Body Parts Read online

  Praise for Caitlin Rother

  BODY PARTS

  “A must read . . . well-written, extremely intense; a book that I could not put down.”

  —Kim Cantrell, True Crime Book Reviews

  “Excellent, well researched, well written.”

  —Don Bauder, San Diego Reader

  “Page-turning excitement and blood-curdling terror . . . riveting, fast-paced, and sure to keep you up at night.”

  —M. William Phelps

  “Rother paints every page with all the violent colors of a malignant sociopath’s fever. This kind of frightening and fascinating glimpse into a killer’s mind is rare.”

  —Ron Franscell

  “A superior study of the formation of a serial killer and his lost and lonely victims.”

  —Carol Anne Davis

  “Shocking, chilling, fast-paced . . . a book crime aficionados will be loath to put down.”

  —Simon Read

  LOST GIRLS

  “A close look at a killer . . . deeply reported, dispassionately written . . . done superbly by a writer who knows how to burrow into a complex case.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Disturbing . . . This book will be popular with fans of Ann Rule and other popular true crime writers.”

  —Library Journal

  “Thoroughly reported, well-written, terrifying ... I doubt that there will be a better book on this tragedy.”

  —San Diego Reader

  “Well-written, thought-provoking . . . if ever a ‘true crime’ deserved a book-length study, this is certainly that crime.”

  —San Diego Union Tribune

  “A nuanced look at Gardner, from rapist-killer to charmer with girlfriends aplenty.”

  —North County Times

  “A gripping account of the chilling disappearances of two San Diego area schoolgirls, a compelling picture of the victims’ families’ heartbreak, a nuanced inside look at the two police investigations. A must-read.”

  —Sue Russell

  “Rother is at her best when she boldly dissects how a boy with psychological problems formed into a man indifferent to his monstrous acts toward two young girls.”

  —Katherine Ramsland

  “A frank and riveting look at the life and mind of San Diego rapist and killer John Gardner.”

  —Diane Fanning

  DEAD RECKONING

  “Well researched and a quick, engrossing read, this should be popular with true crime readers, especially the Ann Rule crowd.”

  —Library Journal, Starred Review

  “This gave me chills, and that’s not easy to do.”

  —Steve Jackson

  “Gripping . . . Rother gives readers compelling insight to an unthinkable American nightmare. The book is frank and frightening, and it sizzles.”

  —Aphrodite Jones

  “Impressively reported in a forthright narrative . . . a pitch-perfect study of avarice, compulsion and pure California illusion.”

  —Ron Franscell

  “We’ve finally found the next Ann Rule! Caitlin Rother writes with heart and suspense. Dead Reckoning is a chilling read by a writer at the top of her game.”

  —Gregg Olsen

  “Gripping, brutal, riveting—Rother delivers a thrilling account of murder and mayhem.”

  —M. William Phelps

  “A true-crime triumph . . . Rother solidifies her star status.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “This gruesome story is fast-paced and will grip any lover of the true crime genre.”

  —North County Times

  POISONED LOVE

  “A true-crime thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat.”

  —Aphrodite Jones

  “Absorbing and impeccably researched . . . a classic California noir story of passion and betrayal and death, with a beautiful, scheming adulteress at the center of the web.”

  —John Taylor

  “With integrity, class and skill, Rother weaves this complex story seamlessly in the page-turning fashion of a suspenseful novel.”

  —M. William Phelps

  “A lively and immaculately researched book.”

  —Carol Ann Davis

  “A devastating portrait . . . an unwavering look at how one young woman fantasized herself into murder.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “A page-turner.”

  —San Diego Metropolitan

  “A gripping account.”

