TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (7 page)

Rosenquist kept the ball rolling. “Her hair gets tangled in the ligature. He doesn’t want to leave the ligature behind. He’s afraid of prints. Or maybe—this is a fuckin’ pleasant thought—he wants to use it again. So he cuts her hair to free it.”

The detectives weren’t guessing as much as they were connecting the dots. Bertocchini slowly stirred his black coffee with a spoon just for something to do while he deliberated. “But the guy
brings
the scissors with him. How did he know he was going to need them?”

“Because he’d done it before,” Rosenquist said without skipping a beat.

Later that morning, they returned to the morgue and verified that the horizontal band of marks on Stephanie’s neck were “discontinuous” on the left side—the same side with the extra-short hair. This made them think, more than ever, that Stephanie’s hair had indeed been sheared off after she’d been strangled just to extricate the ligature.

They visited the ditch again the following morning. This time, Bertocchini brought his hip-length wading boots from his garage at home. Only instead of stepping into a fast-moving stream to hook a rainbow trout, he intended to stomp through a muddy ditch looking for something,
anything
, to help catch a killer.

When he was fastened into the big, bulky boots, Bertocchini went out into the waist-high water with a lawn rake. Starting in the area where the body had first been spotted, he began methodically to scrape the bottom. Pulling the rake through mud and silt, he brought up empty beer cans, cigarette wrappers, an oil can, and other assorted litter. They carefully picked through it all.

An hour later, he snagged an article of
clothing. Bringing it up to the bank, they unfolded the material and saw it was a blue tank top with lacy edges and a design at the nape of the neck. Before placing the garment in a plastic bag for the
crime lab, Bertocchini spotted several strands of hair stuck on it, as if it had been worn during a haircut. He carefully removed the strands of hair and placed them in an envelope.

Also, though it didn’t mean much to him at the time, Bertocchini noticed that in several places it appeared that her blouse had been ripped.

Or maybe
cut.

Three

S
tephanie was hurt when we broke up,” said her ex-boyfriend,
Randy
Miller, sneaking another look at his watch. “She loved me a lot.”

Vito Bertocchini was ready to take this skinny, blond Surfer Joe and hang him upside down by his bony ankles. In the detective’s mind, the fact that Stephanie was said to be no longer serious about this God’s-gift-to-womanhood jerk spoke well of her.

After fishing Stephanie’s blouse out of the ditch that morning, Bertocchini and Pete Rosenquist had set out to conduct alibi interviews and gather as much other information as possible. Her former live-in boyfriend had been at the top of their list. At this point in the investigation, they were as much in the dark as they’d been that night standing above the ditch—with no leads whatsoever pointing to the identity of her killer.

“I gotta tell you I wasn’t ready for a serious relationship,”
Miller went on. “I needed my freedom. She loved me so much, I just knew she’d always be there for me.”

But she’s not, is she?
Bertocchini very much wanted to say to the haughty young man in his early twenties.

Stephanie’s mother had put it best in describing the type. Some guys go around looking for the perfect rose, Jo-Allyn
Brown had sadly explained, not realizing that all along they had a rare orchid.

“Anything bothering her?” Rosenquist asked.

“She was depressed about her weight,” Miller said in the cavalier way thin people are able to talk about someone else’s weight problem. “She felt she was getting too heavy. She always wanted to look good for me.”

Another furtive glance at his watch.

The bottom line was that Randy Miller had a solid alibi for the night in question. It was too bad, because Bertocchini would have loved to pop this idiot.

“Look, guys, I have a date,” Miller finally blurted out. “I gotta get going. Can we finish this another time?”

At that moment, Bertocchini felt a wave of sadness pass over him. Stephanie’s body wasn’t even in the ground yet and this guy gave his social life a higher priority than the investigation into her murder. She deserved better.

“Sure,” Bertocchini said, standing. He suddenly wanted to be upwind as far as possible.

Back at his desk, Bertocchini phoned the south Sacramento field office of the
California Highway Patrol, intending to leave a message for the officer who had tagged Stephanie’s car at 9:40
A.M.
on July 15. As it happened, the officer’s shift had just ended and he was in the office, so he soon came on the line.

