Lost and Found (18 page)

Later that morning, Terry and Carl Probyn held a press conference at the El Dorado Sheriff’s Department’s South Lake Tahoe station. They were accompanied by Carl’s mother, Wilma, and Jaycee’s little sister, Shayna.

Clasping Jaycee’s favorite stuffed bunny to her chest, Terry tearfully announced the family was posting a $5,000 reward for any information leading to her daughter’s safe return.

“Please don’t hurt her,” wept Terry. “She’s a good girl. Just drop her off. No questions. No nothing.”

Then she told reporters how Jaycee would check the microwave oven clock in the kitchen every morning, starting her walk to the school bus stop at precisely 8:05
A.M
. And she described how Carl had watched in horror as he’d witnessed Jaycee’s abduction.

“My husband heard her scream,” said Terry, “and that’s it.”

Then Terry burst into tears, as she spoke directly to her missing daughter.

“If you are out there and you can hear me,” she sobbed, gazing longingly into the camera, “you know I love you and want you to come back soon. She’s out there somewhere. The baby has been asking for you, Jaycee.”

El Dorado County Sheriff’s Department sergeant Larry Hennick told reporters his officers had been working around the clock, setting up checkpoints all over the Lake Tahoe area.

A reporter then asked if investigators believed Jaycee’s disappearance had anything to do with a domestic dispute. FBI special agent Joseph Sheehan replied that Jaycee’s natural father had already been questioned but was not a suspect.

“At this point,” said Agent Sheehan, “we are less inclined, if we ever were inclined, to see this as a family matter.”

Suddenly, from the back of the room, a smartly dressed female TV tabloid show reporter started yelling at Carl and Terry Probyn.

“What are you hiding in that house?” she shouted accusingly.

As everyone turned around in amazement, the woman continued, lambasting the police for not allowing her camera crew to film inside the Probyns’ home.

In the hours after Jaycee Lee Dugard’s abduction, South Lake Tahoe plunged into shock and disbelief. Nobody could believe that something so horrible could touch the tranquil town, where serious crime was virtually unknown. And from now on parents started taking their children to the bus stop or directly to school.

“Kids were very, very worried,” explained Meyers Elementary School principal Karen Gillis-Tinlin. “They walk to the bus every day. It was a common thing . . . and then it went awry.”

For the rest of the week, all special events marking the end of the school year were cancelled. And Jaycee’s fifth-grade class became a continuing group therapy session, as her teacher and classmates tried to make some sense of her disappearance.

“It was a very scary time,” recalled Meyers fifth-grade teacher Sue Louis. “We did personalize—‘My gosh, this could have been my child.’ ”

Then suddenly pink ribbons started appearing all over South Lake Tahoe, on trees, poles and posts. It was reminiscent of the yellow ribbons for the American Embassy hostages in Iran, twenty years earlier.

“We had pink ribbons on the kindergarten fence within twenty-four hours,” said Gillis-Tinlin. “The students knew that her favorite color was pink. Pink ribbons were everywhere.”

Jaycee’s heartbroken classmates also tied a pink ribbon to her chair, writing letters to their lost friend as a way of expressing their feelings.

“The kids needed to talk about it,” said Louis. “What an incredibly scary thing to have happen in a small town.”

Jaycee’s classmates even drew their own missing persons posters for their lost friend. And in a heartbreaking photo opportunity for the Associated Press, three of them posed holding them up.

“Pleas [sic] look for her. It is worth it,” read one little girl’s poster. “Tahoe Girl Kidnapped,” read another. And another classmate’s poster had drawings of a heart and a flower, alongside the words, “Jaycee Lee Kidnapped. Please Look.”

Another classmate, Kristina Rhoden, who had attended Jaycee’s eleventh birthday party a month earlier, said South Lake Tahoe was never the same again after she disappeared.

“It was horrible,” she explained in 2009. “There was an overflow of fear. That bus stop in Pioneer Trail was a major stop. We realized it could have been anybody who was taken. We just couldn’t believe someone we knew was kidnapped—that no one was really safe.”

