CHAPTER 8

“TORSO GIRL”

The coastline of Humboldt County curves northwest into the Pacific Ocean and back again, ending about fifty miles below Oregon. The economy of this rural region depends on seasonal fishing, lumber, and the tourists who flock there to see the famous redwood forests. More artists live in Humboldt, per capita, than anywhere else in the state.

The greater Eureka area, which has more than forty-two thousand residents, is the largest metropolis for three hours in any direction. A network of tributaries, which flow through and around the city, is fed with salt water by the tides and freshwater by the rain. Known as sloughs, they run from the bay inland, creating a brackish environment that supports fish, shrimp, and crabs.

In 1997, Wayne was working three days a week at Arcata Readimix, a cement and gravel-mining plant on the Mad River, seven miles north of Eureka. Because he was also working in Vallejo with a karaoke company, he lived part-time on his father’s property in Napa and part-time with his aunt Doris and other Ford family members in Eureka.

At the Ford family homestead, Wayne’s cousin Robert Johnson tried to engage Wayne in conversation, but it was hit-and-miss. As long as they were discussing race cars, it was fine. But, Robert said, “If you tried to talk about any other subject, family or whatever, he just kind of wouldn’t say anything, or get up and walk out of the room.”

One day, for example, Robert saw Wayne sitting in his room, staring at a ceramic slab imprinted with a child’s hand and the name “Max.”

“What’s that?” Robert asked.

Wayne looked up with a lost expression, then closed the door without a word.

“What’s wrong with Wayne?” Robert asked his mother, who was also living there.

“I have no idea,” she said.

Another time, Robert went to Wayne’s room to get him for dinner.

“I’ll be right there,” Wayne said.

It was fifteen minutes before he joined them in the kitchen.

“What took you so long?” Robert joked.

Wayne gave him a strange look, ate his dinner quietly, went outside to smoke a cigarette, then retreated to his room.

Wayne and his relatives used to go out together to bars, where Wayne liked to drink and sing karaoke. He also used to enjoy playing his guitar and singing to them at the house, but he gradually stopped performing, even when Robert asked him to.

Wayne went out one night with his cousin Leslie and met her friend Candy, a schoolteacher.

He came home afterward, laid his head on his aunt Ginger’s lap, and told her about his immediate attachment to Candy.

“Aunt Ginger, I really love her,” he said as she stroked his hair. “I want to go out with her.”

Ginger, who used to babysit Wayne and Rodney, felt Wayne’s mother never gave him the upbringing she should have, hiding him away in the house with the shades drawn all day. Ginger thought that Wayne had always felt different and needed attention. He wanted so badly to fit in.

Wayne’s aunt Vickie also thought Karen had seemed peculiar, sleeping around with other men while she was married to Gene. Vickie later said she thought Wayne resented his mother because of these other men and for abandoning him as a teenager. His ex-wife Elizabeth reminded Vickie of Wayne’s mother.

Vickie would later recall how Wayne used to walk around the house in a silk robe, like Hugh Hefner. He also would walk around downtown with a briefcase, dressed in a suit and tie for no reason in particular.

As a result of his continued remarks about “needing space,” his aunt Doris suggested that he buy her trailer and move into it somewhere private. He accepted her offer that July and moved into the Town & Country Trailer Park in Arcata.

Arcata has a fluctuating population that expands to twenty thousand when Humboldt State University is in session. It gets about forty inches of rain, mostly between November and April.

Wayne’s trailer was only a few feet from a fence separating the park from Arcata Readimix. Because he had no garbage service, he would dispose of his trash at his aunt’s house.

The afternoon of October 26, 1997, was sunny but seasonably cool when photographer Bob Pottberg and a few friends put their kayaks into the frigid Freshwater Creek. Pottberg liked to go canoeing a few times a year, but he’d never explored Freshwater Slough, which connects to Ryan Slough, both winding waterways with muddy banks surrounded by marshland.

The plan was to spend a few hours meandering down to the boat ramp under Samoa Bridge, where they had left a car to drive home.

By 4:00 P.M., the air was starting to grow even cooler. Pottberg was coming around a bend to a wider portion of the canal when he saw a white object ahead on the north bank, unnaturally stark against the lackluster green and brown landscape.

