Body Parts (29 page)

“He was clean-cut. He always kept his truck clean. Now we know why,” Keehn said. “All indications were he loved his job. Then look what he was. God Almighty.”

People who had thought they had known Wayne expressed their surprise.

“He would come in and buy his beer and cigarettes and complain about how his back was feeling,” store clerk Jeremy Fugate told the AP. “I would go out and have a cigarette with him and trade jokes.”

Jeremy said he often wondered about the mental health of some of his customers, but he’d always thought Wayne was all right.

Around 9:30 that morning, Wayne met in his cell with psychologist Paul Berg, who had flown up from Oakland to conduct an evaluation for the Humboldt County District Attorney’s Office. The hour-long taped conversation was later ruled inadmissible at trial because of Wayne’s persistent requests for an attorney.

Berg presented a letter for Wayne to sign, explaining that he was not providing treatment, that their discussion would not be confidential, and that Wayne would be speaking to Berg voluntarily.

“I don’t have an attorney yet,” Wayne said.

“I know that, and that’s the reason for giving you the letter,” Berg said. “I would like to interview you and what I’m interested in mostly is your mental state.”

“Oh, boy,” Wayne said. “I still don’t know why I don’t have an attorney. I thought you would be my attorney.”

As they went back and forth about the preliminaries, Wayne started crying, as he did four or five times during the interview. He seemed to be in a fog.

“You promised I could see an attorney and I haven’t seen one yet,” Wayne said.

Berg assured Wayne that he would get an attorney, probably when he got arraigned. Wayne seemed confused and didn’t really understand why Berg was there, so Berg went over everything again. With that, Wayne agreed to sign the letter and speak with Berg.

Wayne said he had trouble moving thoughts from his mind to his mouth. “It’s there for just a second, and the harder I try to think, it’s like I can’t, it’s gone. . . . I used to be smart.”

Wayne said he started noticing this when he was living with his father in Napa. “I asked him if, um, if you lose your marbles, do you realize it?”

“What did he say?”

“I don’t know what he said. I just told him that I felt I was losing mine.”

Wayne said he didn’t continue treatment after going to the clinic in Eureka because his problem had gone away.

After telling Berg that the crimes began after his wife left him and took his baby, Wayne started weeping and said he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. He said he used to have problems with anger, but he’d since gotten over that.

Asked how he managed that, Wayne said, “Just stopped. And just—held things in more. Just, you know, just let things go.”

Wayne described his head injury from 1980, but said he didn’t remember having any problem thinking after that, nor had he ever heard voices or had visions or hallucinations.

“Strange ideas?” Berg asked.

“I can’t make up my mind.”

As they discussed Wayne’s history with women, Wayne said, “People just don’t see this, I guess . . . how dangerous they are. . . . They kill you from the inside. . . . They don’t like it to be over, they like to keep hurting you. . . . Once you get involved, you fall in love and all that, then it’s over. . . . They really seem to get a kick out of that.”

He said Wadad was the only woman he’d met who was good to him, unlike his first wife, a slut who had sex with other women in front of him.

“Good, strong Kuwaiti girl. Beautiful girl,” he said of Wadad, adding that they broke up because she thought he’d cheated on her, when all he did was fondle a girl’s breasts.

It soon became unclear which woman he was blaming from moment to moment as they all began to blur together into one common cause of his pain.

When Elizabeth left him, Wayne said, “she sucked my heart right through my penis. And everything else—wallet, money, baby, everything. . . . I was just, she used. . . . her female charms to take . . . everything I had. I don’t think she had a heart. . . . I still love her.”

At one point in the interview, Wayne appeared to be talking about Kelly, but he could have just as easily been talking about Wadad or Elizabeth.

“Did you ever hit her?”

“Yes, it was controlled because I didn’t want to hurt her.”

“Controlled, meaning not beating the shit out of her? Controlled means slapping her or something, hitting her once?”

“I used a belt on her.”

“Didn’t she fight back?”

“This was agreed upon.”

“She liked it?”

“No.”

“She agreed that you could punish her?”

