A gripping, deep investigation into a serial killer who turned himself in with a woman’s breast in his jacket pocket...
Title: Body Parts
Author: Caitlin Rother
Pages: 384
Genre: True Crime
BODY PARTS takes a deep psychological look at serial killer Wayne Adam Ford. A long-haul trucker, Ford confessed to picking up dozens of prostitutes and troubled women along California roads. He tortured and repeatedly choked them during sex, revived them with CPR, then did it again. Only four of them didn’t survive, he said, claiming that was an accident. After dismembering two of his victims, he dumped their bodies in the California Aqueduct and other waterways in Humboldt, Kern, San Joaquin, and San Bernardino Counties. Ford's complex death penalty case made national news because he is one of the only serial killers to turn himself in and help authorities identify his victims. He was recently transferred from death row at San Quentin to a state prison in San Luis Obispo.
Originally released in March 2009, this new edition of BODY PARTS has been updated with 32 pages of new developments about the identification of Kerry Anne Cummings, Ford’s first victim, whom he dismembered and who went unidentified for 25 years. If there is such a thing as a happy ending to a book about a serial killer, this is it. The new material takes the reader through the investigative process involved in solving a cold case like this one so many years after the fact. Kerry now has her name back and her family has closure after so many years of not knowing what happened to her, after being prevented from reporting her missing to police because she was using drugs. Rother is the first to interview the Cummings family about Kerry and her troubled life before she went missing in late 1997.
Overall, the book is based on exclusive information Rother uncovered during her extensive research and exclusive interviews with Ford’s father and brother. She also interviewed, the prosecutor, sheriff's detectives from all four counties, the defense’s sole investigator, and a woman who survived after being raped and tortured by Ford. By obtaining a court order to release sealed court files and digging through boxes of evidence and investigators’ reports, Rother was able to paint comprehensive and compelling portraits of Ford, his family and his victims. Rother’s book shows readers how Ford’s family dynamics, his severe head injury, his bouts of mental illness, and his compulsive sexual perversions led to his tragic killing spree, tearful confessions, and dramatic trial.
This is a re-release with 32 pages of new developments about the recent identification of Ford's first victim, Kerry Anne Cummings, through genetic genealogy 25 years after her murder. So, now she has her name back and her family has closure.
BODY PARTS is available at Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Body-Parts-Serial-Killers-Compulsions/dp/0806543914.
Book Excerpt
The new number Detective Fridley tried for Kathie went to voice mail, so he left her a message, saying that he was calling from the sheriff’s department in Eureka.
Kathie immediately assumed that he was calling about her long-missing sister, Kerry, though she was expecting him to say that Kerry had overdosed, and they had finally identified her. But when they connected, she didn’t mention any preconceived notions. “I let him do the talking,” she recalled.
“I’m calling about an unusual situation,” he told her. “Can I ask if you have any family members who are missing?”
“Yes, I do, my sister.”
“How long has she been missing?”
“Since 1997 or 1996,” Kathie said, feeling a little dizzy from the stress of the call and unable to remember exactly.
“Does your sister have any identifying marks?”
“She has a ring of flowers around her left ankle, a nose piercing, and her ears are pierced.”
“Can you tell me, did your sister ever give birth?”
“Not to my awareness,” she said, but inside, she was thinking, oh, s***. She knew he was talking about Kerry, so she started to panic, jumbling the chronology of events in her mind. There’s a baby out there. No, there’s an adult now.
Just the thought of a baby she never knew about broke her heart, especially not knowing if the child had lived.
“We may have connected her DNA to a close relative,” Fridley told Kathie, clearly trying to be sensitive and careful with his words. “Jeff Cummings, do you know him?”
“Yes, he’s my cousin.”
“I would like to talk to you about what we know, but first we’ll need to get DNA confirmation that the person that we have here matches your sister.”
Hearing that said so directly, Kathie felt faint. “I’d been expecting it, but I hadn’t been expecting it that day,” she recalled.
“What do we need to do?” she asked. “We need to get a copy of your DNA and compare it to the DNA that we have.”
After determining the location of the nearest police agency, Fridley said he would arrange for her to get tested.
Over the next three days, Kathie went even further down the rabbit hole than Jeff had. Not only did she read all the news stories she could find, but she listened to podcasts and downloaded the first edition of this book, published in 2009, on her Kindle.
“When I searched on the internet and all those pages came up with him, I went into complete shock. I never imagined, honestly, that this would be the kind of information and news I would get.”
She had to read this book three times, because she couldn’t absorb all the gruesome details on the first go. “The first time I just read through it, and I could hardly remember what I read, other than a few identifying markers that convinced me that this was the right person. I went back for pieces that I missed, [thinking], what did I read? I just kept going through it.”
She kept wondering why Ford had started off “so gruesome,” by cutting up her sister so violently, but then didn’t do the same thing to his next victims, other than slicing off the woman’s breast that was in his pocket when he surrendered.
“Knowing my sister, she was willing to be intimate with him,” Kathie said. Based on her last conversation with Kerry, when she “was more wasted than any other conversation I’d had with her, I figured she was on something new, so he suggested, ‘Let’s try this,’ and she said, ‘Okay, whatever,’” until she choked, passed out, and died.
– Excerpted from Body Parts by Caitlyn Rother, Citadel Press, 2025. Reprinted with permission.
New York Times bestselling author Caitlin Rother has written or co-authored 15 books, ranging from narrative non-fiction crime to thrillers and memoir. Among her recent titles is an updated edition of BODY PARTS with 32 pages of new developments about the Wayne Adam Ford case, and DEATH ON OCEAN BOULEVARD, the story of the Rebecca Zahau death case. Coming out in June is DOWN TO THE BONE, about the McStay family murders, and in 2026, DOPAMINE FIX, the first in a two-book deal for a new crime fiction series with Thomas & Mercer. An award-winning investigative reporter for 19 years, Rother's stories have been published in Cosmpolitan, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The San Diego Union Tribune, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and The Daily Beast. Her more than 250 TV, radio and podcast appearances include 20/20, People Magazine Investigates, Crime Watch Daily, Australia's World News, and numerous shows on Netflix, Investigation Discovery, Lifetime, HLN and REELZ. A popular public speaker, she also works as a writing-research coach-consultant and website designer. For fun, she binges on limited series, swims, and plays keyboards and sings in a jazzy bluesy trio called In the Lounge with her partner. Rother earned a bachelor's in psychology from UC Berkeley and a master's in journalism from Northwestern University.
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