It was nearly 1:00 A.M. when she found Patty and Jim in front of the liquor store near the corner of 29th and E streets. Relieved to see her, they hopped in the passenger seat, with Patty on Jim’s lap as he gave directions to his apartment several miles away.
Jim apologized for calling Stephanie so late.
When they arrived, they all went inside.
“Okay, guys, how do I get home?” Stephanie asked.
“Look, Patty is going to take me to work in an hour,” Jim said. “Why don’t you wait and follow us?”
“Yeah,” Patty said, “you can follow me home.”
Stephanie declined the offer. She was anxious to get back, and didn’t want to wait around for an hour.
“I can find my way back,” she said. “Just write out directions.”
Jim did, directing her to take Interstate 5, which bisects Sacramento down the middle as it traverses the spine of California, mostly through its vast Central Valley. To the south the highway goes all the way to the Mexico border and to the north, Canada.
From Jim’s apartment, Stephanie was to take Bingham to Durfee, to Windbridge Road, to Greenhaven, then to Florin Road and the entrance to I-5 northbound, which would take her into Sacramento. He went over the directions with her, telling her which way to turn at each intersection. “Be sure to go north not south on I-5,” he reminded her. “It’ll say Sacramento.”
North was Sacramento and home; south was a desolate stretch of highway—40 miles to the next town.
When Stephanie left, Jim walked with her to her car and made sure she knew which way to head off.
She followed his directions …
Bingham to Durfee—
Durfee to Windbridge—
Windbridge to Greenhaven—
Greenhaven to Florin to the entrance to I-5.
But when Stephanie reached the highway, she drove past the I-5 north ramp—the “Sacramento” portion of the sign was obscured by overgrown brush.
Instead of heading north toward home, she went south.
PATTY BURRIER telephoned the Brown residence the next morning to report that Stephanie’s boss had called because she had failed to show up for work.
“Stephanie’s missing,” Patty said.
“Missing?” Jo-Allyn Brown said incredulously. “When did you last see her?”
Patty went into a somewhat confusing explanation about car trouble the night before, and Stephanie getting out of bed to give them a lift.
“What time did you last see her?”
“About one o’clock this morning,” Patty said. “She was going right home.”
After dropping Jim Frazier off at his radio station, Patty had arrived home shortly after 2:00 A.M. Discovering that Stephanie wasn’t home, she figured that her roommate had decided on the way back to crash somewhere else—maybe her sister Lisa’s, or even Randy’s. After the bank had called, Patty checked Stephanie’s room again. There was no sign she had ever come home.
“Please, get in your car and drive the route that Stephanie would have taken home,” her mother pleaded. “Her car might have broken down. Call me back!”
Jo-Allyn was alone in the house—Tom had already left for work, and Michaela for school. Her knees went weak and she sat down, trembling, at the kitchen table. She knew Stephanie wouldn’t miss work without calling in—it was completely unlike her. If she didn’t call in, it was only because she hadn’t been able to call. At that moment, her worst motherly fear hit her: Stephanie had been kidnapped, drugged, and was tied up in the back of a windowless van on its way to NewYork or some other faraway place where she would be exploited for her body or photographed for pornography.
Somehow, Jo-Allyn got to the phone on legs she could no longer feel. She called a friend who lived near Lisa to knock on her door—her oldest daughter didn’t have a phone—and tell her to get to a phone right away and call home. Then, she telephoned some of Stephanie’s friends. Those she was able to reach said they hadn’t seen her. She made a point of not staying on the line long, and after the last call, she thought, Stephanie will be calling any minute.
When the phone rang, it wasn’t Stephanie, but Lisa, who reported that she hadn’t seen her sister in days.
Finally, Jo-Allyn called Tom’s place of work, the local water district, and asked that a message be sent to him in the field to return home right away. She didn’t want to do it, and felt terrible at the thought of worrying him, but she needed him at her side now.
The only reason Stephanie isn’t calling, Jo-Allyn repeated to herself, is because she can’t. There was only one thing left to do: notify the authorities.
