The Tampa Tribune from Tampa, Florida • 9

9-A Billy Mansfield. THE TAMPA TRIBUNE-TIMES, Sunday. April 12. 1981 1 I Billy disappeared from the mushroom plant 15 minutes later, Luna said. He didn't bother clock out.

That same morning, Gary loaded all the brothers' personal belongings into garbage bags threw them into the white van with a Flor-, ida license plate. A friend of Gary's recalled asking Gary, "Why are you doing this?" "I've got to take care of my brother," Gary was said to reply. "I don't think he can take care of himself." 7 The Mansfield brothers were picked up Winnemucca at 2 a.m. the following day. officers, who stopped the van with guns drawn, described Billy Mansfield as calm and business-' like, like he knew the drill.

Billy was charged with Saling's Gary with being an accessory after the fact. Among the items found in the cluttered van were a police scanner, a "hangman's noose," a pump shotgun and green stuff be- lieved to be marijuana, investigators said. The Toronado, which had broken down, was later found abandoned in Sacramento. A thread of evidence. That's what Jon Hopkins, the prosecuting attorney, asked his investigators to find.

-And, he said, they did. 4 It was one aquamarine cotton thread, lieved to have come from Saling's shirt. Hopkins, said the thread was lying on a pair of pants in the van. Nevertheless, the case is mostly circumstantial, he said. The prosecution is still compiling evidence, but so far, Hopkins said, "The strongest piece is that thread." In Santa Cruz, Billy and Gary Mansfield are known as the "grocery bag brothers" because -they wore paper bags over their heads at their first appearance in court.

The District Attorney's office wanted the brothers to wear bags so potential witnesses wouldn't be preju diced before seeing photo lineups. The death of Rene Saling has been devastat-, ing for her family, who remember a devoted mother, an excellent cook, a piano player, pOet. Saling had three sons. When she died, the oldest boy was the youngest was 3 months old. She was a beautiful woman, Marta Osborne, 19, Saling's half sister, said.

"She was the type of girl you'd look at and say, 'Wow, I wish, I looked like i Jean Bates, 25, looks strikingly like Saling. This is how she recalls Billy Mansfield's reaction when she saw him in court: He stared at her. He lowered his eyes. Billy and Gary exchanged a few imperceptible words. Then, they laughed at Rene Saling's sisters.

It is small, and it stands next to a barber shop. Patricia Schindler, a 25-year-old divorcee who cooks at the Beach Street Cafe in Watsonville, goes to the Wooden Nickel occasionally. She did Dec. 6, 1980, and she will never forget that night. On a day off from work four months later, Schindler and her 4-year-old daughter had lunch with a reporter at the Wooden Nickel.

The daughter drank a Shirley Temple. Patricia Schindler talked about Billy Mansfield and the night of Rene Saling's murder. "That body could've been me," she thought aloud. Schindler said Billy would come- into the Beach Street Cafe for breakfast and ask her out. She turned him down three times, she said.

But that night, Billy was at the Wooden Nickel Too, and he was coming on strong. He kissed and embraced her. It made her uncomfortable. He had a drink and talked with her, but she hardly remembers what they talked about, except that he asked her to go to Colorado with him. Schindler, ordinarily gregarious, was nervous and wanted to be left alone.

She was afraid of him. "I just picked up these bad vibes," she said. "I just didn't like him. I felt something wasn't right. I like people, and those blue eyes of his but something inside just said, 'Don't go with When Schindler showed him no interest, he turned to her friend, Kim Powell, 19.

She, too, was turned off by Billy Mansfield. At the preliminary court hearing in February, Schindler testified that Saling appeared briefly at the bar about 11 p.m. She watched Saling because she looked familiar. Schindler realized she had gone to school with Saling's sister, Jean Bates. Family members said Saling went to the bar that night looking for her husband, Raymond Saling, a 25-year-old truckdriver, because the two had one of their frequent quarrels that night.

Schindler testified that Saling, whom she described as "pretty wasted," was taken Into the' kitchen by the bar owner and evidently asked to leave. She said she saw Saling walk out the door with Billy Mansfield behind her. "It's 11:00, and already he's scored," she remembers saying sarcastically to Powell. Family members said Saling had no driver's license; she had stopped driving after a harrowing experience in which the brakes of a car went out on her. They believe she would have accepted a ride from a stranger.

"I'm sure that's what it was," Raymond Saling said. "A lot of girls don't know how crazy people are." And Jean Bates, 25, said she used to warn, her older sister about accepting rides from people she didn't know. Or, Bates said, Saling may have taken a ride to make her husband jealous. But Saling's family believes she would have strenuously resisted a sexual attack. "I told her," Jean Bates said softly, shuddering at the irony, "that she would end up in a ditch one day." 4 A bar isn't the easiest place to cull witnesses for a murder trial.

People drink. They lose track of time. Strangers resemble other strangers. And Billy Mansfield's attorney is expected to produce witnesses who will say they saw Saling leave with a man who bore no resemblance to Billy. But Louie Luna, a stocky, 27-year-old Mexican who grows mushrooms, told investigators he saw a woman fitting Saling's description leave the bar late that night and head toward the parking lot with Billy.

