Body Parts (25 page)

They also found several blue tarps, a plastic bucket containing water, a sponge, and a dinner plate, and several more porno magazines, wet from the rain.

However, the thighs were nowhere to be found.

The same day, the sheriff’s department issued a news release announcing that Wayne Adam Ford, a thirty-six-year-old Arcata man, had been arrested. Still attempting to keep the specific details under wraps and out of the media, the release stated:

“On Tuesday evening November 3, 1998, a subject came to our office in Eureka, asking to speak with officers concerning his possible criminal activities. The subject subsequently provided our officers with information concerning the human torso case. Based upon information attained from the subject, and some physical evidence discovered that helps to corroborate his story, the subject was arrested and booked on a charge of murder.”

Nonetheless, news of the breast in Wayne’s pocket soon spread.

A series of detectives, trying to solve similar murders in their areas, responded to Freeman’s teletype in the coming days.

“Everyone is taking a look at him because his method of killing matches so many cases,” Kern County sheriff’s Sergeant Glenn Johnson in Bakersfield told the
Associated Press,
an international wire service also known as the AP.

Investigators from Vallejo, where a prostitute had been stabbed in November 1995, were among those who visited Eureka. About three weeks before he turned himself in, Wayne had been cited for driving his truck through a red-light area in Vallejo that was not an authorized truck route.

He also looked like a candidate for the death of a woman whose body was found in the aqueduct in Palmdale, in Los Angeles County, in August 1997.

Defense attorneys got in the act, too. Mark Topel, who represented convicted wife-killer Lawrence Angelel, claimed that Wayne, not his client, was responsible for murdering and beheading Lawrence’s late wife, Lonna, whose truck was found at a truck stop in Eureka the day after she disappeared in December 1995.

But none of these women’s deaths was ever attributed to Wayne.

Years later, Freeman said he suspected there were “lots of unresolved victims” Wayne never disclosed to authorities. He’d sensed that Wayne felt it was okay to admit he’d killed hookers, but not nice girls from nice families.

Following up on the missing thighs, Freeman and Dawson interviewed Wayne again around 2:00
P.M.
on November 4, this time in an empty office in the detective bureau.

The acoustics were much better there, and given Wayne’s tendency to drop his voice, Freeman figured the room would improve the tape’s sound quality.

During the fifty-five-minute interview, Wayne seemed more rested and a bit more upbeat than he had the night before. Wayne tried to explain why he didn’t make sense sometimes. It wasn’t that he was lying, he said, he just couldn’t remember things very well.

“If something that I say doesn’t sound right, I’m not telling it to you untruthfully as I recall,” Wayne said.

“Well, you know, last night I knew you were doing the best you could to remember everything and tell me,” Freeman said, hoping to get him to go deeper.

“I figure I’m probably going to die,” Wayne said, “which is what I want, but I’m not going to kill myself.”

“Well, that’s good!”

“I told them that, but they . . . don’t want to believe it,” Wayne said, referring to the jail officials.

“So you . . . want the system to do its job and—”

“Punish me.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Detective Freeman reminded Wayne that he’d advised him of his constitutional rights the night before and asked if he wanted to keep talking. “You remember that? Does that still—is that still true as far as you’re concerned? You still want to cooperate and . . .”

“Yes.”

“. . . help us. Okay. Good enough, Jim?” Freeman asked Dawson to make sure his bases were covered. Dawson said he’d better read Wayne his rights one more time, so Freeman did so, and Wayne agreed to keep talking.

As they went over details of his first victim again, Wayne said she was on the chunky side. “She’d be fat if she was any heavier. . . . She had kind of . . . a chubby look to her face.”

He also said he was in a car when he picked her up, not his big rig. He thought it was on October 14 or 15 of 1997.

Freeman tried again to get details of how Wayne actually killed her. “Do you remember what happened after you picked her up?”

“I don’t know,” Wayne said.

“You don’t want to talk about it?”

“That part.”

“Okay.”

“What if I just tell you she wasn’t a prostitute?” Wayne said, apparently hoping that would suffice.

