Body Parts (24 page)

Wayne said no, but they had common features. He said he also wasn’t responsible for the death of the Samoan girl who’d been in the news recently.

“I was wondering, you know, what’s going on.... I’m obviously losing my marbles, but thinking I’m not alone here,” he said, referring again to another killer.

“I need to know how this girl died,” Freeman said. “There were some other things done to her that—that you haven’t told me about, right?”

Wayne blurted out another non sequitur, admitting that he had been arrested for killing a dog about five years earlier. He claimed that it was an accident, but even though he told a police officer that he’d shot the animal in self-defense, his report stated that Wayne “killed him because I wanted to.”

Freeman tried to reassure him that he wouldn’t and couldn’t put words in Wayne’s mouth, not with a tape recorder running.

“I want to help her, okay?” Wayne said.

“You’re helping.”

“I want to help you find out who that girl is. . . . It’s extremely important to me. . . . I know where her head is, but I don’t know if it’s still there.”

“Where?” Freeman asked. “Where is that?”

Wayne explained that he burned her clothes in the incinerator at the Readimix cement plant, where he used to work in Arcata, then put her head, lower legs, and arms in a nearby sandbar along the Mad River.

“I buried them in, buried and pushed and put them in the sand . . . and then the rains came.”

“If the arm washed away, the head might’ve washed away, too, don’t you think?” Freeman asked.

Wayne said he didn’t know, but he had placed a foot-square piece of cement on top of her body parts, which he thought should still be there.

Freeman said the best way to identify the girl would be to find her teeth and then track down her family through dental records.

“Would you want to take a trip out there and show us?”

“If you want me to,” Wayne said.

Freeman asked if there were any more body parts in Wayne’s trailer. He also asked a number of other questions, but couldn’t get a straight answer out of Wayne, whose sentences were growing increasingly incoherent.

“Except for, I didn’t know how to get rid of, you know,” Wayne said. “After it happened, I panicked. In the trailer, I panicked, and I think I was already getting real messed up more than I am right now.”

Clearly, something bad had happened in that trailer and Freeman wanted the details. But Wayne seemed incapable or unwilling to be more specific.

When Freeman asked Wayne again whether he would show investigators where he put the body parts in the river, Wayne responded with his own question.

“You willing to have an attorney along?” he asked.

“Anytime you want an attorney, we—we’ll stop,” Freeman said.

“Can’t we just get the attorney and do all this, too?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Well, because what will happen is the attorney will tell you not to talk to me anymore,” Freeman said, chuckling. “That’s what attorneys do. As soon as you retain an attorney, the first thing the attorney tells you is, ‘Don’t talk to the deputy sheriffs or the investigators or the police.’”

“Well, I suppose if I was trying to weasel out of doing something that I did wrong somehow, that . . . ,” Wayne said, mumbling something.

“Get an attorney?” Freeman asked.

“Yes. But I’m not trying to weasel out on anything. I turned myself in. But I don’t think very good, and I take my advice from my brother.”

Freeman told him that as soon as Wayne mentioned the word “attorney,” that Freeman had to be very careful, “because we have to make sure that if you want an attorney that—that we stop and get you one. So you have to be able to convince us that you really want help.”

“I wanna help, but I can’t fix anything,” Wayne said. “What really screwed my head up, I know is, a, to cause the pain inside. It’s not something to me physically, I don’t know what it is, but it’s got me in, it’s got me crippled inside. It’s taken some kind of physical damage on me. Holding things in too long.”

Wayne cried, saying he understood that he’d caused pain to the women’s families, too. “Every day they hurt. Because of me, they’re suffering. So the less suffering, the quicker they know.”

Wayne said he might have kept the breast in his truck refrigerator for a week or two, but he couldn’t keep track of time very well.

Freeman had been waiting for the right moment to ask about the other victims he suspected were still out there. “You’re probably expecting this—is there anyone else?”

“Yeah,” Wayne said.

“How many would you say?”

“Two.”

“Two others? And do you remember where these people . . .”

Wayne said he was trying to recall where he’d picked up the woman he’d put in the aqueduct, but he was having trouble. It was somewhere near an air force base, near where he’d made a pickup at a cement plant.

