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Two killers leave a trail of bodies along I-5
BY MARA BOVSUN
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Sunday, March 23, 2014, 1:00 AM
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(COURTESY NEWS-SENTINEL)
MARCH 9 1981 PHOTO BEST QUALITY. AP PROVIDES ACCESS TO THIS PUBLICLY DISTRIBUTED HANDOUT PHOTO PROVIDED BY MARION COUNTY SHERIFF
(AP)
Roger Reece Kibbe (l.), the I-5 Strangler. Randy Woodfield (r.), the I-5 Killer, was in jail when new monster came to light.
Interstate 5 stretches nearly 1,400 miles from the Mexican border to British Columbia. Except for a brief section where it is known as the San Diego Freeway, most natives simply refer to the road as “The Five.”
But in the 1980s, it might just as well have been called the Highway of Death.
Two serial killers, working separately, stalked women along the interstate through the decade. One would become known as the I-5 Killer, the other the I-5 Strangler.
Together, they are responsible for more than a dozen confirmed killings, but investigators believe that the actual number could be at least four times as high.
They came from very different backgrounds. Randall Brent Woodfield, the I-5 Killer, was born in 1950 into an ordinary upper middle-class Salem, Ore., family. Handsome and athletic, Woodfield landed a spot on the Green Bay Packers football team in 1974, while he was still in college.
In contrast, Roger Reece Kibbe, the I-5 Strangler, born in 1949, was a loner, a stutterer who endured teasing at school and beatings from a mother who hated him.
Early initiation into crime was one common bond.
A THURSDAY, FEB. 6, 2014 PHOTO
In the 1980s, Interstate 5 in California might as well have been called the Highway of Death. (DAMIAN DOVARGANES/AP)
For Woodfield, the offense was public indecency. Although never confirmed by the team, his long-term hobby — flashing — got him cut from the Packers a year after he was chosen, wrote Ann Rule in her book “The I-5 Killer.”
Back home in Portland, he was soon arrested for attacking women, forcing them to perform oral sex, and then stealing their purses. Sentenced to 10 years in 1975, he was out on parole in four.
Not long after that, young people started to die. Cherie Ayers, a former classmate of Woodfield’s, was beaten and stabbed on Oct. 9 in Portland. A month later, in the same city, Darci Fix and Doug Altic were shot in the head.
Through the fall and into the winter, a gunman in a fake beard became a solo crime wave in the towns and cities along the interstate. In January 1981, he struck again in Salem, sexually assaulting and then shooting two young women, Beth Wilmot and Shari Hull. Hull died, but Wilmot survived.
In early February, he took his crimes into the California towns of Redding, Yreka, and Mountain Gate. A wave of robberies and sexual assaults was capped off with the double murder of Donna Eckard and her 14-year-old daughter. Both had been shot in the head multiple times; the girl had been sodomized.
The day after Valentine’s Day in 1981, one of Woodfield’s former flames, Julie Reitz of Beaverton, Ore., was shot dead in her home.
Through the month, rapes, robberies and murders continued along I-5.
Police caught up with Woodfield in March and linked him to crimes all over the region. In June 1981, he went on trial in Salem for Hull’s murder.
The jury found him guilty of that crime and a slew of additional charges, earning him a sentence of life plus 90 years.
Investigators linked Woodfield to other robberies, an estimated 60 rapes, and more murders, perhaps as many as 44, along I-5. These cases would not come to trial, however, since the one sentence had him firmly tucked behind bars.
Darci Fix
Woodfield was in jail for a few years when it became apparent that another serial killer was on the loose along the interstate. In July 1986, a fisherman found a body in a wilderness area near Sacramento. Later identified as Stephanie Brown, the dead woman had been strangled, her hair had been hacked off, and the shoulder straps of her blue tank top had been neatly cut.
That August, a mother and daughter, Carmen Anselmi and Charmaine Sabrah were returning from dinner out when their car broke down near Sacramento. A man in a two-seater stopped and offered to drive one of the women to a phone. Charmaine got into the car. It was the last time her mother saw her alive. Three months later, a hunter found the girl’s decomposed corpse. Like Brown, she had been strangled, and her hair and clothing had been cut.
After a prostitute met a similar fate, this serial killer became known as the I-5 Strangler.
Salesman Roger Kibbe came under suspicion when a police officer pulled him over for a traffic violation and noticed a resemblance to a composite sketch. Kibbe seemed an unlikely suspect, in part because his brother was a homicide detective.
Kibbe was collared after he picked up a prostitute and started to get rough with her. She fled and her screams alerted a nearby patrolman. He was charged with assault.
Meanwhile, the bodies of strangled women, all with scissors-cut clothes and hair, kept turning up. Investigators built a case around items found in Kibbe’s car — scissors, cord, paint chips, fibers and hairs.
The trial of the Strangler for the murder of a runaway, Darcie Frackenpohl, started on Valentine’s Day 1991, a decade after the I-5 Killer went to prison for life. Based largely on the lab work of forensic scientists, described in detail in “Trace Evidence” by Bruce Henderson, the jury found Kibbe guilty. His sentence was 25 years to life, with the possibility of parole.
Years after conviction, the lives of these highway murderers ran along the same route again. In 2008, DNA evidence connected Kibbe to six more killings, dating back to 1977, to which he pleaded guilty. Four years later, the same forensic science techniques linked Woodfield to an additional five. The new evidence wiped out the chances, however slim, that either will be set free to roam The Five again.
Kibbe (r.) seemed an unlikely suspect, in part because his brother was a homicide detective.
Kibbe (r.) seemed an unlikely suspect, in part because his brother was a homicide detective. (BRIAN FEULNER/COURTESY NEWS-SENTINEL)
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