Lost Girls (21 page)

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Authors: Caitlin Rother

BOOK: Lost Girls
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To the detectives, the fact that these newly found items were so far from the underwear and Chelsea's car signaled foul play. But rather than show a box full of random clothing items to Chelsea's distressed parents, Palmer sent photos on his cell phone to Detective Johnson, who was assigned to stay with the Kings to facilitate communication. Johnson showed the photos to Kelly, asked if they matched the brand of socks, underwear and running shoes that Chelsea wore, and she figured out which ones were likely to be Chelsea's.
The matching clothing items were taken to the sheriff's crime lab that evening, along with Chelsea's hairbrush, toothbrush and retainer. Time was of the essence. Everyone was still hoping to find Chelsea alive somewhere, and detectives and crime lab managers agreed that the items should go to the front of the line for DNA testing. The underwear was, in fact, stained with a small amount of blood, so the first step for criminalist Anne-Marie Shafer was to confirm that it contained Chelsea's DNA. Next, Shafer would look for male DNA on the panties, and then see if it matched any registered sex offender whose DNA profile was on file with the FBI database—the Combined DNA Index System, known as CODIS.
As part of the usual protocol, the DNA samples were also sent for a parallel set of tests at the DOJ lab in Sacramento. Tyler Burtis, a supervising DOJ agent attached to the sheriff's homicide team, persuaded the lab to run these tests over the weekend. Usually, investigators would have to wait until at least Monday, even for expedited results.
It was good that they found the panties as soon as they did—before the rain and before someone had stepped on them. And they were pleased to see that the socks were clean on the sole, which indicated they had been dropped, not worn, in the dirt.
“We got lucky,” Brown said. “That's some good sample.”
 
 
District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis first learned of the case while she was at a luncheon that Friday, listening to the FBI's Keith Slotter give a speech. He mentioned that his pager had just gone off with a text from his daughter, who had been following the Chelsea King search.
That day, Dumanis said, she watched the “rocking of the community” start its trajectory. Because her department liked to get in early on homicide cases, her liaison with the sheriff's department kept her updated from that point on. Over the weekend, Dumanis personally decided who would be the best of her thirty-two prosecutors in the Superior Court and Pretrial Division to handle the case: forty-four-year-old Kristen Spieler, an attractive and talented blonde who had been hired in 1998 by the previous DA.
“Kristen is one of their hitters,” Brown said of Spieler, who was named Prosecutor of the Year in 2008. Spieler had won convictions in high-profile cases before: one against a fourteen-year-old girl tried as an adult for killing her mother with a claw hammer, and another against Gerald Nash, who had chopped up a homeless man he'd befriended and spread his body parts throughout the county.
“Prosecutors love these kinds of cases because it's the closest they can come to being police officers,” Dumanis said.
 
 
That afternoon, about one hundred agents from the FBI's Safe Streets Task Force, as well as additional officers from the SDPD and sheriff's department, began knocking on 360 doors of homes surrounding the park. They checked every room in these houses, as well as the backyards, thinking that Chelsea might have gone for help but passed out before she reached the door. Virtually all residents agreed to let the agents enter without a fight.
“The big thing on child abductions that we really feel is important is the neighborhood, the neighborhood, the neighborhood,” Alex Horan said.
At the same time, the Sexual Assault Felony Enforcement (SAFE) team, a group of officers from the state DOJ and the sheriff's department, interviewed violent sexual offenders who lived in the area. Drawing a ten- or fifteen-mile radius, the SAFE team did a bed check of all “290” sex offender registrants, and also checked activities over the past thirty-six hours on all the 290s who wore the same type of GPS ankle bracelet that John Gardner had worn while on parole. All they found was one man who had ridden a bike across the bridge over Lake Hodges.
“We were striking out,” Brown said.
 
 
That evening, Detectives O'Brien and Enyeart went to the Kings' home to do a cursory interview and search their house for signs of foul play. When they were done, they told Palmer they were confident that the house and the Kings were clean.
Meanwhile, the helicopters searched all night long using infrared and FLIR thermal imaging equipment, which sees through brush in the dark by searching for anything releasing heat, as a live person would, or even a dead person within ten or twelve hours of death.
Brown sent O'Brien and Enyeart home to shower and catch a few hours of sleep while he and Palmer tried to get some rest in the front seat of their cars at the command center. But it was no use.
“There's a million puzzle pieces and they're all flying around in your head,” Brown said.
Chapter 22
By midday Saturday, February 27, a search team had also found a sports bra in the culvert on Duenda Road between Smoke Signal Drive and Moon Song Court. Because some rain had fallen, Parker and the detectives theorized that these items had been dropped into a drainage area upstream in the neighborhood, and had floated down to the culvert on Duenda.
Kelly said the sports bra was the same size, color and brand that her daughter had recently purchased in a two-pack. The Kings also produced a receipt and a box for the new yellow-and-silver Adidas shoes Chelsea had ordered from Road Runner.
The detectives spoke some more with Chelsea's parents, and interviewed her ex-boyfriend and neighbors, delving deeper into her life to see if she might have run off with or been abducted by someone she knew.
“Everybody could have done it,” Brown said. “You always start there.”
In San Diego County, he said, 99.9 percent of missing girls had run away, not been abducted, and in most homicide cases, murder “boils down to love, money or drugs.” But after these interviews and the sheriff's computer crimes team had checked the Kings' computers, the detectives were confident that the “parents didn't do it, the ex-boyfriend didn't do it. She doesn't use drugs. She didn't run away. This girl is as good as gold,” Brown said.
 
