TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (15 page)

Bob Bell and Stan Reed were opposites in almost every respect. Standing next to each other—Reed in his old corduroy coat and Bell in a snazzy blue blazer complete with pin-striped shirt and fashionable silk tie—the partners looked like Felix and Oscar. While Reed was direct and no-nonsense almost to a fault, Bell had an understated, patient way of dealing with people. The style of the partners sometimes clashed. Whereas Reed wasn’t given to wasting time on meaningless theories and could easily lose his patience if he didn’t receive complete answers to his very concise questions, Bell could talk to a suspect or witness for hours on end until he got what he needed.

Biondi, who figured that Reed must have taken the lead on this pedal-to-the-metal interrogation, hadn’t come this far to turn around and go back without facing Rundle.

“Look,” Biondi said, “let’s go back in and give it another shot.”

Reed shrugged and turned around.

Bell, a button-down type with rimless glasses on a cherubic face that looked like it belonged on an accountant more than a cop, lit up at the prospect.

Rundle was younger than Biondi pictured. Barely able to drink legally, he would have been carded by any legitimate bartender. He was pleasant looking, with a college-boy haircut and neatly trimmed beard. He didn’t seem excited, nervous, or remorseful.

“We know what you’ve done, Rundle,” Biondi said evenly, not raising his voice. “Tell us about the others. What happened here in Placer was the end. When did it start?”

Rundle showed a blank expression. “I don’t know about any others,” he answered in a voice so soft that Biondi had to strain to hear him.

“It really won’t do you any good to hold out on us,” Bell added in a sorrowful, almost ministerial tone. He had settled in a chair as if he was going to stay awhile. “Why don’t you get it off your chest?”

Rundle’s baby blues darted from side to side, as if looking for a way out. Finally, with a great sigh, he dropped his head into his arms on the table.

“All right—” His voice cracked.

Was Rundle going to cry?
Biondi wondered.

“—I did another one. My first. In May.”

“This year?”

“Yeah.”

Two months
before
Stephanie Brown.

“Where?” asked Biondi, being careful not to appear surprised.

Rundle raised his head. “Sacramento.”

Biondi nodded as if he’d known all along.

Rundle’s eyes had remained dry, and his voice was steady again. He’d made a speedy recovery.

“Who?” Biondi asked.

“Filipino, I think. Met her down by the river,” Rundle said, as if discussing a prom date.

Filipino?

“Where’d you dump her?”

Right off I-5, came the answer, along the banks of the Sacramento River near the Pioneer Bridge.

I-5 and I-80 met at the Pioneer Bridge over the Sacramento River at the western outskirts of downtown Sacramento—with I-5 heading north and south and I-80 east toward Reno and west into the San Francisco Bay Area. Even though only a couple of miles from the Sacramento County sheriff’s downtown headquarters, this location was within city limits. Therefore, it was the jurisdiction of Sacramento’s municipal police department.

Biondi didn’t recall hearing of a recent murder victim found in that area. Did that mean the young woman’s body was still there?

The detectives pumped the suspect for more admissions, but the well had gone dry. Finally, Bell flipped off his cassette tape recorder and they left the room.

Within minutes, Biondi was on the phone to
Sacramento Police Homicide. When he was informed that a dead twenty-one-year-old Filipino woman had indeed been found strangled at that location near I-5 six months earlier, Biondi felt like ripping the phone out of the wall.

He well remembered the two stoic, note-taking representatives of Sacramento P.D. at the
DOJ meeting forty-eight hours earlier. A homicide detective had arrived with a deputy chief. They listened, and hadn’t said word one. Biondi now knew they had sat on a very similar case that they should have presented. Obviously, they’d come to find out what everyone else knew. Shades of dealing with the FBI and other alphabet-soup federal agencies.

“I suggest you take a drive up here,” Biondi hissed into the receiver. “We’ve got a gimme for you.”

