Wayne Adam Ford, who has confessed to killing four women, told authorities he turned himself in so he wouldn't kill his ex-wife and leave his cherished son an orphan, the county coroner said Saturday.
"He said he was ashamed of what he was doing and his anger was mostly directed against his wife and he was getting more angry at her every day" for keeping him from seeing their son, Humboldt County Coroner Frank Jager Jr. said."And if he didn't do something, he would end up doing the same thing to her, and that worried him, because if something happened to her, his son would be an orphan," said Jager, who talked to Ford before he was arraigned Friday.
Ford, 36, a long-haul trucker from Arcata in northern California, was being held on $1 million bail in the slaying of an unidentified woman whose headless torso was found floating Oct. 26, 1997, in a channel outside Eureka. He is charged with one count of first-degree murder.
He has confessed to killing three other women he picked up and had sex with during his trucking trips. Their nude bodies were all dumped in waterways.
People who knew Ford have said he regularly complained that since his separation and divorce from his wife, he has been frustrated in his efforts to see their son, who turns 3 next month. Their divorce decree gave him limited visitation.
"He couldn't really give any reason" for killing the victims, Jager said. "He's got a lot of problems in his background in relationships with women, feelings of rejection, especially his wife. But he couldn't give any reason."
In a 3 1/2-hour interview with investigators just before his arraignment, Ford disclosed the location of the unidentified woman's head, which detectives hope to find Sunday or Monday. Jager said he was afraid the head may have washed out of the spot where it was buried.
Ford told them the head was buried in the channel of the Mad River, which runs near the travel trailer where Ford lived in Arcata for the past two years.
Jager said pathologists hope to use knife and saw marks on bones from five body parts Ford led them to at a campsite outside Trinidad on Wednesday to match them with the still-unidentified torso. They also will use DNA analysis to compare them.
Jager refused to say what body parts were found.
Ford had kept them in a freezer in his Airstream trailer in Arcata for the past year but hid them in a hole at the base of a tree just days before turning himself in to authorities, Jager said.
If the head is found, pathologists can compare it with dental records of missing persons on file from around the West, Jager said. They also could reconstruct what the victim looked like.
The burial of the head along the Mad River led investigators to believe that an arm found on Clam Beach north of Eureka may have come from the torso as well. The arm was sent to the FBI laboratory after it was found.
Ford told authorities the slayings happened during rough sex.
"One of the things I asked him was how many are there," Jager said. "He said three or four, he's not sure. He has a difficult time recalling times and dates and placing them in the right order."
Born in Petaluma, Ford served in the Marines and bounced around the West before moving with his wife and son to Las Vegas. Two years ago they broke up and he moved to Arcata, a town of about 16,000 nestled among the redwoods of northern California.
He first found work driving a cement truck for Arcata Readimix.
"There didn't seem to be anything too weird about him, which makes it all the more spookier," said fellow driver Mike Fletcher, who ate lunch with Ford each day.