Disturbed Ground Read online

  Disturbed Ground

  By Carla Norton

  Also by Carla Norton:

  Perfect Victim

  Copyright © 2011 by Carla Norton

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

  Inquiries can be directed to www.CarlaNorton.com.

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1994 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

  Norton, Carla

  Disturbed Ground, the true story of a diabolical female serial killer/by Carla Norton

  ISBN 0-688-09704-9

  Brought to you by KeVkRaY

  Dedicated to the memory of

  “Bert”

  Alvaro Jose Rafael Gonzales Montoya,

  the innocent catalyst for all that followed.

  PROLOGUE

  The morning of January 1, 1986, dawned with the usual promise of hangovers, parades, and football games. But in Sutter County, a rural stretch in Northern California, this particular New Year's Day was less memorable for any holiday reverie than for the excitement surrounding a discovery down on the banks of the Sacramento River.

  There was a damp chill in the early-morning air, but local fisherman Roy Beals was flushed when he burst into the Verona General Store and Restaurant. "Hey! You gotta come out and take a look!" he cried between gasps. "I found a dead body! No kidding! It's in a box, down by the river, 'bout a mile or two."

  Marge and Marvin Horstman, the owners of the store, stared at their stocky friend. Before they could respond, he was tugging at Marvin's sleeve. "You gotta come with me," Beals implored. "I ain't for sure, it's wrapped up in plastic. You gotta come an' see. I'll show ya I ain't jokin'."

  A few minutes later the two men scurried down the steep embankment, coming to a stop next to a large rectangular wood box that rested just a few feet from the water.

  "There's a body in there, I'm pretty sure," Beals whispered. "I just took a peek."

  The two men drew closer and stared inside at something suspiciously large wrapped in plastic. "Well, let's take a look," Horstman said, squatting down next to it.

  Abruptly, Horstman stood back up. "I don't want to touch it," he said bluntly. "Have you got anything in your car? Some pliers maybe?"

  Beals hurried back up the embankment to fetch them. Then, with his heart in his throat, Horstman pulled away enough of the plastic to discover what was inside.

  Their call to the Sutter County Sheriff’s Department sent a jolt through the office on what should have been a sleepy holiday. Detective Sergeant Wilbur Terry handled all homicide investigations, so he drew the grim duty of going out to tiny Verona to investigate the report.

  Two patrol deputies in the area were also sent to take a look, and by the time Detective Sergeant Terry arrived, the deputies had already interviewed Beals and Horstman. One deputy had carefully made his way down the riverbank to ascertain that, indeed, there was a corpse in that box. One deputy: one extra set of footprints. Henceforth, Terry mandated, they would all share that single trail, stepping on as little evidence as possible.

  More backup arrived shortly, transforming this quiet fishing spot into a bustling crime scene. The deputies approached the perimeter of the scene cautiously, careful not to disturb possible evidence. Leaves had fallen into the box, so it had been there for some time. Photographs were taken, tire tracks and footprints lifted. Cigarette butts, bottle tops, odd scraps of material were carefully removed from the site.

  Detective Sergeant Terry believed in taking his time, in scrutinizing every detail. You never know what you're looking for, he thought, just something that doesn't belong. Morning had long yielded to afternoon by the time he wrapped things up.

  A hearse was called to take the body into Yuba City, the county seat, where the putrefied corpse was X-rayed. This was done not only for possible identification, but also to determine whether bullets, broken knife blades, or other lethal objects were lodged within. There were none.

  It was discovered, however, that in a curiously fastidious gesture, more than a dozen mothballs and a room deodorizer had been placed in the box with the corpse.

  Big cities have fancy morgues for conducting autopsies; in Sutter County any possible homicide victims are taken to Ullrey's Memorial Chapel. There, Dr. Frederick Hanf did the honors, unwrapping the remains like some ominous gift.

  The body was in a fetal position, wrapped in a bed sheet and layers of plastic secured with tape. Additionally, the head and hands had been bagged in black plastic garbage bags. Uncovering the body, Dr. Hanf found a bloated, decomposed white male with white hair and a mustache, dressed only in a T-shirt and undershorts, wearing a wrist-watch. He couldn't estimate the time of death beyond saying that a couple of weeks or months might be "fair." And he could not determine the cause of death.

  During the autopsy, Dr. Hanf took a blood sample from the heart that would be sent to the Department of Justice (DOJ) crime lab in Sacramento for toxicological testing. The sample was later found to be so decomposed as to be "unsuitable" for a number of tests.

  The body's fingertips were snipped from the hands and also sent to the DOJ in Sacramento, where they were prepared and rolled for prints. No matching prints were found, but it was noted that the man was missing the tip of his right thumb.

  Meanwhile, Detective Loren Felts had the odious task of examining the slimy plastic for fingerprints. (The stench was so sickening that his partner finally told him to take the work outside.) After many hours of painstaking examination, Felts found only a few disappointing partial prints.

  With no ID, no missing person's report, no matching prints, and no hint to who this fellow might be, the name on the case filed remained "John Doe." Rather than file unsolved cases in a drawer, Detective Sergeant Terry believed it best to keep them out in the open, as a constant reminder that there were answers yet to be found. He plopped this slim "John Doe" file down on top of his desk.

