Читать книгу Dead And Buried: A True Story Of Serial Rape And Murder - Corey Mitchell - Страница 20

ELEVEN

March 16, 1999

Pismo Beach Athletic Club, Pismo Beach, California

Morning

David Zaragoza jumped on his favorite Lifecycle exercise machine as he did every weekday. He picked up the San Luis Obispo Tribune and scanned the cover of the front section. Staring back at him was the winsome face of the missing Cuesta College student, Aundria Crawford. As Zaragoza pumped away on the Lifecycle, he read the story of how Captain Topham suspected a break-in at her apartment, only ten blocks from downtown San Luis Obispo. Topham also mentioned that he believed Aundria might have been abducted.While Zaragoza’s sweat beaded into his eyes, one person’s face popped into his head. Bizarre stories swirled around in his brain. Something bothered him, but he could not pinpoint it.

Twenty minutes later, gleaming with sweat, Zaragoza dismountedfrom the exercise machine. He grabbed a towel, wiped his forehead, and took a swig from his water bottle. The routine did not relax him as it usually did. Instead, he was irritable. The Aundria Crawford story nagged at him incessantlyand left him unfocused.

He took another swig from his water bottle. Suddenly he realized what was bothering him. He grabbed his gear and newspaper and bolted out the door.

David Zaragoza was a parole officer in San Luis Obispo County. The thirty-seven-year-old family man grew up in Northern California. His father ran a farm, where Zaragoza worked as a kid, but David had bigger dreams for himself. He attended Cal Poly in the early 1980s. He kept his interests in the family line, but he wanted to run a plethora of farms. He was eager to achieve this goal when he signed up for courses and received his degree in agricultural business. Upon graduationZaragoza found the job market to be almost nonexistent, so he applied for a job in the California penal system. He assumed he might find a job in the field of corrections.

Zaragoza began his run with the California penal system in January 1989. He started out as a state prison guard for three years before he received a promotion to correctional counselor at California Men’s Colony East in San Luis Obispo.

By April 1992 he advanced yet again to the position of paroleagent, but he went back to being a prison counselor from November 1992 to November 1993. He then returned to his parole position in San Luis Obispo.

By 1999 David Zaragoza was a seasoned parole officer and his specialty was sex offenders. And there were plenty of them in his region.

San Luis Obispo, despite its beauty and small-town mentality,is located in a potentially volatile portion of the state of California. It is located within 140 miles of eleven security prisons. One of the most notorious facilities in the country, the California Men’s Colony (CMC), is located within one mile of Cuesta College and five miles from Cal Poly. CMC has housed numerous high-profile criminals within its walls, including the serial-killing duo of Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, who met there in the late 1970s and, upon their release,terrorized Southern California by kidnapping, torturing, and murdering teenage girls.

Some of the other ten prisons include the California State prison—Corcoran. It is home to notorious 1960s cult figure Charles Manson, the leader of the Manson Family, which killed at least seven Los Angelinos in 1969 including eight-and-a-half-monthpregnant B-movie actress Sharon Tate; Robert Kennedy’s assassin Sirhan B. Sirhan; and Juan Corona, a migrant farm worker who killed and buried twenty-fivepeople in Yuba City, California.

The other prisons nearby include the Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla, the Central California Women’s Facility, the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison located in Corcoran, the North Kern State Prison, the Wasco State Prison, the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi, the Correctional Training Facility of Soledad, the Salinas Valley State Prison, the Pleasant Valley State Prison, and Avenal State Prison.

In addition to the multitude of correctional facilities, San Luis Obispo County also houses one of the state of California’slargest mental hospitals for criminals, Atascadero State Hospital. Before he went to prison, the aforementioned serial killer Roy Norris spent five years there after he raped and assaultedtwo women in San Diego. Atascadero doctors declared him “no further harm to others.” Three months later, he raped a young woman from Redondo Beach. Norris ended up in CMC, where he met Lawrence Bittaker.

One of the misnomers of California is that it is a mecca for violent crime, especially rape. While it is true that the total numbers of rapes are high, the percentage of violent, forcible rapes of individuals is one of the better percentages in the United States. According to the U.S. Crime Index Rates, in the year 2000, there were 90,186 reported forcible rapes in the country. Of that total, 9,785 occurred in the state of California.That same year the state’s population reached almost 34 million; therefore, the rate of occurrence of a forcible rape in California in 2000 was 28.9 out of every 100,000 people. This placed California as the thirty-first best state in the Union. The nationwide average recorded that year stood at 32 per 100,000 people.

Despite these surprising numbers, the individuals who committed these crimes are some of the most notorious in our country.

David Zaragoza’s parole beat included some of these notoriouscriminal sex offenders. At the time of Aundria Crawford’s disappearance, his roster consisted of more than one hundred of California’s most reviled offenders.

As he chewed over the Crawford information, one parolee’s name sprang to mind: Rex Krebs.

Krebs, a prison parolee, lived deep in the woods of Davis Canyon, near Avila Beach, just south of San Luis Obispo. Zaragoza had been assigned the Krebs case back in 1997 after he was released from Soledad State Prison. Krebs had been incarcerated for rape charges in two cases that occurred ten years earlier in nearby Arroyo Grande and Oceano. Zaragoza remembered that the Krebs attacks involved break-insof women’s residences. There was a ring of familiarity to his modus operandi.

Zaragoza decided to pay Krebs a visit.