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

by Bruce Henderson

  “You’re serving time for some offense?” prosecutor Bob Drossel asked.

  “Yes, sir. Receiving stolen property.”

  “And what is your sentence?”

  “Three years. State prison.”

  Driggers explained he’d been in a year, which meant he’d serve at least another year before he could be paroled.

  Drossel showed his witness a picture.

  “Do you recognize this person as Lora Heedick?”

  “Yes.”

  “What type of relationship did you have with her?”

  “She was my girlfriend.”

  “Did you have another relationship besides?”

  “Yeah. We did drugs together and did things to make money to get drugs. She was into some prostitution.”

  “Did you assist in that capacity?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “I would like to draw your attention to April 20, 1986, and specifically the last time that you saw Lora Heedick alive. Do you have that time frame in mind?”

  Drossel couldn’t believe it, but the hard-ass convict who no doubt pumped iron daily behind bars had gone blubbery and was grabbing for the Kleenex. This was better than he could have hoped for, although the prosecutor still feared he’d get eaten up by the defense on this witness.

  “Yes, I remember,” Driggers said, blowing his nose.

  Drossel took him through events that night: his walking down South 9th Street looking for Lora, and her pulling up in an older white car. Driggers said he got into the car, Lora introduced him to the man, and they shook hands.

  “Did you notice anything about his hand?”

  “Yeah. I noticed he had rough features to his hand. It was not real clean, like a workingman’s hand, you know.”

  “What about the size?”

  “Fair-sized. I didn’t swallow his hand with mine.”

  “Did he seem excited? Nervous? Quiet?”

  “He seemed real quiet and what I would call withdrawn. He didn’t say much.”

  Driggers told of the man volunteering that he could get some drugs at his shop nearby, and Lora suggesting that Driggers get out of the car and wait for their return.

  “I waited—all night.”

  The con went back to the tissues.

  Driggers identified a picture of Kibbe’s white Maverick as the type of car his girlfriend rode off in that night.

  Drossel asked Driggers if he remembered attending a physical lineup at Sacramento County Jail on September 1, 1988.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You were asked as a witness to view five individuals for identification purposes?”

  “Yes.”

  Drossel showed him snapshots taken that night of the five men in the lineup; they were all middle-aged, and about the same height and build.

  “And the person you picked out as the man who drove off with Lora was?”

  “Number two in the lineup.”

  “And who is number two?” Drossel asked.

  “The defendant.”

  Well and good, but unfortunately the prosecutor now had to bring out the fact that Detective Kay Maulsby, on orders she didn’t particularly agree with, had shown Driggers a picture of Kibbe six months before the lineup.

  “I told her that it looked very much like the guy that was in the car that night,” Driggers said.

  Had seeing that picture subsequently influenced his pick in the lineup?

  No, Driggers said.

  The defense would surely disagree.

  On cross-examination, Phil Kohn started off with a line of questioning to show that Driggers himself had been a suspect for months in the murder of his girlfriend.

  “Did you ever beat up your ex-wife, Debbie Richardson?” Kohn asked from somewhere out in left field.

  Drossel jumped up. “Objection as to relevancy.”

  “Mr. Kohn?” the judge asked.

  “I’m going to ask Mr. Driggers about his relationship with his ex-wife.”

  “Objection,” Drossel said forcefully.

  The judge directed the jury and witness to leave the room so he could hear the lawyers out.

  When the door shut behind the last juror, Kohn said, “I have police reports, Your Honor. This guy, according to his ex-wife, had her have intercourse with other men in front of him, and he would masturbate while they were doing it. He’d have sex with the men when they were done.”

  “What does this have to do with this case?” asked Judge Finney.

  “The sexual aspect of the case,” Kohn persisted. “The police have released Mr. Driggers as a suspect. The defense hasn’t. I think there is a reason why he would make the identifications that he did. And the reason is that he wants to take the pressure off himself.”

  “This kinky sexual conduct is hearsay and it’s not relevant,” Drossel countered. “I can see where we’re heading: toward improper impeachment of the witness.”

  The judge allowed Kohn to resume his line of questioning of Driggers to see where it went; however, he did so out of the presence of the jury.

  Kohn again asked if he ever beat up his ex-wife, Debbie Richardson.

  “Yeah. She beat me up, too.”

  “Did you ever threaten to kill her?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever threaten to pour acid on her face?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever force her to have sex with other men in your presence?”

  “No.”

  Kohn was stymied. “All right, nothing further.”

  Judge Finney wanted to be clear before he brought the jury back. “These questions will not be put to this witness without Mr. Kohn making a bona fide offer of proof. Bring the jury in.”

  Kohn hammered away at Driggers’s late-in-the-game identification of Kibbe, pointing out his earlier failures to do so, including that he was shown a photo lineup that included the defendant as early as January 1987—eighteen months before he finally ID’ed Roger Kibbe.

  On redirect, Drossel asked simply: “Is there any question in your mind that the person you identified at the physical lineup is the person Lora Heedick was with the last time you saw her?”

  “No, sir. I wouldn’t be up here right now if I had any doubt.”

  “No further questions.”

