Body Parts (44 page)

Canty and Mapes raised some concerns about Victoria Redstall’s videotaping future proceedings along with the “legitimate media,” so Smith called a hearing for the next morning so that Victoria could present, under penalty of perjury, her press credentials and some documentation about her project.

At the hearing, Victoria presented an e-mail, reportedly from the owner of a production company with whom she said she was working. She also presented an unsigned contract, admitted she had been paid nothing so far, and said she’d been financing the documentary with her credit cards.

Under questioning by Mapes, she admitted to giving the name “Victoria Clare” when visiting Wayne.

“I went into the jail with my true ID,” she said. “I don’t have fake ID. I trained to be a deputy sheriff, so I know the rules. I know the law.”

“Are you aware that at some time there was a bulletin with your photograph at the jail saying, Do not let this person in?” Mapes asked.

“Never,” she said.

“Previously you were ordered by a bailiff in this courtroom . . . not to take pictures pursuant to a judge’s order, correct?”

“No, she actually said to me when I was sitting down that—she threw me out of the courtroom for using my camera, when I had been specifically given written permission by the judge. She threw me out and she defiled me.”

Victoria, who had already said that she’d applied for press credentials from the sheriff’s department, switched course and said she wasn’t actually media.

“I’m doing a documentary,” she said.

“And you agreed you gave a false name to the jail when you went there?”

“No, I gave my real name, Victoria Clare.”

“You didn’t give ‘Redstall’?”

“I didn’t give my last name because I was obviously wanting to protect my identity.”

“From the jail?”

“From the jail.”

In the end, Judge Smith did not take away Victoria’s privileges and allowed her to film alongside the news reporters and photographers, who have their own innate sense of who is one of them.

On August 2, Judge Brian McCarville was filling in for the vacationing Judge Smith, when two questions arose from the jury.

The jurors wanted to know if they could see Forbush’s interview with Wayne’s mother, and also the transcript read in court from the investigator’s interview with Melva Lenore Ward, the dispatcher in Redding who had taken Wayne in as a teenager.

McCarville told the jury that although the psychological experts made reference to Brigitte’s interview during their testimony, the interview itself would not be available. The judge promised to deliver the Ward interview transcript, however, which had been inadvertently withheld.

A week later, on August 9, one of the jurors asked for extra clarification on jury instructions concerning whether “‘mental illness’ should be a serious consideration.”

After conferring with the attorneys, McCarville read parts of the instructions to the panel once more, including three of the relevant mitigating factors.

“You do not all need to agree whether such factors exist,” McCarville said. “If any juror individually concluded that a factor exists, that juror may give the factor whatever weight he or she believes is appropriate.”

With Victoria’s help, word of her antics soon spread around the globe.

A story in the
Los Angeles Times
that ran on August 1 quoted her saying she’d driven her red convertible next to Wayne’s bus as it headed back to jail so that he could watch “her blond hair blowing and her jewelry glimmering in the sunlight.”

Victoria also told the
Times
that she’d been sued by her former homeowners association because she used to stand on her condominium balcony in her nightdress so that news helicopters would fly over and shine their spotlights down on her. She didn’t explain how the helicopters knew she was there.

Newspapers in Victoria’s native England followed up with their own stories, which were loaded with the irony of a former breast-enhancement spokesmodel, who wore tight clothes that accentuated her breasts, befriending a serial killer with a breast fetish.

Around the same time, Court TV’s Crime Library Web site ran a story with the headline
VICTORIA REDSTALL’S FIXATION,
calling her a serial killer groupie. The story quoted her as saying that Wayne wasn’t the same man as he was when he killed those women.

“We all have evil in us,” Victoria told Court TV.

“Even as she shed tears over his apparent show of conscience, she thought it was ‘hysterical’ that this offender with a breast fetish had become so attuned to a model for breast enhancement,” the story stated.

Complaining that the media was printing horrible things about her, Victoria went on the former MSNBC program
Scarborough Country
to defend herself the day after the
Times
story ran.

Host Joe Scarborough, a former U.S. Representative from Florida, asked Victoria what positive things she hoped to achieve for society by visiting “this cold-blooded killer” in jail when Wayne’s own attorneys wanted her to stay away.

“Because a serial killer is made, they’re not born,” Victoria said in her usual rapid-fire speech. “And it’s a component, a lethal cocktail, of obviously bad childhoods, abusive relationships, a bang on the head, which he had in 1980. He had an accident which caused him to go into a coma. A lot of this hasn’t come up in the trial . . . and I know he wants to get that out.”

Asked why she trusted him so much, Victoria said, “Because he wouldn’t be a danger to anyone coming in contact with him, because he’s on the medication that has made him normal now, completely normal and completely leveled him out.”

Referring to Wayne’s breast fixation, Scarborough asked, “What’s that all about?”

“When I met Mr. Wayne Adam Ford, I didn’t know that was the extent of—he had a breast fetish,” she said. “I knew that he dismembered some of his victims. So what it is, is, again, slandering the truth and making me look like, ‘Oh, I’ve got to go after him because he’s into breasts.’ Absolutely not. I dress very professionally in the jail and in the courtroom, and it’s just a coincidence that people are going to make a story about it.”

Later that month, Victoria didn’t do herself any favors by telling the San Bernardino
Sun
that she and her documentary film crew were heading up to Humboldt County to search for Jane Doe’s missing head.

