'I-5 Strangler' Roger Kibbe Dies in His Prison Cell, and Officials Open a Homicide Investigation
Kibbe, 81, serving life for seven murders, was found unresponsive at Mule Creek State Prison with his cellmate standing in the cell.
Published
Roger Reece Kibbe, the "I-5 Strangler," died in his cell at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California, in the early hours of Sunday, February 28, 2021. He was 81. On Monday, March 1, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced that his death was being investigated as a homicide.
At about 12:40 a.m., a correctional officer making the night's population count looked into the cell Kibbe shared with Jason Budrow, 40. Budrow was standing inside. Kibbe was lying unresponsive on the floor. Medical staff took him to the prison's health care facility, but life-saving measures failed, and he was pronounced dead at 1:23 a.m. Budrow was moved to the Administrative Segregation Unit while the prison's Investigative Services Unit looked into the death, and the state's Office of the Inspector General was notified. Amador County Undersheriff Gary Redman told the Sacramento Bee that the death was "being investigated as a homicide." Budrow himself was serving life without the possibility of parole for a first-degree murder in Riverside County, sentenced on June 29, 2011, as a second-striker.
Kibbe had spent three decades behind bars. On May 10, 1991, an El Dorado County court sentenced him to 25 years to life for the murder of Darcie Frackenpohl, a runaway from Seattle whose nude body was found at Echo Summit. Years later, DNA evidence tied him to six more killings reaching back to 1977. To avoid the death penalty, he pleaded guilty to all six in 2009, answering "guilty" six times as San Joaquin County Judge George Abdallah Jr. read each victim's name. On November 5, 2009, he was sentenced to six consecutive terms of life without parole.
The six women were Lou Ellen Burleigh, Lora Heedick, Barbara Ann Scott, Stephanie Brown, Charmaine Sabrah and Katherine Kelly Quinones. Burleigh disappeared on September 11, 1977, after going to what she believed was a job interview at a Walnut Creek shopping center; her body was found at Lake Berryessa in Napa County. Scott was kidnapped in Pittsburg on July 3, 1986, and left at the Lone Tree golf course in Contra Costa County. At the time of the plea, prosecutors said Kibbe bound his victims with parachute cord, silenced them with duct tape, cut their clothes into irregular shapes with scissors that had belonged to his mother, sexually assaulted them and strangled them.
What was established on March 1, 2021. Prison officials said only that Kibbe was found unresponsive with his cellmate standing in the cell and that the death was being investigated as a homicide. They did not announce a cause of death, did not accuse Budrow of killing him and did not say what had happened in the cell. Reports that DNA linked Kibbe to the six further killings place that link in 2008; he was convicted of those murders by his own guilty pleas.
Sources
- Mule Creek State Prison Officials Investigating Inmate Death as a Homicide (corrected), California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
- 'I-5 Strangler' Roger Reece Kibbe Killed In State Prison Attack, CBS San Francisco (KPIX)