Lost Girls (19 page)

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Authors: Caitlin Rother

BOOK: Lost Girls
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The dogs alerted at the door of a run-down church nearby, and also at the Pala Learning Center, where a “missing child” flyer with Amber's photo and information was posted. Inside, one of the dogs pushed his nose into several books on a shelf in the library, one of which was titled
The Dog with Golden Eyes,
and featured a wolflike dog on the cover. The book had never been checked out.
“Whether she was alive at the time she went there and then was killed, or whether she was already dead, we can't know,” Sarah Platts, the VK9 commander, said at the time.
At one point during the search, Olmstead said, Moe and Rebecca showed up, almost skidding to a stop as they pulled in front of the dog handler's cars. They were seen having words with them.
All of this information was passed on to the EPD, but the claim that dogs could track Amber on a freeway full of cars six long months after she may have driven through there was widely pooh-poohed by law enforcement, perhaps more privately than publicly. Benton said the department did its due diligence, sending out other tracking dogs used by the FBI in November to retrace the VK9 dogs' steps, but they found no trace of Amber.
 
 
The family's persistent search efforts and unflagging media appearances, including spots on
The Steve Wilkos Show
and
Tyra Banks,
won Amber a lead spot in the cover story of the November 23 issue of
People
magazine:
VANISHED WITHOUT A TRACE, HEARTBREAK AND HOPE,
a feature about six young people who had gone missing in 2009. The article said that Amber was
believed to be among the roughly 115 youths who are abducted by strangers each year, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Moe Dubois was the first parent to be quoted in the story, which used Jaycee Dugard's rescue as the news peg. Likely because the media has been criticized for covering missing persons' cases involving primarily young white girls, this story also included the disappearance of two African Americans, a twenty-four-year-old woman and a six-year old boy.
For the parents of the still-missing, the return of Jaycee was a moment to let optimism crowd out dire imaginings, because the one thing these parents cannot let go of is hope,
the story stated.
At this point, hope was all parents like Carrie and Moe had to go on.
Chapter 19
After leaving the Rock Springs apartments in Escondido, John Gardner reregistered January 7, 2010—within the required five days under Megan's Law—at his grandmother's house in Lake Elsinore, fifty-four miles to the north of his mom's condo.
Gardner's uncle Mike, who owned the house, later told authorities that he thought Gardner was really splitting his time between Cathy's and Linda's, but fulfilling his legal obligations on paper by registering at his grandmother's. He wasn't allowed to live with Cathy because she lived too near a school.
When Gardner arrived in Lake Elsinore, Mike noticed that his nephew had a black eye. Gardner told Mike that he'd hit himself in the face with a tool while doing some work. Mike didn't believe him.
In the early hours of Sunday, January 24, Gardner was seen racing his 1999 gold Pontiac through the parking lot of the Stater Bros. strip mall on East Mission Road in San Marcos, San Diego County. He apparently lost control and crashed into a light post, then ran away on foot. A witness notified the sheriff's department, and his car was towed to a wrecking yard. The collision caused major damage to the right front end, but none to the post. The deputy's report said Gardner violated the law by driving at “unsafe speed for conditions,” but the case was closed because the property owner chose not to prosecute.
Mike said Gardner wasn't seen for two or three days afterward, and when he returned, Mike asked him what had caused the collision. Gardner said he'd gone to a bar, and had only one drink, but someone must have put something in it, because he passed out while driving home and crashed. He admitted that he had left the scene because he didn't want to get in trouble. After his car was totaled, the only vehicle he had access to was Jariah's car, which was now a black Nissan.
Although Riverside County sheriff's deputies routinely check on sexual offenders, they hadn't had an occasion to check on John Gardner by this point.
“He wasn't red-flagged in any way,” said Sergeant Joe Borja. “We didn't receive any information from Escondido indicating that he was a problem.”
 
 
In 2011, Gardner claimed that he'd spent some time in late January and early February 2010 trying to find a placement with an inpatient mental-health or drug rehab facility, but that no one would take him. As a result, he only disintegrated further as he shuttled between his grandmother's house and his mother's condo. He said the public facilities in San Diego County wouldn't take him because he was a Riverside County resident, and no facility in either county would take him because he was a sex offender.
Because Gardner was also indigent, unemployed, and had no insurance or car, his mother drove him to the Riverside County mental hospital to see a psychiatrist on February 8, 2010. “I thought I was going to get committed,” he recalled.
Gardner and Cathy both said he tried to tell the psychiatrist that he was in a dangerous mental state.
“I've not been feeling well. I'm worried I'm going to hurt somebody,” Gardner said.
“What do you mean, you're going to hurt somebody?” the doctor reportedly asked.
“Well, I'm afraid I'm either going to kill somebody or kill myself,” he said. “I think I'm a 5150 [a danger to himself or others].”
“I just think you need medication. You're displaying a manic episode right now,” Gardner quoted the doctor as saying. “If the problem continues, come back and see me.”
Gardner said he suggested to the doctor that he lock him up for a couple of days until he got adjusted to the meds, but the doctor said Gardner should be fine once he started the prescription. (The author was unable to confirm this visit through records because of privacy laws, but Cathy did produce two prescription drug vials dated February 8.)
“I felt better, but I felt high,” Gardner said later to describe the effects of the new drugs. “I didn't recognize that right away, because it was a different feeling.” But gradually, he said, he realized that he almost felt like he was on meth.
 
