Body Parts (15 page)

Rhoades didn’t check into Tina’s life in Tacoma, but he did contact the police department in Las Vegas, where a homicide sergeant confirmed that Tina had been a working girl there, too.

“The sergeant told me that all of her last addresses and places where they’d last contacted her were parts of the city that were known for prostitution at the time,” Rhoades recalled.

Tina had lived for a time in a Ramada Inn on Boulder Highway, but her last known address was a motel on South Boulder Highway.

Her violations, which started in November 1996, ranged from soliciting prostitution to trespassing, unlawful possession of drug paraphernalia, obstructing traffic, driving without a license and insurance, and failing to heed an order to stay out of an area where she’d been previously arrested for prostitution.

Tina was last cited by police on May 6, 1998, less than a month before her body was found, for giving false information to a police officer, but her records show that the charge was dropped “per negotiations.”

Tina was sentenced numerous times and ordered to spend anywhere from ten to 180 days in jail, but it’s clear from the dates of her arrests that she didn’t serve out the longer sentences because she was arrested again in short order.

Court officials said the detailed court records for her crimes no longer exist, so the specifics of her lifestyle and activities in her final years could not be determined. However, judging by the available records and most recent booking photo, it’s obvious that she was an attractive but troubled young woman, using drugs and selling her body for money.

When Rhoades got a copy of her booking photo, he couldn’t believe how different she looked in death.

“I would’ve never guessed in a million years that was the same person,” he said.

In early August 1998, Tina’s mother came home from work to find her husband standing just behind the front door, as if he were waiting for her to arrive. Ron never did that, so Mary instantly knew that something was wrong. Horribly wrong.

Ron had gotten a message to call the coroner’s office in Kern County, California, that afternoon. They told him what they could, which wasn’t much. Mostly, they needed to know what to do with Tina’s remains. That left Ron with the hardest job—telling Mary that her daughter, her only child, had been murdered.

Ron said he needed to talk to her and sat her down on the couch.

“There’s no easy way to tell someone that a loved one is dead,” he said later. “I’ve done it a number of times as a police officer. . . . You just got to say it.”

Ron delivered the news in the gentlest way he could, but he couldn’t stop Mary from feeling what she described as “the most gut-wrenching sorrow that a mother could feel.”

Mary ended up in the hospital the next day, her body overcome by grief.

“She fell apart,” Ron recalled nearly a decade later. “I’ve been trying to hold her up ever since.”

When Mary called the coroner’s office, they told her she shouldn’t come to see Tina’s body because of its condition, so a cremation was arranged. Soon afterward, Tina’s ashes arrived in a little plastic brown box, her rings wrapped in a piece of cloth.

Ron crafted a beautiful oak urn to hold them, which Mary kept on top of the dresser, surrounded by the earthly things that Tina cherished.

“It’s got a little music box on it,” Ron said. “It hasn’t been wound up forever, but you can walk past it and it will start playing.”

But from that point on, Mary couldn’t focus anymore. She was so emotionally devastated that she couldn’t face going to work.

Before they’d moved to Oklahoma, Mary had worked as a nurse in a nursing home, where sometimes Tina would tag along with her. Mary would also bring Ron’s German shepherd for the elderly residents to pet. Once they moved to Oklahoma, Mary worked at a construction warehouse similar to Home Depot.

After Tina’s death, Mary couldn’t do much of anything, not even putter around in the garden the way she used to. The mental anguish paralyzed her so much that she had to be hospitalized on five occasions, for four to six weeks at a time.

At first, she would try to return to work, but she eventually realized she couldn’t handle it. She became medically disabled, and according to Ron, she would never be able to work again.

CHAPTER 11

T
HE
O
NES
T
HAT
G
OT
A
WAY

On June 16, 1998, Wayne picked up a prostitute in Anaheim, California. Later dubbed “Orange County Doe” by authorities to keep her identity confidential, she told police that she was working at the corner of Beach and Lincoln Boulevards when she approached Wayne in a gas station parking lot.

