The Skeleton Crew (7 page)

Sometimes, if a financial reward accompanied a solution, there was even money in it. No need to live vicariously through some fictitious detective; you could dabble in real deaths, complete with the occasional dismembered or torched corpse or serial killer victim.

Creating ColdCases was like throwing a fishing line into a pitch-black pond on a moonless night. But More built it, and many, including Todd Matthews, came.

It quickly became apparent to More who the regulars were. He enlisted Todd—who was researching missing women for chatty church ladies from Indiana who'd met and befriended him at Tent Girl's grave—to keep a lookout for inappropriate comments on ColdCases; frequent contributor Jennifer “Stormy” Marra to keep up E-clipse's website and answer e-mail; and an avid member named Helene Wahlstrom, who lived in Sweden, to populate the site with cases from around the world. Wahlstrom came across ColdCases and Marra's Doe Network at a time in her life when she was unable to leave her house alone. A rape and stalking survivor, she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and had been forced to terminate her studies at a Swedish university. At the time, using an e-mail address in which the word “turtle” stood in for her name, Helene was clearly hiding in her shell, living a quiet life at home with her father while scouring the
Internet for cold cases.

When I tracked down Wahlstrom in Sweden,
she told me that at first she was mystified by the power the missing and unidentified exerted over her. Later, she could see that she had identified with all those victims. By volunteering to help others who had suffered a loss, she said she hoped something good would emerge from her pain and self-imposed seclusion.

Meanwhile, Todd, recognizing that Jennifer Marra's site was more polished and technologically advanced than his own, joined the Doe Network in 2001 and closed down The Lost and the Found. That year, Marra decided to spend more time with her family and turned the day-to-day maintenance of the Doe Network over to Wahlstrom, who not only posted daily on ColdCases but who had also become Marra's second in command.

With no need to divulge one's identity, background, or motivation, it was hard to know exactly who these web sleuths were and why they flocked to sites like ColdCases, Websleuths, and Official Cold Case Investigations. Voyeuristic? Creepy? Sociopathic? Were these Sherlock Holmes wannabes doing a good thing or a bad thing?

The doubt stemmed in part from the cloak of anonymity the Internet conferred on its users; there was no way of knowing who wickedprincess222 really was. You needed a Sherlock Holmes just to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. “It's like the KKK,” Todd once commented. “You can post anything you want wearing that hood.”

One exchange I unearthed went a long way toward illustrating the disturbing anonymity of those who read and contributed to cold case forums.

In July 2007,
a member of Websleuths sat at her computer in Phoenixville,
Pennsylvania. The users of the forum typically gave themselves screen names—Magnum P.E., momtective, Twindad, latenightRN, MidwestMama—or some version of a real name, such as Darlene735. The one near Philly called herself Gina M. She threw a question out into cyberspace about a mystery almost four decades old: Whatever happened to Elizabeth Ernstein?

In 1968, officials in Scott County, Kentucky, focused for a time on
a
missing teenager who seemed to fit Tent Girl's description
—around five foot five; 105 pounds; short, dark bobbed hair—who had disappeared almost exactly two months before Tent Girl was found. Nearly fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Lurene Ernstein lived in Mentone, a town near Redlands, California. On the morning of March 18, 1968, she set out for school wearing a blue dress with a white flower print, a small gold chain necklace, and tennis shoes, carrying a red algebra book and a blue notebook, with a quarter in her pocket. Friends would say later that Elizabeth, called Liz by her friends and Betty Lu by her family, had seemed depressed for the past few days.

She had said something about joining a “hippie colony” near San Francisco, but her mother knew her daughter to be so meticulous about personal hygiene that even if Liz had decided to run away, which was unimaginable, she would have taken along a change of clothing. Liz left school at 3:40 p.m. to walk home two miles through blossoming orange groves. Someone had spotted her that afternoon on a palm tree-lined street amid the groves, the blue notebook and algebra textbook under her arm. She never arrived home.

