‘I-5 Strangler’ Roger Kibbe, Sacramento-area serial killer and rapist, killed in prison
Convicted serial killer Roger Reece Kibbe, known as the “I-5 Strangler,” was killed Sunday morning at the state prison where he was serving consecutive life sentences, authorities said.
At around 12:40 a.m. Sunday, a corrections officer at Mule Creek State Prison in Amador County was conducting a routine population count when he found Kibbe, 81, lifeless on the floor of his cell with his cellmate, Jason Budrow, 40, standing there. Prison guards rushed Kibbe to the prison’s infirmary, but he was pronounced dead around an hour later.
A cause of death wasn’t released, but prison officials said Kibbe’s death is being treated as a homicide.
Budrow has been rehoused in the Administrative Segregation Unit pending the investigation, prison officials said. Budrow was imprisoned in 2011 from Riverside County to serve life without the possibility of parole for first-degree murder as a second-striker.
Kibbe was serving multiple life sentences for killing at least seven women over two decades in what became known as the “I-5 Strangler” slayings.
He was first convicted in 1991 of strangling a 17-year-old Darcine Frackenpohl, a runaway from Seattle who was living in West Sacramento, and leaving her nude body at Echo Summit. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for the 1987 murder.
At the time of his arrest, Kibbe was serving a jail term in Sacramento County for assault and attempted kidnap of a prostitute.
Detectives had long suspected Kibbe of murdering several other women.
It wasn’t until DNA and other evidence from the crime scenes were resubmitted in the early 2000s that Kibbe was linked to six other killings.
In 2008, a new San Joaquin County indictment accused him of the murders of Lou Ellen Burleigh in 1977 and the deaths of Barbara Ann Scott, Stephanie Brown, Charmaine Sabrah, Katherine Kelly Quinones and Lora Heedrick — all in 1986.
In 2009, Kibbe pleaded guilty to the new murder counts with special enhancements for rape and kidnapping. He was to serve consecutive life sentences in exchange for prosecutors not seeking the death penalty.
A string of murders
Burleigh, 21, was Kibbe’s first known murder.
She left her Walnut Creek home in September 1977 for a job interview, but never came back. Kibbe later confessed to luring her into a van to discuss a cosmetics job, saying his office was under construction, according to news accounts. He then tied her up, drove her to the Lake Berryessa area where he raped and killed her before dumping her body in a dry river bed.
Burleigh’s body wasn’t found until 2011, when a Napa County sheriff’s deputy found a bone fragment near Lake Berryessa that matched the site where Kibbe confessed to leaving her body.
His later victims include Heedrick, 21, of Modesto. She was last seen April 20, 1986, in her hometown, when she got into a car headed toward Highway 99. Her body was found Sept. 6, 1986, near Highway 12 and Interstate 5.
Sacramento resident Brown, 19, was found the morning of July 15, 1986, in a ditch beside Highway 12 near Terminus Island. She had been strangled and sexually assaulted. A crumpled map was found alongside her car near Hood Franklin Road and I-5.
Sabrah, 26, of Sacramento, was returning to Sacramento on Aug. 17, 1986, when her car broke down at Peltier Road and I-5. Leaving her mother with the automobile, Sabrah drove off in a two-seater sports car with a man who offered to help. The strangled body of the mother of three was found Nov. 9, 1986, near Highway 124 in Amador County.
Authorities said Kibbe strangled Heedick with her tank top. Kibbe choked Frackenpohl to death with what prosecutors said was a cord with dowels at both ends, a weapon found in Kibbe’s storage locker.
There’s a nearly decade gap between Burleigh’s death and Kibbe’s next known victim, leading some to speculate that the former Citrus Heights furniture maker with an affinity for sky diving killed others.
“There are so many different jurisdictions and, unfortunately, so many cases of young ladies who have been found,” Kevin Mayo, a then-San Joaquin County deputy district attorney told The Sacramento Bee in 2009 at the time of his guilty plea. “There’s a lot of thought that he could have done some of them.”
Karen Finch, a 25-year-old Lodi resident, was found dead in a ditch along Kiefer Boulevard, a half-mile north of Jackson Road, in 1987. Like Kibbe’s other victims, she’d been sexually assaulted, but there wasn’t enough evidence to charge Kibbe, and he never confessed.
Kibbe often left a signature — random cuts in his victims’ clothing with a pair of scissors. The book “Trace Evidence: The Hunt for an Elusive Serial Killer” reported that when Kibbe was younger he would cut up garments he stole with a pair of his mother’s scissors. Detectives said he sometimes bound himself with the garments.
Detectives later found scissors in what they called Kibbe’s “crime kit” along with parachute cord, the book reports.
