Body Parts (19 page)

So, next, Jones and Claypool went to the house of Bob Olson, the clerk who was working the night Lanett disappeared. Bob was a skinny sixty-year-old guy with dark hair and big-framed glasses. He said Lanett had come to the store three times that night and made three phone calls. On her last trip at 9:30
P.M.
, she said she’d be back at 11:00
P.M.
to talk to him. Bob said she didn’t show up, so he and Julie, the stock clerk, left at 11:07
P.M.

Jones found it suspicious that a twenty-five-year-old woman would be meeting up with this guy, who was more than twice her age, at that late hour.

“I didn’t think at the time he was being totally honest,” Jones recalled later, saying he added Bob to his mental list of suspects.

After that, the detectives interviewed Ignacio, who said he’d last seen Lanett on Saturday morning, September 19, after spending a few days with her at her cousin’s place. That Sunday, he’d gone with his family to his sister’s house in Victorville and didn’t get back until late.

During a subsequent interview with Lanett’s cousin Sharon Bailey, the detectives gained some new insight about why Lanett went to the liquor store so often.

First, Sharon said, there was no phone at Charlotte’s, so they often used the pay phone at the store. Second, they shopped there for items other than alcohol. And third, as it turned out, Lanett had a little deal worked out with Bob the night clerk. Jones’s instincts had been right.

On Saturday, the day before Lanett disappeared, she had gone to the liquor store twice. The first time, around 5:30
P.M.
, she made a remark to Sharon about coming back with $30, saying, “I’m just going to let him [Bob] touch me.” She returned with the money in hand.

Sharon said Lanett made another trip at 9:30
P.M.
, saying she was supposed to go back around 11:30 to meet Bob and another guy for drinks and make $70 more. But she came back saying the “date” had been postponed until Sunday night.

When Lanett didn’t come back on Sunday, her mother and cousins felt something was wrong; it wasn’t like Lanett to leave her babies for that long. Yet, when Michelle suggested that Charlotte file a missing persons report, Charlotte said no, because Lanett had done this in the past. Still, she told Michelle that this time she thought Lanett was dead.

A few weeks later, Jones and Claypool made another trip south to San Bernardino County to conduct further interviews. Jones had learned that Theo Flores’s real name was Darío Llamas Flores, so he brought a six-pack of photos, including Theo’s, to show around.

After tracking down twenty-four-year-old Theo at his mother’s house in Ontario, they stopped by to ask him some questions. Theo said he’d last seen Lanett around the first of September, and since his car had broken down, he couldn’t have dumped her body in northern California.

His mother, speaking to the detectives in Spanish while her other son translated, confirmed Theo’s story. She said she’d learned of Lanett’s death from Debra White and was upset by the news because she’d cared for the young woman.

On October 21, Claypool and Jones learned that Lanett had yet another ex-boyfriend with a temper. One of her friends said she could only remember his first name—Domingo—but she was sure he drove a red Mustang. She gave them a physical description and said he used to beat up on Lanett; it didn’t seem to take much to set him off.

“The list of suspects—it was just huge,” Jones said later. But, he added, “we had very minimal physical evidence, so we were just trying to get what we could.”

In a matter of weeks, however, he would realize that none of these suspects was the guy he’d been looking for.

CHAPTER 13

P
ATRICIA
A
NNE
T
AMEZ

Detective Frank Gonzales was watching TV at his house in Rancho Cucamonga on Friday night, October 23, 1998, when his phone rang around ten o’clock.

It was his sergeant, Mike Lenihan.

“Hey, Gonzo, we’ve got a female floater in the California Aqueduct in Hesperia,” Lenihan said. “I’ll see you there within the hour.”

The consummate professional, Gonzales, who was the lead on his team of four homicide detectives, put on his dark Oscar de la Renta suit and headed out the door. He kept a pair of overalls in the car in case he had to crawl through mud, but the evidence techs usually did most of the dirty work.

He didn’t know it yet, but Tina Gibbs’s body had been dumped by the same man a month earlier in the same aqueduct—385 miles to the north.

Gonzales pulled up to the pumping station on Amargosa Road, just west of Interstate 15, around 11:20
P.M.
He walked through an opening in the chain-link fence and took a look around at the landscape. The aqueduct was surrounded by miles of flat desert, covered with chaparral.

Once the rest of his team arrived, they set up lights to illuminate the area so they could take photos and search for tire tracks, shoe prints, or any other evidence the killer might have left behind.

Gonzales walked along the narrow asphalt road that paralleled the canal, then headed down the dirt and gravel embankment toward the water, where he could see the victim’s nude body floating underneath the pumping station. Two guards walking the aqueduct had found her there, caught up in one of the gates.

Because she was naked, Gonzales figured that she’d been killed during a sexual assault.

As he got closer, he saw something that shocked him, even after working at least two hundred homicides and observing more than a hundred autopsies over the past eight years: her chest had a yellow circular indentation where her left breast used to be.

That’s when he knew that her death had been not just personal, but violent as well. He had a bad feeling that a man was roaming the region, assaulting and cutting up women. If so, this would be his first serial-killer case.

The sheriff’s dive team suited up and got into the chilly water to retrieve her body. They tied a rope to one of her legs to make sure they didn’t lose her to the current, floated her over to the east side of the aqueduct, and pulled her up in a metal basket. Then, fighting the current, they dived down to the bottom of the canal, looking for other evidence. They found none.

Now able to examine her more closely, Gonzales saw a scar on her stomach and ligature marks on her wrists and ankles, which indicated that she’d been bound. The marks were about a half-inch wide, almost like a strap or dent in the skin, and were a different color than the surrounding area.

