Through a fingerprint match, police learned that the victim was known as Tina Gibbs, age 26, from Tacoma, Washington. She was known to law enforcement and had worked as a Las Vegas street hooker during the months before her death.
Lanette Deyon White
Four months later, on Friday, September 25, a woman’s naked body was discovered lying in roadside irrigation ditch off Interstate 5 near Lodi, California. Several items thought to be connected to the crime were found a little farther along the highway: Women’s clothing, a bloodied tarpaulin, hair, a white plastic bag with the logo of the Flying J truck, and some pieces of jewelry were scattered around. Investigators hoped this evidence would provide much-needed clues as to the identity of the victim and how she met her fate.
Due to the advanced state of decomposition, it was determined at autopsy that the woman had been dead for several days. A puncture mark was found on one of the victim’s breasts, and there was evidence of suffocation. Investigators believed that the woman was murdered someplace other than where she was found and then thrown from a moving vehicle into the ditch.
Fingerprints identified the victim as an attractive 25-year-old named Lanette Deyon White, from Fontana, California. She had last been seen alive by her cousin on Sunday, September 20, as she prepared to visit a grocery store to buy milk for her baby.
Patricia Anne Tamez
She kinda hung around the corner at Sixth Street and Highway 18. I saw her regularly near the stop sign on the corner. Sometimes she walked into my office to ask for a cigarette. I don’t know what her official title was, but I surmised she was a lady of the evening.
—Larry Halverson,
conductor for the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway
By now, Wayne Ford had moved out of his trailer home and was camping deep in Humboldt County woodlands. According to him—and this is quite an implausible story—he was living rough because he “didn’t want to see anymore prostitutes” for fear of killing them, and he “didn’t want to see any more babies.” The fact that he saw plenty of of both during his job as a long-distance trucker seems to have been conveniently erased from his mind.
Aged 29, from Hesperia, California, Patricia Anne Tamez had lived a turbulent life. When she wasn’t roaming the streets for a quick fix or prostituting herself to support her drug habit, she could often be found in a mental institution or state hospital, undergoing drug rehabilitation and psychiatric therapy. She was a far cry from the vivacious college student she had once been. Supporting her drug habit had consumed her life and become her sole ambition.
On Saturday, October 22, 1998, Patricia spent the early part of the afternoon soliciting sex with truck drivers at the intersection of 6th and D Streets in downtown Victorville, California. She was wearing a white T-shirt over her panties, a pair of tennis shoes, and very little else, it seems.
After several hours she got her first response when a man driving a large, shiny black truck pulled up with a proposition. The driver worked for Edeline Trucking. It was Wayne Ford, on his way to pick up a load of concrete in Lucerne Valley when he passed through Victorville and spotted the woman advertising her services:She flagged me over. Yeah, I saw her from a distance. I slowed down. I thought someone was trying to cross the street. She looked at me and flagged me down. She lifted up her T-shirt to reveal her panties, a cross between pink and purple. I circled the block, found a space to stop, and picked her up.
—Wayne Ford to Detectives Frank Gonzales and Jeff Staggs,
November 3, 1998
Larry Halverson, conductor for the BNSF Railway Company, had his office nearby. He noticed that following a brief conversation the woman climbed into the cab and the vehicle drove off. “That’s the last I ever seen of her,” recalled Halverson at Ford’s trial.
The pair continued east on Highway 18 into Apple Valley, where Ford pulled into a vacant lot near a convenience store. The couple climbed into the sleeper portion of the cab and had sex. Ford later told detectives the unlikely story that he awoke to find Patricia not breathing. He claimed that he tried to revive her with CPR but stopped when he got tired.
Ford couldn’t quite remember exactly how Patricia Tamez stopped breathing, but he told the detectives how it had “happened before with other women” and said it “involved a form of asphyxiation I sort of used my hands to cut off the blood flow of the carotid artery during sex.”
