Body Parts (18 page)

“It appeared as if White had a hard time focusing on my face,” the officer’s report stated. “She would glance up towards my voice and her eyes would immediately fall back down towards the ground.”

While she was being arrested, she was identified as the woman who had caused $1,700 in damage to a Chevy Beretta, belonging to the Studebaker’s DJ, earlier that night. Lanett had walked on the hood and scratched it with her heels, mangled the windshield wipers, and destroyed the wipers’ motor. She’d also broken off the antenna, which she used to hit the windshield until it cracked.

The officer, who took her to jail, wrote that she was too drunk to understand her Miranda rights, so he didn’t even try to read them to her.

After being late and not showing up for her weekend jail program in 1995 and 1996, her probation was revoked in April 1996. A bench warrant was issued and her bail was set at $50,000. By the time Lanett was killed, she had five outstanding warrants to her name, with bail amounts totaling $127,500.

In July 1998, the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Child Support Division filed a complaint against Lanett, seeking a monthly $370—her “presumed income as provided by law”—as support for Amanda, who had received $5,180 in welfare payments over the past fourteen months. The DA also asked the court to make sure that Amanda had health insurance.

Clearly, Lanett was a young woman in trouble, caught in a downward spiral.

The last time Debra White saw her daughter was September 16, 1998. Lanett had brought her mother a birthday cake, saying she’d return three days later on the actual day to celebrate. Debra said this was so typical of Lanett, who was always thoughtful, particularly on special occasions.

Debra got a call from her sister Judy on Tuesday, September 22, saying that Lanett had gone to Baker’s restaurant to pick up a check on Sunday and never came back.

Three days later, an Ontario police officer notified Debra and Bill at their apartment that Lanett might have been “involved in a homicide.” He told the Whites to contact the San Joaquin County detectives working the case, so Bill and his son went to a pay phone down the street to make the call. Debra later said she immediately went into shock, not understanding or wanting to accept the news.

Detective Mike Jones took the call.

“Do you know why she might be up in northern California?” Jones asked.

“Why?”

“We’re conducting an investigation.”

“No, I don’t know why she’d be up there,” Bill said.

Jones asked where Lanett was living and Bill gave him an address in the 10000 block of Catawba Road in Fontana, where Lanett and her two youngest children had been staying with her cousin Charlotte Bailey.

The detective could detect some concern in Bill’s voice, but wanted to get a sense for whether he could be a suspect before giving him any real details. Normally, everyone who had contact with the victim, including family members, was considered a potential suspect. Jones would eliminate them, one by one, as he interviewed them.

“With a homicide, everybody’s a suspect until you know different,” Jones explained later.

Figuring that he needed to conduct the murder investigation in Lanett’s home city, Jones decided to hold the specifics until he could talk to the Whites face-to-face in a couple of days. In the meantime, he went ahead with the official notification.

“Sir, well, I have some bad news for you. We found a young female in a waterway, deceased, near Lodi. We have tentatively identified her by fingerprints and it is Lanett,” Jones said.

After the call, Bill and his son went back to the duplex and told Amanda about her mother’s death. Almost ten, Amanda was old enough to understand and promptly burst into tears. They decided to wait until later to tell Amanda’s three younger siblings.

When it came time to make arrangements, the Whites didn’t have much money, and because of the decomposed state of Lanett’s body, they decided to cremate her. As soon as they got the box of her ashes, they held a service for her at a local mortuary.

“I had to take my baby out of there [in a box], holding her like that,” Debra said later. “I never . . . thought I’d ever have to go through something like that. Your kids, they go from an accident, car wreck, stuff like that. But something like this, there’s no excuse for it. No excuse in this world for it.”

On Monday, September 28, Jones made the ten-hour drive down to Fontana with Detective David Claypool. Knowing they would start their interviews with Lanett’s parents, Jones called the Whites when they were about an hour away.

The city of Fontana is built on a flat area surrounded by mountains, ringed by a yellow layer of smog blown in from the urban metropolis of Los Angeles.

The sun was starting to go down when the detectives pulled up to Debra’s sister Judy’s house in the 9000 block of Beach Avenue, around 7:45
P.M.

Debra talked softly, crying off and on, as Jones questioned her about Lanett and her lifestyle.

“I was pretty confident that she wasn’t involved, even though I didn’t think there was a very close relationship between the two,” Jones said later.

As they were talking, Debra said that Lanett had lived with her and Bill until the first part of September, when they had to kick her out. She didn’t elaborate.

After Debra said Lanett’s ex-boyfriend Theo Flores had sprayed Easy-Off oven cleaner on Lanett’s trailer, and also tried to kill her, Flores moved to the top of Jones’s list of suspects.

Jones spoke with Bill next, taking him out to the car to show him a photo of Lanett’s tattoos so that he could confirm her identity. Jones wasn’t going to show Bill any shots of Lanett’s face or breasts, given their decomposed and blackened state. Even so, he still tried to warn Lanett’s father about what he was going to see.

“I’m going to show you a picture of her back,” Jones said. “The picture is not pretty.”

Bill Sr. was devastated by his daughter’s death. A macho guy who never showed his emotions, Bill cried after seeing what had happened to his only daughter.

“He’s a pretty brave man and I think it’s messed with him ever since then,” Debra said in 2006. “It’s like he never used to cry very much, but now, I always see him crying. I mean, he tries to act like he’s not, but I know when he’s crying. And it’s just like, you know, a heartbreaking, awful, terrible thing for someone to have to go through.”

That same night, Jones spoke with Charlotte Bailey, Lanett’s cousin, who seemed pretty honest, given that she admitted to smoking a dime bag of crank ($10 worth) with Lanett the last day she saw her alive. Charlotte said she, her sister Sharon, Lanett, and their seven children had all been living in her tiny unit on Catawba Road in Fontana for three or four weeks before Lanett was killed.

