TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (49 page)

“You’re not gonna just say that you read about them in the paper or some bullshit? It’s got to be all the way.”

“And the property of at least one,” Maulsby said.

“Uh-huh.”

“May I have your hand on it?” Reed said.

The detective and killer shook hands.

A
FEW
minutes past 10:30
P.M.
that night, Harriet Kibbe climbed into the backseat of an unmarked police car, where Roger was waiting for her.

They were alone—surrounded by detectives sitting in and standing around other unmarked cars—in the parking lot of Bradshaw’s family restaurant at Madison Avenue and Highway 80 in northeast Sacramento, ten miles from downtown.

Harriet was exhausted, sad, and angry. It had been that kind of day since detectives descended on her at work around 3:00
P.M.
with a search warrant for her car. Her Hyundai had been impounded; she was told it was going to be processed for evidence again and returned in a day or two. She had found a friend to take her home; the same friend had brought her to the rendezvous with Roger.

She had, in the last seven or eight hours, come to the realization that she’d seriously deluded herself into thinking things would return to some kind of normalcy when Roger got out. She had reasoned it would be possible because detectives hadn’t been knocking on her door these past months. Things had settled down. Maybe they had other suspects; maybe they’d even found the real killer.

She had missed Roger during his incarceration, and had enjoyed their twice-weekly jailhouse visits. He had seemed determined, after his latest run-in with the law for his shameless stupidity in picking up a prostitute, to get back on track with a good job and stay out of trouble. She had intended to give him, and their
marriage, another try, and had been counting the days until he would be released.

They had observed, apart, their thirteenth wedding anniversary six days earlier with a promise to celebrate in person when he got out. She would make a nice dinner. They might even take in a show. She had so desperately wanted things to be normal. For her to take him in her arms, tell him everything would be all right. To have him take her the way he used to, strong and virile; it was the only time she could really let go and be completely submissive. Yes, she had missed him. They had been through a lot the past couple of years, but she thought there was still time.

Roger’s handcuffs had been removed.

They clasped hands like frightened children.

Then, without any adornment at all, he told her. He named names but they meant nothing to Harriet. Four, maybe five. By then, he was bawling. He added at the end, “I’m sorry,” like a bad boy who had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar before supper.

Harriet went limp.

She had believed his lies, every single one. She had continued to ask him, in her darkest moments, whether he knew anything at all about the dead women. Always, even in jail, he had said no. He had denied everything, until this very moment.

She had believed his story about the prostitute—he claimed she had lied to police and committed perjury. Harriet had not attended the
trial
because Roger wanted it that way, therefore she’d known none of the sordid details. She had simply taken his word. For the last year and a half she had believed in his innocence with all her heart.

And now he had told her the awful truth.

He was a killer, and she felt like a fool.

When he had gone to jail, she had come to visit him early on with a plan: she and Steve would team up and go out and find the real I-5 killer. She would pretend to be a broken-down motorist, alone, and Steve would be nearby to catch the guy. Roger had said, “Don’t do that.” She thought he had said so because he didn’t want her to get hurt.

She had never known anyone who had killed. What did a murderer look like? The only vision she could conjure up was the wild-eyed Charles Manson. He was a murderer, yes. He
looked
like one. But Roger? Her shy, timid husband had driven around, picked up women, and killed them with his bare hands?

She tried to release his hand but wasn’t even sure if she’d done so because she couldn’t feel her limbs.

Harriet broke down, and cried with her husband.

L
ATER
that evening, Roger
Kibbe reneged.

“Where’s the victim’s property you said you’d be telling us about?” asked Detective Kay
Maulsby.

“I have no idea,”
Kibbe said.

“Do you have any intention of telling us anything?” Detective Stan
Reed asked.

“No.”

Reed was doing a slow burn. They had fucked up, all of them, by not setting up a tape recorder in the car where Roger and Harriet had talked for forty minutes. It had been a huge mistake because now
Kibbe was backing out of the deal.

