Killer on the Road

by Ginger Strand

  Throughout the seventies, a number of things had become apparent about the interstate highway program. It had mowed down mountains, plowed through communities, and divided up farms with little regard for the opinions of affected citizens. It had cost at least three times what it was expected to cost. It had accelerated white flight from cities, contributed to urban blight, and abetted the spread of environmentally destructive, aesthetically awful suburbia. It had spawned a monotonous national landscape of homogeneous franchise businesses, ticky-tacky homes, eyesore shopping malls, and hideous commercial strips.

  After the first wave of antihighway screeds, an increasingly sophisticated critique had evolved. The focus shifted from what the highways destroyed—landscapes, urban communities—to what they created: sprawl. The highway problem could not be separated from what was called “urbanization,” but might better be called “suburbanization.” All those land-eating shopping malls and office parks and subdivisions paving their soulless way over countryside and farmland needed to be stopped, before they turned the nation into a nondescript nowhereland. The Task Force on Land Use and Urban Growth issued a report in 1973 declaring that a “new mood” was afoot in the nation. “Increasingly,” the report declared, “citizens are asking what urban growth will add to the quality of their lives. They are questioning the way relatively unconstrained, piecemeal urbanization is changing their communities and are rebelling against the traditional processes of government and the marketplace which, they believe, have inadequately guided development in the past.” The following year, the Real Estate Research Corporation, an independent research and consulting firm, issued a monumental analysis, The Costs of Sprawl, that outlined the fiscal consequences of poorly planned development. It seemed that a new era of “smart growth” was dawning: good urban planning, transit-oriented development, preservation of green spaces and community values. One only had to look at San Francisco, which had canceled its freeways, or Boulder, which had passed slow-growth measures throughout the seventies, or Portland, which drew a growth-management boundary around itself in 1979, to see the future.

  The attack on sprawl was part of the seventies zeitgeist, another instance of citizens questioning the doctrine of endless growth and attempting to recenter American life on something other than consumption. But in the eighties, the nation was no more interested in putting limits on suburbia than it was in applying brakes to the economy. In the mood of cultural retrenchment that marked the Reagan years, the antisprawl, antigrowth movement collapsed. “As the boom of the 1980s and 1990s got underway,” writes one theorist of sprawl, “it soon became apparent that defeat had been snatched from the jaws of victory and that decentralization and sprawl were far from conquered.” What all those tract mansions and office parks and shopping plazas with name-brand stores represented, after all, was greed: developers’ greed for land and for profits, individuals’ greed for goods and for status. And in the eighties, greed was good.

  • • • • •

  In November 1986, Katherine Kelly Quinones, another Sacramento prostitute, disappeared. A month later, the twenty-five-year-old was found strangled by Lake Berryessa in Napa County, forty miles north. Police had no leads.

  In May of 1987, the Kibbes moved to the edge of Sacramento. The rising tide of the eighties was not floating all boats: in mid 1986, Roger’s furniture-making business had failed. The bank moved to foreclose on their Oakley home. Averting disaster, Harriet Kibbe sold the house. Now she had found a job for herself and Roger. They would manage a ministorage facility called Public Storage, she handling the bookkeeping and customers, Roger maintaining the grounds and doing odd jobs around the place. In addition to receiving modest salaries, they would get to live in a one-bedroom apartment on the premises.

  The Kibbes thus moved to the not-yet-incorporated Sacramento suburb of Citrus Heights. Like the nearby Foothill Farms, like so many places in the nation, Citrus Heights was named for what it had displaced. It had begun its growth spurt in the 1970s, when I-80 was completed and a handful of shopping malls and plazas sprouted up not far from the interchange. More retail complexes, office space, and tract housing quickly ate up the rest of the area’s rural land, and Citrus Heights said good-bye to the last of its citrus trees. The Public Storage facility the Kibbes moved to was a white strip of building flanking a bland low-end shopping plaza near the Antelope Avenue interchange. It’s a classic piece of what developers call “ground cover”: a cheap, easily bulldozed business that allows landowners to be cash-flow positive while waiting for the right moment to develop a piece of property. The rental office was at the corner of the building, the manager’s apartment adjacent. Rows of garagelike storage units behind reached their fingers toward I-80, its traffic roaring dully by.