Crank is another name for methamphetamine, an extremely addictive stimulant that can be snorted or smoked, causing an unnaturally high euphoria that could last for hours, followed by a deep fall into withdrawal, which causes users to keep on using.

As was typical with what Jones described as “cranksters,” he quickly determined that Lanett, her cousin, other members of her family, and some of her friends and acquaintances belonged to a community that had a different lifestyle and sense of time from mainstream society.

“[Charlotte] gave me a bunch of leads to start from there,” Jones said.

Alcohol, drugs, and sex ran rife through the stories that Jones would hear over the next few days as a picture of Lanett began to emerge. She was regularly seen with hickeys on her neck. She liked to stand in Catawba Road outside her cousin’s house, wave men down in passing cars, bum a cigarette, and strike up a conversation. She’d also been having simultaneous relations with at least two men, and there were others around the periphery. Some of her friends said they’d never seen her with any white friends in the time they’d known her.

When Jones finished with White’s immediate family, he and Claypool went back to their hotel to get some sleep. They got up the next morning and had breakfast, but they didn’t feel the need to rush.

“Most of these people aren’t up and moving until 10 or 11
A.M.
,” Jones said.

Charlotte’s neighborhood was in one of the city’s older residential areas, inhabited primarily by low-income Latino families, where peddlers sold ice cream, snow cones, and fried corn munchies from three-wheeled carts, riding up and down the streets and honking their horns. In late 2007, chain-link fence or other barriers surrounded the small perimeter of most every house or multiunit dwelling. Some had plastic flamingos in the front yards, others abandoned cars. The aroma of home-cooked Mexican food filled the air along these residential streets, but along the boulevard, the air hung with a turpentinelike odor mixed with exhaust fumes from the nearby Highway 10.

The view from Charlotte’s run-down building was a vacant dirt lot, scattered with industrial trailers and trucks. Her triplex was only a block from Valley Boulevard, a noisy throughway lined with car dealerships, strip malls, liquor stores, and auto repair shops. Cars with shiny silver hubcaps proudly cruised the strip, sharing their loud music and booming bass with their fellow motorists. Many billboards and business signs were written in Spanish.

Lanett and Charlotte frequented a liquor store around the corner. A couple of miles down the boulevard from Charlotte’s place were several truck stops—the Fontana Truck Stop, Three Sisters Truck Stop, and Truck Town. Hookers were known to frequent these and other well-traveled businesses like them, hoping to make some money by “dating” truck drivers who were looking for a little action to spice up those long hours alone.

It’s unclear how Lanett ended up at one of these places, which were too far away, really, to walk to in high heels. According to Wayne, who said he picked her up on a frontage road near a truck stop on Cherry Street, she was upset and had been drinking the night she got into his big rig.

The two detectives gradually pieced together what happened in the days before Lanett disappeared on Sunday, September 20.

Early in the day, Lanett and Charlotte smoked some crank at their friend Michelle’s house, returning to Catawba Road in the afternoon.

Lanett pushed her baby in the stroller to the corner liquor store, sometime between 5:15 and 6:00
P.M.
, to call her friend Mario. She came back with a bottle of Cisco, a cheap sweet, flavored wine similar to Ripple that has a 20 percent alcohol content.

Lanett’s cousin Sharon told the detectives that Lanett stayed outside talking to a big guy in a white pickup truck while Charlotte took a nap. He was a white guy, six feet tall, 180 pounds, with graying hair, a thick mustache, and tattooed arms. Jones later learned that the guy was fifty-two-year-old Ralph Edward Bishop III, who admitted using a quarter-gram of crank a day and could not account for his whereabouts later that night. Jones added him to the list of suspects.

Charlotte woke up to see Lanett putting on a black-and-brown dress, which she wore for her second trip to the liquor store around 7:30
P.M.
, returning with another bottle of Cisco.

Mario showed up about 9:00
P.M.
Lanett went outside and gave him a hug, then sat in his lap, kissing him in the front yard.

Sharon, who had gone to lie down, woke up around ten o’clock because Lanett had turned on the hall light to change her clothes again. This time she put on a pair of tight faded jeans, a blue midriff tank top under a long-sleeved brownish plaid shirt, and a pair of black-and-white high-heeled sandals.

Lanett was sniffling as if she’d been crying, but she wouldn’t tell Sharon what was wrong.

One of Lanett’s children woke up and wanted some milk, but they were out, so she said she would walk to the liquor store—for the third time that night—and get some. This was the last time Sharon saw her cousin.

At some point after Lanett left, Charlotte was awakened by Lanett’s baby crying. Mario told her that Lanett had gone to pick up her check at Baker’s, then was supposed to meet someone at the liquor store to “make some money.” The Baker’s manager later looked at a photo of Lanett and said he’d never seen her before.

Mario woke Sharon around 11:00
P.M.
to tell her he was worried that Lanett had not come home yet. Around 1:00 or 2:00
A.M.
, he walked around the block to see if he could find her. He spent the rest of the night on the couch, waiting for her.

Ignacio, another of Lanett’s boyfriends and the father of her baby David, showed up the next morning. When he learned that Lanett hadn’t come home, he waited around all day with Mario, hoping she’d show up.

Finally, around 5:00
P.M.
, they both went to the liquor store to see if anyone knew where she was, but no one had seen her since 9:30 the night before. At that point, Ignacio took his son to his grandmother’s house.

On September 29, the detectives paid a visit to the liquor store, where Jones asked owner Sean Massis if they could watch the video surveillance tape. But upon checking the dates on the tape, they realized September 20 had already been recorded over.