Lost Girls (28 page)

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Authors: Caitlin Rother

BOOK: Lost Girls
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Knowing it was going to rain that weekend, the investigators stayed there until well after midnight before quitting for the night. The ME's office said it was too late for anyone else to head up there, so Hinkes was directed to pack up the remains and bring them to headquarters. They were all fatigued, and Brown didn't want all these people trampling the crime scene in the dark. The best thing to do, he said, would be to come back when they could see properly and go over the area inch by inch.
The EPD had already collected Amber's dental records, preparing for this day. Her last dentist had gone out of business, so the only records to which the investigators had access were six years old, when she still had most of her baby teeth. But Brugos, Brown and Benton didn't want to tell Amber's parents anything about their findings until they knew for sure that it was her. “It's bad business,” Brown said. The family had already been through enough.
Besides, the EPD and the city crew had not finished searching through Kit Carson Park, and even though Benton and Sergeant Don Parker were longtime friends, Benton had instructions to keep most everyone over there out of the loop.
As Benton, Brown and Brugos discussed how to proceed, they all agreed that they didn't even know yet if the remains they'd found at Pala were Amber's. Benton mentioned that the searchers had found a plastic bag at Kit Carson, which looked as if animals had torn through it, similar to the bag the little girls had described with the hair floating in the creek.
“We'll keep searching at Kit Carson Park,” Benton said.
They agreed that there were more killers out there than John Gardner, and it was also possible that either of these victims was someone else's work.
“If there are two [victims], why couldn't there be three?” Brown agreed.
Most of what Parker's team had found at the park that day and night, when the effort stopped and picked up first thing Saturday morning, was a mass of animal bones. “This was due diligence,” Parker said, but “it was for nothing.”
Weeks later, when Benton was finally allowed to tell Parker, he pleaded with him to repeat his discussion with Brown and Brugos to the SAR unit and explain that they honestly didn't know if they had Amber's remains. Gardner had told a reporter that the Kit Carson search was just a ruse to hide the fact that he was taking the detectives to the real grave site. Thinking that Gardner should get over himself, Benton wanted Parker and his team to know the truth.
“Make sure you tell your people I'd never subject them to these kinds of conditions unless we absolutely had to,” he said. He never would have put the SAR through such a dangerous exercise in “hepatitis-type” waters just to create a ruse.
 
 
Meanwhile, Amber's family was getting restless. Benton had alerted Moe Dubois and Carrie McGonigle on Thursday night that they were going to start searching Kit Carson the next morning. He even gave them a briefing Friday at the park, being honest about his doubts they were going to find anything because the ME's investigators had told him as much.
“If there had been a body in there, we likely would have found it already,” he told them. “I don't think it is there, but you never know. We have to search it.”
While the Pala search wasn't made public, the Kit Carson Park search was all over the news by six o'clock, Friday evening. Most everyone else was wondering, was that Amber in the creek or wasn't it?
Benton had just gotten home from Kit Carson that evening, and was thinking he could spend some time with his family, when he got Brown's call to come up to Pala.
Meanwhile, attorney Michael Popkins got a worried call from his co-counsel, Mel Epley, who had seen the news report televising the search at Kit Carson. Epley was worried that the media had found out about the secret trip to Pala. As they talked, Popkins searched online for a news article and was relieved to see that the media were nowhere near Pala.
“That's not where we were,” he told Epley as their worry turned to gratefulness for their good fortune with the media distraction. The search at Kit Carson hadn't been planned, but it couldn't have been timed more perfectly.
“I thought it was an incredible benefit to us and took the focus off what we were doing,” Popkins said later. “It was a gift from God.”
 
