Lost Girls (23 page)

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Authors: Caitlin Rother

BOOK: Lost Girls
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Only five hours after Candice Moncayo had drawn the composite that afternoon, a Colorado Springs detective drove the six-pack out to her place, where she quickly identified Gardner at 7:40
P.M.
, California time, while Gardner was still being interviewed and processed.
Pointing to his photo in position number six, she said, “That's him. That's him.”
Ironically, Candice didn't have cable TV, so she never even saw the news; she only heard what had happened to Chelsea from her own family.
“To be honest, my first response was one of great fear and great anxiety and, at the same time, great hope that it ... they were not connected,” she later told talk show host Larry King.
Two days after Gardner was arrested and she identified him as her attacker, her sister Kayla told ABC News, “She is shaken up, but she's a strong girl. She has the joy of the Lord on her.”
 
 
Just after 8:00
P.M.
, the Fugitive Task Force detectives transported Gardner downtown to the Central Jail, where he was booked for murder and placed into protective custody due to his previous sex crime conviction and the massive publicity surrounding his new case.
An hour later, a team of investigators armed with search warrants, including Palmer and Enyeart, joined their colleagues at his mother's condo in RB, while Brown and O'Brien headed for his grandmother's house in Lake Elsinore, serving warrants at 9:12 and 9:53
P.M.
They took computers from Cathy's condo, where they found a headless snake in the trash can.
Palmer asked the same questions of Cathy that their colleagues had been asking her all day. “We're asking you for help,” he said. “Do you know anything? Our concern is with Chelsea King.”
“My concern is with my son,” Cathy replied. “I understand you have a job to do, but I've got a job too—my son.”
At 9:35
P.M.
, DOJ special agent Sonja Ramos did a forty-five-minute interview with Cathy to get some background on Gardner. Cathy told Ramos that Gardner had been taking Effexor, and described him as “impulsive, goofy, silly and very kind.” She said his girlfriend, Jariah Baker, was living at Serenity House, a rehab facility in Escondido, and that Gardner had lost his job and was living with his grandmother in Lake Elsinore. Cathy would pick him up there and drive him to San Diego to visit her, “because he did not drive.”
The night Chelsea went missing, she said, “was a regular evening.” Gardner arrived at her house around six, then she, her husband and son “had dinner and watched TV.” Gardner took walks when he stayed at her house, she said, but she didn't want to discuss where her son usually walked because she didn't want to say something that would unintentionally incriminate her or her son.
The investigators weren't happy with her lack of cooperation. “There is a line where you're protecting your son and where you're protecting society in general,” Palmer said later. If she had any inkling that he was involved in this, “for God's sake, you've got to tell somebody, and she didn't.”
 
 
Minutes after John Gardner was arrested, the detectives who were waiting outside his grandmother's house stormed inside after ripping the front door off its hinges, hoping to find Chelsea sequestered inside. But the house was empty because Linda Osborn was still in the hospital. The FBI and the Riverside County Sheriff's Department (RCSD) assisted in the search. Brown left in the early-morning hours, sending his men home to catch a few hours of sleep.
The task force detectives who had been waiting outside Gardner's last known address in Escondido didn't break down any doors, but they, too, went inside and checked around, only to learn he hadn't lived there in months.
After booking Gardner for murder, the detectives had to prepare a briefing known as a “DA three-day,” or issuing conference, in which they would present their case to a panel at the DA's office so the attorneys could ask questions. If the detectives made their case well, the DA would file charges and Gardner would have his arraignment within the required seventy-two hours of his arrest.
With still no sign of Chelsea, everyone was frustrated. The question hung, unstated but heavy in the air among all the volunteers and sworn officers who had been searching for her for several days now, “Where is she? Where is she? Where is she?”
On Monday, some of those who had been watching others search got permission to join in and jump into the thick of it, thrashing around in the hard, tall reeds. Desperate, just desperate, to find Chelsea King.
 
