Darcie’s pimp, James Brown, had called the Frackenpohl residence in suburban Seattle a week or so after Judy had filed the missing persons report. Darcie’s brother, Larry, was home alone at the time. Brown wanted to know if they’d heard from Darcie, and Larry said no. After the short conversation, Larry had hung up, then quickly picked up the phone to call his mother at work. Brown hadn’t yet been disconnected—he was whining to someone, “That bitch is probably hiding from me,” before the line went dead. His complaint, obviously unintended for their ears, made both Larry and Judy feel more confident that Brown had had nothing to do with Darcie’s disappearance.
Seattle Detective Mike Hatch of King County’s new missing persons bureau wasn’t so sure about James Brown, even when Brown initiated a call to the detective three months after Darcie’s disappearance to find out whether there was anything new in the search for her. In truth, there was no search under way for Darcie—just a file that Hatch hadn’t opened in a month. When Brown said he was in Seattle, Hatch tried to solicit information about the last time he’d seen Darcie, but Brown said he didn’t want to talk about it over the phone. He refused to give his whereabouts but promised to come to Hatch’s office four days hence. He also consented to Hatch’s request to take a polygraph that day. When the day arrived, Brown was a no-show. Thirty minutes later, Hatch had a superior court subpoena issued in Brown’s name.
The first week of December, Hatch called the Sacramento Police Department and asked for the records section. Since the city was Darcie’s last known location, he requested any arrests or contacts that the department had with her, but they came up empty-handed. He spoke with a Sergeant Meadors in the homicide unit and gave him a full description of Darcie. The sergeant said there had been no homicide victims or Jane Does fitting her description within the city limits; he suggested Hatch call the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office. Hatch did, speaking to coroner’s investigator Laura Synhorst. Hatch asked if they knew of any unidentified female murder victims that fit Darcie’s description, adding that she was missing the four ends of her fingers on her right hand. Synhorst said no. She took down all the other pertinent information, and promised to call if an unidentified female victim fitting that description came in.
A few minutes after he’d gotten off the phone to Sacramento, Hatch received a call from Kim Quackenbush, a prostitute friend of Darcie’s from Seattle who said she’d been with her on the night Darcie disappeared in Sacramento. The last time she saw Darcie, Quackenbush reported, was around 9:00 P.M. on August 24, 1987. They were both working on West Capital Avenue, a popular stroll area in West Sacramento. At the time, Darcie was wearing a sleeveless pink dress, pink pump heels, and a thin black chiffon jacket. Hatch asked Quackenbush if she thought Brown might have harmed Darcie or if she might have voluntarily left him. Quackenbush was positive neither had happened. Darcie’s disappearance was a shock to everyone, she said, Brown included—although within a few days he’d recruited a new blonde to whom he gave Darcie’s clothes.
On December 8, Hatch was having his teeth cleaned and his dentist happened to be adjacent to Darcie’s dentist. He had the receptionist go next door and retrieve Darcie’s dental records, which had been ready for him to pick up since September. The following day, he sent the dental charts to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office. The first thing chief investigator Bill Hagland of the medical examiner’s office did was to send a copy of the records to the Washington State Police in Olympia for them to enter into the National Crime Information Center’s missing persons system, to which many states—including California—contributed information about missing persons and unidentified dead on a voluntary, if somewhat delayed, basis. There was no hit in NCIC.
On Christmas Eve day, Judy Frackenpohl received a surprise phone call from Detective Hatch.
“Have you heard from Darcie?” he asked.
“No, I haven’t.”
The question irritated Judy. When Hatch had previously told her that the “typical runaway” calls home during the holidays, she had responded that Darcie wasn’t a typical runaway because she called home “all the time.” Had he not worked the case seriously, Judy now wondered, because he expected Darcie to call over the holidays?
“Well, in that case, since there haven’t been any new leads,” Hatch said, “I’m deactivating the case.”
“What does that mean?”
“We won’t be actively investigating it. Since your daughter apparently disappeared from Sacramento, I suggest you call and file a missing persons report with them.”
Judy saw red. “I asked you people four months ago if I should do that,” she said furiously. “I was told I had to file it here since Darcie lived here.”
The detective calmly offered to give her the number of the Sacramento Police Department.
“Merry fucking Christmas to you, asshole!” Judy Frackenpohl yelled into the receiver before slamming it down.
LT. RAY Biondi had a wild idea as to how to get some dialog going with Roger Kibbe: send in a woman detective to visit him in jail.
In the process of persuading detective Kay Maulsby that she should be the one, Biondi found himself answering her cautionary questions.
“You sure we can do this?” she asked. “He’s made it clear he doesn’t want to talk to us.”
“Then he’ll tell you to leave.”
Biondi’s hope was that Kibbe would be less threatened by a lone woman and more willing to open up than he had been to other detectives who had spoken to him.
“Try to establish rapport,” he said. “Become his friend. If he is ever going to vent and come clean, be the person he’ll talk to. It’s lonely sitting in jail. Show him that you care enough to come see him.”
“Before or after I read him his rights?”
Biondi laughed. “Don’t worry about that. He can go back to his cell or tell you to leave if he doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“What if he tells me something or even confesses? How can we ever use it, Ray?”