But Freeman wanted more, so he got Wayne to repeat that he had killed her—albeit accidentally. He asked if she was dead when Wayne cut off her head and limbs.

“Yes,” Wayne said simply.

Freeman explained that he had to ask these questions because it was the only way to find out what happened, but he understood how hard it was for Wayne to talk about it.

“I hate to put you through this, but I just have to. Okay?”

“No, you don’t.”

“Hmm?”

“It’s kind of you to say that, though.”

Freeman said he needed more details to make his case stronger, and he asked again what Wayne did to the victim. But Wayne wouldn’t budge.

Freeman was able to learn, however, a more exact location of where Wayne had dumped the torso—near the Ryan Slough Bridge on Myrtle Avenue before it turned into Old Arcata Road.

“That’s when I was going to turn myself in,” Wayne said.

“Okay. And what . . . changed your mind?”

“How they treated me over at the mental-health place.”

Freeman asked if they treated him poorly.

“The first guy I talked to was fine, but the next guy, he was just—he had someplace else to be. It was just his attitude was . . .”

“Who cares?”

“Yeah . . . turning yourself in is not an easy thing to do.”

“True. Very, very true,” Freeman replied.

“Wouldn’t take a great deal to change your mind.”

After discussing Wayne’s work history in the Eureka area, Freeman moved on to what he really wanted to know.

“So you think the bears might have got the thighs that you had up there at your camp?” he asked.

Wayne said they might have. “Did you look in the wrong place?”

Freeman asked Wayne again if he would be willing to show investigators where he’d put them. Wayne said he was concerned about getting his clothes wet, so Freeman promised to get him some dry ones when they were finished.

“So you’re the ones who . . . [are] going to put me in the hot seat?” Wayne asked.

“No.”

“That’s where I belong, isn’t it?”

“I’m only glad you chose to turn yourself in,” Dawson said, trying to forge his own relationship with Wayne. “We all belong in the hot seat. We’ve all done things wrong.”

At this point, Dawson took over the questioning, starting with the basics: where Wayne was born, went to school, his time in the Marine Corps, and his previous relationships.

Wayne described his quick rise and fall in the marines.

“How did you do that?” Dawson said, laughing.

“Divorced . . . it’s a long story.”

Wayne said he didn’t know when the depression started, but it began affecting his life to where he couldn’t fight or control it, and so he got kicked out of the military.

As he talked about his most recent marriage and his son, Max, he made a cryptic allusion to what his friend Scott thought was a suicide attempt while Wayne sat in his garage with his El Camino running.

“I was in some weird . . . I can’t describe how it was,” Wayne said. “. . . I thought it was an exhaust leak or something.”

He said he felt kind of light-headed in the El Camino, almost as if he weren’t really there. Then, after he left Scott’s, he picked up the hitchhiker in Eureka that night.

He said she told him she wanted to go to Clam Beach and that she was causing problems for her family. “She was pretty down on herself.”

“Did she do anything to you, or say anything to you to get you upset?” Dawson asked.

Wayne mumbled something.

“What did she say?” Dawson asked.

Apparently upset by this question, Wayne started crying. “If I could, I don’t, okay, I don’t, I don’t want to talk about that, okay!”

“I know you don’t,” Dawson said.

“I can’t.”

“Okay.”

Still crying, Wayne said he wanted to help them identify her, but he was having trouble signing his own “death warrant.”

“It’s hard. I’m fighting the fact that I know, that I, I deserve probably to die for what I’ve done and there’s this guy right here that’s going to do the best to put me there. . . . I know that I’m risking a lot by doing what I’m doing without an attorney. . . . I know talking to you is legally a very dangerous thing.”

“It’s the right thing. That’s what we’re talking about here.”

“It is the right thing and I want to do the right thing . . . but my brain doesn’t work. I have a bunch of conflicts going on now. Two years ago, no problem. . . . Whatever broke, broke. Whatever snapped, snapped.”

Dawson asked if Wayne had been taking any drugs at the time.

“No, I wish to hell I could have an excuse like that.”

Dawson asked if Wayne had ever had any problems with alcohol, and Wayne said, “I could never develop a problem. I drank and drank and drank, but—”

The tension in the room was broken for a moment as Dawson and Freeman both laughed.

