The I-5 Strangler left a mark investigators came to recognize: he cut his victims' clothing open in odd, irregular shapes. He used scissors that had belonged to his mother. He abducted women, most of them from the freeways around Sacramento, tied them with the parachute rigging cord he used for skydiving, and silenced them with duct tape. He raped them and strangled them, sometimes garroting them with the cord, and before he left he cut away most of their hair to get the tape off. Roger Reece Kibbe, a furniture maker from suburban Sacramento whose brother was a law enforcement officer, was caught in 1987 for something smaller.
He was born on May 21, 1939, in San Diego County. His first arrest in the case came in 1987, when he tried to handcuff a sex worker who fought back and screamed until a police officer heard her. On her testimony he was convicted of assault and battery and jailed for eight months, and in that time detectives assembled a murder case against him.
Darcie Frackenpohl, seventeen, had run away from her home in Seattle and was living in Sacramento when she was last seen around August 23, 1987. On September 19 a jogger found her nearly nude body west of South Lake Tahoe, below Echo Summit in El Dorado County, two to three weeks after she was killed; her pink dress lay about a thousand feet away. Kibbe was arrested for her murder in 1988, convicted of first-degree murder on March 18, 1991, and sentenced on May 10 to twenty-five years to life. Investigators said then that they suspected him in six other killings attributed to the I-5 Strangler, but prosecutors could not file charges.
The six were spread over a decade and several counties. Lou Ellen Burleigh, twenty-one, left her home in Walnut Creek on September 11, 1977, for what she thought was a job interview at a shopping center, and never came back. Lora Heedick, whose name also appears as Heedrick and whose age is given as twenty and as twenty-one, was last seen getting into a car with a middle-aged white man on April 20, 1986; she was found near Sacramento that September. Barbara Ann Scott, twenty-nine, was found strangled beneath a tree on a golf course in Antioch on July 3, 1986. Stephanie Brown, nineteen, was found raped and strangled in a drainage ditch in San Joaquin County on July 15, 1986, and a pair of unusual scissors lay near her body. Charmaine Sabrah, twenty-six, accepted a ride from a stranger on August 17, 1986, after the car she and her mother were in broke down on Interstate 5, and was found strangled at Ione on November 9. Katherine Kelly Quinones, twenty-five, was found strangled near the Pope Creek Bridge at Lake Berryessa on December 21, 1986, and identified by her fingerprints under the name Traci Lynn Gobel, one of seventeen she had used.
In 2003 Kibbe led prosecutors and detectives to a dry creek where he remembered leaving Lou Ellen Burleigh; nothing was found. A detective searched again in 2007, and Kibbe went back with detectives in 2009, again without result, and a grand jury was convened. A San Joaquin County District Attorney's Office investigator, using new developments in the DNA evidence, had by then tied him to the old killings. Prosecutors agreed not to seek death, reasoning that he was unlikely ever to be executed, and on November 5, 2009, in San Joaquin County, the white-haired seventy-year-old said "guilty" six times as Judge George Abdallah Jr. read each victim's name. The counts covered killings in Amador, Contra Costa, Napa, Sacramento, San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties, and he received six further life sentences without parole, with enhancements for rape and kidnapping. As part of the deal he was interviewed in prison by the forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz. In 2011 a detective went back to the creek on his own and found a bone, and DNA proved it was Burleigh's, some thirty-four years after she vanished; one wire report places her remains at Lake Berryessa in Napa County.
He was never charged in the death of Karen Louise Finch, twenty-five, who vanished on June 14, 1987, and was found seven days later in a ditch at Sloughhouse, sexually assaulted, her throat cut, with duct tape in her hair. Vito Bertocchini, the San Joaquin County sheriff's detective who spent twenty-four years on the case, said Kibbe was "responsible for many more."
At about 12:40 on the morning of February 28, 2021, an officer counting inmates at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione found Kibbe unresponsive on the floor of his cell, his cellmate Jason Budrow standing by the body. He was pronounced dead at 1:23 a.m., aged eighty-one, and the autopsy found he had been manually strangled. Bertocchini said Kibbe had told him in 2019 that he was afraid of the general population, worried someone would make a name for himself by attacking him. "This is evil killing evil," the detective said. Budrow, already serving life without parole for strangling his girlfriend in Riverside County, said he had killed Kibbe to avenge his victims. The Amador County district attorney, Todd Riebe, charged him with first-degree murder and did not seek death, and he received a second life sentence.