David Rundle, it turned out, had not killed Stephanie Brown, Charmaine Sabrah, or Jane Doe. (Several years later, after being convicted of and sentenced to death for the two Placer County murders, Rundle copped a plea to murdering the Filipino woman in exchange for life imprisonment without parole on that charge—saving the state, and himself, the ordeal of another death penalty case. Rundle, with several more years of appeals yet to be exhausted, still sits on Death Row.)

Biondi had driven home that night from Placer County in a terrible funk. A young woman had been sexually attacked and strangled to death in the shadow of I-5 a few months earlier, yet those two Sacramento P.D. guys had
said nothing.
He considered it a disheartening example of law enforcement failing to communicate. He didn’t blame the detective as much as the deputy chief, who must have been calling the shots. Biondi knew that working detectives generally had no problem sharing information with those from other departments. But when the bosses became involved, it could be a far different story. He’d seen it before and he knew he’d face it again. It existed not only in communications between separate departments, but also behind the walls of virtually every law enforcement agency in America, with the left hand frequently not knowing what the right was doing. At times, bureaucratic politics was to blame; other times, outright incompetency in middle and upper management. In reality, the only people who benefited from such dissension were the bad guys on the street.

An article had probably run in the paper back in May concerning the discovery of the unidentified female murder victim, but Biondi didn’t remember reading it. Even if he had, no alarms would have sounded because Stephanie Brown hadn’t yet been abducted on I-5. As soon as he began to suspect that a serial killer was active in the area, Biondi had made
a point to reach out to other agencies. And now, after weeks and months, that collaborative effort had been nearly torpedoed by bureaucratic small-mindedness.

And people wondered why conscientious cops inevitably burn out?

T
HREE DAYS
after the composite of the I-5 series suspect was rereleased to the media at the
press conference—resulting in a flood of new leads called in to authorities—a
San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Department squad car on routine patrol in east Stockton braked sharply as it approached a busy intersection to avoid a dark sports car that turned left against a red.

Deputy
Armando Mayoya activated his flashing lights. When he was sure oncoming traffic had slowed or pulled over, he punched it and made a hard, squealing right through the intersection onto the cross street.

As it was a few minutes before midnight on a Saturday night, Mayoya, a ten-year department veteran, expected soon to be dealing with a tottering DUI.

The dark blue Datsun 280Z had not raced ahead and had obligingly stopped at the curb.

Pulling up behind, Mayoya flipped on a powerful spotlight that illuminated inside the vehicle. The driver was alone in the two-seater.

The deputy jotted down the license number—California 1-
Mary-Boy-Victor
-4-6-6.

It sounded familiar.

Checking a note clipped to his dashboard, Mayoya saw that the plate matched with the one given to him three or four hours earlier by a prostitute who had flagged him down in front of the Capri Motel on what was known as Stockton’s “stroll” area.

His informant,
Janet Nelson, had been, at nearly thirty years of age, older than most of the working girls hoofing their stuff in spiked heels and short skirts hoping a cruising John would stop and make a date. In her rather accelerated career, however, she’d probably seen as many dicks as an over-the-hill urologist. Mayoya would not be surprised later to learn that many of the girls on the street considered Nelson almost a mother figure. Fittingly, it had been she who decided to stop a cop and possibly save a life.

The story Janet Nelson had told that night was secondhand and Mayoya knew it would never be heard inside a courtroom. Nonetheless, he listened carefully.

Nelson explained she had been sitting with another prostitute,
Sheri Zeller, twenty-one, at a fast-food joint earlier in the evening. As they sipped hot coffee and rested their aching feet, they kept their eyes peeled.
When a dark 280Z cruised by slowly, Sheri pointed it out, saying the John had previously offered her $1,000 and some new clothes if she’d take a ride with him to Lake Tahoe. Of course, she had refused—no working girl in her right mind would sign up for such a long journey with a stranger. Especially, as Zeller had added, with one that “looked like the picture of the killer in the paper.”

Not long after that conversation, Nelson had explained to Mayoya, the same dark 280Z pulled over on the stroll for her. She approached the vehicle, but only close enough to get the license number. Then, she spun around and went back the opposite way. “See, I don’t know what he looks like myself,” Nelson had told the deputy. “All I know is what Sheri told me.”

