The detective told Reed that Gerson had been convicted of murder, served seven years, and was paroled in May 1985. In the year since, Gerson had been a “good suspect” in another San Joaquin Valley town in the rape-strangulation of a twenty-two-year-old woman, although there hadn’t been enough evidence to charge him.
Reed next called Gerson’s parole agent. As Gerson was no longer serving parole, the agent didn’t have a current address on him. When Reed told him of the Karen Finch case, the parole agent said, “Yes, he would be capable of that.”
The state department of motor vehicles had an old address on Gerson, too. Nine traffic citations had been issued to him by various jurisdictions in the past eighteen months. Reed contacted the traffic courts to see if Gerson had given a more current address at any of his appearances. In this way, Reed found Gerson’s Sonora address, which he’d supplied to the court some months earlier.
The address sounded familiar. Reed flipped through the Finch file until he found what he was looking for. The slasher murderer, Rick Gerson, had lived two doors from the apartment Karen Finch had first moved to after she separated from her husband.
Reed sat face-to-face with Rick Gerson, not long after, in an interview room of the Stanislaus County Jail, where he’d been booked several days earlier on a misdemeanor.
Reed asked the ex-con if he was willing to assist in eliminating himself as a possible murder suspect.
“Yes, I’d be glad to help,” said Gerson, a big, muscular guy with Elvis sideburns and tinted glasses.
“Do you remember where were you on Sunday, June 14th?”
“June 13th was my birthday,” he said. “On Sunday, I was in Sonora. I dropped my fiancée off at work around 2:30 P.M. I picked her up that evening after work about 10 P.M.”
Gerson said that in between driving his fiancée to and from work he was home alone, meaning he had no alibi for the hours during which Finch had apparently disappeared.
Until recently, Gerson had worked for a courier service, which assigned him regular routes that had taken him, at various times, to Modesto, Fresno, and Sacramento on Highway 99 and I-5, sometimes until as late as 2:00 A.M.
Reed went over some other dates, starting with the date Lora Heedick disappeared.
“Were you in Modesto on April 20, 1986?”
“No, I was making deliveries to Fresno then.”
Reed asked about July 15, 1986—“Were you driving on I-5 south out of Sacramento late Monday night or very early Tuesday morning?”
“In July I was driving the Fresno route. If I wasn’t on the road, I would have been home in Sonora.”
Reed asked Gerson if he’d been driving on I-5 toward Sacramento early in the morning of August 17, 1986, even though he looked nothing like the composite of the man whom Carmen Anselmi said her daughter had ridden off with.
“Man, that was a year ago,” Gerson said, scratching his head. “August—no, I wasn’t going to Sacramento then. I was working farther south. What day of the week was that?”
“Sunday.”
“I didn’t work Sundays. I don’t know where I was.”
“Are you familiar with the I-5 series of murders?”
“Yes, it’s on the nightly news all the time. I’m an ex-con and with this type of crime, I watch out. If I can mentally place myself somewhere else at the time that these events occurred, it helps.”
“Are you responsible for any of these murders?”
“No.”
“Were you responsible for the murder you were previously convicted of?”
“No, but the evidence was strong against me.”
For Reed, Rick Gerson would be one of those monstrous thorns in the side that periodically came with a case—a guy who could be “good” for the deed but who can’t be placed at the scene. For months, his name would keep popping up in connection with Finch. Although no evidence ever built up against him, with so many intriguing coincidences—like his having lived two doors from Finch—he was never really cleared either. He hung around like a freeloading houseguest who arrived for the weekend and spent the summer.
Just one more murderer walking the streets, Rick Gerson would, in the end, prove to be simply another distraction to be dealt with in pursuit of a serial killer.
AS OF June 1987, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department Homicide Bureau had received five hundred suspect leads in the I-5 series via the media. Of those, Lt. Ray Biondi counted twenty individuals as viable suspects who should be investigated; “should be” were the operative words.
The Bureau was handling, on average, one new murder a week. In the first six months of the year, detectives had twenty-two homicides, all but one of which had been solved. Ten unsolved cases were carried over from 1986, as were eight even older cases that had new, workable leads. The Bureau also received an average of three missing persons cases a day, and at midyear had ten cases that were being investigated.
For nearly a year Biondi had been firing long memos up the chain of command requesting help. He had visions of his memos being folded into paper airplanes and launched out upstairs windows. He was convinced he’d become known within the department as the world’s biggest whiner.
Biondi had been promised more than once that help was on the way, only for it not to materialize. But in early July, the promise was finally kept: four detectives from other bureaus were authorized to transfer to Homicide for temporary assignment to work I-5.
He had lobbied so long and hard for reinforcements, when they finally came to pass, Biondi felt neither jubilation nor surprise. “It’s about time,” he offered grimly. There would be, he knew, other aggravating struggles ahead: Where were the new homicide detectives going to work and what were they going to drive, for example, as no office space was available in Homicide and no spare cars existed in the entire division?