Before they placed her in a body bag—two, actually; one inside the other—Steve Foster, a coroner’s investigator, took her fingerprints, which Detective Mike Gilliam entered into the California ID system later that night.

They got a hit within hours: twenty-nine-year-old Patricia Anne Tamez, five feet seven inches tall, 135 pounds, brown hair and eyes, and of Mexican descent. Based on her arrest record, she’d had quite a troubled past.

Patricia Tamez was born in McAllen, Texas, on April 25, 1969, to Rudolfo and Anna Tamez. She spent her first two years in the Rio Grande Valley before her parents divorced and Rudolfo took her to Santa Barbara. The two of them moved south to Ventura, then up to Berkeley, where she went to high school.

Patricia was a normal child who enjoyed doing normal things—playing with dolls, riding her bike, building sand castles, getting a tan, and riding the roller coaster at Magic Mountain. She kept several rabbits and a parakeet as pets, giving the bird a funeral after it died. She was an average student, but she could meet an intellectual challenge if she set her mind to it, such as memorizing the Greek alphabet. She also enjoyed playing chess, even though she wasn’t very good at it.

Rudolfo would always remember the day when four-year-old Patricia couldn’t wait for her father to get home so she could tell him she’d thrown all her baby bottles away. She was a big girl now and could drink from a glass.

Rudolfo remarried when Patricia was about eight, and had two children with his new wife. Patricia got along well with her new siblings, holding her baby sister as they drove back from Santa Barbara so the toddler could see out the window. Rudolfo had promised that they could stop and get something at McDonald’s if the little girl could spot one along the way.

As Patricia got older, she really liked to cook, especially tortillas with spicy El Pato tomato sauce, loaded with cheese. She also had a weakness for fast food—a Super Taco from Taco Bell or a Big Mac from McDonald’s.

This was the start of her downfall, really, because she began thinking she was fat. She took diet pills to lose weight, then moved on to other drugs. Six months before she died, she admitted she’d used heroin, LSD, and PCP, and was addicted to meth, cocaine, and alcohol.

In 1988, Patricia was nineteen when she got married to a man whose last name was Prine.

In July 1990, Patricia was arrested in Lake County, in northern California, for possessing drugs and hypodermic needles. Rudolfo bailed her out of jail and said she took the fall for her addict husband because she had no criminal record. Patricia was sent to a diversion program, filed for divorce, and then joined her father in Hesperia, which is in southern California’s high desert near Victorville, in 1992.

Rudolfo was encouraged when Patricia enrolled at a community college in Victorville and did very well. Hoping to become an X-ray technician, she applied to a vocational program, but she was rejected because she hadn’t taken human anatomy. Instead of enrolling in an anatomy class and reapplying, she took the setback to heart. She felt unlucky, that nothing ever went right for her.

By January 1, 1993, she’d quit school and was in trouble again. The twenty-three-year-old had hooked up with another man heavily involved with drugs, but this time they were caught with more than a couple of needles.

Two sheriff’s deputies arrested Patricia and eighteen-year-old James Listerman after seeing a drug scale and a mirror with a white powdery residue on the backseat of her 1976 Cadillac sedan. The car was parked at the Hesperia Motor Lodge in front of room two, where the couple had been staying.

A search of the car turned up a gun, meth pipes, numerous boxes containing the necessary chemicals and equipment for a portable meth lab, and more than ten pounds of the drug in various stages of cooking.

During an interview by Narcotics Detective G. Milani that night, Patricia said she’d returned to the motel to check out. She said she’d recently bought the Cadillac from a friend, Michael Murphy, for her boyfriend, James, but when he couldn’t pay her for the car, they decided to sell it for $250 to a guy they knew.

Patricia said she usually stayed with her parents in Hesperia, but since she’d met James a month ago, they’d been living from motel to motel. She said she just used meth, claiming to know nothing about James’s drug dealings or the meth-cooking paraphernalia.

Asked if she got her speed from James, she said, “Yes. No. I don’t know. I can’t say anything or I’ll be dead. They’ll kill me.”

Milani told her that he knew the car was registered to her, and if she’d been hanging out with James for the past month, she had to be lying.

“It’s the other guy’s stuff!” Patricia said, explaining that James had picked up the items in the car from a friend at Carl’s Jr. about half an hour before they returned to the motel.

Milani said he still didn’t believe her.

“I’ll come clean with you and tell you the truth,” she replied, “but I want my attorney here, because I’ve told the truth to the cops before and they’ve used it against me to f*** me over.”

James was arrested and charged with felony possession of pseudoephedrine (the main ingredient of meth) with the intent to manufacture meth. He was also charged with a count of selling or transporting meth, another felony. Patricia was charged with possession for sale of meth.

This incident was not enough to deter Patricia. Ten weeks later, she was at it again, and this time she was literally caught with her pants down.

Alerted by a confidential informant, two Ontario police officers responded to a call of possible narcotic activity in room 220 of the Days Inn. Officers J. Holloman and Franklyn went first to the front office, where they were told the room was rented to Michael Murphy and a woman named Patricia, whose Cadillac was parked in the lot.

The officers knocked at the second-floor room and Patricia answered. Seeing she had no pants on, Franklyn told her to get dressed.

She left the door slightly ajar, so they immediately recognized the chemical smell of meth cooking and the potentially lethal situation. Many people are injured or killed every year in explosions that can occur anywhere meth makers can plug in a hot plate: garages, warehouses, apartments, and cheap motel rooms.

Now dressed, Patricia said she would talk to them outside, but the officers weren’t taking any chances. They pushed past her to find a man asleep in bed. He turned out to be none other than James Listerman, aka James Norton.