TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (40 page)

Maulsby had already known about Placerville. She’d joined other detectives earlier that week for two days of surveillance at the rustic cabin, located off Highway 50 midway between Sacramento and Tahoe.

Steve had gone on to explain that Roger “couldn’t handle” being alone at the cabin. “He falls apart when he’s not within arm’s reach of Harriet. They really feed off each other. He called from a pay phone and asked me to come pick him up. I did and brought him home. We had some long walks and talks. I got him stabilized, and in a few days took him back to Harriet. He’s still very frightened and insecure.”

On the ride up to meet Steve at his office—they had arranged the appointment at the end of their phone conversation—Maulsby had struggled with a dilemma. She wanted to provide Steve with enough information to show that Roger was a viable suspect, but also, having heard about the brothers’ “long talks and walks,” she didn’t want to give Steve too many details to pass on to Roger. She realized it was a fine line she’d have to walk—trying to convince Steve of his brother’s guilt and enlist his cooperation without giving away important details of the ongoing investigation.

In his office sitting across from Steve Kibbe with his desk between them, Maulsby began her careful recitation.

If Steve was surprised or disturbed by any of the information, he didn’t show it.

Of course, he was a homicide detective, Maulsby reminded herself. That’s how he was trained to react.

Maulsby realized that this was a difficult situation for him—another cop detailing why his brother was suspected of committing multiple homicides. She wondered how she would have reacted if the tables were turned.

As Steve began to open up, it was clear that he was quite concerned about his brother, whom he described as “without a mean bone in his body.” Roger had long tried to emulate him, he said. When Steve would grow a beard or mustache, so would Roger. When Steve would shave it off, Roger would follow suit. There was even a time, Steve said, when Roger had wanted to be a cop. Now, the loyal brother in Steve made it clear he stood ready to give Roger a place to live and help in finding a job when he got out of his “present difficulties.”

Maulsby plowed on. “Can you give me some dates that Roger has visited you?” She was interested in determining whether Roger had found victims along the road to or from visits to Steve’s—the Jane Doe murder scene, after all, was just a few miles down the road on Highway 50.

Steve checked his desk calendar and reeled off a couple of dates, none of which matched any known abductions. The effort struck Maulsby as very casual, almost perfunctory, and she couldn’t believe the veteran homicide detective didn’t offer to roll up his sleeves and help them get to the bottom of things.

On the drive back to Sacramento, Maulsby replayed the session. Even with a fellow homicide detective laying out the mounting circumstantial evidence pointing to his brother’s involvement in a series of murders, Steve had acted rather unimpressed. He seemed able to turn his back on the evidence. Indeed, his attitude came off as: Roger is my brother and you’re wrong about him. As an experienced homicide detective, he knew the score. Where was the cop in him? Did he really believe his line about Roger’s harmless ways, delivered with full knowledge of Roger’s troubled past? Or was he dying inside at the suspicions building against his brother, and was he harboring his own doubts about Roger?

Detective Steve Kibbe was in a very tough spot.

“I
FELT
a chill. I knew I was gonna die.”

“What did you do then?” asked Sacramento County Deputy District Attorney
Jeanne McCullough.

The eyes of everyone in the hushed courtroom were on the prosecution’s first witness in the
People of the State of California
v.
Roger Kibbe
in Department G of
Sacramento Municipal Court, with the Honorable Alice A.
Lytle presiding on November 20, 1987.

“Then I started fighting,” answered Debra Guffie, her blond hair long on the sides and cut butch on top.

“When you say ‘fighting,’ can you describe what you did?”

Guffie answered not in words but with body language, mimicking how she desperately fought to free herself from her assailant that night in the golf course parking lot.

“Let me see if I can describe for the record what the witness is indicating,” said Judge Lytle. “You sort of half rose out of the seat flailing your arms in front of you. Is that what you did?”

“Yes.”

“Were you making any sounds at the time?” asked
McCullough.

“I screamed once or twice.”

