Body Parts (31 page)

“His patterns indicate he was a disorganized predator who didn’t really plan out what he was going to do,” Kern County sheriff’s Sergeant Glenn Johnson told the
Las Vegas Review-Journal
. “He also didn’t offer a reason as to why he kept the body.”

Las Vegas police reviewed old homicide and missing persons cases for possible ties to Wayne, including a case involving a woman’s torso that was found on a conveyor belt at a local recycling plant. However, they found no connections.

“Dismemberment homicides are extremely rare, but it doesn’t appear the timeframe fits,” Homicide Lieutenant Wayne Peterson told the
Review-Journal
.

As the news slowly spread south, people who had known Wayne in Orange County came forward to tell the media how stunned they were to learn that he was a serial killer.

“Everybody is talking about it; they’re basically shocked,” Mike Mattingly, an employee at Taka-O, the sushi bar in Laguna Niguel where Wayne used to work, told the
Orange County Register.

Trino Llamas, who worked at an auto repair shop with Wayne, and considered him a close friend, said his hand started shaking when he saw Wayne on television. Llamas’s wife couldn’t believe that Wayne had actually sat in their living room and had dinner with them.

“I never saw him blow his top,” Llamas said. “He was very mellow.”

Llamas noted, however, that Wayne used to get depressed pretty easily. He said Wayne used to tell him that he and his then-wife, Elizabeth, fought frequently.

“He still loved her,” Llamas said. “The next day (after a fight), they’d be in each other’s arms. It was one of those deals.”

When Scott and Linda Hayes heard about Wayne’s crimes, they were horrified to learn that Wayne had been in their house with their children—twice—after having committed murder, and yet they still had not been able to detect any change in his behavior.

In the beginning, Wayne’s family came to visit him in jail, where the officials let his aunt Vickie give him regular haircuts.

The first month, his aunt Doris came nine times, his father Gene only once. His brother, his cousin Tori, his grandmother, and his uncle Jimmy all stopped by as well.

Wayne called his family members collect so many times that he ran up their phone bills. Gene finally had to tell Wayne to call only once a month.

The irony did not escape Wayne that Arcata Readimix, his former employer, had supplied the cement for the jail that was now his home.

“I’m in the jail I helped build,” he told Rodney.

The media was all over the family that first year, and depending on who said what, family members turned against each other, split, and divided over what was said.

Some of Wayne’s relatives recalled how he used to play his guitar and sing Garth Brooks’s country songs for them. How they’d go to hear him sing karaoke in the local bars. He sung a mean Elvis tune, they said, even making tapes of himself, which he tried but was unable to sell.

They told the
San Jose Mercury News
that he seemed to have a split personality, because he always seemed so sweet, good-looking, and polite. Never cussing in front of women. Never loud or boisterous.

But the embarrassment of it all often kept them from giving their names to the newspaper. “We don’t condone what he did. We’re horrified by it,” one relative told the
Mercury News
. “But there is a sadness here and that is someone seeking acceptance, love and wants love from his earliest stage to his latest stage.”

Several days after Wayne turned himself in, a TV reporter came banging on Rodney’s windows at 2:00
A.M.
, demanding an interview and scaring Rodney’s wife and kids so much that he immediately moved the family to another location.

Meanwhile, Rodney felt tortured, asking himself the same questions over and over:
Could I have prevented some of this? Why did I do some of the things I did to my brother? What should I say in court? Do I want my brother to die?

In early November, Freeman and another deputy made the five-hour trip to Gene’s house in Napa with a pickup and car trailer to collect the El Camino. Wayne had bought the vehicle from his father, then gave it back when he didn’t want it anymore.

After lifting fingerprints and spraying the interior with luminol, the investigators determined that the vehicle was clean, except for some blood on the driver’s side of the pickup bed. Two months later, Freeman released the truck back to Gene, after Wayne’s defense attorney and the prosecutor said they had no further interest in it.