He said Billy came back inside shortly and asked Luna if he wanted to meet "a chick." Luna, who knew Billy from the mushroom farm, said he asked where she was, and Billy said, "I got her in my car" and gave Luna the keys. He said Billy told him, "Whatever you do, don't let her out. Keep her locked up." Luna said he thought that was odd. Standing in the middle of the mushroom plant on a chilly April morning, he told a reporter he had heard of Billy's arrest in November on the Hernando County warrant for battery and false imprisonment. So he was worried about the woman Billy wanted kept locked in his car.

Luna told investigators that he went out to the car, a white-over-green Oldsmobile Torona- to California with Maureen, Gary's wife Liz and her three young children. They settled at the KOA campground in Watsonville, a drab city 14 miles southeast of Santa Cruz. They lived in an orange A-frame tent and a 12-foot trailer. Billy got a job as a maintenance man at Miranda Mushrooms, a farm in nearby Monterey County. At work he was known as Tim Mansfield (one of at least a half dozen aliases he used), and the residence he listed on his job application, it turns out, was the Crestview Shopping Center.

Gary, calling himself. Joe, went to work as an electrician for Genie Electric in Watsonville. Santa Cruz is a sprawling county with scenic bluffs overlooking the Pacific. In some ways, it is similar to Hernando County: the industrial mainstays are tourism and agriculture. Estimated population: 200,000.

Why did the Mansfield brothers pick Santa Cruz? An inspector with the Santa Cruz County District Attorney's office figured they wanted to live in a small town; an electrician who knew Gary thought the Mansfields had run out of money. "They were just jumping from town to town, city to city," he surmised. The Mansfield brothers jumped again, and quickly, once word of Rene Saling's death began to spread, and after a co-worker let Billy know the police were looking for him. Two days after Saling's body was found, the brothers crossed the state line into Nevada. There, they were nabbed by rookie patrolman Mike Rogers, Badge Number .4, Winne-mucca Police Department.

He recognized the white Dodge van and the license plate: SZB246. He'd seen it in a teletype before he went on shift that night. Rene Saling's body was discovered late Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1980, in a shajlow, water-filled ditch near the entrance to the Santa Cruz County dump. She was spotted by a middle-age woman heading to the' dump in a pickup truck.

A black cord of loosely woven nylon, 57 inches long, was knotted so tightly around Saling's neck that in some places it disappeared into the flesh. There was evidence suggest she had been raped. She lay on her left side. Her blouse was pulled up above her breasts and her pants were pushed down to her feet. One tan boot was missing.

It still is. The aquamarine blouse was torn, and three small pieces of similar material were found in a turnout 300 yards down the road. The body was marked by bruises scrapes. It looked like she'd been' dragged against a rough surface or scratched by fingernails. There was internal mostly in the scalp, also indicating a struggle.

The medical examiner estimated the woman had been dead 8 to 12 hours. It was about 12 hours earlier that Rene Sal-ing was seen with Billy Mansfield. Investigators say he was the last person to see her alive. People who saw them both said Saling was sitting in Billy's car, in 'the parking lot of the Wooden Nickel Too bar. They said she was drunk and at times unconscious and incoherent.

The ditch along Buena Vista Road, where Saling's body was found, is about four miles from the bar, about two miles from the KOA campground, on a direct route from one to the other. Billy was remembered af the KOA as 'Tom," the man with the bushy beard and piercing blue eyes who tried to solicit sex from the teen-age daughters of neighboring campers. The Mansfields also angered other campers by dumping dirty diapers, dishes and trash into the fire rings of the neatly manicured park. Jane Greenwood, assistant KOA manager said of Billy, "He's got the strangest expression in his eyes. When he looks at you, it's as if he's not even seeing you.

They're really weird eyes. They give you the creeps." Maureen left Billy in November, fleeing, she latef told investigators, for her life. (Maureen told investigators that Billy continually beat her and threatened to kill her if she tried to leave. She said he twice brought strangers to the trailer and forced her to have sex with them. Another time, he brought a young teenage girl to the camp site and forced Maureen to watch as he had sex with the girl.

She also told investigators Billy was always talking about "weird, inhuman things," as the D.A.'s office described them. He would talk about homosexual activities with fellow workers and about watching a woman have sex with a dog. Maureen told investigators that Gary's wife told her Billy had killed a girl named "Sally" in Tampa. He was supposed to have picked up "Sally" in a bar, then killed her and dumped her on a roadway somewhere in Tampa. Tampa Police say there is no missing "Sally" and believe the reference was to.

Sandy Graham. William Mansfield, Billy's father, sits in a Brooksville courtroom during his own trial for sex offenses. Graham's body, uncovered at the Hernando site in March, was positively identified Wednesday. Contacted by telephone last week, Maureen Mansfield said she didn't want to be "bugged," and wouldn't talk to a reporter. One morning, Billy came to work crying.