 
After seeing Gardner's booking photo in the news, two witnesses put him in the park within hours of Chelsea's run, and many others told authorities that they were pretty sure they'd seen him in the area that day or in the weeks before.
Jacquelyn Maxton said she was 100 percent sure she'd seen Gardner when she'd gone running around three in the afternoon on February 25, the day Chelsea went missing. Starting her run at Duenda, Maxton was heading north on the trail, about three hundred yards from the entrance, when she saw Gardner coming toward her. He said “Hi” and smiled, so she said “Hi” back. Feeling uncomfortable, she looked down at his shirt rather than meet his eyes. It was a black T-shirt that had
HARD ROCK CAFÉ BAGHDAD
in white letters with some Farsi script underneath. He was wearing baggy blue jeans, and he was “a little pudgy,” with a protruding belly. As she continued on, she turned right, where the trail forked off and headed east, where she saw a girl with a ponytail she believed was Chelsea run past her. Detectives determined that she'd seen Gardner about three hundred yards from where Chelsea's panties were found.
 
 
On the evening of February 26, Cindi Jo Stock told authorities she'd been out running with her dogs between 1:00 and 1:30
P.M.
the day before, when she saw a man wearing a white T-shirt with a brown
HARD ROCK CAFÉ
logo, jeans and tennis shoes. She'd been running this same four-mile route for the past five years, starting near where Chelsea had parked her car. She'd run about 1.5 miles out, past the waterfall, when she saw the man crouching near the water and two large rocks that were labeled with plaques describing the Kumeyaay way of gathering food during ancient times. The man, who was smoking and holding a silver beer can, stood up as she approached. He was a tall, stocky and clean-cut guy, with brown eyes and a belly, and was drinking beer from a white plastic bag containing a six-pack. He had three empties scattered around him.
The man warned her to watch out for the rattlesnake. She stopped and asked where it was. Her dogs had been through a rattlesnake avoidance class, and she wanted to see how they'd react. Grabbing a stick, he poked the snake, which was about nine feet off the trail, prompting it to coil and rattle its tail. The man didn't seem scared, saying he'd moved there from the Big Bear area, and knew a lot about snakes. This one was a female, he said, and he'd already gotten the venom out of its fangs. He seemed friendly and nonthreatening, but she wanted to finish her run. She kept going, hit the two-mile mark and turned around.
When she came back, the man was sitting in the same spot, but the snake was a couple of feet closer to the trail. As they talked more about snakes, coyotes and dogs, he even recognized the breed of Stock's dogs. She said good-bye, and he told her to have a good day. She finished her run, getting back to her car around 2:30
P.M.
The night Stock reported this incident to authorities, she tried to lead a detective to the spot, but rather than walk the 1.5 miles from the parking lot, they decided to drive around and walk from the 10300 block of Poblado Road, near where Candice Moncayo reported her assault. As they tried to approach the area, however, an officer was cordoning off the area where the panties had been found. Because the detective didn't want to risk contaminating the crime scene, they used a computer to identify where she'd met the man.
On March 1, after Stock's brother directed her to a news photo of Gardner online, Cindi Jo Stock called the detective back, saying she was “100 percent sure” that Gardner was the man with the snake.
Figuring that Gardner had used the snake as a ruse or an icebreaker for conversation, Brown and Palmer went to the waterfall area with an evidence tech at 1:30
P.M.
that same day, and found the rattlesnake head as well as the white plastic bag she'd described, which was under a bush about forty yards away. Inside were nine empty silver Coors Light cans and an empty box of Camels. The detectives then returned to Cathy's to collect the headless snake they'd found in the trash, plus the clothes that the witnesses said he'd been wearing: a
HARD ROCK BAGHDAD
T-shirt and jeans.
Detectives also learned that on the day before Chelsea went missing, an eleven-year-old African-American sixth grader at Bernardo Heights Middle School in RB told her parents that a white or Hispanic man in his mid- to late thirties, with a short, military-style haircut and driving a black car, had been following her as she was walking home from school around 3:30
P.M.
Her mother reported the incident to police about fifteen minutes later.
The girl had been walking with a classmate until they parted ways at a park. As she continued on alone, talking on her cell phone, she heard the sound of a car slowing behind her. It drove past her, did a U-turn and parked about twenty feet in front of her, facing her. The driver, who was wearing sunglasses, didn't say anything but stared at her as she walked past. A woman driving by stopped to warn the girl that this man looked suspicious, and offered to cruise alongside her until she got home, which was about two blocks away. The woman also advised her to be aware of her surroundings and not talk on her cell phone. By then, the man had driven away; the girl couldn't remember his license plate number.
That Friday, when the girl's mother learned about the Chelsea King investigation, she called the school to report the incident, and was told that she was the second parent that week to report this type of information. After Gardner was arrested on Sunday, the girl's father showed her Gardner's photo on his iPhone, and asked if she recognized him.
“Yeah, that's him,” she said. “That's the guy in the car.”
Her father was able to find Cathy's address from watching the news, and he and his wife drove over there to look for a black car. When he got to the house that evening, an officer pointed to Jariah's black Nissan, which was parked in front of Cathy's condo. The father went back the next day to take a photo in the daylight.
Two special agents interviewed the girl on Monday evening and showed her a photo six-pack that included Gardner's, but she pointed to his photo and the one next to it. Her father showed her the photo of Jariah's car for the first time and asked if it looked familiar.
“Kind of,” the girl said, adding that she thought the number 1 was the last digit in the license plate of the black car that followed her, just like Jariah's license plate, but she hadn't noticed any front-end damage. After the interview, her parents came outside to tell the agents that the girl was leaning more toward Gardner's photo. She'd only included the other man because he was wearing a blue shirt. The agents determined that the place where she'd originally seen the black car was only two blocks from Cathy's condo.
Chapter 24
On Monday morning, Amber Dubois's father showed up at the sheriff's command center at the RB park to talk to the media. When sheriff's spokeswoman Jan Caldwell heard that Moe Dubois was in the upper parking lot, she walked over to see what was up. Moe told her that he was sure Gardner was responsible for his daughter's disappearance.
“Help me,” he pleaded. “Help us.”
“Absolutely, Mr. Dubois,” Caldwell said. “We will do everything in our power to work with the Escondido Police Department and find out if this has any connection.”
 
