IONE, Calif. (AP) – A California serial killer who, according to authorities, strangled and raped at least seven women, was fatally suffocated in a state prison, officials said on Wednesday.
Roger Reece Kibbe, 81, known as the “I-5 Strangler” in the 1970s and 1980s, was spotted unanswered on Sunday in his cell at Mule Creek State Prison, southeast of Sacramento – his 40-year-old cellmate was Nearby.
An autopsy showed that Kibbe was strangled manually, said Amador County sheriff’s office, classifying the death as homicide.
No charges were made for the death of Kibbe, a former furniture maker in the Sacramento suburb, whose brother was a police officer.
He was first convicted in 1991 for strangling Darcine Frackenpohl, a 17-year-old girl who ran away from her Seattle home. His nearly naked body was found west of South Lake Tahoe, below the Echo Summit, in September 1987.
Investigators then said they suspected him of other similar murders.
But it wasn’t until 2009 that an investigator from the San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office used new developments in evidence to connect him to six additional murders in several northern California counties, with several victims found along Interstate 5 or more. highways in 1986. Kibbe was serving several terms of life for the murders when he was killed.
Authorities said they never stopped trying to prove that he was responsible for even more deaths. Investigators secretly took him on several field trips from the prison with the hope that he would reveal the whereabouts of more victims.
They were going to buy him a McMuffin egg and a Coke for breakfast, another Coke and a hamburger and fries for lunch, Vito Bertocchini, retired San Joaquin County sheriff’s detective and public prosecutor investigator, told The Sacramento Bee.
Bertocchini has spent nearly two decades chasing Kibbe and thinks he must have killed others during the 10-year gap between his first and last known murder. Investigators said they had found other women who were killed and evicted with Kibbe’s trademark of cutting their victims’ clothes in strange patterns.
He was finally captured after Sacramento police said a possible victim escaped and they recovered a tourniquet made from a pair of billets and parachute cord along with scissors and other items.
The investigators said they combined the rope with the rope found with Frackenpohl’s body and at Kibbe’s house, all with microscopic dots of red paint. The DNA eventually linked him to two other victims, and he agreed to cooperate in exchange for prosecutors to remove the death penalty from the table.
Kibbe never admitted to murders other than those for which he was accused, but Bertocchini said he never stopped trying to get another confession.
Even after retiring in 2012, each year he sent birthday and Christmas cards to Kibbe, asking him to speak up if he remembered anything about other victims. He and his former partner last visited Kibbe in prison for the last time in 2019, but he still didn’t want to admit any more victims.
Now it is too late, but Bertocchini called Kibbe’s death by strangulation “adequate justice”.
“I wish no harm to anyone,” said Bertocchini. “But I hope he remembered each of his victims while he was being killed.”