 
After staying clean since New Year's Day, Gardner almost overdosed in a suicidal binge in Fallbrook five days after seeing the psychiatrist. Starting at six in the morning on Saturday, February 13—the one-year anniversary of Amber's murder—he said he took five triple doses of Ecstasy and four white pills that were probably OxyContin or Vicodin, smoked an eight-ball of speed, inhaled at least two lines of cocaine, then washed it all down with eighteen beers. The date was no coincidence.
“I knew I wasn't supposed to drink alcohol with Ecstasy, so that's why I did it,” he said, adding that he was trying to give himself a heart attack by mixing the stimulants and beer with other drugs.
He finally passed out at three in the morning on Sunday, and slept through that day and night, while Jariah frantically called and texted him, wondering where he was. It was Valentine's Day, and she'd gotten a day pass from rehab because they'd planned to hang out that day. By the time he woke up on Monday and called her back, she was pretty angry.
“Hey, sorry, I did a lot of stuff,” he told her, referring to the binge. “I'm bringing your car back.”
“Fine,” she said curtly.
Gardner called his mother because he'd run out of gas, so she came up to get him. They gassed up Jariah's Nissan and dropped it off, then headed to Cathy's place, where Kevin drove him back to Lake Elsinore. Gardner soon developed a severe sinus infection, which prompted his aunt Cynthia to call Cathy, and they took him to the emergency room at Pomerado Hospital the night of February 19.
“I wasn't feeling right and was starting to lose it. I wasn't telling anyone why, because I'd killed somebody,” he said later. “I had a constant feeling of guilt. I felt like I was losing control of myself, that I would lash out and hurt somebody or myself, even though I already tried to... . Someone could say something to me, and if it was challenging in any way, I would want to hurt that person. Any opinion other than mine I would feel rage, and I recognized it and knew it was wrong.”
 
 
That's what had happened on the night of February 17, when Mike said he got a call from Cynthia, who reported that their mother was sick. Mike went over to the house, where he learned that Cynthia and her boyfriend had failed to take Linda to her doctor's appointment. Linda, he said, looked like she was going to die.
Furious, Mike yelled at the couple for missing the appointment. Gardner stepped in, told his uncle to stop screaming, and threatened him. Mike responded with a counterthreat that he was going to call police, which he carried out. He then put Linda in his car and started driving her to a hospital in Temecula. Sheriff's deputies responded to the report of a disturbance at Linda's house, but no one was there when they arrived. When they called Mike, who was en route to the hospital, he said the fight was over and authorities were no longer needed.
After Gardner's arrest, Mike called in to KFI-AM talk radio in Los Angeles for an on-air anonymous interview, describing the incident in vague details that were completely different from how Gardner had recounted the scene to Cathy.
“It was a very loud argument, threatening toward me,” Mike said. “I told him, ‘I don't have a problem with you. Why don't you go walk it off, take a walk around the block. I'm an old man, I'm not going to tolerate you yelling at me like this.'”
Gardner had told Cathy that Mike was the one acting like a jerk, blocking them into the driveway so they couldn't take Linda to the hospital.
The last time Mike saw his nephew was right before Cathy and Cynthia took him to the emergency room. Cynthia told Mike that Gardner had “done too much meth and he was having sinus problems.”
 