“You’re telling me that you’re not a man of your word and that your word didn’t mean diddly-squat?” Reed asked.

“I guess that’s what it comes down to.”

“None of this is admissible in court,” Reed said. “Tell us about Lora. Or about Stephanie or Charmaine or Darcie. Tell us so we can tell their families.”

“I don’t know anything.”

It was midnight. Except for the trip out for the meeting with Harriet, Kibbe had been in this room for seven hours. He had gotten what he
wanted, and now he was back to being an RV. He knew what most guilty suspects didn’t know: the less you tell the cops, the better off you are.

Reed stood, looking down on Kibbe.

“Well,” the detective said, “I hope they punch your fucking ticket, because obviously you have no remorse.”

At 3:15
A.M.
on April 28, 1988, Roger Kibbe was booked into El Dorado County Jail on the charge of murder.

H
ARRIET
K
IBBE
paid the fee and drove into the
landfill dump not far from the cabin she had just cleaned out on her way to live with old friends who would have her.

Her life was in shambles. She had already visited Roger in jail in
South Lake Tahoe barely forty-eight hours after his backseat
confession. She was drawn to him like a moth to the flame; wanting and needing more information, but uncertain as to whether it would help or hurt. Roger had orchestrated their tryst in the police car for her benefit—she realized and appreciated that. After he had so clearly spoken the truth to her, perhaps for the first time in a long time, she had many questions she wanted answered. Or did she? Did she really want to know? Would the details help rid her of all the ugly pictures that kept running through her mind, or would they only make for more horror movies? She had sat studying his face through the glass partition that separated them. He looked drawn and tired; his color was not good.

Since his confession, her worst fear was that she had done this to him. Had he become who he became because of her? Because of their
marriage? He hadn’t killed anyone before they met; he said not. She accepted his word on it, which meant she hadn’t been so blinded when they first met as not to see something that important. But that he became a killer during their time together only added to her feelings of guilt. She had been angry, she had been stubborn, she had been a miserable wife. She had failed him, that much was clear. Had she also helped push him over the edge?

“I’m sorry,” she had said tearfully.

It wasn’t her fault, he said.

Where did things go so wrong? she wondered aloud.

She had a vision of them living as husband and wife in one room, a room she knew about, but a room where their life together had become a sham because Roger had another room where he lived a major part of his life alone; a secret room filled with violence, murder, and ghosts. He had thrown open the door now, allowing her to peek inside for the first
time. But did she want to go any further? Did she really want to see what he had done in that other room?

She assured herself she would have left him in a minute had she known he was a murderer. And yet, knowing what she now knew, she had sat there on the other side of the glass, looking into his eyes, talking to him through a telephone receiver, trying to figure things out. If she wouldn’t leave him now, when would she? When she wasn’t crying, she had gone quiet for long periods, which was unusual for her, and then the opposite: rambling about small things. In between, she asked her questions.

“How did you kill them?”

He had lifted his leg and pointed to his calf.

She interpreted it to mean he’d used their nylons.

“How did you take them such a long way in the car?”

“Tied them up and gagged them.”

He admitted to her that he had been so quick to give away their Maverick because it might link him to murder.

“So then you used the Hyundai,” Harriet said. “
My
car.”

They had managed such exchanges in small doses, remaining, for the most part, fairly detached. The next minute, she was telling him her plans to clean out the cabin and their storage space. It was then he had asked her to do something for him. She couldn’t recall him asking her for a favor in a long time.
If only he had asked for what he needed sooner
, she had thought,
things might have ended differently.

Harriet pulled up next to a mountain of trash, then backed up as close as possible. She stepped from the car, opened both back doors, and popped the trunk lid.

She unloaded quickly, trying not to look at the stuff she was throwing out. Each item represented, in a way, another dead dream. They had all been part of a life,
their
life, and now were no longer needed or could no longer be tolerated. In only a few years, she had gone from owning a home and running her own business to a small apartment that came with a menial job to now living out of suitcases so as to stay mobile and be less of an inconvenience to others. She was living life backward.