Bertocchini explained his interest in the abandoned
Dodge Colt that the officer had recently tagged at Hood Franklin.

The CHP officer,
Joseph Payne, remembered the abandoned vehicle. He explained that his shift started at 5:45
A.M.
and that the first time he had driven by the location that morning was when he had tagged the car.

Bertocchini asked whether the officer had noticed if the keys had been in the car.

“They weren’t in the ignition.”

“What about a purse or wallet?”

“I didn’t see one.”

“Did you notice if the headlights were on?”

“There were no outside lights on.”

By then—five hours or so after Stephanie had been abducted—the battery was no doubt already drained.

“I did notice a map on the ground.”

That was something new. “Where?”

“At the rear of the car,” said Officer Payne. “It was kinda crumbled up. Made me think that someone must have been lost.”

“Did you pick it up?”

“I left it.”

No map had been found at the location, but Bertocchini recalled how windy it was out there.

“See anything else?” he asked the patrolman.

“No, nothing. I tagged the vehicle and left.”

Bertocchini and Rosenquist went back to the
Hood Franklin exit. They meticulously searched both sides of the highway this time, eventually finding a crumbled map about a quarter of a mile away. It was a Mobil road map of California, folded open to the Sacramento area.

On July 19, Bertocchini and Rosenquist were invited guests at Stephanie’s big Catholic funeral. It wasn’t uncommon for a murderer to show keen interest in a victim’s funeral or grave. In one case, a killer had visited the grave site of a victim on the anniversary of her murder and incriminated himself into a recording device hidden by police near the headstone. Now, the two detectives doggedly took down the license numbers of all 123 vehicles present.

Afterward, they hung back in the church, not going forward to visit the open casket as the mourners did following the services. The detectives had already spent their time with Stephanie. It was time now for her family and friends to say good-bye.

A few days later, Jo-Allyn
Brown called Bertocchini and asked for directions to the crime scene, explaining that she and her husband wanted to see where their daughter had been found. “We just want to be in the last place she was. Somehow, we think it will help.”

“Please don’t go by yourselves,” cautioned Bertocchini, who could only imagine how difficult the trip would be for the bereaved parents. “If you’ll give me a couple of days, I’ll take you myself.”

That Saturday, he took the
Browns where they wanted to go. They drove the route from where Stephanie’s car was found on I-5 to the ditch off Highway 12. Her mother commented ominously on what a long ride it was. “I hope she was already unconscious,” added Stephanie’s father.

Bertocchini hadn’t the heart to tell them.

T
HE WEEK
after Stephanie’s murder, the detectives were ready to turn over her Dodge Colt to her parents. The entire vehicle had been dusted inside and out for latent fingerprints. Unfortunately, the only ones found belonged to Stephanie.

Rosenquist drove the Colt, with Bertocchini following. At one point, Bertocchini had to stop for gas, but Stephanie’s car had plenty.

They had found in the car a credit slip for a Sacramento Union 76 station. It was dated the night of Stephanie’s disappearance. The next day, they measured the distance from the gas station to where her car had been found. It was 31.2 miles. The trip odometer on Stephanie’s car, when it was
found deserted on I-5, had read 31.3. Obviously, she had reset it when she bought gas that night.

During the thirty-minute drive to Loomis, Rosenquist noted that the Colt’s temperature and oil pressure were within normal range. As they neared their destination, Rosenquist braked the vehicle hard several times to see if it would stall during an emergency stop, but the engine purred right along.

When they arrived, the detectives asked Jo-Allyn Brown to come outside and take a look at the car. At the crime lab, it had been discovered that the armrest and a metal shield that fit in behind the door handle on the passenger’s side were lying on the floorboard.

“Do you know if the armrest might have fallen off or been removed at any point?” Rosenquist asked.

“Not that I’m aware of,” said Stephanie’s mother. She explained that her daughter had been proud of her little car and always took good care of it.

The broken armrest conjured up another image for the two detectives: Stephanie, who by all accounts would not have gone meekly with her abductor, struggling with someone intent on pulling her from the driver’s side of the vehicle, and her desperately reaching in the opposite direction for something to hang on to.