 
It was cold, it was raining, and Brown was starting to worry. They still hadn't found Chelsea, and he wondered if she might be alive, but somewhere else. And now that they'd reached the forty-eight-hour mark, they were also starting to think that “somebody killed this girl and it wasn't somebody close to her,” that she could have fallen prey to a practiced killer.
“We really did think we had a
Silence of the Lambs
thing here,” he said. If somebody had killed her in the park, surely the dogs would have found her already.
In most murder cases they dealt with, they could tell when a killer didn't know what he was doing. “Most of these things are sloppy and easy to figure out,” Brown said. But in this case, the assailant seemed to be “a lot smarter than your average killer. He's covering his tracks.”
 
 
Brown asked an analyst to do a computer search for any reports of recent crimes in the park. After consulting the Area Regional Justice Information System (ARJIS) criminal database, which was shared by law enforcement agencies throughout the region, the analyst gave Brown a report about an attack on a jogger the morning of Sunday, December 27, 2009, as well as the detective's phone number.
The report, written by SDPD officer David Nilsen the day of the ten-thirty incident, listed the assault on twenty-two-year-old Candice Moncayo as an “attempted robbery.”
Soon after the incident, Candice's sister Kayla, a student at Rancho Bernardo High School, wrote an editorial about the incident in the
Silver Spur,
her school newspaper, but it didn't run until the day after Chelsea went missing.
One needs to be cautious of what is around, and not take for granted the stillness that Rancho Bernardo is known for,
Kayla wrote.
We should not live in fear, but we should be aware.
Candice was just finishing an eight-mile run, heading south on the trail off Duenda, near Poblado Road, on this sunny morning when she saw a man walking toward her. Candice described the suspect as about twenty-five years old, five feet eleven inches tall and about 230 pounds, with a heavy-to-muscular build, brown hair and brown eyes. She said he was clean shaven, with a “military crew cut,” and was wearing a blue sweater with a horizontal white stripe and blue jeans. The man had grown to six feet two inches (Gardner's actual height) in her sister's news account.
“Good morning,” Candice said as she approached the man. She thought it was a bit strange for someone on a running trail to be wearing jeans, but she figured he lived in one of the houses nearby and was just out taking a walk.
The man responded in kind, but then, without any warning, he tackled her from the side as she was running past him. He knocked her down, climbed on top of her and pinned her shoulders to the ground, leaving bruises on her shoulders and scrapes on her knees. When she started screaming for help, he tried to quiet her.
“Shut up!” he ordered.
But Candice kept screaming. “No!” she yelled. “You'll have to kill me first.”
“That can be arranged,” he replied, telling her again to shut up.
“No,” she yelled.
The man said a few other things to Candice, which, she later explained on
Larry King Live,
were crude and she didn't feel comfortable repeating.
Gardner later claimed that when he realized she was scared he was going to rape her, he said, “I don't want that. I want your money,” to which she replied, “I don't have any money.”
Moncayo, in fear of being raped, was now in fear for her life,
Nilsen wrote in his report, noting that
the suspect did not touch Moncayo in a sexual manner.
Then the man ordered Candice to “give me all your money.”
After she told Gardner she had no money on her, Candice said, he grabbed her by the shoulders and began to shake her frenetically, “the way you're not supposed to shake a child.”
But when he chose her as a victim, he didn't bargain on the fact that she was the daughter of John Moncayo, a five-time world kickboxing champion, or that she'd been involved in jujitsu for most of her life, which taught her the skills to defend herself. Thanks also to her training and natural instinct, she said, she was able to fight him off due “to the grace of God.”
Managing to work her left hand into position behind her, she was able to pivot and jab her right elbow sharply into the man's nose. As she felt the crunch of his cartilage, he let go of her and grabbed his nose, which was dripping with blood. Candice ran as fast as she could toward the nearest house, where she called police, while he ran in the opposite direction, heading north into the hills. Several patrol units responded and checked the area, but found no witnesses or any trace of him.
Candice was left emotionally shaken by the experience, she said, but she was determined to overcome the trauma. The very next day, she went out running with a pit bull belonging to her sister's boyfriend.
“I felt that if I didn't get back on the horse right away, that I never would,” she told Larry King when she appeared on his show with Chelsea's parents and Amber's mother on March 16, 2010.
“What mark has this left on you?” Larry King asked.
“A deep one. It's something I think I'll be dealing with for the rest of my life. Just the other week, I was running and I had to pass a gentleman on the trails. And he was also—he was going for a hike. And I ... He had to stop and let me pass. So I had to come close to him. And, you know, I burst into tears and, I think, ruined his run. So I'm ashamed about that a bit.”
Candice didn't mention this on TV, but she told the probation officer who wrote Gardner's sentencing report that she was so upset after the attack that she had to drop two college courses midterm. She also required more than a dozen counseling sessions to deal with the aftermath, knowing that she, too, could have been murdered.
 
