TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (22 page)

A DOJ criminalist arrived on the scene, and spent two hours examining the car and removing miscellaneous debris with forceps from the floor mats, front and rear. He also took tape lifts from the floor of the car, picking up whatever stuck to lengths of Scotch tape, then vacuumed up whatever remained and sealed the contents in a plastic bag. Two long hairs were taken from under the seat-belt holder on the driver’s side; a hair and piece of yellow fiber from the trunk; a length of rope from the trunk; plant material and soil from the passenger-side rear fenders; long, needle-like plant material from the driver’s side rear fender and hair samples from the new owner.

The young man who had received the Maverick directly from Kibbe, his former employer, was interviewed by detectives. He remembered the vehicle being very dirty inside when he first got it. Among the items he noticed on the rear floorboards were long fingernails coated with pink fingernail polish, women’s hair clips, and a lot of brown hair. He had vacuumed and washed the vehicle several times before selling it. On the front floorboard had been a large odorous stain he attempted to disguise with deodorants and soaps. When this didn’t work, he cut out the stained carpet and threw it away shortly before he sold the car.

At the Sacramento DOJ lab, where the samples from the Maverick were analyzed under a microscope, no evidence was found that connected Lora Heedick or any of the other strangulation victims to the vehicle—a major disappointment to homicide detectives in several counties.

At this point, nothing was coming easy. Even the Maverick lead—assuming that Driggers himself wasn’t the killer and that his picking out the Maverick hadn’t been irritatingly coincidental—was convoluted. Investigators with the
Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department reported that they were checking out
another
Maverick lead: two ex-con brothers who lived in Modesto frequented the strip where Heedick had disappeared, and drove an older white Maverick.

Reed decided to ask Driggers to take a lie detector test. Knowing that most guilty suspects avoided the test administered by the authorities, Reed was impressed that Driggers quickly agreed.

On February 3, 1987, Driggers was strapped to a
polygraph machine operated by a sheriff’s department sergeant who was a trained polygraph examiner. But then something strange happened. On two key questions—
“Did you yourself cause the death of Lora Heedick?”
and
“Regarding the death of Lora Heedick, did you yourself cause her death?”
—to which Driggers answered no, the examiner judged him “deceptive.”

Driggers could not be arrested simply because he failed the polygraph—in most situations, polygraph results weren’t even admissible in court. When Reed broke the news to Driggers that he had failed, however, the detective advised him of his Miranda rights.

Driggers said he understood his rights, and that he wished to talk anyway. He vehemently denied that he had killed his girlfriend.

Reed was well aware that
polygraphs were not 100 percent reliable—one reason the courts frowned on them. Variables such as the examiner’s competence, the wording of the questions, and whether the suspect had recently imbibed alcohol or taken drugs or prescription medication could and did influence results. Contrary to popular opinion, polygraphs were not all black-and-white, pass or fail, but contained distinct gray areas.

Nevertheless, Reed considered polygraphs a valuable investigative tool. He had always deemed especially weighty the willingness or reluctance of an individual to be strapped to the rather intimidating contraption via a network of body sensors. Someone determined to prove his innocence certainly had more reason to take a polygraph than a guilty person, Reed reasoned. It was known, however, that some sociopaths and psychopaths could “beat” the machine. It had been explained once to Reed that these individuals lacked a kind of internal wheel the rest of us
have that spins at warp speed when we know we’ve done something wrong. In short: a
conscience.
A lack of conscience confounded the polygraph, a “scientific” machine built on the premise that people aren’t entirely comfortable telling a lie.

Fighting back tears, Driggers explained to Reed that he’d been unable to shake the feeling that he was partly responsible for Lora’s death because he had taken her to the stroll that night to hook for drug money.

If Driggers had had strong conflicting emotions when he answered the questions as to whether he had “caused” her death, Reed knew it was at least theoretically possible that the polygraph had detected a guilty conscience—via rises in blood pressure, pulse rate, etc.—rather than guilt.

Repetition being the art of effective interrogation, Reed took Driggers back over the events of the night in question. The detective had heard it all before until, suddenly, Driggers mentioned something new.

“I called my mom a lot that night.”

“From the motel pay phone?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“To see if Lora had showed up or called.”