Now that was a good question.
A few years earlier, Biondi had been interviewing a guy about a murder. Funny thing was, he thought the guy’s wife had committed the nasty deed. But as the guy was going through his alibi he grew noticeably more nervous. Biondi decided to run a bluff. “Tell me how you killed him,” he asked, poker-faced. The guy broke down and confessed everything, explaining he’d thrown the murder weapon in a river. Biondi read the suspect his Miranda rights at that point, and had the guy repeat the whole story. The trial judge allowed the confession but a higher court ruled that everything Biondi had learned in the interview was the “fruit of a poisoned tree.” Without other evidence to tie him to the crime, the guy walked.
“If Roger confesses, it would be tainted,” Biondi admitted. “Let him know that nothing he has said up to that point can be used against him. Then read him his rights and start over. Try to keep him talking. It’s up to the D.A. to fight legal issues. Our job is to solve the case.”
“You’re thinking we don’t have anything to lose?”
“Right.”
“In that case, I don’t have a thing to fear.”
Biondi cocked his head, looking at her quizzically.
“All his victims were so busty.”
It was a twenty-five-minute drive from Sacramento through long miles of green fields alive with wild flowers to Rio Consumnes Correctional Center, the branch jail that housed 1,200 sentenced prisoners doing county time. The first view of the huge facility was a tall guard tower that jutted up from the middle of the complex and was visible for miles.
At the main entrance, she signed in as an official visitor under the date, December 30, 1987, and gave her badge number. She didn’t have her 9mm service revolver to turn in because it was where she always kept it: locked safely in the trunk of her work car. She waited in a deserted hallway for Roger Kibbe to arrive from “B barracks.”
She had purposefully not given Kibbe any notice, and wondered if he w
ould even leave his cell when he was told who was here to see him. But she soon saw him sauntering down the hall, next to his escort. When they reached her, Maulsby identified herself. She asked him if he remembered her from the day the search warrant had been served at Public Storage.
“Yeah.”
“I’d like to talk to you, Roger.”
Kibbe shrugged.
The escort officer unlocked the door to a private conference room, and they all entered.
“You can uncuff him,” Maulsby said.
Kibbe’s strong hands, manacled in front, came free.
The escort looked at Maulsby.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You can leave.”
He did, swinging the door shut behind him. A few seconds later, the bolt lock clicked in place.
They sat down in metal chairs facing each other.
“I went to Tahoe last month and talked to Steve,” Maulsby said.
She had Roger’s attention.
“We spoke again over the phone a couple of weeks ago. Steve is concerned about you.”
“I know.”
“I promised him I’d check with you to see how you’re doing. He’s concerned that you might need some psychological help. Are you having any problems here?”
“No, everything’s fine. I just don’t know if they’re going to leave me in the same barracks.”
“Would you like to stay where you are?”
“Yes, I would.”
“I’ll try to arrange that.”
They discussed general conditions at the jail—Kibbe liked the food but thought it unfair the way the TV room was run—and segued into some of his personal background. It wasn’t anything revealing, just droplets of information, but at least he was talking. When he told her about his childhood troubles in school, she empathized. When he spoke about how much he enjoyed woodworking, she smiled.
She thought about how normal it all seemed, Roger talking to her so calmly in such a controlled setting. Yet, she knew the evidence was mounting that he had killed, more than once, with those same thick hands that he so skillfully used to build furniture. He was probably not so calm then, she surmised. He was probably very excited, maybe enraged; no doubt he was fiercely demanding and terrifyingly cruel. In fact, she’d seen the proof of it. That he could do such horrifying things to someone he held no grudge against—women he didn’t know but used like an archer aiming at a bull’s-eye—was what she found most incomprehensible.
Yet, she sat discoursing with him as if he were her kindly next-door neighbor or corner greengrocer.
Forty minutes later, they parted, the ice broken.
On the drive back, she reflected on how ordinary the soft-spoken, almost grandfatherly man before her had seemed. That must have been the man whom his victims had seen minutes or seconds before he flipped a switch and became somebody, or something, very different.
It had been eerie.
Still, she would return. As long as he kept talking, she’d come back to him for as long as he’d let her.
THE FIRST week of January 1988, Detective Vito Bertocchini located, through a check of motor vehicles records, the Datsun 280Z formerly owned by Roger Kibbe.
Bertocchini picked up Kay Maulsby and Jim Streeter on the way to Rocklin, 20 miles northeast of Sacramento. The new owner, Donald Udell, twenty-three, had purchased the Datsun six months earlier from a Sacramento used car dealer.
The only change he’d made to it, Udell explained, was mounting a new audio-stereo system in the dashboard. In doing so, he made some adjustments in the face plate of the dash, then painted the dash when he finished. During the installation, he told the detectives that he’d found a gold loop earring under the driver’s seat.
“Did you find anything else?” Bertocchini asked.
“No, but you know, every once in a while there was a real rotten smell in the car,” he said. “I always thought it was the ventilation system.”
Maulsby explained they would like to process the car inside and out for trace evidence. “We’ll be looking for hair, fibers, and other evidence,” she said.
