Lost Girls (24 page)

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Authors: Caitlin Rother

BOOK: Lost Girls
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It was really the Kings, though, who had helped make this so personal for all of them. Every morning before the searchers headed out again, Brent and Kelly went around and thanked them all for their efforts to bring their baby home, which only served to pump up and reinvigorate them.
 
 
At the Chelsea King Search Center, the volunteers, who had joined together with earnestness, anxiety and passion to find her, now gathered one more time to mourn her death. They hugged and consoled one another, almost sad to have to say good-bye to the center and to each other.
“I think it did an amazing job at a necessary time of making people aware that the community is what we make it,” one searcher said.
The search effort was so emotionally powerful that it created bonds that lasted even after the pain of the tragedy had faded.
That night, hundreds attended a moving candlelight vigil for Chelsea outside St. Michael's, a Catholic church in Poway.
Chapter 25
The ME's office didn't need the help of forensic anthropologist Madeleine Hinkes to process the area where Chelsea's body was found, but the FBI called and asked her to come look at some bones that had been found elsewhere around the lake in case John Gardner turned out to be a serial killer.
“One of my first thoughts was ‘I wonder if it's Amber,'” said Hinkes, who worked under contract with the ME's office.
It was getting dark when Hinkes parked her car near the command post, where “there were lots of cars, lots of people, lots of standing around.” She followed the agents as they walked the same trail Chelsea had apparently used on her run, across the lake from where her body was found, and through some reeds.
With a Ph.D. in anthropology and twenty-six years on the job, processing twenty to thirty homicide cases a year, Hinkes was able to tell right away whether a bone was of human or animal origin. If a bone was found whole and intact, the joint surfaces were quite different for a human being walking on two feet than an animal walking on four legs. After a few hours of examining the remains searchers had uncovered, Hinkes determined they were of animal origin: the skull of a snake and the bones of four or five coyotes, which had probably died of natural causes or from fighting with each other.
 
 
While Sheriff Gore was talking to the media, Sergeant Brown and his crew were processing Chelsea's grave site for evidence.
It was dawn on Wednesday by the time they were ready to move her body. Out of respect to Chelsea and to his evidence, Brown didn't want to put her on a quad, which would be a radically bumpy two-mile ride to the command post and past the TV photographers, who had been waiting all night to get the classic shot of her being loaded into the white transport van. Likewise, he didn't want to bring in a noisy chopper, which would also effectively alert the media and the neighborhood that he was moving her.
Brown wanted to avoid a Princess Di scenario, with paparazzi chasing the van and making a scene, so he came up with an alternative plan, recruiting Special Agent Tyler Burtis and his three DOJ detectives to help him. One of them drove to the other side of the lake, got a boat and brought it over. Then, like four pallbearers, they lifted Chelsea's body onto the boat and took her across the lake to a van waiting for them at the city-owned dock near Hernandez' Hideaway. From there, Burtis's crew quietly transported her body to the ME's office for the autopsy.
 
