Patty’s brow furrowed. She seemed to be considering the question very seriously.
“She’d have been real scared, but she definitely would have resisted. I know she wouldn’t have been out hitchhiking if her car had broken down. But she might have accepted a ride or help if she felt they were trustworthy. She wanted to think the best of people.”
The detectives drove directly to the home of Jo-Allyn and Tom Brown, arriving at 10:30 P.M.
“I’m very sorry to tell you that your daughter’s body has been positively identified by her driver’s license thumbprint,” Bertocchini said somberly.
“You’ve seen her?” Jo-Allyn asked.
The detective nodded.
“Was she—cut up or—mutilated?”
“No, nothing like that happened,” Bertocchini answered softly.
The grief-stricken parents had been braced for the news since two Sacramento County homicide detectives had knocked on their door three hours earlier and begun by saying, “Please sit down.” The Browns had seen enough police dramas on television to know what came next.
Lt. Ray Biondi had sent the detectives because he was afraid of a leak to the press—which in every big city monitors police radio frequencies. He hadn’t wanted the parents to hear about their daughter’s death on the news or from an inquiring reporter.
The Sacramento detectives had earlier told the Browns of finding Stephanie’s car deserted on I-5, and of the young woman’s body found 15 or 20 miles away that had been “tentatively identified” as Stephanie based on photographs.
For Jo-Allyn Brown, in obvious shock and grasping a wadded tissue now as she spoke to Bertocchini and Rosenquist, the real blow had come that morning.
Ever since Stephanie had been reported missing, her mother instinctively knew that something dreadful had happened. All day, she’d been wondering just how parents of kidnap victims who are never found could endure such an ordeal. Not knowing had to be the worst torture imaginable. If Stephanie had been killed, her mother at least wanted an intact body to pray over, say good-bye to, and bury nearby.
Thank God, she’s been found, Jo-Allyn thought.
Stephanie could come home now.
Two AND A half hours later, Rosenquist and Bertocchini stood on the embankment above the irrigation ditch that Stephanie’s body had been pulled from that morning. They had come here to check the ambient light at approximately the same time she had been killed the previous night.
A half moon hung sideways in the sky, but otherwise the night was as black as a bottomless pit.
They both understood that this exercise was part of the visceral attachment that a detective inevitably makes to each and every victim. They wanted to go where Stephanie had gone on her last ride, following the same roads and going past the same terrain. They wanted to be where she had died just twenty-four hours earlier.
They hung around, not wanting to go just yet. Each wanted to stay as close as they could to the crime scene—antennae all the way up and sensors turned on.
One thing that registered with them both was how incredibly isolated this location was, which caused them to ask aloud: How did the killer find it in the dark?
They concluded that he had to have been familiar with I-5 and the surrounding area. On this back road at this time of night—so close and yet so far away from the nonstop traffic of a perpetually busy interstate highway—he’d have had little worry of his evil deeds being interrupted. He must have known that.
As Bertocchini stood listening to about a million frogs croaking contentedly in nearby ditches and ponds, he pondered what must have happened here twenty-four hours earlier. Had she been alive and conscious during the fifteen- or twenty-minute ride here? Yes, he decided, she must have been. Bound and awake, taken away by force … the ride had to have been unbelievably terrifying for her.
Once they had arrived at the side of the ditch, how long had her ordeal gone on? Had her screams filled the night or had she been gagged? Had her attacker killed before, or was it his first time? Had he panicked afterward, or did he stay calm and collected?
Some questions couldn’t be answered, but others could, through instinct and deduction. Based on the scene, Bertocchini and Rosenquist both felt they were dealing with a very cool customer, as he had been careful not to leave behind any incriminating evidence. If he’d assaulted and killed her here, as they figured he must have, the killer had shown enormous composure to pick up after himself before departing.
“Pete, why do you think he re-dressed her?”
Rosenquist didn’t answer right away. “Maybe he was ashamed,” he ventured. “Or maybe he was hoping we wouldn’t look for sexual assault. He knows that’s a good way for us to find blood type and other incriminating evidence. I’m just guessing here.”
Bertocchini found himself thinking about how much he’d like to get his hands on the scumbag who had kidnapped, beaten, abused, and killed a young woman who had so much of her life yet to live. No doubt the killer would prove to be less brave when faced with someone whose hands weren’t tied and who could hit back. That was usually the case with creeps. Bertocchini brought himself back quickly from his fantasy of ministering street justice. He was a detective, responsible for collecting evidence and making a case. A good homicide cop had to be tough-minded, he knew, and possess a deeply rooted spirit of detachment. It was his job to stay observant, thoughtful, and within himself, so as to keep an open mind and not overlook a thing.
Two days later, Bertocchini went back to speak to Stephanie’s parents. He was looking for as much information about her as he could possibly find—her life, her friends, her patterns. With no suspect or incriminating evidence, it was the best place to start an investigation.
