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IONE, Calif. (AP) – A California serial killer who officials say strangled and raped at least seven women suffocated to death in a state prison, officials said Wednesday.
Roger Reece Kibbe, 81, known as “I-5 Strangler” in the 1970s and 1980s, was spotted unanswered Sunday in his cell at Mule Creek State Prison southeast of Sacramento – his 40-year-old cellmate was standing nearby.
An autopsy showed Kibbe had been manually strangled, the Amador County Sheriff’s Office said, calling the death a homicide.
No charges have been laid for the death of Kibbe, a former Sacramento suburban furniture maker whose brother was a law enforcement officer.
He was first convicted in 1991 of strangling Darcine Frackenpohl, a 17-year-old girl who had run away from her Seattle home. His nearly naked body was found west of South Lake Tahoe below the Echo Summit in September 1987.
Investigators then said they suspected him in other similar murders.
But it wasn’t until 2009 that an investigator from the San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office used new evidence to link it to six more murders in several northern California counties, with several victims found on along Interstate 5 or other freeways in 1986. Kibbe was serving several life sentences for the murders when he was killed.
Authorities said they never stopped trying to prove he was responsible for yet more deaths. Investigators secretly took him on several field trips from the prison in the hope that he would reveal the whereabouts of other victims.
They would buy him an Egg McMuffin and a Coke for breakfast, another Coke and a burger and fries for lunch, said Vito Bertocchini, retired San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Detective and District Attorney’s Investigator. .
Bertocchini has spent nearly two decades chasing Kibbe and believes he must have killed more during the 10-year gap between his first and last known murders. Investigators said they found other women who were killed and dumped with Kibbe’s trademark of cutting her victims’ clothes in strange patterns.
He was eventually captured after Sacramento Police said a potential victim escaped and they recovered a tourniquet made from a pair of ankles and a parachute cord, as well as scissors and other objects.
Investigators said they matched the cord to the cord found with Frackenpohl’s body and at Kibbe’s, all with microscopic dots of red paint. DNA eventually linked him to two other victims and he agreed to cooperate in exchange for prosecutors removing the death penalty from the table.
Kibbe never admitted to any murders other than the ones he was accused of, but Bertocchini said he never stopped trying to get another confession.
Even after his retirement in 2012, he sent Kibbe birthday and Christmas cards every year, asking him to speak up if he remembered anything about other victims. He and his former partner last visited Kibbe in prison in 2019, but he is still reportedly no longer admitting victims.
It is now too late, but Bertocchini called Kibbe’s death a strangulation “proper justice.”
“I don’t wish harm on anyone,” Bertocchini said. “But I hope he remembered each of his victims while he was killed.”
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