  Not bad, Drossel thought. He saw Driggers coming across as credible, even with his sordid past. And the defense had not gotten into him as badly as Drossel thought they might.

  Detective Kay Maulsby came next.

  She told the jury how Roger Kibbe first became a suspect in the I-5 series, for her, when she saw the crime kit from the Debra Guffie assault case in the property room of the Sacramento Police Department.

  She testified to having found the pieces of cordage during the search of Tupelo, thereby providing a key link in the “chain of evidence”—the chain that led directly to the DOJ lab where Faye Springer had gone to work on the cordage.

  On cross-examination, Phil Kohn stayed on James Driggers’s case by pulling out negative information that Maulsby had learned about Driggers during her investigation of him as a possible murder suspect.

  “Who is Debbie Richardson?” asked Kohn, who knew there was more than one way to skin a cat in a court of law.

  “James Driggers’s ex-wife,” Maulsby said.

  “Did you have a telephone interview with her on July 31, 1987?”

  “I did.”

  “Did she indicate she had been beaten up by Mr. Driggers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she indicate to you she had been grabbed by the throat by Mr. Driggers.”

  ‘Yes.’

  “Without going into detail, did she indicate to you that he had some very bizarre sexual preferences?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which included having her have sex with other men while he watched?”

  “Yes.”

  Kohn was not finished putting forth damaging information about the defense’s very own murder suspect. He asked Maulsby about her
interview of a cousin of Lora Heedick’s. The detective confirmed that the female cousin had seen bruises on Lora that Driggers had reportedly inflicted.

  “Did she tell you that Lora advised her that Mr. Driggers had threatened to burn her eyes out with a cigarette?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did all of these statements lead you to believe that Mr. Driggers was a suspect in Lora Heedick’s murder?”

  “I still considered him a suspect at that point.”

  Maulsby also was asked to explain in further detail how she had shown the lone picture of Kibbe to Driggers, thereby arguably polluting his later identification of Kibbe—instead of giving up Lt. Ray Biondi as the real culprit in the scheme, she took the heat herself. She was, however, able to qualify her actions when Kohn generously left her an opening.

  “I did not put the picture in front of him and say, ‘Is this the man you saw with Lora?’” Maulsby explained. “What I said was, ‘Is this person familiar to you? Have you seen this person in the stroll area?’”

  Kohn elicited from Maulsby that she had taken would-be eyewitness Carmen Anselmi to a number of public rental facilities, including Tupelo, where Roger Kibbe was manning the desk, and that Charmaine’s mother failed to recognize him as the man who drove off with her daughter.

  Vito Bertocchini’s name was called by the prosecutor on the sixth day of testimony.

  He told of responding to the murder scene off Correia Road and Highway 12 on July 15, 1986, and finding Stephanie Brown’s body floating facedown in 3 feet of water. He described the debris under her rear bra strap and how the waistband of her shorts were turned in, as if someone had re-dressed her.

  “Were you able to ascertain if there was any evidence of tire tracks from a vehicle pulling in there?”

  “When we arrived, paramedics and firemen were already on the scene. Any type of tracks that would have been there had been driven over.”

  Bertocchini told of subsequently recovering Brown’s tank top from the water, and later, the pair of scissors.

  Drossel then turned to the Sabrah investigation.

  The detective testified to Carmen Anselmi’s working with a police artist to come up with the composite of the suspect her daughter had ridden off with, and how he had circulated the composite to various police departments.

  “Did at some point the name Roger Kibbe come into play as a suspect in this series?” Drossel asked.

  “His name did come up, yes.”

  “Under what circumstances.”

  Bertocchini explained how the patrol deputy in his department had made the stop on Kibbe, and passed along word that he looked a lot like the composite.

  “Do you remember a point in time, as far as you were concerned, when you considered him a suspect?”

  “That would have been after my first interview with him on December 15, 1986.”

  “Could you point him out?”

  “He’s seated at the end of that counsel table wearing a white-and-green striped shirt.”

  It was a psychological ploy: Drossel wanted as many witnesses as possible to point a finger at the defendant.

  When it was his turn, Phil Kohn asked what had caused Bertocchini to see Kibbe as a suspect after that first interview.

  “This may sound ridiculous,” the big cop admitted, “but I just had a gut feeling. Part of it was that he knew the locations. He traveled Highway 12, where Stephanie Brown was found. He traveled on I-5, where she and Charmaine Sabrah had been abducted. He knew the Ione area, where Sabrah’s body was found. He admitted to contacting prostitutes.”

  “Anything else?”

  Bertocchini nodded. “He had a two-seater sports car and looked like the composite.”

  Kohn asked whether or not Kibbe had been read his Miranda rights prior to the interview.

  “No, not that day,” Bertocchini said.

  “How did you conclude the interview?”

  “We took photos and fingerprints. I asked if he would be willing to take a polygraph exam and he said he had to contact his brother. He made a phone call to his brother. He came out and said he would get back to us. He and his wife left.”