 
John Gardner was stressed-out, mentally unbalanced and physically ill. Looking back later, his mother described his behavior as “Charlie Sheen on steroids.”
After she took him back to her condo, Cathy estimated that he called six to eight facilities daily for the next couple of days. But despite repeated requests from the author—and from Gardner as well—Cathy could not or would not produce phone records to prove it, and his attorneys said they couldn't either.
Nonetheless, the claims that Gardner was turned away are based in truth. San Diego County government officials said they subsidize 799 drug-treatment beds and 316 mental-health inpatient beds throughout the region, but
none
of these programs accepts sex offenders. And even though the court-ordered Conditional Release Program for Mentally Disordered Offenders offers additional beds, they only accept sex offenders who are not violent. Gardner was not in this program; but even if he had been deemed a “mentally disordered offender,” he likely wouldn't have been eligible for one of these beds because he'd physically assaulted his thirteen-year-old victim in 2000.
Later, his sister Shannon said tearfully, the family felt “lots of guilt because we couldn't get him in somewhere (into treatment) faster.”
Chapter 20
Soon after Kelly King called the sheriff's Poway substation to report her daughter, Chelsea, missing on the evening of Thursday, February 25, 2010, Sergeant Christina Bavencoff and Deputy Luis Carrillo were dispatched to meet Brent King at Rancho Bernardo Community Park. Kelly met them there with a set of spare car keys, which allowed Carrillo and Bavencoff to search the BMW. They found Chelsea's cell phone in her purse on the backseat.
A mother herself, Sergeant Bavencoff felt the hairs rise on the nape of her neck. Sensing that time was of the essence, she determined they should begin searching the park and lake area immediately. Even though the park was in the San Diego Police Department's (SDPD) jurisdiction, Carrillo called in her colleague, sheriff's sergeant Don Parker, to trigger an SAR effort.
“We'll do something like that when we know there's an urgency, because we had a last known point, what we call an ‘LKP,' for Chelsea—her car,” Parker explained. “We also know that her habits were iron-clad.”
Sergeant Parker was eating dinner at his house, about a fifty-minute drive from the park, when he got the call from Carrillo at eight-twenty in the evening. Parker got into his SUV, which was packed with gear for all kinds of weather, and headed down to RB. After working twenty-two years with the sheriff's department, he was used to all-night searches, but this case would prove to be different.
“These were by far the toughest five, seven or eight days in my career, even with having real difficult times with kids burning up in a motor home. I watched them burn right in front of me, and this was [even more] terrible,” he said. It was difficult, “because it was protracted and we knew that Chelsea was probably out there.”
When he arrived, he saw hundreds of teenagers and their parents, swarming in and around the Rancho Bernardo–Glassman Recreation Center. At least one hundred of them were outside the gym building, wrapped in blankets to brace against the forty-degree chill, and looking bewildered. Some had already been out combing the area, and many of their friends still were roaming around, calling out Chelsea's name in the dark and hoping she'd yell back. Later that night, the whole park became one big crime scene, cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape to allow the professionals to do their job and to prevent do-gooders from disturbing any evidence that might be discovered.
Overhead, the sky was filled with the chopping whir of helicopters, zigzagging back and forth across the park, and shining their spotlights along the shores of Lake Hodges. In between refueling at two nearby municipal airports, San Marcos or Gillespie Field, a couple of helicopters were constantly in the air that night, one belonging to SDPD and the other to the sheriff's Aerial Support to Regional Enforcement Agencies (ASTREA).
Chelsea's black BMW was still parked in the lot near the trailhead. One of Parker's first orders of business was to find the Kings in the gym and introduce himself so he could later try to insulate them from the searchers' loose talk. As Parker approached and shook their hands, Kelly King was wrapped in a blanket. Her big, sad eyes were red, her expression pleading with Parker as if to say, “Please help me. Help us find her and bring her home.
Please.
”
Parker, whose own daughter was fifteen, didn't really know what to say to those eyes.
What am I going to do?
he thought.
I can't manufacture Chelsea out of nothing.
“It was really tough,” he recalled.
All he could do was try to reassure her and Brent that his crew would do everything in their power to find Chelsea. Afterward, he went back outside and headed up to the sheriff's command post, which had been set up in the lower of two parking lots.
The sergeant quickly ran over the possibilities in his head: If Chelsea had twisted an ankle or injured herself somehow, she could be lying on the ground and need help. She could have been kidnapped from her car or kidnapped elsewhere by an assailant who had dumped her car in this lot. She could also be down and hurt after being assaulted on the trail—or worst case, dead. Obviously, he hoped for the first scenario; but regardless, time was of the essence—either to find her alive and bring her in, or to find her body before the cloudy skies opened up and the forecasted rain began to fall, swelling the banks of the lake, and swallowing her up.
“Initially we were all hoping and praying that she was injured,” he said. But, he added, “a big storm was coming and I knew we had to get things rolling. I knew we had to get divers in the water before the storm came. If there's anything that destroys clues—footprints or scents for dogs—it's rain.”
And over the next few days, he said, “there was a deluge.”
