Debra Sloan, 42, female, was discovered nude off a rural roadside near Laytonville after Mendocino County road workers spotted her body on November 30, 1998, in the days immediately following Thanksgiving weekend. Investigators quickly determined she had been killed shortly before the discovery; she had recently met a man in the area and left with him prior to her death.
Detectives focused on 41-year-old Fort Bragg mill worker John Annibel, whom witnesses placed with Sloan over the holiday weekend after she sat beside a stranger in a local bar. Accounts collected by reporters and summarized in a true-crime history describe Sloan being strangled and her body dumped in a remote ravine amid the North Coast's redwoods, consistent with what road crews later found.
On December 4, 1998, Mendocino County authorities arrested Annibel and charged him with Sloan's murder. The following year, in September 1999, he was convicted in Mendocino County Superior Court; contemporary and later summaries report a sentence of 25 years to life, and he remains incarcerated in a California state prison.
In the course of the investigation and after his arrest, Annibel also drew scrutiny in earlier Northern California cases, including the 1976 rape and strangulation of Sherry Lynn Smith and the 1980 disappearance of Andrea LaDeRoute. Humboldt County investigators questioned him in both matters, but he was not charged there; reporting for years afterward continued to note his suspected links while emphasizing that Sloan's killing is the only homicide for which he was convicted.
