TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (27 page)

Driggers remained an enigma.

Maulsby visited, on her own, Carmen
Anselmi. The two women hit it off immediately; Maulsby the inquiring detective with a heart, and the grandmother obsessed with seeing her daughter’s killer identified and held accountable. They sat across from each other at the kitchen table, sipping iced tea, as
Charmaine’s little boy napped in the adjacent room.

Carmen told how excited Charmaine had been that night about getting out for a change. “I wanted it to be really fun for her. I bought her some new things to wear and loaned her my earrings and a skirt. I arranged for baby-sitting and paid for it as my treat.”

Maulsby had her go over what had happened at the dance and afterward when they went to get something to eat, then their ominous car trouble on I-5. Some new details emerged, such as: Carmen wanted to walk to a house they could see a mile away, but Charmaine was afraid to get out of the car. “I guess she felt safer staying in the car. I didn’t want to walk alone, so I stayed in the car, too.”

Maulsby figured that Carmen had probably relived the ride with the man in the dark sports car a thousand times or more, but she asked her to recall it once more. As she did, the detective tried to pry out more details.

“He was so quiet that it made me a little nervous,” Carmen admitted for the first time. “I was afraid to even turn and look at him. I was afraid he might get mad and ask me what I was looking at him for. I mostly just saw his profile out of the corner of my eye. I think he only turned his face right toward me once. That was when I said something about how my son wouldn’t like it when he found out we were out dancing. When I said that, he looked at me with a nasty smile on his face. About the only other conversation we had was when I asked him if he lived around there and he said Stockton. If he lived in Stockton, I asked, why was he on the road to Sacramento so late? He either said he had a business there or had business to do there, I can’t remember which. He didn’t respond like people normally do. He just answered real short answers and acted like he didn’t want to talk, so I didn’t say any more.”

Carmen admitted to Maulsby how terribly guilty she still felt for letting her daughter get in the man’s car.

When the interview was over, Maulsby handed her business card to Carmen and encouraged her to call any time. “If you want to know what’s going on,” she said, “or just want someone to talk to.”

On the way out, Carmen proudly showed the detective her grandson, who had already started walking.

Another afternoon, Maulsby and
Dean drove to Lodi on a Sabrah lead—to make contact with a forty-year-old man whom a neighbor reported as matching the description of the
suspect in the Charmaine Sabrah case. He did a little, Maulsby thought, but he had an airtight alibi.

And so went the next couple of weeks, with Maulsby immersing herself in the cases. While she and Dean cleared some leads, none of them turned up anything promising.

Meanwhile,
Biondi had assigned the other new detectives,
Gary Gritzmacher and
Tom Carter, to investigate the possible
suspects at the top of the DOJ “Tip List,” starting with Roger Kibbe. However, before they could get started, they found themselves tied up for weeks on what seemed like an important lead at the time—if true. Two security guards on foot patrol in a rural commercial area located along the Delta in San Joaquin County reported seeing a man in a blue Nissan 4 × 4 pickup attempting to dispose of what looked like a body. When the man spotted the uniformed guards, he put his suspicious load back in the truck and quickly drove off before the guards could get a license number.

Gritzmacher and Carter obtained a computer printout of all Nissan 4 × 4 pickups registered in the state. Unfortunately, registrations did not indicate the color of a vehicle, so the detectives found themselves with a list of 3,660 late-model (1983–1987) pickups. Due to the volume, the detectives focused on those registered in the San Joaquin Valley, which pared the list down to several hundred. One by one, they tracked the vehicles down, first checking the color, then looking for the special features reported by the guards: a chrome roll bar and a row of lights above the cab. Whenever they found a pickup close to the suspect truck, they interviewed the owner to find out where he and his truck had been on the night of the sighting. Although it was a needle-in-a-haystack lead, a report of someone attempting to dump a body in the general area of the
I-5 series had to be taken seriously.