 
The next morning, Gardner's girlfriend, Jariah Baker, gave consent to let investigators search her Nissan, where they found a pack of Camels, one of his traffic citations and rolls of electrical and duct tape.
That afternoon, Sergeant Brown, his crew and criminalist Anne-Marie Shafer gathered in the district attorney's office in the Hall of Justice, in the heart of downtown San Diego's civic center, to deliver their “DA three-day” presentation.
“Murder is a big deal,” Brown said, and because this murder was a particularly high-profile case, and also because the presentation was held downtown, DA Bonnie Dumanis made a rare showing at the briefing, which was attended by fifteen to twenty people, sitting around a big table.
“This was clearly, from the beginning, going to be a special case,” Dumanis said.
It was just before three o'clock, when Shafer was giving her portion of the presentation, when Brown's beeper went off. That moment froze in time for Dumanis as pager after pager went off in succession around the table.
“Our hearts were basically broken at the same moment,” she said.
These were seasoned professionals, quite experienced in the world of death and tragedy, and yet every one of their faces went white as they all realized that Chelsea was gone.
“I have to take this call,” Brown said, apologizing to Dumanis. “We found a body at the lake.”
Quite unlike any other case they'd dealt with, this one made even these investigators, prosecutors and former judges feel vulnerable. It hit them right in the gut where the fear lived, the fear that someone they loved—particularly a child—would head out the door one day and never come back, falling victim to a horrible death over which none of them had any control. Like everyone else, they, too, had thought RB and Poway were safe communities.
Brown ran with his team to their cars and made the round of calls that usually started off a frenetic homicide investigation: to the forensic evidence techs, investigators and a pathologist from the medical examiner's (ME) office, as well as the same bug expert, known as an entomologist, who had testified in another high-profile San Diego case—that of convicted child killer David Westerfield.
FBI agents Wade Dudley and Andy Chambers, a Los Angeles dive team member, were following the shoreline in their boat, watching for bird activity and signs of disturbed brush or earth. They pulled into a cove, saw some fresh dirt and went to investigate. There, under the brush, it looked like a creature had moved aside the loose sandy soil to expose some blond hair.
It was March 2, 2010, at 2:56
P.M.
when they found Chelsea's body in a shallow grave on the south shores of Lake Hodges. The more religious of those watching this case considered it no coincidence that she was facing Battle Mountain, where a cross was illuminated at night.
Chelsea was only about ten feet from where they'd found her first shoe, an area of heavy brush that had been searched a half-dozen times already, but it had been cold, it had been raining, and her body had been covered with dirt, which protected her from the elements. Also, because the temperatures were so low, only the tip of her nose had begun to decompose, which is why the cadaver dogs hadn't picked up the scent.
“We had searchers go through every foot of this area,” Sergeant Don Parker said, as he stood at the scene a year later. “My regret is we didn't find her until we did. It wouldn't have changed anything. It just prolonged everybody's agony.”
As TV news cameras captured some blurry shots of the boats pulling over and finding Chelsea, they also captured Brown putting his arm around Palmer. From the camera's perspective, it looked almost as if Brown was comforting Palmer, a rare show of affection between two seasoned homicide detectives, although in this case, that didn't seem all that extraordinary.
In fact, however, Brown was simply telling Palmer how it was going to be. They were already exhausted after working with no sleep for several days straight as they watched the case unfold, and they were only just now at the point where they normally began working a murder.
“These thousand people are going to leave,” Brown told Palmer. “It's just going to be the seven of us who are always here. Our job starts now, Mark.”
This case had been very different from their normal fare from the start. They typically began their investigation after they knew the victim was dead, but in this case, they'd hoped that Chelsea was still alive. They'd learned who she was, and they'd become emotionally invested in her fate. This case had been more tiring and more disappointing than usual, and now they had less than twenty-four hours to gather evidence before Gardner would be arraigned. They were going to have to dig even deeper than usual.
 