As Stephanie resided in an unincorporated area of town, jurisdiction fell to the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department.
When uniformed Deputy Stanley Acevedo knocked on the door of Stephanie’s duplex at 11:30 A.M. that morning, he was shown in by an unsmiling Patty. A concerned Jim Frazier was there also. Stephanie’s mother, who elected to stay home near the phone, had asked that Patty and Jim be present to speak with authorities since they had been the last to see Stephanie.
By now, Patty was very worried. She had retraced the route Stephanie should have taken home, and found no sign of her roommate or her car.
Jim, who had been so diligent about explaining to Stephanie the best route home and making sure she headed off in the right direction, was also very troubled. He kept replaying the directions over in his mind: Had he written them out correctly? He was certain he had. So, what had gone wrong?
Patty and Jim told the deputy of their car trouble the previous night, and how they had called Stephanie for a ride. They also explained that she was unfamiliar with the area Jim lived in and how he had given her explicit directions home.
“I don’t get it,” Patty said. “If she had gotten lost or had car trouble, she would have called.” Or if Stephanie had stayed at a friend’s house, Patty went on, she would have shown up or called by now.
The deputy asked what Stephanie was wearing.
“White shorts and a tank top,” Patty said. “Blue, I think. She’d been in bed and just threw some things on to come get us.”
Patty found a recent picture of Stephanie and gave it to the deputy. In the snapshot, a smiling Stephanie had tilted her head to one side and thrust her shoulder toward the camera in a coquettish pose. Her mane of wavy blond hair flowed well below her shoulders. Ever since she had been a little girl her dazzling smile was the first thing most people noticed about Stephanie. In person, it was accentuated by her big brown eyes that widened excitedly at the right moment to let you know that her joyful expression was genuine, not forced.
Patty told the deputy that Stephanie had remarked that she didn’t have any cash on her. Patty also reported the obscene phone calls, as well as Stephanie’s mention of the loud knocking at the door.
Before he left, Deputy Acevedo interviewed Stephanie’s mother by phone. To his pointed questions, Jo-Allyn Brown said that her daughter was not overly rebellious or difficult, nor was she on probation or in any trouble with the law. And yes, she was in sound mental condition.
“Anything bothering her?” asked the deputy.
“Not that I know of. She was in good spirits when she was here. She was excited about going to a concert this weekend.”
“Do you have your daughter’s fingerprints?”
“What?”
“A fingerprint card, maybe?”
“No.”
“Are dental X-rays available?”
“I guess so,” she sighed.
“I have to ask these questions, Mrs. Brown,” the deputy explained apologetically.
“I understand. I’m sure her dentist has X-rays. I can give you his number.”
“I’ll need it.”
When Deputy Acevedo returned to the station, he typed up a two-page missing person report that included such details as Stephanie’s shoe size (8½ narrow), waist measurement (27 inches), bra size (36D), and vehicle license number (2AEF486).
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br /> When the deputy finished, the report was reviewed by his sergeant. Acevedo explained that this case didn’t have the feel of a routine missing person. The sergeant agreed that Homicide should be notified right away. Otherwise, if the report were submitted through channels and left to surface on its own, it could take days to land on a detective’s desk.
They also gave Communications a description of the missing woman and her vehicle. A “BOLO” (“be on the lookout for …”) was radioed to all county sheriffs’ units as well as California Highway Patrol cars in the area.
It had been twelve hours since Stephanie Brown had turned south not north onto I-5.
EARLIER that morning, Allen Dakin, fifty, had bicycled toward his favorite fishing hole along a slough of northern California’s great freshwater delta, fed by endless tributaries that snaked down far-off mountains.
The supercharged heat that radiates off the ruler-flat Central Valley floor in midsummer was already warming to the task. The land was fertile here south of Sacramento due only to the miracle of irrigation. Days before, the thermometer had soared within a notch or two of a quarter-century-old record for that date of 110 degrees. It would be another scorcher today—the best fishing would be early, the fisherman knew. By midday, he planned to be sitting in his pint-size mobile home with a tall cold one after a fish fry.
