TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (43 page)

She thought about how normal it all seemed, Roger talking to her so calmly in such a controlled setting. Yet, she knew the evidence was mounting that he had killed, more than once, with those same thick hands that he so skillfully used to build furniture. He was probably not so calm then, she surmised. He was probably very excited, maybe enraged; no doubt he was fiercely demanding and terrifyingly cruel. In fact, she’d seen the proof of it. That he could do such horrifying things to someone he held no grudge against—women he didn’t know but used like an archer aiming at a bull’s-eye—was what she found most incomprehensible.

Yet, she sat discoursing with him as if he were her kindly next-door neighbor or corner greengrocer.

Forty minutes later, they parted, the ice broken.

On the drive back, she reflected on how ordinary the soft-spoken, almost grandfatherly man before her had seemed. That must have been the
man whom his victims had seen minutes or seconds before he flipped a switch and became somebody, or something, very different.

It had been eerie.

Still, she would return. As long as he kept talking, she’d come back to him for as long as he’d let her.

T
HE FIRST
week of January 1988, Detective Vito Bertocchini located, through a check of motor vehicles records, the
Datsun 280Z formerly owned by Roger
Kibbe.

Bertocchini picked up
Kay Maulsby and Jim Streeter on the way to Rocklin, 20 miles northeast of Sacramento. The new owner,
Donald Udell, twenty-three, had purchased the
Datsun six months earlier from a Sacramento used
car dealer.

The only change he’d made to it, Udell explained, was mounting a new audio-stereo system in the dashboard. In doing so, he made some adjustments in the face plate of the dash, then painted the dash when he finished. During the installation, he told the detectives that he’d found a gold loop earring under the driver’s seat.

“Did you find anything else?” Bertocchini asked.

“No, but you know, every once in a while there was a real rotten smell in the car,” he said. “I always thought it was the ventilation system.”

Maulsby explained they would like to process the car inside and out for
trace evidence. “We’ll be looking for
hair, fibers, and other evidence,” she said.

Udell gave detectives permission to search the vehicle believed used in the abduction of
Charmaine Sabrah and possibly other I-5 victims.

Streeter started to work, but soon found the power source at Udell’s residence inadequate to run his laser machine. Detectives got permission to drive the car to DOJ.

It took Streeter three hours to process the vehicle. In the course of his examination, he took samples of fibers from the seats and floor mats, recovered some animal hairs, and swabbed a stain on the passenger seat while a DOJ latent print examiner dusted the vehicle, lifting a partial palm print from inside the rear window of the hatchback.

Streeter would, however, find nothing to connect Sabrah or any other I-5 victims to the Datsun 280Z.

Roger Kibbe’s luck was holding.

T
WO WEEKS
after the big powwow at DOJ, the secret deal between six
California and Nevada law enforcement agencies to keep the lid on the
I-5 murder cases fell apart when Sacramento County Sheriff
Glen Craig and Lt. Ray Biondi stepped into a room of newspaper, radio, and TV reporters.

Various
media outlets had been calling, almost immediately, wanting updates on the I-5 investigation. Biondi convinced his boss they had to go public with the full series and “let it all roll out.”

The deaths of four more women had been linked to the I-5 murder series, Sheriff Craig announced, bringing the known total to seven
victims. As far as the public was concerned, the new victims were:
Karen Finch,
El Dorado’s two Jane Does, and Nevada’s
Virginia City Jane Doe.

The only thing Craig held back was the clothes cutting. “I cannot be specific about what evidence links these seven women to the same killer,” he said, “other than they were all traveling on or found near the interstate or intersecting roads and highways. For that reason, we believe the person responsible is mobile and spends a lot of time in his vehicle seeking his next victim. The real tragedy is that he may not look any different than you or me. You might not be able to tell that he has horns and is the devil.”

The sheriff, in his frankness, broke another agreed-upon rule by discussing each case in detail, even those that “belonged” to other jurisdictions.

