Body Parts (13 page)

Freeman and other authorities immediately suspected that her disappearance was related to the torso case.

On December 5, Wayne walked into a mental-health clinic in Eureka.

During the intake interview with psychiatric social worker Todd Flynn, Wayne said he had suffered from severe depression for most of his life and described his crying spells, thoughts of suicide, multiple aches and pains, feelings of hopelessness and agitation, and recurrent insomnia.

Flynn wrote in his notes that when Wayne became depressed, he would abruptly leave his job and had problems maintaining relationships.

“Patient had been using alcohol more, binged while he was singing in bars,” Flynn wrote.

Apparently minimizing his alcohol problems, Wayne said he drank half a beer every few weeks. He also said he’d been obsessively focusing on his thoughts, which disrupted his sleep and judgment. To Flynn, he seemed negative and sad, describing activities that were clearly doomed to fail. However, he never mentioned killing or wanting to kill anybody.

Flynn’s diagnosis was dysthymia, a low-grade depression that could possibly be more serious, with histrionic (displays exaggerated emotional responses), dependent (allows other people to meet his needs), and narcissistic (uses other people as objects to meet his needs) features.

Flynn referred Wayne for a psychiatric evaluation. But after the staff psychiatrist talked with Wayne, he decided that Wayne should undergo counseling before trying medication.

Wayne made an appointment for December 18, but he never showed up.

On December 18, 1997, Freeman met with two profilers from the state DOJ he’d contacted. The profilers, Sharon Pagaling and Richard Sinor, had also come to Eureka to check into the Karen Mitchell case for the Eureka PD.

Freeman toured Ryan Slough with the profilers before they went to the police station to review the Mitchell file.

Pagaling and Sinor told Freeman that they, too, thought the two deaths were related. They said the killer likely was a white man in his forties, who had killed many times before and, generally, did not intend for his victims to be found. In the torso case, however, they believed the killer was especially proud of his handiwork with the knife, so he put Jane Doe into the slough—where someone would find her.

They believed the killer also weighed the risk of being caught while transporting the body from his home, where he felt it was safe to commit his crimes. They figured he worked a regular job, because the body was dumped on a weekend, and that he lived nearby, was a frequent visitor, or had lived there before. His knowledge of the area would be crucial, they said, because he needed to park close enough to the slough that he wouldn’t have to risk being seen while carrying the body.

Pagaling and Sinor suggested that Freeman try to determine what was in the victim’s stomach because, as he was well aware, these types of killers rarely had sexual intercourse with their victims; they usually forced them to perform oral sex and swallow the semen.

Freeman already knew what had happened to the stomach contents. During the autopsy, he’d seen Lawrence, the pathologist, dump them into a strainer, looking for pills. Lawrence had found a few beans, which he rinsed with water, thereby disposing of the gastric fluid. Sipma told Freeman that if he’d done the autopsy, he would’ve saved the stomach contents as a matter of routine.

“I was very disappointed at that,” Freeman said later. “Very disappointed.”

The profilers also requested that Freeman try to determine where the victim had been actually thrown into the slough, because it was possible that more body parts could be found in a sunken container or a barrel nearby. They suggested he pick a day when the tides were similar to the weekend the body was found and put some weighted bags near the estimated location to see where the current took them. If any of the bags ended up where the body was found, the bottom at the dump site should be searched.

On January 29, 1998, two people cutting driftwood at the beach in McKinleyville, a town north of Eureka, pulled an arm out of the surf.

It was a left arm, sunburned and dried out. Freeman ordered DNA tests to look for a match with Karen Mitchell or his Jane Doe. The hand was sent to the DOJ lab in Sacramento to see if it could be rehydrated enough to take a set of usable fingerprints.

The next day, a team of investigators searched the shore from Clam Beach south to the Mad River, which flowed from the mountains through Arcata, emptying into the ocean near McKinleyville. No other body parts were found.