Dakin stopped at a flooded irrigation ditch off a seldom-used two-lane road adjacent to a cultivated cornfield. It was his cache for live bait: fat crawdads that bass often hit on. He climbed off his bike, and was working his way down the ditch checking his crawdad traps when he spotted her.
Though the body was floating facedown, he knew it was female by her shape—too, the only thing she had on above the waist was a pink bra. He also knew there was no point in trying to pull her out. She had obviously been there for a while, and was surely dead.
At that point, the middle-aged man panicked. Jumping on his bike, he pedaled away furiously, leaving his fishing rod and tackle on the ground. Not stopping at the nearest farmhouse about a mile away, he passed a dozen more farms as he rode all the way home to call the authorities.
Deputies from the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Department and an emergency crew from the local fire department were the first to respond to the scene at 8:45 A.M. With irrigation water from an adjacent field pouring into the ditch nearby, they used a long gaff to push the body to the opposite bank, where they could better prevent it from drifting downstream.
Two San Joaquin Sheriff’s detectives, based in Stockton, some 35 miles south of Sacramento, arrived half an hour later. From the passenger’s side of the unmarked car emerged Pete Rosenquist. A trim six-footer, he was handsome in a classic Paul Newman way, with sandy-colored hair and sky-blue eyes. With sixteen years on the force and seven in Homicide, Rosenquist, nearing forty, was the wise veteran. A strong, quiet type, he had a been-there-done-that confidence that didn’t come off as cockiness. He was willing to be a team player, but was just as comfortable working alone. This fit the style of San Joaquin’s five-member Homicide Bureau, where individual detectives were assigned to murder cases, rather than teams of two partners as in most departments. Whichever detective wasn’t tied up in court or was otherwise least busy with “unsolves” would get the “fresh one.” If someone needed help with a crime scene or interviewing a difficult witness or making an arrest, he’d ask whichever detective had time to come along.
The driver, David “Vito” Bertocchini—big, barrel-chested, 6-foot-2, under thirty, black hair and matching mustache—was as tough as he looked. On the force six years, he’d been the type of street cop who relished a good bar fight to break up. Now that he was working detectives—he was brand new to Homicide—he missed the action of Patrol. Bertocchini was no fashion plate: he favored nylon windbreakers, polyester pants from Sears or JCPenney, and rarely a tie. Nobody could say, however, that he wasn’t impassioned about his work. An old hand like Rosenquist only had to point and get out of the way—the irrepressible Bertocchini would find a way to get the job done, no matter what.
By luck of the draw, this new case had been assigned to Bertocchini. It would be only his second homicide—the first had been the shooting of a drug dealer, still unsolved. Rosenquist was along because he was between court appearances on another case and had offered to help out. These two were opposites, and not just in appearance. Rosenquist could at times be as laconic as Calvin Coolidge, while Bertocchini, with a born salesman’s gift of gab, was always on full volume. Yet, in Rosenquist, the sagely Homicide veteran, newcomer Bertocchini would find his mentor.
Before allowing the body to be removed from the water, the two detectives went down the steep bank to take a look. Floating facedown in the water, the shirtless victim’s back was exposed. They could see some long twigs and leaves caught under her bra strap. Her back and shoulders were dirty, as were her white shorts. Her legs were not visible in the murky water.
Back at the top, the detectives made a cursory search of the immediate area for any type of evidence. The ditch was surrounded on all sides by tall grass and weeds. There was a makeshift trail of freshly matted-down grass leading down the embankment on the side of the ditch where the body had first been discovered. Midway down the slope the detectives found a woman’s leather sandal. A matching one was at the waterline. The shoes were photographed and taken as evidence.
When the detectives gave the word, a bare-chested fire department captain with a rope around his waist went down the embankment and strapped the body into a wire-type gurney used for emergency evacuations. The gurney was then pulled up to the road.
The detectives could now see red abrasions at the front of the dead woman’s neck, and a band of purplish discoloration around her neck—the telltale markings of ligature strangulation. Whatever had been used to garrote her was gone.
