2 Slain Women, 2 Kidnaped Girls Found

FBI agents stormed a mobile home in South Lake Tahoe, freeing two teen-aged girls but finding the bodies of two older women who had accompanied the girls to what they thought would a filming session for an anti-drug video production.

The FBI said Herbert Coddington, 29, of South Lake Tahoe, was arrested Monday night at the mobile home on kidnaping and murder charges.

He is suspected of kidnaping Alecia Thoma, 14, and Monica Berge, 12, and killing Maybelle (Mabs) Martin, 69, owner of Showcase Finishing and Modeling School in Reno and her friend, Dorothy Walsh, 67, also from Reno.

The two women were found in bag-lined containers in a back bedroom of the mobile home. The girls were held in a small room that had been boarded up inside the mobile home, agents said.

FBI agents from Nevada and California and seven law enforcement agencies began an intensive search of the Tahoe-Reno area when Martin’s 1984 White Chrysler was found in a South Lake Tahoe shopping center parking lot Sunday.

Coddington was arrested without incident. “He didn’t have a chance to resist,” the agent told reporters.

According to Martin’s office, her students have included Linda Lee Mead, who was Miss America in 1960, and Donna Douglas, who played Elly Mae Clampett in the “Beverly Hillbillies” television series.