“And while this whole process of screaming and the flailing of your arms was going on,” McCullough continued, “what else were you doing?”

“Your Honor, I object.” The voice belonged to short, rotund
Bart Wooten, deputy public defender, seated at the defense table next to his client, Roger Kibbe. “She said she screamed once or twice, and it assumes a fact not in evidence.”

“That question is acceptable,” the judge said.

“Thank you, Your Honor,” said McCullough.

Since well before the start of trial, the thirty-one-year-old brunette prosecutor had been fighting over the smallest issues in what should have been a routine matter. But there was nothing run-of-the-mill about this misdemeanor case that might well have been settled by a plea bargain were it not for one juicy piece of information that the twelve jurors would never hear: that the middle-aged defendant was a
suspected serial killer.

McCullough, who had been in the D.A.’s office only eight months and had been handling jury trials for even less time, had found herself at the controls of a critically important case.

Weeks earlier, Kay Maulsby had come to McCullough’s office to say that homicide detectives in several counties were confident that Roger Kibbe was the I-5 killer. She mentioned the similarity of the white cordage, which seemed to connect Kibbe with the latest murder, but admitted that they didn’t yet have the hard evidence they needed to charge him. Maulsby had gone over this with Biondi more than once. They could make an arrest on the basis of probable cause—and the white cordage
did
constitute probable cause—but that only meant Kibbe could be held for forty-eight hours unless the district attorney filed charges. Filing formal charges required a much greater burden of proof: beyond a reasonable doubt. Many district attorneys, including Sacramento’s, tossed another ingredient into the mix: they would not file charges unless there was a likelihood of conviction.

“We don’t have enough to file murder charges and we don’t have
enough detectives to watch this guy indefinitely twenty-four hours a day,” Maulsby had explained to the new prosecutor. “Our best shot at getting him off the street for a while and buying ourselves some time is in your hands.”

“You mean if he walks on this assault charge,” McCullough had said, “more women may die?”

Maulsby nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

It was the most pressure that McCullough had had yet as a prosecutor; plainly, it was up to her alone to get a bad guy off the street. If he was acquitted, not only would it be her fault but others would pay the ultimate price for her mistakes or incompetence.

The judge and defense counsel were also made aware of the ongoing murder investigation, and everyone turned up the intensity level several notches. Since then, McCullough had battled opposing counsel at every step. It had taken two days to seat a jury in a trial that would feature only a handful of witnesses and a few days of testimony. The case required conscientious jurors who would not be put off by the victim’s occupation, McCullough had realized.

The case was viewed by McCullough’s superiors as a tough one that had to be done, but there was no talk of replacing her with a more experienced litigator. The reason the case was considered tough by even veterans in the D.A.’s office was because no one had known for certain until Debra Guffie walked into the courtroom whether she would in fact show up. If she hadn’t, the trial could have gone on with the police witnesses, but it would have been difficult to convict. Jurors might well question why what happened in the parking lot that night was serious enough to send a man to jail when it wasn’t serious enough for the victim to show up.

As it was, Guffie was a no-show at an early pretrial hearing. Partly as a result, a felony attempted-rape charge was reduced down to three misdemeanors: battery, soliciting prostitution, and false imprisonment (for Kibbe attempting to handcuff Guffie). After that missed appearance, Maulsby went looking for Guffie. The detective found her living at her disabled mother’s home and served her with a subpoena. Maulsby talked to her about the importance of prosecuting the man who had attacked her, although without telling Guffie that Kibbe was a suspected killer. A couple of days before trial, Maulsby picked up Guffie at her mother’s house an hour away and brought her to Sacramento. At the county’s expense, she was put up in a hotel close to the courthouse. One evening after preparing her witness to testify, McCullough gave Guffie a ride back to the hotel. She had from their first meeting been impressed not only
with Guffie’s expressed motivation for testifying—not wanting other women to be hurt—but by how articulate she was. The young prosecutor had decided that this strung-out, heroin-addicted prostitute would do fine on the witness stand. “You know, I have a dream,” Guffie told McCullough as they pulled up in front of the hotel. “Someday I’d like to have my own small house with a white picket fence where I can live undisturbed.” McCullough was touched by the sweet, innocent dream of such a hardened street person. “I hope you find your dream, Debra.”