She said Wayne paid her $40 to sit in his truck while he masturbated. She also told authorities that she agreed to perform oral sex for $35. Either way, once she got in his truck, she learned he had other things in mind.

Wayne told her to climb into the sleeper, where no one would see them, and they both removed their clothes. Wayne directed her to get on her hands and knees in front of him, then grabbed her arms and tied them behind her back with one end of a nylon rope; he tied the other end around her neck. Next, he took another rope, pushed her knees to her chest, and bound her wrists and ankles together.

Wayne told her not to struggle because it would only make things worse. He then proceeded to gag her, burn her breasts and vagina with a cigarette lighter, poke her genitals with a sharp instrument, and sit on her face. He took a break to drive around for a while before returning to the sleeper.

Then he raped her. Four separate times during sex, she said, he choked her with a rope until she fell unconscious, bringing her back each time with CPR.

Afterward, he rifled through her purse and took all her money. As he dropped her off, he told her she was lucky because the others had not survived.

On August 21, Wayne showed up at Scott and Linda Hayes’s house at 4:00
P.M.
, a day Scott would remember well because he’d had a vasectomy.

Wayne stayed a couple of days, during which time he talked Scott out of his favorite knife—a hunting knife in a special case.

Wayne wouldn’t let anyone go near his truck until he cleaned it. He initially tried to trade his mattress for one of Scott’s, but after learning that Scott couldn’t get rid of the old one, Wayne changed his mind, saying the new mattress wouldn’t fit in his sleeper.

Linda Hayes noticed that Wayne drank a lot on that visit. He also didn’t change his clothes or bathe for three days. Other than that, he was the same guy.

After he left, they never heard from him again.

Twenty-two-year-old Rachel Holt lived in Vallejo, but she worked the streets of Santa Rosa, often at a Motel 6.

On August 23 at 11:00
P.M.
, she was standing in front of the Monte Vista Motel on Santa Rosa Avenue with a couple of other prostitutes when she saw a big, shiny, and dark truck pull up.

Wayne reached over and pushed open the passenger door, which Rachel took as an invitation.

“What’s up?” she asked. “Do you want a date?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I got a hundred bucks. Jump in, let’s go.”

Rachel, who had been a working girl for five years, was only four feet eleven inches tall, so she had some difficulty climbing up onto the steps and into the passenger seat. Wayne gave her the money, which she tucked into her sock.

They drove for a little ways, looking for a place to park his massive truck. Rachel suggested the Friedman Brothers parking lot, which was large and would be empty at that time of night. Sure enough, it was, so Wayne parked in the middle of it.

He introduced himself as Adam and she told him her nickname, “Unique.”

Rachel pulled her shorts down to her knees, but left her nylons on, because she had cut out the crotch for easier access.

After Wayne took off his pants, she put a condom on him and they proceeded to try to have sex. The problem was that Wayne wasn’t too aroused, so it wasn’t working very well.

Rachel didn’t understand why he was so nervous, twitchy, and distracted. He kept looking around and was paying little attention to what they were doing. Meanwhile, Rachel tried to get him more excited, but he still wasn’t hard enough to penetrate her.

“Why are you so nervous?” she asked. “Try to relax.”

Wayne grabbed at her breasts more forcefully than she liked. “Take it easy. Slow down,” she told him. “You’re being too rough.”

“I apologize, I’m having a hard time here,” he said.

But even then, he didn’t let up, which made Rachel uneasy. She had a weird feeling in her stomach that something wasn’t right.

They messed around for fifteen more minutes, but Wayne was still too soft.

“Let’s switch positions,” he said. “This isn’t working for me.”

Rachel turned over so that she was on her hands and knees, but the new position didn’t seem to work any better. Wayne said it would turn him on if she put her hands behind her back and grabbed her butt, so she obliged him. But as soon as her hands were behind her, he grabbed and bound them together with a rope.

They hadn’t talked about doing any S/M. Rachel did not like the direction in which things were heading. What was this guy doing?

