Body Parts (14 page)

Some cases have been publicized more than others, such as the body of a fifty-seven-year-old, fully clothed gold dealer who was murdered and dumped there in August 1980, his ankles and left wrist shackled to a large steel chain. Or the body of screenwriter Gary DeVore, who had been missing for more than a year when he turned up in his Ford Explorer in July 1998, submerged in mud where the Antelope Valley freeway crosses the canal. Investigators believed DeVore swerved off the road during a long, late-night drive home from New Mexico.

State water officials say ten corpses were found in the aqueduct in 1996 and 1997, combined. Although some such deaths are deemed homicides, many are thought to be drownings, despite the bold black-and-white signs posted on the gated entrances, cautioning:
STAY OUT OF AQUEDUCT. YOU MAY DROWN
.

Cotton is the number one crop in the tiny farming community of Buttonwillow, where more than two-thirds of the population of 1,266 was Hispanic at the time of the 2000 census.

“The only thing Buttonwillow seems to be in the middle of is nowhere,” Matt Phillips wrote in the
Bakersfield Californian
.

Nonetheless, it is still an important point as “nowhere” goes. Buttonwillow earned a claim to fame and distinction in 2000, when the California Land Surveyors Association declared it the state’s “center of population,” meaning that the town—or a field thereabouts—was the most easily accessible point on average for all California residents.

It’s unknown why four men who worked for a Bakersfield construction company were in the Buttonwillow area on the evening of June 2, 1998, but around six o’clock, they reported finding the nude and badly bloated body of a woman hung up on the steel cable of alternating red and white buoys that spanned the aqueduct. After the discovery was confirmed by two sheriff’s patrol deputies, the homicide team was called in.

The woman appeared to have been in the water for a while, so authorities were initially unable to identify her, and little publicity was given to her death. At that point, she was just another Jane Doe.

Gary Rhoades, a thirty-six-year-old detective with the Kern County Sheriff’s Office, was off-duty at his house in Bakersfield, with his wife and three daughters, when he got the call just before 7:00
P.M.
Rhoades, who started with the department as a deputy in 1981, had been working homicides for less than a year.

Knowing that he was going to be investigating a crime scene in or near water, Rhoades purposely dressed down in jeans and a polo shirt, something he wouldn’t mind getting dirty.

It was just getting dark when he met up with his partner, Ron Taylor, the lead detective, and their sergeant, Don Ferguson. The patrol sergeant and commander and a coroner’s investigator also showed up to join the two patrol officers who had initially responded.

The woman’s body was about forty feet downstream from the Highway 58 bridge, which crossed the canal and was surrounded by flat fields as far as the eye could see.

The rope line was meant as a safety device for people who had inadvertently fallen into the cold water. But given that the woman’s body was nude and facedown, Rhoades figured she hadn’t fallen in accidentally while fishing.

“You automatically think it’s some kind of rape or murder, or something like that,” he said later.

Rhoades and Taylor walked both sides of the bridge and both banks above the cement canal, searching by flashlight for shoe or tire tracks, pieces of clothing, or any other evidence. But they found nothing.

The investigators gathered on the west bank of the aqueduct, just south of the bridge, and lowered a boat into the water so that Rhoades could take a look at the body. Seeing no obvious signs of foul play, such as a gunshot wound, he took photos of the victim, then pulled her by the arm to the shore, where she was placed in a body bag.

By about 9:30
P.M.
, he and the other officers had tied ropes to the bag, hoisted it up the embankment, and lifted it into the white van of the private company contracted by the coroner’s office. This Jane Doe was five feet five inches, weighed about 125 pounds, and had blue eyes and reddish blond hair.

The next day, Taylor and an evidence technician went to the morgue in Bakersfield to try to roll a set of fingerprints, but her skin was too decomposed.

The department also sent out teletypes, distributing her description to agencies throughout the state, with the hopes of identifying her as a missing person.

On June 4, Rhoades and Taylor returned to the morgue for the autopsy, where Dr. Donna Brown noted that the victim had premortem, dime-sized bruises to the left side of her jaw along the cheek, a triangular mark underneath her neck, bruises to the right side of her neck, and scrapes on her temple and chin. Her neck was fractured and circled with a linear mark, as if she’d been strangled with something. Under the skin, Brown found deep bruising in the cheek and in the voice box area.

They took a sexual assault kit—anal, vaginal, and oral swabs; hair from her head and pubic area, and a blood sample—to try to match the DNA with a suspect once they found one.

The victim wore five rings on her left hand. On the web between her thumb and first finger was a tattoo of the letters “JJ,” encircled with a heart. She also wore a ring on her right ring finger.

The pathologist removed her hands, then soaked the skin in a chemical solution to improve the chances of obtaining fingerprints. They were finally able to take a usable set of prints, which they entered into the state DOJ’s Western Identification Network and the FBI’s databases.

Meanwhile, Rhoades and Taylor searched the missing persons’ files to see if they could find any leads. But they came up empty.

On July 29, their victim got a name.

Rhoades got a call from Sharon Pierce, a sheriff’s evidence tech, saying that she’d gotten a fingerprint match with a Tina Renee Gibbs from Tacoma, Washington, who had a criminal record as a prostitute there and also in Las Vegas.

But even then, the death of the woman, listed as a Tacoma resident, warranted only a three-paragraph brief inside the local news section of
The Seattle Times.
It noted the lack of suspects in the homicide case, but it did not mention how she made her living. No major newspaper in California appears to have noted her passing.

“The body of Tina Renee Gibbs, 25, was found floating in the water June 2 near Buttonwillow, a small town about 30 miles west of Bakersfield,” the
Times
story said. “She was strangled before her body was left in the aqueduct, Kern County sheriff’s coroners said.”

