By age 32, drifter John Sapp had spent the better part of two decades confined to state and county institutions. Following the disappearance of a girlfriend, 24-year-old Elizabeth Duarte, in 1981, Sapp was imprisoned for two years on a charge of burning her home. The lady was still missing five years later, and in May 1986 Sapp was arrested again, this time charged with her murder and those of two other persons. Prosecutors named Sapp's first known victims as John Abono, 22, reported missing from his Concord California, home in 1975. Another Concord victim, Robert Weber, 35, had been abducted, shot, and dumped in Colusa County, where his bullet-riddled body was recovered during August 1985. Sapp's arrest was precipitated by the discovery of a human skeleton in Butte County, during April 1986, believed to be the last remains of Sapp's elderly mother. No one had seen 67-year-old Geraldine Sapp since her son moved in with her, some time in 1985. Sapp denied the murder of his mother , while confessing knowledge of her death. She had been killed by someone else, he said, and Sapp had finished off her slayer as a gesture of familial respect. As May of 1986 wore on, authorities in Butte and Contra Costa Counties were examining more sites where Sapp reported planting corpses of his nameless victims.