On Wednesday, June 12, two days after Jaycee Lee Dugard was taken, the El Dorado Sheriff’s Office released the composite drawing of the suspected female kidnapper based on Carl Probyn’s description. The drawing showed a thin-faced Arabic-looking woman in her thirties, with piercing dark eyes and long black hair. It was circulated to all law enforcement agencies in California and Nevada, as well as television stations and newspapers.

The El Dorado County Sheriff’s Department—the official lead agency of the investigation—were now receiving an average of one new lead every five minutes from all over America.

“We are checking all of them out,” Special Agent Tom Griffin of the FBI told
The Sacramento Bee.
“But I am afraid that we have nothing positive to report right now.”

After Terry Probyn’s heartfelt television plea to the kidnappers, two families from Lake Tahoe and Sacramento, who wished to remain anonymous, had pledged $10,000 each, bringing the total reward money to $25,000.

As the long agonizing hours turned into days, Terry Probyn chain-smoked, drinking herself senseless. Her friends and family tried to comfort her, but she was inconsolable. Her mood swings alternated between panic, hope, anger and despair.

“Basically my wife collapsed,” recalled Carl Probyn. “She was just beside herself.”

On Wednesday afternoon, Terry Probyn received a visit from Trish Williams, who ran a San Jose–based nonprofit agency called Child Quest International, dedicated to the recovery of missing children.

After spending some time with Terry, Williams decided she needed to be occupied doing something constructive, instead of drowning her sorrows in alcohol.

“We wanted to get her out of the house,” she later told author Robert Scott, “and doing something . . . positive.”

So she drove Terry to St. Theresa’s Catholic Church, where dozens of volunteers had gathered to walk the streets, distributing Jaycee’s missing poster, as well as the sketch of her suspected female kidnapper.

Jaycee Lee Dugard’s missing poster, which would also be used on a t-shirt, bore two recent photographs and read:

ID INFO

Jaycee is a white female, 4'7" tall, weighs 80 pounds, has straight blonde hair and blue eyes. She has a gap in her front teeth, a chicken pox mark between her eyes and a birthmark on her right arm below her elbow. She also has a mole on her back and was last seen wearing a pink jacket, pink stretch pants, a white t-shirt and white canvas tennis shoes.

CIRCUMSTANCES

Jaycee was last seen by her step-father walking up a hill to her school bus when a gray on gray vehicle made a U-turn and the person on the passenger side grabbed her and put her in the car and sped off. The step-father gave chase but lost sight of the vehicle. Jaycee has not been seen or heard from since.

IF YOU SEE THIS CHILD, OR MISSING PERSON, OR KNOW WHERE SHE IS LOCATED, PLEASE CONTACT THE EL DORADO SHERIFF DEPARTMENT.

For the next few days, Terry Probyn helped distribute the posters, which soon started appearing on walls, trees, convenience stores and motels all over California and Nevada, and later as far away as the East Coast.

22

AMERICA’S MOST WANTED

By Thursday morning, seventy-two hours after the kidnapping, investigators had made little progress in their search for Jaycee Lee Dugard. Although there had been hundreds of reported sightings of the little girl or the kidnappers’ car, nothing had checked out.

“Everyone was so concerned,” said the FBI’s lead investigator on the case, Chris Campion, “because it was such a tragic and shocking case for the community. We got tons of calls, and we really diligently followed every lead that we possibly could to its logical conclusion.”

At his daily press briefing, El Dorado County sheriff Don McDonald said all investigators really had to go on was Carl Probyn’s description of the getaway car, now believed to be a two-tone gray 1980s Mercury Zephyr. He said that although investigators still believed the kidnappers might be holding Jaycee in the area, all the roadblocks and door-to-door searches had stopped.

