Body Parts (22 page)

“It can’t be that bad,” one of the patrons told him. “Things will look better tomorrow.”

Wayne often hung out in this bar, his truck parked outside as he drank alongside the fishermen and other regulars.

“Usually, he’d have on a cowboy hat and boots,” one of them told the
Times-Standard.
“I really thought he was one of us.”

CHAPTER 15

S
URRENDER

Eureka is known for having one of California’s best-preserved Victorian commercial districts. The seaport city grew up around Humboldt Bay more than 150 years ago, when miners, fishermen, and loggers, drawn by the redwood forests, made their living there.

Today, Eureka is home to government workers and people in the lumber, fishing, service, and tourism industries. People ranging from judges to lawyers, prostitutes and transients, can be seen walking the downtown area near the county courthouse, a five-story concrete building of grays, tans, and browns that takes up an entire city block and houses the sheriff’s department and the jail.

Versions of the events that transpired in the sheriff’s lobby on the evening of November 3, 1998, vary dramatically—depending on who is telling the story.

Rodney’s recollection conflicts significantly with the memories of the two law enforcement officers—Deputy Michael Gainey and Sergeant Michael Thomas—who joined them, one at a time, after the Ford brothers had been waiting about twenty minutes. This discrepancy was not revealed until Rodney was interviewed for this book in October 2007.

As Rodney recalls what happened:

Gainey was the first to come out and talk to them. Wayne repeated his mantra for the deputy, saying he had hurt some people.

“What do you mean
hurt
people?” Gainey asked Rodney.

“I don’t know, ask him,” Rodney said.

Wayne started rambling, and not making sense again. He looked at Rodney and asked, “Do you think I need an attorney?”

“Yes,” Rodney said.

“What do you need an attorney for?” Gainey asked Wayne. “You’re not even under arrest. We’ve got no reason to hold you. You can’t just come in here and say you’ve hurt some people. We need to know what you did.”

“I hurt some people real bad,” Wayne said. “I know you won’t believe me, so I’ll just show you.”

Wayne went to reach into one of his jacket’s front pockets and started to retrieve its contents when Gainey exclaimed, “Stop! What are you doing?”

“I’m just going to pull it out,” Wayne said, slowly revealing a plastic bag with some yellow fatty tissue that Rodney thought looked like a piece of raw chicken.

“What’s that?” Gainey asked.

As the deputy reached out to touch it, Wayne turned the bag around so Gainey could get a better view. As soon as the nipple became visible, Gainey and Rodney realized what the bag contained.

Gainey immediately put his hand on his pistol. “Don’t move,” he shouted at Wayne, and again at Rodney.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Rodney said. “I’m just sitting here.”

Gainey made a beeline for the wall phone. “I need somebody else out here right away,” he told the receptionist.

“Did you know what he had in his pocket?” Gainey asked Rodney, who was just as surprised as the deputy.

Sergeant Thomas came out a minute later, wearing latex gloves, and took the bag from Wayne.

“Should I get an attorney?” Wayne asked his brother again.

“You definitely need an attorney,” Rodney said.

“I want an attorney,” Wayne told the officers, who handcuffed him and started walking him to the jail next door.

“Where are you taking him?” Rodney asked.

The officers said they were moving Wayne somewhere safe, where he couldn’t hurt anyone, until they could figure out what was going on.

Another officer took Rodney to the lieutenant’s office.

Contrary to Gainey and Thomas’s testimony, Freeman’s investigative report confirmed Rodney’s recollection that Wayne “pulled [the breast] out of his jacket pocket and handed it to Deputy Gainey and Sgt. Thomas.”

Rodney wouldn’t learn until a year later that the breast did not belong to Wayne’s first victim, but his fourth. There were some things he just didn’t want to know, so he hadn’t read the newspaper or watched the TV news to find out.

