Chapter 7
Elaine Canalia and Jack Court first met the bearded painting contractor in May, 1994, then ran into him several times again at a swap meet in Prescott Valley, Arizona. They often made the ninety-mile trip north from their Phoenix paint manufacturing warehouse to buy and sell products at the open air market near Prescott.
A slim, attractive, forty-something woman, with shoulder-length blond hair and pleasing features, Canalia had been in business with Jack Court for four years. They had met while employed at the same firm in 1988, and soon discovered a host of interests in common. In 1990, they decided to give up their jobs and take the big risk of launching a business partnership. It worked, and with financial success, their entrepreneurial teamwork developed into a more serious relationship. Elaine had fallen in love with the amiable, late-fifties, soft-spoken Jack, who returned the devotion. Their friends thought they made a perfect couple. Together, Court and Canalia, made business and pleasure a perfect mix. They mutually developed a deep interest in the Pacific Islands, and wondered what it would be like to live there one day.
From their allotted space at the swap meet, between Prescott and the small town of Elaine and Jack marketed their paint and established contacts for future sales. One spring afternoon, while strolling between rows occupied by other vendors, Elaine spotted stacked cans of paint for sale. She commented to the bearded man behind the stacks, “Oh, I see we have a competitor.”
The “competitor” laughed and explained that he had been a painting contractor in California and had moved to Arizona to start anew. Business hadn’t been as good as he’d hoped, so he wanted to sell his surplus supplies. They exchanged pleasant ries, after which she left. During the next few weekends, Canalia and Court met the gaunt, bearded man several times. She would recall, “He was personable, seemed quite intelligent, and his speech was articulate.” Regarding his personal appearance, she thought he wasn’t ugly, just average. “I really wasn’t very interested in his physical looks. Just his paint.”
On a hot Saturday, July 9, at the swap meet, the couple encountered the bearded contractor again and chatted for several minutes with him. He stood behind a van he used to transport his wares, and told them that he also owned a pickup truck. During the conversation, he mentioned that he had an abundant supply of colorant stored at his home near Dewey. Court and Canalia expressed interest in buying the colorant, so the contractor asked them to follow him to his house.
Driving behind the white van, Court steered his pickup through the sweeping curve on State Highway 69 and turned into the exclusive tract of top-dollar homes just outside Dewey. En route, Court’s ten-year-old grandson who had made the trip with them that day announced that he had to go to the bathroom.
After winding through the new development of luxury custom residences, along the greens of an expansive golf course, they slowed at a corner lot. Smooth river stones artfully decorated the yard in front of a split level L-shaped house with a curved driveway leading to a two-car garage. The contractor led them around the corner to a side concrete driveway, or parking pad, perhaps twenty feet deep, ending at a wooden fence. They parked in front of a truck which had been backed into the pad, and was partially covered by a canvas tarpaulin. A variety of unlabeled cans, presumably paint, surrounded the yellow truck, which bore the Ryder rental company logo. It had obviously been sitting there for some time, next to a white pickup.
Canalia felt hairs on the back of her neck rise. Why would this guy keep a rental truck parked close to his house, maybe for several months? Jack, too, wondered why the man would have the Ryder truck, when he also had a van and a pickup truck.
Canalia, Court, and the grandson followed the gaunt painter into his backyard, enclosed by a six-foot wooden fence, and saw hundreds of paint cans of various sizes covering the entire grounds, stacked everywhere among ladders and dismantled scaffolding. With the help of the contractor, they began loading cases of paint colorant into the back of their pickup. Court’s grandson reminded him that he needed a restroom. They asked the contractor if the boy could use the facilities in the house, but the bearded man instantly shook his head, saying that would be impossible because the water had been turned off. No water, no toilet. To Canalia, the contractor’s attitude seemed abrupt and unconvincing. She became even more concerned at his brusqueness when the child began playing with a cap gun that made popping noises. The bearded painter snapped, “Don’t do that. This is a quiet neighborhood and we want to keep it that way.”
