TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (50 page)

A diabetic, Harriet had been under doctor’s orders to avoid stress. Two weeks after her court appearance, she suffered a heart attack. Hospitalized for a week, she’d been recuperating only a few days at home—she had a steady bookkeeping job and was renting a small house—when Roger’s lawyer called. She had explained her
health situation and put off her decision for a week, then decided to come, even though she hadn’t yet been able to return to work.

Roger came out, sat on the other side of the glass partition, and picked up the phone.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi. I understand you wanted to see me?”

“I didn’t ask to see you.”

She realized how accomplished he was at making her feel like a sap. He just sat there looking at her, not bothering to inquire as to her health, although his lawyer must have told him about her recent problems.

“Why am I here, then?” she asked with a bite.

It finally came out. He wanted her to get the proper form for him to sign so Steve could dispose of his body. Roger said he was planning to kill himself before trial.

The
threat didn’t push a button in her like it would have at one time. Now she just thought:
How cowardly.

“I’m thinking you should face the music,” she said.

The past two years had given Harriet some perspective. Although she certainly didn’t consider herself blameless for the mess they had made of their
marriage and life together, she had come to the realization that no one could turn someone else into a
serial killer. A person had to be wired to kill in cold blood, perhaps from childhood, maybe from birth. She had devoured relevant and conflicting articles and knew the popular themes presented by defense attorneys and sociologists, but the bottom line remained unchanged: Roger had
murdered those women. She hadn’t, and his mother hadn’t either, no matter how wanting his childhood relationship with her had been. Still, Harriet couldn’t help but speculate as to the root of what she realized must be Roger’s great hatred for women. Else why would he have done what he did? Even after the months he’d talked to her about his crimes, there remained that unanswered question:
“Why?”

She seized the moment. “You said this wasn’t about me or our marriage. Have you given any thought to what it is about?”

He didn’t answer.

She knew she was playing amateur psychologist, and probably none too well. She figured she’d earned the right.

“Do you think it might be about your mother?” she asked. “Do you think maybe you’ve been trying to kill her all this time? If that’s the case, look where it’s gotten you thirty, forty years later. I mean, here you are talking about killing yourself. Haven’t you destroyed enough lives in the sake of trying to get back at her?”

His stare was ice-cold.

“No,” he finally said.

She departed for home not long after.

O
N
V
ALENTINE
’
S
D
AY
,
1991,
The People of the State of California
v.
Roger Reece Kibbe
began
in
South Lake Tahoe.

As he stood before the jury to deliver his
opening statement, tall, fair-haired, even-tempered
Robert Drossel, assistant district attorney for El Dorado County, was well prepared for the task at hand.

In the California criminal justice system, Drossel had done it all: eight
years as a prosecutor; seven years as a defense attorney, both in private practice and as a public defender; two years as an investigator for the public defender’s office; ten years as a police officer.

El Dorado was the fourth rural northern California county Drossel had worked in, and he knew that cases like the I-5 murder series did not come along very often. For local residents, the fact that serial killers were a rarity in this backwater county was good news. As a litigator, however, Drossel, who had successfully prosecuted two other murder cases and was a veteran of seventy-five felony jury trials with a 90 percent conviction rate, very much appreciated the challenges he knew this largely circumstantial case would offer.

