Roger Reece Kibbe was a furniture maker from Citrus Heights, a suburb of Sacramento, whose brother worked in law enforcement. In May 1991 an El Dorado County judge sentenced him to 25 years to life for the murder of Darcie Frackenpohl, a 17-year-old who had run away from her home in Seattle. Detectives already suspected him in six other killings of women in Northern California, the cases the press had grouped under the name "I-5 Strangler," but prosecutors did not have the evidence to charge him.
That changed in the 2000s. An investigator for the San Joaquin County District Attorney's Office resubmitted old evidence for testing, and DNA and trace evidence connected Kibbe to the older cases. In 2009, to avoid a possible death sentence, he pleaded guilty to six counts of first-degree murder covering women killed in 1977 and 1986. He was sentenced to six consecutive terms of life without parole. In the early hours of February 28, 2021, at the age of 81, he was found unresponsive in the cell he shared with another prisoner at Mule Creek State Prison. The autopsy found that he had been strangled.
Few reliable details of Kibbe's early life have been reported. A Seattle Times report on his 1991 sentencing gave his age as 51, his home as Citrus Heights, and his trade as furniture making, and said his most recent job had been running a rental-storage business. The Associated Press, reporting his death in 2021, described him as a former furniture maker from suburban Sacramento and noted that his brother was a law enforcement officer. The Ceres Courier called him a former Ceres businessman. His date and place of birth were not reported, nor was anything about his childhood, schooling or family life beyond the brother's job.
The name "I-5 Strangler" came from the highway. Interstate 5 runs north and south through the Central Valley, past Sacramento and Stockton, and several of the women in the case were taken or found near it or near the state highways that cross it. Investigators in the 1980s came to treat separate deaths in separate counties as possibly connected, the Associated Press reported.
Lou Ellen Burleigh was the first woman Kibbe admitted killing, and for 34 years her family did not know where she was. She was born in Klamath County and grew up in Merrill, a farming town where her mother taught school. When she was about six, the family moved to Pleasant Hill, California, after her father took a job as a draftsman, the Associated Press reported in 2011.
By September 1977 she was 21 and living in Walnut Creek, in Contra Costa County. On September 11 she left home for what she believed was a job interview at a shopping center in Walnut Creek, and she did not return. Her car was later found in Pleasant Hill. The Associated Press reported that she had gone to meet Kibbe about a secretarial job. A suspect was named, according to a 2011 CBS San Francisco report, but the case went cold.
Kibbe later told investigators that he had taken her to the Lake Berryessa area of Napa County and killed her there. Her remains were not found until 2011.
Nine years passed between Lou Ellen Burleigh's disappearance and the next killings Kibbe admitted. No killing he admitted in between has been reported.
The five women from 1986 were killed over about seven months. The Lodi News-Sentinel, reporting on his guilty pleas, wrote that the victims in the case ranged in age from 17 to 29 and included mothers and students.
Lora Heedick was 21, by the account of the Lodi News-Sentinel and the Ceres Courier; the Associated Press gave her age as 20 and spelled her name Heedrick. She was kidnapped in Modesto on April 21, 1986, according to both local papers. The Lodi paper said she had been with her boyfriend that night. Her body was left near Isleton.
Barbara Ann Scott was 29. She was kidnapped in Pittsburg, in Contra Costa County, on July 3, 1986, and her body was found in Contra Costa County. At Kibbe's sentencing in 2009, her sister spoke to him directly. "I cannot fathom how a so-called human being could do such things to a woman," she said, as quoted by the Ceres Courier.
Stephanie Brown was 19 and lived in Sacramento. On July 15, 1986, according to the Lodi News-Sentinel, she drove out to pick up her roommate at a bar, lost her way in the dark and ended up heading south on Interstate 5. Her car was found later, and her body was found in San Joaquin County, near Terminous. The Ceres Courier reported that DNA linked Kibbe to her death in 2003.
Charmaine Sabrah was 25, by the account of the two local papers, or 26, by the Associated Press. She lived in Sacramento and had an infant at home. On August 17, 1986, she and her mother were driving home after an evening of dancing in Stockton when their car broke down near Thornton. A man in a two-seat car stopped and offered a ride. There was room for only one passenger, and she went with him because she needed to get home to her baby, the Lodi News-Sentinel reported; her mother stayed with the car. The man was later identified as Kibbe. Charmaine Sabrah's body was found in rural Amador County. More than two decades later her mother told the court in Stockton that she had forgiven him, according to the Ceres Courier.
