Kerry Ann Cummings was twenty-five. Her sister Kathie reported her missing and was told that Kerry was an adult, that she had chosen the life she was living, and that if she was not a threat to herself or anyone else there was nothing the police could do. On October 17, 1997 a duck hunter found a dismembered torso in Ryan Slough, north of Eureka. More remains came ashore at Clam Beach the following January, and testing later established that both sets belonged to the same woman. Nobody could say who she was.
Wayne Adam Ford was born in Petaluma on December 3, 1961, the second son of an American father and a German mother. His parents separated when he was ten. He left school without finishing, enlisted in the Marines and served six years, leaving with an honorable discharge in 1985. He married and divorced twice and had a son. By 1997 his second wife had left and taken the child, and he was working as a long-haul truck driver and living in a trailer park at Arcata, and afterward at a campsite.
His family dated a change in him to November 1980, when a drunk driver hit him and he spent nine days in a coma; afterward, relatives said, his personality was different. His first wife, Kelly Pletcher, has said he forced her to have an abortion in Napa in 1981, and she later spoke publicly about an abusive marriage. From 1983 he had mounting trouble at work as his mental health declined, was hospitalized several times, and was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.
He had come to police attention before. In 1986 he was accused of beating and robbing a prostitute in Garden Grove. In 1990 he was arrested for cruelty to animals and served a short jail sentence at San Clemente.
Between October 1997 and September 1998 he killed four women. He picked them up, took them to his truck or his trailer, strangled them, and dismembered three of the four bodies afterward, leaving parts in a slough, an aqueduct and an irrigation canal.
Tina Renee Gibbs was twenty-six and from Las Vegas, and one account dates her death to May 16, 1998, near that city. Her body was found on June 2 in the California Aqueduct near Buttonwillow in Kern County, and she had been strangled. Lanette Deyon White, whose first name is also spelled Lanett, was twenty-five and from Fontana; he picked her up near a truck stop at Ontario, and September 25, 1998 is given both as the day she died and as the day her body was found in an irrigation canal near Lodi. Patricia Anne Tamez was twenty-nine, and she was the last. She was killed at Hesperia, and her body was found on October 23, 1998 in an aqueduct in San Bernardino County.
On November 3, 1998, or November 2 by one account, he walked into the main station of the Humboldt County sheriff's office at Eureka with his brother Rodney, who had persuaded him to go. He said he needed to talk to somebody about some women he had hurt. In a plastic bag in his coat pocket was a woman's severed breast. Over the following days he confessed in detail to all four killings, and a search of his camp produced further remains of the woman from Ryan Slough.
The case then took nearly eight years to reach a verdict, largely over whether his confession and the evidence he had brought with him were admissible. In December 2001 Judge Michael A. Smith unsealed part of the grand jury indictment, which charged four counts of murder on the testimony of detectives, criminalists and coroners, most of them from Northern California. A San Bernardino County jury convicted him on June 27, 2006 on four counts of first degree murder with special circumstances, and in August it chose death. On March 16, 2007 Smith denied defense motions for a new trial or a reduction to life without parole and imposed the sentence. Ford sat through the hour-long hearing with almost no expression, and lowered his head and winced as the rulings came.
In 2016 a reporter found him in the east block of San Quentin's death row, where he said he had once been completely in favor of the death penalty. "I would have rather been killed a long time ago rather than spend the last 18 years in solitary confinement," he said. No decision on his automatic appeal has been published. He has since been reported at the California Men's Colony, where California moved condemned men when it closed the San Quentin row.
His own account of why he came in was that he wanted it to stop. His brother told the story of that day, and of their childhood, on television in 2019.
The woman from Ryan Slough stayed a Jane Doe through the trial and the sentencing and for seventeen years after that. Her DNA profile was checked against missing persons databases and the national index for decades. In June 2023 the Humboldt County sheriff's office, working with the California Department of Justice DNA laboratory and the forensic genomics firm Othram, identified her as Kerry Ann Cummings, twenty-five years after her death.
Her sister had spent those years looking for her on her own. As the internet expanded, Kathie said, she took to searching the national missing persons website whenever she was missing her, scanning for any mention of her sister's tattoo and going through the photographs of the Jane Does. She was dearly loved, Kathie said. The coroner's office worked with the family to release Kerry's remains so that she could be buried with her relatives.