TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (45 page)

Streeter delivered to Springer’s lab station several boxes of tape lifts. The lifts had been taken with 3-inch lengths of Scotch tape, then each had been secured to its own petri dish, sticky side down with the ends taped over the dish and covered with a glass lid. One by one, she began to slip the small, carefully labeled dishes under her $15,000 stereomicroscope, which gave her a startling, three-dimensional image of the evidence.

As Streeter had hoped, Springer soon had I-5 in her grasp—a serious flirtation, so far, while continuing to work her own expanding caseload.

Her first step in any trace evidence case was to take inventory of everything that had come off the victim, and group these materials into broad categories that could later be narrowed down. Since they had a strong suspect, she would next compare these findings with anything they had from the suspect and his environment, seeking exchange evidence.

She worked like a machine, with little wasted motion. She first viewed the I-5 tape lifts at low power—40 mag or so—to get the lay of the land. When she saw something that caught her eye, she used a tungsten needle and tweezers to remove the fiber and slip it onto its own microscope slide. Then, she really went to work, using increased power settings—she did most of her work between 200 and 400 amplification—and varying types of microscopes. She spent anywhere from four to eight hours analyzing a single fiber, but when she was finished she usually knew all there was to know—its burning point, its chemical makeup, the name of its manufacturer, etc.

In her third week on the job, Springer, who had that afternoon been examining the dozen or so tape lifts from Darcie Frackenpohl’s dress, asked Streeter about the car Roger Kibbe was believed to have been driving at the time of the victim’s abduction and murder.

“It’s a white Hyundai,” he said, not bothering at first to look up from his own work.

“Do you remember if the interior
carpet was blue?”

Springer, unbeknownst to Streeter, made a habit of looking first for carpet fibers, which were easily recognizable because they were bigger than other fibers. When she looked at the end of a carpet fiber, its cross-section looked distinctly triangular, like a three-cornered block.

Streeter, with a look of astonishment, reacted as if his colleague had uncorked a dinner club magic trick and levitated the heavy lab table between them.

“Yes, it
was
blue,” he said, his brow crinkling.

“I thought so,” said Springer, turning back to her trusty microscope.

D
ETECTIVE
Kay
Maulsby hadn’t heard a word from Roger
Kibbe in the almost two months since she’d last visited him. Still, she returned to
Rio Consumnes Correctional Center on March 23, 1988.

In their private interview room away from guards and other inmates, he seemed pleased to have the undivided attention of the attractive woman detective.

“Have you had any other visitors?” she asked.

“Harriet comes but she hasn’t been this week yet,” he said. “Steve doesn’t visit me. He stays pretty busy with his work, you know.”

“Are you depressed?”

“No, I’m not depressed.”

“Have you thought about whether you’re going to ask for any counseling while you’re here?” she asked.

“I know I have some problems and it would probably be good for me to talk to someone. But I’m just gonna put in my time.”

Maulsby told of driving to Ceres, south of Modesto, and seeing the location where his furniture-making business had been.

“What route did you use to commute?” she asked.

“I can’t remember the name of the road.” His guard had gone up. “I d-don’t want to answer that.”

She asked whether Harriet had found a place for them to live yet.

“No, she’s gonna wait until I get out now. We’ll find a place together in Sacramento.”

Maulsby nodded casually as if the thought of that happy day didn’t nauseate her. She waited until she could trust her voice.

The detective had visited another inmate three weeks earlier: Lora Heedick’s boyfriend, James Driggers, who was serving out his robbery
sentence at Norco, the state prison where San Joaquin detectives had interviewed Harriet Kibbe’s sister,
Helen Pursel, four months earlier. Lt. Ray Biondi insisted that Maulsby show a single photo of Kibbe to
Driggers, who had previously failed to pick out the suspect from a photo lineup. She argued against showing one photo; if
Driggers made the ID this time, it could be argued in court as being highly suggestive. Biondi said he didn’t see Driggers ever being much of a witness, explaining he just wanted the assurance that “Kibbe is the guy who did
Heedick even if we compromise Driggers as a witness.” Maulsby had done as she was ordered. She explained to Driggers that she was going to show him a picture of a man and wanted to know if he’d ever seen him in the Modesto stroll area. Driggers looked for a few seconds at the image of a bearded Kibbe, and said he “looked a lot like the guy” who had taken his Lora but he couldn’t be certain. “He has a beard and I don’t remember the guy having a beard,” said Driggers.