 
Because the investigators couldn't compare the teeth found at the Pala site with Amber's childhood X-rays of her baby teeth, they decided to fly a DNA sample from one of the molars to the DOJ lab in Sacramento, with the hope of getting an answer by Sunday or Monday. What no one expected, however, was that Rick Cardoza, the ME's contract dentist, was able to identify Amber within twenty-four hours because of the unique features in her jaw that Hinkes had recognized, which were evident in both the childhood X-rays and the skull.
Brown wanted to wait for the DNA test results to confirm that finding while they finished scouring the Pala site for remains and evidence, but he was overruled. “I thought we were going to get to sleep one day while we waited for the answers,” Brown joked.
When Bonnie Dumanis got word that Amber Dubois had been identified, she was at the funeral for a CHP officer who had crashed on State Route 52 during his shift, an unfortunate accident that elevated the emotions for law enforcement personnel working this case.
“My mind went to, ‘are there other bodies?'” she recalled.
Lieutenant Benton had made an agreement with Moe and Carrie about how they wanted to be notified if Amber's remains were found: they wanted to come in together to hear the news.
So Benton and investigator Beverly Marquez, who had been working the case for the past year, each called one of the parents around eight o'clock on Saturday night and told them as little as possible.
“Can you meet us down at the station?” they asked.
After Moe and Carrie arrived, they sat in shock as they listened to medical examiner's investigator Gretchen Geary break the news: they had found Amber's remains.
Carrie, who had been holding out hope that Amber was still alive, started shaking. “When they told me, it was a sense of relief. Closure. Denial,” she said.
Understandably, after a year of wondering where their daughter had gone, Moe and Carrie wanted to know more. Sheriff's sergeant Roy Frank apologized that he couldn't tell them anything else. “We were led to this location,” he said. “I can't give you details at this time.”
As they continued to ask questions, Frank just kept repeating his statement. “This is a homicide investigation. We can't release anything more at this point, but we will, when we can.”
He did say, however, that they hadn't finished gathering Amber's remains, which was difficult for Moe and Carrie to hear.
“Her entire body has not yet been recovered,” Moe told
48 Hours.
“We don't know if it's because of wild animals or what. But we just know our whole baby has not been recovered yet.”
Chapter 29
It was cloudy that Sunday afternoon when EPD Chief Jim Maher called a press conference to announce that Amber Dubois's remains had been found, thanks to “a tip.” Moe and Carrie stood at the podium, with tired red eyes, as if they had been up all night crying. Carrie refused interviews and said nothing. Moe simply thanked all the volunteers for their efforts over the past year.
“They are the most dedicated people we could have imagined,” he said, wiping away tears. “That's all we wanted to say.”
Although the media and Amber's family were told nothing of John Gardner's “tip,” Dave Brown was still not happy that the news conference had been held that afternoon. He instructed members of the Gardner task force not to release details concerning Gardner's involvement, not to their coworkers or even spouses or girlfriends or boyfriends, “because it's going to get in our way. We are on a team. We talk to each other, that's it,” Brown said.
Later that afternoon, a woman fastened two cloth flowers to one of Amber's “missing” posters, which was hanging on a fence at the high school, along with a note enclosed in plastic.
Dear Amber,
she wrote.
You're in a much better place now. May you rest in peace.
 