One of the first questions asked by McCullough after Guffie had taken the stand was whether she could identify the man who picked her up that night and drove her to the parking lot. Guffie answered in the affirmative. With a steady hand she pointed to the defense table at Kibbe, who was wearing a red-and-blue jacket over a sports shirt open at the neck. With identification out of the way, McCullough had focused on taking Guffie through her ordeal, step by step.

“And in making those flailing motions,” McCullough continued, “what were you trying to do?”

“Get the door open,” Guffie said.

“That would be the passenger door?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did you have any problems getting that door open?”

“Yes. It was locked the first time I tried.”

“Had you locked the door?”

“No.”

“And did you get it unlocked?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do then?”

“I opened the door and went to jump out.”

“Did you jump out?”

“Uh-huh. I was also pushed.”

“Who pushed you?” asked McCullough.

“The defendant.”

“What part of your body did he push?”

“My lower back.”

“How did you land?”

“On my hands and knees.”

“What were you feeling at that point?”

“Thanking God he didn’t want me and that he’d pushed me out and I’d gotten away.”

Guffie told of the defendant quickly driving off, and the police officer
showing up before she’d even picked herself up off the ground. She described running after the police car as it chased after the white car, and next seeing her assailant in the back of a police car a few blocks away.

Being careful not to leave any damaging information for the defense attorney to use to impeach her witness on cross-examination, McCullough had Guffie explain how she had first given a phony name to police because she was afraid of being arrested on an outstanding warrant.

“You eventually told them your real name?”

“Yes.”

“And you were arrested?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And what were you arrested for?”

“For fraud of a medical card.”

“You spent the night in jail?”

“Yes.”

McCullough had Guffie explain that the charge resulted from her using someone else’s medical card. The D.A. couldn’t imagine the jurors being too concerned about it.

“What happened with this charge?” asked McCullough.

“I recently did two and a half weeks in jail on it.”

“No further questions.”

The defense attorney, who was also fairly new, did no damage to the witness on cross.

After Guffie’s testimony—McCullough thought she had come across very well—the prosecutor called six more witnesses, all of whom worked for the
Sacramento Police Department, over the course of the next two days.

At each break in the proceedings, McCullough fretted over whether Kibbe, who came and went daily of his own accord, would return to court. Knowing he was the subject of a murder investigation, he might flee, she feared, if he thought he was going down on the misdemeanor charges and headed for lockup. Or would he hang around, willing to do some county jail time and counting on the cops not being able to make a murder case stick?

Four patrol officers, including Sergeant
Charles Coffelt, testified to events leading up to the arrest of Kibbe, and to finding the handcuffs in the parking lot.

Another officer,
Robert Gillis, a trained crime scene investigator, testified to his own search of the parking lot, during which he found the sealed plastic Baggie containing the crime kit. He detailed for the jury its contents.

The last witness,
Penny Hummel, a civilian identification technician, testified to finding a latent print on the handcuffs that matched Kibbe’s right ring finger.

By the time
McCullough rested her case, she thought it would be real stupid of the defendant to take the stand. Why would he testify and pin himself down one way or the other—truthfully or not—as to the circumstances of a case that could well be the linchpin in a subsequent murder prosecution, where the stakes would be so very much higher?

Sure enough, when it was time for the defense to present its case, Wooten informed the court that they had no witnesses to call.

“Do you have any evidence at all to introduce?” asked the judge.

“No, Your Honor.”

Following final arguments by the lawyers—McCullough felt she’d delivered the case neatly wrapped with a ribbon on top—the jury returned a swift verdict on November 25, 1987.