REX ALLAN KREBS: THE SADIST OF SAN LUIS

Article BY Lori Bell

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A savage ex-con lays seize to San Luis Obispo, California, targeting and torturing college age women, then burying their bodies. This sadistic murderer couldn’t control his evil impulses, and continued to prey on the innocent, until a savvy parole officer led law enforcement right to him.

In San Luis Obispo, CA, on November 12, 1998, 20-year-old Rachel Newhouse, a junior nutrition major at Cal Poly University, was getting ready for a night on the town. She was bright, with a cheery disposition, and an extremely popular, all-American girl.

Rachel, and her roommate Andrea, arrived at Tortilla Flats, a Mexican restaurant and bar popular with the locals and college students. Approximately one hour after Rachel had been on the bar side, she and her friend apparently were seen outside the women’s restroom.

They got into an argument, Rachel became upset and left by herself without her friend. Rachel began the two mile walk back home just after midnight. The streets were dark and deserted. At some point she had to make a decision to cross a bridge or follow down the street she was on. Rachel decided to take the bridge route.

There was a man who had been drinking. He had had approximately six shots of Jack Daniels. He was driving in a truck and saw her walking across the bridge. The man put on a skeleton mask, exited his truck, and approached Rachel on the bridge.

Rachel tried to walk past him but, he wouldn’t allow her to. He ended up beating her in the face, knocking her unconscious, and then dragged her to his truck. He secured her hands behind her back, tied them, and then tossed her body behind the cab of the truck.

He then drove her to a remote area where he stopped the truck and tied her legs up. Then he took her to a dilapidated cabin in the middle of nowhere. He threw her over his shoulder and dragged her into the cabin. At this point she regained consciousness.

Inside the abandoned A-frame cabin, the nightmare was just beginning. The man put Rachel on the floor and untied her legs, then proceeded to rape her. He stuffed her underwear in her mouth, tied a rope around her and hog tied her, then left the cabin. When he came back Rachel was dead.

The following day, after Rachel failed to show up for work at a local brewery, her roommates called the police. The San Luis Obispo police didn’t have much to go on, other than a blood stain on the bridge. That blood stain was tested and came back positive for Rachel.

There were no eye witnesses and no body, so the investigation pretty much stalled. Law enforcement established a reward to generate new leads. On November 19th, 1998, San Luis Obispo police department called the FBI for assistance on the case. The stakes were high.

Rachel Newhouse wasn’t the first co-ed to disappear from San Luis Obispo. The town was still reeling from the vanishing of 19-year-old Kristen Smart, another Cal Poly student who had been missing since May 1996.

On May 26th, 1996, Kristen went to a party to kick off the Memorial Day weekend in her freshman year of college. She was trying to get friends to go with her, but they didn’t want to go, so she was on her own.

According to witnesses, Smart enjoyed the party, then left around 2:00 in the morning. One of the other party goers noticed that she was passed out on the lawn adjacent to the party. The young man who discovered Smart lying in the grass, enlisted the help of a female student .

They realized she was way too intoxicated to go home back to campus on her own, so they actually walked her back towards campus. Another student, Paul Flores, also known by the nickname “Chester the Molester,” actually showed up out of nowhere and convinced the other two students that they should let him walk her to her dorm alone.

They relinquished her to him and it was the last time she was ever seen. Five days later, on May 30th, police questioned Paul Flores. He told detectives he knew nothing about Smart’s disappearance. Yet, a month later, when Cal Poly campus was searched with cadaver dogs, the dogs alerted on Flores’ dorm room and his mattress inside.

Still, authorities didn’t charge the 19-year-old student with any crime. Eighteen months later, attorneys for the Smart family depose Paul Flores. He refused to answer any questions. Smart’s family, and the community in general, felt that there were plenty of clues that led to Flores. But San Luis Obispo police department didn’t move the case forward at all.

In November of 1998, people were mentioning Flores’ name again. They wondered if he was responsible for the disappearance of Rachel Newhouse. Because of the proximity of the Smart disappearance, the townspeople really felt that Flores may have been involved.

In San Luis Obispo, on March 11, 1999, 20-year-old Questa College undergrad, Aundria Crawford, was studying in her bedroom. She loved animals, and she was the person that everyone seemed to really enjoy being in the company of.

The interior design major had no idea that, outside, a predator lurked, his identity distorted by the panty hose stretched over his face. This individual had cased her place approximately four to five times. He very specifically targeted her.

The masked man waited for Aundria to fall asleep. He tried the front door, the back door, all the first floor windows, and they were all locked. But, then he found a very small one open, he forced out the screen, and forced himself through that window.

