TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (59 page)

Debra Guffie
, the one who got away and first pointed the finger at Roger Kibbe, has disappeared.

James Driggers
, Lora Heedick’s boyfriend, was discharged from parole in April 1994. His present
whereabouts are unknown.

Robert Drossel
transferred from the
El Dorado County District Attorney’s South Lake Tahoe office to the main office in Placerville, were he supervised the attorney staff and handled major prosecutions until his retirement
in 1997. “Roger Kibbe did a lot of cruising in his
cars looking for victims,” Drossel says. “The song ‘On the Road Again’ kept running through my mind during the trial. I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure just how many he’s good for.” The man who successfully prosecuted Roger Kibbe for murder lives quietly with his family on California’s north coast.

Phil Kohn
, Roger Kibbe’s lead defense lawyer, works for the
Clark County Public Defender’s Office in Las Vegas, handling
death penalty cases. “I think the prosecutors erred in not filing special circumstances in the
Darcie Frackenpohl murder and making it a death penalty case,” Kohn says. “How hard would it have been to prove kidnapping? The evidence showed he walked the victim down that road to do damage to her. That’s a kidnap, according to the statutes.”

Harriet Kibbe
still lives in northern California. So angry at detectives for coming to her place of work and trying to intimidate her, she has to this day not spoken to authorities about her husband or the murder case against him. Not long after Roger’s conviction, she began visiting him at
Folsom State Prison. The visits continued nonstop for four years. “I still needed to make it better,” Harriet says. “I was consumed with wanting to make up for whatever part I had played in ruining his life. Then one day he called to say they were transferring him down south. I went to see him, knowing it would be the last time but not telling him. I said, ‘You know, I still love you, but there are all these dead bodies.’ Roger said, ‘Well, they’re all gone.’ “ Among the murders Harriet says Roger confessed to her: the Napa County victim (
Karen Quinones). “Not a day goes by when I don’t think of Roger and his victims,” she says. “The one picture I keep seeing in my head is Stephanie Brown’s. Why hers and not the others’, I don’t know.” Harriet, who last visited Roger in early 1996, received a twenty-first wedding anniversary card from him on April 25 of that year. She sells insurance door-to-door with her common-law husband,
Robert Hunter. She has never divorced Roger Kibbe.

Steve Kibbe
never visited his brother Roger after his arrest for murder. “Roger has not sought contact with me or anyone else in the family,” says Steve, who felt ostracized by fellow law enforcement officers as a result of his brother’s crimes. “I bent over backwards to cooperate with the investigators, even talking to Roger over the phone and allowing them to record it. I told the detectives I was
not
my brother’s keeper, but I still got slam-dunked by them.” He is also angry that he and the rest of his family
were hounded by the news
media. “There were more victims than those named in court,” he says. “I spent thirty-two years in law enforcement. I want to go out now and leave this behind me.” Steve
Kibbe retired from the
Douglas County, Nevada, Sheriff’s Department in early 1998.

Jack Kibbe
, now in his eighties, lives quietly in suburban San Diego, some fifteen miles from Roger’s
childhood home in Chula Vista. He remembers, years ago, being pestered by Roger to come out and watch him skydive. Seeing his son jump out of an airplane wasn’t something Jack was crazy about doing, but finally he relented. That day, Roger’s main chute didn’t deploy and he had trouble getting his reserve to open. “If it had been another few seconds he wouldn’t have made it,” Jack recalls. “I often think it’s just too bad Roger got his reserve chute open. It’s a terrible thing for a father to think, I know. But all those women would still be alive today.”

Roger Kibbe
is inmate #E99227 at
Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, California. He declined to be interviewed for this book. His longtime cell mate at both
Folsom and Pleasant Valley,
Dale
Sanders, reports that Roger doesn’t have many friends behind bars and lives in “constant fear” of running into a relative of one of his victims in the prison yard. For that reason Kibbe also avoids the shower room, going days without bathing. He loves chess and watches a lot of television; his favorite shows are “
Married with Children” (“Roger is crazy about Kelly Bundy,” says Sanders), “
America’s Most Wanted,” and “Cops.” He is assigned to a job in the yard crew, and is given a trash bag every morning to pick up the prison yard. Sanders says that when alone in their cell at night, Kibbe tells him stories about his crimes, often while sitting on his bunk drinking a Pepsi and eating a Hershey bar. “He hates his mother for the way she treated him as a child,” Sanders says, “and has never visited her grave.” Among the murders Sanders says Kibbe has told of committing:
Karen Finch. All his victims had long hair for a reason: “Once you get your hands in a woman’s hair, you can do anything with them,” Roger tells Sanders. “Just pull back and there’s nothing they can do.” The way he would get women to pull over, Kibbe explains, was to find one that “looked good,” speed ahead, pull over, open his hood, and fake car trouble. He claims Stephanie Brown and Karen Finch both fell for this tactic, although he adds that Stephanie “asked me a question as if she was lost. I looked both ways for traffic and grabbed her.”

Epilogue

Through the years following Roger Kibbe’s conviction in the murder of Darcie Frackenpohl, and long after he left the sheriff’s department and joined the San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office as a criminal investigator, Vito Bertocchini never forgot Stephanie Brown, Charmaine Sabrah, and the other women whom he believed Roger Kibbe had also murdered.

