Inmate suspected in jail assault on Kristin Sensible’s killer beforehand murdered ‘I-5 Strangler’

COALINGA — A California inmate accused of attacking Paul Flores this summer time, shortly after Flores reported to jail to serve his conviction for murdering faculty pupil Kristin Sensible, strangled his serial killer cellmate two years in the past, officers mentioned.

The California Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation this week recognized inmate Jason Budrow because the suspect within the Aug. 23 assault on Flores on the Nice Valley State Jail in Coalinga, about 185 miles (300 kilometers) north of downtown Los Angeles.

The division declined to share details about how Budrow allegedly was in a position to get to Flores or whether or not it’s investigating how the assault occurred on the company’s watch in mild of Budrow’s earlier habits whereas incarcerated.

RELATED: Unique: California prisoner admits to murdering serial killer often called the I-5 Strangler, calls it ‘a mission for avenging’ his victims

“CDCR is restricted within the quantity of knowledge it could present on incarcerated individuals’s housing for security and safety causes,” the company mentioned in an e-mail.

Budrow is serving life with out parole for fatally strangling his girlfriend in 2010 in Riverside County. In a jailhouse interview that yr with The Press-Examiner, he described himself as a “Satanist” and sported a “666” tattoo above his proper eye. He additionally was convicted in 2006 of sexually assaulting a teen.

In 2021, Budrow strangled his new cellmate, serial killer Roger Reece Kibbe, who was often called the I-5 Strangler within the Seventies and Nineteen Eighties. Kibbe strangled and raped at the least seven girls — a number of of them within the Sacramento and Stockton areas alongside Interstate 5 — and reduce his victims’ clothes into odd patterns.

The killing of Kibbe in Mule Creek State Jail in Ione, roughly 30 miles (50 kilometers) southeast of Sacramento, earned Budrow one other consecutive life sentence. An post-mortem revealed that Budrow, then 40, strangled the 81-year-old Kibbe of their cell.

In a letter to The San Jose Mercury Information, Budrow wrote that he killed Kibbe on the day they turned cellmates, although he had deliberate the homicide for months after he noticed a TV particular about him and had sought to share a cell so he might carry it out. Budrow wrote that though he wished a single cell, he was on “a mission for avenging” Kibbe’s victims.

Budrow instructed the newspaper that he had carved “a crude inverted pentagram” into Kibbe’s physique.

He was put into the jail’s Administrative Segregation Unit — a single-person cell, like he wished — earlier than being transferred to Nice Valley. Budrow was positioned in restrictive housing there, which beneath state regulation is reserved for prisoners who “could pose a threat to others or to themselves, or whose habits disrupts the protected and orderly functioning of the ability,” in line with the corrections division.

The state wouldn’t say whether or not Flores was additionally in restricted housing on the time of the assault, which occurred someplace between the leisure yard and the medical clinic. Authorities additionally haven’t disclosed a potential motive.