Sip Of Sins

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In Wichita Falls, Texas, police had four unsolved murders, the worst crime spree in the small town's history.

For more than a decade, the killer successfully eluded police.

But a discarded coffee cup in a trash bin solved the mystery.

On January 19, 1985, Tony Gibbs, a 23-year-old nurse, disappeared after working the night shift at Wichita General Hospital.

Her car was found abandoned on a deserted road not far from the hospital.

There were no foreign fingerprints or clues inside.

The roller coaster of emotions that you go through is just unbelievable.

It's like a horrible dream that doesn't go away.

Four weeks weeks later, a Texas electric worker found Tony's body in a deserted field outside of town along U.S.

Route 281.

100 feet away was an old bus.

Inside was blood, which matched Tony Gibbs.

It appeared she had been stabbed in the bus, then crawled out into the field looking for help.

Until this terrible thing happened, she had the world by the tail.

She really did.

Almost immediately, police had a suspect.

24-year-old Danny Laughlin was seen riding his motorcycle in a field near where Tony's body was found.

Laughlin worked in town as a male stripper.

When asked to take a polygraph test, he failed.

Investigators also learned that Laughlin knew Tony Gibbs.

He had met her a few weeks earlier at a local nightclub.

And then he made some comments about knowing

where the field was at, where she was found.

Semen collected at Tony's autopsy was compared to Laughlin's DNA.

The results were inconclusive.

Nevertheless, Danny Laughlin was charged with Tony Gibbs' murder.

With no forensic evidence linking Laughlin to the crime, prosecutors presented their circumstantial case against him during the trial.

After two days of deliberation, the jury was deadlocked.

It could not reach a verdict on guilt-innocence, and so a mistrial was declared, and he was subsequently dismissed.

Since only one of the 12 jurors believed Laughlin was guilty, prosecutors decided not to retry the case.

16 months later, there was another murder.

This time, a 21-year-old waitress, Tina Kimbrew.

She was just everything a daughter is supposed to be.

You know, a tomboy today and a

debutante tonight, you know, just

perfect.

Tina was found dead on the sofa in her apartment.

At the autopsy, tiny fibers were discovered in her lungs, an indication she had been suffocated.

Those fibers matched a pillow from her sofa.

In this case, there were no signs of sexual assault.

Neighbors in the apartment complex said they saw a man leaving Tina's apartment about five hours before her body was discovered.

The man was described as Caucasian, six feet two inches tall, with dark hair, wearing a baseball cap.

Danny Laughlin was not a suspect in this case since he didn't match the description.

But a few days later, police got their first break.

A man in Galveston, Texas, Farron Wardrip, called police to say he had some important information about Tina Kimbrew's murder.

But what did Wardrip know about a murder that took place over 400 miles away?

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Shortly after Tina Kimbrew's murder, Farron Wardrip, 400 miles away in Galveston, Texas, called police with some information.

Wardrip was a high school dropout who worked at menial jobs and had a history of drug and alcohol abuse.

He claimed to have met Tina Kimbrew in a bar where she worked.

Tina Kimbrew really was my friend.

She knew I had a drug problem, and she knew I had a lot of other things because I, you know, shared that with her.

Wardrip admitted he killed Tina.

The reason?

Tina reminded him of his ex-wife, who ended their marriage shortly before the murder.

When the rage and all the violence was occurring, I saw her eyes, I saw her face,

I screamed how much I hated her.

Police believe that Wardrip confessed because he knew he was spotted leaving the apartment and feared it was only a matter of time before he was caught.

In any event, Ferron Wardrip pleaded guilty to Tina Kimbrew's murder and was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

When I was in prison, and I got off drugs and alcohol and got some clear thinking going on and some of my emotions had subsided.

That's when I started making the decisions that I was going to come out better than I went in.

While in prison, Wardrip obtained his high school diploma and discovered Christianity.

Tina's father believed that Wardrip would spend all of 35 years in prison, but he was wrong.

In 13 months, they notified me that he's up for parole.

And it just, you you know, it just scared me to death.

I mean, it just,

and in my mind, he was going to get out.

For 10 years, Robert Kimbrew used every means at his disposal to ensure that Farron Wardrip remained behind bars.