Later, Canalia couldn’t remember how the lad had solved the problem of needing a restroom. “He either waited, or he found a place behind all that stuff piled in the yard,” she said.
Upon completion of the loading and the business transaction, Canalia, Court, and boy said goodbye, climbed into their pickup, and started to back out of the parking pad. Still experiencing a strange feeling about the Ryder truck, they glanced at each other. They’d both noticed the license plate from Massachusetts. Jack whispered, “I’ll bet the doggone thing is stolen.” Having been recent victims of theft, Canalia and Court felt they should take counsel of their intuitions. They realized that the contractor still stood outside, watching them leave. With the truck still in her sight, Elaine grabbed a scrap of paper, bent over so the painter couldn’t see her actions, and jotted down the license number, along with the rental company’s serial number printed above the cab of the dusty Ryder truck.
Back at their own warehouse in Phoenix, Canalia tossed the slip of paper onto a desk, and pushed it to the back of her mind. She paid no heed to it until three days later, July 12, when a law enforcement friend visited their warehouse to purchase some paint. They had known Det. Steve Gregory of the Phoenix P.D. for several years and exchanged the usual banter with him. Canalia mentioned the strange Ryder truck she’d seen in the Prescott Country Club tract, and gave him the license number along with the Ryder serial number.
Curious about the odd circumstances, Gregory figured he’d better find out if the guy had perhaps bought the truck, or if it might show up on a hot list of missing vehicles. He telephoned the Ryder Company. They responded that they had no report of that particular vehicle being stolen. With the natural suspicion of an experienced cop, Gregory asked the representative to double check and said he would wait for a return call.
Within the hour, Gregory heard from the security department of the Ryder company. The truck had been missing six months, since January, from Orange County, California. But through some oversight, no one had ever contacted the police. The next morning, the rental company corrected the problem by making a report to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, and relaying that information to Detective Gregory. He also asked for the vehicle identification number (VIN) and made note of it.
Gregory called the Yavapai County Sheriffs Office to pass on the tip about the stolen twenty-four-foot GMC Ryder rental truck bearing Massachusetts license plate number 486595. On Wednesday morning, July 13, a little past 8:30, Deputy Joe DiGiacomo received a dispatch to check on the vehicle Canalia and Court had seen parked in the upscale residential tract. The Phoenix detective had courteously provided directions to find the home. As an aid to locating the right house, the information even included an estimate of its sales value, approximately $300,000.
DiGiacomo cruised the neighborhood for a short time, and close to a house on Cochise Drive, spotted the partially obscured truck with RYDER printed in bold letters on the panel over the cab. He observed that the residence faced west and the truck was backed into a side driveway.
On foot, DiGiacomo approached the vehicle and brought out his notes to compare the license number. Something was wrong. The truck he found had plates from Maine, not Massachusetts, and bore the numbers 488708. It seemed strange to the officer that two Ryder trucks might be in the same tract, but since this one had different plates, he had no choice but to leave and request more information. Because the disparity didn’t make sense to Deputy DiGiacomo, he decided to contact the Phoenix detective.
Coincidentally, Detective Gregory had dropped into the warehouse belonging to Jack Court and Elaine Canalia, to pick up the paint he had ordered, when his beeper went off at 9:48 that morning. After conversing with Deputy DiGiacomo, Gregory asked Canalia to verify the location of the truck she had seen. It corresponded perfectly with the site DiGiacomo had visited. Something seemed really out of whack. Gregory had confirmed that the truck was stolen and that Ryder wanted to press charges. Maybe someone had switched the plates overnight. He asked DiGiacomo to take a second look.
To play it safe, DiGiacomo took a backup officer with him, and returned at noon to the location where the truck sat. This time, he checked the VIN number. Bingo! It was the right truck. Something else nagged the back of the officer’s mind. Buckets, five-gallon cans, and one-gallon cans, many of them unlabeled, littered the driveway, all around the truck, and in the yard on the other side of the fence. DiGiacomo had no way of knowing what they contained. Furthermore, a thick electrical extension cord snaked from under the locked back door of the truck, and looped over a fence to a large home on the north side. The scene had all the makings of a clandestine drug lab.