Not only had Driggers not mentioned this before, but neither had his mother when Reed interviewed her. He doubted it could be proven, however, as phoning one Modesto number from another would be a local call and probably wouldn’t show up on a telephone bill.

“I didn’t have much money on me,” Driggers added almost as an afterthought. “I called collect.”

Reed returned to Modesto and talked to Driggers’s mother, Rita, at the cramped rented home where her son lived with her. It was here, with the Driggerses, that Lora had lived the last months of her life.

Rita Driggers remembered her son calling her collect several times the night that Lora disappeared. And yes, she did keep her paid phone bills. Sure enough, her April–May phone bill listed numerous local collect calls throughout the night from a Modesto number.

Reed went by the Sahara and confirmed that the number on the phone bill belonged to the phone booth.

The documented calls meant one of two things to Reed: either Driggers was telling the truth, or as part of a plan to get rid of his girlfriend he had gone back to the pay phone several times to make alibi calls. Which one was it?

Before leaving Modesto, Reed found Driggers at a friend’s house and asked him to come to Sacramento the next day. Driggers said he didn’t
have transportation or any money to take a bus. Reed slipped him twenty bucks.

Driggers didn’t show up. When he sashayed into Homicide a few days later, Reed eyed the disheveled young man with his patented steely gaze. There were things about Driggers and his story that still bothered the detective. But suppose everything he said about that night was true?

“James, I’d like you to work with our artist on coming up with a picture of the man Lora drove off with.”

Driggers’s bloodshot eyes lit up. “No problem. I wanna find that fuckin’ guy as bad as you, man.”

This didn’t mean Reed considered Driggers completely in the clear. But unless he developed new evidence to the contrary, the detective was willing to give Lora Heedick’s bad-news boyfriend the benefit of the doubt.

Early in the new year (1987) Reed had a new crime bulletin sent out to other law enforcement on the Lora Heedick murder, incorporating the latest information provided by Driggers. The suspect vehicle was described as a 1970–75 Ford Maverick, white or light color, two-door, with a dirty interior. A picture of that model Maverick was sent with the bulletin. The suspect was described as a “white male, fifty to sixty years of age, 5-foot-10 to 6-foot, needed a shave, large hands, dirty fingernails.” The artist’s composite Driggers worked on went out with the bulletin, too.

A composite that looked a lot like Roger
Kibbe.

Ten

B
usiness was brisk for the Homicide Bureau as 1986 came to a close and the new year began. A drug dealer was found dead in a homemade coffin floating in a
Sacramento river. All four Bureau detectives jumped on the
case, searching the victim’s apartment in
San Francisco and interviewing family members, friends, and known associates. Within a week, they identified the killer.

At the end of January, Lt. Ray Biondi was out on the streets like a gumshoe again working three different homicides in one twenty-four-hour period. It was his own fault: he’d screwed up and given too many detectives time off.

The following month, DOJ’s
Homicide Analysis Unit produced a printout of its first “
I-5 Investigative Tip List.” Using information about known possible
suspects as well as the point-based criteria provided by the Homicide Bureau, DOJ put Roger Kibbe in first place with 52 points. He was closely followed by
Wayne Welborn—with 48 points—the Sacramento cabbie who had bragged to his psychologist about raping women and who had so obviously reveled at being questioned in connection with the I-5 murder series. A bevy of other undesirables followed: two ex-cons who earned 44 points; two other would-be
suspects with 42 points, including one who had been a suspect in three female homicides five years earlier (the bodies had been dumped in the Delta).

No sooner had the printout been circulated to San Joaquin and the other departments than Welborn was charged in the death of a woman unrelated to the unsolved series, although the victim’s nude body was found, ironically, in an irrigation ditch off I-5 south of Sacramento.

The victim was a sixty-nine-year-old woman who was last seen alive
entering a taxicab outside a bar late the previous night. Her family said she had a history of abusing alcohol and Valium, and had gone to Shelly’s, a seedy neighborhood bar. The bartender said she left a few hours later in a cab. The cab company identified the driver as Wayne
Welborn.