But despite the wishes of Tina's family, Wardrip was released on parole after serving only 11 years of a 35-year sentence.

Wardrip went to live in Alney, Texas, a small farming community just outside of Fort Worth.

There, Wardrip had the support of his mother, father, and eight siblings.

He got a job at the Alney Door and Screen Company and vowed to start his life over.

Very nice man, a fine, upstanding man.

I'd have trusted him with my kids.

I still would.

I still have that much respect for him.

Wardrip was an active member of the Hamilton Street Church of Christ, where where he taught Sunday school.

He also remarried.

Back in Wichita Falls, District Attorney Barry Maka had other concerns.

There were a number of unsolved murders in his jurisdiction.

Still unsolved was the murder of Tony Gibbs, and there were two other unsolved murders.

A year before Tony Gibbs' murder, another nurse, 21-year-old Terry Sims, had just returned home from work when someone knocked on her front door

and forced his way inside.

She's trying to ward off the knife that he's wielding, and

she is fighting so hard, so ferociously for her life that he ties, he cuts a cord and ties her hands behind her back.

Terry Sims was sexually assaulted, then stabbed to death.

On Terry Sim's shoe was a bloody fingerprint, and the semen sample was preserved for future DNA testing.

There had been a few suspects in the murder, but nothing definitive.

And a year later, tragedy struck 21-year-old Ellen Blau as she walked to her car around midnight after leaving work at the Subs and Suds restaurant.

At that point, he just bullrushed her, hit her, knocked her, pushed her back into the car.

Ellen was forced to drive to a deserted field on the outskirts of town, where she was strangled.

Her body was left on a grassy embankment.

The assailant drove her car back to town and left it on a dark street.

Ellen's body was found days later, so badly decomposed by the heat, she could be identified only through dental records.

It was impossible to determine whether she had been raped.

For 14 years,

these three murders had gone unsolved.

So Barry Maca asked his lead investigator, John Little, to take a fresh look at these cold cases.

For Little,

finding the killer was personal.

I knew Tony Gibbs.

My wife knew Tony Gibbs.

And I actually went out with my brother and helped search for her.

On a hunch, Maca asked the forensics lab to compare the DNA of the semen recovered from Tony Gibbs and Terry Sims.

We received word that they were in fact the semen from the same perpetrator.

And so we knew then

that

we had a serial murderer.

No one made this connection because these three cases had been investigated by three different law enforcement agencies with little communication between them.

At least now, John Little knew he was looking for only one killer.

But after 11 years, he knew it wouldn't be easy.

When John Little looked through the case files of the three unsolved murders in Wichita Falls, Texas, he made an interesting discovery.

When Ferron Wardrip was in custody for Tina Kimbrew's murder, a policeman asked him if he knew Ellen Blau, who had been murdered just a few months earlier.

Wardrip said yes.

But that lead was never pursued.

They could have come up with a suspect,

as me being a suspect, if they would have just, I don't know, maybe paid him a little bit more attention.

And Little found more evidence linking Wardrift.

Ellen Blau's best friend, Janie Ball, lived just down the hall from Wardrift, and the coincidences didn't stop there.

Miss Ball was a block down from where Terry Sims was killed on Bell Street.

So, I mean, when I saw that in the file and knowing there was two different agencies investigating this and knowing that they probably didn't put it together, well, it really snapped together for me at that point.

Little also learned that Wardrop was a janitor at the same hospital as Tony Gibbs at the time of her murder.

That made a connection to her.

He'd worked with her, now she's another victim.

But her car was abandoned in the same neighborhood where Wardrop lived.

So he decided to go to Olney, Texas, hoping to collect Wardrop's DNA, since police had semen from the murders.

Wardrop had been living there since his release from prison in 1996.

Little spent weeks staking out the factory where Wardrop worked, hoping to collect anything that would reveal his DNA profile.

If we were to get a sample from Mr.

Wardrop, I wanted it to be a situation where he did, in fact, abandon any interest in the item so that there wouldn't be any search and seizure problems.

From across the street, Little watched as Wardrip took a coffee break after working a forklift.

We set the cup up on top of the car.