Many serial killers can only achieve an orgasm when the victim is being strangled8 and at the point of death. Arthur Shawcross and sado-sexual killer Michael Bruce Ross, whom I have met several times, have admitted this. Before his execution, on May 13, 2005, Ross explained to me during a TV interview at Somers Prison, Connecticut: I would strangle them [his female victims] almost till they stopped breathing. Then I’d stop and let them revive. They thrashed around a bit, and I had to massage my fingers before reapplying the pressure, and I’d repeat it all until I came which was at the very moment they died. It left some multiple bruising around their necks. It was sort of fun.
—Michael Bruce Ross
Ford then told another unlikely yarn, one which had the detectives blinking at each other in disbelief: “I wanted to take her to a hospital, or a police station, but I didn’t know the area,” he said pathetically. “So, I continued east on Highway 18 and pulled over in a remote area to attempt CPR a second time. When it didn’t work, I cried.”
“Why did you cry, Adam, why did you cry?” asked Detective Gonzales, during the interview.
“Cause I didn’t want that to happen,” Ford said.
“Did you cry because you knew it was wrong, Adam?” the detective asked.
“Yeah, it shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t have happened,” Ford replied with something short of honesty, before explaining what happened next.
“I was very, very upset about all of this,” Ford explained. “I continued to Lucerne for my pickup. On my return trip west, toward Highway 395, I headed south and dumped her nude body in the California Aqueduct.”
The evening after Patricia had climbed into Ford’s truck, two security guards at the California Aqueduct were patrolling the area when one of the men noticed something bobbing in the rolling waters near the pump house. To his horror, the guard realized that the object was actually the nude body of a woman. It had caught upon one of the many iron gates that snag debris floating downstream. The guard immediately summoned the police.
When the authorities arrived, they fished the body out of the water, making an immediate note that one of the woman’s breasts had been cut off. Now it was obvious that she had been murdered, she hadn’t simply slipped and fallen into the water where she drowned.
An autopsy examination revealed that the woman had undergone severe trauma before her death. There was evidence that she had been bound: ligature marks from what was determined as nylon rope were found on the wrists and ankles. She had been raped, claimed the prosecutor at Wayne’s trial, and then hit over the head with a blunt instrument. Moreover, her attacker had broken her back before he strangled her. It was determined from fingerprints that the pitiful remains were those of Patricia Anne Tamez, who had gone missing a day earlier.
During a search of the area upstream along the aqueduct, police found items that were possibly linked with the murder: a bloodied towel, blouse, pants, and a .22-caliber air pistol. Police were not able to locate the victim’s missing breast, nor did they have a clue as to the identity of her killer.
When Victoria Redstall asked Wayne Ford why he had cut a breast off, he gave this somewhat implausible answer: “The breast was cut off because it was tied to the rope. It was quicker to cut the breast off than anything else.”
“Because you were trying to push her into the aqueduct?”
“Absolutely, and I wanted to because of of the angel of the aqueduct. I didn’t want to go in myself, so what I wanted to do was kind of spin the body down, like a top, you know, and it didn’t work. So I needed my rope back, but it wouldn’t come back.”
Valerie Rondi—one that got away
I believe that in order for Wayne to do the things he is accused of there had to be a spirit of evil that entered into him.
—Pastor James Ray,
Ford’s spiritual advisor
Just a few days before Wayne Ford gave himself up, prostitute Valerie Rondi was soliciting near a bus stop along Broadway Street in Eureka, the county seat of Humboldt County, California. Valerie gave her exclusive account of the events to Victoria Redstall:Okay! When I met Wayne Ford I was a prostitute. I was walking on Broadway, an’ I was hitchhiking. He pulled over and asked me if I needed a ride. I asked him if he wanted a date, an’ he says, “Yeah!”
I climbed into his truck. He told me how mean his wife was, and all the despicable things she was doing to him, like kinda ripping him off, an’ stuff. But what set him off was I wouldn’t take his money. I felt sorry for him. And he said, “Do you know how it makes me feel to have a hooker who won’t take my money to fuck me?”
