Body Parts (21 page)

Patricia would often come into Halverson’s office to ask for food, water, or cigarettes, which he would sometimes give her.

On October 22, between 1:00 and 2:00
P.M.
, he saw a black eighteen-wheeler with white writing on the driver’s side pull up to the corner and block his view of Patricia. As the truck was making a right-hand turn to head east on Highway 18, which is also called D Street, he saw her close the door and pull her jacket in through the window.

That was the last he ever saw of her.

He later told authorities that the driver was a white man in his midthirties with dark hair and several days’ growth of beard.

The next night, Patricia was found dead in the aqueduct, about eight miles south of Victorville.

After staying up all night working Patricia’s case, Gonzales went to talk to Michael Murphy, the contact she’d listed during her last arrest. Gonzales had no idea if he was a relative or a friend.

When Gonzales talked to Michael on the morning of October 24, he didn’t tell him that Patricia was dead, only that she was missing.

Michael, an X-ray technician at Barstow Community Hospital, told Gonzales that he’d met Patricia when they were both attending Victor Valley College in 1992. He said they’d never had a sexual relationship and were just friends. He knew she was involved in drugs and prostitution, and he’d made several attempts over the years to help her get clean. He’d also given her money for food or a motel room and let her stay the night at his house occasionally. He said he hadn’t seen her since he’d let her sleep in his car and dropped her off at her friend Spivey White’s house before he’d gone to work a few nights ago.

Michael asked whether Gonzales had talked to Patricia’s father. Gonzales said no, so Michael gave him Rudolfo’s address. Michael also gave him Spivey’s address and said Patricia used to frequent the Green Spot Motel, a well-known prostitute hangout near 7
^th
and D Streets in the old part of Victorville.

Spivey wasn’t a wealth of information. He said he’d known Patricia for four or five years and let her stay the night every once in a while because he felt sorry for her. When he last saw her at 8:00
A.M.
on October 22, she’d been wearing white sweatpants, a burgundy sweater, a big white T-shirt, and black-and-white tennis shoes.

Spivey, a mechanic in his fifties, said Patricia was a little mentally off.

“He didn’t really like her spending the night with him, but . . . the nights in the high desert can be very, very cold,” Gonzales said later. “He felt that Patricia was taking things from his house, because sometimes things would come up missing. The items had no value, but, basically, he didn’t trust her.”

Later that morning, Gonzales and Detective Jeff Staggs went to Rudolfo’s house in Hesperia to do the notification.

First, Gonzales asked Rudolfo if he was Patricia’s father.

“Yes, I am.”

“Can I see some ID?” Gonzales asked, just to make sure.

At first, Rudolfo thought they were there to tell him that Patricia had been arrested again, but it slowly dawned on him that police don’t show up at your house for that purpose. It had to be something worse. But everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.

“When was the last time you saw Patricia?” Gonzales asked.

“It was a week ago,” Rudolfo replied.

“Well, there is no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to say it,” Gonzales said. “She’s deceased.”

As the detectives told him what had happened to Patricia, including the fact that her breast had been removed, Rudolfo felt as if he’d slipped out of his own body. He could almost see himself from above, his heart being ripped out of his chest. The pain was so great that he couldn’t cry until the detectives were about to leave.

From that day on, Rudolfo was haunted by the thought that she might have been alive when she was placed in the aqueduct.

After the notification, Gonzales went back to the aqueduct to take another look around, returning the following day to do an expanded search with the sheriff’s search-and-rescue team.

Because the area was wide open and in plain view of cars passing by on Amargosa Road, Gonzales figured that she had been dumped somewhere upstream and had floated down. Tracing the aqueduct west a few miles, he found a likely spot: a dirt turnout next to a bridge where the canal crossed Interstate 395, about a mile from Interstate 15.

Over the next few weeks, Detectives Gonzales, Staggs, and Rod Fulcher conducted interviews in the Victorville neighborhood where Patricia had worked, hoping someone might have seen something. Halverson, the railroad conductor, was the closest they came.