 
Sheriff's spokeswoman Jan Caldwell could feel a change in the air as soon as Chelsea's body was discovered that afternoon.
Always very focused, Don Parker was usually an easygoing guy, and so full of life. They'd had some false starts in the past few days, but judging by the look of anger mixed with sadness on his face, Caldwell could see that this was the real thing. As he stood in the command post with a walkie-talkie in one ear and a cell phone in the other, he turned to the incident commander and said, “They found her.”
It was up to Caldwell to notify Sheriff Gore. In the first couple of days after Chelsea disappeared, Gore had instructed Lieutenant Brugos to let Caldwell talk to the media so as not to send the message to the Kings that they should give up the hope of finding their daughter alive. The last thing the Kings needed was to see Brugos being interviewed, with his “homicide lieutenant” tagline on the TV screen.
After Gore had announced John Gardner's arrest to the media, he didn't want to keep going on TV simply to say, “Nothing new,” so he had told Caldwell that morning that he was leaving her in charge of talking to the media once again.
“Scoop, you take it from here,” he'd said. “I'm overexposed.”
As soon as she got word that afternoon, Caldwell called Gore right away. But as one former FBI agent to another, they didn't want to say much on an unsecured cell phone, knowing their conversation could be monitored by the more technologically savvy people out there.
“You need to come up to Rancho Bernardo right now,” Caldwell said.
“Is this significant?” he asked.
“Yes, you need to be here.”
“I'm on my way,” he said.
After that call, Caldwell walked outside to see one of the King family's friends approaching. She didn't have to say a word; he could tell by her expression what had happened. His eyes were brimming with tears by the time they met face-to-face.
“I'm so sorry,” Caldwell said as she hugged him. “She's going to make a difference.”
“And she did,” Caldwell said later. “It's not in the way we wanted, but she did, and she's going to continue to make a difference.”
Some people looked for a higher meaning to this tragedy, something to help them make sense of it. Chaplains were milling around the command center that afternoon, and Caldwell couldn't help but ask one of them for some kind of spiritual explanation.
“Why?” she asked. “How could this happen?”
“This makes God sad too,” he said. “God didn't want this to happen. There is evil in the world. But there was a reason for this.”
Spending so many years in law enforcement, Caldwell had learned to find ways to release the emotions of her job. Inside her file for Chelsea's case, she had pinned this quotation from author and historian Washington Irving (1783–1859):
There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief ... and unspeakable love.
 
