|
A full-blooded Blackfoot Indian, Kipp was the son of a prostitute who abandoned him at the age of twenty-two months. Adopted by relatives , he was raised by an alcoholic "father" who frequently beat Martin in public. Liberated by his guardian's death, Kipp left the reservation for a stint in the Marine Corps and was briefly stationed in Japan, where he won divisional honors in boxing. Reassigned to the base at El Toro, California, Kipp began playing with a rock band in his leisure time. In June of 1981 he was accused of abducting and raping a woman he met at a tavern in Long Beach. Martin went AWOL in lieu of facing the charges, but was captured in Idaho and returned to California for trial. Convicted of rape , he was sentenced to three years in prison, serving an actual nineteen months before his release in 1983. (Early release was granted, in part, because Kipp had himself become a rape victim in prison.) He was already registered with Southern California authorities as a convicted sex offender when his violent urges surfaced once again. On the evening of September 16, 1983, 19-year-old Tiffany Frizzell checked into the Ramada Inn on Pacific Highway, in Long Beach, California. A native of Washington state, she was hoping for a good night's rest before she had to register at Brooks College the next morning, signing up for classes and attempting to secure a dormitory room. She never made it to the campus. On September 17, a maid at the Ramada found the co-ed's body stretched out on her bed, stripped naked from the waist. She had been beaten, raped, and strangled in a cruel assault that the medical examiner called "animalistic," so swift and violent that self defense was probably impossible. Fifteen months elapsed before the killer struck again, just after Christmas 1984. Antaya Howard, 19, left her Orange County home to buy a pack of cigarettes on December 29 and never returned. On January 3, 1985, her car was found in Huntington Beach; inside, beneath a blanket, lay Antaya's body, fully-dressed, but with her clothing disarranged. Like Tiffany Frizzell, she had been strangled. In the minds of homicide investigators, there was nothing to initially connect the crimes. Los Angeles and Orange Counties chalk up several hundred murder victims every year, and strangulation is a common mode of death. Moreover, there were obvious dissimilarities: Tiffany Frizzell, was white, Antaya Howard black; the former had been killed in her motel room, while the latter was abducted from the street, abandoned in her car. In short, aside from cause of death, there was no pattern visible to overworked investigators. Working from a matchbook found beside Antaya Howard's body, officers checked out an all-night restaurant in Newport Beach, where witnesses recalled the victim talking to a man identified as Martin Kipp. A quick scan of Kipp's record put detectives on alert; they visited his Long Beach address and discovered he had lately been evicted by the paying tenants, who returned the evening of December 30 to find Kipp sleeping in a closet, clothing torn, deep scratches on his face. While they initially accepted Kipp's explanation that he had suffered a "hard night," his continual, mooching of food and liquor led his long-suffering roommates to show him the gate in early January. The coincidence of dates was damning, and a check of fingerprints on file matched Kipp's with latent prints recovered from Antaya Howard's car. Coincidentally arrested in Laguna Beach, on outstanding traffic warrants, Kipp was remanded to Orange County authorities for booking on a charge of rape and murder. Once in custody, Kipp faced a second murder charge filed in the case of Tiffany Frizzell, with police keeping mum on the nature of their evidence . Delays kept Martin out of court until the latter part of 1987. In the meantime, still incarcerated, he was married to a paralegal aide assigned to help with details of his case. In April 1987, Kipp's bride was arrested on conspiracy charges, after she approached an undercover officer with plans to break Martin out of the Orange County jail. Pleading guilty, she escaped with probation, on the condition that she refrain from visiting her husband. Kipp's trial, for murdering Antaya Howard, covered two full weeks in August 1987. Convicted on August 15, he was sentenced to die in the gas chamber at San Quentin. At this writing, he has not been tried for the murder of Tiffany Frizzell. |