  That June, a young woman named Karen Finch disappeared. She had spent the day with her daughter at her boyfriend’s home in Sonora, an attractive small town up in gold rush territory. At the end of the day, she took her daughter back to her ex-husband’s home in Twain Harte, farther up the slope of the Sierra toward Yosemite National Park. She then headed back into the Central Valley to her own apartment in Lodi, a small town between Stockton and Sacramento. She never made it. Her anxious boyfriend found her car on a deserted, mostly agricultural stretch of French Camp Road, between Modesto and Stockton. A week later, her body was found in sparsely populated Amador County, about an hour north of her car. She had been viciously stabbed to death.

  Finch’s boyfriend and her ex-husband were both brought in for questioning, but Ray Biondi was pretty sure he knew what he was looking at: another victim of the I-5 killer. Like Stephanie Brown, Charmaine Sabrah, and Lora Heedick, Finch had been found mostly nude, with her clothing scattered about the scene. Some of the clothes had been cut up in odd ways: in some cases, the cutting seemed to have been used as a method of removing the clothes, but in others, the slashes and slices were what detectives called “nonfunctional cutting.” And Biondi had a gut feeling he knew what those nonfunctional cuts were: a signature.

  • • • • •

  By 1987, serial killers were becoming big business. Since the 1980 success of The Stranger Beside Me, Ann Rule had been publishing one or two books a year profiling serial killers. Meanwhile slasher films, a horror subgenre centered on a psychopathic murderer and his string of gruesome killings, had become wildly popular. Focusing on a serial killer, they were serials themselves, spawning seemingly endless strings of sequels. Halloween began its incredible run in 1978, and was shortly followed by many more: Prom Night, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street. Slasher films were distinctive in that they often took the point of view of the murderer. The audience, while terrified of the killer, also identified with him: he was what kept the story going. Suddenly, kids wanted to dress up as Jason or Freddy on Halloween.

  While audiences flocked to slasher films, they also bought true crime books about serial killers and sensationalist nonfiction books like Jack Levin and James Alan Fox’s Mass Murder: America’s Growing Menace, published at the height of the serial killer panic in 1985. “Despite our emotional distance from the crime,” the authors declared at the start, “we must face the fact that the incidence of mass murder is growing. The 1960s mark the onset of the age of mass murder in the United States.”

  Following hard on the heels of the age of mass murder was the age of mass-murder analysis. A slew of books and television shows about serial killers offered popular takes on law enforcement theories—many of which were being developed at the new National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. The profilers there had developed the idea of “signature.”

  Signature, notes John Douglas, an author and retired FBI profiler, is different from modus operandi. A criminal’s MO is how he tends to get the job done—in the case of Ed Kemper, say, picking up hitchhikers, then strangling them. But Kemper’s MO changed: when strangling got difficult, he used a knife that he had brought along as a backup. And when he got his hands on a gun, he switched to simply shooting h
is victims. Eventually, he gave up on hitchhikers altogether. The fact that an MO can and does change flies in the face of the myth that serial killers always use the same method of murder—a myth that has been formed by Hollywood as much as by anyone in law enforcement.

  Signature, on the other hand, is more constant. A criminal’s signature, according to Douglas, is “what the perpetrator has to do to fulfill himself.” It may have little to do with the crime itself—it may even complicate the crime’s commission, as in the case Douglas recounts of a bank robber who, during his robberies, made his captives undress and took photographs of them. This was obviously something the robber was doing for his own kicks, rather than as part of the robbery.

