TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (21 page)

That they would part had no longer been in doubt; it had come down to a matter of timing. Roger had obviously decided now was better than later. Thinking about it, Harriet could hardly blame him. She had turned into such a miserable nag she couldn’t stand herself sometimes. Why wouldn’t Roger want to leave sooner? He deserved happiness, too.

A few months earlier, Harriet, pessimistic about her life changing for the better, had
contemplated suicide. She had phoned her sister-in-law,
Julie Kibbe (Steve’s wife), one afternoon to ask her opinion on the “easiest and most painless” method. Harriet’s rationale had been that if she was going to do it, she wanted to do it right, and not suffer needlessly or wind up a vegetable.

Julie had gone right along with the program. “Get in the car and you run the hose.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah. You drive the car in the garage and start the engine, but first make sure you drink enough so that you’re pretty numb. Make sure you lay down on the seat because if you sit up they’ll have to break your legs to get you out of the car when you’re dead.”

Harriet wondered at the time what difference it would make if her legs had to be broken when she was dead, but she refrained from saying anything and logged the advice.

Fifteen minutes later the sheriff’s department was at Harriet’s door with deputies, paramedics, and an ambulance. She would find out later that Steve, overhearing his wife’s end of the conversation, had become alarmed and called authorities. She was kept under observation in the hospital
suicide ward until 3:00
A.M.
the next morning. When they released her, she had called and asked Roger to come get her. When he arrived, he was angry. She was unable to get him to talk on the gloomy ride home.
I’ve just left a suicide ward
, she thought.
Why isn’t he more concerned about me?

It had been not so long after that when Harriet, finally beginning to lay plans for life after Roger, had solicited his promise to stay for a year—a promise that she assumed, given his sudden departure, he’d decided not to keep.

The phone awakened her that night. She was surprised to hear Roger’s voice on the other end.

“Hi, how you doing?” he asked in his soft, almost hushed voice.

“What,” she sputtered, still half asleep. “Why are you calling me?”

“To see how you are.”

“You ran off without a word and you call to see how I am?” She had thought she might actually never hear from him again, but here he was calling so soon.

He said he had left just to clear his head.

She wasn’t a fool. She knew he could well be cheating on her. But right now Roger’s possible involvement with another woman was not a high-priority concern.

She explained that after he left she’d called the detective and told him there would be no polygraph.

“Do you know anything about any of these women who were murdered?” she asked, a new urgency in her voice.

“No.”

Two days later Harriet was in the office doing paperwork when Julie phoned from Tahoe. She told Harriet that Roger had arrived at their place the previous night. That didn’t surprise Harriet, as Roger often ended up at his brother’s whenever he disappeared for a day or more.

“Roger feels bad and wants to come home,” Julie said. “But he’s afraid to. He’s got the crabs.”

“The
crabs
?”

Roger had made his admission to Steve, claiming he’d caught them from a motel bed. Steve told Julie, with orders to strip the bed Roger had slept in.

“Roger’s afraid to tell you,” Julie said, “but I thought you should know.”

Harriet also spoke to Steve. The two of them, she had long ago realized, performed very similar roles in Roger’s life. Steve was Roger’s protector, always trying to make something better for his older brother. In that sense, she and Steve were almost like competitors, and perhaps for that reason their relationship had never been particularly warm. However, it had been Steve and Julie—her then next-door neighbors—who introduced Harriet to Roger in 1972, when he had come to live with them after being released from a halfway house following a prison stay.

Harriet asked Steve if she knew where Roger had been the last three days.

Steve said Roger had called collect from outside Las Vegas the previous day. Before accepting the charges, Steve had asked the operator where the call originated from. He heard Roger say, “Don’t tell,” but Steve insisted the operator tell him before he would agree to pay for the call. In this conversation, Roger told Steve he was taking a trip across country “to get away.” When Steve asked him why he was leaving, Roger said he feared he was about to be framed for murder. Steve had persuaded Roger to take a room for the night and call him back in the morning. When Roger did, Steve had been able to convince Roger not to flee.

