting like a camera.”

  Shomer said physical lineups and photo lineups were “fine as long as you don’t contaminate that memory by information you present to that person beforehand.”

  In a series of three “hypotheticals” presented by Kohn with no n
ames used—in fact, they were the exact circumstances of the prosecution’s three eyewitnesses—Shomer reacted to the information provided, concluding that both time and suggestibility had played major roles in their eventual identification.

  “I would have grave suspicions about validity,” he concluded. “From a psychological standpoint, they wouldn’t be called identifications at all. They would be called statements of someone who really believes what they’re saying. They are not necessarily lying. But from a psychological standing they are not valid identifications.”

  On cross-examination, Drossel asked Shomer if he had a reputation as a defense witness.

  “I have no idea,” he said.

  “You tell us you have testified two hundred fifty to three hundred times. Hasn’t it always been for the defense?”

  “So far.”

  “And do you believe you continually testify for the defense because you hold some positions on eyewitness identification that are contrary to the views of your peers?”

  “Absolutely not,” Shomer huffed.

  “This area of eyewitness identification is actually a portion of the studies in psychology, isn’t that correct?”

  “I suppose.”

  “It’s not a science like medicine, correct?”

  “That’s absolutely incorrect. It is more of a science than medicine is.”

  A few questions later, Judge Finney sent both the jury and the witness from the room.

  From the bench, the judge looked down scoldingly at Kohn. “I don’t think this gentleman is helping your cause in maintaining that what he has done is a scientific endeavor. He is a professional witness. He runs with the answers. There is not one shred of evidence at this point that witness methodology, for lack of a better word, debunking witness identification, is scientific or accepted within the scientific community. I have had over the years several eyewitness experts testify. I have had hundreds of psychiatrists and psychologists testify, and I have never heard anybody try and put the patina on it that this gentleman is trying to do.”

  Once the judge had cooled off, Shomer came back for Drossel to finish his cross.

  The next witness, Raymond Farrell, was a master parachute rigger who owned his own parachute company.

  Farrell identified the cordage in the case as Mil C5040 Type 3, “commonly known as 550 cord because it has a break strength of 550 pounds.”

  “Is this cord common in your industry?” Kohn asked.

  “It’s real common.”

  In addition to use in parachute rigging, Farrell said he had sold the cord to dog trainers for training purposes, for clotheslines, and even to a group of musicians once for stringing bongos and African drums.

  “It’s commonly available in places other than a parachute shop?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you ever seen any colored marks, in particular, any red marks, on any 550 cord when it comes from the factory?” Kohn asked.

  “It doesn’t come from the factory marked, but it’s common to find the marks on the cordage. It’s done at the factory when they’re manufacturing canopies.”

  “What’s the purpose of the markings?”

  “They usually string this type of cordage out on a line table and they’ll put out hundreds of yards of cordage at once. And they have a marking grid they use for cutting and sewing canopies. At a couple of parachute factories where I have worked, they used colored-coded markings to indicate where to cut and sew.”

  “It doesn’t have to be red?”

  “Right. Any color. It’s common to use a bright color, like red or green or blue.”

  “And what is that paint applied with?” he asked.

  “Usually felt-tip markers are the easier thing to use,” Farrell said.

  Kohn seemed to have gone one question too far, but he recovered. “Can it be spray-painted on?” he asked.

  “It can be sprayed on if you’re trying to cover a wider area, such as on a four-line release system—you mark a larger portion of line to indicate which line to pull.”

  Farrell held his fingers about 4 inches apart to show how wide an area of line would be sprayed.

  On cross, Drossel went for the heart.

  “You mentioned that there can be some red substance put on those cords during manufacturing, is that correct?”

  “Yes. To know where you are going to cut the line.”

  “You mentioned felt-tip marker could be used.”

  “Yes, it is pretty common.”

  “That is more common than some other types of substance, such as paint?” Drossel asked.

  “In my experience, felt markers were the most common used at the factory that I worked in.”

  “I have no further questions.”

  John Thorton, a professor of forensic science at the University of California, Berkeley, was called next.

  He testified to having reviewed the reports of Faye Springer and Skip Palenik and to reading their testimony.