Freemen met with Officer Dave Parris again, and after reviewing statements from the Ford family, decided to try to locate the teal Toyota sedan that Valerie Rondi had mentioned. Some of Wayne’s relatives recalled that the car had a bad, unexplainable odor after he’d used it over the Labor Day weekend in 1997.

The car had been repossessed and sold to new owners in Willow Creek, but they allowed the officers to search the car and process it for blood. There was a trace amount in the trunk, but the DNA didn’t match any of Wayne’s known victims.

“I concluded there was another victim and we don’t know who it is,” Freeman recalled later. “I think he was at this for quite a long time. I think he started as a serial rapist.”

Meanwhile, as Wayne met with his attorney, Kevin Robinson, he still seemed preoccupied with identifying Jane Doe and locating her missing head and limbs. Robinson hired criminalist John Thornton to try to find them.

Robinson also arranged to see if Wayne could recognize any missing women in a book of photos. He didn’t.

Thornton and Cisco Lassiter, an investigator with the alternate counsel’s office, met with Wayne at the jail on December 1, 1998, to get a description of where he’d buried the body parts. Wayne drew them a map of what he described as “the boneyard,” an area on the riverbank surrounded by high willows, where Readimix stored equipment and junk.

Wayne said he’d buried the head three feet deep, under a concrete slab, in the slushy sand next to the boneyard.

Within an hour, Thornton and Lassiter went to the site, but the current was raging so hard they were unable to get anywhere near it. They took pictures of the river to prove that the described area was underwater.

Thornton made a second trip, on September 28, 1999, when the river was significantly lower. This time, Thornton was able to poke around, but he was unable to locate the slab block or any body parts.

The New York Times Magazine
ran a blurb on December 20, 1998, making light of Wayne’s arrest, with the headline, “Something About Wayne.”

“Norman Bates is getting all the attention lately, but there’s a case to be made for Wayne as the official name of scary guys,” it read.

The article proceeded to list murderers, including John Wayne Gacy, Wayne Williams, Wayne Boden, and John Wayne Glover, as well as other “unsettling Waynes” in the news, such as John Wayne Bobbitt.

“Coincidence? Lorenda Bardell, president of the Vancouver-based Kabalarian Philosophy, a group that tries to analyze how names relate to personality, says Wayne ‘creates very caustic moods which prevent harmony in close associations.’”

PART IV

CHAPTER 20

N
EW
C
HARGES
, N
EW
A
TTORNEYS

On September 17, 1998—just days before Lanett White got into Wayne’s truck—California Governor Pete Wilson signed the “Serial Killer—Single Trial” bill into law.

Authored by state Senator Richard Rainey, R–Walnut Creek, the measure allowed district attorneys in different counties to consolidate multiple charges of murders, committed in a similar fashion, into a single trial to be held in any of the respective jurisdictions.

“Serial killers who go on brutal killing rampages do so without consideration of county lines,” Rainey, a former county sheriff, said before Wilson signed the bill. “The current system is not only a waste of time and money, but it causes unnecessary pain for victims and their loved ones.”

Proponents, who’d spent the past decade lobbying for such a bill, argued that the law could have saved taxpayers half the $2.1 million cost of convicting “Freeway Killer” William Bonin in Orange and Los Angeles Counties, where he raped and strangled fourteen boys in the early 1980s. (Bonin was executed in 1996.) Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker,” and David Carpenter, the “Trailside Killer,” were also prosecuted in several counties, forcing some witnesses to testify six times.

Opponents, including defense attorney groups and the American Civil Liberties Union, countered that piling multiple cases into one would ratchet up the cost of transporting witnesses and putting them up in hotels far from home, but, more important, would result in unfair trials for defendants.

“Prosecutors should not be able to ‘forum shop’ to have a defendant tried for a murder committed in one county in another county where the prosecution believes it will be more likely to get a conviction or the death penalty,” the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice argued.

Wayne was to be the first defendant to face prosecution under the new law, which went into effect January 1, 1999.

