Trace Evidence: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer

by Bruce Henderson

  Judy was at a loss to understand it, too. The three of them had always been a tight little family, camping out of their 15-foot trailer that Judy hauled to national parks behind an old pickup, and vacationing every summer in Alaska, where Judy’s parents lived. Judy was proud of the stability she’d single-handedly given the kids—living in the same house their entire childhood, going to the same school, having plenty of extended family nearby.

  After Darcie’s rebellion, Judy’s efforts had run the gamut: from driving around frantically looking for her, to angrily locking Darcie out of the house when she ran off, to finally accepting Darcie’s absence as her decision.

  Over a period of time, “tough love” won out. Judy stopped giving Darcie money and footing her bail on charges ranging from vagrancy and shoplifting to prostitution. “I do not condone what you are doing,” Judy told Darcie, “and I will not contribute financially to your lifestyle.”

  At the same time, Judy never hesitated to reinforce to Darcie that she was free to come home any time. She always had a home and the door was always open, but with one caveat: she had to abide by her mother’s rules. These rules included getting back into school, not doing drugs (Darcie was a dabbler), helping around the house, and otherwise being a responsible member of the family. It was Darcie’s choice.

  More than not, Darcie opted to stay out.

  The previous Christmas (1986) Darcie had spent in a Seattle jail cell on a loitering charge. A local television station did a story on the unfortunate souls spending Christmas in jail. They handed out gifts on Christmas Eve to prisoners, and interviewed some of them live on camera. Darcie looked into the camera and said she didn’t have a home and, flashing her baby blues, how she didn’t have anywhere to go. It was an Oscar-worthy performance, and Judy had been mortified, even more so when friends and relatives started calling to say they’d seen Darcie on TV.

  At times when Darcie became desperate enough—like when she had to be hospitalized on her mother’s insurance for an acute venereal disease shortly after the Christmas she spent in jail—she returned home. But she never stayed for long; usually two or three days, a couple of weeks at the longest. When she left again, it could be in the middle of the day or night, without notice, and usually she didn’t even pack a bag. Rain or shine, she would walk out the door with the clothes on her back.

  Still, she had always called home regularly, never going more than two weeks without touching base.

  Darcie’s last call had been on August 23 (1987), a Sunday afternoon—collect from Sacramento. She was checking in, telling her mother that she and James planned to go to Disneyland, then maybe to Texas in a couple of weeks.

  Judy had never met James Brown but she knew from Darcie he was her twenty-year-old black pimp-boyfriend. They’d met several months earlier in Seattle when Darcie was on the streets and Brown had just gotten out of jail on a pandering charge. He had recruited her on the spot. As far as Judy was concerned, nothing good would come to Darcie from this symbiotic relationship or from her traveling farther away.

  “You feel like coming home?” Judy had asked tentatively. She was disappointed that Darcie wasn’t already home—a week earlier, she called from Oakland and reported that she and James were fighting and that she was thinking of coming home. Obviously, they’d made up.

  Judy told Darcie she didn’t like her being so far away, and that Larry was missing her, too. “I’ll wire you a ticket to come home,” Judy said.

  Darcie had said she would “think about it.”

  The last thing Judy said was “I love you.” She certainly didn’t like what her daughter was doing but she’d raised her kids to know that her love for them was never conditional. How could she love them less for their mistakes?

  “I love you, too,” Darcie had said.

  A month earlier, Darcie had been placed on a Trailways bus and sent home by the San Francisco Police Department after a prostitution bust. She’d stayed for Larry’s fifteenth birthday in late July. Darcie had dinner out with them, then left the next afternoon for California, saying she needed to go back and get James out of jail. As Larry had walked her to the bus stop two blocks away, she confessed she didn’t really want to go back to California but that she was afraid of what James would do to her if she didn’t. Darcie had always found it easier to confide in her brother than her mother. For his part, Larry heard more about his sister’s wayward life than he really needed to, but he always listened. When the bus came they hugged good-bye. It was the last time Larry saw his sister.

  Judy was accustomed to her daughter’s leaving, but Darcie’s return to California had bothered her a lot. It was so far away, and Darcie’s hustling life only increased the odds that something bad would happen.

  Six days after Darcie’s last phone call home, Judy received a collect call from James Brown in Sacramento. He wanted to know if Darcie had called or come home. Judy told him she hadn’t. He said he didn’t know where she was.

  Initially, Judy took heart in the news, thinking that Darcie had left the guy and might be on her way home.

  Then, a few days later, she received another collect call from Sacramento. This one was from someone who identified herself as Lily. Claiming to be a friend of Darcie’s, she said that Darcie had disappeared and that James had been arrested for “suspicion of a missing person.”

  Judy called the Sacramento Police Department to see if they had arrested anyone named James Brown. She checked the jails, too, but no one had heard of him.

  The next day—September 4 (1987)—Judy called the King County Department of Public Safety to file a missing persons report. King County covered all the unincorporated areas of greater Seattle.