 
Sheriff Gore took it upon himself to notify the King family personally, which Sergeant Brown considered a favor to him.
“I'll do it,” Gore said, taking on a task that no one really wanted.
First he went to the RB park to gather information on how and where Chelsea was found, then he called Detective Chris Johnson to find out who was home at the King house. This was something he dreaded doing, but out of respect to the family with whom he had developed such a bond, he felt it was his obligation.
“It was the longest drive of my life,” he said, “and the longest walk up the driveway. What do you say?”
Inside, Johnson was there with Brent, Kelly and Kelly's brother, a retired school superintendent. They watched, with the hope of good news in their eyes, as Gore walked in—just as they had done during his daily visits since Chelsea had gone missing.
The bonds of trust between the Kings and Gore had deepened since they'd met in the park's gym four days earlier. During one visit, Brent brought down Post-it notes with inspirational messages and quotes that Chelsea had posted on her bathroom wall, sharing with Gore what kind of marvel their daughter was. As upset and worried as the Kings were, Gore had encouraged them to get up in the middle of the night to do a satellite interview with him for
Good Morning America,
trying to get the word out about Chelsea's disappearance. Gore felt Kelly grip his hand tightly for support throughout the entire interview.
But on this sad afternoon, as much as he wanted to, Gore didn't have any good news or hope to give them. “We believe we've found Chelsea,” he said somberly.
“Are you sure?” Brent asked.
“I'm sure enough that I'm here.”
After days of listening to Gore encourage them to keep hoping, Kelly and Brent broke into tears, devastated.
“There was hugging and crying,” Gore recalled later. “Everyone is crying. Chris, me.”
Detective Johnson had practically lived with the family since Chelsea had disappeared, which was the sheriff's department's way of keeping them informed while also obtaining necessary information quickly for investigators.
“He was their bodyguard, family member, support system,” Gore said. “It was tough on him.”
And for Gore too. “Nothing in my career has had the emotional impact that this case has,” he said.
When Gore returned from the Kings' house in Poway to lead a news conference at the park, his eyes were still welled up with tears. To Caldwell, it looked as if he'd aged two years during the past hour.
Surrounded by top officials from every law enforcement agency in town that had worked some aspect of this case, Gore spoke soberly to the reporters and their cameras about finding a body they thought was Chelsea's. But he wouldn't say for sure because she had yet to be officially identified.
“Had you searched the area before?” a reporter asked.
“This is an area we had been searching over the last five days, but unfortunately we missed it because it was in a shallow grave,” he said. “It's a heavily wooded area and not observable from the homes up on the hillside or if you're standing in the park, so it gives some amount of cover to whoever did this.”
Gore declined to answer questions about the state of the body or describe what Chelsea's assailant had done to her. “I don't want to talk about that,” he said.
No one broke down and sobbed. But everyone who had been scouring the trails and the lake for signs of the missing girl—the deputies, detectives and chiefs who had invested their emotions in the chance that she would be found alive—hugged and touched one another far more than usual that afternoon, expressing a primal need for the comfort of human contact. Caldwell took note of this, unable to think of another news conference where she'd seen so much bonding behavior among her colleagues.

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