Since nothing else was working, Maulsby decided she’d try another approach with Kibbe.

“I know you’ve talked to a lot of detectives,” she said. “Has anyone ever asked you straight out if you killed these women?”

She had heard stories of convicts claiming they would have confessed if only someone had asked them the question. She didn’t want Kibbe at some point down the road to be able to say such a thing.

“No,” he said. “They always beat around the bush.”

“I’ll ask you. Did you do it?”

Neither of them broke eye contact, and soon it became a colossal staredown.

Maulsby, determined not to be the first to look away, lived with the silence, his eyes boring into hers.

A minute passed, then two; they seemed like an eternity. Someone was mowing the lawn out in front of the administration building, and somewhere inside the walls a steam pipe hissed.

He broke first. “I can’t answer that.”

She leaned forward in her chair, closer to him than she had ever been.

His face was an impassive mask.

“Roger, you can’t even say that you
didn’t do it?
”

His expression softened. The corners of his mouth curled as if he was going to smile, but then he caught himself. The moment was gone. He was unreadable again.

The interview was over.

Roger Kibbe was due to be released in thirty-six days.

*      *      *

A
FTER
criminalist Faye Springer found two blue
carpet
fibers in tape lifts from Darcie
Frackenpohl’s dress, Jim Streeter produced a floor mat that he had confiscated from Roger Kibbe’s Hyundai.

Streeter had taken the mat—under authority granted police by the search warrant—because it had a dark red stain on it. When the stain tested negative for blood, Streeter had stored the mat with other I-5 evidence.

Springer plucked a
fiber from the carpet mat and mounted it on a slide. Placing it under her stereomicroscope, she dialed in a magnification of 4x, its lowest power, and brought her eyes down to the binocular eyepiece; by focusing both eyes on a single image, she gained good depth perception and saw a distortion-free image.

Her first microscopic view of the car mat fiber caused a familiar stirring inside—one that she always got whenever she was close to finding a needle in the haystack.

She dialed 10x, then 20x, and worked her way up to the highest power, 65x. As she spun through the mag powers, she made handwritten notes and drawings; a running commentary of her observations would be critical documentation in the event that her testimony was required at a criminal trial.

When she was ready to study a cross-section of the fiber, she took it off the slide and impeded it in a swirl of clear, soft polypropylene substance that hardened almost immediately. Then, monitoring her work through the microscope, she made a thin slice with a special tool, cutting first through the epoxy and then the fiber. That slice she then placed on a separate slide and put it under a microscope to examine the fiber’s internal structure.

She conducted the same examination of the blue fibers from Darcie’s dress. When she got to the cross-section, she could see they were the same blue trilobular nylon weave developed years ago by Dupont because it hid dirt so well.

Springer was alone in the lab, so it was easy for her to do what came natural: stay quietly focused. In fact, unlike other criminalists, who sometimes donned headsets and listened to music or talk shows while working, she preferred quiet so she could concentrate. She credited her ability to remain at a microscope for so long without feeling motion sickness, as other researchers sometimes did, to having worked her way through college sorting tomatoes and cherries on a fast-moving assembly line. She had her sea legs.

By the time Streeter returned, late afternoon, Springer had worked for several hours on the fibers and knew exactly what she had.

“We have a match,” she told Streeter.

She placed the slides containing the fibers in side-by-side microscopes. Streeter first looked at the one from the Hyundai mat. When he looked through the microscope with the fibers taken off the dress, he let out a low whistle.

“You can see they’re the same color, shape, and type,” she said, “but there’s something else. The mat fiber and one of the fibers taken off the dress both have the same dark particles, shaped like footballs, on them.”