Jan Caldwell, the sheriff's department spokeswoman, was just leaving choir practice at her church in Carmel Valley, when she got a call from Sergeant Parker around nine o'clock in the evening.
“We have a missing juvenile at the Rancho Bernardo Community Park,” he said. “Why don't you head this way, because we're getting quite a lot of media down here.”
When Caldwell arrived a half hour later, she saw a sea of people. There were only two news cameras, but the same crowd of teenagers and parents were still milling around near the tennis courts and the trailhead.
“This shouldn't take too long because somebody reported hearing someone calling out ‘Help me, help me,'” a deputy told Caldwell as she was assessing the situation. Unfortunately, the reporting party was mistaken. The person was actually calling out “Chelsea, Chelsea,” hoping that the teenager would answer the call.
Caldwell's heart went out to the Kings, noting the same expression on Kelly's face that Parker had seen, the “look of a mother that's missing part of her body.” Feeling protective, Caldwell was irate when she heard that a TV reporter followed Kelly into the park's outdoor restroom and into a stall, asking her questions for the eleven o'clock news. In response, Caldwell corralled the media into the upper parking lot, which left them with no bathroom access, so this couldn't happen again. Kelly was distraught enough without having a reporter intrude on such a private moment. “It was rude. It was disrespectful,” Caldwell said.
The more Caldwell heard about Chelsea in the coming days, the more she knew “what an amazing, amazing child that Chelsea was, and it became scarier to us as law enforcement that something sinister had happened.”
After getting briefed by Deputy Carrillo and Sergeant Bavencoff, Parker put his head together with members of ASTREA and his SAR team to calculate and define the search area based on where Chelsea might have gone for her run.
The bulk of Lake Hodges, a serpentine thruway, of sorts, that followed the contours of a canyon, was to the northwest of the command center and branched into fingerlike tributaries, where trees grew into the shoreline. As the trail nearest Chelsea's car headed west into the park, it quickly split into two trails, which then splintered into numerous others, all part of a network of trails that went around the lake, on both the north and south shores. One of the trails looped around, so even if Chelsea had headed in the opposite direction, she still could have ended up on the trail that led into the neighborhood along Duenda Road and cul-de-sacs, such as Moon Song Court, where the houses looked down the hill and out over the lake. She also could have headed back to the main street from her car, heading east to the footbridge and crossing over to the north side of the lake.
Even then she could have gone left or right, so it was anyone's guess which route she'd taken. Searchers decided to start at the most obvious spot—her last known point at her car—and fanned out from there in concentric circles. Knowing she could easily jog eight miles, they figured she could have gone four or even five miles out if she hadn't been abducted and driven elsewhere, and that became their radius.
In addition to the trails and the lake itself, the park had all kinds of nooks and crannies to search, a couple of knolls to the north, a valley with a waterfall between two ridges, and an area the searchers called “the greenbelt,” a sticker-filled strip, seventy yards across and thick with bushes, trees, and water, which ran between two long rows of houses off Duenda that looked down from above.
One of the trickier areas was a creek that ran under an arched footbridge, filled with rocks, forming an eddy in the murky water. The search crews donned wet suits or dry suits, which seal at the wrist and neck but keep the body dry, along with gloves and hoods, and felt around with their hands as they went through the creek, shoulder to shoulder so as not to miss any area. It wasn't particularly safe work, because they could step on broken glass or get tangled in networks of tree roots or dead branches, and find themselves stuck.
“It's like an underwater forest,” Parker explained. “They're doing it literally by feel. The divers, of anybody in the search, worked the hardest.”
That night, and every day after that, when Parker got frustrated sitting still at his post in the command center, he headed into the muck and helped out the searchers for a while.
“I had to do something,” he said.
 
 
The first break in the case came that Thursday evening. A civilian sheriff's department employee who lived in a house on Moon Song Court came out on his deck when he and his wife heard a helicopter making announcements about Chelsea. Knowing the trails well, they joined the search behind their house. Later, around nine forty-five, he went out again alone with a flashlight and walked down the same path they'd taken before. He went only a short distance when he came across something right there in the open: a pair of ankle socks and some ladies thong underwear.
Knowing these items could be critical, he immediately reported the find to SDPD, which sent an officer right over to collect them. The items were taken to the crime lab the next day. No one wanted to jump to conclusions, but finding a pair of underwear that looked as if they had just been dropped there, two miles from Chelsea's car, was not a good sign.
At 11:35
P.M.
, the sheriff's department put out a reverse 911 call describing Chelsea to about one thousand homes around the park in RB, not including Cathy Osborn's condo. The text of the recorded message read:
We are currently actively searching the area for a missing seventeen-year-old female, Chelsea King... . Her vehicle was found at Rancho Bernardo Community Park. She may be somewhere in the area of Lake Hodges or the trails adjacent to the park. If you have any information or have seen or heard anything please call 911 or the sheriff's department immediately.

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