TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer (13 page)

Dr. Gould seemed taken aback when handed the two jaw sections. He was more accustomed to working with X rays. But getting to work in his spotless lab, he cleaned the teeth first, then X-rayed them. Comparing that film to two sets of dental X rays taken of the missing person’s teeth—ten years ago and seven years ago—Dr. Gould did a careful tooth-by-tooth examination before stating that there was no doubt in his mind that the teeth belonged to the missing person.

Upon leaving the dental offices, Pane and the Amador detective drove directly to the downtown Sacramento address of the next of kin in the missing persons report. Although both of them considered notification the hardest part of their jobs, to delay it would be unconscionable.

At 5:45
P.M.
that day, an anguished mother sitting at her kitchen table learned that her daughter’s body had been found.

The scattered remains of
Charmaine
Sabrah had been located, three months after her disappearance, a distance of some 50 miles from where she had gotten into the quiet stranger’s car.

As
Carmen Anselmi finally heard the news that she had long dreaded, she did not immediately cry. It was as if all her tears had been used up. Instead, she rocked slowly back and forth.

In her arms she cradled Sabri, the bright-eyed, dark-haired baby boy that her daughter wanted so much to get home to the night she died.

Six

T
he cackling began a few minutes into the video when the screen showed the potbellied pathologist puffing on his stogy as he leaned over the remains.

Gathered around a conference table at the
Amador County Sheriff’s Department four days after Charmaine
Sabrah’s body had been found were Lt. Ray Biondi and Stan Reed from
Sacramento, Vito Bertocchini and Pete Rosenquist from
San Joaquin, Department of
Justice staffers—including criminalist Jim Streeter—and two Amador detectives. They were here to discuss similarities in the three unsolved murder cases in Sacramento, San Joaquin, and Amador counties.

As Doc began to pull apart the remains, Bertocchini let loose with a loud curse, followed by a thunderous: “I’ve gutted
rabbits
with more care!”

When the pathologist shook out the victim’s clothes, Reed practically growled, “So much for trace evidence.”

Biondi cringed, too, at the idea of any hairs, fibers, and other microscopic evidence that the killer might have left on the victim’s clothes now part of the landscape in western Amador County.

When the tape ended, the Amador detectives were plainly embarrassed by the reaction of their peers. One explained solemnly that Doc was an “old-timer” and the only pathologist available to them that day.

Next time
, Biondi mused,
call Dr. Frankenstein.

No one really held the Amador guys to the fire over the unusual “tailgate autopsy.” The general feeling in the room was not one of righteous indignation but rather a collective we’ll-work-with-what-we’ve-got.

As for Streeter, he received validation that what he’d witnessed that day
in the field had seemed as peculiar to the others as it had to him. He told himself he couldn’t have stopped it. Any effort to do so would only have alienated him from the Amador guys, not a wise move when he was on their turf and, more important, when cooperation between DOJ and Amador might eventually mean the difference between solving the case or not.

The Amador detective went on to explain that ligature strangulation was the cause of
Charmaine Sabrah’s death, and that she was found with her wrists bound behind her back. He added that her jewelry and purse were never found.

“Could you tell whether her
hair had been cut?” Bertocchini wanted to know.

The local detective looked surprised. “We did find some blond hair caught in the ligature but I never heard anyone say it was cut.”

Biondi summarized aloud. Sabrah was the third unsolved homicide of a young female in four months within a 60-mile radius that had evidence of bindings, either proven sexual assault or presumed due to the victims’ state of undress, ligature strangulation as the cause of death, no ID on the bodies, and transportation of the victims and/or their bodies for some distance.

“I might have been jumping the gun,” Biondi added somberly, “but I’ve been thinking for months, ever since Stephanie Brown, that we had a series working. Now, with Sabrah and—”

“I’ve seen this scumbag’s work,” Bertocchini jumped in. “He’ll never stop until we nail him.”