Streeter hadn’t noticed the particles.

“Do you know what they are?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

“I also see on the fiber from the dress what might be a speck of red paint, although it’s so tiny I can’t be certain.” Springer explained that the equipment at the DOJ lab couldn’t get enough light into the particles or magnify them enough to analyze them sufficiently. She judged the dark particles to be something under 100 microns—smaller than a microchip—and the possible paint only two or three microns. What she was working with might well have been called
trace
trace evidence.

“But we have a match?”

Streeter wanted to be clear, as he intended to call detectives with the news.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “The fiber off the victim’s dress matches the fiber from the Hyundai.”

What Streeter had hoped would happen when he’d first heard that Riverside’s famed trace evidence expert was coming to DOJ Sacramento was unfolding before him. Faye Springer had already gone several steps farther than anyone else had been able to with the I-5 evidence.

In the process, she was building a murder case.

Twenty-One

T
wo weeks before Roger Kibbe was due to be released from county jail, Lt. Ray Biondi and Kay Maulsby showed up at criminalist Faye Springer’s lab to review the evidence.

It was the first time Biondi had met Springer. He could see right away that she was totally absorbed in her work and not given to chitchat. While he griped about the bureaucratic snafus in the I-5 investigation, she waited him out. When he finished his whining, she launched into her forensic briefing.

Maulsby had had her first dealings with Springer ten days earlier when they visited several I-5 crime scenes; Springer had wanted to see them firsthand. In overalls and wearing latex gloves, she had collected dirt and plant samples, and they searched for clothing and any other evidence that might have been overlooked. Springer had told Maulsby during their
tour de murder
how she wished she could have been at the scenes while the bodies were still in place. Mistakes had been made by people who didn’t know squat about
trace evidence, Springer complained, not only the debacle with the pickup autopsy of Charmaine Sabrah but other careless screwups—like laying out Darcie
Frackenpohl’s dress on the road to better take a picture of it.
Trace evidence lost at the scene, Springer explained, was trace evidence lost forever.

Since her success with the
fiber evidence, Springer had been assigned to the I-5 investigation full-time, as her higher-ups realized they now had a trace case on their hands. Streeter, who had gladly stepped aside, had switched places with Springer—he was now consulting as needed.

Springer explained to Biondi and Maulsby that the strongest case they
had against Kibbe, from a scientific standpoint, was the Darcie
Frackenpohl murder. She’d looked at tape lifts from the other cases and so far found no fibers or other significant items of trace
evidence linking Roger Kibbe to the victims. Therefore, the criminalist had focused her efforts on Frackenpohl.

Lined up on a long lab table was an impressive stack of petri dishes containing tape lifts; Biondi thought there must be hundreds of them. The criminalist had separated out some to show the detectives. They looked at a magnified view of the similar blue fibers—the one from Kibbe’s car mat and the two recovered from Darcie’s dress.

Springer explained that the fibers off the dress were consistent with the fibers from the Hyundai. She told of the dark particles on two of the fibers that she’d not yet identified and the possible
red paint speck on one of the fibers found on the dress.

As for
hair evidence, Springer said she found two strands of hair that were similar to Kibbe’s. She’d found a dark foreign hair among Stephanie’s lighter pubic hairs combed out during the
rape-kit exam by the pathologist. This hair proved to have several similarities to Kibbe’s pubic hair samples. She’d also found a dark foreign hair on Darcie’s dress that was similar to Kibbe’s body hair exemplars.

“It could be a limb hair, which is too bad.”

“Why’s that?” Biondi asked.

“Limb hair has less inner structure and is harder to compare,” Springer said.

Biondi knew that hair evidence was not at all like fingerprints because hair couldn’t positively identify an individual. Forensic evidence in the Brown case, then, came down to the single hair and inconclusive
blood typing, insufficient to persuade a district attorney to file murder charges. Every D.A. he’d ever met liked to file winning cases, not sure losers or even close calls. The fiber evidence in Frackenpohl was stronger, but was it enough?