Body Parts

On September 17, 1998—just days before Lanett White got into Wayne’s truck—California Governor Pete Wilson signed the “Serial Killer—Single Trial” bill into law.

Authored by state Senator Richard Rainey, R–Walnut Creek, the measure allowed district attorneys in different counties to consolidate multiple charges of murders, committed in a similar fashion, into a single trial to be held in any of the respective jurisdictions.

“Serial killers who go on brutal killing rampages do so without consideration of county lines,” Rainey, a former county sheriff, said before Wilson signed the bill. “The current system is not only a waste of time and money, but it causes unnecessary pain for victims and their loved ones.”

Proponents, who’d spent the past decade lobbying for such a bill, argued that the law could have saved taxpayers half the $2.1 million cost of convicting “Freeway Killer” William Bonin in Orange and Los Angeles Counties, where he raped and strangled fourteen boys in the early 1980s. (Bonin was executed in 1996.) Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker,” and David Carpenter, the “Trailside Killer,” were also prosecuted in several counties, forcing some witnesses to testify six times.

Opponents, including defense attorney groups and the American Civil Liberties Union, countered that piling multiple cases into one would ratchet up the cost of transporting witnesses and putting them up in hotels far from home, but, more important, would result in unfair trials for defendants.

“Prosecutors should not be able to ‘forum shop’ to have a defendant tried for a murder committed in one county in another county where the prosecution believes it will be more likely to get a conviction or the death penalty,” the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice argued.

Wayne was to be the first defendant to face prosecution under the new law, which went into effect January 1, 1999.

Three months later, the Humboldt County Grand Jury indicted Wayne on a single count of first-degree murder for Jane Doe’s death. His trial was set for July.

Meanwhile, prosecutors from Humboldt, Kern, San Joaquin, and San Bernardino Counties were discussing behind the scenes how best to consolidate the four murders into one new case, possibly elsewhere.

When San Bernardino prosecutor David Whitney heard about the Ford case, he told his assistant, Diana Soren, that it would be groundbreaking if he could bring it to their office.

So that’s exactly what he set out to do.

“He was jazzed about it,” Soren recalled later. “He loved a challenge.”

Because there is no public record of these conversations, it’s unknown how, when, or why this choice was made, but Whitney had clearly been pursuing his goal for months.

“This just makes sense for the most expedient way to do it,” Whitney told the Riverside Press-Enterprise in November 1998. “It is more efficient.”

Two of the four victims were from San Bernardino County, which had a broader tax base and was far more conservative than Humboldt when it came to sentencing defendants to Death Row.

Of the more than 660 inmates sitting on the row in September 2007, thirty-six were from San Bernardino, a mountainous and desert region of freeways, dust, and heat that ranked sixth among the state’s fifty-eight counties in handing down death sentences. Only two of those inmates were from Humboldt, widely known as the nation’s “marijuana country,” where locals say their relaxed, bucolic life is sheltered by a “redwood curtain” from the rest of the world.

Ultimately, the other DAs agreed to let Whitney take the case.

On June 29, 1999, Whitney filed a new set of charges in San Bernardino as required under the new Rainey law.

Unlike the original complaint in Humboldt, which carried a possible sentence of life in prison without parole, this one packed a potentially fatal punch: Wayne now faced four counts of first-degree murder and the special circumstance allegation of multiple murders, which made him eligible for the death penalty. (He wasn’t charged with the rape of “Sonoma County Doe” because it didn’t fall under the new law.)

Around this same time, Ron Forbush, an investigator contracted by the San Bernardino County Public Defender’s Office, traveled to Eureka to ask Wayne if he wanted a public defender to represent him on the new charges.

Soon after Wayne said yes, Deputy Public Defender Joe Canty stepped in as a battle of legal heavyweights began to take shape in San Bernardino.

After earning his law degree and taking classes toward a Ph.D. in legal philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles, David Whitney started his legal career as a deputy public defender in Los Angeles County in 1972.

Two years later, he left the public sector to become a criminal defense attorney, first in L.A., then in San Bernardino County, where he switched sides and joined the DA’s office as a senior deputy in 1986.

Over the years, Whitney earned a reputation as a formidable courtroom force. He took on the role of coordinator for death penalty and psychiatric issues in the DA’s office, rising to become lead attorney in its Major Crimes Unit and a member of the Capital Litigation Committee for the California District Attorneys Association in 1995. He also taught law courses and testified as an expert witness in state and federal death cases.

Soren went to work as Whitney’s litigation assistant years after he’d defended one of four teen gang members who had murdered her father in 1981.

“Of all the attorneys, he treated my mother and I with respect,” she said later.