  By now the detective had arrived at his own name for the old fellow. Having pondered the case for a while, he'd developed a theory. The autopsy had revealed no cause of death, so it seemed the old man had died of natural causes. Why hadn't he been buried? Why had he been so quietly deposited at the riverbank? Because, Terry surmised, the family simply hadn't wanted a death certificate. "That's somebody's old Uncle Harry," the detective concluded, "and somebody's still collecting old Uncle Harry's Social Security checks."

  His guess was better than most. But if the case had seemed more sensational, if the mostly nude victim found down by the river had been young and female, law enforcement may have guessed something closer to the truth. They may have at least considered that this was the work of a mad lover, might have even wondered whether this could be their first hard look at the work of a serial killer.

  But only a fraction of all murders—4 or 8 percent—are committed by serial killers, so this seemed highly unlikely. Besides, there was no pattern to guide them.

  For now, the method and identity of the killer would remain as mysterious as the name of the victim. So elusive was this killer that even a long criminal history would not invite scrutiny, for this crafty individual possessed the most extraordinarily convenient of disguises, beyond the ken of even the FBI's most sophisticated profilers.

  Over years of intense forensic study the FBI has fine-tuned the art of "profiling," time and again divining the age, build, behavior, even the type of residence of a serial killer long before it has narrowed its investigation to individual suspects. It
has distilled a formula. Serial murders, done secretly and systematically over a period of time, are virtually by definition sexually motivated, the victims random strangers. Typically, serial killers are white, in their late twenties to early forties, and almost exclusively male.

  Almost.

  INTRODUCTION

  It rarely snows in Sacramento, California, making it a much more amenable place for the homeless than, say, Kansas City or Detroit. A few winter days might turn brutally frigid, but the blistering heat of summer warrants more complaint than the cold of winter.

  In any case, street people are virtually never found frozen to death on Sacramento's park benches.

  They die in other ways.

  Not that many notice. In death as in life, anonymity cloaks them like grimy overcoats. Strangers who have seen their faces soon forget. Even their own families may have been trying to forget them for a very long time.

  When Sacramento's itinerants die, the county buries them by the cheapest means possible. No one comes to their funerals; no one visits their graves.

  As in other American cities, the citizens of Sacramento perceive a large and growing "homeless problem." They can't help but notice the clusters of vagrants loitering around town; and they're pained to spot the occasional bag lady on the curb tending not just small parcels, but also small children. Still, this is a city rich in distractions, with more to recommend it than the infrequency of days when the mercury dips below freezing. While it lacks the glamour of Hollywood or the charm of San Francisco, Sacramento basks in a growing reputation as a desirable place to live, with two universities, a plethora of fine shops and cafes, and its providential location at the confluence of two glistening rivers (the Sacramento and American). The snow-capped Sierra rise to the east, fields of orchards and sunflowers stretch across the valley, and a bustle of new developments, belted together with a rush of freeways, girds the city. Old-fashioned Victorian homes endow the downtown with a sense of style and tradition. And the streets are flanked with a deciduous lushness that dies each autumn with a shout of crimson.

  At the city's heart, past a clot of government buildings, the magnificently restored state capitol dome gleams above Capitol Park. Here, tasteful dark suits stream along sidewalks and heels click down hallways as ideas are delivered to the state's legislators. Outside, buses deposit tour groups who have come for a government pilgrimage.

  Yet even this capital city of "the world's sixth largest economy" has not been immune to the toxic side effects of "Reaganomics," and small, dirty caravans of overburdened shopping carts also clatter along these sidewalks.

  Though Sacramento's weather is kind and its charities busy, life on the street is a wearisome limbo of waiting and walking, of stubborn rules, of being hungry, of making do. The well-traveled route from shelter to soup kitchen and back is called, simply, "the Walk."

  Benefit checks—veterans benefits, disability, Social Security, SSI (Supplemental Security Income), Medicaid, pensions—are the slow heartbeat that feeds this flow of society. The money comes in spurts: a wealth of food, alcohol, and cigarettes for a few days that trickles to nothing by the end of the month. Some budget, some splurge, others have it stolen. Street people, with little to lose but less for protection, make easy targets for con artists and thugs.

  Those with physical handicaps are hard to begrudge our tax dollars, but those with mental handicaps meet more often with incomprehension than compassion. They are "the crazies," "the ranters," and they suffer a gamut of mental afflictions: schizophrenia, manic depression, Down syndrome, organic and inorganic brain damage. For many, internal distractions loom larger than mundane matters such as shaving or brushing their teeth. The voices they hear, the paranoia that molds their behavior are as real to them as any tree or building, and far more demanding than mere social graces. No one pretends they could get work but for a failure of will.

  With the number of public mental hospital beds dwindling to a fraction of what they were a generation ago, and with "deinstitutionalization" the prevailing ethic, housing the mentally ill is a formidable task. Those recognized as ill—not merely discounted as obnoxious—may be rescued from the street by mental health workers who then try to place them in appropriate facilities, (ironically, those "lucky" enough to be tagged "5150"—law enforcement lingo for "a danger to themselves or others"—often get the most comprehensive care.)

