Officer Matches Wits With Worst

James A. Sidebotham, chief investigator for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department in the Randy Kraft serial murder case, still hears from colleagues about Cody Schreiber.

Schreiber was suspected of killing his Mission Viejo roommate six years ago. During an interrogation that lasted nearly two hours, Schreiber told two investigators about burglars breaking in and killing the roommate. He talked and talked and talked. But he steadfastly denied killing anyone.

Sidebotham was monitoring the questioning from another room. When it ended, he talked briefly with Schreiber at a water cooler.

“You ready to give it up?” Sidebotham asked.

Schreiber looked at him.

Let’s talk, Schreiber said.

Grisly Details Given

Alone with Sidebotham, Schreiber confessed. Sometimes it helps just to let it all out, Sidebotham suggested.

So he did. Schreiber told in grisly detail, before a hidden video camera, how he decapitated his roommate and buried the body parts. Sidebotham later allowed Schreiber to be the director and star of his own videotape, re-creating the crime for investigators.

The videotaped confession and the video re-creation of the crime were key to the prosecution’s case against Schreiber who was convicted of first-degree murder.

“It takes a unique individual to get a cold-blooded killer to open up like that,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Bryan F. Brown, one of the prosecutors in the Kraft case and an unabashed admirer of the 52-year-old investigator. “Sidebotham is the kind of cop you would confess to. It’s like telling your grandfather.”

The rail-thin Sidebotham can manage a smile about the Schreiber story. But after 27 years in law enforcement, most of his stories are about the anguish of victims’ families, murders with no clues and the tedious task of going to court once a suspect is caught.

In the Kraft case, prosecutors wonder if Sidebotham hasn’t been forced to perform beyond the call of duty. He has been on the witness stand 18 days--and returns again today--in a pretrial search warrant hearing. No one in Orange County legal circles can recall a police officer testifying longer.

Kraft, accused of killing 37 young men between 1971 and 1983, is challenging the legality of the search of his car and three searches of his Long Beach home. Sidebotham led a team of investigators who seized several thousand items of evidence in those searches.

Kraft’s attorneys say Sidebotham overstepped his bounds.

“He just took whatever he damn well wanted to, without regard whether it was in the search warrant,” said attorney William J. Kopeny. “I’ve never seen a search of someone’s car or home more exhaustive than this.”

Prosecutor Brown has praised Sidebotham for the way he conducted the searches.

“There isn’t any other investigator we would rather have on that witness stand right now than Jim Sidebotham,” Brown said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. James P. Cloninger, who also is a prosecutor on the Kraft case, agrees. He calls Sidebotham “a walking encyclopedia of information about the unsolved murder cases in this county. We’re fortunate to have him.”

Sidebotham is nonchalant about the length of his testimony in the Kraft hearing. It’s just part of the job, he says.

“Regardless of whether he is convicted, this trial means a lot to a lot of families who have gone for years without any arrest made in their sons’ deaths,” Sidebotham said in a rare interview.

Sidebotham sums up detective work as “a lot of phone calls in the middle of the night, and a lot of cold hamburgers.”

For Sidebotham, the Kraft case began with a 2 a.m. telephone call to his south Orange County home on May 14, 1983. It’s the kind of call to which his wife, Carole, has grown accustomed.

Kraft had been arrested for a minor traffic violation by two CHP officers in Mission Viejo just an hour before. Though Sidebotham won’t discuss the details, his testimony during the past several weeks makes it clear that by sunrise on the day of the arrest he realized that he was investigating more than one murder. And by the end of the first day, he and his colleagues had begun an investigation that led to Oregon and Michigan and five other California counties.

Kraft is charged with 16 murders. But Orange County prosecutors have filed an additional 21 murder accusations against him, to be used in an attempt to ensure the death penalty if he is convicted.

Since the Kraft case began, Sidebotham has been promoted to sergeant, and he now oversees all Sheriff’s Department investigations. He could retire at any time. He said he once thought of retiring at age 56 but added, “We’ll see.”

He really hasn’t minded the phone calls and the cold hamburgers. There are rewards, he says.

“It just means so much when you can say to a family, ‘We just arrested a suspect in your son’s murder.’ ”

He recalls the Freeway Killer case, when William Bonin of Downey--now on Death Row--was convicted of 10 murders of young boys in Los Angeles County and four similar murders in Orange County.

“One victim’s mother called me every week for years, even before Bonin was arrested,” Sidebotham said. “You just can’t imagine the suffering these people go through.”

When 12-year-old Kelly Cartier was shot by Thomas Edwards six years ago, Sidebotham met with her at the hospital. Edwards had shot Cartier and her best friend, 12-year-old Vanessa Iberri, both of Lake Elsinore, at the Bluejay Campground in Cleveland National Forest. Iberri died instantly, but Cartier survived a bullet wound to the head.

When Cartier first had to testify against Edwards at his preliminary hearing, Sidebotham stayed by her side while she waited outside the courtroom for her turn on the witness stand.

“You tell yourself not to get emotionally involved in cases,” Sidebotham said. “But how can you not become emotional about a wonderful little girl who has gone through something like that?”

Kelly Cartier has had to testify against Edwards three times since then--at his trial and at two subsequent penalty trials. She has grown into a young woman of 18.

“It’s like watching your own daughter grow up,” said the investigator, who has three daughters.

But Sidebotham also remembers two other teen-age girls, found dead at Bolsa Chica State Beach in 1976. Despite thousands of hours of investigators’ time, their killer has never been found.

“You feel so helpless in cases like that,” Sidebotham said. “You think maybe you’ve come across something, and it doesn’t pan out so you start over again. That’s the part of the job that’s so hard to take.”

But there is the occasional Cody Schreiber case.

“Well, sometimes you get lucky,” Sidebotham said.