Attempts to raise anyone in the house produced only silence from inside. DiGiacomo contacted the Prescott Area Narcotics Team (PANT).
The narcs arrived at 1:15 P.M., listened as DiGiacomo briefed them, and conducted an examination of the various containers. They found no trace of chemicals used in drug labs, but the extension cord coming out of the truck’s rear doors made them wonder if illegal materials could be inside. A secure lock kept them from opening it for an inspection. They noted that the vehicle apparently hadn’t been moved for several months. The long orange extension cord looped over the wooden fence, across the backyard to the adjacent property. The detectives would wait for a search warrant before asking the residents of the neighboring home why they apparently were supplying electric power to the truck.
Examining an older model white Dodge pickup truck parked beside the Ryder vehicle, the investigators found nothing unusual or suspicious. They wrote down its license number, and called in for a make on the owner’s name.
Deputy DiGiacomo summoned a local locksmith, who showed up within a few minutes and easily unlocked the Ryder truck’s back door.
In the shadowed interior, more cans of paint stood stacked in the spacious cargo section. Close to the rear of the truck bed, the officers could see a large off-white rectangular appliance which appeared to be a chest-type freezer. They found a switch in the “on” position, with the appliance running to keep the contents frozen. It, too, was locked, and a dozen wide strips of heavy masking tape had been placed at intervals to seal the lid. The locksmith went to work again.
Detective Mike Garcia, a member of the PANT team, wearing a white apron, placed a gauze mask over his mouth and nose, donned rubber gloves, and ripped through each strip of the masking tape. When he raised the lid, a foul odor assaulted the assembled cops’ noses. Garcia, controlling an urge to heave, said he thought it smelled like decaying flesh. As he and two other investigators peered into the interior, they could see frost on the inside walls, and a large object completely covered with black plastic garbage bags resting at the bottom.
Garcia tentatively reached in, and felt along the top section of plastic. His face grim, he withdrew his hand and said, “It feels like a human arm!” He added that it seemed to be frozen solid. The PANT officers, realizing they very likely had found the makings of a homicide, carefully closed the freezer lid and halted their portion of the investigation to summon the homicide team.
A young, clear-eyed lieutenant, Scott Mascher had climbed the sheriffs department ranks faster than mountain sheep ascend craggy mesas of the Juniper Mountains above Prescott. Standing five-nine, a solid 165 pounds, with eyes the color of Arizona sky, light brown hair with matching full mustache, and an outdoorsman’s tan, Mascher hailed originally from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, but had been transplanted to Arizona as a young child. He adapted to the rugged desert like a young cougar. Nothing pleased him more than to explore sheer red cliffs, wide basins, and flat mesas all the way from the lower Sonora desert to the sandstone and granite buttes of the high country. As he grew up, he became intimately familiar with wash trails winding among prickly pear cactus, stately saguaros, scrub oaks, junipers, up to the towering ponderosa pines. After his high school years in Phoenix, Mascher attended Yavapai Community College. While still taking classes, in 1984, he joined a volunteer sheriff’s reserve group, and accepted a full-time job the next year in Sedona, the red-rock surrounded artist/tourist town where New Age thinkers find magic. A stint as an undercover narc followed, in which he worked everywhere in the 8,000-square mile county. Promoted to sergeant, then detective sergeant in the major crimes unit, he worked the dozen or so homicides committed each year in Yavapai County. By 1993, Mascher accepted a remarkably rapid promotion to lieutenant.