By mid-March, Freeman learned that the arm’s DNA matched the torso’s. The arm also appeared to have been sawed partway through, which was consistent with the marks on Jane Doe’s left shoulder.

After hurting his back at the cement plant, Wayne went on workers’ compensation leave on November 21, 1997. He believed the company was stringing him along because they wanted him to quit rather than fire him, so he went next door to Edeline Trucking and asked for a job in February.

He was assigned truck #60, which had a forty-five-foot flatbed for transporting freight, and he started driving that night. Because he didn’t own a car, he essentially lived in the sleeper portion of the cab, driving it over to the trailer park to do his laundry.

Meanwhile, Freeman talked to Kay Rhea, a psychic he’d used on previous cases. Many of the details she provided turned out to be true, even though she’d offered some of them in the wrong context.

“Kay asked me to describe the general location where Jane Doe was found. I did this and Kay told me the victim had dark brown hair, but not black hair,” Freeman wrote in an investigative report.

Rhea told Freeman that Jane Doe had lived with the killer, who was at least forty-five years old, hardened, drawn, and wore a beard that was at least two inches long, untrimmed and graying.

She said he lived in a small house or cabin deep in the woods and up a dirt road, outside Eureka city limits—i.e., within the sheriff’s jurisdiction—where marijuana was being grown. He owned a short pickup truck with a camper shell, “possibly a Ford,” which rattled and had traces of dried blood in it.

Rhea said he may have worked with wood, or was a logger, but he waited each month for his disability or veteran’s check to arrive. His right arm was covered in tattoos, including a large one that ran from the elbow down and had something to do with the marines.

She said he would rather drink coffee and smoke than eat. He also took drugs and drank a lot of alcohol. In fact, he was in a drunken rage when he killed Jane Doe. The man was not clear-headed much and often felt sorry for himself.

“He also reverts back to how he was treated as a child,” Freeman wrote. The killer got angry at Jane Doe when she said she was leaving. She was getting her things together when he knocked her down and bashed in her head.

Rhea said the killer had scattered body parts and she was surprised that a leg hadn’t shown up. She felt the legs were near Trinidad.

She said she could see the killer having sex on a blanket with the victim, who had an irregular nose, brown eyes, and an upper right tooth with metal in it, possibly gold. She was not tall, had known the killer for two or three months and had traveled with him. Nineteen or twenty years old, she may have had some Indian in her.

“Kay said that he now regrets killing her,” Freeman wrote. “Sometimes he wishes she were back. Kay also said that it is not like his conscience is bothering him. It is he misses the things she did for him.”

“Kay said this person is not a serial-killer-type guy. She said his ability to have sex is low because he has a small penis. He gets very mad if someone laughs at him about his size.... Kay said she sees the victim lying in a pool of blood around her head. He uses the ‘F’ word a lot. Kay said he wakes up and says, ‘F***, f***, f***, what did I do now?’”

Freeman attempted to carry out Pagaling’s request to float objects in the slough to see where they ended up, but the exercise had to be canceled in December, January, and February due to bad weather.

He and Deputy Roy Reynolds, who had researched the area’s tidal patterns, attempted a floatation experiment on March 16, when they filled about eighteen burlap sacks with enough wood chips and empty plastic bottles to equal the torso’s weight. They started placing the bags intermittently along the slough, but they had to abort the exercise because they ran out of time.

Meanwhile, the coroner’s office quietly buried Jane Doe’s remains in Potter’s Field, an indigent section of Ocean View Cemetery in Eureka.

Freeman and a larger team of deputies conducted a second floatation experiment on May 5. This time they filled thirty-one gunnysacks with wood chips and plastic bottles, placing them in four parts of the slough where they thought the body had most likely been dumped.

Bag 14 was placed near the Park Street Bridge and came to rest about one hundred feet from where the torso was found. Bag 18, placed near the Devoy Road Bridge, about one and a half miles downstream from Bag 14, ended up where the torso was found, but it took three complete tide cycles to land there.

