AUTOPSY: ‘I-5 STRANGLER’ STRANGLED IN PRISON

A California serial killer who authorities say strangled and raped at least seven women was fatally choked himself in a state prison, officials said.

Roger Reece Kibbe, 81, known as the “I-5 Strangler” in the 1970s and 1980s, was spotted unresponsive Feb. 28 in his cell at Mule Creek State Prison southeast of Sacramento — his 40-year-old cellmate standing nearby.

An autopsy showed Kibbe had been manually strangled, the Amador County Sheriff ’s Office said Wednesday, calling the death a homicide.

No charges have been filed in the death of Kibbe, a former suburban Sacramento furniture maker whose brother was a law enforcement officer.

He was initially convicted in 1991 of strangling Darcine Frackenpohl, a 17-year-old who had run away from her home in Seattle. Her nearly nude body was found west of South Lake Tahoe below

Echo Summit in September 1987.

Investigators said then that they suspected him in other similar slayings.

But it wasn’t until 2009 that a San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office investigator used new developments in evidence to connect him to six additional slayings in multiple Northern California counties, with several victims found alongside Interstate 5 or other highways in 1986. Kibbe was serving multiple life terms for the slayings when he was killed.