Body Hunter (2 page)

Chapter Two

 

It had been nearly a month since the gruesome death of Terry Sims. The killer had found a new job and attempted to put the grim events of the murder behind him. He had vowed that it would never happen again. After reading news reports that Sims knew karate and that it was believed that the killing might be gang related, he had convinced himself that Sims had been murdered by someone else.

Now employed, the gangly man pushed a damp mop down the corridor of the Wichita General Hospital. He'd been working as a hospital orderly for several weeks, cleaning up the messes made by others. His life was the one disorder he couldn't seem to straighten out.

Although he blocked the murder from his mind, he couldn't impede his ever-increasing feelings of hostility. It was as though he were back on that circular track in junior high school, running faster and faster. His relationships continued to be a source of frustration and irritation; thus his drug and alcohol use escalated, leading to even more feelings of disappointment. The circle of uncontrollable rage seemed to have no beginning and no end.

Although the orderly thought the housekeeping job beneath him, he emptied trash from a hall receptacle as he watched Toni Gibbs, a beautiful twenty-three-year-old nurse, make her rounds. He had first noticed Toni shortly after beginning work. Her bright flashing eyes and beaming smile lit up a room. Her white nurse's cap, anchored with bobby pins, held her brown hair streaked with gold in place. Toni was small, no more than five-feet, one-inch tall. She weighed a mere ninety-four pounds.

The orderly had wanted to get to know Toni Gibbs better, but she'd brushed him off. His family, Terry Sims, now Toni Gibbs. Everyone seemed to reject him.

He left the hospital after his three-to-eleven
P.M.
shift and walked the streets of Wichita Falls. The city of one hundred thousand was mere miles from the Oklahoma border. The economy of Wichita County was driven by oil and agriculture, Sheppard Air Force Base, and Midwestern State University.

As Wichita Falls boomed, the young hospital worker sank deeper into financial distress. His feeling of disappointment with his life turned to fury as he screamed to the sky, hollered at the trees, and cursed God. By the time daylight was breaking over the eastern horizon, he was high, drunk, and walking back toward Wichita General.

 

 

Toni Gibbs had completed her eight-hour shift. Tired and ready to head home, she drove her 1984, white Z28 Camaro out of the hospital parking lot. In the beams of her headlights, she saw a tall slim man walking along the hospital grounds. It was the new hospital orderly.

“Hi,” Toni said, her window only partially open in an effort to keep out the cold January air.

“Hi,” the man replied in a low, sullen tone.

“Do you need a ride?” Toni asked.

“Yeah.” He climbed into the passenger side of the two-door sports coupe.

Toni Gibbs's kindness had no effect on his angry mood. As the man stared at Toni guiding her car down the nearly deserted city street, an angry fire burned in his belly. His internal hostility shifted to the pretty young registered nurse beside him.

“Drive out U.S. 281,” he demanded.

Toni Gibbs's surprised expression altered her attractive features.

“Drive!” he shouted.

Toni obeyed, nervously, guiding her vehicle past a green-and-white sign denoting the Wichita Falls city limits toward U.S. 281 and into neighboring Archer County. Suddenly, the man grabbed her dark jacket and jerked her toward him. The car swerved.

“I want to talk to you!” he yelled. “I need to talk to you!”

But it wasn't Toni Gibbs the man wanted to talk to; it was someone else. As he stared at Toni, he saw another face glaring back at him. Someone else's disappointed eyes piercing him.

The sparkle was gone from Toni's own beautiful eyes, replaced with frantic fear.

The man continued to pull and jerk on Gibbs's jacket. Her tiny body bounced around the interior of her car like a BB in a hand-held maze game, slamming into the driver-side door, then against her attacker until she lost control of the vehicle and veered off the road.

Once stopped, Gibbs sat behind the wheel, gasping from the near crash, her breathing quick and shallow.

The assailant gripped her jacket tightly as he instructed her to drive the car down a dirt road.

“Stop!” he demanded when he spotted a construction site in the otherwise desolate area. “Stop the car!”

The vehicle came to rest on the lonely Archer County road. Still enraged, the man tightened his grip on Toni's jacket, using his greater strength as he resumed slinging her about inside the car. Her head smashed against the headrest, then the steering wheel. Her aggressor began to tear at her clothes.

“I hate you!” he screamed. “I hate you! I hate everybody!”

Frightened, she screamed, “Why? Why do you hate me?”