In his spare time, Mascher still exercises his devotion to the wide open spaces by guiding elk hunters through the mountains, and as a licensed boatman-river raft guide down the rapids of the mighty Colorado in Grand Canyon. He and a buddy, Garry Saravo, who investigates crimes for the county attorney’s office, experienced near disaster in 1983 during a surging flood in the canyon. Water rose above the dam at Lake Powell, causing the river to become a torrent. On an inflated raft, Mascher and Saravo, at the lower end of the lake, felt the massive crescendo of water grab them, Said Mascher, “It flushed us out sixty miles in one day!” At one point, the pounding waves flipped the boat over. “We got it upright, and used canoe paddles to get down river to Lake Mead.” Mascher grins, and says, “I’ve been addicted to that life ever since.”
Also addicted to police work, in which Mascher proudly points to a ninety-nine percent rate of solved murders (“We know the perp in the other one, and we’re still gathering evidence to nail him”), the energetic lieutenant would lead the investigation into the mysterious frozen contents of the Ryder truck.
Mascher arrived at the Cochise Street address a few minutes before four that afternoon, along with one of his detectives, Lonnie E. Brown. DiGiacomo briefed them. They once again tried to raise someone in the house, but got no response.
With his fellow investigators wearing protective aprons, masks, and gloves, Mascher operated a video camera to record the opening of the freezer, while he spoke into the microphone. “So, at this point, let us open up the freezer, and, uh, see what’s inside.” Lonnie Brown, also wearing a “moon suit,” used a knife to carefully slice through the rigid top layers of black plastic and peel them back one by one. As he lifted the third layer, both men could see a nude human shoulder and an arm. Gradually, Brown exposed more icy, whitish flesh. A pair of frozen hands came into view, in the middle of the body’s back. Silver colored steel handcuffs bound them together at the wrists. It caught the detective’s attention that the fingers were well manicured, with long nails cut square at the ends. Brown observed, “The body was in somewhat of a fetal position with the back towards the front of the freezer and the head towards the left rear corner.” The detectives wondered why the corpse had been curled into such a tight position, since the freezer’s large interior would easily have allowed fuller extension of the body.
The video camera continued to run. Mascher observed the ghoulish scene and later described what he saw. “The freezer was still running and it was ice cold inside the chest. When you look down into the freezer, there was a lot of apparently frozen blood, body fluids, and ice crystals.”
Each of the investigators’ grimacing facial expressions reflected the horror they gazed on. As Brown peeled yet more of the frozen plastic away, he revealed the frost-covered back of the dead victim inside the freezer. They couldn’t even yet determine the body’s gender, but could see that the head, bent at the neck toward the knees, was covered by smaller white plastic bags. Brown wondered if the head had been severed, then covered by the different bags. He said, “In my opinion, the victim was not killed at this scene, inside of the chest freezer.” He based the judgement on his observation of frozen blood and fluids at the bottom of the freezer, with no evidence of blood splatter on the sides or top of the appliance. He also noted that some decomposition had occurred, leading him to believe that the body had not been frozen until at least a few hours, maybe longer, after death.
Noting the make of the freezer, Mascher jotted down that it was a Signature 2000 with a capacity of twenty-three cubic feet, deep freeze chest-type model. He would later learn that it was manufactured in March 1991 by Montgomery Ward.
Because any further handling of the frozen-body might disturb potential evidence, Mascher directed Brown to discontinue the tragic unveiling, then called the Yavapai County Medical Examiner. After a brief telephone conversation, the M.E. suggested that the freezer be closed, with the corpse still inside, and transported to a fully equipped lab. That way, the body could be extracted using more scientific procedures to retain whatever forensic evidence might be available.
The best way, Mascher decided, was to have the entire truck, containing the charnel freezer, towed to the Arizona state crime lab in Phoenix, and let the Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office send a forensic doctor to examine the human remains. With extreme care, they might be able to lift fingerprints. The prints would be needed, because nothing else in the truck or freezer provided any inkling of who the frozen body might be.
One of the detectives, canvassing neighbors in Prescott Country Club, found two different residents who said they had first seen the Ryder truck about six months earlier, in January 1994. It had been parked at the same spot for about two months.
