On November 4, 1998, Wayne Adam Ford made headlines when he walked into the Sheriff's station in Northern California, pulled from his pocket a Ziploc bag with a severed breast inside it and admitted to killing four women.
Ford, 36 at the time of his arrest, of Arcata, was being held on murder charges in the Humboldt County Jail on $1 million bail. Sheriff Dennis Lewis said Ford walked into his department, said he had some evidence, and pulled out the baggied bag breast. According to the Sheriff the emerging serial killer, "was remorseful and apparently had reached a point in his life where he wanted to talk about what he'd been involved in."
Investigators in Eureka said the four victims he mentioned were female hitchhikers and/or prostitutes who had been sexually assaulted before they were slain and mutilated post mortem. One of the slayings dated back to 1997, when the torso of a woman 18 to 25 was found floating in a channel near Eureka.
Investigators found six or seven body parts of the unidentified woman based on information Ford provided, said Sheriff Lewis. The breast he brought to the Sheriff's station was from another victim. Authorities said Ford implicated himself in two other recent slayings, in San Bernadino and San Joaquin counties.
The first body found, discovered in October 1997, had been so thoroughly dismembered that her identity remains unknown. Believed to have been a hitchhiker whom Ford picked up, her mutilated torso was found in a marsh near Eureka. One of her arms was later found on a beach. Her head, other arm and parts of her legs are still missing. Ford stored other body parts in the freezer of his Arcata trailer for a year, and according to laboratory analysis, apparently tried to cook some of them.
On June 2, 1998, the nude body of a Las Vegas prostitute, Tina Renee Gibbs, 26, was found in a Kern County aqueduct. She had been strangled. Four months later, the nude body of Lanett Deyon White, a 25-year-old prostitute from Fontana, was found floating in a San Joaquin County irrigation canal. The precise cause of death remains undetermined.
Patricia Ann Tamez's nude body was found floating in the California Aqueduct in San Bernardino County in October 1998. She had been strangled and one of her breasts removed--the one Ford carried in his coat pocket more than a week later when he and his brother walked into a sheriff's station in Humboldt County.
After confessing to killing the four women, Wayne told authorities he turned himself in so he wouldn't kill his ex-wife and leave his son an orphan "`He said he was ashamed of what he was doing and his anger was mostly directed against his wife and he was getting more angry at her every day"' for keeping him from seeing their son, Humboldt County Coroner Frank Jager Jr. said.
People who knew Ford have said he regularly complained that since his separation and divorce from his wife, he has been frustrated in his efforts to see their son. Their divorce decree gave him limited visitation.
In a 3 1/2-hour interview with investigators just before his arraignment, Ford disclosed the location of the head of a woman's headless torso that was found Oct. 26, 1997, in a channel outside Eureka. Pathologists hope to use knife and saw marks on bones from five body parts Ford led them to at a campsite outside Trinidad to match them with the still-unidentified torso. Ford had kept the body parts in a freezer in his Airstream trailer in Arcata for the past year but hid them in a hole at the base of a tree just days before turning himself in.
Wayne's arrest has led officials to identifying the body of Patricia Anne Tamez, a 29-year-old Victorville woman discovered dead two weeks ago in the California Aqueduct near Interstate 15 outside Hesperia. San Bernardino County officials said the body was missing a breast.
Ms. Tamez may have been working as a prostitute at truck stops, officials said. A friend, Deborah Reck, said Ms. Tamez was an upper middle class college student who dropped out because she liked to party too much and was "really into crystal meth."
Authorities identified another of his victims as Tina Renee Gibbs, a 26-year-old Las Vegas prostitute, whose body was dumped in an aqueduct in Kern County. Ford admitted killing Gibbs, saying that she died during rough sex that included bondage. Two other victims remain unidentified.
Born in Petaluma, Ford told friends he served in the military and bounced around the West, living in Big Bear and San Clemente before moving with his wife and son to Las Vegas. After breaking up with his wife he moved to the Northern California coast, where he started working as a long-haul trucker.