Budrow already is serving life without parole for strangling his then-girlfriend in 2011 in Riverside County.
Death penalty cases are costly and lengthy affairs that include automatic appeals. California hasn’t executed anyone since 2006 and Gov. Gavin Newsom has issued a moratorium on capital punishment while he is in office.
Kibbe, 81, was initially convicted in 1991 of strangling Darcine Frackenpohl, a 17-year-old who had run away from her home in Seattle. Her nearly nude body was found west of South Lake Tahoe below Echo Summit in September 1987.
Investigators said then that they suspected him in other similar slayings.
But it wasn’t until 2009 that a San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office investigator used new developments in DNA evidence to connect him to additional slayings in Northern California counties.