TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (20 page)

“Are you saying you have knowledge of these murders?” Reed asked, his interest piqued.

“Yes, I might.”

“What do you know, Wayne?”

Welborn clearly enjoyed the attention. “The type of personality involved here,” he began, as if lecturing to a college psychology class, “fits a guy I did time with. His name is
Chuck Anderson, and he’s from Sacramento. While I was in prison with him, he attacked a female officer with a pair of scissors. He hates women and he would be capable of doing something like this.”

“Do you have any specific information that he’s involved in these killings?” Reed asked.

“No, I do not.”

Reed suspected Welborn was playing games, but he jotted down the information anyway.

Before he left Homicide, Welborn made a point of stopping to meet Lt. Ray Biondi, whom he said he’d seen a lot of on television. Acting as if it was an honor to be brought in for questioning in a murder case, Welborn noticed a stack of Little League cookies Biondi was selling for his sons, and bought twenty bucks’ worth.

It turned out that Chuck Anderson was still behind bars. As for Welborn,
his alibi was confirmed by his taxi logs, his manager and fellow drivers, and several fares he had picked up on those two nights.

As far as Biondi was concerned, there were lots of POI’s, some much better would-be suspects than
Kibbe, given their records of sex-related violence. But suspects were not the first thing on Biondi’s mind at this point. Although he always hoped for an easy break like a “magic phone call” identifying the culprit, he knew that without some serious organization in this multijurisdictional investigation, the killer’s identity might show up as a lead or in a report but not be recognized as such by detectives. Someone, somewhere might even have interviewed him, but the report might have been buried in voluminous paperwork and unless a new piece of information caused a second look, no one might ever focus on him again.

Biondi considered the main thing that had been done right in the investigation so far had been the centralization of all physical evidence with the DOJ crime lab. But the real payoff in terms of scientific analysis of the evidence would not come until they could get sufficient
manpower to follow up on the hundreds of unworked leads and otherwise work the growing number of unsolved homicides in a coordinated fashion.

Bertocchini’s enthusiasm was not to be extinguished. “I tell you, this guy is killing women. Everywhere we have dead bodies, this guy has a reason to be there,” he told Biondi before leaving his office that night.

Bertocchini drove home on I-5 that night excited, and also frustrated. He wondered if he was out of his depth. Maybe he was better suited to being a street cop than a detective. All this endless jawing and inaction got to him. He much preferred slapping the cuffs on a bad guy and lighting up a cigar to celebrate.

If he had his way, Kibbe’s Sacramento residence would have been staked out round-the-clock beginning immediately. But the consensus was that while Kibbe was worth knowing about and his picture should be shown to witnesses, with hundreds of other leads to follow up on, who could get overly worked up?

Anyway, the veteran detectives knew Kibbe’s brother,
Douglas County Sheriff’s Department Detective
Steve Kibbe, from the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, 80 miles due east of Sacramento, as they had all worked cases with him over the years.

What were the chances that the brother of a homicide detective would turn out to be a serial killer?

Nine

T
he morning after Roger Kibbe was questioned by Homicide, Harriet went into the bathroom to take a shower. When she emerged ten minutes later, Roger had vanished. Checking the bedroom, she found that he had taken most of his clothes with him. He had done so in a great hurry; socks and other items were scattered about the floor.

She could have kicked herself: Roger hightailing it was so damn typical she should have seen it coming.

Still in her robe and with her hair wrapped in a towel, she dropped listlessly to a chair in the bedroom. She sat with arms folded and rocked slowly back and forth.

Upon their arrival home from the police station the previous evening, an obviously shaken Roger said he couldn’t trust the cops not to rig the polygraph against him. Chalking up his distrust to his past troubles with the law, Harriet empathized rather than argued. Without the slightest doubt of her husband’s innocence, she’d said, “If you don’t want to take it, don’t. If they bother us, we’ll go see a lawyer.”