Asked what the hitchhiker had been wearing, Wayne started mumbling again.

“Try to work with me on this, okay?” Dawson asked.

“Believe me, the day that you guys kill me, I hope, that that makes them feel better,” Wayne said, referring to the families to whom the investigators kept referring.

“It isn’t going to make anybody feel better.”

Wayne said he still had her backpack in the tent, but there was no identification in it.

“I remember tennis shoes. Small size,” Wayne said. “Her clothes were those pants that . . . I don’t know what you would call them, they looked like clown pants to me.”

“Jogging pants?” Freeman asked.

“Yeah, you know, like kinda baggy ones. . . . They were just a wild pattern. . . . They were bluish-green in color.”

He said she was wearing layers, with a sports bra underneath a couple of other shirts, and a jacket. She was carrying a “John Wayne” can opener and a plastic bag, which he thought had drugs in it. She also had very large breasts.

He couldn’t remember where she was from, but he thought it was somewhere like Arizona or Colorado.

“Where did you take her?”

“Do I have to?”

Freeman wanted Wayne to describe how and where he’d actually cut her up, reminding Wayne that he’d already admitted to putting “parts and pieces of her in different places.” But Wayne wouldn’t elaborate.

“Would it be safe to say that, that was Clam Beach? Where she died?”

“I don’t know.”

When Freeman asked if Wayne had taken her to his trailer, Wayne still wouldn’t give them a straight answer.

“Don’t do this to me anymore,” he said, crying again.

“Okay, I’m sorry. Okay,” Dawson said.

“I know I deserve it, but it’s not going to help me think.”

“I understand that your whole . . . attitude is that you want to try to remember these things,” Freeman said. “And that’s why, if we force it on you, it’s going to cause you to not be able to remember. So we don’t want to force anything on you.”

“I want to do the right thing,” Wayne said. “I hate to say this, because it’s almost blasphemous for me to use God’s name, because of who I am. But I want to do what’s right by God.”

“Well, so far you are,” Freeman said, thinking that he really wanted to hammer on Wayne, but at the same time he didn’t want him to shut down. “I’m a religious guy. So is Jim, actually. . . . We feel like you are doing the right thing. Maybe we should stop talking and take a ride. What you think? That sound good?”

Nearly a decade later, Wayne revealed a few more details about Jane Doe to the producers of a documentary, who posted this audio clip of Wayne’s comments on their Web site (roomzerothemovie.com):

“She was probably. . . early twenties. . . . She’s Caucasian, probably five-five, five-six, weighed anywhere from 140, 150 pounds. She was top-heavy. I believe she had brown eyes. She had a real plump face, almost—I hate to even use the word—but piggish-looking, with big cheeks. She had a backpack and a sleeping bag. She wore a multicolored knit cap over her brown hair . . . just below the ears. . . . She said that her sister loved her, when I asked her about people who cared about her. She was having trouble with her parents, evidently, but she said her sister loved her. . . . Her pubic hair went all the way up to her belly button, and all the way across her torso, something I’ve never seen before. Maybe it’s more common than I know, but this is just something that struck me as unusual, so maybe it will help somebody, like her sister. In that backpack, she only had a couple of things. She had . . . a Baggie with . . . something that might have been heroin. She had a rosary bead cross, one of those little plastic ones. . . . She didn’t have any ID. She didn’t have any money. She didn’t have any jewelry. She was just very ill-equipped to be out in the middle of nowhere. So I don’t think she was out for very long.”

After the interview with Freeman and Dawson, the investigators drove Wayne to the campsite in Trinidad; he genuinely seemed to want to help find her remains.

Redwood trees, two hundred and three hundred feet tall, commanded both sides of Highway 101. To the west of the Seawood Drive exit was Patrick’s Point Drive, a windy frontage road, lined with RV parks and beautiful homes overlooking the ocean, which led to Patrick’s Point State Park. Wayne had set up camp in the wilderness about one hundred feet east of the highway, where there were no amenities such as electrical hookups, running water, or restrooms.