  To Biondi, the nonfunctional cutting of the victim’s clothing was a signature. It convinced him the murders he was investigating were linked. Once he learned about Roger Kibbe’s teenage habit of stealing items of women’s clothing and cutting them up, he would begin to see how it all fit together. But even before he knew any of that, he felt certain he was on the right track. He became even more certain in August 1987, when an unidentified teenage girl was found dead a hundred miles away in South Lake Tahoe, her body thrown by the side of Highway 50. The young woman—later identified as Darcie Frackenpohl, a seventeen-year-old runaway from Seattle—had been wearing a sleeveless pink dress that had been cut in several places.

  Scholars of serial killing—and there are such people out there—have frequently pointed out that signature is often an acquisitive act. Killers keep “trophies” from their victims, whether jewelry or personal effects or—as in Kemper’s case—body parts. They become, in essence, collectors. Ted Bundy, typically, is most eloquent on the topic. Discussing his crimes in the third person, he said that he “should have recognized that what really fascinated him was the hunt, the adventure of searching out his victims. And, to a degree, possessing them physically as one would a potted plant, a painting, or a Porsche. Owning, as it were, this individual.”

  Serial killers reduce people to objects to be added to a list. Some even keep an actual tally. Randy Kraft, the “Freeway Killer” from southern California, was also called “The Score-Card Killer” by the press: when he was arrested in 1983, he had in his car a list of sixty-five victims he had “collected,” written out in a cryptic code. Writers and serial killer “buffs” reinforce the collecting aspect of the crime, arguing over body counts and debating about the most “prolific” serial killers, turning high body count into an achievement, a status-conferring list of possessions. Ed Kemper described killing as a way of making dolls out of living women. A decade later, killers were competing to see who could own the most dolls. As the popular eighties coffee mug slogan went, he who dies with the most toys wins.

  • • • • •

  In September of 1987, Lieutenant Biondi went to Nashville to attend the fifth National Conference on Homicide, Unidentified Bodies and Missing Persons. There, he gave a presentation on the difficulty of tracking serial murders across multiple jurisdictions. As an example, he outlined what he and his fellow detectives were now calling “the I-5 series.” He had finally convinced his bosses at Sacramento Homicide to create a task force specifically for these killings. At the conference, he told two hundred of his fellow detectives, hailing from thirty-five states, about the murders along the I-5 corridor. He recounted the nonfunctional clothes cutting that seemed to link the crimes, and the difficulty of getting a bunch of separate agencies to work together on solving them.

  Biondi wasn’t the only one at the conference looking for ideas about an unsolved series of freeway murders. Public panic about serial killing had abated, but homicide detectives were noticing a disturbing new trend. Bodies were regularly being found along the nation’s interstate highways. Biondi attended presentations on freeway murders and the “redhead” killings—unsolved murders of young women who had ended up dumped along interstates in Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas.

  Such cases had been increasing in frequency since the late seventies. Donald Henry Gaskins, convicted in 1976, traveled the South’s roads in search of victims for what he called his “highway killings” (as opposed to his “serious killings,” which were people he knew). Patrick Kearney, who trolled the freeways of Orange County looking for young male hitchhikers, was arrested in 1977. William Bonin, who also killed young men along California highways, was arrested in 1980. Randy Kraft, a Bonin copycat, was arrested in 1983. Kearney, Bonin, and Kraft had each been dubbed the “Freeway Killer.” Randy Woodfield, an Oregon bartender who murdered people while robbing homes and businesses along I-5, became known as the “I-5 Killer.” He was arrested in 1981 and was quickly made the subject of a book by Ann Rule. And in 1984, Larry Eyler, called the “Interstate Killer” or the “Highway Killer,” was arrested in Illinois. Suspected in more than twenty murders, many involving bodies dumped along highways, he was convicted and sentenced to death.

