Trace Evidence: The Hunt for an Elusive Serial Killer

A roadside strangler, meek as a ""corner greengrocer,"" confounds California detectives in this tense and gritty true-crime account from the co-author (with Vincent Bugliosi) of And the Sea Will Tell. In July 1986, when Stephanie Brown's body was discovered in an irrigation ditch off a desolate stretch of Interstate 5, San Joaquin detectives noted that the young woman had been strangled and her blouse had been cut. One month later, a graying, soft-spoken man offered a ride to a female motorist stranded on I-5; when her partially nude, bound body was found 50 miles away, criminalists ignored the numerous scissor cuts in her pink tank top. The signature style of the ""I-5 Strangler"" would be present at five more ""female body dumps"": always the young women would be strangled, usually with a nylon cord, and always their clothing would reveal a bizarre pattern termed by one baffled Department of Justice criminalist ""non-functional cutting."" Convinced that these murders were the work of one ""highly organized"" serial killer, Lt. Ray Biondi of Sacramento County Homicide repeatedly called for a multi-agency task force to coordinate the cross-jurisdictional detective work, but ""ego and politics"" prevented such organization. With novelistic urgency, Henderson tells two equally chilling stories here: how a handful of detectives and one trace-evidence expert nabbed the killer despite what Henderson calls an ""unbelievably stupid"" battle plan--and how Roger Kibbe, a detective's brother and ""somebody's husband,"" became that killer. (Mar.)