When the term “temporary” had been used to describe the assignment of the four new detectives, Lt. Ray Biondi had no idea how short a period of time some administrators had in mind. By early August—after only one month—he was already having to write memos justifying their continued assignment, explaining that the four were “learning the cases” and “we need to consider this a long-term commitment.”

Biondi was summoned by the undersheriff to appear in
Sacramento
County Sheriff
Glen Craig’s office on August 20 (1987) to provide the three top officials of the department (including the chief deputy of investigative services) with “an update on our Special Taskforce” and to “review” Homicide’s ongoing
manpower requirements. Biondi translated the memo’s bureaucratic language as follows: “Get your butt up here and tell us why you still need the extra bodies.”

Within the opening seconds of the meeting, Biondi’s assessment proved only too accurate.

“How many leads are you working, how long will it take to clear up each one, and when can we get our temporary people back?” the deputy chief asked in a single breath.

The three bosses sat looking at him, waiting.

Amazed at the obviously unrealistic expectations of the brass, Biondi sat dumbfounded. He could rattle off an accurate count of the leads, of course, but as to how long it would take to clear up each and every one—he knew he’d be dispensing total SWAG (Some Wild-Ass Guess). Unforeseen variables would greatly impact on the duration of the investigation—like whether or not the actual killer was presently among the suspect leads, whether the killings continued and new cases had to be handled, how many new leads would surface, etc. Didn’t the brass hats realize this? Had they been out of the field that long? Or had law enforcement become such a cut-and-dried numbers game to them?

Careful to make eye contact with the sheriff, who would have the final word, Biondi laid out his case for keeping the four temporary detectives indefinitely. He said it was still his hope that other agencies would contribute manpower and resources to a multi-agency I-5 task force.

As to the four detectives, Biondi admitted he didn’t know how long he’d need them, “but I don’t see this series getting solved without this kind of full-time effort.”

“My biggest concern,” said the chief deputy, “is that this is summer and we need these people back for vacation relief in their respective bureaus.”

Biondi didn’t dare respond because he couldn’t be certain what might come out if he opened his mouth.

“Now wait a minute,” Sheriff Craig said sternly. “Your priorities are wrong. Vacation relief is
not
our biggest concern. Our priority is to solve these murders.”

Thank you, Sheriff
, Biondi wanted to holler. At that moment, he wished very much he had voted for the man.

“You know, my daughter drives on I-5 frequently,” the sheriff went on. “I’m very concerned as a parent. This is a scary situation.”

Biondi was promised that everything would be done to allow him to keep the detectives as long as possible.

Two weeks later, Biondi attended another meeting, this one at DOJ, to discuss the feasibility of forming a multi-agency task force to investigate the I-5 killings.

The multi-agency task force Biondi had long envisioned would total four to six detectives, on loan from various departments with cases in the unsolved series. They would work together daily in one room, with one manager in charge, and with all the necessary support, such as lab and clerical. A small, focused group would be far more productive, he knew, than the independent investigations that had been going since Stephanie Brown’s abduction and murder a year earlier.

Biondi led off, explaining to the eight other participants that while Sacramento County presently had four detectives assigned full-time to I-5, his department simply didn’t have the facilities or resources to “do the job right.” His department, he explained, favored forming a multi-agency task force, with
DOJ assuming a leadership role.

“We’ve focused so far on four cases, Brown, Sabrah, Heedick, and Finch, which contain distinct similarities in MO,” he explained. “But I would not want to limit the scope of the investigation to these killings. I’ve got a feeling this guy has done more.

“I’d like to stage another
press conference and release new information,” Biondi went on, “to regenerate public interest and support. The last press release resulted in nearly a thousand leads combined for us and
San Joaquin, and hundreds of persons of interest for us to look at. From them we developed about twenty potential suspects, many of whom we have interviewed at least once. We may have even already talked to the killer, but if we have it was more a matter of dumb luck than anything. There are people out there who have information we need. This guy doesn’t live in a vacuum. He has family and friends, and there may be witnesses who have seen things on the road or somewhere but haven’t stepped forward for whatever reason. I think we need to go public again in a big way, but doing so would require a task-force approach to handle all the new leads.”