  —San Diego Magazine

  ALSO BY CAITLIN ROTHER

  Naked Addiction

  *Poisoned Love

  My Life, Deleted

  (By Scott and Joan Bolzan and Caitlin Rother)

  *Dead Reckoning

  Where Hope Begins/Deadly Devotion

  (By Alysia Sofios with Caitlin Rother)

  *Lost Girls

  Twisted Triangle

  (By Caitlin Rother with John Hess)

  *Available from Kensington Publishing Corp.

  and Pinnacle Books

  BODY PARTS

  CAITLIN ROTHER

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Praise for Caitlin Rother

  ALSO BY CAITLIN ROTHER

  Title Page

  PROLOGUE

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1 - KAREN AND GENE

  CHAPTER 2 - FEAR OF PUNISHMENT

  CHAPTER 3 - DIVIDED ATTENTIONS

  CHAPTER 4 - KELLY AND THE HEAD INJURY

  CHAPTER 5 - “DANGER TO HIMSELF, OTHERS AND GOVERNMENT PROPERTY”

  CHAPTER 6 - ADAM AND WADAD

  CHAPTER 7 - ELIZABETH AND MAX

  PART II

  CHAPTER 8 - “TORSO GIRL”

  CHAPTER 9 - THE MONEY COW

  CHAPTER 10 - TINA RENEE GIBBS

  CHAPTER 11 - THE ONES THAT GOT AWAY

  CHAPTER 12 - LANETT DEYON WHITE

  CHAPTER 13 - PATRICIA ANNE TAMEZ

  PART III

  CHAPTER 14 - “YOU WON’T LOVE ME ANYMORE”

  CHAPTER 15 - SURRENDER

  CHAPTER 16 - “I HAD TO MAKE HER SMALL”

  CHAPTER 17 - “PUNISH ME”

  CHAPTER 18 - “BABIES”

  CHAPTER 19 - “HE ALWAYS KEPT HIS TRUCK CLEAN”

  PART IV

  CHAPTER 20 - NEW CHARGES, NEW ATTORNEYS

  CHAPTER 21 - PREPARING FOR TRIAL

  CHAPTER 22 - PROSECUTION: SADISTIC, SEXUAL PREDATOR

  CHAPTER 23 - DEFENSE: CONFUSED AND MENTALLY ILL

  CHAPTER 24 - REBUTTAL: MALINGERING?

  CHAPTER 25 - HAUNTING WHISPERS

  CHAPTER 26 - LIFE OR DEATH

  CHAPTER 27 - NO MERCY

  CHAPTER 28 - WAYNE: ACCIDENTS AND MISCONCEPTIONS

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  LOST GIRLS

  Copyright Page

  PROLOGUE

  Rodney Ford had just gotten home after quitting his job on Monday, November 2, 1998, when his brother, Wayne, called.

  “I’m in some real bad trouble and I think the police are looking for me. I need your help,” thirty-six-year-old Wayne said, crying. “I need you to come get me.”

  Rodney was nearly two years older than Wayne and had always been stronger emotionally than his little brother. They’d been close since childhood, when they weathered their parents’ divorce and had only each other for company in faraway places, like Okinawa, Japan.

  When they were boys, their personalities were as stark contrasts as their hair color. Rodney, who had brown hair, had always been easygoing and outgoing; Wayne, a blond, kept mostly
to himself and seemed to have a harder time dealing with life. Much harder.

  It was already 7:00 P.M. when Wayne called, and Rodney was tired after a long, frustrating, and final day as a general superintendent for a big construction company, especially after commuting two and a half hours each way to South San Francisco.

  He didn’t relish getting back on the road, but he could hear in Wayne’s voice that something was wrong—more wrong than the half-dozen times Wayne had asked for help in the past. Wayne needed him. And Rodney wanted to be there for his brother.

  They were family, and family was important to him.

  So Rodney quickly threw some things in a bag and hit the highway, heading north to the Ocean Grove Lodge in the seaside town of Trinidad, California. His destination was a five-hour drive from his house in Vallejo, and about a half hour north of Eureka, the coastal city in Humboldt County where he and Wayne grew up.

  It was after 1:00 A.M. when Rodney pulled off the coastal Highway 101, headed east, and turned into the driveway of the motel, which was surrounded by a commanding stand of redwood trees, some three hundred feet tall.