“Right . . . because I told her how much it hurt me that she had hit me and—”

“This was payback and she agreed?”

“Right. No respect. I can’t hit her hard because it would hurt her too much.”

Moving on to why he was in jail, Wayne said, “I’m here because I should be. . . . I didn’t mean to do it, but it’s my fault. . . . I’m not a murderer. I wouldn’t do that.”

“But you did do it.”

“I had to.”

“Do you remember doing it?”

“No,” Wayne said, crying. “I don’t remember.”

“You would see the results after.”

“That’s right.”

“You remember dismembering the victims?”

“I remember trying to save them. All of them.”

“How did you try to save them?”

“CPR,” Wayne said.

“I only tore one of them up,” he added, saying that he didn’t like Berg’s use of the word “cut” or “dismember.”

Asked whether his first victim was already dead when he cut her up, Wayne said, “That’s sick.”

“What’s sick?”

“Thinking she would be alive.”

When Wayne said again that he wanted an attorney, Berg decided he should cut the interview short. He would’ve liked to spend many more hours talking to Wayne, but he felt that would be inappropriate.

That same morning, Freeman, a team of local investigators, and detectives from San Bernardino and San Joaquin Counties searched Wayne’s thirty-two-foot silver Airstream at the trailer park in Arcata.

His blue Jeep, which was parked there, sported a red-white-and-blue Marine Corps sticker on its back bumper; a plastic sheriff’s badge was pasted onto the front license plate.

When evidence tech Judy Taylor walked into the trailer, she thought someone had ransacked it. Wayne’s belongings were so crammed into the small space it was hard to move around. The living room was to the right, with a circular couch and a large toolbox. The kitchen area was to the left, leading to a bunk bed, hallway, and bathroom.

While Taylor photographed and videotaped inside and outside the trailer, other investigators gathered up an odd collection of items, including a box of latex gloves, a hacksaw, a pair of pink women’s panties, and a white plastic bag with a
Flying J
logo.

Taylor looked under the kitchen sink and found the Yuban coffee can, three-quarters full of a fatty substance, that Wayne had told Freeman about. The contents were semi-solid and a gold color, like butter or cooking grease.

In the freezer, they found the same fluorescent-colored substance, which looked like melted sherbet, that they’d seen on the white plastic bags they’d pulled from the hole with the thighs at the campsite.

Meanwhile, the detectives interviewed Wayne’s neighbors. The woman who lived next door said she rarely saw him around. His curtains were always closed, he never seemed to have visitors and he stayed up until the wee hours. Others reported that he kept a row of ceramic ducks, all lined up, on the windowsill.

Park manager Frankie Yeakley said Wayne paid his rent on time or before it was due. She described him as very laid-back, easygoing, honest, and really trustworthy; he never seemed sad, angry, or depressed.

“He would tell stories about his family, but always seemed to be happy,” Detective Mike Jones wrote in his case report. “She went on to describe him as somebody, who . . . she would have gone to have coffee [with] and would not have felt threatened.”

Big news stories tend to attract people who want to be part of the action. One neighbor, for example, told the
San Jose Mercury News
that she watched investigators remove a decaying human forearm from behind Wayne’s trailer and a foot-long clump of women’s hair from inside the trailer, as if it were a trophy. It’s possible that she was so freaked out by learning that she’d lived next door to a serial killer that her imagination ran away with her, because nothing like that was ever reported or documented by authorities.

Another woman contacted police—and visited Wayne in jail—claiming that he had confided all sorts of horrors to her before surrendering. After talking with her for a while, however, Freeman realized that she had pulled details from the newspaper and was either seeking attention or just plain delusional. She later appeared on the
Leeza Gibbons
talk show, where she took credit for persuading Wayne to turn himself in.

After the initial search, the investigators transported the trailer to the sheriff’s boatyard in Eureka, where they strung an evidence seal across the door, safeguarding it until the techs could come back and take a more intensive look.