 
After the news conference, the sheriff's department formed a Gardner task force to determine whether he was responsible for any other murders or missing girls in the area, specifically Amber Dubois.
The group had its first meeting later that morning at sheriff's headquarters on Ridgehaven, where they canceled all training classes scheduled in the big meeting room. Task force members included the sheriff's cold case homicide team, several SDPD detectives, one Riverside County sheriff's detective, two state parole agents, prosecutor Kristen Spieler and her colleague Bob Amador, five DOJ special agents, two fugitive detectives, EPD lieutenant Bob Benton and five of his detectives, a half-dozen FBI agents and a National Center for Missing & Exploited Children representative.
Brown joked that Benton had been “harassing” and “borderline stalking” him, convinced that Chelsea's murder was related to Amber's case, which had been a nagging and unsolved concern for his department for the past year. Brown and Benton had already had a conference call on Monday, even before Chelsea's body was found. Now Brown gave a one-hour briefing on Chelsea's case to the rest of the group.
EPD detective Al Estrada then gave a three-hour presentation on Amber's case, noting the distinct similarities to Chelsea's. Both were daytime nabbings of fair-skinned, high-school-age white girls. Such abductions were not only very rare in San Diego County, but these occurred within only eight miles of each other. Estrada explained how Amber's family had become fragmented, with Moe, Carrie and Sheila not speaking to each other at times as they fought over how funds for the search effort should be spent.
Brown assigned tasks to the group members, including follow-up interviews with Gardner's family and friends, as they worked to try to connect the dots between the two cases. One of the tasks was to generate a comprehensive list of all unsolved missing girls' cases from 2005 to the present, a list of several hundred that was given to the parole agent for follow-up. Within a couple of weeks, every girl but Amber had been accounted for. Some of them had been found soon after they'd been reported missing, but the parents had never informed law enforcement.
For Brown, it was better to be safe than sorry. “I don't want another missing girl,” he said.
By now, it was no longer just law enforcement officers, but people in general—and Amber's family in particular—who speculated that John Gardner was responsible for killing both of these bright and talented young girls, so close to each other in age and geography, during the same month but a year apart.
Chapter 26
The tragic death of Chelsea King violated the serenity of those Poway and Rancho Bernardo residents who felt they lived in a sanctuary. Something precious had been taken, not just from Chelsea's fellow students at Poway High School, but from teens and parents across the region.
“This has shattered everybody's world. Everybody's security,” a school counselor said. “If it can happen to Chelsea in the middle of the afternoon, it could happen to anyone, anytime, because Chelsea was not a risk taker.”
Chelsea's classmates asked to sleep in their parents' rooms; others asked for night-lights. As soon as she went missing, they wove a bright blue heart with her initials, made out of ribbon, through a chain-link fence at the school. Once they knew she'd died, they crafted a similar message on the fence using plastic cups, a tradition when a student had passed. They also built her a shrine of flowers, candles and love notes, which grew to a ten-foot span, with a banner featuring her photo and this message: WE LOVE YOU. CHELSEA YOU'RE IN OUR HEART.
Because the entire school was in mourning, the 2,700-student population decided to grieve as one by wearing the same colors each day: Monday was blue for Chelsea's eyes; Tuesday was orange, her favorite color; Wednesday was purple, to indicate hope; Thursday was green, to honor her environmentalism and the school's color, which kids usually wore on Fridays. That left yellow, the color of her favorite bloom, the sunflower, as a bright pick-me-up for the end of the week.
Parents everywhere were more worried than ever about letting their teenage daughters go out by themselves, especially where they might run into strange men. Girls flocked to self-defense courses and stopped going jogging alone. Parents in law enforcement used their resources to provide Tasers to their teenage girls, while civilians went online to buy Mace.
“This guy was registered in Lake Elsinore, and they can talk all they want about not letting sex offenders live near schools and parks, but there's nothing stopping a guy like this from getting in his car and going elsewhere, as Gardner did,” said Leslie Wolf Branscomb, a mother of two teenage girls, who went online to buy pepper spray for herself and her daughters. “I'm not sure if it's legal for minors to carry pepper spray, and I'm not going to look it up, because I don't want to know. I've told them that as far as I'm concerned, this is non-negotiable—anytime they go anywhere other than school, they're to have it with them. Sad, isn't it, that it would come to this—arming a twelve-year-old?”
 