She’d first cleaned out the storage space on Drake’s Hill Drive in Rancho Cordova, 20 miles east of Sacramento. It was there they had stored a lot of their things after they’d been fired from Public Storage five months earlier. The space had not ever been searched by police because they didn’t know about it. She’d found what she was looking for right away. He’d told her it would be in the red pouch where he kept his skydiving records.

At the bottom of the bag had been the solitary
diamond ring he wanted her to get rid of. She held it in her palm. The diamond was about half a carat, although it looked larger because it was set in a thin gold band. He claimed he had stolen it from neighbors in Oakley who had given him the key to their house while they were away so he could water the plants and feed the dog. Was that the truth?

She turned, and threw it into the trash heap.

When she got to his sneakers, she hesitated. They were his favorite, a two-tone gray. He used to wear them all the time but hadn’t in a while. She had found them in a camper shell not far from the cabin, which had been searched by police shortly after Roger’s arrest for murder. But the cops had missed the camper shell, and the shoes were in the narrow closet, right where he said to look for them.

They had two or three red spots on them. Was it paint or blood? She couldn’t tell, and didn’t want to know.

She was running on instinct now, the powerful instinct to protect, and was not consciously thinking about her actions but simply performing a necessary function.

She heaved them as far as she could.

Twenty-Two

J
ANUARY
1991

H
arriet
Kibbe hadn’t seen
Roger in two years.

She walked into the familiar visiting area at the
South Lake Tahoe Jail, where he was still awaiting trial, an event delayed repeatedly by a string of pretrial motions and hearings but now scheduled to start in less than two weeks.

After signing in, she located her assigned cubicle and waited for him to be brought out. She was perspiring and felt weak; it wasn’t nerves, although she was uneasy.

For eight months after his arrest she had shown up here almost weekly. Both were needy in different ways. They had made an unspoken deal: his information in exchange for her company. Without volunteering anything, he had continued to answer her questions. He did not tell her, however, what he’d done with the women sexually, although she’d asked.

It was odd the things she had thought of.

“What about your black eye?”

Darcie Frackenpohl kicked him.

“And the time you had the crabs?”

He caught them from a
victim he picked up in Sacramento when he left home in December 1986, ending up in Las Vegas and at Steve’s. Along the way, he’d dumped her in
El Dorado. This one, he said, had not yet been discovered.

Harriet thought Roger was perfect in jail. With the discipline, routine, and defined parameters jail afforded, he was more relaxed and communicative than ever. He seemed more trusting, too—of himself, as well as others. After one of her early visits, it had come to her why he’d always
wrapped the front porch of every house they lived in with tightly spaced latticework. In retrospect, it had looked like bars.

When she finally had her fill, she had been able to disconnect from him abruptly, with no good-byes. She was back now only because of a call from his lawyer; Roger had asked to see her before trial. The request had surprised her.

She had been subpoenaed by the district attorney the previous month. When she walked into the courtroom, Roger, heavier than she had ever seen him, hadn’t even bothered to turn around and look at her. Roger’s lawyer explained to the judge that Harriet was going to invoke spousal immunity, and she had been dismissed without being called forward. Immunity ensured that Harriet, who had refused all interview requests by detectives, would not have to testify for either side. However, she had privately promised the prosecutor in a face-to-face meeting that if he couldn’t make his case without her, she would do whatever she could to help. She dreaded ever being called upon to do so, and it wasn’t something anybody could legally make her do, but she knew she must, even if it meant one day telling the world what she had done at the landfill. In all their long talks, Roger had never once shown a smidgen of remorse for his victims or their families. Harriet knew now that killers came in all sizes and shapes, and could look like, well, somebody’s husband. She understood that Roger was capable of killing again, and behind bars was where he belonged.