Aundria’s cat, Riley, let out a sound like a human scream. Aundria woke up and went to inspect the commotion. She opened the door shortly thereafter, and was confronted by the masked man. She tried to put up a fight, but he punched her repeatedly until she was finally rendered unconscious.

He hog tied Aundria, and put duct tape over her mouth. He took two pillowcases from her bedroom. One he put over her head, and the other he filled with CDs, VHS tapes and a VCR. As he was exiting the location with her body, and the other pillowcase, he noticed there was a small little key chain that had a billiard 8 ball on it.

The intruder took the keychain as a trophy. He took her body, threw it into the back seat of the cab, and drove her to a remote location. He raped and sodomized her repeatedly over the next several hours.

At one point. Aundria attempted to escape, and actually saw his face. That’s when he told her he was going to have to kill her. At that point, he strangled her to death with a rope. The following day, Aundria’s mother, Gayle, couldn’t get ahold of her so she called the San Luis Obispo police department .

Police dispatched an officer to search Aundria’s duplex. Her mother tagged along . They found Aundria’s purse inside her car, which remained in the driveway. Inside her unit they saw her pager, but they couldn’t find her keys.

Aundria was classified as a missing person, just like Rachel Newhouse five months before her. Police were tipped off to a sadistic parolee with a history of violence toward women.

On March 15th, 1999, San Luis Obispo Police announced that they didn’t feel that the two missing women’s cases were related, but Rachel’s uncle, Peter Morial, who happened to be a DA in Riverside, went public stressing the similarities between Aundria and Rachel .

Both were young women attending colleges nearby. Both had similar physiques, and both disappeared without a trace. He felt that a serial killer may have been operating in the area. Parole Officer, David Saragosa, had the same hunch and believed the serial offender could be his 33-year-old parolee, Rex Allan Krebs.

Out of more than 100 ex-cons in his caseload, Saragosa remembered Krebs’ criminal history. Specifically Krebs’ pension for violence against young women. Twelve years earlier he had broken into the Pismo Beach homes of two women, and terrorized them.

On May 24th, 1987, Shelly Crosby came out of a restaurant and went past Krebs, who was trying to get her attention. She basically ignored him, and that really ticked him off. He then followed her home in his Volkswagen.

The 21-year-old divorced mother returned to an empty house. The kids were at the sitter’s, and her roommate wouldn’t be back till 6:00 am. Krebs waited in his car for 45 minutes, for Shelly to go to bed. Later, she was awoken by Krebs’ hand across her mouth.

She not only smelled alcohol and cigarettes, but she also felt the blade of a knife pressed against her throat. Krebs tied her up with a nylon rope, and then raped her repeatedly. He suddenly heard the muffler of her roommate’s car coming to the location.

Krebs leaned over next to her after she was secured and said, ”Have a nice day,” and fled the location. Three weeks later Krebs struck again.

On June 15th, 1987, Anishka Constantine was sleeping in her Pismo Beach home. Her 7 -year-old was sleeping next to her. She was awoken by a crash, and found herself face to face with Krebs, who placed a screwdriver point right at the edge of her eye.

Her daughter screamed, and the 31-year-old single mother, offered Krebs money and jewelry, whatever he wanted. But, Krebs said “I want you.” Anishka told her daughter to go underneath the bed. She found a phone underneath there and attempted to call 911. Unfortunately the phone was dead.

Krebs was determined, but so was Anishka. When he was unzipping his pants, Anishka noticed he had a knife at his waist. She told him, “Maybe we should go to another room.” As they were walking down the hallway, she managed to knock the knife out of his belt and onto the floor.

They struggled over it. Anishka did attempt to stab him, but unfortunately, his belt buckle deflected it. Enraged, Krebs repeatedly bashed her head into the wall. Somehow, despite her injuries, she was able to flee the location.

Anishka ran outside and screamed for the neighbors. Police found a brown corduroy snap brim hat, a buck knife and the sheath, Krebs had left behind. Both Anishka and her daughter positively identified Krebs out of a photo line- up.

Krebs eventually confessed to the rape of Shelly Crosby, and the attempted rape of Anishka Constantine. Krebs agreed to a plea bargain and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Unfortunately , he was paroled after serving only 10 years.

In September of 1997, the California Department of Prisons unleashed convicted rapist, Rex Allan Krebs, onto the public, because of model behavior and overcrowding. Krebs was diagnosed a sexual sadist, who, after he was released, settled into the quiet little town of San Luis Obispo shortly after the disappearance of Kristen Smart.

