Whatever Mother Says... (2 page)

Investigators did not allow Mark Dafforn from the discreetly named “county removal service” to take control of the body until 2:00
P.M.
Detectives frequently find homicide scenes tampered with before they even arrive at a location. But on this occasion, they actually had the luxury of more than eight hours of light to minutely examine the area for clues. Police sifted through a vast array of belongings found near or on the body, including perfume, writing paper, necklaces, bracelets, clothing, a toothbrush, even a fork and soup spoon. But there was no actual evidence of the victim’s identity.

Detectives decided it was time to rechristen the charred remains as Jane Doe #4873/84.

That day, an urgent telecommunication was faxed to the U.S. Missing Persons Bureau.

It read:

WEA
18–22
YRS. BLN HAIR, SLENDER BUILD, POSS WEARING A YELLOW NYLON HOODED PARKA AND UNKNOWN COLOR CORDUROY PANTS
.

THIS DEPARTMENT IS CURRENTLY INVESTIGATING A HOMICIDE WHICH HAS OCCURRED IN OUR COUNTY AT APPROXIMATELY
0545
HRS THIS DATE. VICTIM WAS FOUND BY A PASSING MOTORIST. VICTIM HAD SILVER DUCT TAPE COVERING HER MOUTH, AND AROUND BOTH WRISTS. VICTIM WAS THEN SET ON FIRE AT THE SIDE OF THE ROAD. VICTIM WAS VERY BADLY BURNED, AND UNRECOGNIZABLE. VICTIM HAD SOME PERSONAL PROPERTY WITH HER, POSS IN
2
PLASTIC GARBAGE BAGS. BAGS CONTAINED MISC PERSONAL PROPERTY, INCLUDING CHILDRENS CLOTHING, HOWEVER BAGS WERE ALSO BURNED
.

REQUEST YOU CHECK YOUR RECORDS FOR ANY MISSING PERSONS WHICH MAY MATCH THIS JANE DOE, OR ANY SIMILAR HOMICIDES
.

THANKS IN ADVANCE
.

REFER: LT CADER/DET LIDDLE CASE
#4858–84

PLACER COUNTY SHERIFF’S SUBSTATION, DRAWER
1710,
TAHOE CITY, CA.
95730
DONALD P. NUNES SHERIFF/CORONER
(916) 583-1561 7/17/84

1358
HRS NTS/PJO

The day after the discovery of the corpse, detectives sent the victim’s fingers off to Sacramento to have prints taken off them after police began to suspect that the body might have been that of a missing woman called Georgia Darlene Taylor. The practice of removing fingers from a corpse is a little known procedure which is rarely referred to because it is considered by some to be a disrespectful way to treat a body. But investigators across the world have been using this method of checking fingerprints for years, because it saves having to move entire corpses across state lines and in some cases international borders. Recently, a Florida medical examiner was transporting a victim’s fingers across the state when he was stopped by the Florida Highway Patrol for allegedly speeding. When the official explained to the motorbike cop what he had in the box on the seat next to him, the officer refused to believe him and forced him to open the container. The policeman fainted on the spot.

Back in Sacramento, an examination of the prints on the duct tape found wrapped around part of the body confirmed that two men implicated in the Georgia Darlene Taylor case were not involved in the death of this particular Jane Doe. To add to their frustration, investigators could find no match for the prints on the state computer file.

The subsequent autopsy—performed by forensic scientist Dr. A. V. Cunha at the DeWitt Center Morgue on July 23—provided the police with few clues to Jane Doe’s killer. All they could be certain of was that she was five feet three inches, weighed approximately 115 to 130 pounds, and had blond hair and blue eyes. However, the examination did uncover that she had died
after
being bound, gagged, and set on fire. Dr. Cunha also found a large ovarian tumor in the corpse, which indicated she had been severely beaten in the stomach.

Dr. Cunha was also puzzled by the apparent presence of two recent wounds in the right back and lower buttocks region. But the corpse was too badly charred for him to recognize the exact causes of each injury.

However, the one aspect of the discovery of the body that had investigators instantly very concerned were the diapers found near the body, plus what they thought were children’s clothing. Detectives feared that this Jane Doe might have been with a child who could have been killed elsewhere. Only later did they acknowledge that the “children’s clothing” were actually just skimpy teenagers’ blouses.