Her parents, a Lockheed chemical engineer and a psychiatric social worker, offered five thousand dollars for any information that would help them find their daughter. They sent word of her disappearance to a reported ten thousand newspapers. An Associated Press photo datelined San Bernardino shows the couple—both dark-haired and slender, their faces tense and drawn—gazing up at a towering pile of boxes containing the circulars about to be mailed nationwide. Dozens of papers, in Texas, Massachusetts, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and other states, including Kentucky, ran the story. The Georgetown, Kentucky, papers ran breathless headlines anticipating a solution to the Tent Girl mystery, but no proof materialized that Liz Ernstein was Tent Girl.

After an initial flurry of coverage, no further details emerged. That silence would not be broken for almost forty years, and when it was, it would be through a medium no one living in the era of black-and-white television in 1968 had envisioned.

It wasn't unusual for a post such as Gina M.'s to be followed almost immediately by speculative comments from fellow users. If someone dug up a scrap of information—a newspaper story or some other tidbit—they'd
often post it. As the more experienced web sleuths knew, missing children who returned home unharmed didn't generate press coverage, so it was conceivable that Liz had come home with little public fanfare, or with fanfare that had been obliterated by time. On the other hand, Liz had never been reported dead. That would have made the papers.

A few months after Gina M. posted her query and rehashed the details of Liz's disappearance, she received an answer that seemed to ring with authority. “We never found her body or any evidence of her running away,” wrote someone who signed himself Jeff E. “We”? The writer identified himself as Elizabeth Ernstein's younger brother, Jeff Ernstein. He recalled that, in 1968, California was the pinnacle of the hippie movement, when some teenagers ran away for a weekend—or forever. Abductions, rapes, murders, he wrote, “just hardly ever happened back then.”

He related how his parents had paid a private detective to work for the family full-time. Norman and Ruth Ernstein, despite their science-based careers, were so desperate, they contacted psychics and even checked in with NASA and the U.S. Air Force in case there had been any reports in the area of UFO alien abductions. The Ernsteins ran out of funds. Volunteers helped raise money for ads, for the detective, and for a reward that eventually totaled twenty thousand dollars—the equivalent of more than a hundred grand today.

Search-and-rescue teams and hundreds of volunteers combed the orange groves and surrounding countryside, to find no trace of Liz except a bra in her size, washed in the same detergent the household used. The family held a memorial for Liz in the early 1990s.

The next few posts by Websleuths members thanked Jeff for his post and encouraged him to send details about Elizabeth to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Jeff E. did not respond.

Scanning later posts in the thread, I saw one from another Websleuths user named James G. It was dated December 2009, a full two years after Gina M. and Jeff E.'s exchange. James G. gave his location as Southern California.

“I just stumbled by accident on this site after Googling your sister Elizabeth's name,” James G. wrote to Jeff E. What came next sent a chill down my spine.

“I was her boy friend at the time of her disappearance. You may re
member me. I went with her and your mother and a friend of your mom's up to the mountains not very long before Elizabeth disappeared. One of her brothers went along but I am not sure of his name. It seems to me I remember the name of the boy being Jeff but I'm not positive of that. I know that he was about 10 or so. We had a picnic and a good visit. I remember what she said to me as we walked around. I even remember the conversation in the car going up and coming back. Do you have any memory of this?

“Also, only a short time (maybe a week) before she disappeared, Elizabeth called my family and told them that she needed to meet me and tell me something very important. She wanted to meet me in front of Redlands Community Hospital, but I went there and waited for Elizabeth for over an hour, and she never showed up.”

Was it possible that new information about the days before Liz's disappearance would surface this way, on an obscure page of public web posts? It would be like a document concerning a crime in New Mexico turning up stapled to a supermarket bulletin board in Hoboken, New Jersey. It might be significant, but the chances of someone with any connection to the original investigation seeing it were practically nil.

James G. went on to request specific details about the family, the circumstances of Elizabeth's disappearance, and the investigation.