With the advance of DNA in criminal investigations, Bertocchini obtained a search warrant in 2000 to collect a sample of Kibbe’s blood. He drove to Pleasant Valley State Prison, and served Kibbe with the warrant requiring him to provide blood for scientific analysis. The inmate said he would probably faint during the procedure. As he rolled up a shirt sleeve for the prison nurse, Kibbe added, “I hate the sight of blood.”

After that came the laborious process of working the cold cases from the files and storage archives of the various jurisdictions involved as Bertocchini searched for viable evidence that could be compared to Kibbe’s DNA.

Three years later, after Kibbe was linked through his DNA to additional murders, Bertocchini returned to the prison, along with his former partner, Pete Rosenquist, then retired. Bertocchini told Kibbe the DNA results.

“Do you want to talk about these cases?” Bertocchini asked.

“I don’t know,” Kibbe said.

“Here’s what’s going to happen, Roger. We’ve got you made on these other cases. The D.A. will probably file special circumstances, which could mean the death penalty. If you want to avoid that, you need to start talking.”

It wasn’t as if Bertocchini cared a whit about sparing Kibbe’s life. Rather, he wanted to provide some closure for the families of Kibbe’s victims. With the exception of Darcie Frackenpohl’s family, none had seen anyone convicted of killing their loved one. With Kibbe now close to 70 years of age, and given that appeals in a California death penalty case could take up to 20 years to be exhausted, chances were good that even if he was sentenced to be executed Kibbe would die of natural causes in prison.

Kibbe seemed to be studying his hands, which were folded in his lap. “Okay,” he said softly. “I can tell you about four of them.”

As Bertocchini explained, that was the “start of the process.” Eventually, Kibbe confessed to kidnapping, raping and murdering a total of seven women: Darcie Frackenpohl, whom he had already been convicted of killing, Stephanie Brown, Charmaine Sabrah, Lora Heedick, Karen Quinones, Barbara Ann Scott, whose body was found in 1986 on a golf course next to an airport Kibbe went to for skydiving flights, and Lou Ellen Burleigh, a missing person in 1977 whose remains had never been found.

Bertocchini believes Kibbe also murdered Karen Finch. There was no DNA evidence that fingered Kibbe, however, and Kibbe denied killing her. “In talks with me,” Bertocchini said, “Roger claimed that strangulation is not a violent way to die. When he strangled a woman, he says she just went to sleep. With Finch, there was a violent struggle, during which she was stabbed in the chest and her throat slashed. I think he viewed slugging it out with a woman and stabbing her to death a failure, and one he was not willing to admit to.”

Information given by Kibbe as to where he had dumped Burleigh’s body aided authorities in locating her remains in 2011. During an eight-hour, video-taped session with Bertocchini, Kibbe described all seven abductions, rapes and murders in excruciating detail. The man across from him, Bertocchini now saw with his own eyes, was a heartless serial-killing machine. Kibbe spoke softly, with neither the tone nor volume of his voice changing for hours on end. He appeared devoid of any remorse or emotion.

On September 29, 2009, as part of a plea deal to avoid the death penalty, Kibbe, his hair white and sporting a long, scraggly beard to match, entered guilty pleas in a San Joaquin County courtroom to the six additional murders. Five weeks later, he was sentenced to six life terms without the possibility of parole.

Convicted serial killer Roger Kibbe is still incarcerated at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, Fresno County. Since his additional convictions and receiving life without parole, he is classified at Level 4, a designation given the most dangerous inmates in the state prison system.

Before Bertocchini retired in 2012, he visited Kibbe. The detective found Kibbe clean-shaven with a buzz cut and more weight on his frame, all of which made him look 20 years younger than he had in court three years earlier.

Kibbe told the detective that he stayed in his cell most of the time because there were “lots of violent inmates” in Level 4 and he didn’t want to be around them. As a result of his new classification, he no longer had all the privileges he once had, and he said he especially missed making arts and crafts.

“He knows there’s always a possibility that he may run into an inmate who was related to one of his victims,” Bertocchini reports. “He knows he could be killed by someone out for revenge or just wanting to make a name for himself in prison. Kibbe lives in fear of that happening.”

In spite of Kibbe’s confessions and life sentence that guarantees he will die in prison, Bertocchini does not feel his own strong sense of closure in the case he worked on and off for 24 years. “We linked Kibbe to six murders committed between 1986 and 1987, and one in 1977. I don’t believe this guy killed once then stopped for ten years before deciding to become a serial killer. What was he doing for those ten years? And for that matter, before 1977? That thought is scary. Really scary.”

Stephanie Brown, nineteen, a suntanned girl-next-door type, disappeared on California’s Interstate 5 after venturing into the night to give her roommate a lift.

Charmaine Sabrah, twenty-six, was enjoying a night out with her mother when her car broke down on I-5 and she accepted a ride from a stranger in a sports car.

Lora Heedick, twenty, and her boyfriend were in search of money for street drugs on the night she got into a car with a middle-aged man and was never seen alive again.