Whitney started his long days working at home and didn’t care for publicity. He had a dry sense of humor and enjoyed making people laugh, but he could also be very serious. Although he wasn’t theatrical in the courtroom, he could be folksy if he sensed that would appeal to a jury.

“Juries absolutely loved him,” Soren said. “He knew when to be lighthearted with them. He knew when he had to be tough. He never lost a case when I was there. It was amazing to watch him.”

Joe Canty was formidable in his own right.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in political science at the University of California, Riverside, Canty entered law school at UCLA. Following graduation, Canty served as an Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) officer and then as a reserve JAG officer until 1974, while he was working as a prosecutor in the San Bernardino County DA’s Office.

He rose through the ranks and became chief deputy in 1974, prosecuting high-profile cases while also earning a reputation for helping the helpless. In the process, he met Forbush, then a sheriff’s homicide detective, and formed what would become a decades-long friendship.

Canty was similar to Whitney in that he, too, switched sides after a stint in private practice. During his time as a criminal defense attorney, Canty developed cancer. After battling the disease into remission, he joined the public defender’s office in 1990.

“He fought the fight and he prevailed,” Forbush said later. “He always had residual medical issues because of that, but he beat it.”

Forbush, who started with the sheriff’s department as a correctional officer, left as a homicide lieutenant on a disability retirement in 1977, shortly after a traumatic fatal shooting during an arrest.

He tried real estate for a while, then became a private investigator. While working for the public defender’s office, he was often paired up with Canty, who had since become lead attorney in the Public Defender’s Capital Defense Unit.

It was only natural that Canty get the high-profile Ford case, and for Forbush to join him.

Canty strongly opposed the death penalty, feelings that stemmed from his deep Catholic faith. An altar boy growing up, he attended a Catholic high school and later became a Eucharistic minister. He was known as “Papa Joe” to his nine children.

“He felt life is sacred,” said Forbush, who shared those feelings with Canty.

Meanwhile, Kevin Robinson, Wayne’s Humboldt attorney, still had a trial date on the docket, so he arranged for his client to undergo some medical tests in San Francisco.

Freeman tagged along with Correctional Officer Don Vizgaudis on the June trip, in case Wayne made any spontaneous comments. Freeman and Wayne spent much of the drive playing “Can You Top This?” a game that involves identifying the brands and years of passing cars.

Wayne made two remarks during the trip that later found their way into court papers. The first he said to a paramedic: “If I had been given Paxil ten years ago, it would have saved a lot of people.”

He uttered the second one on the way back to Eureka. They were approaching the Benicia Bridge on Interstate 680 when they saw a woman standing with her children at the side of the road next to a car with its hood up.

“It’s too bad that we can’t stop and help because we have a prisoner,” Freeman said to Vizgaudis.

“If we stopped to help her,” Wayne chimed in, “she could tell her grandchildren how one time she was helped by two nice cops and a serial killer.”

After learning that Wayne was going to be transferred to a jail in San Bernardino County, Robinson tried to block the move.

“What the district attorney is apparently attempting to do is deprive me of access to my client while I prepare for trial, on some theory that he gets to charge the same case in as many different counties as he can find are connected in their commission, and whichever district attorney wishes to go to . . . bat first gets to choose,” Robinson argued at a hearing before Humboldt County Superior Court Judge Bruce Watson.

Watson rejected the motion, so Robinson petitioned the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco to intervene.

But the momentum had already begun.

Wayne was transferred.

It didn’t take long for the media to find out that Wayne had arrived at the West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga.

In October, Wayne gave what appears to be his first and last interview to a newspaper reporter. He told James Rainey, a Los Angeles Times staff writer, that he had not understood “all the elements of the crimes” when he spoke to detectives back in November, and his requests for an attorney were denied at least nine times.

Since then, he’d clearly learned about the legal factors constituting murder, saying he’d realized that he “did not commit four murders.”

The Times story said he also claimed that Humboldt County authorities had “‘broken the law’ during his initial interrogation” and “coerced him into making incriminating statements.”

Wayne had not only been on medication since his confessions, he also seemed to have been educated about a possible insanity or diminished-capacity defense, based on the head injury he suffered in 1980.

But he exaggerated the facts surrounding that incident, telling Rainey that he’d been in a coma for nine days. He attempted to prove his claim by pushing the dental bridge holding his two front teeth forward with his tongue and pointing to a scar on his upper lip.

“I’m not saying I should be set free. Maybe I should spend the rest of my life in a hospital,” Wayne said. “This should have been treated medically from the very beginning.”

Still, Wayne said he didn’t expect to be let off the hook and was ready for whatever punishment came his way—whether it be time in a psychiatric hospital, “forty years in prison” or the death penalty.

“It’s in God’s hands,” he said.