Like the armrest.

L
T
. R
AY
B
IONDI
had a strong intuition that Stephanie Brown had been abducted and murdered by a
serial killer. He had no real proof, just a nagging hunch wrought from long experience in such sordid matters.

As commander of
Sacramento County’s Homicide Bureau for a decade, Biondi had been involved in and directed more than 400 murder investigations. The majority were what cops call “smoking-gun” cases, where there is an abundance of incriminating evidence. In these cases, the killer is usually a “novice” and often someone the victim knew—a spouse, a lover, a relative, a business associate—and is quickly identified. In other cases—known in the homicide trade as “whodunits”—the killer is not so easy to find. Solving these Sherlock Holmes–type cases required skill, dedication, and perseverance on the part of the detectives assigned to them.

Serial killers, who actually enjoy making people suffer and die, represented the biggest challenge of all. And while murder is murder, their victims usually died in the most horrifying ways. Biondi had often found law enforcement to be ineffectual in stopping
serial killers, in large part because of a failure either to recognize or accept that a string of seemingly
unconnected killings have a common denominator. Instead of focusing on a single killer, investigators tended to scatter in divergent directions. An unsolved murder series has all the confounding aspects of any whodunit with the added urgency of a race against time: until solved the killing would continue.

Serial killers differ from common, garden-variety murderers—they kill not for money or revenge or in the heat of an argument, but randomly, and for far darker reasons known only to themselves. They have no remorse, and can be highly organized. They are hard to catch, difficult to convict, and almost impossible to comprehend. Their crimes may or may not be about sex, but they’re almost always about power and control. No one can know when or where they’ll hit next, or whom they’ll serve up as their next victim.

During his career, Biondi had earned a reputation as one of the country’s most respected experts on serial murders. He had helped capture and convict more than his share of serial killers, among them:
Richard Chase, the “
Vampire Killer,” who in less than a month (in 1978) murdered and eviscerated four adults, a youngster, and an infant;
Gerald Gallego, a second-generation killer (his father had been executed by the State of Mississippi in 1954), who raped, tortured, and killed at least six teenage girls, three young women, and one young man in California, Nevada, and Oregon (1978–80);
Marty Trillo, a gardener who broke into the homes of elderly women in broad daylight and raped and killed several victims (1978–80); and
Jon Dunkle, who killed one teenager and two young boys in northern California (1981–85).

Biondi understood how difficult it was to explain fully why a serial killer does what he does (almost all serial killers are, in fact, men). The rational mind views such crimes as senseless and motiveless. They make a kind of sense to the killer, to whom alone the act has meaning. To the rest of us they seem maddeningly arbitrary. Even when a serial killer is apprehended and the case solved, police and the relatives of victims are often left wondering why it happened. Biondi was convinced that a serial killer wasn’t made overnight or, for that matter, born to his calling. In some instances, something very negative has happened in the perpetrator’s life at a crucial age, then festered inside for a long time until it implodes and starts him killing. No matter what unresolved emotions and unfulfilled fantasies bring him to that moment, after the first time he finds it easier to do again. And he usually keeps getting better and better at killing.

True, in Stephanie Brown, police had just one dead young woman, not two or three. Yet, Biondi had little doubt that she had been a random
victim, and her abduction and murder a stranger-on-stranger crime. A random victim of opportunity is usually targeted by someone who kills more than once. For these reasons, Biondi was already very much thinking series rather than one isolated, stand-alone killing.

Stephanie
Brown’s body had been discovered almost immediately, despite the fact that it had been partially submerged in the deep ditch bordered by heavy undergrowth located off a dead-end dirt road. Logically, she should not have been found for some time, which the killer no doubt counted on. Fate had intervened in the form of the fisherman looking for crawdads. The missing persons report had just been filed and was already being investigated, and also, the
jurisdiction with the Jane Doe happened to telephone the law enforcement agency that had the “right” missing person. The match had been made quickly. In Biondi’s judgment, they had gotten lucky with this one. Given the killer’s modus operandi, Biondi wondered how many of the dozens of unsolved homicides involving young females in the area this guy might be responsible for.