Now-retired FBI special agent Mary Ellen O’Toole was part of the team of profilers working the Jaycee Dugard case. She thought it “striking” that a couple, especially a woman, was involved in such a crime. O’Toole, who would later co-write an FBI manual on child abduction, said investigators had been working on the theory that Jaycee’s kidnappers had also taken Michaela Garecht, three years earlier.

“We had this cluster of child abductions,” O’Toole told
Dateline NBC
in 2009, “and of course one of the primary questions . . . were they committed by the same individual.”

The FBI investigators were also astonished at the apparent “high-risk behavior” of the kidnappers.

“It occurred in broad daylight,” she observed. “Plus, it occurred in front of other people who could provide us with information about the car, about Jaycee, about the abductor.”

On Thursday afternoon, Anthony Batson, a producer on Fox Television’s highly rated
America’s Most Wanted
(AMW), flew into Sacramento with his crew. They then drove to South Lake Tahoe to interview Carl and Terry Probyn at their Washoan Avenue home. It would be the first of three AMW segments on Jaycee over the next few years.

“It was my first time dealing with the parents of a missing child face-to-face,” Batson remembered. “We talked to Jaycee’s parents. . . . They were devastated and desperate.”

Batson and AMW correspondent Lena Nozizwe interviewed the Probyns in their pine-tree-canopied backyard about the fateful morning their daughter had disappeared.

“Tears flowed throughout the interview,” said Batson. “Some of them were mine.”

Then they filmed Carl in the garage, where he had witnessed the abduction.

“Once the car opened,” he said, “I really panicked. I reached for my car keys. Didn’t have any. They were in the house.”

The AMW crew then moved to Jaycee’s bedroom, interviewing her tearful mother on her bed, surrounded by her daughter’s beloved teddy bears and dolls.

“We do feel she’s alive,” said thirty-two-year-old Terry holding Jaycee’s teddy bear. “You know, I feel her in my heart. And that’s what keeps me going.”

The segment, which would air the following night, included home video of Jaycee’s recent birthday party, with a slow-motion shot of her blowing out birthday cake candles.

“It was edited in such a way,” said Batson, “as to grab the viewer’s attention, make them look closely at the cute blonde girl on the screen, and motivate them to pick up the phone and call our free 800 number, if they had the slightest detail they thought investigators could use.”

In 2009, Batson, now a senior producer with CBS’s
The Early Show
, would admit that at the time he secretly believed Jaycee was already dead.

“The FBI says the first seventy-two hours is crucial in a missing child case,” he explained. “After that, the chances of recovery are next to zero.”

On Monday, June 3—one week before Jaycee Lee Dugard’s abduction—a two-year-old girl had been playing alone in the garden of the Beverly Lodge Motel in South Lake Tahoe. Inside her mother was paying a bill at reception, when she saw a dark-skinned woman pick up the child and start walking toward the hotel entrance.

She dashed out to challenge the woman, who immediately handed over the child, saying she had just been looking for the mother. Then she got into a white pickup truck and was driven away by a Caucasian man.

After reading about Jaycee’s abduction and seeing the sketch of the suspected woman, the mother had called investigators to report the earlier incident.

And on Friday morning, at its daily briefing, the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office appealed to the mysterious woman to come forward, so she could be eliminated from the investigation.

Lieutenant James Roloff then told reporters that the investigation had been “scaled down,” due to a lack of promising leads. And investigators were now hoping that evening’s
America’s Most Wanted
telecast would revitalize the search.

“If there are no developments over the weekend,” reported
The Sacramento Bee
, “investigators will reevaluate the effort Monday.”

That night millions of viewers all over North America watched the moving
America’s Most Wanted
segment on Jaycee Lee Dugard’s abduction.

“Have you seen Jaycee Lee Dugard?” asked AMW host John Walsh. “Jaycee’s eleven years old. She has blonde hair and blue eyes. She’s four-and-a-half feet tall and weighs eighty pounds.”

The dramatically powerful piece generated hundreds of leads, none of which came to anything. One viewer mailed in an ad from a swingers magazine, saying the photo of the dark-haired woman in the advertisement resembled the composite sketch.