  It was the first time anyone had come close to mentioning Steve Kibbe at the trial, and Drossel knew it would probably be the last. He had thought long and hard about whether to call the cop brother to the stand, but decided doing so would break a trial attorney’s cardinal rule: don’t ask a question you don’t know the answer to. For Steve Kibbe had refused to talk to authorities any more about his brother.

  Kohn tried to show that Roger hadn’t been free to leave during the interview, thereby impugning the legality of Bertocchini’s first contact with Kibbe, but it was thin gruel.

  Next, the pathologist who had performed the autopsy on Stephanie Brown testified that she had died six to eight hours before he had examined the body next to the irrigation ditch at 9:00 A.M. on the morning she was discovered.

  “What opinion did you form as to cause of death?” Drossel asked.

  “She died from asphyxia due to ligature strangulation and being submerged in the water. I feel she was probably alive when she went into the water.”

  Drossel looked at his notes. He didn’t recall anything about drowning in the coroner’s report.

  “There was abundant frothy white fluid in her air passages,” the pathologist continued without being asked. “This can occur with strangulation alone. Usually, when there is this amount of frothy material, it means that the victim has inhaled water, which is mixed with air and produces the froth.”

  The pathologist, with whom Vito Bertocchini had to fight so hard to get a rape-kit examination done had not mentioned to detectives the day of the autopsy that Stephanie was probably still breathing when she hit the water.

  Jo-Allyn Brown came to the stand to testify about the last time she saw Stephanie.

  After identifying a picture of her smiling daughter, Jo-Allyn told of Stephanie’s visit earlier in the evening of her disappearance. “She came home to do her laundry and visit.”

  “What time was that?” Drossel asked.

  “From about six thirty to around nine o’clock that evening.”

  The prosecutor went over what Stephanie was wearing—the same clothes she had on when her body was found—and her mother said Stephanie’s hair had been in a ponytail.

  Jo-Allyn forced herself to look at Kibbe. He was looking down at the table, and rocking slowly in his chair.

  “Was that the last time you saw your daughter?”

  “Other than at the mortuary,” Jo-Allyn said.

  “I’m sorry,” Drossel said, “I meant alive.”

  “Yes,” Jo-Allyn said sadly.

  On her way out of the courtroom, Jo-Allyn Brown stared down at the man they said had killed her daughter.

  Roger Kibbe had a People magazine at the table.

  Stephanie Brown’s roommate, Patty Burrier, testified to Stephanie’s having arrived to pick her and her boyfriend up around midnight on July 15, 1986, when they had car trouble.

  Next, Patty’s former boyfriend, Jim Frazier, the radio disc jockey, came to the stand.

  “After Stephanie gave us a lift to my place, I wanted to make sure she knew her way home,” he said. “At first I suggested that she wait for us because I was going to be proceeding to work, which was in the same direction and on the way back to her and Patty’s place. But she didn’t want to do that.”

  “What happened then?” Drossel asked.

  “I wrote directions”—Frazier was struggling with his emotions—“for her on a piece of paper.”

  Having talked to him previously, the prosecutor knew that the young man carried enormous guilt. Had he written the right directions? Had he done everything he could to ensure that she would return home safely? Frazier still agonized over what happened that night five years ago.

  Frazier said he explained the directions to Stephanie and went over them with her several times because she seemed to be unclear. “I thought I
made it very clear she needed to go northbound on I-5 to get home. I told her southbound would take her out in the middle of nowhere.”

  “And you saw her drive off?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Did you ever see her again?”

  Frazier shook his head. “Never.”

  Drossel directed Frazier’s attention to a large map displayed before the jury.

  “Do you see the arrow, ‘Brown’s car abandoned’?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “In terms of where Stephanie was intending to go that night, what direction is that from Sacramento?”

  “South,” Frazier said, his voice barely audible. “The wrong direction.”

  “I have no further questions.”

  “Mr. Kohn?” Judge Finney said.

  “No questions,” said Phil Kohn.

  Moving on to the next victim, Drossel called an Amador County detective regarding the discovery of Charmaine Sabrah’s body on November 9, 1986. “There was some black material around her neck knotted very tightly,” he said.

  Drossel then called the decidedly Old World pathologist who had autopsied the remains in the bed of his pickup. “It was referred to as a tailgate autopsy,” the pathologist said a bit defensively when given the chance, “but I just didn’t see any reason to go anywhere with the body.”

  The pathologist said he found the cause of death to be “asphyxia due to strangulation by ligature.”

  When the next witness, Carmen Anselmi, was summoned, she entered the courtroom, took one look at Kibbe sitting at the defense table, and yelled: “Hey, that’s the guy! That’s him!”

  “That’s enough,” Judge Finney barked.

  Drossel hurried over to his witness. “Please, we’ll get to that later.”

  The shrill accusation had broken the practiced calm and formality of the courtroom, unsettling the judge, the three trial lawyers, and the jury—although the defendant hadn’t even turned around—and causing the assembled news reporters covering the trial to scribble furiously into their notepads. If the outburst had been poor courtroom etiquette, it had made for good courtroom drama.

  Judge Finney gave the proper admonishments to the jury to disregard the matter, and when Carmen Anselmi took the stand there was a brave effort on everyone’s part to pretend it had never happened.