 
Once John Gardner was arrested and Chelsea's body was found, a shift occurred. In a natural progression of sorts, the newly galvanized community that had come together in goodwill was now raising up in collective anger. Again, using every form of technology and social networking available, this community shared its emotions faster and with more furor than ever before during a local murder case. Incessant media coverage only fed the fire, disseminating every piece of information that could be uncovered on deadline in what had become an extraordinarily competitive national news story.
Just as the hope and concern for the missing girl had gone viral, so did the fury and hate aimed at the man deemed responsible for her murder. Knowing nothing about John Gardner's mother, who had gone into hiding and refused to talk to the media, people were convinced that he'd been living with her and they blamed her for not turning him in. Surely, she must have known what he was up to, or at least what he was capable of. Why didn't she stop him?
So much for being innocent until proven guilty. Gardner's DNA on Chelsea's panties was enough to convict him in the court of public opinion. Posts on Internet forums already had Gardner strapped to the table, ready for a lethal injection. Some groused that they didn't want to wait for a trial; they would just as soon kill him themselves—an eye for an eye.
On the morning of Gardner's arraignment, vandals spray-painted a message of hate on Cathy Osborn's garage door while she was at work:
Chelseas blood is on you. Move out.
Few people sympathized with Gardner's family.
“I wish they'd leave her alone—the media,” said Deputy Public Defender Michael Popkins, one of Gardner's new attorneys. “Mom doesn't deserve this. She didn't do anything wrong. You raise your kids the best you can.”
But some of this anger was irrational and was escalating unbounded. Critics railed with violent rhetoric against “the system”—lumping the state mental-health, corrections and parole agencies together with the criminal justice system. Existing laws weren't strong enough to stop sexual predators from roaming free in parks and playgrounds, they charged, or from molesting little girls with abandon. With a lack of proper enforcement, more needed to be done to protect our children, our future.
Overnight, Gardner became the poster boy for all sexual predators on the loose, churning debate on
Today
in the morning and
Nancy Grace
at night, in letters to the editor, at Starbucks and the gym. Why, critics asked, had he been allowed out of prison the first time? And why, if he'd violated parole multiple times, had he not been returned to prison? If the DA and the judge had done their job and not given him a plea deal in 2000, this monster would still be behind bars and Chelsea King would be alive. How could he have gotten off with just five years, when the possible sentence was thirty-two?
Criminal defense attorneys, including Gardner's, countered that the six-year sentence in 2000, of which he served five, was sufficient. “He got a pretty stiff sentence for a first-time offender,” Popkins said. “It wasn't a light sentence by any stretch.”
District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis tried to shield Deputy District Attorney Dave Hendren, who had made the plea deal under the previous DA's watch, and was now receiving death threats. Hendren was happy to lay low.
Dumanis had seen her share of cases after working her way through law school as a typist clerk in the DA's office, twelve years as a prosecutor and eight years on the bench. As such, she agreed with the defense attorneys, calling the sentence “very reasonable.” After reading the transcripts from Gardner's preliminary hearing and sentencing, she determined the case had been handled appropriately. For one, she said, Gardner had no prior record. Two, it was always risky to go to trial with a case like that one. And three, contrary to what Gardner and his family claimed, his attorney, William Halsey, had done a satisfactory job of defending him.
“I didn't see anything that looked incompetent in the way he handled things,” she said in 2011, after the matter had been resolved and she no longer felt hamstrung by the ethical limitations of discussing a pending case.
In her view, superior court judge Peter Deddeh was a law-and-order kind of jurist, and Hendren, as the sex crimes division chief, was entirely capable. She concluded that the critics were “trying to play on the fears and biases of the public.” With all the distortions and falsehoods being circulated, she “felt that everybody didn't have all the information.” All in all, she said, she felt satisfied with the outcome of the 2000 case, because even if it had gone to trial, “we felt we wouldn't have done better than we did. In retrospect, we all felt upset, but the judge didn't have a crystal ball.”
In the heat of the moment in 2010, however, forensic psychiatrist Mark Kalish didn't see it that way. He countered that the court
did
have the information it needed to foresee something like this happening; the judge and DA's office simply discounted it. People had every reason to be angry, he said. His colleague, Dr. Matthew Carroll, had told the judge in no uncertain terms that Gardner “would be a continued danger to underage girls in the community” and warranted the maximum sentence possible.
“They should be [angry]!” Kalish said. “I'm frustrated, and I think Dr. Carroll is frustrated. I mean, we try to do a good job, and it gets ignored, apparently.”
Others were able to rise above the lynch-mob mentality and see the situation more rationally. “Whose fault is this?” Mike Workman, a father of five, asked rhetorically. “Well, it's everybody's fault,” he said, noting that many California voters don't want to spend more money on government programs, including those to treat the mentally ill.
Never before had the San Diego region experienced such extremes of emotion tied to one murder case—emotions that continued to mount in the coming days with the announcement of another crushing discovery that only worsened the fears and worries of parents everywhere.
When Chelsea's autopsy was conducted on Wednesday, March 3, Sergeant Dave Brown and Detective Mark Palmer finally conceded they could take a nap. Before that, they were too worried to sleep, in case they missed something.
Reporters were baffled why they still were unable to confirm that the body found at the lake was Chelsea King's, even with the ME's office, which typically released such information within a day or two. Gore later indicated that this was not a purposeful decision, but rather an inadvertent omission out of caution and respect.
Apparently, the notification got tangled up first by a “gag order” e-mail that Dumanis had sent to law enforcement chiefs across the county, which had trickled down accordingly. The gist of the e-mail, according to one recipient, was “no one will talk about this matter, or you'll be fired.” Not surprisingly, this had an immense chilling effect over media coverage from that point on.
Months later, Dumanis said her e-mail wasn't that harsh or explicit, and noted that she had no power to fire anyone who wasn't in her department. She said she emphasized in the e-mail that this was a pending investigation, she quoted the bar association rules about pretrial publicity, and she underscored the need to consider the wishes of the victims' families under Marsy's Law, which protected their privacy rights.
Dumanis also acknowledged that she didn't want to give defense attorneys any ammunition to win a motion for a change of venue. This was a probable death penalty case, which meant they had to be even more careful than usual.
Nonetheless, after Dumanis's directive, the sheriff's department, DA's office and Escondido police immediately clammed up, trying to squash the overwhelming media attention of the past week. Local law enforcement agencies were told to refer reporters to the DA's media office, which instituted a communications lockdown, including a “no comment” to Dr. Kalish's remarks. Paul Levikow, Dumanis's spokesman, said the shutdown was necessary “to get the defendant a fair trial. We want the state of California to get a fair trial, too.”
They were right about one thing: the media had been responding to the unprecedented level of community emotion with an unprecedented level of coverage.
 
 
Chelsea was remembered in a private memorial service to which the Kings asked Sheriff Gore and five others involved in the investigation to be pallbearers: Lieutenant Lori Ross, Sergeants Don Parker and Christina Bavencoff, Detective Chris Johnson, and Deputy Luis Carrillo.
Initially, Gore declined the Kings' invitation to have him and the other sheriff's officers participate in the funeral.
“This is family,” Gore said.
But Brent King said he felt strongly about this. “No, you brought our baby back to us, and that's what this will symbolize.”
As bagpipes played, followed by a French horn solo, Chelsea's own French horn sat spotlighted on center stage at The Church at Rancho Bernardo, a former movie theater. The sheriff's officers, wearing their special ceremonial uniforms and white gloves, carried her casket inside the church, filled with about eighty sobbing family members and friends, finally bringing Chelsea home.

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