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    Letters from a Serial Killer
    Letters from a Serial Killer
    Letters from a Serial Killer
    Ebook111 pages1 hour

    Letters from a Serial Killer

    By Stephanie Kahalekulu and Kristi Belcamino

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    About this ebook

    "Heartbreaking and horrifying, Letters From a Serial Killer delves into the thinking of a monstrous murderer - but it also reveals the brave struggles of the women who faced him in order to find justice for his victims. It's a powerfully emotional true account that simply must be read." - Claire Booth, author of true crime book, The False Prophet'

     

    "An unflinching look at the mind of a notorious Northern California predator who shattered young lives - and invaded the psyche of the reporter who dared to confront him.Together with an anguished victim's mother, Kristi Belcamino fought for answers, at great personal and professional peril. Letters from a Serial Killer is required reading for the armchair criminal profiler. But be forewarned: this book is not for the meek."- Henry K. Lee, author of Presumed Dead: A True-Life Murder Mystery

     

    On a December morning, 7-year-old Xiana Fairchild left her apartment in downtown Vallejo to head to the school bus stop and was never seen alive again.In Letters from a Serial Killer, Kristi Belcamino and Stephanie Kahalekulu share details of their jailhouse conversations with the man who kidnapped and killed Xiana, the letters he sent from behind bars and how they are forever bonded by their dealings with a monster, but more than that—by their quest for justice for Xiana.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStephanie Kahalekulu
    Release dateOct 25, 2021
    ISBN9798201927615
    Letters from a Serial Killer

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      Book preview

      Letters from a Serial Killer - Stephanie Kahalekulu

      Chapter 1

      Obsession

      In 1999, when I was a full time reporter, covering the cops beat for the Contra Costa Times newspaper was my life.

      It was my passion. And my obsession.

      When I wasn’t at work I was at my Oakland studio apartment reading about crime reporting and studying how the masters—such as Pulitzer-prize winning Miami Herald reporter Edna Buchanan—did it.

      Stories on the cops beat are fascinating. Truth is always stranger than fiction. I couldn’t possibly have made up the real life craziness I saw as a crime reporter. The adrenaline rush of listening to the police scanner and rushing out to cover car crashes, stabbings and brush fires is probably what motivates other people to become police officers or fire fighters.

      No other beat has ever interested me in the least.

      From the beginning of my reporting career, I knew I wanted to cover crime. In 1995 during my first newspaper job at a small chain of newspapers in White Bear Lake, Minn., a big story, a heartbreaking story, broke on my beat. A young woman from the town I covered was kidnapped off a Texas military base. Traci McBride, a nineteen-year-old Army private, had been on a base payphone talking to someone back home when the line went dead.

      I met her family and later grieved when her body was found. The emotional weight and gravity of reporting and writing about something so tragic did not escape me. I realized that writing these stories that other reporters shied away from was a sacred duty and that it was my job to write about tragedy in a way that did the victims justice.

      The next time I looked into a pair of distraught, grief-stricken eyes they belonged to the parents of a girl also taken from a military base. Thirteen-year-old Christina Williams was grabbed while walking her dog at the partly decommissioned Fort Ord. Her body was found seven months later on an abandoned part of the base.

      Then I met parents who had been living with their children missing for years, sometimes decades. There was a different look in these parent’s eyes. The most awful look yet. Instead of shell shock and despair, their eyes contained a hollow grief, a lackluster dullness, a weariness and pain that had worn them down to a mere shell of a person. And, how could it have not?

      So, on that December 1999 day when I found out a child was missing on my beat, I knew the routine. I also expected the worst.

      Chapter 2

      H i, FBI.

      I wish I could remember the moment I learned that Xiana Fairchild was missing, the moment her disappearance crossed my desk in the newsroom, some twenty miles south of Vallejo in Walnut Creek. We didn’t cover a lot of what went on in Vallejo. Only big stories.

      Of course, a missing little girl was a huge story.

      But I can’t remember what I thought that day. What did the editor say? What did I think? I do know that I had no idea that after writing hundreds of news stories—several about kids kidnapped and killed—that this one little girl’s disappearance and horrific death would change my life and that her face and her story would still haunt me sixteen years later.

      The first big story I wrote about Xiana ran four days after she disappeared. It was an interview with Robinson and Turnbough.

      By then, police had already received 125 calls into their tip line. The reward fund had grown to $10,000. Within hours of her disappearance, bloodhounds were searching the area. Searchers scoured the waterfront and divers took to the waters of the Mare Island Strait.

      The community response was powerful and swift with dozens of people volunteering to help find Xiana. A volunteer center was quickly set up in an empty store at a strip mall. Hundreds of people swarmed the volunteer search center, grabbing flyers to pass out, making yellow ribbons and staffing phone lines.

      In addition to the divers and bloodhounds, search efforts those first few days included 150 trained search-and-rescue personnel, dozens of volunteers, and more than thirty investigators from the police department and FBI.

      Within a few days, however, police said their search efforts had been exhaustive and without new leads, they had no more places to look.

      Police stopped holding daily press conferences. I needed to find something newsworthy to keep the story alive in the paper.

      In many missing children cases, keeping it in the newspaper puts additional pressure on investigators to solve the case. Although in Xiana’s case I believe police were so passionate that they didn’t need public pressure to keep the investigation thriving, it still helped to keep the story fresh in the public’s eye.

      I’d been scrambling for a break on the story. It was my job and it was also the best way to help bring her home. To keep the story in print, I knew I needed to speak to Xiana’s mother.

      I’d left dozens of phone messages and stuck numerous business cards in the doorjamb at the Georgia Street apartment. Finally, Robinson called me back. And agreed to meet.

      In person, thirty-year-old Robinson was a slightly heavyset woman with long, bleached reddish frizzy hair, glasses, and acne-scarred skin. Her long nails were painted purple and she wore sweatpants.

      During my interview at a plastic table on the sidewalk in front of the Booklover’s Haven coffee shop in Vallejo, Robinson and the thirty-three-year-old Turnbough smoked Marlboro cigarettes, ate cookies, drank coffee and talked about Xiana. All the while they periodically waved at a man circling the block in a gray car they were convinced was an FBI agent keeping tabs on them. Every once in a while, Robinson would wave and say, Hi, FBI.

      The couple told me about their lives since Xiana, whom they called Nana, had disappeared. They said they’d cried a lot and slept little, taken lie-detector tests, had their car confiscated by police, and been stalked by reporters and FBI agents.

      Robinson told me that reporters not only called them constantly (which I was guilty of doing), but one had even propped a ladder outside their apartment window in an attempt to peer inside their apartment.

      The couple said the FBI gave them a large white van to drive until investigators were done examining their vehicle. Robinson said the van was bugged and probably had a tracking device.

      This is what they told me about the night before Xiana

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