Wayne Adam Ford was born on December 3, 1961, in California, served in the Marines, and worked as a long-distance lorry driver. He was married and divorced twice and had a son, and by 1997, after his second wife left and took the child, he was living out of the cab.
Between October 1997 and September 1998 he killed four women, three of them working as prostitutes, in Humboldt, San Bernardino, Kern and San Joaquin counties. He picked them up, took them to his truck or his trailer, bound and strangled them, and dismembered the bodies afterwards, putting parts into rivers and irrigation canals. The first victim, found in pieces in the Ryan Slough near Eureka, was not identified for years.
Three of the four were Patricia Tamez, twenty-nine; Lanett Deyon White, twenty-five; and Tina Renee Gibbs, twenty-six. The fourth, whose torso was found in a slough, has never been identified.
On November 3, 1998, he walked into the Humboldt County sheriff's office in Eureka with his brother Rod, who had persuaded him to go, and said he needed to talk to somebody about some women he had hurt. In the pocket of his coat, in a plastic bag, was a woman's severed breast. He then confessed in detail to all four killings over several days.
The case took eight years to reach a verdict, largely over whether the confession and the physical evidence he had brought with him were admissible. He was convicted in San Bernardino County on June 27, 2006, of four counts of first degree murder, and the same jury returned a death sentence. He is on California's death row. His own account of why he came in was that he wanted it to stop.