Why was help finally on its way? In retrospect, the big press conference held the same month as the sheriff’s election had pinned down the department. After the ballyhoo, and given that the body of another young woman (Karen Finch)—abducted, no doubt sexually assaulted, murdered, and dumped—had since been found in Sacramento County, common sense dictated that something had to be done. Also, to Biondi’s pleasant surprise, in Captain Frank Wallace he’d found himself with an irascible if effective new ally who managed to sell the top brass on the fact that the staffing of Homicide was insufficient to handle its cumulative caseload and, at the same time, conduct an aggressive investigation into the rash of unsolved female murders. Too, maybe all the paper planes zinging out the windows had helped. Whatever the reasons, Biondi would finally have the live bodies he needed to launch a serious investigation.
Biondi knew the four new detectives were totally unfamiliar with the cases and would need time to review all the reports and organize the files. Once they were comfortable with the cases, he had some ideas of directions to send them, but he also wanted them to be free to follow their noses. There being no time to train rookie detectives, three of the four selected had previously done stints in Homicide. The fourth, Biondi phoned to give the good news.
“Just wondering,” he deadpanned, “you still interested in coming to Homicide?”
“Heavens, yes!” Kay Maulsby said.
A year nearly to the day after Stephanie Brown was abducted on I-5, strangled, and dumped in a ditch 20 miles away, an I-5 task force had finally been born.
The hunt was joined for an elusive serial killer.
Twelve
When DOJ criminalist Jim Streeter received the clothing evidence in the Karen Finch case two weeks after her body had been discovered, it didn’t take him long to recognize that the cutting was the same as what he’d seen in the Stephanie Brown and Charmaine Sabrah cases.
Some articles of clothing were cut completely through, as if to remove them. Other garments were cut in the telltale teasing patterns, or what Streeter had labeled “nonfunctional” cutting in the Brown and Sabrah cases.
Finch’s pink tank top was sl
iced down the front in a series of jagged cuts that would have exposed the victim’s breasts. But there were also slits of one-quarter to one-half inches in length coming off the center cut, slits with no discernible function. The top was also cut from under the victim’s left arm down toward the bottom of the garment, but stopped short of the hem. At the shoulder seam was another cut—approximately one-half inch in length—that went nowhere. The left shoulder strap was almost cut through, but not quite.
The blue shorts and pink panties were cut in an identical pattern, suggesting that the victim had been wearing them both when cut. They were cut completely through in the front, beginning on the left side seam and running across the crotch down to the hem of the right leg.
The shorts were splattered with blood that turned out to be the victim’s type A. To Streeter, it appeared that the victim was wearing the shorts—or at least they were nearby—when she received her violent stab wounds. They had been found on the road, near copious amounts of type A blood.
At the autopsy, no sperm had been detected by the pathologist when he examined the rape kit swabs under a microscope. This didn’t deter Streeter, as it was not uncommon for a trained criminalist to find sperm after a pathologist had failed to do so. At the DOJ lab, specimens were routinely subjected to histological stains, a process that makes different cells easy to identify. In the case of sperm, what was commonly referred to as the “Christmas tree” stain was used; the heads of sperm cells became red and the tails turned green. When Streeter microscopically examined two slides marked “cervical” and “introital”—the latter swabbed from the opening of the victim’s vagina—they both lit up in a brilliant red-and-green collage.
The hairs in the victim’s pubic combings were similar to her own light brown pubic hairs plucked at the morgue by a coroner’s assistant, Streeter noted. And he observed nothing remarkable—no blood, tissue, etc.—in the scrapings from underneath her fingernails recovered at the morgue as part of the rape kit examination.
A piece of duct tape found on the road turned out to be different from the duct tape found stuck to the victim’s hair. A latent print analyst could find no fingerprints to lift off either length of tape.
Always, Streeter came back to the cutting. Obviously, the act meant something so important to the killer that he carried scissors to the crime scene and repeated the ritual again and again.
After his initial analysis of the Finch evidence, Streeter called Biondi. “I’m looking at lots of nonfunctional cutting, more than Brown and even Sabrah,” the criminalist said. “Cuts that go nowhere—up, down, sideways.”
Even when they did find the killer, Biondi knew they might never learn the culprit’s inner thoughts and feelings as to why he did what he did. Why he killed whom he killed, why he cut their clothing, why anything. With serial killers, the authorities and the families of victims rarely got answers to those kinds of troubling questions.
Biondi didn’t think that the I-5 killer was a rapist who happened to be killing, or even a killer who happened to be raping. He exhibited signs of a true serial killer; his motive was no doubt psychological, with his perverted acts having meaning only to him. At the scene of any serial killing where the victim had been raped, it would be correct to say the motive was sexual assault. But it usually went deeper than that. What was the killer actually accomplishing in acting out his fantasy? Almost always it came down to power and control, with the crimes committed by individuals who were otherwise powerless in their daily lives, or thought they were. It was about control of the situation, control of the moment, controlling who would die, controlling how and when. The crime was an elaborate dance for the killer that prolonged his power over the victims. He felt superior to someone, maybe for the first time in his life; his ability to end a life whenever he decided to do so gave him the power so long denied him.