  After taking Darcie’s age and description, the officer, obviously going down a form, asked questions.

  Did she have a history of running away?

  “Yes,” Judy said.

  “About how long has she been running away?”

  “Two years.”

  “She’s a chronic runaway, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “To your knowledge does she use drugs?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Is she involved in prostitution?”

  “Yes.”

  The officer was obviously filling in the blanks on the form, but the entire process seemed to Judy very dehumanizing. She felt that Darcie was being placed into a category that would result in no one taking this seriously.

  “Listen, I’ve had a lot of trouble with my daughter,” Judy said. “But she never goes more than a week or so without calling, no matter what she’s involved in. It’s now been almost two weeks since I’ve heard from her, and then I get these calls from California that she’s missing. I’m very concerned that something has happened to her. I want her name put into the system as a missing person.”

  The officer duly wrote down the information, but Judy had the distinct impression that this missing persons report was not going to be his or anyone’s high priority.

  “Tell me, Officer, should I file a missing persons report in Sacramento?” she asked.

  The officer said no. “She lived here and left from here, so this is where the report should be filed.

  “We’ll need the name and address of her dentist.”

  Darcie had had extensive orthodontic work; in fact, she was still wearing a retainer that had been soldered into place by the dentist on her last visit. Judy gave the officer the name of their dentist. She also explained that Darcie had an unusual birth defect.

  “On her right hand,” Judy said, “my daughter is missing the tips of her four fingers above the top knuckle.”

  THE MISSING persons report on Darcie Renee Frackenpohl collected dust for more than a month before being reviewed by a King County detective.

  The report finally landed on the desk of Detective Mike Hatch, formerly of the Green River Task Force and recently assigned to a new squad formed to track missing persons and teenage runaways who fit the profile of Green River victims.
>
  The first bodies in the local unsolved murder series had been discovered in July and August 1982, when the remains of five young women were found in and near the meandering Green River in southern King County. Two of the bodies had heavy rocks placed on them to hold them underwater. The press dubbed the unknown suspect as the “Green River Killer.” Since the grisly discoveries that summer, a total of forty-one young women had been killed in what was to become one of the largest serial murders in U.S. history.

  A majority of the bodies were skeletonized by the time they were found, but most of the victims were thought to have been strangled, and usually with their own clothing, although in numerous cases no clothing was found. After being abducted, the victims were transported to rural dump sites.

  Over time, a clear profile of the victims had emerged. The majority were young—or young-appearing—females last seen on Pacific Highway South near the Sea-Tac Airport, the Rainier Valley area of Seattle, or downtown. The majority had some connection with a street-type lifestyle (although thirteen victims did not), either as known prostitutes or through having friends or associates involved in the illicit trade.

  The special squad—consisting of Hatch and two other detectives—had been formed to investigate a growing backlog of some 200 missing persons cases in King County, including about two dozen young women with street lifestyles. One of the goals of the squad was to determine if the Green River Killer was still active. A similar effort three years earlier that evaluated reports on missing persons and teenage runaways had given police their first understanding of just how prolific this serial killer was.

  Hatch called Judy Frackenpohl on October 8, 1987, to see if she’d heard from her daughter in the thirty-four days since Judy had filed the report. She told him that she had not.

  The next morning, Hatch checked King County Vice records and found several contacts his department had had with Darcie, including a prostitution-related arrest in June (1987). That same morning, he called Judy and asked for copies of her phone bills showing the collect calls from Sacramento. Judy said she would copy the records, and be available to meet with him. Hatch said he wouldn’t be able to sit down with her. Three days later, the detective picked up the bills from the receptionist in the lobby of Judy’s office. He called the California numbers, finding them to be pay phones.

  When she heard nothing more from Detective Hatch, Judy telephoned him as the two-month anniversary of Darcie’s disappearance approached. She called to say she still hadn’t heard from Darcie, and to remind him that someone cared.

  “You know, the typical runaway will call home during the holidays,” he offered.

  “But look at her pattern,” Judy said. “Darcie is not a typical runaway.”

  Hatch made the following notation of her call in the missing persons file: “10/20/87, 0930 hrs. I received a phone call from Judy Frackenpohl. She states that she still has not heard from Darcie Frackenpohl as of yet.”

  Then, the detective closed the file.

  A month would pass before he made another entry.

  With no reason to be optimistic, Judy was filled with an eerie sense of apprehension and impending danger. It hit home that her daughter’s lifestyle had become increasingly dangerous, and not conducive to growing older.

  Darcie had, as far as her heartsick mother was concerned, dropped off the face of the earth into the dark nether world of the missing. She had been gone before, of course, but she had never been missing.

  Her mother knew that Darcie would not go this long without being in touch; not unless she couldn’t call or come home. Not unless she was being held against her will.

  Or—unless she was dead.

  “THE SUSPECT you’re looking for is probably white, male, mid-twenties to early thirties, unmarried, either never married or divorced, works with his hands and is dexterous with tools, and has a reason to be outdoors, like a job or hobby.”