I mean, at that point, I had to hold myself back from just running across the street and snatching it.

Little noticed that Wardrip threw his paper cup into a nearby trash barrel.

Little seized the opportunity.

I walked up to him and I did have a big wad of tobacco in my mouth and I said, do you have a spit cup or something?

And he pointed over to the trash barrel and he said, sure, help yourself.

Little looked into the barrel and saw not one used coffee cup, but many.

Not knowing which one was Wardrip's cup, Little had to act fast.

It seemed like an eternity looking into it.

He was standing right over my shoulder.

There was still some coffee in the bottom of this cup.

And it had cheesecracker crumbs on the drinking rim.

And I'd seen him eating the cheese crackers, and I said, this has got to be the cup.

The cup was immediately sent to the forensic lab for DNA testing.

Manager Judy Floyd examined the cup for skin cells.

She noticed the cracker crumbs were still on the cup and felt sure she could retrieve DNA.

I swabbed the cup with a sterile cotton swab in order to pick up epithelial cells and then it was this swab that I actually used for the extraction of DNA.

Floyd then compared the DNA from the coffee cup to the DNA from the semen collected from two of the victims, Terry Sims and Tony Gibbs.

When I observed the complete profile that I had obtained from the cells from the cup that Mr.

Wardrop had used, I could see that his profile was an exact match to the profiles from the crime scene.

To find out how often this DNA profile would occur in the general population, Judy Floyd performed what is called a DQ-alpha test, which is a particular location on chromosome number six.

Judy Floyd discovered Wardrop's DQ-alpha type was extremely rare.

This particular typing was rare enough that, combined with all of the other genetic types in his profile, that particular profile would be expected to occur only once in the world's population.

Meanwhile, the Austin, Texas Crime Lab was able to lift the bloody print on Terry Sim's shoe and compare it to Wardrip's fingerprints.

It was so far down on the third digit, almost into the palm, that

unless you could really just sit there and work with it to get the print and know where it was at,

you could take a set of prints and miss it every time.

But it was clearly Wardrip's print.

And I think it was a powerful piece of evidence.

He had ripped those shoes off of her.

and had blood on his hands when he grabbed her shoes to pull them off.

Ferron Wardrip was arrested and during questioning revealed one last piece of information that police knew nothing about.

After 15 long years, The families of Terry Sims, Tony Gibbs, and Ellen Blau were within inches of justice when Ferron Wardrip was arrested for their murders.

And when he was confronted with the DNA evidence, he confessed.

I don't think I've ever sat in a room with somebody who could have been colder.

Wardrip didn't realize he was sitting next to the man who trapped him.

I asked him if he recognized me when...

when I was from being down there getting the cup, and he claims he didn't.

As the interrogation was about to end, Wardrip confessed to a fifth murder.

Two months after Tony Gibbs' murder, Farron Wardrip told police he left Wichita Falls and went to Fort Worth, Texas.

He met Deborah Taylor, a wife and mother of two in a neighborhood bar.

Deborah had been there with her husband, but he was tired and had left the bar a few hours earlier.

Wardrip asked her to dance, then offered to drive her home.

In the parking lot, when Deborah refused his advances, he killed her.

Wardrip dumped Taylor's body at a remote construction site.

Workers found it one week later.

Deborah's husband, Ken, remained a suspect for 14 years, although he was never charged.

I think Mr.

Wardrop should be very glad

that these guys got him before I did.

The new DNA testing also had another benefit.

It exonerated Danny Laughlin, who had been tried for Tony Gibbs' murder, but not convicted.

Unfortunately, he didn't live long enough to hear about it.

He was killed three years earlier in an automobile accident.

On October 4th, 1999,

nearly 15 years after he committed these crimes, Ferron Wardrip pled guilty to murder and was sentenced to death by lethal injection.

I never once thought I got away with it.

I knew that I had left evidence behind.

Detectives looked at all the evidence that was collected, all the interviews and stuff, and of course, my name was there in 1986, just like it was in 1999.

And why those individuals didn't recognize that is still confusing to me this day.

I really was a serial killer.

Mistakes were made, but the one that was not made was to quit or give up.

We never did that.