The rest were noncommittal about any connection—the way good detectives tend to be when they don’t have all the facts before them.

Biondi knew the realities of working Homicide. Detectives tended to get comfortable in their own little worlds, assuming that their cases were strictly local. (More times than not they were right.) For that reason as well as their own growing caseloads—why go looking for more work?—they weren’t searching for linked murders. But Biondi understood that recognizing the likelihood that these three killings were connected would be the first step to finding a dangerous serial killer, and he had no intention of giving up—not now, not later.

With the exception of Bertocchini, no one endorsed Biondi’s idea to form a task force devoted to tracking down this killer, with each agency contributing detectives and other resources. However, everyone agreed to send all their reports on all possible I-5 cases to DOJ, which would copy and disseminate the paperwork to the other agencies. Also, all evidence from the three crime scenes—and any future murders that seemed at all similar—would be submitted to Streeter.

Although Biondi knew this was not the ideal way to investigate a
serial killer who crossed over invisible political boundaries about as easily as a flight of blackbirds, he was pleased that all the evidence would be analyzed in one central place.

Nonetheless, Biondi was feeling a dread that manifested itself in a full-body weariness. He understood better than most at the table how unbelievably tough murder series were to unravel, and the incredible amount of legwork that would be required to find and arrest the culprit. Unless they were able at some point to form a multi-agency task force, the work would have to be done by hard-pressed detectives already carrying heavy caseloads.

He knew that Bertocchini had picked up a prison homicide a few weeks after Brown and two new cases since Sabrah’s kidnapping. Rosenquist was busy working eight other homicides, several carryovers from previous years.

As for Sacramento County, when Stan Reed had arrived to search the
Brannan Island crime scene, it was the thirty-seventh homicide in the sheriff’s department jurisdiction that year. That figure did not include twenty-six unsolved cases from previous years that still required attention whenever viable new leads cropped up. It also didn’t reflect the Bureau’s assisting other agencies with their murder cases (such as Brown and Sabrah) and the man-hours being gobbled up by an ongoing
investigation into the
Unabomber, who had killed a Sacramento computer store owner the year before (1985) with a powerful homemade bomb.

As for what some detectives were calling the “I-5 series,” it wouldn’t help detectives that the three known victims had been located in different jurisdictions, and that the two identified victims were nabbed in one jurisdiction and dumped in another. Police agencies were filled with layers of bureaucracy that led to administrative infighting—distractions that could and too often did get in the way of conscientious cops trying to do a job. With the number of jurisdictions involved, Biondi knew that interagency battling,
interdepartmental turf wars, bureaucratic red tape, and petty bickering would only increase geometrically.

He could foresee departments (and he did not exclude his own) being unwilling to make the necessary manpower and monetary commitment to form a special task force. Amador County was already making noises that its small detective bureau—three detectives handling every investigation from shoplifting to homicide for 600 square miles—could not become involved in any long-term investigation.

Without strong coordination and cohesiveness, Biondi anticipated
that the I-5 series would get chopped into individual cases that might or might not be ardently worked by the appropriate jurisdiction. Even if detectives were given the time to work the cases, collectively their efforts would overlap. For example, information developed by one agency would not always get to another agency that needed it in a timely manner. Such inefficiencies would haunt them from day one.

Biondi was keenly aware that this multi-agency effort to find a heinous serial murderer had all the makings for a cluster fuck, from which only the killer would benefit.

F
OUR DAYS
later, Jim Streeter received in his Sacramento lab the
physical evidence in the Stephanie
Brown case. Some of it had previously been analyzed by a small, satellite DOJ lab near Stockton that served San Joaquin County, which did not have its own crime lab.

First turning his attention to the
rape kit, he noted that an insufficient amount of
semen had been recovered to conduct
DNA genetic-fingerprinting testing. Next best would be to run a less conclusive
blood-typing test, which was most useful in eliminating a suspect. When it came to fingering someone, these results would only determine how large or small a group of the general population an individual belonged to. In this instance, the field hadn’t been narrowed much: Streeter found the donor had any one of several common blood types. Together, they represented 89 percent of the total U.S. population.

