Roger Kibbe Victims

Case background and investigation

Between 1977 and 1987, a series of women were abducted, sexually assaulted and strangled in the Sacramento and Stockton areas, and their bodies were left along highways and in remote places across Northern California. The Los Angeles Times reported that two of the victims were taken from Interstate 5 after their cars broke down, which gave the unidentified killer the name I-5 Strangler. The victims' clothing had been cut in unusual patterns.

The earliest known victim was Lou Ellen Burleigh, 21, of Walnut Creek, who disappeared in September 1977. The others, according to Wikipedia's list drawn from court and news records, were Lora Heedick, 21, Barbara Ann Scott, 29, Stephanie Brown, 19, Charmaine Sabrah, 26, and Katherine Kelly Quinones, 25, all killed in 1986, and Darcie Frackenpohl, 17, of Seattle, who was killed in 1987 and found near Echo Summit in the Sierra Nevada.

Roger Kibbe, who lived in the Sacramento suburbs, became a suspect on the basis of a composite sketch, the vehicle he drove and an attempt to abduct a woman in Sacramento, the Los Angeles Times reported. Without DNA technology, prosecutors charged him only with the Frackenpohl killing. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder, and in May 1991 he was sentenced to 25 years to life.

DNA testing later tied Kibbe to six more killings. Investigators confronted him in prison, and the Times reported that he admitted to the murders in 2003. A grand jury indicted him in 2008. In 2009 he pleaded guilty to six murders in exchange for prosecutors not seeking the death penalty, and he received six life sentences without the possibility of parole. As part of the agreement he agreed to help locate Burleigh's body, the only one that had not been found.

Repeated searches near Lake Berryessa with Kibbe present were unsuccessful. In early 2011 Napa County Deputy Sheriff Michael Bartlett, searching on his own time, found a bone in a creek bed in the area Kibbe had described. DNA testing confirmed in June 2011 that the remains were Burleigh's.

On February 28, 2021, a corrections officer found Kibbe unresponsive in his cell at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, with his cellmate, Jason Budrow, standing nearby, CBS San Francisco reported. Kibbe was 81. An autopsy found that he had been strangled. KTVU later reported that Budrow, who was already serving life without parole for a 2010 murder, received an additional consecutive life sentence for killing Kibbe.