Any hope Biondi had of other departments contributing detectives to a task force soon faded:

San Joaquin—a captain of detectives explained that as of September 1 (1987) they had assigned three detectives (including Vito Bertocchini and Pete Rosenquist) to work I-5 full-time; however, his department did not support the multi-agency task force concept. He went on to gripe about the DOJ lab, which his department used exclusively as they didn’t
have their own crime lab. He then requested—a bit audaciously, Biondi thought—that DOJ criminalists review fifteen unsolved female homicides that had occurred in his county over the past five years to see if there were any similarities with I-5. (DOJ had already compared nearly thirty female body dumps to known I-5 cases, searching for similarities.)

Modesto Police Department—even though Lora Heedick had disappeared from the streets of this quiet town, only to be found strangled 50 miles away, a sergeant said they had no homicides related to I-5. Therefore, they would not be able to become involved in a task force.

El Dorado County Sheriff’s Department—a homicide detective reported that a Jane Doe had been found two months earlier that might be tied to the I-5 cluster. Estimated to be in her twenties, 5-foot-3 and 120 pounds, with long brown hair, she was nude from the waist up and had been dead for six months to a year. Her decomposed body was found in a ravine off Highway 50, a well-traveled route to Lake Tahoe. “It looked like she might have been thrown from a car or the shoulder of the road,” he explained. Due to the condition of the body, the cause of death could not be determined. The detective asked for DOJ’s help in identifying the victim; however, he said his department would not be able to participate in a task force.

Department of Justice—DOJ was willing to do everything but lead a task force. DOJ would continue to act as a clearinghouse for all the information sent to it by the various departments, and provide skilled lab support.

Although Biondi would keep pushing every chance he got for a multi-agency task force, at this and subsequent meetings between various agencies it became obvious that, at best, there would be two or more I-5 investigations running simultaneously from within different departments. He couldn’t help but feel that ego and politics had derailed good law enforcement. The problem was not at the field detective level, where guys like Vito Bertocchini and Pete Rosenquist wanted very much to work on I-5 with other professionals like Stan Reed and Bob Bell. The juggernaut went farther up the chain of command, where bosses worried that another manager, another department, another sheriff would get all the publicity, and eventually, once the killer was caught, all the credit.

Without a major coordinated effort, the brunt of deciding what information to send DOJ, whom to interview, and which leads to follow up on would fall to the detectives working the cases, with veto power given to their bosses, who might or might not know anything about the unsolved series. It would continue to be, Biondi knew, haphazard at best.

As if he needed further proof of just how bad it could get, he returned to the office to discover that he was about to lose two of his four temporary detectives.
Gritzmacher and
Carter had been ordered by the chief deputy to return to their former assignments—Gritzmacher back to Narcotics to work on a big drug case and Carter to the Jail Division for vacation relief. They had worked on the I-5 series for exactly six and a half weeks—just long enough to become familiar with the cases—and had spent an entire month running down the blue Nissan lead that never panned out.

For now, Biondi could keep Maulsby and
Dean.

From upstairs another compromise had come down in a seriously compromised investigation.

How many more young women would die by the same hand, Biondi worried, before they got their act together?

K
AY
M
AULSBY
looked forward to her lunches with fellow detective
Bobby Armstrong. And now, in early September (1987), it would be their first since she’d started Homicide.

If the department had given an award for the friendliest detective, Armstrong would have won hands down. Slender, with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair and a ready-made smile, Armstrong, fifty-three, already had thirty-three years’ seniority on the department, and professed no intention of retiring until forced to do so by county regulations at age sixty. He was one of those rare individuals who made a point of never saying anything bad about anyone. In his case, living by the Golden Rule had reaped huge dividends. Everyone liked Bobby Armstrong, really
liked
him, even the bad guys he’d arrested over the years, many of whom still served him loyally as informants two and three decades later.