Katherine Kelly Quinones was 25. She was taken in downtown Sacramento on November 5, 1986, and her body was found some time later in the Lake Berryessa area of Napa County. Napa County prosecutors said he had brought both Katherine Quinones and Lou Ellen Burleigh to the lake area and killed them there.
Darcie Frackenpohl was 17. She had run away from her home in Seattle and was living in the Sacramento area in 1987. Several news reports spell her first name Darcie; the Associated Press spelled it Darcine. In September 1987 she was found dead near Echo Summit, west of South Lake Tahoe in El Dorado County, the Associated Press reported. She had been strangled.
Her case was the one that brought Kibbe to trial. The Associated Press reported in 2021 that Sacramento police had recovered items from Kibbe after a woman he tried to abduct escaped, and that investigators matched trace evidence, marked with microscopic dots of red paint, to evidence in the Frackenpohl case and to material at his house. The Seattle Times, reporting his sentencing, wrote that the judge had allowed prosecutors to present evidence linking Kibbe to several other killings, and to an attempted kidnapping in Sacramento, between April 1986 and May 1988.
Kibbe was tried in El Dorado County Superior Court, the county where Darcie Frackenpohl's body was found. A jury convicted him of one count of first-degree murder. The prosecutor, Robert Drossel, had described him as a man who gathered his tools for killing "like a mechanic getting ready to go to work," the Seattle Times reported.
On May 10, 1991, Judge Terrence Finney sentenced him to 25 years to life. Kibbe showed no emotion. The Seattle Times reported that he would have to serve at least 16 years and eight months before he could be considered for parole. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation records that he was admitted to state prison on June 7, 1991, to serve a life term with the possibility of parole.
The conviction rested on one killing. Investigators said at the time that they also suspected him in six other deaths linked to the I-5 Strangler, but prosecutors could not file charges in those cases, the Associated Press reported. For the next decade and more he was a prisoner serving time for one murder, and the families of the other women had no answer.
Kibbe was suspected in at least one more killing that was never charged. Karen Finch was a mother from Lodi whose killing was investigated in connection with Kibbe. In 2009 the San Joaquin County deputy district attorney who handled the case, Kevin Mayo, told the Lodi News-Sentinel only that Kibbe had been a suspect in her death; he would not discuss other open investigations. Kibbe was never charged with killing her, and no court has found that he did.
Vito Bertocchini, the former lead homicide detective on the case for the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Office, spent 24 years on it. In 2021 he told CBS Sacramento that he believed there were more victims. "Absolutely. He's responsible for many more," he said. He recalled Kibbe once telling him, "I have two cans in my head. I'm opening the lid to one can and letting some secrets out." No further killings were ever charged or admitted. One of Kibbe's defense lawyers, Jan David Karowsky, told the Lodi News-Sentinel in 2009 that he did not believe his client had killed anyone beyond the seven women he was by then convicted of killing. The Associated Press reported in 2021 that Kibbe never admitted to killings beyond those he was charged with.
The break came from old evidence. In 2002, according to a 2011 report by CBS San Francisco, an investigator for the San Joaquin County District Attorney's Office resubmitted DNA evidence from five strangling murders of the 1980s. The results pointed to Kibbe, who was already in prison for the El Dorado County murder. The Associated Press reported that DNA linked him to two of the victims, and the Lodi News-Sentinel reported that trace evidence, such as fabric from the seats of his car, tied him to others. The Ceres Courier reported that DNA linked him to Stephanie Brown's death in 2003.
In 2003, investigators interviewed Kibbe in prison, and he admitted the other killings, his lawyers later said. The Associated Press, writing in 2011, said authorities had confronted him that year with the evidence about the other women. The Napa Valley Register reported that he confessed in 2003 to six more murders.
That same year, investigators from the Napa County and San Joaquin County district attorneys' offices and a Walnut Creek police detective took Kibbe to several places near Lake Berryessa where he thought he might have left Lou Ellen Burleigh. Nothing was found. In 2007, an extensive search of an area similar to the one he described also came up empty, CBS San Francisco reported.
The district attorneys of San Joaquin, Sacramento and Napa counties agreed that San Joaquin County would lead the prosecution, the Napa Valley Register reported. A San Joaquin County grand jury heard the case and returned an indictment on February 26, the Lodi News-Sentinel reported; the transcript ran to about 1,500 pages. Because he faced a possible death sentence, California law gave him two defense lawyers, both paid for by the public, since he had no income.
Prosecutors decided not to seek death. The reasons, as the Lodi News-Sentinel and the Napa Valley Register reported them, were his age, the cost of a capital trial with many witnesses who had long since moved away, and the slow pace of executions in California; he would very likely die in prison before any death sentence could be carried out. The Associated Press summed up the prosecutors' view as a judgment that Kibbe was unlikely ever to face execution.