Toni didn't understand that she wasn't the person the man hated. His displaced anger toward someone else was now directed at her. The pretty young nurse just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Like Terry Sims, Toni Gibbs was a fighter. She reached for the door handle of her Camaro and quickly flung it open. Just as she began to flee her captor, a sharp, searing pain tore into her flesh as the cold steel of a knife blade slashed her soft skin. She bolted from the car and made a run for it. A run for her life.

Gibbs's feet moved quickly, but the man's long strides were too much for her. He had soon caught up with Toni in the open pasture north of the dirt road. He slammed her to the cold dry earth, her body hitting the ground with a painful jarring impact. Then he dragged her through an open field blanketed in knee-high grasses. When he reached a burned-out school bus abandoned between sprawling mesquite trees, he ripped the clothes from his victim's body. Shivering from the cold and the fear, Toni began to cry. Then the abuser topped Toni's petite frame with his own overpowering physique.

The man might have been in complete physical control, but his emotions raged unrestricted. The pretty, pain-laced face beneath him wasn't that of Toni Gibbs. He saw someone else's cool accusing stare. Pushing her shoulders down into the dirty floorboards of the old bus, he rammed himself into Gibbs's unyielding body, savagely raping her. Each painful lunge of his pelvis against hers produced pain, anguish, and heightened fear. Toni's screams echoed in the shell of the rusting bus as the man's rage rampaged on. To rape his victim was not enough. He had to humiliate her. Degrade her. The angry man spun Toni over on her stomach and with as much force as he had used to rape her, he sodomized her.

He had made Toni completely powerless, making himself the absolute ruler over her. He was energized by the power, not by the sex. His complete mastery over Toni, the pain he inflicted on her was the greatest domination he had ever felt.

Toni Gibbs screamed from the pain. Tears of suffering stained her cheeks. Finally, the attack stopped. For several moments there was peace. Toni lay quietly. The hospital orderly she had attempted to befriend lay beside her, taking in depthless, rapid breaths.

Moments later, Toni's back abruptly arched from the same searing pain she first felt in the car. Again and again the hot burn of the sharp knife blade was plunged deep into her slim body. Three stab wounds to the back, three more to the chest. The lifeblood drained quickly from her body.

The attacker kneeled beside Toni, again panting from exhaustion. He forced himself to take short deep breaths as he struggled to regain control. As each breath lengthened, his anger diminished.

Calm at last, he stared disbelievingly at his victim.

The man quickly gathered up Gibbs's clothes and hurriedly stuffed the red-stained white uniform, bra, and panties under the floorboards of the rusted-out vehicle.

Desperation overtook him. He had to get back to Wichita Falls. Away from the smell of death. Away from the unbearable sound of Toni Gibbs gasping for air.

The man climbed behind the wheel of the white Camaro, moved the seat all the way back to accommodate his lengthy legs, and headed back down U.S. 281 toward Wichita Falls. When he passed the high golden arches of McDonald's, he turned the car down a side street, and pulled to the curb at the intersection of Van Buren and McGregor Streets. He abandoned the vehicle and walked less than one half mile back to his apartment.

While her attacker fled the scene, Toni Gibbs struggled to live. She crawled from the bus shell into the open field, pulling herself along the ground by desperately grasping clumps of brush. One hundred yards away, she died.

Chapter Three

After an eight-hour break, Toni Gibbs was expected to return at 10:45
P.M.
for a second shift at Wichita Falls Hospital. The Midwestern State University graduate failed to report.

“Something must be wrong,” the nursing supervisor told her staff. “It's not like Toni to not show up. I'm calling her brother.”

Jeff Gibbs was told that his sister was missing from work. Jeff telephoned his older brother in New Mexico and in a matter of hours, Walden Gibbs was in Wichita Falls. He and Jeff began the search for Toni.

The Gibbs brothers first stopped at the Rain Tree Apartments on Barnett Street where Toni lived. There was no sign of Toni or her white Camaro. Although the apartment seemed in order, they feared the worst. Toni's recent words rang in Jeff's ears.

“I've gotten some obscene phone calls recently,” she'd told him. “Sometimes he talks nasty, sometimes he just breathes. If I've been out somewhere, he'll call and tell me what I was wearing. I want to get a tap put on my phone.”

Jeff had been distressed by the calls and when Toni asked what type of weapon to buy, he'd purchased her a can of mace. He made certain she knew how to use it and insisted she carry the canister with her whenever she walked alone.

Jeff was scared. His hands trembled as he dialed the phone. “I want to report a missing person,” he told the police.

Jeff's next call was even more difficult to make. He had to tell his parents in New Mexico that their only daughter was missing. As soon as they heard the news, Donnie and W. L. Gibbs left for Wichita Falls.