Steve said Roger also related having been stopped by the
Nevada Highway Patrol for doing 110 mph on U.S. 95 in the desert north of Vegas. Harriet knew that Roger carried Steve’s sheriff’s department business card; on occasion, when stopped by a cop, he’d pull it from his wallet in the hope that he could get out of a ticket. Sometimes, it worked.

When she spoke with Roger, he sounded apologetic.

In the face of everything—she made a note to call the pharmacy and find out how to get rid of crabs—Harriet found herself strangely relieved that Roger wanted to come back. Things would go easier with the job, and it would make her a lot less crazy about her immediate future.

She agreed to drive up to Tahoe and pick up Roger and bring him home. He’d leave the Datsun 280Z there, with Steve promising to drive it to Sacramento in a week or two.

Although she could get very angry with Roger for his silent and sneaky ways, when he was gone Harriet missed him. She also felt sorry for him.

The next evening, Roger stood naked in their bathtub as Harriet soaped his entire body with a special medicated shampoo, then ran a fine-toothed comb through his body hair. It was a painstaking process, as he had thick black hair covering his chest, shoulders, back, and legs.

Harriet again felt needed.

O
N THE
morning of December 19, 1986, four days after he had questioned Roger Kibbe, Vito Bertocchini met with Carmen Anselmi at her Sacramento apartment.

He explained he was going to ask her to look at a group of
photographs. Then, he went through the admonishments required by law. “The fact that the
photographs are being shown to you should not influence your judgment. You should not conclude or guess that the photographs contain the picture of the person who committed the crime.”

Anselmi nodded.

“You are not obligated to identify anyone,” he went on. “It is just as important to free innocent persons from suspicion as to identify guilty parties.”

Anselmi said she understood.

The detective took out six color photographs not much larger than wallet-size. He spread them out on the kitchen table. All were frontal head shots of middle-aged Caucasian men with graying hair. Five were known as “filler photos”: pictures of nonsuspects, most of them sheriff’s department employees. Photo 3 was Roger Kibbe.

She looked at the photo spread anxiously, with darting eyes. She didn’t hit on any of them. “It was so dark in the car,” she said, sounding discouraged.

“Please go through them again, one by one, and take your time. It might be helpful to try to eliminate the ones you’re sure aren’t the suspect.”

This time, she went much slower, picking up each picture and studying it intently. In so doing, she eliminated #1, #2, #4, and #6.

Bertocchini asked her about #5.

“He has a fuller face,” she said, “but I can’t positively eliminate him.”

“Okay. What about number three?”

“The hair is right. Color, style, and hairline. The nose is the same, too.”

Bertocchini waited.

“I can’t be sure one way or the other. I never saw the front of his face.
Always the side. His right side. It might be better if I could see them in person.”

Bertocchini knew they didn’t have enough on Kibbe to bring him in for a lineup. To put together a stand-up lineup, they were required to process a
suspect into jail and notify an attorney, who would have to be present; if the suspect couldn’t afford one, a public defender would show up.

The detective gathered up the pictures and left.

Although he made a point of not showing it, he was every bit as disappointed as Charmaine’s mother.

The detective had not been very surprised when Kibbe declined to take a polygraph. He felt stronger than ever that Kibbe was dirty.

Bertocchini was still haunted by Harriet Kibbe’s comment that her husband had previously been a suspect in the disappearance of a young woman. He contacted the
Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department to see if they had anything in their files other than what appeared on Kibbe’s rap sheet, which by law included only arrests and convictions. A deputy in the records section promised to look. Most police departments routinely kept “field interrogation” cards that documented any time an individual was contacted by officers. An “FIR” card could lead to a treasure trove of reports.

In the mail a few days later came a copy of Offense Report #84-8068, dated April 1984. The crime of “rape by force” had been reported by Janice
Evans, a twenty-seven-year-old white female. She initially identified her attacker as “Robert,” but investigators soon identified the accused as one Roger Reece Kibbe, age forty-five, who resided in Oakley and worked in a nearby city as a truck driver for Volunteers of America. (She gave the license number of her attacker’s white, two-door car as 1SAL700, one letter off from Kibbe’s Maverick: 1JAL700.)