On a Tuesday in September 2009, in a San Joaquin County courtroom, Kibbe said "guilty" six times as the judge read the name of each woman and each charge, the Lodi News-Sentinel reported. He was 70. The deal required him to cooperate with law enforcement, to be interviewed by a psychologist, to take a polygraph examination, and possibly to lead investigators to the places where the crimes took place. In return he would face no further charges if he told the truth; if a lie was discovered before sentencing, the deal would be void.
The six counts of first-degree murder covered Lou Ellen Burleigh, Lora Heedick, Barbara Ann Scott, Stephanie Brown, Charmaine Sabrah and Katherine Kelly Quinones. The crimes took place in Amador, Contra Costa, Napa, Sacramento, San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties, the Associated Press reported, and the murder counts carried enhancements for rape and kidnapping, CBS San Francisco reported.
The defense said the outcome spared the families. "It's a fair resolution to Mr. Kibbe and to the victims' families, who don't have to be traumatized by a trial," said Deputy Public Defender Miriam Lyell. "This sentence will insure that he will never be released from custody." After Kibbe was led away in handcuffs, Mayo, the prosecutor, said, "This is just an opportunity for him to tell us what he did with his life."
On November 5, 2009, Judge George Abdallah Jr. of San Joaquin County Superior Court sentenced Kibbe in Stockton to six consecutive terms of life without the possibility of parole, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Relatives of the women spoke in court. Barbara Ann Scott's sister addressed him directly. Charmaine Sabrah's mother, who had stayed with the broken-down car the night her daughter accepted his ride, told the court that she had forgiven him, the Ceres Courier reported.
The Napa County district attorney, Gary Lieberstein, whose county had lost two of the women, said he hoped the sentence would bring the families some closure. "Hopefully, they'll get some peace in knowing he can't hurt anyone else," he said, as quoted by the Napa Valley Register.
Reports of the sentence differ in one respect. The Napa Valley Register wrote that the plea deal in September had at first included two life terms, and in 2021 corrections officials told the Associated Press that Kibbe was serving two terms of life without parole from San Joaquin County, without being able to explain the absence of the other counts. The department's own release, issued the same day, lists six consecutive terms of life without parole for six counts of first-degree murder.
As part of the plea agreement Kibbe returned to Lake Berryessa with investigators to try to show where he had left Lou Ellen Burleigh. He could not find the place. The Napa County Sheriff's Office said he was unable to pinpoint it, and Bertocchini told the Associated Press that fires and landslides had changed the terrain so that Kibbe struggled to find the landmarks he remembered.
The forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz interviewed Kibbe under the agreement. Dietz's firm later said that Kibbe had agreed to speak with detectives and with Dietz and to show them where he had hidden the remains of one victim. With Kibbe's consent, Dietz worked with the documentary filmmaker Tom Jennings on a television program about the interviews and the search, which was scheduled to air on MSNBC on November 18, 2012, under the title "Profiling Evil."
In 2011 a Napa County sheriff's deputy, Michael Bartlett, became interested in the case and asked to be taken to the place Kibbe had described. Searching on his own time, he found remains near Lake Berryessa, and a DNA laboratory confirmed that they were Lou Ellen Burleigh's. Her mother and her two brothers were told of the identification shortly before police announced it in June 2011, CBS San Francisco reported.
That December her remains were taken home to Klamath County, where she was born, for burial. Her mother, then living in Seattle, said she would have her daughter's remains buried with her when she died, and that the family could at last go to one place, "like people sometimes do, and just talk," the Associated Press reported. The family planned a small memorial after Christmas.
Kibbe spent almost 30 years in state prison. From 2013 he was held at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, Amador County, southeast of Sacramento, the Associated Press reported. Investigators took him on several trips out of prison over the years, hoping he would lead them to more victims, the AP reported. He never admitted to more.
Bertocchini kept in touch with him. The detective last spoke with Kibbe in 2019, and told CBS Sacramento that Kibbe had been afraid of the general prison population. "He was scared to be on mainline. He was worried that somebody would make a name for themselves by attacking him," Bertocchini said in 2021.
At about 12:40 a.m. on Sunday, February 28, 2021, a correctional officer counting prisoners at Mule Creek State Prison saw Jason Budrow, 40, standing in his cell. His cellmate, Kibbe, was lying unresponsive on the floor. Medical staff took Kibbe to the prison's health care facility, where efforts to save him failed, and he was pronounced dead at 1:23 a.m., the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said. He was 81. Budrow was moved to an administrative segregation unit while the prison's investigative unit looked into the death, and the state's Office of the Inspector General was notified.
