Read Online TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer by Bruce Henderson - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Bruce Henderson
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gas station to where her car had been found. It was 31.2 miles. The trip odometer on Stephanie’s car, when it wasfound deserted on I-5, had read 31.3. Obviously, she had reset it when she bought gas that night.
During the thirty-minute drive to Loomis, Rosenquist noted that the Colt’s temperature and oil pressure were within normal range. As they neared their destination, Rosenquist braked the vehicle hard several times to see if it would stall during an emergency stop, but the engine purred right along.
When they arrived, the detectives asked Jo-Allyn Brown to come outside and take a look at the car. At the crime lab, it had been discovered that the armrest and a metal shield that fit in behind the door handle on the passenger’s side were lying on the floorboard.
“Do you know if the armrest might have fallen off or been removed at any point?” Rosenquist asked.
“Not that I’m aware of,” said Stephanie’s mother. She explained that her daughter had been proud of her little car and always took good care of it.
The broken armrest conjured up another image for the two detectives: Stephanie, who by all accounts would not have gone meekly with her abductor, struggling with someone intent on pulling her from the driver’s side of the vehicle, and her desperately reaching in the opposite direction for something to hang on to.
Like the armrest.
L T . R AY B IONDI had a strong intuition that Stephanie Brown had been abducted and murdered by aserial killer. He had no real proof, just a nagging hunch wrought from long experience in such sordid matters.
As commander ofSacramento County’s Homicide Bureau for a decade, Biondi had been involved in and directed more than 400 murder investigations. The majority were what cops call “smoking-gun” cases, where there is an abundance of incriminating evidence. In these cases, the killer is usually a “novice” and often someone the victim knew—a spouse, a lover, a relative, a business associate—and is quickly identified. In other cases—known in the homicide trade as “whodunits”—the killer is not so easy to find. Solving these Sherlock Holmes–type cases required skill, dedication, and perseverance on the part of the detectives assigned to them.
Serial killers, who actually enjoy making people suffer and die, represented the biggest challenge of all. And while murder is murder, their victims usually died in the most horrifying ways. Biondi had often found law enforcement to be ineffectual in stoppingserial killers, in large part because of a failure either to recognize or accept that a string of seeminglyunconnected killings have a common denominator. Instead of focusing on a single killer, investigators tended to scatter in divergent directions. An unsolved murder series has all the confounding aspects of any whodunit with the added urgency of a race against time: until solved the killing would continue.
Serial killers differ from common, garden-variety murderers—they kill not for money or revenge or in the heat of an argument, but randomly, and for far darker reasons known only to themselves. They have no remorse, and can be highly organized. They are hard to catch, difficult to convict, and almost impossible to comprehend. Their crimes may or may not be about sex, but they’re almost always about power and control. No one can know when or where they’ll hit next, or whom they’ll serve up as their next victim.
During his career, Biondi had earned a reputation as one of the country’s most respected experts on serial murders. He had helped capture and convict more than his share of serial killers, among them:Richard Chase, the “Vampire Killer,” who in less than a month (in 1978) murdered and eviscerated four adults, a youngster, and an infant;Gerald Gallego, a second-generation killer (his father had been executed by the State of Mississippi in 1954), who raped, tortured, and killed at least six teenage girls, three young women, and one
During the thirty-minute drive to Loomis, Rosenquist noted that the Colt’s temperature and oil pressure were within normal range. As they neared their destination, Rosenquist braked the vehicle hard several times to see if it would stall during an emergency stop, but the engine purred right along.
When they arrived, the detectives asked Jo-Allyn Brown to come outside and take a look at the car. At the crime lab, it had been discovered that the armrest and a metal shield that fit in behind the door handle on the passenger’s side were lying on the floorboard.
“Do you know if the armrest might have fallen off or been removed at any point?” Rosenquist asked.
“Not that I’m aware of,” said Stephanie’s mother. She explained that her daughter had been proud of her little car and always took good care of it.
The broken armrest conjured up another image for the two detectives: Stephanie, who by all accounts would not have gone meekly with her abductor, struggling with someone intent on pulling her from the driver’s side of the vehicle, and her desperately reaching in the opposite direction for something to hang on to.
Like the armrest.
L T . R AY B IONDI had a strong intuition that Stephanie Brown had been abducted and murdered by aserial killer. He had no real proof, just a nagging hunch wrought from long experience in such sordid matters.
As commander ofSacramento County’s Homicide Bureau for a decade, Biondi had been involved in and directed more than 400 murder investigations. The majority were what cops call “smoking-gun” cases, where there is an abundance of incriminating evidence. In these cases, the killer is usually a “novice” and often someone the victim knew—a spouse, a lover, a relative, a business associate—and is quickly identified. In other cases—known in the homicide trade as “whodunits”—the killer is not so easy to find. Solving these Sherlock Holmes–type cases required skill, dedication, and perseverance on the part of the detectives assigned to them.
Serial killers, who actually enjoy making people suffer and die, represented the biggest challenge of all. And while murder is murder, their victims usually died in the most horrifying ways. Biondi had often found law enforcement to be ineffectual in stoppingserial killers, in large part because of a failure either to recognize or accept that a string of seeminglyunconnected killings have a common denominator. Instead of focusing on a single killer, investigators tended to scatter in divergent directions. An unsolved murder series has all the confounding aspects of any whodunit with the added urgency of a race against time: until solved the killing would continue.
Serial killers differ from common, garden-variety murderers—they kill not for money or revenge or in the heat of an argument, but randomly, and for far darker reasons known only to themselves. They have no remorse, and can be highly organized. They are hard to catch, difficult to convict, and almost impossible to comprehend. Their crimes may or may not be about sex, but they’re almost always about power and control. No one can know when or where they’ll hit next, or whom they’ll serve up as their next victim.
During his career, Biondi had earned a reputation as one of the country’s most respected experts on serial murders. He had helped capture and convict more than his share of serial killers, among them:Richard Chase, the “Vampire Killer,” who in less than a month (in 1978) murdered and eviscerated four adults, a youngster, and an infant;Gerald Gallego, a second-generation killer (his father had been executed by the State of Mississippi in 1954), who raped, tortured, and killed at least six teenage girls, three young women, and one
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