Dead And Buried: A True Story Of Serial Rape And Murder. Corey Mitchell
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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.
TWELVE
March 17, 1999
Davis Canyon Road, Davis Canyon, California
Noon
David Zaragoza skipped his usual workout regimen at the gym. Instead, he hopped into his Jeep Cherokee and hurriedly made his way to Davis Canyon. The beautiful canyon area is home to lush vegetation and beautiful, sprawling mountains covered in towering green trees. Inside the canyon are numerousfruit and vegetable farms and vineyards. Mixed among the vast farming areas are beautiful multimillion-dollarhomes that belong to the wealthy vintners. Among the gorgeous mansions sit several weathered houses and old trailer homes festooned with television satellite dishes.
From the south, one enters Davis Canyon via See Canyon Road, a well-paved road with a few twists and turns, but nothingtoo treacherous. Rex Krebs lived in this general area. To get to his house, Zaragoza had to drive a mile-and-a-half on See Canyon Road before he made a left onto Davis Canyon Road. This road was the reason why Zaragoza had the Krebs case in the first place.
Krebs lived in a rental home, owned by Muriel Wright, almosttwo miles in from See Canyon Road. Not a far distance until you actually used Davis Canyon Road, which is rocky, narrow, and skirts alongside some precarious drops over the edge. The two-tire track pathway is barely accessible by any vehicle other than a four-wheel drive. Zaragoza’s Jeep Cherokeewas more than sufficient.
Zaragoza was familiar with the path to Krebs’s house. He had been there several times for routine parole visits. He believedKrebs was a decent enough fellow. After all, he was only thirty-three years old and had lived a rough life, in and out of reform schools, jails, and prisons for almost half his life. Zaragoza hoped that Krebs was getting his life back on track—job, girlfriend, nice secluded home. He hoped Krebs had kept his nose clean.
Zaragoza made his way up the winding dirt road. He passed only a few homes that were located nearly a half mile apart from one another. It was not unusual for the neighbors to not see one another for six months. Most of the Davis Canyon inhabitants liked their privacy and tended not to mingle.Zaragoza sensed that was why Krebs lived here.
No one would bother him.
He looked up and saw the familiar landmark that let him know he was almost to Krebs’s residence. It was the beat-up wooden A-frame house, with its broken windows and menacingexterior, just off the road. It always spooked him, out in the middle of nowhere. He drove around the corner past the A-frame. The grass seemed to grow higher on either side of his Jeep Cherokee. This signaled the end of the road for him. Within fifty yards he saw the mailbox.
He was here.
Zaragoza kept the engine running; however, he depressed the brakes. He took a deep breath, glanced up at his rearview mirror and could not see his eyes behind his dark wraparound sunglasses.
That was just how he wanted it.
Zaragoza took another deep breath and placed his foot on the gas. He entered the long dirt driveway to the right and watched as the trees scraped the sides of his Jeep Cherokee—“Texas pinstripes.” The driveway was about fifty feet long and descended past a small pond to the east. Just beyond the pond was a midsize royal blue wooden barn with white trim. It seemed large enough to house a couple of midsizeCadillacs. Zaragoza reached the bottom of the driveway. As he looked to his left, he saw