According to the department, Budrow had been sentenced in Riverside County on June 29, 2011, to life without the possibility of parole for first-degree murder. The first Associated Press report of the death said the cellmate's life sentence carried the possibility of parole; the department's corrected release and later reports give life without parole. CBS Sacramento reported that Budrow's earlier murder conviction was for killing a woman he had dated.
Days later, the Amador County Sheriff's Office said that the autopsy showed Kibbe had been manually strangled, and it classified the death as a homicide, the Associated Press reported on March 3, 2021. No charges had been filed at that point.
"This is evil killing evil. That's what it is," Bertocchini told CBS Sacramento. He said he feared it might now be too late to get answers for other families. Lou Ellen Burleigh's brother, speaking from Seattle by video call, told the station: "I don't have any sympathy for him at all." Their mother, then in her 90s, said: "He chose to kill and I can't really hate him. I just feel regret."
The killing added to Budrow's sentence. In January 2024 the Associated Press reported that he was serving two terms of life without parole, one for strangling a girlfriend in Riverside County in 2010 and one for strangling his new cellmate at Mule Creek State Prison in 2021.
Kibbe was convicted of seven murders in all. One conviction came from a jury: the first-degree murder of Darcie Frackenpohl, found by an El Dorado County jury and punished with 25 years to life in 1991. The other six came from his own guilty pleas in San Joaquin County in 2009: the first-degree murders of Lou Ellen Burleigh, Lora Heedick, Barbara Ann Scott, Stephanie Brown, Charmaine Sabrah and Katherine Kelly Quinones, punished with six consecutive terms of life without parole. No appeal of either judgment was reported.
Other victims. The detective who worked the case longest believed Kibbe killed more women than the seven in the court record, and a San Joaquin County prosecutor said in 2009 that he had been a suspect in the killing of Karen Finch of Lodi. Kibbe was never charged with any other killing, he never admitted any, and one of his lawyers said he did not believe there were others. These are suspicions, not findings.
The 2009 count of life terms. Corrections officials told the Associated Press in 2021 that he was serving two life terms without parole from San Joaquin County, while the department's own release that day listed six. The Napa Valley Register wrote that the September 2009 deal at first included two life terms. The court sentence of November 5, 2009, as recorded by the department, was six consecutive terms.
Names and ages. The spelling of Lora Heedick's surname varies (Heedrick in Associated Press copy), as does her age (20 or 21) and that of Charmaine Sabrah (25 or 26). Darcie Frackenpohl's first name appears as Darcine in Associated Press copy.
September 11, 1977: Lou Ellen Burleigh, 21, leaves home in Walnut Creek for what she believes is a job interview and does not return.
April 21, 1986: Lora Heedick is kidnapped in Modesto.
July 3, 1986: Barbara Ann Scott, 29, is kidnapped in Pittsburg.
July 15, 1986: Stephanie Brown, 19, of Sacramento, is abducted.
August 17, 1986: Charmaine Sabrah, of Sacramento, accepts a ride near Thornton after the car she and her mother are in breaks down.
November 5, 1986: Katherine Kelly Quinones, 25, is taken in downtown Sacramento.
September 1987: Darcie Frackenpohl, 17, is found near Echo Summit, west of South Lake Tahoe.
May 10, 1991: After a jury convicts him of her first-degree murder, Kibbe is sentenced in El Dorado County to 25 years to life.
June 7, 1991: He is admitted to state prison.
2002: A San Joaquin County investigator resubmits DNA evidence from five 1980s killings; the results point to Kibbe.
2003: Kibbe admits the other killings in a prison interview, according to his lawyers, and goes with investigators to Lake Berryessa; nothing is found.
2007: A further search near the lake finds nothing.
September 2009: He pleads guilty in San Joaquin County to six counts of first-degree murder.
November 5, 2009: He is sentenced to six consecutive terms of life without parole.
2011: A Napa County deputy finds remains near Lake Berryessa; DNA identifies them as Lou Ellen Burleigh's.
December 2011: Her remains are returned to Klamath County for burial.
November 18, 2012: A television program on Park Dietz's interviews with Kibbe is scheduled to air on MSNBC.
2013: Kibbe is moved to Mule Creek State Prison.
February 28, 2021: He is found unresponsive in his cell and pronounced dead at 1:23 a.m.; the death is ruled a homicide by manual strangulation.
January 2024: The Associated Press reports that his cellmate, Jason Budrow, is serving life without parole for the killing.