Asked by a reporter for the latest description of the suspect, Craig said they believed him to be white, in his forties, and a frequent lone traveler along Interstate 5 south of Sacramento and on U.S. 50 to the Lake Tahoe basin.

Craig acknowledged Biondi, who stepped forward.

Biondi had been thinking long and hard since the disastrous council at DOJ. All those bosses not wanting to go public had to have been for a reason other than ego. He decided it had to do with the more sinister fact that when they finally did, they’d simultaneously have to commit to doing whatever it took to
stop the killings.
It had to do with politics, budgets, manpower resources, and all that unholy crap. He was damn disgusted, but he’d keep it buttoned up this day.

“Investigators are seeking information from women who may have encountered and then refused to go with a man who offered them a ride,” Biondi said. “Anyone who saw anything suspicious that might be connected to these or other related crimes, please come forward. We need your help.”

This was not a charade for Biondi—until they had a nailed-down murder case against Roger Kibbe, they would continue to search for evidence and seek information. The veteran had learned not to hang his hat
on the first strong suspect that came along. He’d seen plenty that “looked good” before the bottom fell out and they had to start over.

The next day’s front-page headlines in the
Sacramento
Union
told the general public what a lot of high-ranking coppers hadn’t wanted to let out of the bag:

‘I-5 Strangler’ Expands Trail of Death
Cops Link Slayings of 7 Young Women
to Man Who Prowls the Highways

What the public and many top law enforcement administrators with other agencies didn’t know, however, was that the prime suspect was tucked safely behind bars—

—for now.

D
ETECTIVE
Kay
Maulsby went back to
Rio Consumnes the day after the press conference.

She and Roger
Kibbe settled into the same interview room as before, and she asked how he’d been getting along in the week since her last visit.

“Okay,” he said.

“Are you aware of the news concerning the homicides?” she asked, touching for the first time on the real reason why she was making these pilgrimages.

“No,” he said, a bit warily.

“There was a press conference yesterday. It was on TV last night.”

“The inmates switched to another channel when the news came on.” It had the sound of a dismissal.

“Listen, Roger, I’m still investigating these cases,” she said earnestly. “So are other detectives. You’re one of the suspects being looked at but I’ll work just as hard at proving your innocence as your guilt if you can help eliminate yourself by giving me something to go on. Like your activities and whereabouts on certain dates.”

There was no response.

“Do you think we might ever get to the point where it would be possible to discuss such specifics?” she asked.

He seemed to consider the question. “I-I think so.”

“If you are in fact innocent, it’s important to the investigation that we eliminate you as soon as possible so that we might concentrate on finding the real suspect.”

His nod was barely perceptible.

She decided to back off.

They discussed
Harriet and his concerns as to how she was getting along without him.

“I worry about her,” he said. “She’s still working as a bookkeeper and driving in from Placerville every day. She’s going to be trying to find a place for us to live in Sacramento, closer to her work, when I get out.”

When I get out.

Maulsby willed herself not to react.

“What are your plans?” she asked, then quickly added: “When you get out, I mean.”

“I’d like to find something in woodworking.” He was relaxing with the lady cop across from him; his stutter had disappeared. “Maybe I can find someone with a shop who can afford to take on a helper.”

After thirty-five minutes, she asked if it would be all right for her to come see him again.

“I thought I didn’t have a choice,” he said.

“You do, Roger.” She wanted to sound firm but friendly. “I’ll come back to see you or I won’t. It’s entirely up to you.”

He didn’t take long.

“It’s okay to come back.”

J
UDY
Frackenpohl answered a knock on the door of her Seattle home at 5:30
P.M.
on Tuesday, January 12, 1988.

A man in a brown suit stood at the threshold.

Judy knew without being told—

—This was the detective she’d been dealing with over the phone for four months but had never laid eyes on—

—He was here to tell her that Darcie was dead.

“Mrs. Frackenpohl, I’m Detective
Hatch.”

“Yes,” she managed weakly.

“May I come in?”