  Immediately to the right was the main motel building, which housed the office, a restaurant, and a bar, where Wayne had spent most of the day, drinking and playing pool with the bartender. A giant neon sign on the roof that read COCKTAILS lit up the night.

  To the left of the driveway was the rustic cabin where Wayne was staying, and the phone booth he’d used to call Rodney.

  There were eight of these cabins, most of which were split into two units with queen-size beds. Wayne had asked for the cheapest one, which cost only $38.50 and was also the smallest of the lot. They called it room zero.

  Years earlier, room zero had been a barbershop in the same unit known as room one. When the barbershop closed, the motel owner turned it into another sleeping unit, thus the strange name. Room zero had two twin beds, a color TV, and a shower, but no kitchenette like the bigger rooms. The décor was simple: white walls and gray carpet.

  Rodney parked in front of the cabin and walked up the stairs leading to a wooden deck, where Wayne was standing in the open doorway, waiting for him, with the television on.

  Wayne looked bad. Unkempt and emotionally ragged. His hair, now brown and straight, was an unruly mess. He was crying as Rodney came up and gave him a hug.

  “What’s going on?” Rodney asked, genuinely concerned.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Wayne said through his tears. “I really needed you to be here. I really wanted your help.”

  They went into the cabin and closed the door behind them. As they talked for nearly two hours, facing each other on the twin beds, Rodney often couldn’t follow what Wayne was saying. He kept crying as he rambled on, jumping from one topic to another. Talking nonsense, really.

  After about fifteen minutes or so, Wayne started settling down a bit and wanted to discuss their troubled past.

  “Why did Dad treat us the way he did?” Wayne asked. “Why did our mom leave us? Nobody loves me or cares about me.”

  “Well, I love you,” Rodney said. “I care about you. I mean, I’m here.”

  Rodney was not the crying type, but he was crying now, too. He didn’t like to see his brother so upset. It made him a little emotional.

  Then Wayne shifted gears and wanted to talk about cars, an interest they’d always shared. Rodney restored muscle cars as a hobby, and Wayne wanted to know what kind of motor Rodney put into a certain model, that sort of thing. But that topic lasted only five minutes or so before Wayne started weeping again.

  Over the past year, Wayne, who worked as a long-haul truck driver, had come through Vallejo twice a month to see Rodney. Often, they’d meet up for breakfast, or Wayne would have a meal with Rodney, Janell, and their two daughters at their condo. But Rodney usually couldn’t spend as much time with his brother as Wayne would have liked.

  Wayne would always complain that his ex-wife Elizabeth wasn’t letting him see their baby son, Max.

  “I miss my boy,” Wayne would say. “I can’t see my boy.”

  Rodney had told Wayne not to marry Elizabeth in the first place, that she was too young and they weren’t a good match. Wayne didn’t take his advice.

  Rodney had seen Wayne shed a tear or two since the divorce, but nothing like what he saw in the cabin that night.

  After a while, the conversation took an unexpected turn. “I hurt some people, and I don’t want to hurt anybody anymore,” Wayne said.

  “You hurt some people?” Rodney asked, confused.

  “Yeah.”

  The two of them used to throw punches, wrestle around, and give each other bloody noses as kids, but Rodney always won. As an adult, though, Wayne often got into brawls when he drank. That was nothing new.

  “Did you get in a bar fight, or did you break a guy’s arm?” Rodney asked.

  But Wayne wouldn’t discuss the extent of his actions. He simply said he wanted some help, because he didn’t want to hurt people anymore.

  “I’m here to help,” Rodney said. “I want to help you.”

  “I want to go to the sheriff’s,” Wayne said. “I want to turn myself in.”

  After working all day, quitting his job, driving for ten hours, and now having to deal with this, Rodney felt like he couldn’t cope with another single thing.

  Despite the surreal feeling that filled room zero, Rodney knew why he was there and what they had to do. But for the moment, all he wanted was to close his eyes and shut everything out for a few hours.