Because the torso was thought to have been in the water less than twenty-four hours, Freeman decided that the Park Street Bridge was the more likely dumping site. If the killer had placed the torso there at dawn on October 26, he and Reynolds decided that it would have moved to its final resting place by the time the tide went out that evening.

In the year after Jane Doe’s death, Freeman came up with a half-dozen possible suspects by comparing notes with various agencies and investigators all over the country, some going back a decade or more. But none of them turned out to be his guy.

“What I found out during this investigation is that a lot of people do really weird things,” Freeman said later.

It bothered him that he still didn’t know the victim’s name.

CHAPTER 9

T
HE
M
ONEY
C
OW

On April 15, 1998, Wayne and Elizabeth’s divorce, custody, and visitation agreement became final. Wayne was allowed to visit Max for one week every three months, on the child’s birthday, on Christmas in even-numbered years, and for the month of December in odd-numbered years. However, Wayne never exercised those rights.

As part of the settlement, Wayne had agreed to start sending child support payments: $200 each month.

In late May, Elizabeth heard some strange clicks on her answering machine. She figured it was Wayne calling and hanging up. The following weekend, she and Wayne talked for the first time in a while. They had a surprisingly decent conversation and communicated well for a change.

“I was in town this weekend,” he said.

Elizabeth was upset that Wayne, who had only come to Las Vegas two or three times to see his son since they split, hadn’t called ahead to arrange a visit.

“Why didn’t you let me know?” she asked.

Once they got past that topic, Elizabeth proudly told him that she had bought herself a new car and had landed a great job. She and Max were doing well. But, as usual, the conversation came back around to the failure of their marriage.

“It’s kind of your fault because you left me,” he complained.

They also talked about why Wayne didn’t see much of his son.

“You have a choice of being in your son’s life or not, and you’re choosing not to,” she said.

“It’s hard,” he said.

“That’s not my problem.”

At that point, Elizabeth heard the beep of someone calling on the other line, so she clicked over, then came back to Wayne.

“I’ve got to let you go,” she said.

“No, I’m not done yet.”

Elizabeth talked to him for a few more minutes before they hung up.

It would be five more months before Elizabeth would learn exactly what Wayne had been doing in Las Vegas that weekend in May.

In July, August, and September, Wayne left messages on Elizabeth’s answering machine, apologizing for sending his $200 check late.

“I’m sorry, I’m on the road and I just forgot. I’m sending it off now,” he’d say in that “woe is me,” melancholy tone of his.

The check always came about two weeks late and Wayne had taken to writing “The money cow” in the top left-hand corner where the return address would normally go.

The last time he left such a message was in September, when his check arrived on the twenty-eighth day of the month.

In October, Elizabeth didn’t receive a check at all.

CHAPTER 10

T
INA
R
ENEE
G
IBBS

The California Aqueduct is one of those necessary parts of life that southern Californians generally don’t think about when they take a bath or drink a glass of tap water.

The water takes seven days to flow down this 442-mile, concrete-lined conduit, coursing from the Sacramento Delta through wide open stretches of farmland, under bridges and beneath freeways to the desert at Lake Perris, about twenty miles past Riverside. The canal splits into two branches in northern Los Angeles County near Gorman, where the water is diverted into various reservoirs, to treatment plants, and on to homes and businesses.

But what most people probably don’t know—and what the California Department of Water Resources doesn’t go out of its way to publicize—is that the canal has been an unwelcome repository for less than savory items since it was built in the 1960s. Many of these foreign objects aren’t found until that particular portion of the aqueduct, which is divided by intermittent gates and pumping plants, is drained for cleaning and maintenance.

Slippery and slimy with green algae, thirty-two feet at its deepest point and 110 feet across the surface at its widest, the aqueduct has been host to guns, phone booths, pipe bombs, stolen cars, semitrucks—and, sadly, the decomposing corpses of infants and adults.