A decade later, Rodney was still wondering what happened to the surveillance tape from the camera he saw in the sheriff’s lobby, which he believed captured Wayne’s repeated requests for an attorney.

If there was such a tape, Rodney said, it was “probably conveniently lost. . . . They didn’t want to look stupid or like Barney Fife.”

Detective Juan Freeman said that as far as he knows, that camera was only for observation purposes. If there had been a videotape, he said, he would have entered it as evidence.

Freeman acknowledged that “Mr. Ford asked for an attorney a whole bunch of times” in the lobby. However, he said, a suspect has to be in custody and under interrogation for that request to be valid.

“When Mr. Ford was asking for a lawyer [in the lobby], there was no interrogation taking place,” he said, explaining that questions about booking information, such as name and address, don’t meet the legal standard.

Freeman said Wayne invoked his right to an attorney during their first interview, so they stopped talking, but Wayne waived that right numerous times after talking to his brother.

“My belief is that Rodney is the hero of the case because he did the right thing [by bringing him in],” Freeman said.

Freeman, who was the detective on call for the weekend, was eating dinner and watching the news with his wife, Lynn, when he got the call from Sergeant Thomas around 6:30
P.M.

Freeman suggested they arrest Wayne on suspicion of mayhem so they could hold him until Freeman could get to the station.

The detective threw on his work clothes, and after arriving at the office around 7:00
P.M.
, Gainey and Thomas briefed him in more depth about what had transpired in the lobby.

Freeman asked to examine the notorious plastic bag; then he had Thomas arrange for the DOJ crime lab in Eureka to collect the evidence and preserve it properly for trial. After speaking briefly with Rodney, Freeman went to talk to Wayne.

Freeman’s interview with Wayne, which began at 7:47
P.M.
, lasted less than ten minutes.

“What Rod told me was that you had some things that you wanted to get off your chest, and he told me that you probably wouldn’t have come in if he didn’t bring you,” Freeman said.

Freeman asked Wayne some basic questions about where he lived and kept his belongings so that Freeman could write up search warrant affidavits.

Wayne explained that he lived in the trailer park in Arcata, but spent little time there.

“I mean, I live there, but I never go there, ’cause I’m on the road,” he said.

Getting right to the point, Freeman said, “It’s obviously a female’s breast, and you had that in your pocket. Your brother said that you said that that was just the tip of the iceberg, and you . . . didn’t want to hurt anybody else. Is that right? You’re nodding your head, yes?”

After mumbling his answer twice, Wayne finally spoke loud enough for the tape recorder to pick it up: “Yes.”

“Okay. And the other thing that we need to clear up is that you did mention something about an attorney?”

“I need an attorney,” Wayne said. “My brother said I need an attorney.”

“Your brother said you need an attorney?”

“Yes.”

Freeman explained that that meant he couldn’t ask Wayne any more questions.

“I mean, obviously, there’s a woman out there missing a breast. Or maybe more? . . . We don’t know what else you might have done. You know, what other families you may have hurt. And if you . . . need an attorney, there is no way you’re going to be able to clear your conscience, so, I mean, that’s okay. That’s your right. But if you need to get something off your chest and clear your conscience and maybe try to help some families and some people that you’ve hurt, then you need to decide that you don’t want an attorney and you want to talk to me, but that’s strictly up to you. . . . I’m certainly not going to try and twist your arm. . . . If you still feel like you need an attorney, that will stop everything right now and [we’ll] just go from there. So it’s up to you, Wayne.”

“I need an attorney.”

With that, Freeman told Gainey to walk Wayne back to the jail and book him for mayhem; then he went back to interview Rodney about the events leading up to their arrival at the sheriff’s department.

Meanwhile, Wayne went through the booking process in another part of the jail.

After talking with Rodney, Freeman called Jim Dawson, the chief investigator for the district attorney, to get some help preparing search warrants for Wayne’s campsite, trailer, and motel room.