The final pathological diagnoses by Dr. Cunha referred to
ninety percent
burns to the body and described those previously inflicted wounds as being of “uncertain significance.”

Dental examiner James Nordstrom was able to be more helpful. He reported that the victim had a chipped tooth, possibly caused during an attack, and a number of fillings that might make identification easier.

However, a computer check could not match up those dental records, and Placer County detectives believed it was unlikely they would establish identity of the corpse, let alone solve the case. Putting a name and family to a murder victim is usually the most significant development in trying to investigate a homicide. Without a name, there is basically no one to interview, unless of course there were some witnesses.

So it was that just eight days later, Sheriff Donald Nunes made a formal request to have the body of their Jane Doe #4873/84 frozen at the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office until further inquiries could be made. Publicly, police were continuing their investigation as energetically as ever. Privately, they were winding down the entire probe because they had reached a complete and utter dead end. By freezing her body in case it should be needed for evidence/identity purposes at a later date, the sheriff was simply going through the motions just in case a miracle occurred and they got a break on the case.

Jane Doe’s face was even reconstructed by police artist Jim Hahn on the day before her remains were taken off to be frozen in Sacramento. Detectives hoped that the drawing might provoke some response once they printed up posters, but they did not hold out much hope.

On August 1, 1984, Placer County investigators tried one last telecommunication message, this time to narcotics units, vice units, biker units, intelligence units, and sex crime units nationwide in a final effort to identify their Jane Doe. They got no response.

At the end of August a continuation report filed by Placer County Sheriff’s Department was sent to Sheriff Nunes informing him that more than two hundred possible leads had been investigated into the identity of the corpse. The report concluded that their biggest hope was that when schools reopened in the later part of September, they might get a reaction to those posters distributed to every school district in the state.

When fall came and that drew a complete blank, the Sheriff’s Department—rather than incur any more expensive freezer charges at the Sacramento Medical Examiner’s Office—released the body for burial at the New Auburn District Cemetery in Auburn. The funeral was unattended. No one ever knew her real name.

The following spring, the FBI contacted the Placer County Sheriff’s Department in Auburn, with 235 possible matches for the Jane Doe. But they soon proved negative.

The main problem for police was that unsolved murders in the rural Sierra counties divided by major highways were a logistical nightmare. Virtually all the homicides were imported; in other words, they happened elsewhere and then became their case because the bodies were dumped on their turf.

Most cases tended to be shifted quietly to the back of homicide files. Detectives prepared to wait for a lead that, in most cases, never surfaced. The mystery of Jane Doe #4873/84 would remain unsolved for almost ten years.

*   *   *

Almost one year later, on June 21, 1985, a fisherman discovered a corpse in a box on the edge of Martis Creek Lake, located just east of Highway 267 in the densely forested Martis Valley area of Nevada County, California, just fifteen miles from where that other body had been dumped and set on fire. He immediately alerted Elmer Barber, camp host at the Martis Creek Lake Campground, to the existence of the corpse. Barber went straight to the local sheriff’s office where he told Deputy Gary Costley all about the “body in the box.”

At 12:40
P.M.
Officer Costley drove up the paved road, past the Tahoe Truckee Sanitation Agency building, turned east and then followed the road as it swept to the north and headed onto another paved road clearly marked with a campground sign. Just past the campground, the road turned to gravel and dirt before sweeping to the left and straightening out once more at the location by the lake where Elmer Barber said the body had been found. Deputy Costley found the box—measuring just twenty-five inches by nineteen inches—in amongst a clump of young weeping willows, which covered an area of only about twelve feet by eight feet near the water’s edge.

Costley tentatively pulled open the top of the box—clearly marked “Popcorn Cups”—to examine the contents. Inside were stained sheets, blankets, and plastic bags. On closer inspection, Costley could clearly see a left arm and shoulder, the left side of a torso, and the left hips of a human body in a fetal position. The body ranged in color from a light, almost white color, to green, purple, and black. There was also a cloth ligature around the deceased’s neck and wrist.

Tire tracks near the scene were evident, but because of rain that morning they were not clear enough to be identified.

