Killer spared execution, killed in prison
SACRAMENTO >> A California serial killer known as the “I-5 Strangler” in the 1970s and 1980s has been killed in the prison where he was serving multiple life sentences, state correctional officials said Monday.
A correctional officer doing rounds spotted Roger Reece Kibbe, 81, unresponsive in his cell at Mule Creek State Prison southeast of Sacramento shortly after midnight Sunday, officials said.
His cellmate was standing nearby, officials said. Kibbe was taken to a prison health care facility but was pronounced dead less than 45 minutes later. Amador County’s chief coroner, sheriff’s Sgt. P. Weart, said he couldn’t give details on the death, citing the ongoing investigation.
Kibbe, a former suburban Sacramento furniture maker whose brother was a
law enforcement officer, was initially convicted in 1991 of strangling 17-year-old Darcine Frackenpohl, who had run away from her home in Seattle.
Her nearly nude body was found by a jogger west of South Lake Tahoe below
Echo Summit in September 1987, two to three weeks after she was killed. Her pink dress was discovered about 1,000 feet from the body.
Investigators at the time said Kibbe was also a suspect in six other murders believed linked to the “I-5 Strangler,” whose trademark was cutting his victims’ clothing in odd patterns. Several took place in the Sacramento and Stockton areas along Interstate 5.
Prosecutors then were unable to file charges in those cases, and he was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for Frackenpohl’s death.
That changed in 2009, when a San Joaquin District Attorney’s Office investigator used new developments in evidence to connect him to the old slayings.
Kibbe pleaded guilty in San Joaquin County to six new counts of murder in Amador, Contra Costa, Napa, Sacramento, San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties.