by John Bateson
At the time, John was on summer break after finishing his freshman year at the University of California, Davis. He was on the school’s cross-country and track teams and was a premed student. James, meanwhile, had graduated from high school and was set to attend UC Davis in the fall.
Earlier that evening an elder had come by the house to pick up James for a church outing. On the door was a note: “We’re all sick. Jim is unable to go. Thanks for coming by.”
When the elder called the house later and spoke with Gloria Ladd, her incoherence alarmed him and he contacted the police. The scene that officers walked in on when they arrived was the same scene that greeted Holmes. The front door was ajar, and Mrs. Ladd sat quietly in the dining room, smoking a cigarette. Meanwhile, John Ladd was in his bedroom, lying on the floor. He was dressed in boxer shorts, his head was on a pillow, and his body was partially covered by a blanket. Holmes noted that he was cold to the touch, in full rigor with marked lividity in the dependent portion of the body (that is, on the side facing the floor). There were no external signs of trauma—no abrasions, lacerations, or gunshot wounds.
James Ladd was lying on his bed in another room. He, too, was dressed in boxer shorts, as well as a white T-shirt. Like his brother, he was cold to the touch, in full rigor with marked lividity, indicating that both young men had been dead roughly twelve hours.
On a desk in the kitchen were two brief handwritten wills. They were signed by each brother, dated the day before, and said the same thing: “In the event of my death, I leave all of my material possessions and my money to my brother. If not surviving, to my mother, Gloria Ladd. If not surviving, to be equally divided among my aunts and uncles.”
Near the wills, on the kitchen table, were bankbooks for the two brothers, indicating that each had inherited thirty thousand dollars recently from a grandmother. On another table was what appeared to be a partially completed, unsigned note in Gloria Ladd’s handwriting indicating a possible suicide attempt.
Because portions of the police report and investigation wouldn’t be released to the media, Holmes suppressed corresponding information in his own report. Later, he added it as a confidential addendum to the file. In this supplemental report he noted Gloria Ladd’s confession to Bart Stinson.
Holmes had been on the job only four months, but already he knew Stinson because he was the police officer who questioned Marlene Olive and Chuck Riley about the deaths of Marlene’s parents, James and Naomi Olive. Over the years, Stinson had gained a reputation as “Marin’s toughest crime fighter”—this was the title of a newspaper article about him when he retired—in part because he didn’t look or sound anything like it. On the contrary, he had a confiding nature, and his soft southern accent lulled people in. This was the case with Gloria Ladd. Her motive for the murders seemed to be financial gain, but it took only a few minutes for Stinson to learn that she killed her sons because she thought it was the only way she could save them. She was certain that the world was coming to an end soon, and killing them would preserve their souls.
“The wills confused many people,” Holmes says, “because they thought she did it for the money. I sat and listened to her talk with Bart for half an hour, though, and she absolutely was convinced that she had done the right thing. Money had nothing to do with it.”
As she recounted to Stinson, Gloria Ladd told her sons that she had been exposed to hepatitis, and her doctor suggested that both boys take prescribed medicine as a preventative measure. She crushed thirty phenobarbital tablets in water for each one and saw that they consumed this tonic before they went to bed (phenobarbital is a barbiturate that is used as a sedative and also to treat certain types of seizures). Both boys were small—James was five foot five and weighed 135 pounds while John, the older of the two, was five foot nine and weighed 150 pounds—and she thought each dosage would be fatal. Instead, she found her sons alive the following morning.
At that time she gave each of them three delamine pills (delamine is an antihistamine). These had no apparent effect. That night, just before bed, she gave each son fifteen more phenobarbital tablets in water. During the night, both boys were groggy, got out of bed, and stumbled around. Once again, though, they didn’t die. The next morning she placed a plastic bag over the head of one boy, then the other, suffocating them. She couldn’t get John back into bed before doing this so she left him on the floor. The same morning she took the family dog to the Marin County Humane Society.
Holmes learned that at one time Gloria Ladd had been a mental patient at Napa State Hospital. Her brother told Holmes that five years earlier she had attempted suicide and was treated at both Marin General Hospital and a community mental health clinic. In the aftermath of John’s and James’s deaths, these agencies were criticized for not taking the boys away from their mother at that time. Child welfare workers don’t like to break up families, though, and she hadn’t abused or neglected her sons.
“I’m sure they were so obedient and trusting,” the church elder told Holmes, “that they took the pills without question.”
When Holmes talked with Gloria Ladd’s physician, he was told that a month earlier she had asked for a prescription of one hundred phenobarbital tablets. The physician refused and instead prescribed thirty delamine pills. When she asked again for phenobarbital a short time later, he prescribed another twelve delamine capsules. It was unclear where she secured the phenobarbital.
“She was a quiet lady, and her sons were good kids,” Holmes says, “not into drugs or causing trouble. She was sure that the world was ending and this was what she had to do.”
THE STEPHENSES
It’s virtually impossible for a double homicide to have any kind of happy ending. After Bill and Tasia Stephens were murdered, however, there was one bright spot.
A friend of Bill Stephens went to their house after Stephens hadn’t shown up for work in two days or answered his phone. Through a locked sliding-glass door, the friend saw the couple lying next to each other, unmoving and covered in blood, on the bed in their master bedroom. He called the police, who confirmed that the Stephenses were dead from multiple gunshot wounds. Police then called Holmes and also Child Protective Services because next to the Stephenses’ bed was a crib with a nine-month-old infant in it, alive and unhurt.
Mr. Stephens, age forty-five, was dressed in boxer-style shorts and a T-shirt. He had been shot three times—twice in the head and once in the chest. There was no evidence of powder staining, indicating that the weapon was more than a couple of feet away when it was fired.
Mrs. Stephens, forty-three, was wearing black pants and a white blouse. She had been shot twice in the head, and there was no gunshot residue on her body, either. Like her husband, she was cold to the touch, in full rigor, with moderate lividity in the dependent areas, indicating that death probably had occurred the previous day.
As usual, Holmes took oral, nasal, rectal, and vitreous fluid swabs from both bodies, as well as fingernail scrapings, fingerprints, and samples of Bill’s and Tasia’s head hair and pubic hair. Some of this information was used to confirm the decedents’ identities. In addition, vaginal swabs were done when the possibility existed that a woman had been sexually assaulted and the perpetrator’s semen might be present. Rectal swabs were taken as well, to eliminate the possibility of drug stashing (that is, people hiding drugs in a body cavity to avoid being charged with possession). The latter didn’t seem likely in the Stephenses’ case; however, as many swabs as possible were collected in all cases like this because it was the only opportunity that the coroner’s office would have.
“We did everything we could do because we knew that we’d never have that body again,” Holmes says.
There was another reason for the swabs, which was to be able to say in court that something wasn’t there. Holmes learned that the absence of something can be as important as its presence.
“If the defense asked whether we found any cocaine in a person’s nose, for example,” Holmes says, “and we
said we didn’t check, then it called into question everything we did. ‘Why didn’t you check?’ the defense might say. ‘It could have exonerated my client.’ ”
After he left the Stephenses’ house, Holmes sought out some of their friends to get information on next of kin. Mr. Stephens had a twenty-one-year-old daughter from a previous marriage who lived in Texas, while Mrs. Stephens had siblings who lived in Massachusetts, as well as parents who lived in Greece. Holmes notified everyone he could reach regarding the Stephenses’ deaths, telling them that a full-scale police investigation was under way.
In homicide cases, the first suspects are family members. That didn’t apply to the Stephenses since their families were out of state. Both Mr. and Mrs. Stephens owned small businesses, chains of video stores and hair salons respectively, and the next tier of suspects included potentially disgruntled employees. That proved not to be the case as well, until police questioned the Stephenses’ housekeeper, Yolanda Segura. She was twenty-five, from Guatemala. The Stephenses had fired her recently for being lazy, but that wasn’t what she told her boyfriend, Zohelin Diaz, also twenty-five and from Guatemala. She said that she had quit because Bill Stephens kept making passes at her and had tried to rape her.