On March 17th,1999, parole officer Saragosa visited Krebs at his home on Davis Canyon Road. He noticed that Krebs was in pain. He was wearing a weight lifters belt. Krebs said that he injured himself by falling on a pile of wood.

Saragosa was not buying it, and pushed the investigation. He went to the San Luis Obispo police department and told them he had a pretty weird feeling about Krebs. They passed along the information on Krebs to the Justice Department’s Sexual Predator Unit, which was headed by Karen Sandusky.

Sandusky decided to give Krebs a call at his workplace. When she called him he actually said “I'm surprised you didn’t call me after the first girl went missing .” Sandusky , Saragosa, and an FBI agent were going to meet Krebs at his house that night.

During a search they didn’t find anything related to the missing girls, but they found BBs. Krebs admitted to keeping a BB gun at the lumber yard where he worked. Possession of any firearm, real or simulated, is a parole violation.

The next morning, on March 20th, law enforcement staked out Krebs’ job. They found the BB gun, so they arrested him. Authorities searched Krebs’ home for the second time in two days. While there, they found property that was stolen from Aundria’s house, which consisted of CDs and VHS tapes. They also found the billiard 8 ball key chain. Now they began a full-on investigation of Rex Allan Krebs.

On April 22, 1999, detectives questioned Rex Krebs. He waived his constitutional rights, and agreed to speak to them. They asked him if he was responsible for the disappearance of Aundria Crawford and Rachel Newhouse. He shook his head yes.

When asked if they were going to find either girl alive, he shook his head no. Krebs sheepishly detailed how he killed Rachel Newhouse, which he claimed was an accident. Next, Krebs told detectives exactly what he did to Aundria Crawford. Krebs is the monster everyone’s been looking for .

In Avila, California , on April 22, 1999, Krebs showed investigators where he disposed of Aundria’s and Rachel’s bodies. The interesting thing was that Crawford was only buried twenty feet away from his back bedroom window. Newhouse was buried in a grassy nole.

As they built their case against Krebs, law enforcement sought to answer the question of motive. Why did Krebs repeat the cycle of violence against women? The answer lies in his trauma-filled childhood . There were a lot of red flags in his early life.

Violence surrounded him since infancy. His father not only beat his mother, but when she left him she ended up with another man who also beat him and her. Rex’s father, Allan Krebs, didn’t just beat his wife unconscious, he often viciously raped her within earshot of their children.

Rex’s stepfather raped his sisters, and regularly humiliated him. His stepfather would force Rex to wear soiled underwear over his head for about an hour. And , at the age of five, to wear his sister’s diapers.That kind of demeaning humiliation by a parental figure can definitely lead to the build up of intense rage.

In 1979, 13-year-old Rex began to lash out. He got a ski mask and a butcher knife, and broke into the trailer of one of his classmates. When the mother and daughter came home they found him masterbating in a closet.

At age 14, he started doing prank sexual calls to random women, and he actually called his aunt by mistake. She reported it to his father, who then beat him severely. At age 15, Krebs’ father decided to sign him into a state psychiatric hospital .

After a month of intensive therapy, he was transferred to a residential treatment center. He moved to the Northern Idaho Children’s Home, where he also received treatment and counseling. At first he didn’t do so well, but later he started to excel.

By March 1983, Rex had made great strides. The staff believed he had been rehabilitated. But four years later, Rex is a convicted rapist. Fourteen years after that, he’s on trial for murder.

In Monterey, California, on March 19th, 2001, the Rex Allan Krebs double murder trial got underway. Armed with Krebs’ confession, Rachel Newhouse’s DNA, recovered from blood found in his truck, and Aundria Crawford’s billiard 8 ball keychain, prosecutors pushed for the death penalty.

Krebs never took the stand in his own defense. His legal team argued that his attitude toward women, combined with his alcoholism ,caused his brutal behavior. He hates women very strongly, and especially hated his mother for giving him over to the charge of his father who was tremendously abusive. When he drank he went from good Rex to bad Rex.

The jury deliberated for four days, coming back with a return of guilty on all eleven counts. On April 17th, 2001, the sentencing phase began, and the defense was trying to save Krebs from the death penalty.

What they were trying to do was portray him as a person that was terribly abused as a child, which caused him to become a very violent and sadistic individual as an adult. The jury wasn’t sympathetic, and sentenced Rex Allan Krebs to death on May 11th, 2001.

Rex Allan Krebs is the perfect example of a sexual sadist. One who yes, had a rough childhood , but he actually excelled when he was institutionalized. Yet almost as soon as he got out, he immediately reverted back to his violent, sexual, predictor behavior.

Rex Allan Krebs remains on death row at California’s San Quentin State Prison. A date has not been scheduled for his execution.