Please excuse my language, Victoria. But I said to him, “I don’t give a shit,” and then he punched me, hard, real hard in the face.
He forced himself on me. I wasn’t going to take another beating. He raped me roughly. His eyes narrowed and turned red, and he had a real angry scowl on his face, and that’s when I started kickin’ his ass, ’cause I realized that there was something seriously wrong with this man. His face turned from night to day. It was totally different.
Wayne Ford, agitated in response to Rondi’s claim, said: “I never forced her to do anything. I never hit the girl. None of that stuff. That’s not even true. She turned into an asshole on me, is what she he did.”
Valerie Rondi: “He promised to get me some heroin. He didn’t, so I got sicker and sicker, and by the fourth day I was done.”
Victoria Redstall asked Valerie if she had tried to escape. “No! ’Cause I was so sick and weak. He never showed me any kindness or sensitivity.”
Ms. Rondi then related a time when she went to the freezer in Ford’s truck cab:He said: “Never open that. Don’t even fuckin’ look in there.” I thought it was kinda strange.... he had something in there he didn’t want me to see. I just said, “Okay!” I had no idea there was a severed breast in there. I didn’t know if there was anything severed anywhere.... Then I knew he was going to kill me. . . . we were not going to Vegas . . . all he’d said was bullshit. So I waited for him to get out of the cab [at a truck stop].
So, I waited for him to get out of the truck, and I opened the door and jumped. And I hit the ground and jumped up to another truck, and I opened the door, and said: “Please help me.” The guy, Gerry, looked like Santa Claus, and he told me to get in.
Wayne Ford says something different:Hey, and I got somebody else to give her a ride from the San Jose area back to Eureka and I had to go over the hill. I didn’t really know the guy [the truck driver] very well. I walked up to the step. I said: “Hey! Can you give this girl a ride . . . she’s a hooker that I picked up in Eureka, an’ she wants to go back.” And, he said, “Sure. I’ll take her back.”
Valerie Rondi explained that she didn’t report the matter to the police because “they wouldn’t do anything about it.” Then she claimed that after she saw Ford’s face in a local newspaper, she knew that this was the man who could have murdered her.
Laughing in her interview with Victoria Redstall, Rondi told with some pride about urinating into the pickle jar Wayne kept in his truck: “I went to the truck’s bathroom and there was ajar of pickles,” she said, “so I peed in them. ‘Eat those, you motherfucker,’ I thought. But I forgive him. God forgives murderers, so why can’t I? But now I know how stupid I was. I could be lying there with my head chopped off.”
Victoria put all of Rondi’s allegations to Wayne Ford. His response was one of anger:If I was whatever they say I was, why didn’t I kill that bitch [Rondi]? Well, it sounds like maybe I should have if she thinks she’s pissing in my pickle jar.
It never happened like she says. You see they’ve got to make up these wild-ass stories. I could have dumped her out of the truck and picked up another hooker anywhere on the route. And it’s mighty nice of her to forgive me, ’cause nothing was done to her. That’s what pisses me off. Oh! She is such a liar. I never did anything. Oh, gosh, that girl . . . if anybody wanted to be strangled, it was her.
On the evening of Monday, November 2, 1998, after a day of drinking, Wayne Ford went to the pay phone at the Ocean Grove Lodge, 480 Patrick’s Point Drive, in Trinidad, California, and called his brother, Rod. Wayne was emotional and had something important to tell him. He asked his brother to pick him up from the lodge as soon as he could.
Rod was a five-hour drive away. Nevertheless, despite the distance, he drove to meet up with his brother, arriving at the lodge in the early hours of Thursday morning. Rod was very tired but certainly willing to hear what Wayne had to say, and Wayne Ford takes up the story from here:On my last day of freedom I slept in Room Zero. I hardly slept at all, and I had no way of knowing the actual consequences of turning myself in, but it was a necessary thing for me to do, because I had no right to stay out there and be a danger to other people.