About then, a paunchy, bespectacled private pathologist on contract with the county arrived. He took the core temperature of the body by making an incision in her back and inserting a probe directly into the liver. It registered 81 degrees. He found varying degrees of rigor mortis in the jaw, the legs, and the upper extremities. He also measured the temperature of the water and the air to assist in calculating the approximate time of death.
Nothing would be official until after the autopsy, of course. But at this point, it was an apparent homicide.
The body carried no identification, and no purse or wallet was found. For now, she was “Jane Doe.”
From experience, Rosenquist knew that it was all but impossible to solve a murder when the victim was unidentified. Most investigations, when the killer was unknown, had to start with the victim; her movements in the last hours and days, lifestyle, known associates and enemies, etc. Trying to solve a murder without knowing the identity of the victim was like trying to survey a plot of land with a blank measuring tape. Left to making wild guesses, you had to get real lucky. Like maybe the killer walks into the nearest sheriff’s substation and confesses. Or a witness to the abduction comes forward with a description of the suspect or his vehicle. Even better: the killer gets tanked and brags to the wrong person on the next barstool. What a homicide detective hopes for, every hour of every day as he tries to cover as many bases as possible, is for the victim to be identified, so that the real murder investigation can begin in earnest.
After the young woman’s body was removed from the scene and on its way to the county morgue in Stockton, Bertocchini and Rosenquist made a wider search of the area on both sides of the ditch, and on the other side of the dirt road. They drove down the narrow lane until it ended within a mile at a deserted farm labor camp. Finding no other evidence, they departed around noontime.
They had a postmortem to attend.
ON THEIR downward trek to the Pacific Ocean, two great white-water rivers, the Sacramento and the American, flow from the Sierra Nevada Mountains into the Sacramento Valley floodplain. At the confluence of these rivers lies the city of Sacramento, the California state capital, settle
d a century earlier by an influx of farmers, ranchers, gold miners, and railroad laborers.
Today, downtown Sacramento, the center of political power in the nation’s largest state, is anchored by a cluster of low-slung skyscrapers, much of their impressive square footage taken up with the day-to-day running of state business. This is home to the state legislature, a sometimes corrupt and often gutless body (to alleviate prison overcrowding six years earlier the legislature cut many sentences in half) with a dismal record for failing to pass meaningful laws, thereby leaving one tough call after another up to the citizens or special interests to pursue via the ballot initiative process.
Notwithstanding Sacramento’s nickname, the “City of Trees,” so ordained because of old-growth trees that provide street-side canopies of foliage, a more accurate moniker today would be “Los Angeles Jr.” Clogged freeways, stifling smog, street gangs, an increase in violent crime, and a seemingly unconquerable homeless problem are among the social ills shared by California’s first and fourth largest cities.
Sacramento’s surrounding suburban communities—with sun-kissed names like Citrus Heights, Rancho Cordova, Orangevale—sprawl outward in three directions for a thousand square miles, making up greater Sacramento County. The climate, and nearby camping, boating, fishing, hunting, and snow skiing, as well as the close proximity of Reno and San Francisco (both two-hour drives), coupled with a huge employment pool at several once-thriving military bases, have helped to attract a million and a half residents.
At 2:10 P.M. on July 15, 1986, the missing person report generated by Stephanie Brown’s mother hit the desk of Sacramento County Sheriff’s Sergeant Harry Machen of Homicide at headquarters downtown.
Machen was up to his eyeballs more than usual, as the other three detectives in the Bureau were out on a new double homicide, which meant that everything else came his way. But noting that the report was barely an hour old and had been hand-carried from Patrol up to the third-floor Homicide Bureau, he looked at it right away. In charge of Adult Missing Persons, Machen had set up the reporting procedures, even designing the succinct but detailed forms used department-wide. Six hundred missing persons reports came into the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department every year, and Machen carried out the majority of the investigations himself. A lot of them involved juvenile runaways, errant spouses, and other individuals who didn’t want to be found. Then, there were the others—those who dropped out of sight involuntarily for more ominous reasons.
Trace Evidence: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer Page 2