She started to panic.

“Somebody help me!” she yelled. “Why are you doing this?”

Wayne ordered her to shut up. “If you scream, I’ll kill you,” he said. “I’ll knock your teeth down your throat.”

Rachel was crying now, but that only seemed to make Wayne angry.

“Shut up! Shut up!” he said. “I’ll give you something to cry about.”

Wayne started removing the rest of Rachel’s clothes, pulling off her nylons, shoes, and socks. When he got to her shirt, he realized he couldn’t get it off without untying her hands, so he undid them, but only long enough to get her naked.

“If you try to run or scream or anything, I’ll kill you,” he said.

By this point, Rachel had stopped fighting him. She didn’t want to die. So she let him put her into whatever position he wanted. He moved her onto her back again, with her hands tied together underneath her. But she couldn’t stop crying.

She just lay still, too scared to move.

Wayne had taken off the condom, but because he still didn’t have an erection, he was barely penetrating her. As he continued to yell and threaten her, he seemed to be increasingly frustrated that things weren’t going the way he wanted.

He told her to bite his nipples, but she didn’t do it hard enough to please him.

“I can’t even feel anything,” he said. “Let me see how hard you can bite.”

When Wayne figured out that her mouth couldn’t really reach his nipples in her current position, he picked her up so that she was on her hands and knees again, and untied the rope from around her neck, then forgetting what he was intending to do, he tied the tie around her mouth. He lay on his back and told her to masturbate him and pinch his nipples.

Again, Rachel did what he told her. “He somehow wanted me to act like I was turned on by the whole thing, so I tried to play the part the best I could,” moaning as if she were enjoying it, she later recalled.

Wayne moaned, too, but his penis still wasn’t responding.

Wayne continued to glance nervously toward the front of the truck, as if he feared someone was about to come find them. Finally, he decided he’d better move the truck.

But first, Wayne tied Rachel’s feet together, told her to pull her knees to her chest, then tied the remaining part of the rope around her neck so that if she moved, she would choke herself. He retied her hands behind her back and sat her on the baseboard of the truck so that the back of her neck was on a step. As he started driving down the highway, he had her facing forward, so that she could see up into the sky. It was an incredibly uncomfortable position.

“Shut up. Don’t scream. Don’t cry,” he said. “Don’t make any noise or I’ll kill you.”

Anytime she made a sound, he used his free hand to punch her—hard—in the genitals, keeping his other hand on the steering wheel. When she cried, he punched her even harder or hit her with a leather belt with a buckle. The rest of the time he was either drinking coffee or masturbating her.

Rachel thought it was about an hour before he pulled over, apparently somewhere north on Interstate 101.

Her hands were really hurting now. The rope was so tight that they were losing circulation.

“Are my hands okay?” she asked. “Are they purple? Are they white?”

“Yeah, they’re all right,” he said, untying and rearranging the rope around her neck so that she wouldn’t strangle herself if she moved. He picked her up and put her in the sleeper.

She had no idea where they were, but one thing was clear: when he penetrated her this time, he was far more aroused.

This had stopped being sex for money many miles ago—this was rape.

“Don’t look at me,” he said. “Don’t look at me.”

He tied a man’s necktie around her mouth, like a gag, so she couldn’t talk. But because she kept opening her eyes and looking at him, he also used a tie as a blindfold.

As he penetrated her, he tightened the tie around her neck until she lost consciousness. When she came back, he was giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

A few minutes later, he’d start it all over again. This must have happened four or five times. Rachel lost count.

Wayne seemed to be getting turned on by this, but he was still acting frustrated and nervous.

He forced her to give him oral sex, then turned her over and raped her anally. After one of the times that he revived her, he lit a match and burned her genitals with it, leaving a blister mark that later turned into a scar.

“I fantasized about doing this to someone, but was turned off afterward,” he told her. “It wasn’t as good as I thought it was going to be.”

The ordeal lasted for hours. No matter how long or hard she cried, he just kept at it.