She stepped back, turned, and went into the living room. The detective, who was alone, followed, closing the door behind him.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you that Darcie is dead. Her body was found in California. She’s been identified.”

Judy was listening, but she didn’t want to hear any more. What more could there be to say?

Hatch was apologizing for dropping in unannounced, as if that really mattered. “We don’t call ahead because we don’t want to give false hope,” he was busy explaining.

Judy wanted to tee off on the detective and tell him what a lousy job he’d done trying to find her daughter these past four months, but instead she broke down.

She’d filed, by phone, the belated missing persons report with
Sacramento on Christmas Eve. For months she had pushed and prodded in every direction she knew, but no one seemed to be listening. Her runaway teenage daughter had never been at the top of anyone’s priority list.

With no pair of arms to run to for comfort, Judy stood in the middle of the room sobbing quietly. She’d already cried so many tears over Darcie she was astonished by how many were still left.

“I need to tell you that your daughter was murdered,” Hatch said. “But you can’t tell anyone. Two detectives are coming up from California in a couple of days to talk to you.”

At that point, Judy went numb all over.

Darcie was murdered and she couldn’t tell anyone?

Judy knew that in many ways she’d lost Darcie long ago. The memories she had of her only daughter these past years were not cherished ones. But she’d secretly kindled the hope that Darcie would start to figure things out—as some of her schoolmates were doing—and begin to rebuild her life. Get back into school, find a vocation or career path that interested her. Get married one day, have her own children, drive a station wagon to soccer games. The interlocking hopes: Darcie as an attentive mother with her own kids to raise, herself one day as a doting grandmother, the two of them drawing closer in future years.

Hopes that were now dashed forever.

Twenty

W
here was Darcie found?”
Judy
Frackenpohl asked.

“On the highway to Lake Tahoe,” Detective
Jim Watson said. “In the woods just off the road. She had no ID.”

Judy looked perplexed. “How far from Sacramento?”

Detective Kay Maulsby spoke up. “About a hundred miles. We think she was picked up in Sacramento and driven there. Against her will.”

The day after Darcie
Frackenpohl was identified, Maulsby and Watson started working together on the case. She had liked the soft-spoken detective when she’d first met him at the autopsy months earlier; calm and deliberate, he wasn’t easily stampeded. In fact, at the time, Watson had let her know that he was not convinced the
Old Meyer’s Grade Road murder was part of a series. “Could be a local thing,” he’d told Maulsby, who could see that the handsome, square-jawed El Dorado detective was a cop deep in the bone; he would draw his own conclusions in his own time. In the months since, the similar cordage had moved him, as well, in the direction of Roger Kibbe. Still, Watson took things one step at a time. Through the phone company they were able to get the address of the pay phone from which Darcie had made her last call home. It turned out to be in front of a low-rent West Sacramento motel where Darcie had spent her last days; lounging poolside by day, hooking by night. They conducted interviews at the motel and had the DOJ’s Jim Streeter process for evidence the room she was known to have occupied.

Three days later, the pair of detectives had flown to Seattle. Before sitting down in Judy Frackenpohl’s living room, they’d already interviewed Darcie’s pimp, James Brown, who needed to be eliminated as a suspect. He
admitted to having hit Darcie a few days before she dropped out of sight, but denied any involvement in her disappearance and seemed genuinely upset at the news of her murder. They also talked to her prostitute friend,
Kim Quackenbush, who reported that Darcie had been beaten and robbed by a 6-foot-4 Indian in a white pickup the night before her disappearance.

“The Seattle detective told me not to tell anyone that Darcie had been murdered,” Judy said, bewildered. “How am I supposed to go on like nothing happened?”

“I’m sure what he meant was not to tell
James Brown or any of the other people around Darcie until we had a chance to come up and interview them,” Maulsby said.

“I still don’t understand why it took so long to identify her,” Judy said.

“We sent out bulletins and press releases giving a complete description,” Watson explained. “Unfortunately, I guess they didn’t get to the people who had the missing persons report you filed.”