At ten o'clock in the morning, two days after her disappearance, Toni Gibbs's car was found in the two thousand block of Van Buren Street where her attacker had parked it on the morning of the murder. The Camaro's wheels rested close to the curb, a few feet from the outstretched branches of a large, leaf-barren tree. Toni's purse, with her driver's license still inside, was found under the passenger-side front seat, but her keys were missing. Although there was no sign of foul play, police processed the car for fingerprints and fibers. They took samples of a small stain on the front driver's seat and small smears of a red substance on both the inside and outside door handles on the driver's side. Stains they feared might be blood.

“Suggesting that she up and left is ridiculous,” Donnie and W. L. Gibbs told reporters when asked if it was possible that Toni had merely left town without leaving word. Mr. Gibbs braved the bitter cold, his bald head bare, to speak to the press. His small wife nestled close to him as he informed the media that they were offering a one-thousand-dollar reward for information about their daughter.

Johnny Tidwell of KLUR radio joined the Gibbs in their efforts to entice persons who might have information about Toni to call in. He set up a reward fund at American National Bank. “We hope to raise ten thousand dollars,” Tidwell told listeners.

Wearily, a tall, lanky man listened to news reports as he lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling. Sleep came, then restlessness and confusion.

Had it all been a bad dream? Newscasters speculated that a nurse at Wichita Falls Hospital named Toni Gibbs had been abducted from her apartment on Barnett Street and was missing. He knew he hadn't been way out on Barnett at her apartment.

It wasn't me,
he thought.
Thank God, it wasn't me.

He shook his head, trying to dislodge the image of Toni Gibbs, her bruised and bloody body, her clothes, the bus. But the mental picture remained with him. Haunted him.

As the killer contemplated his role in Toni Gibbs's disappearance, more than three hundred volunteers joined the Gibbses' search for Toni, some on horseback to cover fields laden with mesquite trees and two-foot-tall milo stalks. Others drove back roads and open fields. Helicopters patrolled the area where Gibbs lived.

Many of the searchers were from Midwestern State University, where the pretty young nurse had been a student. Sorority and fraternity members joined with other students from across campus.

“I have to help look for her,” John Little had told a friend. “I was at a fraternity party where she was not long ago. We all need to help look.” Little's attitude reflected that of many others.

“A lot of nurses are frightened. One nurse has been killed, another is missing,” Major Charles Trainham of the Wichita Falls police told the press. In an attempt to reassure residents, he added, “We have twelve investigators checking leads.”

But police efforts failed to calm the fears of nurses in the north Texas city. More than twenty nurses at Bethania Regional Health Care Center had reported receiving harassing phone calls. The number had increased since Terry Sims's murder. Staff requests for escorts had tripled. Now with the mysterious disappearance of Toni Gibbs, the Wichita Falls nursing community was in a near panic. Police attempted to quell their fears by assuring them that there was no connection between the murder of Sims and the disappearance of Gibbs.

By January 31, twelve days after Toni Gibbs was last seen, there were no solid leads in the case. The Gibbs were doing all they could to find their only daughter. They posted reward flyers and granted interviews in hopes of triggering a response. More than sixteen thousand dollars had poured into a Clayton, New Mexico, bank reward fund. Born and raised in Clayton, Toni was as well thought of as her caring parents.

Although they'd vowed to remain in Wichita Falls until their daughter was found, W. L. and Donnie Gibbs were finally forced to return to Clayton. They would wait there for word about Toni. Wait and pray.

Wichita Falls police continued to follow every lead. Several persons claiming to have psychic powers called and offered to help, but it wasn't until four weeks after Toni's disappearance that a break in the case finally came.

 

 

Charlie Hayes steered his Texas Electric Service pickup truck through the metal gate of a barbed-wire fence and across the open pasture just off West Jentsch Road in Archer County. It was about two-thirty in the afternoon when he headed toward a transformer that needed inspection. He slowed his truck as something in the brown grasses caught his eye.

What is that?
Hayes said to himself, squinting for a better look.
Looks like a mannequin.

Hayes climbed out of his pickup and walked toward the still figure nestled in the weeds. Then he abruptly stopped in his tracks.

It was no mannequin, but the nude body of a young woman lying faceup and sprawled on the ground.

Hayes's breath quickened as his heart raced and his body shuddered. He hurriedly returned to his truck and headed for the nearest phone. He had to call the police.

