Free TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer by Bruce Henderson Page A

State, the highway carries 10 million travelers a year along its 853 miles of California roadway. Yet, it is undeniably the quickest route from one end of the state to the other—from the warm beaches of the south through the vast agricultural heartland to the rainswept north.
    Within days of Stephanie Brown’s murder, Vito Bertocchini had phoned Biondi with the idea of an I-5 roadblock to conduct a “witness canvass.” It was a long shot in terms of coming up with any eyewitnesses, Biondi figured. But he saw it as an opportunity to advertise the case further through the media in the hope that the publicity might generate some new leads in a case that he sensed was in imminent danger of reaching a dead end. The randomness of the terrible crime and the likelihood that Stephanie had been killed by a complete stranger meant there was no link between her and her killer for detectives to uncover, no matter how hard they worked.
    The logistics of northern California’s second freeway roadblock—the first, some 30 miles northwest of Sacramento, had gone up a decade earlier to find the fugitive killers of two California highway patrolmen—had fallen to Biondi because Hood Franklin was in his county. He had tried to set it up in time for the one-week anniversary of the crime, but the stateroad department had balked. It would take days to move into the area the equipment and personnel required to pinch off the state’s major north-south arterial. The volume of traffic, even at that late hour, would be heavy.
    It was clear at midnight on July 29, and cooler than it had been the night Stephanie was killed. A stiff Delta breeze whipped the jackets of the nearly two dozen lawmen who had gathered.
    Bertocchini and Pete Rosenquist had shown up with several other San Joaquin detectives. From one of their cars they unloaded a large stainless steel urn filled with hot coffee brewed at their jail. As the road crews were finishing up, the first thing everyone else did, cops being cops, was to grab a cup.
    When theroadblock was finally activated, motorists were met with more than a mile of lighted cones and several large trailers with flashing arrows—enough wattage to light a major runway and bring in a 727. Beyond that, flashing red-and-blue police car lights winked angrily astride the broad freeway.
    Biondi was there with his crew of detectives. Standing on the hard, asphalt surface of southbound I-5’s right lane, he hoped very much that the drivers behind the line of headlights coming their way would obey the lights and temporary “One Lane Ahead,” “Merge Right,” and “Stop Ahead” signs. Normally, this was no place for anyone without a death wish to be loitering, flashlight and notebook in hand.
    Among the first to be stopped were a station wagon from Los Angeles packed with a family headed for an Oregon camping vacation, a semi out of Fresno loaded with tomatoes, and another 18-wheeler sagging with lumber. They kept coming, despite the lateness of the hour, at a clip of two to three vehicles a minute.
    “Do you travel this road regularly on Monday nights or Tuesday mornings?” drivers were asked. “Were you driving along here two weeks ago at this time?”
    If they answered no, they were motioned on, although not before their license numbers were noted.
    If they answered in the affirmative to either question, they were directed to a second area off to the shoulder of the highway where another group of detectives was waiting to question them more carefully.
    At one point, the CHP officers up the line began hollering and waving their flashlights.
    “Incoming!” someone yelled.
    A car containing two elderly ladies had whizzed through the mile of flashing lights and signs without slowing down at all. At the last possiblemoment, the driver noticed a truck stopped in front of her and slammed on the brakes. The brakes locked up, and the car skidded for the last 200 feet through the slow lane before coming to a stop,