He told his co-workers his wife died in an epileptic seizure. "He came to work crying, and I 'God, this guy's going through remembered Mark Kellar, 29. Maureen, whom investigators believe is an epileptic, was merely gone. She had boarded a bus out of Santa Cruz. Billy was' an alcoholic, Maureen had said, and his co-workers at Miranda Mushrooms said he would hide liquor bottles around the mush-, room plant and drink while he worked.

At work, Billy was quiet and introverted, or else he was talking about his sexual exploits, they said. The boss called Billy an average worker with a lackadaisical attitude. Billy's co-workers have one haunting memory. They remember the Monday after the Saturday night that Saling was killed. Billy spent most of that day sitting in his van instead of working.

"He seemed depressed," said Dennis Powell, 22. "We thought at the time he was hungover." Rene Saling was a tall, dark-haired woman with almond-shaped eyes. Several people who were at the Wooden Nickel Too bar the night of her death recall seeing Billy there with a woman of her description. They are expected to testify that he left the bar with her, that she was last seen in his car, and that when he returned to the bar without her to pick up his jacket on that cold December night, he was sweaty and disheveled. "The Nickel," as it's called by patrons, is a blue-collar bar, with knotty pine walls, a dart board, juke box and a band on Saturday nights.

'That body could've been IXv -Patricia Schindler ft- Billy's Mother, Virginia, believes he is innocent and that the police are only out to "get" her son. do, and unlocked it. He sat down in the front seat and began talking to the woman. He said she was so drunk he could not understand her. Luna said he gave up.

The last thing he remembers about the episode was leaving the woman with Billy. When Saling's body was found the next day, police began their tedious search for suspects. Two days later, Luna said, he heard rumors that the sheriffs office was looking for Billy. Luna asked him, "What did you do?" He told investigators Billy looked surprised and said, "I don't know but thanks." if 1 4 1 i (3 'V i ii 1 i Vi k4 fv i Investigators work at I SA the Mansfield home in Weeki Wachee, where I they have sifted through tons of earth. The seach already has yielded the remains or four victims.

Searchers, expect to find more. The curious come for I witness the -WML "4 ft s' 1 3 HI 'V 9 wV Mansfield-Linked Deaths? 1 i'ot 3v-' t1 -A i i i 4 1 Photos by Robbie Bedell, Marilyn Kalfus and John Coffeen. Tampa Tribune; Billy Lovejoy and Dan Coyro, Santa Cruz Sentinel. Graphics by Charles McShane, Russ Kramer Day, and Elizabeth Margaret Graham, who disappeared in Largo Sept. 9, 1980, when she went to answer a call to groom a poodle.

Clements' body was found Oct. 14 in a thickly wooded area in Pinellas County. Graham is still missing. Mansfield is one of several suspects in these cases. Carol Ann Barrett, 18, whose body was found dumped along 1-95 near Jacksonville.

Barrett, a vacationing Ohio coed, was abducted from a hotel and shot in the head. Mansfield is not the only suspect hi the case. In addition: A warrant for Billy's arrest still is on file in Hernando Circuit Court. That warrant was issued last year when Pamela Sherrell, then 18, told authorities that Billy forced her into his van, drove her to a rented trailer, and tried to have sex with her. She said she escaped after threatening him with a knife.

Hernando sheriffs officers and prosecutors say no arrest warrant has been issued for Billy in connection with the discovery of the bodies on the Mansfields' property. Though lawmen have not released details about the cases, they said their suspicions are based on information from confidential informants. Hernando authorities have received dental records from throughout Florida, and as far away as Arizona, so that the records could be compared to the remains of the unidentified skeletons. By MARILYN KALFUS and daniel Mclaughlin Tribune Staff Writers Here are the "deaths to which lawmen think Billy Mansfield may be linked: Rene Saling, 29,. a Watsonville, housewife.

Her body was a drainage ditch near the Santa Cruz County dump Dec. 7, 1980. Billy is awaiting aMay 4 trial. He is in the Santa Cruz County jail in lieu of $250,000 bond. His brother Gary is also held, charged as an accessory to that crime.

His bond. was set at $50,000. Sandra Jean Graham, a 21 -year-old Tampa woman whose body was unearthed April 7 from a wooded lot in Weeki Wachee Acres owned by Billy's parents. She disappeared from the parking lot of Pam Liquors, Tampa, April 27, 1980. She left her purse, glasses and cigarettes at the bar.

Elaine Ziegler, whose body was found March 24 buried on the same property. The 15-year-old Warren, Ohio, girl disappeared from a KOA campground on New Year's Eve 1975 while vacationing with her family in Hernando County. Two unidentified women whose decomposed bodies were found on the same property March 17 and April 3. Cynthia Clements, 19. who disappeared from a Pinellas County convenience store Labor I i I i i i 1) Firs! skeleton uncovered March 17.

Still unidentified. 2) Skeleton of Elaine Ziegler, 1 5, of Warren, Ohio uncovered March 24. 3) Third skeleton uncovered April 3. Still unidentified. 4) Remains of Sandra Jean Graham, 21, of Tampa uncovered April 7, within three feet of No.

3. Billy is led to court in Santa Cruz. followed by his brother, Gary, who is held as an accessory to the murder..