“‘I’m going head-hunting,’ Redstall said with a laugh,” the story stated.

Mazurek said he was disturbed by Victoria’s comments.

“She’s either crazy, or it’s very appalling by trying to get publicity with the facts in this case and these poor victims that were dismembered,” he told the
Sun.

CHAPTER 27

N
O
M
ERCY

This time, the jury deliberated for nine days.

For the past five months, these jurors had been listening to testimony and looking at the gruesome photos and notes they’d taped to the jury room wall to remind them about the serious nature of this case. They’d also taped up the factors they were supposed to weigh and went through every one of them.

“It was hard to come up with what was mitigating,” Darlena Murray said later.

But now they were faced with the hardest part of all, the momentous job of deciding whether this man on trial deserved to keep his life.

“Nobody wanted to make the wrong decision,” Murray said.

At long last, seven months after these twelve citizens were selected to serve their civic duty, they reached their second verdict, on the afternoon of Thursday, August 10, 2006.

Judge Smith was still on vacation, so Judge McCarville gave the interested parties an hour and twenty-five minutes to gather for the reading at 4:35
P.M.

Once the parties were assembled, McCarville asked the clerk to read the verdict.

“The People of the State of California, plaintiff, versus Wayne Adam Ford, defendant. Case number FSB027247,” Evi Roberson said. “Verdict one: We, the jury in the above entitled action, find that the appropriate penalty shall be death.”

The jury confirmed for the judge that this indeed was its collective decision, then was polled individually at the defense’s request. Yes. Yes. And yes.

Mazurek felt a sense of accomplishment that he had been able to wade through the massive amount of information and won a conviction against Wayne Adam Ford.

“I felt I brought some closure for the families and that Wayne got what he deserved in the end,” he said.

Afterward, several of the jurors discussed their experiences and thoughts with the attorneys and media.

Three of the jurors told reporters that the victims’ photos gave many of them nightmares, and most were planning to get therapy.

“It was the most horrendous thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Murray said.

The jurors said that most, if not all, of their colleagues had been leaning toward the death penalty, but they weren’t able to reach a unanimous verdict until one man could decide how much weight to give Wayne’s mental problems. Murray later said it also took some soul-searching by a couple of jurors with deep religious beliefs to get their minds around such a punishment.

Given that Mazurek had tried to keep teachers off the jury, Murray had to ask him, “Why me?”

“Because you seemed so honest,” Mazurek replied.

Murray thought Wayne clearly knew what he’d been doing and knew right from wrong. As for motive, “self-gratification is all we can come up with,” she told the reporters, echoing the prosecution’s argument.

Although she didn’t feel sympathy for Wayne, Murray said, she did feel empathy for him. “He almost seemed like he was two different people.”

Elecia Morris, a twenty-five-year-old public health worker, said she saw no signs of remorse in Wayne, given that he was able to eat a burrito and make deliveries after killing his victims.

Most of the jurors suspected that Wayne had lied about his “amnesia” during the killings. But they knew for sure that he had been lying when he shouted out during Rudolfo Tamez’s testimony.

“If he knew that, then he knew what he did with the others,” Murray said. “So there was no amnesia.”

Murray later said that all but a couple of jurors believed that Rodney, who kept his brother at the sheriff’s station when he wanted to leave, was the only reason that Wayne was on trial. They also felt bad for what Rodney must have gone through, turning his brother in for murder.

Murray said she was among the jurors who left the courthouse believing there were more than four young women who had died at Wayne’s hands.

After the trial, Murray stayed in touch with a couple of other jurors and found it hard to let go of the case.

For weeks afterward, she searched the Internet for more information on the trial and issues that had come up, wanting to learn even more than what the attorneys had provided.

But Murray said she would remain haunted by one question most of all: Who was the Jane Doe from Humboldt County?

CHAPTER 28

W
AYNE
: A
CCIDENTS
AND
M
ISCONCEPTIONS

Probation officer Marixa Mathews interviewed Wayne on October 17, 2006, for a presentence report, which stated that Wayne was “very sorry about all that has happened.” However, he still believed he was “not guilty of four counts of first-degree murder. If anything, he is guilty of four counts of ‘accidental death.’”

Wayne insisted that none of the victims was tortured. “There was no struggling and no pain inflicted upon the victims,” Wayne told Mathews. “All acts and activities were consensual. Anything that might have appeared to be painful or torturous was done postmortem.

“Most serial killers are proud of their work—not me,” he said.

Mathews wrote that Wayne was upset that the victims’ family members, citing Rudolfo Tamez in particular, “have been left to dwell on these misconceptions.”

Wayne said his attorneys had “plenty of opportunity to tell the jurors how the victims’ deaths were related to the defendant’s psychological problems. For whatever reason, they chose not to,” the officer wrote.

Wayne declined to comment on the jury’s death recommendation, but said he didn’t understand why people were so fascinated by the fact that he’d surrendered to authorities.

“If someone breaks the law or does something wrong, they are supposed to turn themselves in—which is exactly what I did. Why would anyone question why I would do that? Then they don’t believe me when I tell them certain things about an incident. Why would I turn myself in just to lie?”

Three women who accused Wayne of raping and torturing them were interviewed for the report, but their names and statements were not disclosed to the public. Wayne denied the allegations, saying, “They were all prostitutes and they all got paid for their services. They all agreed to participate in anything and everything that went on during those encounters.”