After that, they had gone to bed, sleeping separately, as they had for the past eight months. In the Oakley house they’d each had their own bedroom, but in the new apartment they slept in the same room: Harriet in a king-size bed in the center of the room, Roger in a single bed shoved into a corner.

They had slept together for a decade of
married life, and as far as Harriet was concerned their sex life had been just fine. Roger never was a romantic, but once between the sheets he was always sensitive to her needs. Their conjugal bed, in which he functioned well and with obvious
confidence, was the one place he took over—much to the delight of Harriet, who willingly let go. Throughout the years, they had averaged a good three times a week; she was missing it and she couldn’t understand how he wasn’t.

Whenever she dwelled on the start of their separate sleeping arrangement, she thought it seemed totally unnecessary. However, she blamed the impasse on Roger. Allergic to fleabites, she didn’t like sleeping with their cats. At night they customarily put the cats out or closed the bedroom door. One night, however, Roger declined to do so, saying he wanted to sleep with the cats. Feeling that he’d made his choice, Harriet stormed into the spare bedroom. That had been in April (1986), and since then they’d slept separately and had not been intimate. Harriet had wondered if having one bedroom (from which the cats were banned) in the apartment would change things, but it hadn’t.

Harriet understood the episode with the cats had been only a symptom, not the disease. She and Roger had been coming undone for so long it was difficult to remember when the first signs of disharmony had appeared. In truth, they had surfaced even before they were married. But after living together for three years, getting married had seemed the thing to do. Besides, she’d had such a troubled family life growing up that a little trouble seemed normal. And now, no one could say she had given up easily. The past summer, she’d even jumped from an airplane trying to save her marriage.

Roger had long enjoyed woodworking in his garage workshop and skydiving on weekends; neither hobby had ever included her. Anxious to find something they could do together, Harriet had signed up for her first parachute jump. Roger had been supportive, and seemed to get a kick out of watching her make practice landings off the couch. She’d made the tandem jump with an instructor from 7,500 feet—frightened to death the entire time—and that had been the end of it. Roger hadn’t invited her back out to the jump zone with him, and she hadn’t volunteered.

The major disappointments they’d experienced had surely taken their toll—most recently, the collapse of their business, for which Roger had borrowed (and lost) $10,000 from his brother
Steve for start-up capital. Such a reversal, followed by the loss of the home they had loved and their general inability to work through everyday problems, had added to their increasing burden.

Restless one night not long after they’d stopped sleeping together, Harriet got out of bed at 4:00
A.M.
and found Roger’s room empty. She dressed and drove to the shop, where she found him asleep on the office
couch. Waking him up, she said, “Tell me what’s wrong. I need to know.” Without saying a word, Roger, fully clothed, threw off the blanket and walked out. “We need to talk!” she yelled to his departing back. When she heard his car pull away, she broke down.

A month or so later, Roger had not been home for several nights in a row. Around 10:00
P.M.
Harriet called the shop. Sounding desperate, she told him that a “Mexican guy” had called threatening to burn down their house. She begged Roger to come home, and he finally did, an hour or so later. By then, the police had arrived. Lying alone in bed that night, Harriet knew she’d reached rock bottom: she’d made up the call and even filed a false police report in an effort to get Roger to come home to her.

Harriet began picking up Roger’s mess in the bedroom when suddenly she stopped. Dropping the things back on the floor, she rushed into the small office that adjoined the apartment. She opened the drawer in which she kept the cash deposits from customers. It was empty. Roger had made off with the $375 she’d carefully counted out and for which she’d prepared a bank deposit slip the afternoon before.

In an instant, her depression turned to anger.

Roger obviously didn’t give a shit about her and had left for good. His leaving now threatened
her
new job and
her
new home. Luckily, she had just enough money in savings to cover the loss, which she would do right away. But their boss had hired them as a couple: she to handle the office work, Roger the maintenance and upkeep around the rental yard. With Roger gone, who would do the outside work? How long before their employer found out she was alone and fired her? Where would she go? Where would she get the money for another place? How would she support herself?