At 2:00
P.M.
six more policemen arrived on the scene followed by Deputy D.A. Tom Eckhardt. The officials had another problem on their hands besides the homicide: Whose jurisdiction covered the crime scene—Placer or Nevada County? On the basis of the corpse being discovered a few feet inside their county line, Nevada took on the investigation.

By the time the body was removed a few hours later by Medical Examiner’s official Joe Aguera and taken to the Tahoe-Truckee Mortuary for an autopsy the next day, police had combed the area but failed to find any other clues apart from the box. Its grotesque contents also included a discarded pair of white panties and a pair of dirty white socks. Investigators noted that the Jane Doe had three pierced right ears and two pierced left.

The Nevada County Coroner’s Record form filled in that day had few actual facts recorded, just more than a dozen “unknowns” written in the information boxes. The coroner had been unable to determine whether the victim had starved or suffocated in that box. Another Jane Doe was about to be christened after death.

It would take almost ten years before the tragic lives of those two seemingly unconnected corpses would be linked to reveal a horrific story that stunned law officers in two states.

One

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned …

Theresa Jimmie Sanders’s facial structure might not have been particularly classic, and the perpetual frown she wore gave her blue pupils more of a haunted look than the clear-eyed confidence that she wished they’d had, but eighteen-year-old Theresa was still brunette and pretty, if not beautiful. Her complexion was clear and smooth, and her five-foot-five-inch frame was lithe and bosomy.

Resident Sheriff’s Deputy Fred May had vaguely noticed Theresa a few weeks earlier when she and her husband moved into one of the row of small, single-story houses just near the railroad tracks about fifty yards down from his own home on Elm Avenue in Galt, a township twelve miles south of Sacramento, California. He therefore instantly recognized the striking-looking teenage mother when she turned up on his doorstep at 9:15
A.M.
on July 6, 1964.

“You gotta come quick. I shot my husband in the arm.”

Within a few minutes, Galt Police Chief Walter Froehlich was also on the scene and the two men accompanied the young girl—with her baby in her arms—to her home at 586 Elm, where they found her husband Clifford lying facedown in the doorway of the kitchen. His only wound appeared at first to be in the wrist. But the .30-30 caliber slug had traveled through his body and embedded itself in his heart. He was dead.

The two officers immediately glanced at an old model deer rifle leaning against a wall in the front room. Noticing their interest, Theresa told the chief: “I grabbed the gun to make him keep from hitting me and it went off.”

She told them a tearful story about how her husband had begun to thrash her with the butt end of the rifle and how, miraculously, she had been able to wrestle the weapon away from him. She even said to the policemen that Clifford Sanders had been arrested just two weeks earlier for assault and battery, but she had decided not to press charges.

“Her reaction was mild, I’d say,” recalled Froehlich almost thirty years later. “But different people react in different ways.”

Theresa Sanders was booked and taken to the Sacramento County Jail. Her baby son Howard—still ten days off celebrating his first birthday—was taken by the sheriff to one of Theresa’s relatives north of Sacramento.

The day after the shooting, the
Sacramento Bee
daily newspaper ran a dramatic photo of pretty, petite Theresa Sanders being led into the county jail by stern-looking Galt Police Matron Mary Templeton, a whole head and shoulders taller than her prisoner. Arms folded, her hair cut in a fashionable bob style, Theresa Sanders looked as if butter would not melt in her mouth.

The headline that accompanied the photo exclaimed:
MURDER CHARGE IS DUE IN GALT DEATH
.

Its first attention-grabbing paragraph read:

Deputy District Attorney Donald Dorfman said he planned to file a murder charge today against eighteen-year-old Mrs. Theresa Sanders of Galt in the deer rifle slaying of her husband. Clifford Sanders, 23, was slain yesterday morning in the couple’s small Galt home. Investigators reported the .30-30 bullet apparently grazed off his left wrist and lodged in his heart …

The shooting was the talk of Galt—a sleepy railroad town split in two by the old Highway 99 that runs up from Stockton and Modesto to Sacramento. The Sanders had moved to their tiny, one-bedroom house from Sacramento earlier that summer. Conditions inside the house were especially cramped because of the presence of Theresa’s father, James Cross. There was no actual bath or shower in the $75-a-month property, and baby Howard was usually bathed by Theresa in the kitchen sink. The difficult conditions were not helped by the roar of endless cargo trains regularly thundering along the railroad, just a few yards from their front door.