  “Would you tell us the approximate size of the red paint particles on this exhibit?” asked Tom Kolpacoff, pointing to the piece of cordage from the crime kit.

  “It’s six microns,” Thorton said. “That would be six-millionths of a meter, a meter being a little greater than a yard.”

  “To use a real scientific term, it’s an itsy-bitsy particle?”

  “It’s a very, very small particle. I would consider this to be at about the lower possible range of size for any forensic examination. If it was any smaller, I don’t think it would have been of any value for forensic purposes.”

  Thorton described the ten elements found in the red paint by Skip Palenik to be “expected components of paint,” although he said the sodium and chlorine might well be contaminants as suggested by the prosecution’s expert.

  Thorton also agreed that the dark football-shaped particles were fungal spores.

  “Are fungal spores unusual to see?”

  “No.”

  “Does dirt contain fungal spores?”

  “Yes.”

  As for the hair evidence, Thorton said, “In an elimination sense, hair evidence is very useful. If the issue is whether or not a particular hair came from an individual, then it’s my opinion that hair is a miserable form of evidence.”

  However, Thorton did state that he believed it possible to compare animal hairs for purposes of identifying the type of animal it came from. He agreed that the animal hairs found on Darcie Frackenpohl’s dress were cat hairs.

  When it came to the nonfunctional cutting of the victims’ clothing as testified to by Jim Streeter, Thorton said he believed some of the cuts were tears in the fabric. But whatever advantage that had bought the defense in terms of putting some distance between the scissors found in Kibbe’s crime kit and the clothes cutting was lost on Kolpacoff’s next exchange with the defense’s own criminalist.

  “In your professional opinion, is there any way of telling what type of instrument made those cuts?”

  “I think they’re scissor cuts.”

  Drossel began his cross-examination by asking Thorton if he had any problems with the methodology used by Faye Springer in her work on the I-5 cases.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Do you know Skip Palenik’s reputation in his particular area of microscopy?”

  “Yes. Mr. Palenik enjoys immense stature with the forensic science community for his abilities as a forensic microscopist.”

  “You never physically examined fibers or cordage or hair or clothing except the pink dress we have in this courtroom?” Drossel asked.

  “That’s correct.”

  “And the pink dress was first examined by you in court with a magnifying glass just a couple of days ago. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it correct that you are suspect of some of Jim Streeter’s analysis?”

  “That would be a fair characterization.”

  “And you’re testifying without having actually physically looked at the rest of the cl
othes evidence?”

  “Not to be argumentative, but I think I can tell a good egg from a bad one without laying one,” said Thorton.

  Drossel went over Thorton’s tears-versus-cuts testimony, highlighting the sizable number of cuts that Thorton confirmed. His testimony had the effect of corroborating most of the cuts found by Streeter, with the added bonus of identifying scissors as the cutting instrument, something Streeter had not done.

  “You’re familiar with the terms ‘functional’ and ‘nonfunctional’ cuts?” Drossel asked.

  “Yes. I have no quarrel with that concept.”

  “Then Mr. Streeter’s definition of ‘nonfunctional’ cutting makes sense to you?”

  “Yes, it does.”

  Drossel, who decided to quit while ahead, thought Thorton had turned into a pretty fair prosecution witness.

  The last defense witness was Cliffe Harriman, a private investigator and retired FBI agent.

  Harriman had been called to critique the physical lineup of September 1, 1988, at which James Driggers had picked out Roger Kibbe. Shown a picture of the lineup, Harriman said, “There is one individual designated as number two whose attire is sufficiently distinguishable from the other four that it tends to automatically direct your attention to that one individual to the exclusion of the others.”

  Of course, number two was Roger Kibbe.

  Harriman’s reasoning: All five men were wearing gray sweatshirts, but Kibbe’s looked the darkest.

  On cross, Drossel asked if Harriman had been at the lineup.

  “No, sir, I was not.”

  “Have you seen the videotape of the lineup?”

  “No, sir, I have not.”

  “You are basing your opinion on a photograph of the lineup?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Do you know if these shades of coloring are true or whether they may have to do with the film or lighting?”