  If the mentally ill can simply remember to take their own medications (or "meds," in the parlance of mental health workers), they've crossed a major hurdle: They can live on their own rather than in a licensed facility, where a supervisor administers their meds to them.

  Surely, some who could manage to take their meds on their own don't, simply because the prospect of greater freedom is too frightening.

  It could be, there's good reason to be scared.

  PART ONE: CANARY

  There's no loneliness on the street—there's a million of us out here.

  —Vietnam veteran Mike Bailey, in Red Heart

  CHAPTER 1

  At first blush, Bert Montoya wasn’t a particularly appealing fellow. His grooming habits were poor, his big stomach pushed out over his trousers, and a mean case of psoriasis assailed his scalp. With his thick gray-white hair, unruly beard, full lips, and soft dark eyes, he had an unkempt yet benevolent look. He rarely spoke, even with others who spoke his native Spanish. And at his most articulate he mumbled so badly that he was hard to understand, perhaps because he had so few teeth. Shy and acquiescent, he usually watched from the sidelines, appearing isolated, remote . . . yet somehow irresistible.

  Bert talked to trees. Wagging one thick finger skyward, shuffling down the street in ill-fitting boots and rumpled clothes, he conversed with people only he could hear. When more fleshly beings interrupted, he fell silent.

  While Bert Montoya had many problems, alcohol wasn't among them. Other than the infrequent beer, he simply didn't drink. Call him simple, call him mentally retarded, call him delusional, but he didn't really belong here in this metal warehouse, sleeping every night on a vinyl mat on the concrete floor, surrounded by fifty-nine drunks in various stages of inebriation. It was rather chance that had put him here, and inertia that had kept him, since the early 1980s, at Detox.

  "Detox," short for "detoxification," is a misnomer, actually, for the Volunteers of America (VOA) Central Reception Center on Front Street. This long metal structure, tucked unobtrusively into a comer of Sacramento, is really just a no-fuss drunk tank, a money-saving alternative to jailing those who commit the misdemeanor of public inebriation. But unlike the down-and-out drunks who arrive at Detox in paddy wagons, stay a couple of nights, then leave, Bert was a regular here.

  Though Bert was reclusive and communicated mostly in grunts, he had such a gentle, unassuming manner that the staffers at Detox took a liking to him. They gave special vigilance to assuring that Bert got to sleep on his customary mat, B-ll. (Characteristically, he slept with his head and feet pointed in directions opposite everyone else's.)

  Though he was quietly friendly, he remained an enigma. No one ever mistook him for an idiot savant, but perhaps he understood more than he let on. A staffer recalled: "He spoke Spanish to us for three years. Then one day he came into the office and spoke English. Nobody knew he could."

  Besides keeping a protective eye on Bert, the VOA staff gave him food, cigarettes, clothes, even an occasional buck. Noticing Bert's penchant for cigars, a few employees (and even the odd cop) would make a point of bringing him a stogie from time to time. One staffer observed, "He'd rear back like he was worth a million and smoke 'em."

  Bill Johnson, who at age thirty was already a five-year veteran at Detox, was particularly intrigued by this misfit who preferred coffee or tobacco to whiskey or wine. A blue-eyed fellow with a compassionate smile hidden in thick whiskers, Johnson was a man who had seen a world of hurt, but also a sprinkling of miracles. He approached his work with hope, in a quiet, understated way. And he deliberately mingled with the most
solitary, asocial fellows at Detox—especially the shy one who was always mumbling to himself.

  Johnson could manage only the simplest Spanish, so he stuck to English. When he first asked the man's name, he'd heard Alberto— thus, the nickname Bert.

  Over time, Bert began to spend a good deal of time in Johnson's company, and the two established a singular bond. Though Bert never became loquacious, he told Johnson that he was originally from Costa Rica, and that he used to work as a mechanic. Eventually, Bert synchronized his schedule so that when Bill Johnson drove up at 7:30 each morning he was standing there, waiting with a smile.

  Johnson always made sure that Bert got a cup of coffee and something to eat. He reminded him when it was time to take a shower. And Bert even let him cut his hair. "Bert was special," Johnson mused, "and we always treated him special."

  More than special, Bert was honest. Once he found more than two hundred dollars in the parking lot. Did he pocket it? No, he turned it in to the office. When no one claimed it, the staff rewarded him with a few dollars each day until the money was gone.

  Bert also liked to help with chores. Working mostly for smokes, he helped the seventy-four-year-old maintenance man paint picnic tables, wash cars, pick up trash, and sweep floors. He became such a permanent fixture around the grounds that someone dubbed Bert the Detox "mascot."

  Perhaps due to Bill Johnson's soft-spoken, religious influence, Bert also went to church "like clockwork." Boarding the Glory Bound Ministries bus every Sunday, he would ride to the modest church, take a seat, and listen to the service. Here, Bert and others from Detox took comfort in one of the few places where indigents were truly welcome.

  But no matter how regularly Bert went to church, religious faith wasn't going to cure his most pernicious affliction. Bert heard voices.