Meanwhile, the Arizona Department of Motor Vehicles responded to the request officers had made to determine who owned the white Dodge pickup parked next to the Ryder truck.
It belonged to a man named John Joseph Famalaro.
On that same day, July 13, John Famalaro, accompanied by his mother in a red Jeep Cherokee, slowed near the house where he lived on Cochise Street. As soon as he braked to a stop in front of the home, at 5:30 P.M., Deputy Chris Sorensen placed him under arrest for felony theft of a Ryder rental truck. He received a free trip in the back of the deputy’s cruiser to the Yavapai County Sheriffs Office detention center.
Det. Lonnie Brown spoke to the startled mother, and gave her a ride around the corner to her home, on a lot that connected to the property where the body had been discovered. In a short conversation between the detective and Mrs. Famalaro, she told him that she thought her son had been in possession of the Ryder truck about two months and that she assumed he used it in connection with his house painting business. The neighbors had complained of his storing so many cans in the yard, she said, and she thought he planned to utilize the truck to move them. She and her husband had leased the red Jeep for John to use in his new venture, a real estate business in Sedona. Mrs. Famalaro denied any knowledge of her son purchasing the deep freezer. She also told the detective that she didn’t think her boy had any close friends, and that he was a workaholic who hadn’t had any fun in months. All he had been doing, other than working, was visiting his gravely ill father at the Veterans’ Administration hospital in Prescott.
Protocol in Yavapai County calls for the chief investigator of the county attorney’s office to assist the sheriff’s personnel in homicide investigations. Roger Williamson filled that requirement with gusto. Normally light complected, slim at five-nine, 175 pounds, the mustachioed Williamson’s tan face reflected his love for the outdoors and Arizona’s constant sun. Williamson received notification within minutes after Scott Mascher’s team found the frozen body.
On the evening of July 13, he spoke to Deputy Sorensen, who had transported and booked John Famalaro. The deputy mentioned that he’d been to the Cochise Drive house where he saw a set of three keys on a ring belonging to the suspect. Famalaro had told Sorensen that the keys would fit a white van parked in the lot of a Safeway market in Prescott Valley.
When Lt. Scott Mascher traced the orange extension cord to an outlet of the adjacent home, he ordered both houses to be secured with yellow crime scene tape until they could be legally searched. After the arrest of John Famalaro, Mascher and Investigator Williamson spoke briefly to the shocked mother, who owned and occupied the neighboring home. Mascher informed her that she would be provided a motel room for the night. Officers took up positions to guard the houses until. search warrants arrived.
As soon as he left Mrs. Famalaro, Mascher hurried to headquarters hoping to interview John Famalaro. It turned out to be an exceedingly short session. In a cube-shaped room, the suspect sat in a corner with his legs under a table. After he’d heard the Miranda warning a second time, he told Mascher that he preferred not to say anything without the presence of his lawyer, then crossed his arms on the table and dejectedly dropped his head on them.
The only thing that Famalaro had said to anyone was a mention of his van at the Safeway market. With Williamson early the following morning, July 14, Mascher found the 1993 Chevrolet van, which had no license plates. At that hour, it was the only one in the parking lot. They examined the exterior and found a small hole on the left side of the vehicle. It appeared that a bullet had been fired, inside the rear compartment, and had pierced the metallic skin. They called for a tow truck which transported the vehicle to the county impound lot for further investigation.
Wondering why the extension cord had been strung all the way to the home of Famalaro’s parents, Scott Mascher checked with the Arizona Public Service Company in Prescott. A representative informed him that electrical, service for the Cochise Drive house had been discontinued on July 11 for one day only. Power had originally been placed in service several years earlier for the occupant of that residence, Marvin Kraft, who had terminated it two days ago. It had been reconnected on July 12 by John Famalaro and his mother, in his father’s name.
Marvin Kraft, detectives discovered, had been married to John Famalaro’s sister, Francine.