“It was a ridiculous lie,” Holmes says. “The Stephenses were happily married, with a new baby boy. Moreover, the housekeeper weighed over three hundred pounds. She wasn’t someone most men would hit on.” He shrugs. “The police said it was a matter of Latino jealousy. I wouldn’t want to characterize anyone’s motives in a case like this, but it was hard to argue against it.”
Segura and Diaz were arrested south of San Francisco, at a motel in Daly City, after a clerk at the motel recognized photos of them that were shown on TV. Segura was convicted of manslaughter for her role in the Stephenses’ murders and sentenced to six years in prison. Diaz was sentenced to life in prison and subsequently killed himself while incarcerated.
The one positive was that the infant boy was reclaimed by the teenage mother who had given him up for adoption. During her pregnancy, seventeen-year-old Tracy Medeiros stayed at a home for teenage mothers in Northern California. There she met the Stephenses, who desperately wanted to adopt a baby. Medeiros, in turn, wanted her son to enjoy a better life than she could provide, so she agreed to let them have him. The Stephenses were present for the birth, and all three adults collectively chose the baby’s name—Travis. A year later, when Medeiros was notified that Travis’s adoptive parents had been murdered, her son’s safe, secure future suddenly vanished.
“I thought, I love him,” Medeiros decided. “I want him to be with me.”
She was living with her mother in Massachusetts and working at a state hospital for the mentally ill. She successfully applied to regain custody and arranged child care so that she could continue to work.
“It was a senseless tragedy,” Holmes says, “but at least there was a good outcome for the baby. That was something.”
WORST OF ALL
When I read the file on Tammy Vincent, my initial reaction was that the case was too heinous to include in this book. Indeed, when I mentioned it to Holmes, he said, “In terms of what the victim went through, this was the most gruesome homicide I ever dealt with. The Trailside Killer was evil, and his victims experienced awful deaths, but I don’t think any of them experienced the trials and tribulations that Tammy did.”
Ultimately, I decided that it was too important to omit. When the unidentified body of seventeen-year-old Tammy Vincent was found on a beach in Tiburon in September 1979, Holmes was still in the early portion of his career as a death investigator. When she finally was identified, it was 2007 and he was in his third term as coroner of Marin County.
“In the end we knew the story,” he says, “but in the beginning, of course, we did not.”
In the end, what Holmes and others learned was that Tammy had been brought to California from Washington State, where she had been working in a brothel. Her employers not only intended to kill her but wanted to send a message to others of what would happen if they were crossed. In all likelihood, two men were involved, although this isn’t known for certain. What is known is that her assailants showed her no mercy.
The area where Tammy was taken looks much different today than it did in 1979. Today it’s a lush green meadow known as Blackie’s Pasture. It features the life-sized sculpture of a swaybacked horse named Blackie who stood there, day after day in the same spot, for more than two decades. In 1979, however, it was a sandy beach with several dunes and a row of trees that blocked most of the beach from the roadway. A gravel pathway ran through the dunes from the street and connected near the water to a paved pathway that ran along the bay.
Long after dark, Tammy’s assailants led her down the gravel pathway to the middle of the beach, then knocked her to the ground. Holmes was the investigator who responded to the scene, and he found her blood on the pathway, so he knew where she fell. In addition, there were pieces of gravel embedded in one of her cheeks, indicating that she landed face-first.
Much more blood was found ten feet away, in grayish-white sand, surrounded by all sorts of footprints, none distinct enough to provide any clues. Tammy either ran or staggered to this spot, where she was stabbed forty-three times. In newspaper accounts the weapon was described as an ice pick, but it actually was an awl with a red handle and a spike. Holmes knew this, as did the police, because it was left at the scene. Obviously, whoever killed her didn’t care that it was found.