Three months later, the Humboldt County Grand Jury indicted Wayne on a single count of first-degree murder for Jane Doe’s death. His trial was set for July.

Meanwhile, prosecutors from Humboldt, Kern, San Joaquin, and San Bernardino Counties were discussing behind the scenes how best to consolidate the four murders into one new case, possibly elsewhere.

When San Bernardino prosecutor David Whitney heard about the Ford case, he told his assistant, Diana Soren, that it would be groundbreaking if he could bring it to their office.

So that’s exactly what he set out to do.

“He was jazzed about it,” Soren recalled later. “He loved a challenge.”

Because there is no public record of these conversations, it’s unknown how, when, or why this choice was made, but Whitney had clearly been pursuing his goal for months.

“This just makes sense for the most expedient way to do it,” Whitney told the Riverside
Press-Enterprise
in November 1998. “It is more efficient.”

Two of the four victims were from San Bernardino County, which had a broader tax base and was far more conservative than Humboldt when it came to sentencing defendants to Death Row.

Of the more than 660 inmates sitting on the row in September 2007, thirty-six were from San Bernardino, a mountainous and desert region of freeways, dust, and heat that ranked sixth among the state’s fifty-eight counties in handing down death sentences. Only two of those inmates were from Humboldt, widely known as the nation’s “marijuana country,” where locals say their relaxed, bucolic life is sheltered by a “redwood curtain” from the rest of the world.

Ultimately, the other DAs agreed to let Whitney take the case.

On June 29, 1999, Whitney filed a new set of charges in San Bernardino as required under the new Rainey law.

Unlike the original complaint in Humboldt, which carried a possible sentence of life in prison without parole, this one packed a potentially fatal punch: Wayne now faced four counts of first-degree murder and the special circumstance allegation of multiple murders, which made him eligible for the death penalty. (He wasn’t charged with the rape of “Sonoma County Doe” because it didn’t fall under the new law.)

Around this same time, Ron Forbush, an investigator contracted by the San Bernardino County Public Defender’s Office, traveled to Eureka to ask Wayne if he wanted a public defender to represent him on the new charges.

Soon after Wayne said yes, Deputy Public Defender Joe Canty stepped in as a battle of legal heavyweights began to take shape in San Bernardino.

After earning his law degree and taking classes toward a Ph.D. in legal philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles, David Whitney started his legal career as a deputy public defender in Los Angeles County in 1972.

Two years later, he left the public sector to become a criminal defense attorney, first in L.A., then in San Bernardino County, where he switched sides and joined the DA’s office as a senior deputy in 1986.

Over the years, Whitney earned a reputation as a formidable courtroom force. He took on the role of coordinator for death penalty and psychiatric issues in the DA’s office, rising to become lead attorney in its Major Crimes Unit and a member of the Capital Litigation Committee for the California District Attorneys Association in 1995. He also taught law courses and testified as an expert witness in state and federal death cases.

Soren went to work as Whitney’s litigation assistant years after he’d defended one of four teen gang members who had murdered her father in 1981.

“Of all the attorneys, he treated my mother and I with respect,” she said later.

Whitney started his long days working at home and didn’t care for publicity. He had a dry sense of humor and enjoyed making people laugh, but he could also be very serious. Although he wasn’t theatrical in the courtroom, he could be folksy if he sensed that would appeal to a jury.

“Juries absolutely loved him,” Soren said. “He knew when to be lighthearted with them. He knew when he had to be tough. He never lost a case when I was there. It was amazing to watch him.”

Joe Canty was formidable in his own right.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in political science at the University of California, Riverside, Canty entered law school at UCLA. Following graduation, Canty served as an Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) officer and then as a reserve JAG officer until 1974, while he was working as a prosecutor in the San Bernardino County DA’s Office.

He rose through the ranks and became chief deputy in 1974, prosecuting high-profile cases while also earning a reputation for helping the helpless. In the process, he met Forbush, then a sheriff’s homicide detective, and formed what would become a decades-long friendship.