Back in Prescott Country Club, Mascher and Williamson met Mrs. Famalaro again, in front of her home. She insisted that they not tape the conversation. Explaining why the extension cord ran to her house, she said that when her son’s power had been cut off, he had plugged the extension cord into an outside outlet at her house to keep his refrigerator running. He had also brought over some food for her to keep until restoration of power the next day.
The truck, she repeated, had been parked at her son’s place for approximately two months. To Mascher’s questions about John’s background, she said that her son had never been married and that girls “have just broke his heart.” To her knowledge, John didn’t have any friends and had been living alone at the house on Cochise Drive. No, she said, she didn’t know anything about the Ryder truck, was shocked to hear of the body inside, and knew nothing about the freezer. Mascher learned of two more white vans Famalaro possessed when Mrs. Famalaro told him that John kept them parked in her driveway. The investigator wondered what the guy needed so many vehicles for.
Mrs. Famalaro would later say about the freezer, “I didn’t know what he had in there. I thought he was moving paint.” About her son, she added, “I really can’t tell you much about him. I just don’t know. I think he’s good boy. I don’t know what to make of all this. Pray for him. Please pray for him. Our hearts are breaking over this. We are the kind of people who, keep to ourselves. We’re conservative, Christian people.”
County records showed that the house on Cochise Drive had been sold to Marvin Kraft several years earlier. Roger Williamson traced him down to a residence in Prescott and telephoned him. Kraft told of a divorce from Francine Famalaro and of John later moving into the home with him. John had attempted to buy the house, but recent litigation regarding ownership complicated the transaction, so Kraft refused to discuss it with Williamson. He claimed he hadn’t seen John Famalaro since May, at a birthday party.
Williamson asked Kraft if he knew anything about Famalaro’s association with women, but learned very little. Kraft said he had just recently learned of the Ryder truck being parked in the driveway when he passed by the house in early July. Famalaro had moved into the place two years ago, he said, from somewhere in Orange County, California. Kraft had helped him with the move. John seemed to have lots of cars, Kraft said, including a new red Jeep Cherokee, two white milk-type trucks, a large white cargo van, and a white Dodge pickup, most of which he usually kept parked at the house or nearby at his parents’ home.
Famalaro, Kraft said, had been a painting contractor, but recently tried to go into real estate sales. Williamson asked Kraft when he had moved out of the Cochise Drive house, and heard him say that he’d left in January 1993. No, he hadn’t left any of his possessions there.
As the scorching July sun reached its zenith on that Thursday, and began the long drop toward the horizon, Scott Mascher and Roger Williamson continued the search for information. At 3:30, they joined the team of homicide detectives with search warrants in hand to enter the house where John Famalaro had been living. The warrant included permission to examine the red Jeep Cherokee, so Williamson walked over to Mrs. Famalaro’s home, informed her that he needed to get into the Jeep, and opened the car’s door. Inside, he found the key ring he’d hoped to see. It contained a key to the Cochise house, forestalling the need to break down a door.
Inside the house, Mascher made certain video and still cameras recorded everything in the interior before the searchers moved or disturbed anything. The officers divided themselves into two teams to search the split level home. First, each group conducted a preliminary walk-through, cursorily looking for bloodstains. The clutter of boxes, paint cans, and piles of newspapers and magazines, raised all of their eyebrows. One room, though, had been set up as an office, containing three walls of bookcases, all filled with hundreds of volumes, neatly arranged by subject. Other rooms contained even more shelves and books.
Sparse furnishing in the interior occupied the few spaces between stacks of boxes. As Mascher and his searchers scoured through each room, they found several items that caught their interest:
1) A cardboard box, with the word CHRISTMAS printed on it, containing another smaller box. Inside the second container, a “nailbar” with possible bloodstains, an empty handcuff box, duct tape, and a cloth with bloodstains.
2) A pair of handcuffs similar to the cuffs on the victim’s wrists, and handcuff keys.
3) Several identification documents, all with women’s names.