  “Let’s just go to sleep,” he said. “We’ll wake up in the morning, go get some breakfast, and work this out.”

  When they got up around 7:30 A.M., Rodney suggested they both shower and get cleaned up before getting something to eat. Wayne, who had been staying at a campground down the road for the past week, clearly hadn’t bathed during that time.

  Wayne seemed more like himself that morning. He was in a pretty good mood, in fact. He put on a blue knit cap, a pair of black combat boots, some faded jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and a camouflage jacket over his six-feet-two-inch, two-hundred-pound frame.

  They decided to go to the Denny’s just off the highway in Eureka, where, over breakfast, Rodney tried broaching the subject again about the people Wayne had hurt.

  “I don’t want to talk about that right now,” Wayne said. “I just want to spend the day with you. Let’s go and look at the apartment where we lived as kids.”

  So that’s what they did. Rodney drove them to the zoo and some of their other childhood haunts. They searched for the houses where their aunts and uncles used to live, went into a couple of motorcycle shops and checked out the bikes.

  One minute Wayne would be fine, but then he’d start crying again, babbling about things Rodney couldn’t understand. He just wasn’t acting like the Wayne that Rodney knew.

  Counting the night before, Wayne must have gone on six or seven of these crying jags, his mood shooting up and down like a yo-yo. Wayne had had a short fuse ever since the bad head injury he’d gotten in 1980, but this was different.

  Rodney wondered what Wayne wasn’t telling him.

  “How did you hurt some people?” Rodney asked.

  “If I tell you, you won’t love me. You’ll hate me.”

  “I love you,” Rodney said. “I’m your brother.”

  “I hurt some people bad and they don’t have to worry about anything anymore.”

  Rodney didn’t like the sound of that at all. Did he mean it was too late to save any of these people from the danger they were in? Was anyone tied up or being held hostage? Or was it something worse? Rodney wondered what the hell his brother had dragged him into.

  As they talked some more, they agreed that Rodney shouldn’t be placed in the position where he would get into trouble for whatever Wayne had done. But by the same token, now that Rodney knew what he did, he wasn’t going to let Wayne walk away—especially when Rodney could be viewed as an accomplice after the fact.


  Aside from that, the two brothers had forged an unspoken alliance long ago, and Rodney intended to carry out his part of the deal.

  “He knew that if I was involved, it would get done,” Rodney said later. “He knew I would do what was right, regardless of the consequences.”

  This had been going on since Wayne was fourteen, when he broke into a sporting-goods store through the skylight and took $1,700 worth of merchandise, including a couple hundred shotgun shells and some fishing rods.

  Afterward, he showed Rodney his stash, piled up in his bedroom closet. Wayne knew that Rodney would have to tell their father what he’d done. It was all part of the implicit agreement in their twisted brotherly version of show-and-tell.

  Wayne even told his brother so, later on: “I knew you would make me follow through with it,” he said.

  This time, Rodney knew the situation was much worse, and his brother’s emotions were far more complicated. Wayne kept talking about how screwed-up his life was, and how he was never going to see his son again.

  “Why do you think you’re not going to see your son?” Rodney asked.

  Rodney was concerned because Wayne had tried to commit suicide a couple of years earlier during the divorce, and had been talking about killing Elizabeth, too. But that morning, Wayne assured him that Elizabeth and Max were okay.

  Wayne wouldn’t say much more than he already had. He still wanted to turn himself in at the sheriff’s department, only he didn’t seem to want to actually go there.

  He was distraught, drawing out their day together as long as he could, to make the most of what time he had left with Rodney. Once he gave himself up, he said, he knew he wouldn’t see Rodney anymore because he was never going to get out of jail—the only one who could forgive him was God.

  “I don’t want to live anymore,” Wayne kept saying. “I don’t want to live with myself. I deserve to die.”

  Later that afternoon, Wayne suggested they go to a movie, so they picked a vampire flick, a genre both of them liked.