Body Parts (12 page)

Wayne’s trailer was only a few feet from a fence separating the park from Arcata Readimix. Because he had no garbage service, he would dispose of his trash at his aunt’s house.

The afternoon of October 26, 1997, was sunny but seasonably cool when photographer Bob Pottberg and a few friends put their kayaks into the frigid Freshwater Creek. Pottberg liked to go canoeing a few times a year, but he’d never explored Freshwater Slough, which connects to Ryan Slough, both winding waterways with muddy banks surrounded by marshland.

The plan was to spend a few hours meandering down to the boat ramp under Samoa Bridge, where they had left a car to drive home.

By 4:00
P.M.
, the air was starting to grow even cooler. Pottberg was coming around a bend to a wider portion of the canal when he saw a white object ahead on the north bank, unnaturally stark against the lackluster green and brown landscape.

As he paddled closer, he thought he could make out buttocks, and wondered,
is that a mannequin—or is it a body?

At that point, Pottberg thought it would be better if his friend, Lynne Sarty, who worked at a local hospital, checked it out. But she declined.

“No, it was your idea, you go poke it first,” she said.

Sarty was trying to be playful, but she, too, was nervous that it might actually be a body. Her husband, who had their four-year-old in his kayak, had the same concerns, so he paddled ahead without them.

As Pottberg drew nearer, he told himself that it had to be a mannequin because it was missing its arms, legs, and head. The yellow areas had to be stuffing and the white covering had to be fabric or plastic.

He got close enough to tap it with his paddle. Only he didn’t get the sound of wood against hard plastic that he expected. Instead, the figure, which would have been facedown, was squishy to the touch, and he could see that the yellow material was actually fatty tissue, where body parts had been surgically removed.

Pottberg was horrified.

“This is real!” he called out.

Whoever had cut up this poor soul, the gender of whom he could not determine, had done so with precision. There had been no hacking involved.

“At this point, I freaked, turned around, and [went back] to where my friends were,” Pottberg recalled later.

Pottberg’s hands shook as he fumbled for his cell phone and punched in 911. After going through dispatch, he arranged to meet a Eureka police officer downstream at the municipal airport, Murray Field, a fifteen-minute trip by kayak.

The sky darkened and the air grew chilly as Pottberg and his friends waited near the airport for almost an hour before the authorities arrived.

Pottberg tried to explain what he’d found, and initially they were almost blasé about his discovery, saying they found several bodies in the slough every year. Pottberg, who was still thoroughly disturbed by the experience, tried to make them understand that this was different.

“This isn’t just a body,” he told them. “This is
no
body, so to speak.”

The officers finally got the point, once Pottberg detailed the surgical cuts.

“Oh,” one of them said.

Once he’d described the exact location as the north bank, the authorities determined that the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office should handle the case because the Eureka Police Department’s jurisdiction covered only the south bank.

So sheriff’s Lieutenant Frank Vulich, Deputy Coroner Charlie Van Buskirk, and a California Department of Fish and Game officer went by boat to collect the torso from the slough near the end of Park Street, in the neighborhood known as Myrtletown, where they were met by a deputy and the sheriff himself.

The next day, Vulich, commander of the sheriff’s detective bureau, assigned Detective Juan Freeman to be the lead investigator on the case. The torso, as it turned out, was also missing its breasts, so the victim was identified as Jane 194-97 Doe. Freeman called her “Torso Girl.”

Freeman had started working for the sheriff’s department as a correctional officer in the Garberville jail and substation in January 1977. By 1988, he’d transferred into the detective bureau, where he started investigating child abuse cases and eventually progressed to major crimes, many of which were homicides.

As a hobby, Freeman restored hot rods, classic and custom cars. He and his wife, Lynn, were nicknamed “Dagwood and Blondie Bumstead,” after the comic strip characters, because Lynn always wore her blond hair in a ponytail. Although he and his wife reportedly carried “the Bumstead curse” for the misadventures they experienced on their car trips, Freeman didn’t look anything like the cartoon Dagwood. He was bald, stood a sturdy five feet ten inches and weighed 220 pounds.

By the time Freeman got the torso case, he’d already worked a couple dozen homicides, but this one was a first for him.

“I was pretty sure I had the work of a serial killer in front of me,” he said.

All of his homicide cases got to him, but he’d never tried to solve a case where he had no face, teeth, or specific characteristics to help identify his victim and catch his killer.

“I’ve never encountered body parts where I had to build a victim,” he said.