 

 

Shortly after, the field, which had been leased out for cattle grazing land, was surrounded by law enforcement officers from Wichita Falls and Archer County. Bill Guress of the Wichita Falls Police Department, Ed Daniels of the Archer County Sheriff's Department, and Trooper Miller of the Department of Public Safety arrived on the scene together. They immediately had a four-hundred-square-yard area around the abandoned rear section of the school bus sealed off with red barrier tape. Two men were instructed to make crime-scene drawings and the evidence recovery team began searching with metal detectors and documenting the scene with video equipment. A list of all officers at the scene was made. Other than those working the crime scene, no one was allowed near the area.

Guress, Edwards, and Miller walked past the burned-out bus with broken windows, going twenty-five yards south to where the body lay.

Guress scanned the scene. “You can't see this body unless you know it's here, or you just happen on it,” Guress said, walking through the tall grasses.

Toni's hands and arms were above her head, her face turned to her left. Her blond hair blended into the dried grass. Guress could clearly see that there were gaping wounds to her chest and a large bruise on her left hip. From her left arm pit to her elbow, Toni's arm had been chewed to the bone, just as a portion of her left lower calf had been eaten away. Guress, a large man, bent down for a closer look at red markings on her thighs and breasts.

“Those are paw marks,” Guress said. “Looks like animals have eaten part of her left upper arm and left calf. She's been out here for some time.”

While Guress, Daniels, and Miller studied the victim's body, two crime-scene investigators were busy making detailed drawings of the scene. The sketch included U.S. 281 as it intersected with West Jentsch Road. Mesquite bushes at the entrance to the property, the metal gate, barbed-wire fence, and even two Bic pens found near the gate were added to the detailed illustration. The bus and two mesquite trees to the east, a large mesquite tree nearly fifteen feet to the southwest of the bus, a fiberglass tube found in the weeds, a utility pole, an abandoned shed, and Toni Gibbs's body were all in the picture.

Guress walked down the slight slope to the bus. There was no motor, no wheels. The metal form tilted to the driver's side. It was nothing more than a shell with some pipes thrown on the floorboards, along with other debris. The top and sides were rusted.

From the open end of the bus, Guress could see something white. Further inspection revealed a nurse's uniform lying on the dry dirt under the floorboards. It was covered with red stains. A white bra, still clasped, was found among the pipes inside the bus.

Splatters and droplets of what looked like blood dotted the inside walls of the bus. The directions of the blood spots were erratic, with cast-off blood on both the left and right sides of the interior.

“There was a lot of violence in this bus,” Guress remarked, shaking his head.

C. D. Cox, Justice of the Peace in Archer City, arrived on the scene to officially pronounce Toni Gibbs dead. He ordered an autopsy, then released her badly disfigured body to All's Funeral Home.

Crime-scene investigators made plaster casts of depressions near the bus and at the field entrance. The indentations included tire tracks left in the dry mud near the bus.

Everything that could be done was being done at the crime scene to help find out how Toni Gibbs died and to produce a lead to her killer's identity. Guress knew the most difficult part of the process needed to be handled immediately. The Gibbses would have to be told—Toni was dead.

 

 

“I suppose I probably knew while I was in Wichita Falls, but I didn't give up and I didn't just fall apart,” Mrs. Gibbs told reporters after being informed her daughter was dead.

“Part of our lives is gone now. She was just so very, very dear to us. I just wish you could have known her,” she added, dabbing a tissue to her tear-filled eyes.

More than four hundred people filled the pews of the Lamar Baptist Church in Wichita Falls for a memorial service to honor Toni. She was popular and well liked, both in New Mexico, where she was a Clayton High School homecoming queen, varsity cheerleader, and a member of the National Honor Society, and the First Baptist Church, as well as in Wichita Falls, where she graduated from Midwestern State University. MSU received a portion of the reward money collected in Toni's name to use for student scholarships, as did West Texas State University.

“She had a sincere love of mankind and was easily upset when others were criticized or being hurt. She loved with a spirit of loyalty and generosity all who knew her,” the Reverend Sandy Sandlin said. Sandlin prayed for protection of other potential victims.

But public unrest was high on the heels of another brutal murder, and women decided to rely on themselves, not God and the law to protect them. Gun shops' sales soared.

“Many, many people are now carrying some form of self-defense, from nail files to hat pins. Can you blame them?” Joe Tom White, chapter president of the Texas Weapon Collectors Association, said.

An unidentified nurse summed up the feeling in the North Texas community: “Everybody is scared shitless. Out buying guns. Afraid to walk to work.”

No one knew if there would be another victim—or who it might be. Just as they had no idea who the killer or killers were.

Four days after Toni Gibbs's body was found in Archer County, the young hospital orderly quit his job at the Wichita Falls General Hospital.