Freeman tried again to get Wayne to focus. “You feel like talking about the—the two others that you mentioned?”

“Ah, no, I can’t.”

“Can’t think of it?”

“I don’t know what I’m doing. My brain’s not working right.”

Wayne said he’d never done drugs, except some marijuana as a teenager. The pot made his mind come and go, sort of like what was happening to him now, only different. Sometimes, he said, he could concentrate and “sometimes I wander out to lunch.” This had become a problem in his truck driving job, because there were times he couldn’t even fill out the logbook, where he was supposed to record the miles he drove, along with his drop-offs and pickups.

“I used to be able to calculate in my head. Two- and four-digit numbers and problems. I never used a calculator in my whole life. Now I have to use a calculator just to do my log. Just really simple, simple stuff.”

“Yeah, your brother told me, you had a really highly technical job with the service and everything,” Freeman said.

“Was the best thing I ever did.”

Freeman asked if one event had triggered things, perhaps something traumatic.

Initially, Wayne said there were two events—getting kicked out of the marines and his divorce. But then he said he actually had no idea.

“I couldn’t play no more,” he said, crying. “I had to fake like I was happy. Got so people didn’t even want to be around me. I stopped sleeping right. . . . I didn’t eat right. Started drinking at a prostitute bar . . . and darkness. Every time I’d see a little baby, it just ties me up in knots, and they’re everywhere. . . . I love little babies. . . . They’ll kill you with an enzyme.”

“Sometimes, yeah,” Freeman said, as if he understood. “So, before that, did you ever kill anybody, or was it after that, that this started?”

Wayne repeated that he didn’t mean to, that he “tried to revive them.”

“Some didn’t die,” he said.

Freeman asked if he meant that they got away.

“I let them go,” Wayne said, crying harder now. “I didn’t want to kill anybody. I just feel certain, certain things—I don’t know what they are. Certain things, you know, it just makes me freeze up. I just want everything to stop.”

“’Cause you strangle them?” Freeman asked.

“No,” Wayne said.

“So you’d suffocate them?”

Freeman kept trying to get Wayne to discuss how he’d killed these women, but Wayne was either incapable or unwilling to be more specific.

“I know . . . I’m a killer. . . . [When I was young, if] I stepped on a bug, I’d cry,when somebody told somebody to go, I’d cry. . . . I felt bad. I was too sensitive. I was always sensitive like that.”

Freeman asked if Wayne was too tired to keep talking.

“Yeah, I’m tired,” Wayne said. “I can’t be crying and shit.”

Wayne said he didn’t think he could say anything more to help, but Freeman figured he’d try one more time to learn more about the other two women. Wayne said he thought he’d picked one up in northern California and another in southern California, but he couldn’t remember more than that without getting some sleep.

The taped portion of this interview with Freeman lasted a little more than an hour, but Freeman said they spoke for another twenty-five minutes or so after the tape ran out. He decided against stopping to get another tape because he didn’t want to lose the momentum. It was lucky he didn’t—lucky for the investigation, anyway—because Wayne showed him on the map where he’d picked up the three women and dumped their bodies.

Freeman told Wayne that he’d been looking at a suspect in Washington who was a necrophiliac. (The actual term, according to
Merriam-Webster’s Medical Dictionary,
is “necrophile.”)

“What’s a necrophiliac?” Wayne asked.

“He has his fun after the girls are dead,” Freeman explained.

Wayne said he could identify with that. “He’s a sick man,” he said.

Freeman found it curious that Wayne made a big deal of the fact that the “Torso Girl” was his first victim. But at the time, he didn’t take anything Wayne said at face value.

“Nothing is ever as it appears to be or as it’s told to you,” Freeman said later.

However, he said, “I suppose all serial killers have to have a first one.”

Freeman walked Wayne back to the jail and booked him for murder, telling the guards to keep an eye on him, because he seemed depressed. Freeman was concerned that Wayne might become self-destructive.

The detective believed that Wayne—and others like him—cut up and did other bizarre things to their victims’ bodies so as to objectify them.

“They don’t want to think about the victim as a human being,” he said.

Typically, he said, their motivations were sexual, but they also liked to keep trophies or souvenirs of their crimes.