In conjunction with visiting the area where the victim was discovered, Freeman’s first task was to compile a list of “identifiers,” such as approximate height, weight, hair color, and race. This would be done during the autopsy, which was scheduled for October 29 in San Joaquin County; Humboldt had no pathologist of its own.

Accompanying Humboldt’s coroner, Glenn Sipma, and his deputy, Charlie Van Buskirk, Freeman left Eureka at 3:00
A.M.
, with Jane Doe’s body in the trunk, starting the six-hour trip to the morgue in French Camp in a county vehicle with no air-conditioning.

“It was a nasty trip all the way there and back,” Freeman said.

Also present at the autopsy were San Joaquin’s pathologist Robert Lawrence, Charles “Butch” Cecil, a forensic anthropologist and skeleton expert from San Francisco, and Joe Herrera, a sheriff’s deputy who worked in the coroner’s division.

The autopsy took about two hours and the subsequent findings of Dr. Lawrence and Dr. Cecil were remarkably consistent: Jane Doe was white, with possibly some Hispanic background; she was between eighteen and twenty-five years old and had given birth at some point; she was five feet three or five feet four inches tall, weighed 120 to 125 pounds, and had brown or auburn hair; and because she had a low level of carbon in her lungs, she came from an area with little air pollution and was likely a nonsmoker.

They counted twenty-seven stab wounds on the right side of her back and buttocks, all but one of which appeared to have been inflicted after death. All eleven of her bruises, however, were made before death. Three of the bruises were the size of fingertips, patterned like grasp marks on the back of her right shoulder; the rest were on her lower left back.

Some of the stab wounds looked as if they’d been made with a small double-edged blade, and others, including the premortem wound, by a single-edged knife. Ranging in size from a ½-inch to
-inch, they all looked as if they had been cut with a jerking, hesitating motion. The method of limb removal, however, varied. Some bones looked as if they’d been sawed cleanly in half, while others appeared to be half-sawed and then smashed or broken, as if the killer had grown frustrated with the time and effort it was taking.

The head was severed at the neck below the voice box, between the C-5 and C-6 vertebrae. Her breasts had been sliced off and pared down to the rib cage. Her torso had been slit down the center to the pubic area, and her pubic mound had been cut off. Given that her vagina had also been sliced out—and that her body had been lying in the slough for some time—it was no surprise that the pathologists found no trace of semen in or on her body.

Although the Humboldt County Coroner’s Office initially estimated that the torso had been in the water for “less than a week,” that calculation was later amended to the lower range of two to twenty-four hours because of the lack of “animal action” on the body.

The cause of death, however, could not be determined.

On Halloween night, Wayne had dinner with the Ford family at his aunt Doris’s house.

The topic of the well-publicized torso case came up in conversation, and one of his aunts asked, “Who would do such a thing?”

Doris later recalled that Wayne said nothing. He just looked down at his dinner plate.

In the days after the autopsy, Freeman and two teams of investigators, each with a boat and a cadaver dog, searched the water and both banks of the slough system for any other remains belonging to Jane Doe. Both dogs showed strong interest in the area where the torso was recovered; the handlers believed that porous pieces of driftwood may have retained the body’s scent. After fanning out a mile in either direction, the dogs found no more missing limbs.

Freeman, who prayed every day with his wife for God to help him solve this case, submitted the victim’s basic identifiers to the Department of Justice (DOJ) Missing and Unidentified Persons database, which was tied into the FBI’s National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. Initially he asked for a run of young women who were reported missing between October 20 and 26.

He also submitted the data to the state DOJ’s Violent Crime Information System, to the FBI’s violent crime database, and to a database in Washington State that cross-referenced MOs for violent criminals, known as the Homicide Investigative Tracking System. In addition, Freeman contacted profilers with the FBI and the state DOJ in Sacramento and conducted his own research by sending out a national all-points bulletin, asking other agencies with similar cases to contact him.

Within the next year, Freeman developed about a hundred leads on missing women who could have been his victim. Although he came close several times, the DNA never matched.

“I scratched the ground until my fingers bled,” he said.

On November 25, Karen Mitchell, a nice girl from a nice family, went missing five days before her seventeenth birthday. Karen had been living with her aunt Anne and uncle Bill Casper, who was the head criminalist at the state DOJ crime lab in Eureka, which undoubtedly contributed to the media’s and law enforcement’s close attention to the case. Karen was last seen leaving her aunt’s shop at the Bayshore Mall and walking along Broadway to the Coastal Family Development Center, where she took care of children.