Body Parts (42 page)

“Superior Court of California, County of San Bernardino. The People of the State of California, plaintiff, versus Wayne Adam Ford, defendant. Case number FSB 027247. Verdict 1: We, the jury in the above entitled action, find the defendant, Wayne Adam Ford, guilty of the crime of murder in the first degree as charged in count one.”

Roberson continued to read the three others, which were all the same: guilty, guilty, and guilty.

Then came the decision on the pro forma multiple murder allegation: “We, the jury in the above entitled action, find the offenses charged in counts 1, 2, 3 and 4, are a special allegation within the meaning of Penal Code section 190.2 (a) (3), to wit, more than one offense of murder, to be true.”

Canty requested to have the jurors polled individually, and each of them confirmed the verdicts.

“All right,” Smith said. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, by virtue of the verdicts that you rendered and the special circumstance allegation, we are now then going to proceed with the second phase of the trial, the penalty phase. People, ready to call your first witness?”

“No,” Mazurek said as laughter rippled throughout the courtroom, breaking the tension. Even Wayne laughed.

Smith explained that he was being facetious. Obviously, the attorneys had no way of knowing the verdict or when it would come down, so no arrangements for witnesses had been made.

Smith told the jury that he and the attorneys expected to start the penalty trial on July 12 and finish presenting the evidence by late July or early August, when the jury would begin deliberations for a second verdict.

Like her fellow jurors, Darlena Murray would have to wait another month before she could talk about the case to anyone, including her live-in boyfriend, who had been following the proceedings in the newspaper.

Complying with the judge’s order not to discuss the case with anyone, which meant holding in her emotions, had been difficult for Murray. Ever since she’d heard Wayne’s soft, low-talking voice on the taped interviews with detectives, she’d been waking up in the middle of the night and thinking she heard his voice in her bedroom. Not being allowed to tell anyone about these creepy early-morning awakenings made them even harder to cope with. Two years later, she would still get the chills thinking about Wayne’s whispery voice.

CHAPTER 26

L
IFE
OR
D
EATH

By the time the second phase of the trial started in July, a new chapter in Wayne’s complicated history with women was revealed.

Her name was Victoria Redstall and she came from quite a different educational and socioeconomic background than Wayne’s—not to mention the prostitutes with whom he’d been consorting before his arrest.

The attractive British-born blonde, who had an athletic frame of five feet nine inches and 130 pounds, was described by England’s
Daily Mail
as the “privately educated daughter of a chartered surveyor from Esher, Surrey, a wellspoken ‘firmly upper-middleclass’ young woman whose uncle is a knight and whose cousin married into the Sangster racing dynasty.”

But what American media found more relevant was that she was an actress and former spokesmodel for Gro-bust, an herbal supplement, ironically, for breast enhancement, which had worked for her.

Victoria said she started visiting Wayne at the West Valley Detention Center in April after deciding she wanted to make a documentary about a serial killer. She persuaded a correctional deputy to take her to Wayne’s unit in protective custody, then started meeting with him every other day.

As soon as Wayne’s attorneys found out about the visits, they immediately put a stop to them. Victoria was banned from the jail and the deputy was told he’d be fired if he let her in again.

“It was very unethical for that deputy to do that, and it just shows how cunning she is and how she uses herself to do what she does,” Forbush said.

Through these initial meetings, and later, daily collect calls from jail, Victoria said, she and Wayne connected on a deep level, forging a “strong emotional bond” as she gathered material for her documentary.

“This is a professional relationship,” she told the
Daily Mail
in August 2006 after the visits had been blocked. “We have never touched. Our letters do not contain anything romantic. . . . The story has taken over my life and I admit to being obsessed by him, but not in a sexual way.”

Over time, however, this alliance would grow increasingly intimate.

The gregarious Victoria sat with the reporters covering the trial and boasted about her experiences with Wayne—allegedly singing country-western songs together through the bulletproof glass in the jailhouse visiting room. She also told them how upset the defense was about her visits with Wayne.

Victoria, who lived in Studio City in Los Angeles County, said she initially gave a different name to Wayne, because he was, after all, a serial killer. She also used a different name when she submitted forms to Judge Smith, requesting permission to take video footage and photos of Wayne in the courtroom.

Court officials don’t look fondly on people who don’t put their legal names on media request forms, especially when they aren’t employed by a media organization.

Concerned about the photos and video Victoria was taking of Wayne in the courtroom, the defense asked the judge to issue some restrictions, which Victoria proceeded to ignore. She continued to take video footage, then claimed she hadn’t done anything wrong because her camera wasn’t taking “photos” but video.

The bailiff confiscated her camera and escorted her out of the courtroom. When she was allowed back in, her eyes were red and teary.

In a May 2006 posting on localnewsgroup.co.uk, which she wrote to respond to a news story in her home country, she denied being reprimanded by court officials. She also made at least one other claim that was misleading at best.

“Last year, I was reading the weather on the morning News on the number one Los Angeles Station KTLA 5,” she wrote.

KTLA officials said Victoria participated in a promotional audition, but she was never hired.

In addition, she wrote that she “trained to be a Los Angeles County Sheriff and was accepted by a station here.” Sheriff’s officials said they could not confirm or deny her statement because of confidentiality and privacy laws, but people involved in the case were skeptical.

Victoria posted one other comment, however, that proved quite telling: “I have NEVER been obsessed with Serial Killers. I have, however, been fascinated with the mind of a Serial Killer since I was a teenager.”