After going down a list of questions, Bertocchini asked if Stephanie normally locked her car doors while driving at night.
“Oh, yes. She was good about that.”
“Was it her habit, do you know, of driving with her driver’s window down at night?”
“At night? No. She kept her windows up.”
In examining the impounded vehicle earlier that day, Bertocchini discovered it had a dead battery. The headlights switch was in the “on” position, but not the emergency flasher. Once the battery was jumped, the engine started right up. No doubt the headlights’ being on all night accounted for the dead battery. The car had plenty of gas, and appeared to have no mechanical problems. So much for the theory that Stephanie may have had car trouble and was waiting in a disabled vehicle or had walked away for assistance.
Bertocchini had seen the collection of photographs that Sergeant Machen had taken from various angles of Stephanie’s car at the Hood Franklin off-ramp. Flipping through the images of the Dodge Colt at the side of the road, Bertocchini had noted that Stephanie had obviously pulled over cautiously and, almost certainly, voluntarily. Having spent many years in Patrol, Bertocchini recognized the manner in which the car was parked at the shoulder, with its driver’s window rolled down. It looked like a police stop. He had heard chilling stories of Los Angeles’ famous “Red Light Bandit,” who decades earlier had pulled young women and couples over at night with a portable red light atop his vehicle in order to abduct and rape his female victims. Had something similar happened out on I-5 that night? Is that why Stephanie had pulled over, left her car in neutral and the lights on? The thought of a dirty cop, or even someone pretending to be a police officer, was among every cop’s worst nightmares. Bertocchini had also noted something disturbing about the marks on her right wrist. She’d been bound, anyone could see that, and the bindings were never found. The marks, Bertocchini thought, looked similar to the type left on a suspect’s wrist when handcuffs were put on too tight. Of course, anyone could buy handcuffs. As for the possibility of a red-light stop, Bertocchini and Rosenquist had kicked it around without reaching any conclusion. They knew it was just as credible that Stephanie had simply become lost and pulled over to get her bearings or turn around. There were, however, questions
: Could she have been surprised in the dark by her abductor? If she had seen a stranger coming out of the dark, would she have lowered her window to speak to him? Without locking her doors? Would she have gotten out of her car to speak to someone, perhaps to get directions?
“Tell me, Mrs. Brown, was Stephanie very trusting of people?” Bertocchini asked.
Jo-Allyn showed a faint, sad smile at the memory. “Oh, yes, very much so. I called her my ‘love child.’ She could never understand how people could be mean to each other. She was very giving and trusting.”
During the course of this interview, Stephanie’s mother showed pictures of her daughter.
“She would buy presents for her friends even if she was short of money,” her mother reminisced. “She would never turn down a friend in need. I tell myself she was too God-darn perfect for this earth. I know my daughter is in heaven, Detective. She’s in a peaceful place where no one will ever hurt her again.”
In every picture of Stephanie the detective was shown, her blond hair was quite long—much longer than it had been at the morgue.
“She’d cut her hair?” he asked nonchalantly.
“Oh, no,” her mother replied. “She’d worn her hair long since grammar school.”
A red flag went up for Bertocchini.
“Mrs. Brown, how was Stephanie wearing her hair when you last saw her?”
“In a ponytail. She usually put it up at night.”
“I mean—how long was it?”
“Mid-back. To her bra line.”
Bertocchini wasn’t sure how to say this except to the point. “Her hair was short when we found her.”
“Short? Then whoever killed her cut it.”
It was not open to discussion.
BERTOCCHINI and Rosenquist returned to the morgue the following morning.
Considering the invasive procedures that had been performed the previous day, the body under the sheet looked surprisingly whole. It was to be turned over that day to a private funeral home.
They rolled the corpse over onto its side.
Stephanie’s once long, flowing hair was now so short on one side it didn’t even cover her ear. Her hair was strangely lopsided: an inch or two long on the left side, and about 5 inches long on the right.
Bertocchini held the ends of a clump of greasy hair.
“It’s chopped off.”
The hair wasn’t shredded as if slashed by a knife but cut cleanly, although it had the definite look of having been hacked off randomly by someone who wasn’t going for style.
They interviewed Stephanie’s regular hairdresser, who confirmed what Jo-Allyn Brown had said about Stephanie wearing her hair long. The stylist, hired by the family to fix Stephanie’s hair for the funeral, had herself been shocked by the short and ragged condition of her client’s hair. In her opinion, the hasty chop job had been done with scissors.
“How do you figure it?” Bertocchini asked the following morning over high-octane coffee at a hole-in-the-wall across the street from the courthouse.
Rosenquist shrugged. “Maybe he wanted some of that nice long hair to take home. I don’t know.”
Each stayed quiet for a while.
“Those discontinuous marks around her neck, remember?” Bertocchini finally offered. “Her long hair got caught under the ligature as he strangled her. That’s why in some places there’s no marks.”
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
Stephanie 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 i
n 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.
Trace Evidence: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer Page 5