  But none of these killers had become a household name, as so many other killers had in the same period. Even Henry Lee Lucas, who had so captivated the nation with his string of confessions, pretty much dropped out of view after the Texas attorney general’s office issued a 1986 report debunking the majority of his claims. The report even cast doubt on whether Lucas had murdered “Orange Socks”—the name given an unidentified female corpse found along a Texas interstate wearing nothing but a pair of orange socks. The murder of Orange Socks was what got Lucas sentenced to death, but the attorney general’s report pointed out that Lucas was in Florida at the time. Henry Lee Lucas would probably never have made it into print again had he not, in 1998, become the only death row prisoner in Texas to be granted clemency at the request of Governor George W. Bush. His sentence commuted to life, he went back to relative obscurity. He died of heart failure in 2001, largely forgotten.

  Something strange was going on. The nation had created a panic over mobile serial killers. But the most-talked-about killers—John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Son of Sam, even Ted Bundy—were mostly geographically focused. With the exception of Bundy, they weren’t mobile at all. But it didn’t matter, because the nation had come to associate freeways and violence. Meanwhile, real freeway killers—mobile predators using the highways to find vulnerable victims—were out there, but they got far less attention. Like the highways themselves, they were bland, unappealing, and lacking in taste. And their victims—gay hustlers, drifters, prostitutes, runaways—were “throwaway” people. The highway killers may have been “collectors,” but they were collecting the wrong thing.

  • • • • •

  While Ray Biondi was at the Nashville conference, the I-5 case got its first big break. On the night of September 14, Roger Kibbe picked up a prostitute in downtown Sacramento, twenty-nine-year-old Debra Ann Guffie. They drove to an empty golf course parking lot. As they sat in the car haggling over the price of a blow job, Kibbe suddenly grabbed Guffie’s arm. He produced a pair of handcuffs and tried to snap them onto her wrist.

  Guffie was a hardened heroin addict, but she turned out to be a fighter. When Kibbe grabbed her by the hair, she flailed around and bit him. Then she lunged for the door. As they struggled, a Sacramento police cruiser happened by. Guffie managed to get the car door open, and the officer heard her screaming. He pulled up behind the car. Seeing the cops, Kibbe shoved Guffie out the door and sped off. The police officer gave chase, catching up with him a few blocks later.

  Somewhat to the surprise of the police, Debra Guffie was willing to press charges. Kibbe was charged with the assault. In the interim before the trial, hoping to catch him up to something more serious than manhandling a hooker, police set up twenty-four-hour surveillance of the Public Storage facility where he lived. Kibbe did nothing heinous during this time, so in November of 1987 he was tried for battery, solicitation, and false imprisonment—all misdemeanor charges. Debra Guffie took the stand and testified against him. He was convicted on the first two counts and sentenced to eight months in jail. Detectives dec
ided to put together their murder case against him while he was in jail. They didn’t want to give him the chance to kill again.

  The first thing they did was hold a press conference warning women in the area that a serial killer was stalking the highways. It made barely a ripple. So early in 1988, Biondi and the Sacramento County sheriff held another press conference to confirm that detectives had linked seven of the murders happening along I-5. They asked the public for help identifying the murderer. “We think he is a frequent lone traveler on major highways in the Central Valley, the Highway 50 corridor and the Tahoe Basin,” the sheriff told reporters. “He’s probably a resident of one of those areas, more likely the general Valley, as he’s familiar, very familiar, with the rural roads and back roads. He has owned or had access to several different makes of vehicles during the recent years and he’s probably familiar with and frequents prostitution strolls in the Central Valley cities.”

  This sounded like exactly the kind of serial killer the FBI and others had been warning the nation about for years: a mobile predator, trolling multiple counties in his search for easy victims. In spite of this, the newly named “I-5 Strangler” got little attention. Some Central Valley newspapers put the story on page 1, but outside the immediate region, it took a backseat position. The Los Angeles Times, in its Southland edition, ran it on page 35. In the rest of the nation it didn’t play at all.