Gonzales talked to a woman named Sandra Lambert, who had called the sheriff’s office after learning that Patricia had died.

Sandra, who was staying with her husband at the Green Spot Motel while they remodeled the place, said she’d last seen Patricia there around 3:00
P.M.
on October 23. A week earlier, Patricia had told her that a black trucker beat her up because he thought she’d tried to take his wallet at a truck stop in Barstow.

Staggs interviewed another woman at the Green Spot who knew Patricia well. Carla Ponte said she saw Patricia on either October 22 or 23, when Patricia was having lunch at the St. Joan of Arc Church on C Street, which provided meals to the homeless. She said she also saw Patricia later that afternoon, walking by the railroad tracks near her usual corner. Carla said she last saw Patricia get into a silver pickup truck, which drove eastbound on Highway 18 toward Apple Valley.

On October 28, Dr. Steven Trenkle, a pathologist and a deputy medical examiner for San Bernardino County, conducted the autopsy on Patricia’s body.

He took swabs for a sex kit and noted that she had hemorrhaging in the whites of her eyes and pinpoint hemorrhages on her face and upper lip, both indications that she was strangled.

She had pale marks around the wrists and ankles, as if she’d been bound. But after cutting under the skin, he saw that only the right ankle showed any hemorrhaging, which meant that the other bindings were likely tied while her heart was barely beating, if at all.

Trenkle also noted a six-by-six-inch hole in the deepest layer of fat over the chest wall muscle where her left breast had been cut away, apparently using a sawing motion with a fairly sharp instrument. He couldn’t determine whether she was alive or dead when the breast was removed because that area has very little blood flow, and if there had been any bleeding, it would have washed away while she was in the water. A second pathologist, Dr. Yeager, examined the breast later and decided it had most likely been severed postmortem.

The right side of her nose was scraped and she had some small areas of hemorrhaging on her scalp, where she could have been injured or simply bumped her head. But she also had brain swelling, which occurs when the brain is deprived of oxygen, blood, or glucose, and is another indication of strangulation.

The most significant injury indicating strangulation was in the neck. There was no fracture, but Trenkle did see bleeding on the right side around the thyroid cartilage, where the Adam’s apple protects the vocal cords.

Trenkle didn’t always do this during an autopsy, but in this case, he cut open her back. There, he discovered a significant amount of bleeding in the center of her spine—and her back was broken. He determined that the injury occurred while she was still alive—although she could have been unconscious—rendering her paralyzed from the midchest down. This would have prevented her not only from breathing deeply, but also from struggling to escape.

He waited almost two months for the results to come back from the toxicology tests and microscopic examination of tissues before declaring the official cause of death to be strangulation, most likely by the killer’s hands, not by a ligature. He also stated that the victim was dead before she was placed into the water.

The toxicology screening showed that Patricia’s liver was inflamed, which is often seen in people who have taken prescription drugs or abused street drugs. But curiously, given Patricia’s history, the tests detected no trace of any drugs, illicit or prescription, in her blood. If she was still using meth, she hadn’t had any in several days.

PART III

CHAPTER 14

“Y
OU
W
ON’T
L
OVE
M
E
A
NYMORE
”

Wayne continued to make late-night calls to his mother until shortly before he turned himself in. He seemed dejected, and Brigitte feared he might commit suicide, so she tried to talk him out of it.

“There is no need to talk about suicide because this—whatever it is—it can be worked out,” she told Wayne. “But you have to stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

When that didn’t work, she tried a different tack. “Look, Wayne, if you really want to commit suicide, nobody’s going to be able to stop you, so let’s not talk about it.”

Brigitte said she tried discussing Wayne’s psychological state with Rodney, who, coincidentally, had been talking to Brigitte’s mother, Vera, about the same subject. He, too, thought Wayne had been acting weird lately.

But Brigitte said Rodney’s only response to her queries was “Well, you know Wayne.”