Streeter found a single black
hair that did not belong to Brown in an envelope containing her pubic combings.
Hair evidence, however, would not conclusively prove the identity of an individual. Scientifically, it could only exclude a donor. Insofar as providing incriminating evidence, the most they would ever get from the “foreign” hair would be to be able one day to vouch for its
similarity
to a suspect’s.

Streeter looked through a microscope at the several strands of hair found on the decedent’s tank top after it had been recovered from the ditch. He found them to be similar to the sample of hair from Brown’s head. As the loose strands had no roots, he was able to confirm Bertocchini’s suspicions that the victim’s hair had been cut. This struck him as odd.

Streeter turned his attention to the victim’s blue tank top, which he examined with gloved hands. He kept it inside a plastic bag to preserve any possible trace evidence. Both shoulder straps were cut through just behind the top seam, and the back of the shirt was sliced open from top to bottom or vice versa. He was sure it had been cut, as the thin cotton
material wasn’t stretched as if it had been ripped. And the slices were so straight and even that he believed
scissors rather than a knife had been used.

Streeter was intrigued by the evidence of cutting. Checking Stephanie Brown’s other clothes, however, he found no cuts to her bra, panties, or white shorts.

The next morning, bags containing Charmaine
Sabrah’s
clothing arrived from Amador County. Not long after, a DOJ investigator came into Streeter’s lab with the clothing worn by Jane Doe that had been at the Sacramento County morgue since the autopsy.

The criminalist started with
Sabrah.

In examining the black-and-lavender short-sleeve blouse he had seen on the remains at the crime scene, Streeter saw that it buttoned down the front. The buttons—which were unbuttoned when the victim was found—were intact and there was no stretching or damage to the buttonholes. Both shoulder seams had been cut in the collarbone area. Both side seams were also cut open, and Streeter could see that a strip of the shirt’s black lining was missing from each side.

The ligature that had been used to strangle the victim to death turned out to be the missing liner from the sides of the blouse, reinforced with a length of yellow nylon cord knotted in two places.

He next looked at the black
pantyhose, which had been cut into pieces, two of which were found wrapped around her wrists.

Both shoulder straps of the bra had been cut. A short section of strap was missing from each side, and had not been found at the crime scene. There was no damage to the metal clip at the back of the bra.

The panties he had found at the Sabrah scene were cut and missing sections, too. Both sides had been cut to the waistband. Missing and not found were a portion of the right front panel and a portion of the left rear panel. But what Streeter found connected to the panties was more peculiar than what he didn’t find. A piece of the waistband was wound around a clump of hair.

A microscopic examination would reveal seventy-two strands of hair 1 to 3 inches long that were similar to the victim’s head hair. Some of the strands had been cut and others had been pulled out by the root.

The victim’s black half-slip had a 9-inch cut in one side seam, running from the hem upward.

Her purple skirt had no cuts.

Streeter speculated that the pantyhose, since it had been used to bind
the victim’s hands, had come off first. Then, the assailant cut his way through the other layers of
clothing; in places, to remove them, but in other instances for less obvious reasons. There was evidence of animal bites on some of the clothes; pockmarked as if made by needle-sharp teeth, they were quite distinctive from the straight-edged cuts.

Turning his attention to the Jane Doe
case, Streeter examined the articles of clothing he had received: a pair of blue jeans, bikini panties, and gray socks. The only cuts were up the legs of the blue jeans made by the pathologist in removing them at the autopsy.

Despite other similar factors in the three cases, the unique hair and clothes cuttings found in Brown and Sabrah was not present in Jane Doe.

At that point, Streeter had every reason to believe he’d seen all of Jane Doe’s clothing. He did not know about her cut-up tank top that remained in the freezer at the Sacramento County crime lab.

V
ITO
Bertocchini was impassioned, as usual.