“I'd especially like to know if Elizabeth's older sister is still alive. Also is your mother still alive? I'd like to know where the orange groves were located where she was last seen. Are there still orange groves there or have they been replaced by houses and streets? Where was the bra found?

“It would be great to be able to talk with you. I live not very far from Redlands. I always think of her when I drive on the freeway near where she and your family lived at that time. I hope to hear from you soon. James G.” The post included links to Facebook and to a Myspace page. To my disappointment, they were defunct.

The nature of relatively anonymous web postings forced me to wonder: Are both Jeff E. and James G. who they claim to be, a grieving brother and a curious ex-boyfriend?

I came across a 2009 obituary for a Stephen Ernstein,
a 1970 graduate of Redlands, who could have been Liz's older brother; the Jeff E. who
posted on Websleuths could have been her younger brother. (At the time that Liz disappeared, newspaper accounts said she came from a family of five, in which the oldest son had died of polio in 1962.)

At first it struck me as almost unbelievable that Jeff Ernstein would happen upon Gina M.'s posts about his sister, who had been missing for thirty-nine years; but Jeff commented in his post that he had been watching a program about the impact on families of a murder of a child, and that got him thinking about his sister and prompted him to search for her on the Internet. The thread surprised him, because news of her disappearance, as far as he knew, had dropped off the radar by late 1969.

Having your sibling disappear and growing up with parents obsessed with and emotionally drained by efforts to find her could not have been easy. Jeff himself may not ever have given up hope of finding his sister alive. Like others who had had a loved one go missing, he may have been drawn to the cold case message boards' tantalizing bits of information that dangled in cyberspace, available to anyone who happened along.

But as for his claim that abductions, rapes, and murders “hardly ever happened” in the 1960s, well, that was wishful thinking.

Serial murderer Charles Hatcher,
for one, confessed to fifteen child murders dating back to 1969 in four states, including California. The Zodiac serial murderer, who claimed to have killed thirty-seven people, started his reign of terror in California the year Liz went missing. In 1970,
Mack Ray Edwards told police that he had killed six kids
over a twenty-year period in and around Los Angeles.

Before Edwards died in prison in 1972, his claim had increased to eighteen children. It seems not only possible but likely that Liz was abducted, perhaps by a stranger or by someone she knew, murdered far from the orange groves, and hidden so well—perhaps in the nearby San Bernardino National Forest or the San Jacinto Mountains, or in the Pacific Ocean, only around an hour's drive away—that no one ever found her body.

There was no indication that Jeff E. ever saw James G.'s post, and if he had, he might have dismissed James G. as a wacko, as I was inclined to. There's never any way of knowing who you are dealing with on the Internet, whether what people post is real or delusional, or why they are posting in the first place. I mulled the possible implications of Elizabeth
knowing James G. when she was fourteen and seeking him out to tell him “something very important.” It sounded like something out of a bad suspense novel. Was it possible that the private investigators working for the Ernsteins had never interviewed this man? Was this a clue to a murder investigation, or nothing at all?

Why did James G. want to know if the orange groves were still there, and where the bra was found? If he still lived close to Redlands, as he claimed, wouldn't he know whether the groves were there, or couldn't he drive by himself to look?

James G.'s questions struck me as creepy if not downright alarming. He referred to “Elizabeth.” If they'd been as friendly as he claimed, wouldn't he have called her Liz, as her other friends did?

I never found the answers to my questions about James G., but
incredibly, in 2011, half a lifetime after Liz Ernstein disappeared,
remains that had been discovered in 1969 in a shallow grave near Wrightwood—a sparsely populated town nestled in a pine-covered valley in the San Gabriel Mountains around fifty miles from the orange groves—were reexamined. At the time, the coroner had characterized the remains as those of a young male.

Acting on a suggestion from a web sleuth who questioned the original forensic analysis, the San Bernardino County coroner exhumed the remains, which had been buried in a mass grave in a county cemetery. In 2012, DNA confirmed that the remains were Ernstein's.