Wayne Adam Ford: The Long-Haul Truck Driver Who Confessed To Being A Serial Killer
Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesWayne Adam Ford at trial in 2006.
On Nov. 3, 1998, a long-haul truck driver named Wayne Adam Ford walked into the sheriff’s office in Eureka, California. He had a Bible and a woman’s breast in a plastic bag and told the stunned investigators that he wanted to confess to several murders.
To those who knew him, Ford seemed like the furthest possible person from a serial killer. According to the Los Angeles Times, most saw him as “nice” and “quiet” and Ford even had a job in the early 1990s driving a school bus.
But between October 1997 and October 1998, this mild-mannered bus driver brutally murdered at least four women.
Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesFord was found guilty of four counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death.
As Ford told investigators during his confession, he strangled and dismembered a Jane Doe in October 1997, strangled a sex worker named Tina Renee Gibbs after they had sex in May 1998, murdered a mother of four named Lanett White in September 1998, and killed his final victim, Patricia Anne Tamez, in October 1998. Ford also cut off Tamez’s breasts.
According to Ford himself, his overwhelming anger toward his ex-wife triggered his murder spree. One detective even told the Los Angeles Times that Ford seemed remorseful about the murders he’d committed, saying in an interview, “I’m sorry these people got hurt. I didn’t mean to hurt anybody.”
Though he claimed to have killed only four women, it’s unknown how many lives Ford may have actually taken. Regardless, a jury found him guilty on four counts of first-degree murder in 2006 and sentenced him to death.