One important decision had been made prior to Drossel’s assignment to the Kibbe case. El Dorado District Attorney
Ron Tepper and his chief assistant,
Walt Miller, had elected not to seek the
death penalty. They decided that none of the “special circumstances” required by California law in death penalty cases were applicable. Multiple murders was a special circumstance, but El Dorado had
jurisdiction in only one case: the murder of Darcie Frackenpohl. Therefore, additional murder counts could not be filed in El Dorado. It was a loophole in the law that benefited, unfortunately, marauding serial killers. The facts also did not support a charge of kidnapping, another special circumstance, since prostitutes willingly got into strangers’ cars all the time. Obviously, at some point it had become a kidnapping when Darcie resisted, but there was no way to determine where that took place. For instance, if the kidnap had occurred as Kibbe was driving her through Sacramento County, then El Dorado did not have jurisdiction. Assuming that Kibbe would eventually be convicted of killing Darcie Frackenpohl, the prosecutors knew that if and when other counties with I-5 murder cases ever filed murder charges against Kibbe, they could go for the death penalty due to Kibbe’s prior murder conviction in a related case. This prosecutorial decision had not been affected by the shocking suicide of D.A. Tepper a year before trial. His top assistant, Miller, who had been planning to prosecute Kibbe himself, stepped in as acting D.A. and, with all his new administrative duties, decided to hand the case over to Drossel, in charge of the D.A.’s South Lake Tahoe office.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this case involves the murder of Darcie Frackenpohl,” Drossel began. “During the evidence portion of this case, you’ll hear evidence of four murders and an assault, all on young women. You’ll hear how Roger Kibbe, the defendant, is responsible for this additional criminal activity. You’ll hear how this additional criminal activity becomes relevant to the murder of Darcie Frackenpohl.”

Drossel had a relatively laid-back courtroom style, and before a jury was soft-spoken and deliberate. His normal demeanor did not change for this case, even though he was wearing a microphone for the TV show “
48 Hours,” which planned to air a story on serial killers. In the early days of the trial, however, he was keenly aware of the mike—any miscue had the potential of being seen by 20 million viewers—and wondered why he had ever agreed to such a stunt.

Drossel had fought critical pretrial skirmishes with Kibbe’s court-appointed attorney,
Phil Kohn, himself a former cop and El Dorado prosecutor. In fact, Kohn had, with Kibbe’s permission, placed his name in contention for the acting D.A. post, which he lost to
Walt Miller on a 3–1 vote of the county commissioners. (Had Kohn won the appointment, Kibbe would have had to find a new lawyer.) The two sides had tangled over Drossel’s intention to present to the jury uncharged crimes—three other murders believed to be part of the I-5 series. Through the other victims, Drossel hoped to show motive, opportunity, and modus operandi, thereby opening the door to the heart of the serial killer theme of the case. In separate
pretrial hearings that had the look of court mini-trials, Drossel had to prove to the presiding judge, Superior Court Judge Terrence M. Finney, that Kibbe had a unique modus operandi or “
criminal signature” that was present in each killing, and also that there was physical evidence that tied Kibbe to each killing.

Judge Finney—known by the local bar as the “King of the Mountain” because he was the only superior court judge in South Lake Tahoe—ruled in Drossel’s favor. As a former D.A., Finney was viewed by some defense attorneys as pro-prosecution, although he was considered extremely bright on evidentiary issues and a strong supporter of open discovery for the defense—a prosecutor who didn’t hand over everything to the defense could be in big trouble. In Judge Finney’s court, every lawyer won some and lost some.

After the judge’s ruling allowing the other uncharged murders to be presented, Kohn, a feisty bantamweight in and out of court, asked for help to investigate the other cases, and was assigned a second lawyer, studious
Tom Kolpacoff, who would handle most of the scientific evidence, while Kohn did everything else.

“I’ll proceed with the Darcie Frackenpohl murder first because that is the case that gives rise to
jurisdiction in El Dorado County,” Drossel told jurors. “And then I’ll proceed to the
assault of Debra Guffie, a young prostitute, because you’ll see from the evidence how this specifically and im
mediately ties in Kibbe to the Frackenpohl murder. Then we’ll proceed
to the other victims. Stephanie Brown, a young stranded motorist who was murdered.
Charmaine Sabrah, a young stranded motorist who was murdered. And
Lora Heedick, a young prostitute who was murdered.”

Drossel had decided to drop
Karen Finch from the roster of victims because her throat had been slashed—a different MO than ligature strangulation—and also due to the fact that there was no physical evidence linking Kibbe to the crime. The prosecutor knew that if the defense was able to knock Finch out of the box at trial, it might place a question mark in the minds of the jurors as to the other uncharged crimes. With more convincing linkage evidence in Brown, Sabrah, and Heedick, he didn’t need Finch; so, why take the chance?