I planned to spend the day with my brother because I knew that it was going to be the last day of freedom and possibly even my last day of life.
I wanted to spend the day at the zoo in Eureka with my brother because we had spent many days with my mother when we were little boys and with other relatives, grandparents, aunts and uncles . . . just spend the day eating cotton candy and looking at the animals and feeding the ducks and whatever. So, that was one place that I spent time with my brother previously.
What I had to do that day wasn’t something that just came willy-nilly, and easy to do. I needed my brother’s support. I also needed my brother’s love and companionship on that last day. I wanted to spend time doing things I knew I’d never ever get to do again and somewhat reminiscing the good times of my life with my brother when we were little kids.
I think it was all just to ease myself into what I was going to do, and I was really in my mind recording everything as best I could, to keep ’til the day I die which may or may not be very long from the point in time that I turn myself in.
During the conversations with his brother, Wayne appeared to be highly emotional and anxious about something. Yet he refused to tell Rod what exactly was wrong. After several hours of trying to pry at least something out of Wayne, Rod gave in to fatigue and went to bed. Later the same day, Rod tried again. Eventually Wayne confessed with a generous salting of understatement that he had “hurt some people.” Who these hurt people were, and to what extent they were hurt, remained unclear to Rod.
Nevertheless, Rod spent the better part of the afternoon fruitlessly trying to wrestle information out of his brother without much success. Rod, who had the patience of a saint, finally decided that if Wayne had done something that resulted in people getting “hurt,” it was absolutely necessary for him to turn himself into the authorities.
After a meal at a Denny’s, Wayne finally made the decision that would change his life completely: “After Denny’s I told my brother that we shouldn’t take his truck to the sheriff’s department . . . we should take the truck to my grandparents’ house and walk there.” So the two men took a long walk, one that would end in Ford’s freedom being lost forever.
During the evening of November 3, wracked with guilt, Wayne went to the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department, 826 Fourth Street, Eureka, where he introduced himself to the desk sergeant. Wayne said that he wanted to confess about “people he had hurt” and promptly produced a Ziploc plastic bag from his jacket pocket. It contained a breast from the late Patricia Tamez, and it was only then that the justifiably concerned Rod learned exactly what Wayne had done.
Anytime one turns himself in to the authorities, although the cops say they’r
e befriending you, or helping you, they’re really out to do what’s worst for you . . . what’s best for society. And I was in agreement on that issue. I brought a severed breast with me, and the meaning of that . . . it was to give it to the police and not have to say a word. That would have been enough to put me in jail and not have to worry about whether someone else was going to be injured. My plan was to talk to an attorney and have the attorney tell the authorities what happened. And I thought that I’d probably be found guilty of murder, then executed within a couple of years’ period of time.
I was completely stressed out of my mind. I know that I did what I had to do, and it took a great amount of strength to do what I had to do, knowing that I was probably going to die in a very short time. I believed wholeheartedly that I had a good chance of being strung up in a cell that day. In spite of that, I did what had to be done because right is right, and wrong is wrong, so I had to do what was right no matter the consequences to me.
—Wayne Ford
His demeanor was cooperative, depressed . . . he was kind of down. Sometimes he would look directly at me, mostly he would look down. At times, Ford got emotional, even cried, but his voice often stayed at a low volume, at times too low for the tape recorder to even accurately pick it up.
—DETECTIVE JUAN FREEMAN ON WAYNE FORD’S INTERVIEW
After more than a year of struggling to solve the mysterious death of the woman whose torso had been found in a slough near Eureka, Detective Juan Freeman finally got the break he had frequently prayed for. The duty sergeant telephoned him about a man who had walked in to confess details about people he had hurt. “Hey, Juan, this nutball has got a real one-off. He’s got a woman’s breast, in his jacket pocket, for Christ’s fuckin’ sake!” sputtered the sergeant, while holding the offending item at arm’s length.
The Voices of Serial Killers Page 7