Mayoya had thanked his informant and kept the license number. He knew that when a composite in such a high-visibility case got media play it could generate lots of citizens’ reports—most proved to be a waste of time. But with every uniform in five or six northern California counties looking for the man in the composite, who was he not to take a tip seriously?

Mayoya exited his cruiser with a long black flashlight in one hand, and the other on the cold butt of his .357 Magnum service revolver.

The mix of feelings Mayoya experienced as he approached the lone occupant of the vehicle in the dead of night—not knowing if he was coming upon a serial killer or Joe Citizen who’d had a few too many brews—was something that could not be easily explained in an academy lecture. The sweet familiar adrenaline rush had begun, but for someone with Mayoya’s experience there was a definite routineness to it all. Curiosity had a strong pull: Who or what would he find in the car?

Deputy Mayoya intended to write up the driver for blowing the light. Beyond that, being the good beat cop he was, he would play it by ear.

*
When the Unabomber suspect was arrested in 1996 after being turned in by his brother, who had read the bomber’s long manifesto published in
The New York Times
, Biondi knew how fortuitous it was that copies of the manifesto had been sent directly to the media. There was no doubt in his mind that had the manifesto gone only to the FBI, it would
not
have been made public and the Unabomber might have kept on killing for years. Biondi would always wonder how much sooner the Unabomber suspect might have been turned in—and how many of the sixteen bombings might never have happened, which of the three persons killed (including a second Sacramento man, a timber industry lobbyist, in 1995) might have been spared, how many of the twenty-three people injured could have avoided their suffering—had the FBI only released the letters, documents, photographs, and other information it had so zealously withheld over the years in what turned out to be the most expensive criminal investigation in this nation’s history.

Seven

A
s he had done a hundred times before, Deputy
Armando Mayoya stopped short of the driver’s door and directed the beam of his flashlight inside the vehicle. He could, in this way, watch the driver without making himself an easy target.

The driver’s window was already down.

“Evening, sir. License, please.”

Without a word, the driver reached into the back pocket of his jeans and took out a thin wallet. With hands that shook slightly, he removed his license and handed it to the officer.

Placing the license close to the light, Mayoya saw it was issued to a Roger Reece Kibbe, with a street address in Oakley, a small town about 30 miles west of Stockton.

The deputy clipped the license onto his citation book.

“Do you know why I stopped you?”

“Not really,” said the driver, craning his neck to look up into the light toward Mayoya.

Mayoya observed that the pupils of the driver’s eyes were not dilated; he was clean.

“You made a left against a red light, Mr. Kibbe. I almost hit you.”

The driver appeared to nod in agreement.

Mayoya made a slow sweep of the car’s interior with his light. On the floor behind the driver’s seat he saw something that upped his heart rate considerably.

The deputy silently slipped his gun from its holster, and placed the weapon next to his leg—to decrease his reaction time by a split second or two.

“Sir, I’m going to ask you to get out. Do so slowly and keep your hands where I can see them.”

The driver complied.

Mayoya holstered his weapon and frisked the driver. When the deputy was convinced the man was unarmed and posed no immediate threat, he had the driver step back away from the vehicle. The deputy reached inside the car behind the driver’s seat and found that the gun butt he’d seen was in fact a pellet gun.

“Why do you have this?” the deputy asked, holding the weapon up.

The man shrugged, apparently happy to say nothing more. But finally, he added: “I put it in and forgot it.”

It wasn’t against the law to have a pellet gun, but it
was
to brandish a pretend gun as a real one. Realizing he didn’t have much to work with, Mayoya asked the driver what he had intended to do with the pellet gun.

“Nothing. I don’t want it. You can take it.”

“Okay, sir, I will.”

Mayoya did not conduct a field sobriety test because it was apparent that the driver had not been drinking. However, the deputy put out the driver’s name over the radio for a records check that would pick up any outstanding wants or warrants. This was routine.