The next afternoon, Taylor, her colleague John Parrish, and two DOJ criminalists, Toby Baxter and Kay Belschner, came back to follow up. Baxter and Belschner were looking for cutting or sawing tools that Wayne might have used to cut up Jane Doe, and any furniture, clothing, or paraphernalia that might have blood on it.

Because Wayne said he cut her up in the bathtub, they sprayed the bathroom with luminol, a substance used to find blood that the naked eye can’t see. (The blood actually takes on a fluorescent glow when the lights are turned off. But bleach, copper, and brass will also cause a reaction.) As expected, they discovered traces of blood in the toilet, around the ring of the bathtub drain, and in the sink. They got a reaction from the wood floor, but it faded quickly, so they figured the luminol was reacting to something else. They wondered if perhaps the floor had been covered with carpet that had since been removed.

“There was blood all over the place in there,” Freeman said later. “The place lit up like the Fourth of July.”

Taylor and the other techs returned two more times to collect fingerprints and other evidence.

Among the items they took was the book
Seven Promises of the Promise Keeper,
which, according to Amazon.com, details several men’s stories and insights on how they “deepened their Christian walk.” Other items included some rusty kitchen knives, half a bottle of cologne, a small wooden rack, containing a mustache comb and wax, and a yellow rubber duck bath toy.

At 12:30
P.M.
on November 5, Wayne met with San Bernardino detectives Gonzales and Lenihan for a brief interview to see if Wayne would admit to any other victims—dead or alive—or to information that would make him a suspect in any of their unsolved cases. They were also hoping he would reveal new details about how he killed the known victims.

Wayne gave them little else, but he did reveal a new victim—a Mexican prostitute he had picked up in Anaheim, then left tied up, alive, near the 71 and 91 freeways.

Kern County Detectives John Fidler and Ron Taylor sat down for their first interview with Wayne just after one o’clock.

As soon as Wayne identified Tina Gibbs as the woman he’d met on Tropicana Boulevard in Las Vegas, he asked if he could take a cigarette break.

“I’ve got to talk to you about my baby, and I don’t want to do that,” he said.

When they came back, Wayne said he and Tina left Las Vegas because she liked the truck and agreed to go for a ride with him. He described the route he took to Salinas, California, where he was going to drop off a shipment, but he said he couldn’t remember whether he’d dropped her in the aqueduct before or after he went to Salinas.

The interview was very similar to the previous ones in that he said he couldn’t remember details to why Tina had fallen unconscious. All he said he could remember was trying to revive her with CPR, then dumping her in the aqueduct at Interstate 5 and State Route 46.

“She was in the truck with me for too long” because she “started to smell,” Wayne said.

“So she could have been in the truck with you for a couple of days?”

“Longer,” Wayne said.

Asked if he’d had sex with Tina after she was dead, Wayne said, “I think so.”

The detectives kept trying to try to jog his memory, and eventually some new facts emerged.

Wayne said he could picture her when he first saw her; she was wearing shorts. He said they went to a truck stop in Las Vegas, where she stopped breathing. (In a different interview, he said he had sex with her in his truck at the King 8 Motel on Tropicana Boulevard and a couple more times on his way to Salinas.)

When the detectives asked for details about the rough sex, Wayne said again that he was confused.

“There’s been a lot of them,” he said.

“How many?” Fidler asked. “More than four or more than five?”

“There’s been a whole bunch.”

Asked if there were more women he’d picked up on the route to Las Vegas, Wayne said, “Not hurt.”

He explained that he’d picked up some women at truck stops—including three at Bruce’s, near Bakersfield on Highway 58—who got out of the truck and walked away.

He said he’d left one of them tied up loosely enough that she could free herself on some grass next to a closed Texaco station near the 46 and the 5, but off the road so no one would find her right away.

He also said he’d picked up women at the Tulare rest area, and in Fresno, Anaheim, Ontario, and Santa Rosa.

“Lots of places,” he said.

Wayne said he remembered picking up a woman at Bruce’s and leaving her tied up on a truck turnout, just off the 58 freeway in Tehachapi. He didn’t remember her name, only that she was twenty-nine, had dark hair and a thin build, and had left her expensive watch in the truck under the mat.