  The words of the profiler from the FBI’s vaunted Behavioral Science Unit left the three detectives from the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department Homicide Bureau stuck somewhere between awe and amusement.

  “Do you have his phone number?” someone asked.

  Lt. Ray Biondi had first been exposed to the psychology end of murder investigations when he attended a school taught by instructors from the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit back in 1976. At the time, he’d thought it was fascinating stuff, and had come back eager to view murder scenes with this cutting-edge training in mind. As with most new things, the eagerness soon wore off, although his fascination with reading the signs of a scene remained.

  What Biondi came to realize over the years after countless murder investigations was that the experienced homicide detective is a profiler in his own right, even without a single psychology course to his name.

  In fact, the detective had an advantage over the professional profiler, Biondi believed, in that he interacted with the murder through the investigation and developed intuitive feelings as to who, how, and why. The detective also experienced the crime scene through all his own senses, and had a similar intimacy with the unique cast of characters—victim, witnesses, suspects—that showed up in each case.

  The profiler, on the other hand, generally developed his information from afar, through a cold study of written reports and other documentation. As a result, most profiles ended up being drawn with ambiguous borders, with even the most detailed suppositions carrying frustrating qualifiers like “could be,” “probably,” “more than likely.”

  In Biondi’s mind, there was no way that profiling could be compared with forensic evidence. Profiling was much more of a last resort. In fact, he did not know of a single murder or series of murders in which the profile was instrumental in the resolution of the case, or even played an important part in the case. Profiling went wrong when it was oversold, sometimes through the direct claims of the profilers themselves to having solved murders. Like psychics, profilers only talked about the ones they were right about.

  No matter how good the profile or how skilled the profilers themselves, you could not eliminate a viable suspect because he didn’t fit the profile, and likewise, a profile most certainly should never be used as the sole reason to focus an investigation on someone.

  While Biondi believed that profiling research was valuable training for detectives and helped them open their eyes to look at things in a different way, he considered a detective’s feelings and opinions more useful toward solving a case. These feelings and opinions guided a detective from the moment he visited the crime scene until a suspect was arrested. Biondi strongly held that detectives were better off identifying suspects not through complicated personality profiles but with simple, old-fashioned police work: interviewing witnesses, following leads, collecting evidence, etc.

  That said, Biondi wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity to discuss the I-5 series with the FBI’s expert profilers, who were in Sacramento the first week of October (1987) to speak at a homicide investigation school put on by DOJ. The popular two-week course was attended by detectives from various northern California departments, including Kay Maulsby, who had learned, among other things, the difference between an “organized” and “disorganized” serial killer. The I-5 killer would be considered “organized” due to the obvious planning and preparation that went into his crimes. The “disorganized” category was reserved for “frenzy” killers.

  The profilers had graciously accepted Biondi’s invitation to come over after a long day in the classroom and meet with him, Maulsby, and Joe Dean. The FBI agents and the detectives had gone out for a quick dinner first, then returned to the Homicide Bureau and settled around a conference table with loosened neckties and mugs of coffee.

  The detectives briefed the profilers on the unsolved cases, including the latest one in El Dorado, with Maulsby providing details of the Jane Doe crime scene, autopsy, and physical evidence that had been gathered.

  Biondi realized that they had a serial killer who was becoming deci
dedly better at what he did. His killings were impulsive only in the way he chose his victims, for the crimes themselves were obviously planned at great length. He was bringing nylon cord now, probably to use as restraints instead of making do with pieces of the victim’s clothing. He’d changed his strangulation method; by twisting a piece of wood into the ligature he could asphyxiate them in a more controlled manner. He was learning and progressing all the time, finding what worked best, discarding that which didn’t. The scenes screamed out a kind of arrogance on his part, as if he had all the time in the world to taunt and torture his victims and to cut and remove their most intimate apparel. He had become a hideously effective killing machine; no doubt he was better at murder than anything. He was enjoying himself, really enjoying himself. He would never stop on his own. Not ever.

  Concluding that a murder series did exist and that it was improbable there were two or more killers acting independently and duplicating the same type of crimes, the profilers agreed with a general profile of the I-5 suspect that Biondi had prepared for an upcoming press release that he hoped would reignite the public’s interest in the case.

  • The killer was a frequent lone traveler of major highways in the San Joaquin Valley, including Interstate 5 and U.S. 99, as well as the U.S. 50 corridor from Sacramento to Lake Tahoe.

  • He was a probable resident in one of the above areas, more likely the Valley as he was familiar with the rural areas and back roads.

  • He has owned or has access to several vehicles during recent years.

  • He was probably familiar with and frequented prostitution strolls in San Joaquin Valley cities.

  • He probably had a nonthreatening demeanor and appearance upon first contact.

  • He could be a loner type with relatively few close friends, living a quiet lifestyle. He was probably known to neighbors as a “quiet nice guy” and kept to himself.

  • He could live alone, or may live with family, such as parents, brothers, sister and his wife.