Wayne said he’d buried Jane Doe’s body parts to get rid of the evidence that he’d killed her, but Freeman didn’t believe him.

“I think it was sexual, definitely,” he said.

Darryl Long, a psychiatric technician assigned to the jail, was called back to work from home that night to meet with Wayne, who was housed in a cell, five feet square, in the booking area. His job was to evaluate whether Wayne was suicidal and should be placed in a safety cell.

Long and the other officers who had talked to Wayne that night were concerned about his roller-coaster emotional state. He’d be fine one minute, then break down into tears the next. He seemed to have problems gathering and articulating his thoughts, and he kept making suicidal references.

Wayne held up a Bible and said something like, “You know, I’ve committed every sin in here except killing myself.” He also said he deserved to be dead.

Long decided to move Wayne to a padded cell in the medical unit, and put him on suicide watch. The cell was five feet square, with a hole in the floor to use as a toilet. It had no bed or sheets, just a wraparound blanket. Wayne stayed there for two nights, and was prescribed Haldol and Ativan to calm him down, and Cogentin to counteract the Haldol’s side effects.

Meanwhile, Freeman sent two deputies to secure Wayne’s campsite so that he, Dawson, and an evidence technician could comb through it in the morning and retrieve the pair of thighs belonging to his Jane Doe.

When Gainey wrote up his report that night, he stated that Wayne was being held for 187 PC (murder) and 205 PC (mayhem), with a “possible 187 PC from out of the area also.”

Referring to the breast in Wayne’s pocket, he wrote, “Unknown female victim—to be identified.”

CHAPTER 17

“P
UNISH
M
E
”

Around 9:00
A.M.
on November 4, Detective Juan Freeman sent out a teletype to every police agency in the western states, describing Wayne and the women he’d confessed to killing:

“We have subject in custody for homicide. He has confessed to three other homicides of females. The most recent victim within the last two weeks came from Lucerne Valley. One female from Las Vegas. Both of them white. The third female, a Mexican or Indian, came from the Ontario, CA area. Dump sites: he believes he dumped one body near a truck stop in the Adelanto area of San Bernardino County, unknown when. He believes he dumped the Mexican or Indian female in or near an irrigation ditch near Lodi off of Highway 12, near either I-5 or Highway 99. He believes the Las Vegas female was put in the northern part of the California Aqueduct, unknown time. Subject: Ford, Wayne Adam, goes by Adam. WMA 6’2”, 200, Haz, Bro, DOB/120361. Truck Driver.”

The transmission was meant to be confidential—i.e., not media fodder—but Freeman later heard that an officer in nearby Redding, who was dating a reporter, relayed that information to his girlfriend, and that was that.

Later that morning, Freeman joined the team that was processing Wayne’s campsite, where the ground was soggy and damp from the seasonal rain. By the time they’d finished, the investigators had collected a vast array of items from in and around the tent—176, all told.

The interior of the two-person domed tent was strewn with clothing and accessories, either contained in black plastic bags or spilling out of them. Next to the sleeping bag and air mattress was a large plastic ice chest that held several knives, including a thirteen-inch serrated hunting knife, a steak knife, and Scott Hayes’s hunting knife. Inside a dark blue backpack they found a book titled
Blessings,
some women’s shorts, a rosary, and a comb. In a small cooler they found a crucifix and a purple box of audiotapes labeled: Holy Bible, King James version.

They also found a rifle; a hard-core porno magazine; some Bic lighters; black shoe polish; a leather purse; blue-green and red-and-black ropes; Camel cigarettes; cans of tuna, beef stew and chili; garlic salt; a jar of decaf coffee; a wool face mask; a canister of 17 percent pepper spray; a pair of diving fins; camp gloves; mosquito netting; a pair of binoculars; $14.21 in coins; a black belt with a Marine Corps buckle; a guitar in a case; and some tools.

Outside, they found a hatchet, which criminalist Toby Baxter from the state DOJ lab in Eureka took with him to examine for traces of blood. Later, they sent the hatchet and knives, a hacksaw found at Wayne’s trailer, and some of Jane Doe’s bone pieces to the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner to determine whether these implements had been used to cut her up.