As Correctional Officer Anne Goldsmith filled out Wayne’s intake form, she asked if he had taken any drugs or been drinking that day.

Wayne shook his head. “I just don’t want to hurt anybody,” he said.

A white-haired officer, Sergeant Larry Wolfe, came in wearing latex gloves to assist Goldsmith and introduced himself to Wayne as Larry.

“Have you ever thought of suicide?” Goldsmith asked.

“Yes,” Wayne said.

“Are you, like, having suicidal thoughts right now?”

“No, you guys are going to kill me.”

“We’re not going to kill you.”

“Yes,” Wayne said, nodding.

“No, I don’t like to kill people. I’ve never killed anyone. I don’t even kill animals. I can’t even squash a spider. . . . You’re not feeling suicidal right now?” Goldsmith answered.

“No.”

Goldsmith asked when he last felt suicidal and Wayne paused, as if he were having trouble answering.

“When my . . .”

“It’s okay,” Wolfe said reassuringly.

“I’m sorry,” Goldsmith said, patting Wayne on the shoulder.

“It’s okay,” Wolfe said again.

Wayne, who had started crying, choked out, “M-m . . . when my wife, when my wife took my baby from me.”

“Oh, how long ago was that?” Goldsmith asked.

“Two, two, three years ago.”

Their conversation, which was interrupted by a voice over the loudspeaker, became disjointed. Wayne had a tendency to be a low-talker and mumble, so some of his responses couldn’t be heard on the videotape and also didn’t make their way into the transcript.

“I haven’t been thinking good for a long time and it’s getting worse,” Wayne said, trying to explain his slow responses in what would be a constant refrain over the next few days.

“Mr. Ford, excuse me,” Goldsmith said to Wayne, who seemed distracted. “Do you know where you are right now?”

“It’s where I should be.”

“Where is that? What is this place, do you know?”

“This is your jail.”

Wolfe started patting down Wayne, warning that he was going to take off Wayne’s knitted cap.

“What’s your first name?” Wolfe asked.

“I go by Adam,” Wayne said.

Because Wayne was wearing a camouflage jacket, Wolfe asked if he was in the military. Wayne replied that he had been in the marines.

As Wolfe helped Wayne take off his street clothes, the deputies discussed that he needed to go into a padded cell when they were finished. Meanwhile, Wolfe kept trying to keep Wayne calm.

“I’m glad I was here to meet you, you seem like a nice guy,” Wolfe said. “Just relax. Just relax.”

The sergeant had Wayne sit on the floor, where he leaned against the wall with his knees bent as he slowly and deliberately took off his socks and boots. Wayne looked dazed, as if it were difficult to complete even this simple task.

Asked again about drug use or medical problems, Wayne said, “Just my head.”

Wayne said he’d tried seeking psychiatric help at a local clinic a year or two earlier, but “it didn’t do any good.”

“What was it for?” Goldsmith asked. “Did you have a specific diagnosis or anything that you remember?”

“I was losing my . . . my ability to concentrate. I used to be pretty smart, but . . . I’m not anymore and I think I wanted them to give me something for depression because I heard they have medications. ’Cause I just have to get undepressed. Clear my head up.”

But, Wayne said, they told him at the clinic that he didn’t need any antidepressants.

Throughout the process, Wolfe was gentle and respectful with Wayne. When he started to cry again, Wolfe kneeled down and comforted him.

“It’s okay, Wayne.”

“I hurt people. I didn’t really want to, but I hurt people. That’s why you guys are just going to keep me. God’s the only, the only thing left,” he said, nodding. “I am ready to die. I’m not going to kill myself.”

“Good. There’s no need for you to die,” Wolfe said, his gloved hand resting on Wayne’s knee. “Nobody’s asking for your life.”

“Sometimes things are right and sometimes the same things are wrong,” Wayne said cryptically. “And sometimes they’re right again, and I can’t figure it out.”

“Sometimes life is very complicated.”

“But my brother helped me.”