Udell gave detectives permission to search the vehicle believed used in the abduction of Charmaine Sabrah and possibly other I-5 victims.
Streeter started to work, but soon found the power source at Udell’s residence inadequate to run his laser machine. Detectives got permission to drive the car to DOJ.
It took Streeter three hours to process the vehicle. In the course of his examination, he took samples of fibers from the seats and floor mats, recovered some animal hairs, and swabbed a stain on the passenger seat while a DOJ latent print examiner dusted the vehicle, lifting a partial palm print from inside the rear window of the hatchback.
Streeter would, however, find nothing to connect Sabrah or any other I-5 victims to the Datsun 280Z.
Roger Kibbe’s luck was holding.
TWO WEEKS after the big powwow at DOJ, the secret deal between six California and Nevada law enforcement agencies to keep the lid on the I-5 murder cases fell apart when Sacramento County Sheriff Glen Craig and Lt. Ray Biondi stepped into a room of newspaper, radio, and TV reporters.
Various media outlets had been calling, almost immediately, wanting updates on the I-5 investigation. Biondi convinced his boss they had to go public with the full series and “let it all roll out.”
The deaths of four more women had been linked to the I-5 murder series, Sheriff Craig announced, bringing the known total to seven victims. As far as the public was concerned, the new victims were: Karen Finch, El Dorado’s two Jane Does, and Nevada’s Virginia City Jane Doe.
The only thing Craig held back was the clothes cutting. “I cannot be specific about what evidence links these seven women to the same killer,” he said, “other than they were all traveling on or found near the interstate or intersecting roads and highways. For that reason, we believe the person responsible is mobile and spends a lot of time in his vehicle seeking his next victim. The real tragedy is that he may not look any different than you or me. You might not be able to tell that he has horns and is the devil.”
The sheriff, in his frankness, broke another agreed-upon rule by discussing each case in detail, even those that “belonged” to other jurisdictions.
Asked by a reporter for the latest description of the suspect, Craig said they believed him to be white, in his forties, and a frequent lone traveler along Interstate 5 south of Sacramento and on U.S. 50 to the Lake Tahoe basin.
Craig acknowledged Biondi, who stepped forward.
Biondi had been thinking long and hard since the disastrous council at DOJ. All those bosses not wanting to go public had to have been for a reason other than ego. He decided it had to do with the more sinister fact that when they finally did, they’d simultaneously have to commit to doing whatever it took to stop the killings. It had to do with politics, budgets, manpower resources, and all that unholy crap. He was damn disgusted, but he’d keep it buttoned up this day.
“Investigators are seeking information from women who may have encountered and then refused to go with a man who offered them a ride,” Biondi said. “Anyone who saw anything suspicious that might be connected to these or other related crimes, please come forward. We need your help.”
This was not a charade for Biondi—until they had a nailed-down murder case against Roger Kibbe, they would continue to search for evidence and seek information. The veteran had learned not to hang his hat on the first strong suspect that came along. He’d seen plenty that “looked good” before the bottom fell out and they had to start over.
The next day’s front-page headlines in the Sacramento Union told the general public what a lot of high-ranking coppers hadn’t wanted to let out of the bag:
‘I-5 Strangler’ Expands Trail of Death
Cops Link Slayings of 7 Young Women
to Man Who Prowls the Highways
What the public and many top law enforcement administrators with other agencies didn’t know, however, was that the
prime suspect was tucked safely behind bars—
—for now.
DETECTIVE Kay Maulsby went back to Rio Consumnes the day after the press conference.
She and Roger Kibbe settled into the same interview room as before, and she asked how he’d been getting along in the week since her last visit.
“Okay,” he said.
“Are you aware of the news concerning the homicides?” she asked, touching for the first time on the real reason why she was making these pilgrimages.
“No,” he said, a bit warily.
“There was a press conference yesterday. It was on TV last night.”
“The inmates switched to another channel when the news came on.” It had the sound of a dismissal.
“Listen, Roger, I’m still investigating these cases,” she said earnestly. “So are other detectives. You’re one of the suspects being looked at but I’ll work just as hard at proving your innocence as your guilt if you can help eliminate yourself by giving me something to go on. Like your activities and whereabouts on certain dates.”
There was no response.
“Do you think we might ever get to the point where it would be possible to discuss such specifics?” she asked.
He seemed to consider the question. “I-I think so.”
“If you are in fact innocent, it’s important to the investigation that we eliminate you as soon as possible so that we might concentrate on finding the real suspect.”
His nod was barely perceptible.
She decided to back off.
They discussed Harriet and his concerns as to how she was getting along without him.
“I worry about her,” he said. “She’s still working as a bookkeeper and driving in from Placerville every day. She’s going to be trying to find a place for us to live in Sacramento, closer to her work, when I get out.”
When I get out.
Maulsby willed herself not to react.
“What are your plans?” she asked, then quickly added: “When you get out, I mean.”
“I’d like to find something in woodworking.” He was relaxing with the lady cop across from him; his stutter had disappeared. “Maybe I can find someone with a shop who can afford to take on a helper.”
Trace Evidence: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer Page 33