After at first denying any involvement in the woman’s death, Welborn ended up making a “negotiated statement,” in which a suspect is allowed to give a statement concerning his culpability in return for reduced charges. The statement was much too self-serving to suit Detective Stan Reed, who pushed for a full confession. The problem was that the pathologist ruled the cause of death was alcohol and Valium ingestion, and exposure. Welborn claimed the woman had taken off her own clothes, which were found scattered at the scene. He admitted to trying to have sex with her, and to leaving the drunken woman and driving away. He was charged with involuntary manslaughter and attempted rape, but the manslaughter charge was eventually dismissed. Convicted of attempted rape of an unconscious person, Welborn was sentenced to three years.

And the beat went on—in early March, a Sacramento store clerk was wounded and a patron killed during a robbery at a convenience store. Six days later the body of a man, shot in the head, was found wrapped in a blanket and dumped at the side of a road. Within weeks, a parolee was arrested for all three shootings.

A few weeks later, Biondi, with some hesitation, went on a brand-new TV show called “
America’s Most Wanted.” After he presented information and pictures concerning a fugitive suspect in the poisoning death of a local beauty queen, the phones began to ring. The show aired on a Sunday, and by Wednesday they had arrested their suspect, who had been working as a chef under an assumed name out of state.

Twice, Biondi and one of his detectives made trips to Salt Lake City in connection with the
Unabomber
cases—the latest bombing had occurred in that city in February (1987).

If the I-5 series hadn’t been forgotten, it had certainly been pushed to the back burner. This was true not only in Sacramento County, but also in
San Joaquin, where Vito Bertocchini had picked up a drug rip-off killing on New Year’s Eve and had been working it ever since. The problem, as it had been from the very beginning, was lack of
manpower to work the series full- or even part-time. Biondi didn’t even have the personnel to assign to start at the top of the DOJ “Tip List” printout and work their way down focusing on and/or eliminating possible suspects.

With the new year arrived a newly elected Sacramento County sheriff,
Glen Craig, a man with impressive credentials in state law enforcement.
Previously, Craig had been commissioner of the
California Highway Patrol and director of the California Department of Justice. Also, a new commander of the Detective Division was installed: Frank Wallace, who had been Biondi’s patrol sergeant in the 1960s.

Biondi wasted no time in lobbying Wallace for more detectives. It was immediately apparent how overwhelmed Wallace was with the size of the caseloads being carried by his detectives—not just in
Homicide, but in virtually every bureau. He directed his lieutenants to heighten their administrative tracking of each and every case (man-hours expended, etc.). At first blush, some of the Bureau lieutenants, including Biondi, thought Wallace was burying them in unnecessary paperwork. But before long, Biondi came to understand that the captain needed ammunition if he was to lock horns with the pragmatic bean counters farther up the chain of command who opposed any additional expenses.

While Biondi knew that other bureaus were just as hard pressed in dealing with a tremendous volume of crimes—domestic violence, robberies, child abuse, sex assaults, felony assaults, arson, etc.—then and always his priority was much simpler: he wanted to solve murders. He didn’t understand why the new sheriff wasn’t clamoring to ensure a well-staffed and well-equipped Homicide Bureau. It would have been expedient simply for political reasons, as nearly 100 percent of homicide cases received some type of media attention.

Captain Wallace was a throwback to an earlier era. Biondi still remembered the sting of being called out on his first homicide in the early 1970s and ordered to respond to the office, while his bosses—a captain and lieutenant—went to the crime scene. He drank coffee at the office waiting for his bosses to come back and fill him in. Biondi had fought this type of higher-up involvement from his first day in Homicide, although it hadn’t ended once and for all until the tremendous increase in crime in the early 1980s.

During his tenure in Homicide, Biondi had broken the mold in more ways than one. He was the first head of Homicide to last in the position more than four years, and his longevity led to some revolutionary changes in how murder cases were investigated. But in the beginning, he did what everyone else did when they took over Homicide: lead by example. Always out in front, he pushed himself and his weary band of detectives to find one more witness and bring in one more suspect, no matter how many straight hours they’d worked. It was fun for a time, but the back-breaking pace could not go on. Also, when he saw that some of his detectives
were turning into robots waiting for his next move, he realized he was curbing their initiative in the same way his bosses had done to him.