“This, then, is the story of the person who has been dubbed ‘The I-5 Killer’ or ‘I-5 Strangler.’ It’s a story of the defendant, Roger Kibbe, covering a period of two years in his life from 1986 through 1988. This is also a story of a serial killer; that is, Roger Kibbe killed four people and assaulted a fifth and in doing so left his criminal signature at each crime scene. There will be another phrase you will hear in this case which will become as apparent as ‘The I-5 Killer.’ That is, Roger Kibbe as ‘The Cordage Killer.’ I don’t mean to be flippant here. But you will see how evidence of
cordage becomes very relevant and very specific and how it ties Roger Kibbe to murder and eventually delivers a fatal blow.”

In presenting the People’s case, Drossel promised to take jurors “on a bus tour and I’ll be your guide. We’ll be traveling through various locales—to the San Joaquin–Sacramento counties area, the Sierra foothills, and the mountains of Lake Tahoe, our own backyard. This will not be a scenic tour. Quite the contrary. It will be a roadway trail of the most repugnant behavior by a human being.”

Those were some of the things the jury would hear in the trial. What the jury would
not
hear was also substantial. No evidence would be put forth concerning Kibbe’s juvenile arrest record; his stealing and cutting up women’s clothing at age fifteen; his tying himself up with women’s clothing, then telling police he’d been molested; an adult arrest and conviction record that escalated from minor offenses to more serious ones through the 1960s and 1970s and the opinion expressed by the
San Diego polygraph examiner in 1970 concerning Roger Kibbe’s “intense dislike, almost a hatred, for women.”
^*

Although Drossel was sometimes frustrated—as were most prosecu tors—by how much a jury does not know about a defendant, he accepted that the law was clear: this kind of information was too prejudicial to be allowed into the record. Although it was certainly relevant as to the kind of person the defendant was and whether someone might invite him over for Sunday dinner with the family, it was irrelevant to the charge of murder in the Darcie Frackenpohl case.

When Drossel sat back down,
Kohn told the court he would reserve the defense’s opening statement until the beginning of their
case.

Detective Jim Watson was the
prosecution’s first witness.

Under Drossel’s questioning, Watson told of arriving at the
Old Meyer’s Grade Road crime scene at 3:00
P.M.
on September 17, 1987, and finding the body of a nude female lying in a small clearing some 35 feet off the road.

“Was there any identification on the body?”

“No. She was a Jane Doe.”

Watson told of finding several pieces of nylon
pantyhose near the body. One piece of pantyhose was used to gag the victim, he explained, and was wrapped up in the ligature around her neck. He described the ligature as part of the victim’s lightweight, black chiffon jacket, which had been fashioned into a garrote controlled by a 12-inch stick.

The detective
testified to finding three pieces of white cordage, one a few feet away from the body. A second piece was located 950 feet up the roadway from the body, along with the victim’s pink dress. A third piece of cordage was found on the narrow road 1,350 feet from the body, he said, along with another piece of the black chiffon jacket and a pair of lacy panties.

On cross-examination, it came out that Watson thought the perpetrator and victim had entered the chained-off roadway at the top of its incline and walked down to the crime scene. And when the killer had finished, that he’d walked back up the hill, disposing of the victim’s garments along the way.

“There was no cordage of any kind around the victim’s neck, is that correct?” asked
Tom Kolpacoff.

“No, just the black fabric.”

“How did you first become aware that there was a series of homicides that had been termed the I-5 series?”

“Through my discussions with criminalist Jim Streeter and Detective Kay Maulsby the day the body was found.”

The pathologist, Dr.
Richard Sander, who estimated he’d conducted 8,500 autopsies and testified “well over four hundred times,” told of unwrapping the cloth ligature from around the victim’s neck. “Her
hair had been caught up in the ligature,” he explained. “As the garrote had been tightened around the neck, her hair had looped around and around.”

“When you removed the ligature, what did you find?”

“A deep furrow in the neck, or area of the skin that had been compressed by pressure from the ligature.”

“What do you think the significance was of the stick in the garrote being located at the back of her neck?