The Crime Web: Wayne Ford

On November 4, 1998, Wayne Adam Ford, who as a trucker hauled lumber and other commerce throughout California, walked into the Humboldt County Sheriff's Department and told deputies he had killed four women in California. To prove it, Ford pulled from his pocket a plastic bag that contained a woman's severed breast, then confessed to killing the women believed to be drifters, prostitutes or hitchhikers,

Ford, 36, 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.

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.

Ford'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. The autopsy report on Tamez states she was strangled and beaten to death. Her killer severed her left breast, then threw her body into the aqueduct, the autopsy states.

It was Tamez's breast that Ford had in his pocket when he walked into a small-town police station in November 1998 to surrender, officials have said. Handing the severed breast to officers, Ford told them he had been "hurting people," authorities have said.

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. On June 2, a fisherman found Gibbs' nude body floating in the aqueduct west of the small farming community of Buttonwillow, off state Highway 58 in Kern County. The body had been in the water for two to five days.

Investigators believe Ford dumped the body into the aqueduct from a bridge after carrying it in his truck for several days.

His patterns indicate he was a disorganized predator who didn't really plan out what he was going to do. He also didn't offer a reason as to why he kept the body

Ford also told San Joaquin County investigators that he picked up a woman in Ontario, in Southern California, and dumped her body off Interstate 5 near Lodi, 30 miles south of Sacramento. San Joaquin County sheriff's spokesman Mike Padilla identified the victim as 25-year-old Lanett White of Fontana, whose body was found Sept. 25.

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.

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Original Written: July 3, 2001