Cursing Roger’s gross ineptitude when it came to living life, she took a roll call of his shortcomings:

He was weak,

—emotionally unstable,

—insecure,

—a latent thumb sucker who stuttered the most when he lied, not when he told the truth,

—a frightened little boy in a grown man’s body,

—at forty-seven years of age totally unfit for adult responsibility.

Why had he always been so afraid to reveal himself?

*      *      *

S
HE PICKED
up the phone and dialed Vito Bertocchini’s number at the
San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Department. When he came on the line, Harriet told him Roger had decided not to take a
polygraph.

“We have an attorney, so please don’t bother us anymore,” she said abruptly.

“Mrs. Kibbe, I’m just trying to gather information in our investigation,” Bertocchini said. “We have several young women who were abducted, sexually assaulted, and strangled to death. One of them was nineteen years old. Another one had an infant at home she was still nursing.”

So quick had she been to disassociate Roger from the entire matter, she hadn’t considered the enormity of the crime itself.
Murder
had been committed—lives had been taken, callously snuffed out, leaving grieving families.

Harriet knew the detective had meant to shock her, and he’d succeeded. Yet, she formed the thought—stronger than ever—that Roger could not possibly be involved. If a stack of two-by-fours were missing from a lumberyard or if someone’s customized parachute rig had disappeared at the airport, she might have wondered if Roger was up to his old tricks. But
multiple homicides?

They had lived in the same house, slept in the same bed, eaten at the same table, laughed at the same TV shows, wrapped Christmas presents for each other, gone through the ups and downs of life together for more than a decade. While Roger certainly had his faults, he had never displayed a penchant for violence or a hatred toward women. Harriet had been with men about whom she could not so testify, but Roger wasn’t among them. The three slaps, delivered open-handed and during fits of anger over an eleven-year period, hardly counted as violence in her book. As for women, he’d never had trouble making and keeping them as friends. And given the mile-wide streak of passivity that ran through him, anyone who knew Roger wouldn’t possibly peg him as a murderer.

Sexual assaults?
He’d never been the least rough in bed; not with Harriet, and as far as she knew, not with other women. Years earlier, Roger had told her of making love to his first wife, who he said was quite boisterous in bed, and having to stop occasionally to make sure he wasn’t hurting her. How could a man that sensitive
assault
a woman?

Harriet felt very sorry for the victims and their families, but before hanging up on Bertocchini she told him that she didn’t see what it had to do with her husband.

As for Roger’s sudden departure, that was nothing new. Sometimes,
he’d disappear just as Harriet was getting ready for bed. Nothing she could point to seemed to be the trigger—not an argument or words of any kind exchanged. He’d just sneak out and slink away. When he returned—hours later or the next morning—he’d have nothing at all to say about his absence. She had even stopped asking him where he’d gone because he would simply ignore any questions he didn’t want to answer. It seemed whenever Roger got antsy these days, he hit the road. In July alone he’d logged 10,000 miles on the Datsun 280Z, which they’d bought the previous month as Harriet’s
car but which he liked so much he took over. She had bought another car, a white Hyundai, for herself. Once he had the 280Z to drive, Roger had given his old Maverick to a young guy who had been employed part-time at the shop in exchange for $140 owed in back wages when the business failed. (Roger giving away the Maverick—a good-running car they’d owned for three years—for such a pittance had infuriated Harriet. Seeing it as another example of Roger’s irresponsibility, she’d dragged him along to their ex-employee’s house to try to recover the car. It was too late, however, as the ownership transfer had already been filed with the state, and the young man legally owned the vehicle.)

What had made Roger’s departure different this time was that he’d packed his things. He had never done that when he went away before.

As the day wore on, her anger subsided. She stayed busy showing rental spaces (normally Roger’s job) and preparing rental agreements for new customers. Their boss showed up that afternoon. When asked about Roger, Harriet said he was running some errands. She had a feeling she hadn’t lied well. How long would it be before the truth came out, and she found herself out of a job and a place to live?