Also left at the scene were two cans of acetone, one empty and one open. A receipt for the awl and acetone was nearby and indicated that the items had been purchased the night before from a Woolworth’s store in San Francisco. Police tracked down the salesclerk, who remembered the buyer. He was described as a white man wearing a white leisure suit. With him was a teenage girl, about five foot six and 125 pounds, with light brown hair that was tightly curled—an apt description of Tammy Vincent. The man bought acetone—a colorless, flammable liquid found in nail polish remover and paint thinner—enamel paint, and an awl, the clerk said.
Tammy’s stabs wounds, while numerous, weren’t deep, and she managed to get up and stumble several feet. That was when her assailants doused her with acetone and set her on fire with a cigarette lighter. A witness reported seeing a bonfire on the beach shortly after 3 A.M., then a van that sped away.
The fire burned off most of Tammy’s clothing on one side of her body, all the hair on her head, and one side of her face. She was still alive, however, and even ran ten yards before collapsing. At that point she was shot once in the head, execution-style.
A jogger discovered her body at daybreak. Fortunately, the jogger came from the opposite direction and didn’t contaminate the scene. The awl was lying in the sand with fresh blood on its tip, and the solvent containers were near it, along with the lighter. Police tested each item for fingerprints, but only found two partials on one paint can that weren’t sufficient for identification.
What was left of Tammy’s clothing was parts of a black blouse, yellow halter top, and tan jeans. Also found were her shoes—high-heeled and Italian made.
The three people who were there the morning Tammy’s body was found—Holmes and two detectives from the Tiburon Police Department, John Kim and Rich Dunn—had visceral reactions upon seeing her body. It was that horrific.
Kim and Dunn worked night and day on the case. For Kim, it would lead to his own death. He was young but somewhat overweight, and one night while reviewing the evidence again he had a heart attack and died.
Over the next two months, police checked hundreds of leads, but none of them panned out. When Tammy Vincent’s body was buried, her identity was still unknown.
In many counties, an indigent person is cremated, meeting the state constitutional requirement that if someone dies and no one can be held responsible for dealing with his or her remains, then the county where the body is found has to provide a minimal disposition. This wasn’t the practice in
Marin County, however.
“We always felt that if you cremate them, there’s no going back,” Holmes says. “For a little more expense, if you work with the right cemeteries, you can inter somebody so that if you need to exhume the body one day because of new evidence that has come to light, you can.”
In Tammy’s case, and others, the coroner’s office paid the cemetery a nominal fee for a simple wooden casket and burial. The decedent’s body was put in a plastic-zippered body bag and placed in the casket, which was then laid in a four-sided concrete grave liner with a concrete lid. There wasn’t a bottom because the county couldn’t afford interment in a concrete vault, which meant that water could seep into the body bag from below and break down bones, making it more difficult to get a good DNA sample. The person’s probable identity needed to be established first, however, before a DNA test could confirm it.
Instead of a headstone, there was a bronze medallion, set in the ground, with a number on it. The cemetery had a map showing where every grave was, and in the section of the cemetery reserved for county burials there was a record of each one, indicating that John Doe #6-85 was buried in grave #19, for example.
* * *
At the time that Tammy Vincent’s body was found, Holmes took numerous swabs and also pubic hair samples (since all of the hair on her head had been burned away, he couldn’t take samples there). He sent everything he had to the Department of Justice lab to be analyzed, but because this was before DNA testing was well established, relatively little was learned. When the samples were returned to him, Holmes filed them.
Twenty-two years later, in 2001, the Marin County Sheriff’s Office, at the request of the Tiburon police chief, reopened the case. With all of the advances that had been made in DNA analysis during the previous two decades, there was new hope that Tammy’s body and the bodies of other John and Jane Does could be identified. Holmes provided Tammy’s pubic hair samples to the sheriff’s office, which in turn submitted them to the Department of Justice lab for new testing. Ironically, the breakthrough in Tammy’s case, when it came, was the direct result of a series of murders in another state that had nothing to do with her murder.