As he paddled closer, he thought he could make out buttocks, and wondered, is that a mannequin—or is it a body?

At that point, Pottberg thought it would be better if his friend, Lynne Sarty, who worked at a local hospital, checked it out. But she declined.

“No, it was your idea, you go poke it first,” she said.

Sarty was trying to be playful, but she, too, was nervous that it might actually be a body. Her husband, who had their four-year-old in his kayak, had the same concerns, so he paddled ahead without them.

As Pottberg drew nearer, he told himself that it had to be a mannequin because it was missing its arms, legs, and head. The yellow areas had to be stuffing and the white covering had to be fabric or plastic.

He got close enough to tap it with his paddle. Only he didn’t get the sound of wood against hard plastic that he expected. Instead, the figure, which would have been facedown, was squishy to the touch, and he could see that the yellow material was actually fatty tissue, where body parts had been surgically removed.

Pottberg was horrified.

“This is real!” he called out.

Whoever had cut up this poor soul, the gender of whom he could not determine, had done so with precision. There had been no hacking involved.

“At this point, I freaked, turned around, and [went back] to where my friends were,” Pottberg recalled later.

Pottberg’s hands shook as he fumbled for his cell phone and punched in 911. After going through dispatch, he arranged to meet a Eureka police officer downstream at the municipal airport, Murray Field, a fifteen-minute trip by kayak.

The sky darkened and the air grew chilly as Pottberg and his friends waited near the airport for almost an hour before the authorities arrived.

Pottberg tried to explain what he’d found, and initially they were almost blasé about his discovery, saying they found several bodies in the slough every year. Pottberg, who was still thoroughly disturbed by the experience, tried to make them understand that this was different.

“This isn’t just a body,” he told them. “This is no body, so to speak.”

The officers finally got the point, once Pottberg detailed the surgical cuts.

“Oh,” one of them said.

Once he’d described the exact location as the north bank, the authorities determined that the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office should handle the case because the Eureka Police Department’s jurisdiction covered only the south bank.

So sheriff’s Lieutenant Frank Vulich, Deputy Coroner Charlie Van Buskirk, and a California Department of Fish and Game officer went by boat to collect the torso from the slough near the end of Park Street, in the neighborhood known as Myrtletown, where they were met by a deputy and the sheriff himself.

 

 

The next day, Vulich, commander of the sheriff’s detective bureau, assigned Detective Juan Freeman to be the lead investigator on the case. The torso, as it turned out, was also missing its breasts, so the victim was identified as Jane 194-97 Doe. Freeman called her “Torso Girl.”

Freeman had started working for the sheriff’s department as a correctional officer in the Garberville jail and substation in January 1977. By 1988, he’d transferred into the detective bureau, where he started investigating child abuse cases and eventually progressed to major crimes, many of which were homicides.

As a hobby, Freeman restored hot rods, classic and custom cars. He and his wife, Lynn, were nicknamed “Dagwood and Blondie Bumstead,” after the comic strip characters, because Lynn always wore her blond hair in a ponytail. Although he and his wife reportedly carried “the Bumstead curse” for the misadventures they experienced on their car trips, Freeman didn’t look anything like the cartoon Dagwood. He was bald, stood a sturdy five feet ten inches and weighed 220 pounds.

By the time Freeman got the torso case, he’d already worked a couple dozen homicides, but this one was a first for him.

“I was pretty sure I had the work of a serial killer in front of me,” he said.

All of his homicide cases got to him, but he’d never tried to solve a case where he had no face, teeth, or specific characteristics to help identify his victim and catch his killer.

“I’ve never encountered body parts where I had to build a victim,” he said.

In conjunction with visiting the area where the victim was discovered, Freeman’s first task was to compile a list of “identifiers,” such as approximate height, weight, hair color, and race. This would be done during the autopsy, which was scheduled for October 29 in San Joaquin County; Humboldt had no pathologist of its own.