But Biondi wasn’t interested in becoming an amateur psychologist. He preferred to get on with the investigation. From a detective’s point of view, motive wasn’t the most important thing. Sure, in a cop’s ideal world it would be nice to know the motive every single time. But much more important was identifying the killer and developing the evidence that linked him to the murder. Cases were solved and successfully prosecuted all the time where motive was never known.
“It’s clear to me he’s psychologically torturing his victims,” Streeter continued.
“Could be a big turn-on for him,” Biondi said matter of factly.
Biondi knew that regardless of a serial killer’s psychological demons, his reasons for killing might be a lot simpler than forensic experts, psychological profilers, and true-crime writers would sometimes have the world believe.
He’d known plenty of serial killers who had killed simply because they enjoyed it so damn much.
KAY MAULSBY had finally made it.
Life at the Homicide Bureau, however, did not start out as she had pictured. For starters, she and the other three detectives assigned temporarily to the I-5 investigation had no place to work, no desks, no phones, nor were they assigned cars.
First things first: Maulsby made arrangements to borrow an unmarked car from Vice, where she’d previously worked, while the other “newbies” had to borrow a set of wheels every time they wanted to hit the pavement.
With no available work space for them in Homicide, the four new detectives put down roots in a combination conference and storage area down a short hallway. Cardboard boxes filled with old case files were stacked chest-high and three-deep against one wall. Most of the remainder of the floor space was taken up with a conference table, a variety of hard and cushioned chairs, and two old metal desks that were placed top-to-top and pushed into a corner. A window looked out over the Detective Division’s parking lot.
The I-5 investigation consisted of several cardboard boxes containing assorted charts, maps, loose documents, and the all-important case volumes, which included crime scene reports, autopsies, and interview reports.
The first thing Maulsby did was to pin the maps on the wall that showed the widespread locations of the abductions and body dumps. Then, she and the other detectives emptied the boxes onto the conference table, and sat down to sort through the files and begin reading.
An hour later, they were busily taking notes and discussing the cases when a group of detectives with their lieutenant in tow showed up to have a scheduled meeting around the conference table.
The I-5 investigation quickly went back into the boxes, and the four nomad detectives making up the special task force to find a killer had to get lost for a while.
So it went, every day, several times a day.
Homicide had been given the extra personnel to work the series, but little else. Everyone knew it was a ridiculous way to run a major investigation. Ideally, they should have had a “war room” equipped with desks, phones, and filing cabinets; a place where all the files were organized and easily accessible and where detectives could sit side-by-side, exchanging ideas, opinions, and observations.
But Maulsby was not looking for excuses. Like the good cop she was, she’d make do with what she was provided.
After she’d read the cases and visited all the crime scenes, she paired up with one of the other detectives assigned temporarily to Homicide: Joe Dean, a forty-year-old sergeant from the Jail Division who had worked Homicide for a couple of years before getting his stripes, which resulted in his transfer. Built like a linebacker at 6-foot-2, 200 pounds, Dean was a hard-nosed Joe Friday kind of cop who tended to see things in black-and-white with no shades of gray.
The last week of July, Maulsby came into Biondi’s office to talk about the Heedick case.
In Biondi’s opinion, the best homicide detectives were very idealistic, and he had recognized this quality in Maulsby. What drove them forth in nearly impossible situations for extremely long hours had to be their unshakable belief that every murder could be solved. To be comfortable with anything less was unacceptable.
Based on what she’d
read, Maulsby explained earnestly, she felt that James Driggers was a viable suspect in the murder of Lora Heedick and he needed to be worked.
Maulsby noted that Rita Driggers’s phone bill had confirmed collect calls from the pay phone that Driggers claimed he had waited at that night, but also on the bill was another Modesto number called from the pay phone and charged to Rita’s number that had never been identified.
“I think we should get a warrant and go to the phone company and find out who else he called,” she said.
Biondi appreciated that theirs was a fresh objective. He told them of the difficulties experienced by Stan Reed—he’d gone back to the rotation and was handling new murders—in getting Driggers out of the case. Driggers had lied to his mother about the circumstances of Heedick’s disappearance, caused her to file a police report with false information, failed a polygraph, had a rap sheet as long as his leg, and it went on.
Still, Biondi added, “I’ve always felt this one was part of the series even without the signature clothes cutting.”
The mission Biondi had handed the four new detectives was clear: solve these four murders, whether they were linked or not to the series or to one another. If Maulsby and Dean felt Driggers needed to be worked, then so be it. After all, according to FBI statistics, 28 percent of female murder victims were killed by their husbands or boyfriends.
He advised them not to concern themselves with jurisdictional matters: Stephanie Brown, for example, was as much their case as San Joaquin’s, even though her body had been found in the other county. He recommended that they touch base with the other departments, of course, and keep them informed. But everyone wanted the same thing: results. Given that three of the four new detectives had previously solved murder cases—the same three were also sergeants, and of course Maulsby was an ex-sergeant—Biondi believed that the high hopes he was placing in them to make progress in the investigation were not unrealistic.
Trace Evidence: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer Page 20