The penalty trial, which began as scheduled on July 12, was attended by several newspaper reporters, the author of this book, and Victoria.

The $64,000 question was this: Would the fact that Wayne turned himself in and cooperated with authorities help persuade the jury that he should be spared the death penalty?

After the trial, Judge Smith said he believed that Wayne showed remorse and that his tears were genuine. Nonetheless, he said, “I thought there was a high likelihood they [the jury] would return with the death penalty just because of the nature of the crimes and how many there were.”

But that morning, Smith gave no sign of his personal feelings as he welcomed the jurors back to his courtroom.

As Mazurek delivered his ten-minute opening statement, he described the trial’s penalty phase as “the rest of the story,” after which the jury would choose between recommending the death penalty and the lesser punishment of life without the possibility of parole.

“In these cases, you compare sometimes to people throwing a rock into a pond and it ripples out and creates a bigger effect on the people that surround the victims. It’s not just their deaths, but the impact the death had on their mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters, and families.”

He closed by asking the jury to return “the greater punishment.”

“When I first got up and gave my opening, I told you the defendant knows what he did and knows what he is. Well, he also knows, if you remember back to the interviews, what he deserves. And at the end of this, based upon all the circumstances that we’re going to talk about, we all know what he’s going to deserve.”

The defense reserved its opening until the start of its case, so Mazurek went right into his first witnesses, all of whom were correctional officers from Humboldt and San Bernardino Counties.

Three of them testified that they’d found makeshift weapons during searches of Wayne’s single cells. These included a blade that had been removed from a disposable razor and was stuck to the bottom of a table with glazing compound from the window, thirteen days after he surrendered; a five-inch piece of chain-link bent into an L-shape, sharpened at one end and lodged underneath the cell’s door frame; and two 1-inch screws, sharpened at one end, and stored on the bolts holding the table against the wall.

The other three officers testified about Wayne’s bad behavior in jail. In one instance, Wayne got angry and threatened to injure an officer who picked up a piece of Wayne’s candy off the floor and wouldn’t give it back.

In a second incident, Wayne refused to give back his metal food tray until he could speak to a sergeant about a broken pay phone. When he didn’t comply with the deputy’s orders to give back the tray, and threatened to “go to town” on him, the deputy called in four others and a sergeant for a “cell extraction.” They shot pepper spray three times through the food tray slot in Wayne’s cell door before he agreed to put his wrists to the slot and be handcuffed.

Mazurek conducted pretrial interviews with the identified victims’ parents, exploring their experiences with grief so that he could have them relate the most poignant moments for the jury.

At the end of the day on July 12, Mazurek called Ron Sharp, Tina Gibbs’s stepfather, and then Mary Sharp, Tina’s mother. Debra White, Lanett’s mother, and Rudolfo Tamez, Patricia’s father, testified the following morning.

Even now, Mary Sharp said, she was troubled when she saw a missing or murdered child on television. Her heart went out to those poor families, with whom she felt a strong bond. She knew that most other people didn’t understand what they were going through.

But she did.

Her daughter Tina’s birthday and Mother’s Day were always the worst; Mary so missed seeing her daughter’s smile and hearing her laugh. She even missed the way Tina used to roll her eyes when she didn’t get her way.

Ron felt those pangs, too, but what hurt him most were the years of watching Mary suffer over losing Tina. Mary was still dealing with chronic depression, for which she saw a psychiatrist several times a month.

“It’s destroyed me,” Ron told the jury. “I don’t know what to do. I know I got to go on. I’ve got too much to take care of. We’ve been married twenty-six years. I plan on making it forever. She’s tough. But I got to take care of her right now.”

Once Mary found out how Tina died, she started having a recurrent nightmare with scenes of a big rig coming down the highway, clothes being thrown out a window, and flashes of Tina’s face. She was also haunted by the thoughts of what terrible things Tina must have endured in her final hour. It was all too unbearable to imagine.

The only solace Mary had found was a small garden she’d planted in Tina’s memory, with purple, yellow, and white flowers—her daughter’s favorite colors—and an angel in the middle.

Mary still couldn’t help but hope that she would answer the door one day and see her daughter standing on the doorstep.

She would give anything to hear Tina say, “Mommy, I love you,” just once more.

Debra White felt she would never get over the shock of losing Lanett. It was heartbreaking to watch her grandchildren grow up without a mother and apart from one another.

Amanda, Carlos, and David each went to live with their respective fathers. Michael, who stayed with Debra and Bill, was only a toddler when Lanett died, so he didn’t understand.

“Nana, I know how we can see my mom,” he said to Debra one day. “We can get some balloons and put them up in the air and hold on to them, and they will take us up to see my mom.”

Michael kept Debra from going off the deep end. It helped her to know that she was raising her baby’s baby.

Every day, Debra saw something that reminded her of Lanett, and that she was never coming back.

The holidays were difficult, because Lanett had liked all of them. She always took the kids to see fireworks on the Fourth of July and dressed them up for Easter.

“On Easter, there’s no more Easter baskets, no more pretty clothes for the kids,” Debra told the jury. “It’s just like a big, old empty space that’s left in me that’s never going to get filled again.”

Amanda’s birthday, Christmas, Mother’s Day, and Lanett’s birthday were even tougher.

“When I brought her into this world, it was hard for me to bring her in, and for someone to take her from me, I just don’t understand why,” Debra said. “Why would they want to take my baby away from me?”