According to the
Times
, John Douglas, a former FBI serial killer profiler, referred to the Pacific Northwest as “America’s killing fields,” because that’s where serial killers Gary Ridgeway, Ted Bundy, John Allen Muhammad, and Robert Yates Jr. all came from.

But at the time, Rhoades and Taylor had no real leads on how Tina’s body ended up in Kern County.

“It was just anybody’s guess,” Rhoades said. “We talked about pimps and every option you could think of, really,” even the theory that the killer was a truck driver. “We were pretty much open to anything at that point.”

Using information from the coroner’s office, which was part of the sheriff ’s department, Rhoades located Tina’s father, Carlos Gibbs, in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Carlos didn’t express much emotion at the news.

“I’m guessing that’s because he didn’t even know his daughter,” Rhoades said later.

Asked if he knew how to contact Tina’s mother, Carlos said Tina had told him she was dead.

Tina and her mother, Mary, had left Carlos when Tina was about eighteen months old. He didn’t hear from either one of them until Tina called him out of the blue in 1990. She called him again around Christmas 1997, saying she was with her boyfriend “Boo” in Las Vegas.

Rhoades asked Carlos for names and phone numbers for Mary’s relatives, which ultimately led him to find Mary—remarried and very much alive in Blair, Oklahoma.

Tina was born in Fayetteville on April 20, 1972.

When Mary left Carlos, she took Tina to Georgia.

Tina was about seven when her mother began dating Ron Sharp, an army police investigator, and within a few months, Tina was already calling him “Daddy.”

Ron soon married Mary and made it official. Biology aside, he was Tina’s father.

Tina was a happy-go-lucky child who loved going to the beach and singing what her mother called “oldies but goodies.” She played quietly with her cat and wondered at the beauty of a butterfly.

She also liked to go fishing. Even if she wasn’t all that fond of baiting the hook with a worm, she appreciated the overall experience. She enjoyed going to carnivals and the circus, particularly watching the trained animals perform.

Ron taught Tina to swim. She wasn’t very coordinated with her feet, so he would hold her up in the water while she kicked. About every third kick, Tina would thump Ron in the side of the head, but he stuck with it until she could swim on her own.

“She caught on pretty good,” Ron said later. “Whenever we got close to water, she wanted to be in it.”

Ron also taught her to play softball. He coached her team for about seven years until she got tired of the sport, in which she played short center field, the tenth position on a softball team. She may have been an average player, but Ron thought she was fantastic. She hustled around the field and didn’t seem to mind getting bruised.

Tina alternated between being a girly-girl and a tomboy, so she and her mother would also fix each other’s hair, crochet, go shopping, and cook together. Her diet of favorites was pretty all-American: strawberries, ice cream, and hamburgers.

As she grew older, the Sharp house became a hangout for teenage Tina and her friends, a comfortable place to just be. Like many teenagers, she played pool and listened to music.

The family stayed in Georgia until Ron left the army and moved to Oklahoma for six or eight months, but Ron got bored with the slow pace and wanted to get back into police work, so they moved to the state of Washington.

When Tina was sixteen, the family went on a road trip along coastal Highway 101, heading south down into California, where they camped on the beach, and drove through the redwood forest. They continued on to Lake Tahoe and Reno, where the Sharps couldn’t seem to get Tina out of the Circus Circus hotel and casino.

Tina was eighteen in 1991, when Ron and Mary wanted to move to Oregon, and this time Tina decided to stay put. She’d fallen in love and wanted to be on her own.

Mary instinctively knew that Tina was using drugs and had fallen in with the wrong crowd. Ron, on the other hand, thought she’d grown up and was “ready to rule the world.”

“She called me one day and asked me if—if I would come and pick her up so she could come home,” Mary later recalled, “and that’s when we found out that she was messing with drugs. We were her sole support. Anything that she wanted, we gave it to her.”

Mary and Ron tried to get Tina counseling and off drugs, but they weren’t successful.

After they moved to Oregon, they heard from her only a couple of times a year. After they moved back to Oklahoma, they lost touch with her altogether.

The last time Mary remembered talking to Tina was in 1994, possibly on Christmas Eve.

Either way, Mary recalled one thing very clearly: “I was begging her to come home,” she said.

Tina agreed to come home, but she never followed through.

For years afterward, Mary tried to track down Tina through her friends. She kept hoping that Tina would get her life together one day, knock on the door, or give her a call.

Police records in Tacoma show that Tina was arrested more than a dozen times, five times for soliciting prostitution, in 1995 and early 1996, before she relocated to Las Vegas.

Tina seemed to know her way around the streets by the time of her final arrest in Tacoma, the night of January 11, 1996.

She was standing in front of Jack in the Box on Pacific Avenue, wearing jeans and a blue jacket, when undercover Officer Kelstrup decided to go after her. He pulled his unmarked car into the restaurant parking lot, where Tina walked over, opened the door, and got in.

“What are you doing?” he asked as he drove through the lot and headed down Pacific Avenue.

“I’m working,” she replied.

“You mean like prostitution?”

“Yes. Are you a cop?”

Kelstrup said no, so Tina told him to prove it. He asked her what she meant, but she didn’t answer.

“What sex act will you do?” he asked.

Tina looked at him and replied, “What do you want?”

“Just a blow job.”

“How much [money] do you have?”

“Twenty dollars, I guess.”

Tina said she needed $40.

“That kind of seems like a lot,” he said.

“Well, I really need forty.”

Kelstrup agreed to the price, then gave a prearranged arrest signal to a fellow officer, who stopped them on Fawcett Avenue in his marked patrol car. Tina was arrested and booked for soliciting prostitution and several outstanding misdemeanor warrants.