Kibbe was born in 1939 in California and worked in furniture and cabinet making. He had convictions for theft and burglary going back to his teens, including offences involving women's clothing.
He picked up women whose cars had broken down on Interstate 5 and Highway 12 in the Sacramento valley, or who were hitchhiking, tied them, strangled them with a ligature, and cut their clothing with distinctive scissors marks. The victims were Lou Ellen Burleigh, twenty-one, in 1977, and between 1986 and 1987 Lora Heedick, twenty; Barbara Ann Scott, twenty-nine; Stephanie Brown, nineteen; Charmaine Sabrah, twenty-six; Katherine Kelly Quinones; and Darcie Frackenpohl, seventeen. The California press called the case the I-5 Strangler. Lora Heedrick, twenty, is among those named. He was called the I-5 Killer, after the interstate.
He was arrested in 1987 and convicted in 1991 of a single murder, that of Darcie Frackenpohl, receiving twenty-five years to life. The rest of the series could not be charged on the evidence then available.
In the 2000s the California Department of Justice re-examined the cases with DNA and with re-analysis of the fibre and tool-mark evidence. In 2009 he pleaded guilty to six further murders in exchange for the location of Lou Ellen Burleigh's remains, and on November 4, 2009 received six consecutive life sentences. He also gave information on cases he was not charged with.
On February 28, 2021 he was strangled by his cellmate at the Mule Creek State Prison, aged eighty-one.