During Wayne’s final call to his mother, he said he was going to hide in the woods, where no one would find him.

“Wayne, what is it that you’re trying to run from?” she asked.

“Well, you’re probably going to read about it in the paper,” he said.

Up to that point, Brigitte had thought he was exaggerating his problems. He’d always been so emotional.

“Tell me what it is you did.”

“No, Mom, because you won’t love me.”

“I will love you, Wayne, but tell me. Maybe we can work it out.”

“I can’t tell you, Mom. You won’t love me anymore.”

“I might not like what you’ve done, Wayne, and I might even be angry at you, but I will love you,” she said. “That’s not going to change.”

But Wayne wouldn’t budge.

Brigitte finally said, “Look, Wayne, if you’ve really done something serious, you can’t run. Then you go see an attorney and you go to the police and you face what you’ve done.”

Wayne seemed to agree with her on that point, so she continued on. “Even if you don’t have money for an attorney, you know you’ll get one if you need one. We’ll work it out. Just call me. I’m going . . . back to India soon. Let’s call each other again before I go and let me know what’s happening.”

“Okay, Mom.”

Wayne had been frequenting a Christian bookstore in a McKinleyville strip mall, north of Arcata, where he prayed with owner Ballard Anderson “Andy” Lowery. Lowery also took Wayne to a Bible study group for men.

Wayne told Lowery that he’d done some things that didn’t bother him much, so he didn’t think he had a conscience.

“You’re just going to have to get it together and figure out what’s going on,” Lowery told him, saying that God was trying to get Wayne’s attention and lead him that way. “But you have a conscience, or you wouldn’t be talking to me.”

Wayne seemed confused and unsure how to deal with missing his son and the problems he was having with his ex-wife.

Wayne bought cassette tapes of the Bible and said he would play them on the road, but Lowery wondered if Wayne was only buying these items to appease him for the time they spent talking.

In late October 1998, Wayne went to the Bayshore Mall to buy a wallet at Ross.

At the checkout stand, clerk Candy Hogan noticed that Wayne smelled like smoke and alcohol, as if he’d been in a bar. He was wearing a green plaid jacket and jeans, and his hair was combed, but he looked like he hadn’t shaved that day.

“Remember that face,” he said as he showed her his photo ID. “That is the face of a serial killer.”

“That’s not funny,” Hogan said. “That’s not true.” (When she later reported the incident to Detective Freeman, she couldn’t remember whether Wayne called himself a serial killer or a murderer.)

“Well, you never know,” he said.

Hogan told him he wouldn’t be confessing such things to her if he’d really done them.

“Stranger things have happened,” he said, laughing.

Hogan said Wayne had mentioned something about liking to kill women. At the time, she’d thought he was trying to pick her up, which made his remarks seem even more loony. His comments took her by surprise, partly because he seemed happy, but also because he’d seemed so honest and straightforward. She’d never heard anything like that from a customer before.

She didn’t think anything more of their exchange until she learned from the news that he was actually telling the truth.

On November 2, Wayne walked from his campsite down to the Ocean Grove Lodge in Trinidad, where he spent the afternoon drinking and playing pool with bartender Marco Ibarra.

“I was pretty excited because I beat him twice and he is a great pool player,” Ibarra told the
Eureka Times-Standard
a few days later.

Wayne showed up around noon, ordered his first drink, asked for quarters to buy a newspaper, and read the police briefs. Then, as he and Ibarra shot several games of pool, Wayne drank four rum and Cokes, two Budweisers, and two coffees with Baileys Irish Cream.

“[He] told me that he wanted to get drunk and blow his brains out,” Ibarra told the
San Francisco Chronicle
. “When he spoke, he swallowed a lot, like he had a broken heart. He told me his wife had split with his kid to Las Vegas and he hadn’t seen [the child] since.”

At one point, Wayne said he needed to call his brother on the pay phone outside. When he was done, he came back inside and ate two giant Polish hot dogs.