4) A second cardboard box marked CHRISTMAS, containing a bloodstained knapsack and a claw hammer appearing to be spotted with dried blood. A bloodstained black plastic bag contained items imprinted with the name Denise Huber.
Mascher and his team descended stairs into a bonus room, thirteen by forty-five feet, one wall of which abutted a slope in the ground. Someone had chiseled a hole in the cinder block wall and dug an excavation into the rocky earth. The cavern measured six feet below the foundation of the house. Hundreds of one gallon paint cans had been stacked into the dirt chamber, which the investigators soon began calling “the dungeon.”
In other rooms, they found several guns. Mascher noted that the cause of death of the body in the freezer had not yet been determined, so took special interest in the firearms. Videotapes turned up in the search, many featuring the blonde actress Suzanne Somers, others focusing on Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer.
Questions raised by the findings, and the circumstances, led Mascher to request additional warrants for more precise searches, especially in the excavated dirt room. They found nothing of any particular interest in the home of John Famalaro’s parents. Both searches ended at 1:25 A.M. Friday, July 15.
In addition to the name Denise Huber, searchers found items involving ten more female names, along with a variety of credit cards, birth certificates, driver’s licenses, and personal property that might typically be in the possession of young women. Scott Mascher and his detectives began to give serious thought to the possibility that they had stumbled onto the trail of a serial killer.
Back at headquarters, Mascher typed the names into a computer. Within moments, he received feedback on the name Denise Huber as a missing person, related to a report issued by the Costa Mesa, California, police three years earlier, in 1991,
Midway through Thursday morning, Mascher called the Costa Mesa PD and spoke to Sgt. Tom Boylan, who was in charge of the detail of officers still assigned to the Huber case. “I advised him that personal belongings of Denise Huber were located in a residence during a search on a homicide investigation.” A surprised and excited Boylan filled Mascher in on the details of how Denise vanished in June 1991, the ensuing intensive search, and that she hadn’t been heard from since. Mascher entered in his report, “I told Boylan that our victim was found frozen in a chest freezer and has not been identified as of yet, and that a gender has not been determined due to the frozen position of the body. An autopsy will be conducted upon the thawing of the body, tentatively scheduled for Friday, July 16. Sergeant Boylan gave me a clothing description of Denise Huber on the night of her disappearance. She was wearing a black short dress, blouse, black jacket, and pump shoes.”
Agreeing to call Boylan back as soon as he had more detailed information, Mascher hurried to the evidence room with Roger Williamson. The lieutenant instructed an officer to don protective gear, avoiding possible contamination of the evidence taken from the Famalaro house, then to place a white sheet on the floor. The officer complied, and emptied contents of the two cardboard boxes marked “Christmas” which would become well known as boxes 212 and 213. He placed each of the items on the sheet. Mascher and Williamson surveyed the evidence, and listed:
a California driver’s license in the name of Denise Huber numerous credit cards in her name
a checkbook in her name
a “Hawaii” key ring with Honda keys
a black dress, black blouse, black 9West pumps, all specked with what appeared to be bloodstains
a tool known as a roofer’s nail puller, spotted with dried blood
a claw hammer, also apparently bloodstained
Scott Mascher now felt certain he knew the name of the victim in the freezer. He telephoned the Costa Mesa PD again, expecting to speak to Sergeant Boylan, but learned that a lieutenant had been placed in charge of the Huber case.
In Costa Mesa, Tom Boylan had been doing everything possible to keep the search alive for Denise Huber, plus working scores of other investigations concurrently. That July 1994, he had invested in a long-planned vacation to the Caribbean, with unrefundable deposits already spent. In order to stay with the Huber case, he volunteered to sacrifice the money and cancel his trip, but Chief Snowden wouldn’t allow it. He told Boylan to enjoy his vacation, and assigned Lt. Ron Smith to pick up where he’d left off back in 1992, before the promotion. Smith gladly assumed the reins of control again.
Boylan advised Smith to be expecting a phone call from Arizona.