Bertocchini refilled his cup with coffee fit for a lube gun and returned to his desk to read the twelve-page report.

Janice Evans had first been contacted by a sheriff’s deputy at the county hospital where she was examined. She had met her attacker five days earlier when she agreed to have sexual intercourse with him in exchange for $30. When she told him she had been down on her luck lately, he offered to help. The next day she met him at his place of work and he gave her five dollars for lunch. The following day she returned and he gave her lunch money again. Out of the blue he asked if she wanted to come live with him for a while; he’d offered to pay her $200 a day for sex. As she had a $150-a-day heroin habit, she agreed. They met at 8:00
P.M.
that night, ostensibly to drive to his house. They drove on a main
thoroughfare a while, then ended up on a rural road. “Robert” explained he needed gas and that a friend of his had a pump on a ranch that he could use. They continued on the dark road before he pulled over and told her to get out. He came around the vehicle with a 4-inch chrome revolver leveled at her. He ordered her to pull down her pants and lie down on the ground. “Please leave me alone,” she said. “Just take me back.” The man warned: “If you don’t do what I ask, I’ll blow your pussy off.”

She complied and he kneeled down. He inserted the barrel of the gun in her vagina and moved it in and out for several minutes. Then he pulled down his own pants and ordered her to give him “a blow job.” She accommodated, and after he ejaculated in her mouth he told her to stay on the ground until he left. She walked into town and flagged down a motorist who took her to the hospital. (Although she had a few scratches, nothing was found by the attending doctor and nurse that conclusively proved Janice Evans had been raped.)

Another report summarized an interview that a sheriff’s department sergeant had with Kibbe at his place of work two weeks later. After the sergeant read the suspect his Miranda rights, Kibbe said he understood his rights but wished to discuss what happened. He said Janice Evans was a prostitute who hung out on the street in front of his place of work. He said he had given her “a few dollars” now and then but denied having sex with her. “I don’t know what type of diseases she is carrying,” he said. “I’d never touch a prostitute.” He admitted to having given her a ride the night in question, but contended that nothing had happened. He said he had dropped her off in the parking lot of a fast-food outlet where she told him she intended to meet a friend.

The sergeant also interviewed a friend of the victim who confirmed that two weeks earlier she had related the same story she had told the deputy at the hospital, and that she had seemed very frightened.

When the sergeant went looking for Janice Evans to conduct a follow-up interview, she was nowhere to be found. Two weeks later, the case was closed, although on its jacket was the note, “Review if victim reestablishes contact.”

Bertocchini considered the incident report he’d come across vindication of sorts for his feeling that Kibbe was potentially dangerous, and a viable suspect. This report may or may not have been the “young woman’s disappearance” alluded to by
Harriet Kibbe, Bertocchini knew. Still, it seemed quite relevant to the investigation at hand. He phoned Stan Reed with the information about the old rape case.

As usual, Reed played it cool, not encouraging Bertocchini’s anxious
speculation. But he did pull the single-page tip sheet that he’d begun on Kibbe the night he came in for questioning.

Written on the sheet was the following: “Kibbe attempted to pick up prostitutes in Stockton, driving dark two-seat sports car. Had pellet gun. Sold white Maverick this summer. Fled area on 12/16/86.”

To this, Reed added a note about Kibbe’s history of being a suspect in the abduction and rape. Then, he sent the tip sheet to DOJ. Kibbe’s name was in the hopper.

W
HEN
D
ETECTIVE
Stan Reed showed James Driggers the same
photo
lineup that Carmen Anselmi had seen, Driggers wasn’t able to single out anyone either.

However, Driggers went through pictures of older American
cars and picked out the Ford Mavericks for the years 1970 to 1975 as looking like the white car that
Lora
Heedick rode off in the night she disappeared.

Investigators contacted the individual who received Roger Kibbe’s white 1972 Maverick six months earlier in exchange for back wages due him. He reported that he’d sold the vehicle the previous month to someone in Arroyo Grande, 200 miles south of San Francisco. When local police knocked on his door, the Maverick’s new owner gave them permission to search the vehicle.