 

 

Accompanying Humboldt’s coroner, Glenn Sipma, and his deputy, Charlie Van Buskirk, Freeman left Eureka at 3:00 A.M., with Jane Doe’s body in the trunk, starting the six-hour trip to the morgue in French Camp in a county vehicle with no air-conditioning.

“It was a nasty trip all the way there and back,” Freeman said.

Also present at the autopsy were San Joaquin’s pathologist Robert Lawrence, Charles “Butch” Cecil, a forensic anthropologist and skeleton expert from San Francisco, and Joe Herrera, a sheriff’s deputy who worked in the coroner’s division.

The autopsy took about two hours and the subsequent findings of Dr. Lawrence and Dr. Cecil were remarkably consistent: Jane Doe was white, with possibly some Hispanic background; she was between eighteen and twenty-five years old and had given birth at some point; she was five feet three or five feet four inches tall, weighed 120 to 125 pounds, and had brown or auburn hair; and because she had a low level of carbon in her lungs, she came from an area with little air pollution and was likely a nonsmoker.

They counted twenty-seven stab wounds on the right side of her back and buttocks, all but one of which appeared to have been inflicted after death. All eleven of her bruises, however, were made before death. Three of the bruises were the size of fingertips, patterned like grasp marks on the back of her right shoulder; the rest were on her lower left back.

Some of the stab wounds looked as if they’d been made with a small double-edged blade, and others, including the premortem wound, by a single-edged knife. Ranging in size from a ½-inch to -inch, they all looked as if they had been cut with a jerking, hesitating motion. The method of limb removal, however, varied. Some bones looked as if they’d been sawed cleanly in half, while others appeared to be half-sawed and then smashed or broken, as if the killer had grown frustrated with the time and effort it was taking.

The head was severed at the neck below the voice box, between the C-5 and C-6 vertebrae. Her breasts had been sliced off and pared down to the rib cage. Her torso had been slit down the center to the pubic area, and her pubic mound had been cut off. Given that her vagina had also been sliced out—and that her body had been lying in the slough for some time—it was no surprise that the pathologists found no trace of semen in or on her body.

Although the Humboldt County Coroner’s Office initially estimated that the torso had been in the water for “less than a week,” that calculation was later amended to the lower range of two to twenty-four hours because of the lack of “animal action” on the body.

The cause of death, however, could not be determined.

 

 

On Halloween night, Wayne had dinner with the Ford family at his aunt Doris’s house.

The topic of the well-publicized torso case came up in conversation, and one of his aunts asked, “Who would do such a thing?”

Doris later recalled that Wayne said nothing. He just looked down at his dinner plate.

In the days after the autopsy, Freeman and two teams of investigators, each with a boat and a cadaver dog, searched the water and both banks of the slough system for any other remains belonging to Jane Doe. Both dogs showed strong interest in the area where the torso was recovered; the handlers believed that porous pieces of driftwood may have retained the body’s scent. After fanning out a mile in either direction, the dogs found no more missing limbs.

 

 

Freeman, who prayed every day with his wife for God to help him solve this case, submitted the victim’s basic identifiers to the Department of Justice (DOJ) Missing and Unidentified Persons database, which was tied into the FBI’s National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. Initially he asked for a run of young women who were reported missing between October 20 and 26.

He also submitted the data to the state DOJ’s Violent Crime Information System, to the FBI’s violent crime database, and to a database in Washington State that cross-referenced MOs for violent criminals, known as the Homicide Investigative Tracking System. In addition, Freeman contacted profilers with the FBI and the state DOJ in Sacramento and conducted his own research by sending out a national all-points bulletin, asking other agencies with similar cases to contact him.

Within the next year, Freeman developed about a hundred leads on missing women who could have been his victim. Although he came close several times, the DNA never matched.

“I scratched the ground until my fingers bled,” he said.

On November 25, Karen Mitchell, a nice girl from a nice family, went missing five days before her seventeenth birthday. Karen had been living with her aunt Anne and uncle Bill Casper, who was the head criminalist at the state DOJ crime lab in Eureka, which undoubtedly contributed to the media’s and law enforcement’s close attention to the case. Karen was last seen leaving her aunt’s shop at the Bayshore Mall and walking along Broadway to the Coastal Family Development Center, where she took care of children.

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.