 
The SDPD report included no follow-up on the case, so sheriff's sergeant Dave Brown asked the police detective for an update on the investigation. Detective Phil Bozarth said that because of Candice's blood-drawing jab, Officer Nilsen had her elbow swabbed for DNA and the sample had been submitted to SDPD's crime lab. However, Brown said, “because they have a backlog, and because this was listed as a robbery,” the swab was still in line to be tested.
Furthermore, Bozarth said, no composite sketch of the suspect was ever done. Candice had been visiting her family for Christmas vacation, and had to return to the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, where she was studying to be a teacher.
According to Bozarth's report, he'd shown Candice a photo six-pack, including a “wanted fugitive” who was arrested in her parents' neighborhood, but she said he wasn't the guy. He deemed the case “inactive” on February 10, 2010, while awaiting lab results, because “no other related cases were reported in the area and there were no additional leads.”
Candice Moncayo's assault was the only potentially related and recent crime in the area, making this unknown suspect Sergeant Brown's favorite. But the evidence didn't go far enough to constitute a real lead without some kind of sketch or ID, not to mention the DNA test results, a deficiency he made clear to every SDPD boss he saw at the command post.
“Test it or give it to us and we'll test it,” he urged. “This is the closest similar case that might be ours. We don't know, but it's the best one we've got.”
When Brown got the DNA results a few days later, the swab had picked up only female DNA.
In the meantime, Detective Palmer got the Colorado Springs Police Department (CSPD) to work with Candice to get a composite sketch—better late than never. The CSPD made an appointment for Candice at 2:00
P.M.
on Sunday to sit down at the police station with a sketch artist. They got it done that afternoon, then digitally scanned and sent it to Palmer.
The suspect, she said, had the build of a wrestler or football player. “He was a big bulky guy,” with a head that looked a little like her Uncle Matt's. She said she would definitely recognize him if she saw him again.
 
 
There was some debate over how much public notice the SDPD had put out about Candice's attack. The SDPD later said the assault had been mentioned on two TV news channels, in a regional daily paper and on the Web site for the local weekly papers that covered news in Rancho Bernardo and Poway.
“We didn't pay much attention to it because it was initially reported as an attempted robbery,” said
Pomerado News
editor Steve Dreyer, noting that the story ran online as a “routine brief” of two or three paragraphs and didn't even make the printed version of the paper. “I do remember putting it up on the Web, and then we lost track of it. Obviously, if it had been presented to us in another way, we would have paid more attention to it.”
Once news of the attack got out after John Gardner's arrest and arraignment, the citizens of Rancho Bernardo were outraged, claiming that the SDPD had not protected them properly by warning them there was an attacker on the prowl, either by posting flyers or by alerting the media, as they did when a mountain lion was loose in the neighborhood.
“There's a lot of frustration and anger out there right now,” Gary Carlson, RB's neighborhood watch coordinator, told . “The San Diego Police Department did not personally notify us after the December twenty-seventh attack occurred. It was a failure in communications that the attack was classified as a simple robbery on the crime log.”
If the SDPD had notified his group, he said, it would have been able to post warnings online and throughout the community.
“First we would have notified all of our district leaders who would bring neighbors up to speed. The community would have mobilized and put together flyers to post at local businesses, entrances to the park as well as post flyers door-to-door... . Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but I can say we would have been proactive.”
Those same questions also arose from the major media later. However, by then, their immediacy had diminished. At a news conference on May 17, 2010, SDPD lieutenant Jim Collins was questioned about why Candice Moncayo's assault had been characterized as an “attempted robbery,” why no composite sketch was done at the time, and also why the DNA hadn't been tested earlier.
The officer wrote it up as an attempted robbery, Collins said, because Gardner never tried to touch Candice's private parts. Collins said that SDPD attempted to have Candice meet with a sketch artist, but scheduling conflicts on both sides prevented that from happening before she went back to school. The robbery versus rape categorization was based on the evidence they had and could prove in court, he said, not the rape Candice feared would happen.
Collins also noted that they had a helicopter on the scene within thirteen minutes of her report. “We did get a lot of information out there,” he countered.
During the speculative talk of why the SDPD had passed this investigation on to the sheriff's department, the “egg on face” theory was also suggested. By passing the case over to Sheriff Gore's department, the SDPD was able to duck, or at least postpone, having to answer many of these questions. These SDPD decisions—or failings, depending on your perspective—were cited as moves that contributed to John Gardner remaining on the streets, and, if handled differently, could have saved Chelsea's life.
 
 
By 9:18
A.M.
on Sunday, February 28, criminalist Anne-Marie Shafer had developed a DNA profile for Chelsea and had matched it to the blood on the underwear. She'd also found semen on the panties, and ran the male DNA profile through CODIS.

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