 
The weather forecast had called for heavy rains that weekend, and because Brown knew the forensic crew at Pala couldn't work until the skies had cleared, he arranged for a uniformed deputy to stand guard around the clock and block the media's entrance to the access road with yellow tape and a marked patrol vehicle.
It did, in fact, rain on Saturday, and there was a virtual deluge on Sunday, so they weren't able to return to the site until Monday. Madeleine Hinkes went back up then, with about seventy FBI agents and sheriff's search-and-rescue volunteers, who scoured the ten-acre area as news helicopters hovered overhead. A pathologist and two investigators from the ME's office were also there, conducting their own investigation to determine the manner and cause of death.
“We do this in every case,” Sergeant Brown explained. “We want to know who did it. They want to know what happened, so you don't just bring them in at the end.”
“The goal was to recover
all
remains,” he added, noting that he was skeptical about Gardner's claim that Amber's was the only body he had buried up there. “I'm not going to believe him. He's a f---ing serial killer.”
By the end of the day, they'd gathered most of Amber's remains—and an awful lot of bottle caps. Hinkes even saw herself on television.
All of them felt a collective sense of relief that Amber had finally been found, and a collective sadness that they hadn't found her alive. That night, a candlelight vigil was held for Amber Dubois at Escondido High School.
Shock and even more anger swept the county as speculation heightened that Gardner had killed both girls. That anger soon spread as the story went viral, and talking heads debated this case on national TV. The question many people were asking was whether Megan's Law was working effectively, or if sexual offenders, like Gardner, could simply drive through its loopholes on the interstate—and under society's radar—to stay with relatives or girlfriends and do their ghastly deeds.
With 35 million residents, California has the nation's largest number of registered sex offenders. All states now had some form of the federal Megan's Law, a bill adopted in 1996 that was named after seven-year-old Megan Kanka, a New Jersey girl who was raped and killed by a child molester who had moved across the street, without her family's knowledge of his criminal history.
Megan's Law requires sexual offenders to register their home addresses a minimum of once a year, within five days of their birthday. If deemed “sexually violent predators,” they must register every ninety days. All offenders are required to register within five days of changing residences or becoming homeless. If they become transient, they are required to update their registration information within five days with a local law enforcement agency, which forwards that data to the state DOJ—then every thirty days after that. DOJ updates the registered sex offender database and public Web site, the Sex Offender Tracking Program, on a daily basis. If a registered sex offender violates the update requirements, the site will say so.
In 2006, California voters also passed Proposition 83, known as Jessica's Law, which prevents sex offender parolees from living within two thousand feet of schools or parks.
Laura Ahearn, executive director of Parents for Megan's Law and The Crime Victim Center, said John Gardner's habit of roaming from county to county, and house to house, is quite common among sex offenders. To make the law more effective, she said, this predator population needs to be more intensively supervised.
“Bottom line is, Megan's Law does work, but the community has to be an active participant by reporting sex offenders that they may believe are in violation of local registration and other types of employment laws,” said Ahearn, whose agency staffs a nationwide tip line (1-888-ASK-PFML). “Sex offenders are really good at what they do. They will take any step to access potential victims.”
“We're all responsible for reporting anything that's illegal or not supposed to be happening,” said Gardner's uncle, Mike Osborn. “That's the only way society is going to work.”
 
 
Detectives interviewed Mike Osborn and other members of Gardner's family, including his grandmother Linda Osborn. A schoolteacher for thirty years, Mike said he thought his nephew had been a problem ever since he was a child, and that his sister Cathy was “an enabler.”
Mike offered this story as an example: Li'l John was about six when he was playing one day with Mike's two boys. One was the same age, the other a year younger. As John tried to build a tower out of wooden blocks, his older cousin handed the younger cousin a block, which he would then throw at John's castle. Each time, John got increasingly upset and yelled at the younger boy, but kept trying to rebuild. Finally, after the third time, John's anger escalated to tornado-like force. John jumped up, ran to the couch, where the younger boy was sitting, grabbed his neck and began choking him. Mike had to run over and pull John off his son, but John was strong, so strong that Mike had to use enough force to leave a thumbprint on John's arm. After that incident, Mike said, Cathy called authorities on
him.
He admitted that the relationship between him and Cathy had always been strained, and that he only saw John Gardner at family or holiday gatherings.
Mike recalled a second incident when he was substitute teaching at John's elementary school. He was in the principal's office when he heard that two teachers were bringing in a student who had attacked a classmate and stabbed a teacher with a pencil. Mike could see the student kicking and screaming all the way to the office. As the child got closer, Mike recognized his nephew John, who also proceeded to bite the principal.
Mike said he came to John's high-school graduation party, where the eighteen-year-old bragged how big he'd gotten. Mike warned John not to “try anything funny,” because he still outweighed the teenager, to which, Gardner responded, “I can take you! I can take you!” He ran over to Mike, grabbed him around the legs and lifted him off the ground until he finally complied with Mike's demands to put him down. Mike was surprised by Gardner's strength.
During his KFI-AM interview, Mike said Gardner could be fun to be around, but he had a very bad temper. “The number one thing that would set him off would be the relationship he had with his mother.”
Asked to describe Cathy, Mike said, “It's difficult. I believe that she's gone through years of denial and chose not to believe some of these things... . It's sad because it's really hurt her now, and her life is ruined, almost to the same degree that his is.
“He seemed to have semi-normal relationships,” Mike said. “You'd meet him. He'd be the life of the party, the silly goofball ... as long as he was in a good mood. If he was upset, you'd want to stay away from him.”
After learning Cathy's side of the story in 2011, Detective Mark Palmer said he believed she'd dug into denial as a way of coping with what her son had done, because she didn't “want to shoulder any of the blame.”
“You can't tell me there wasn't a point” that she didn't know, Palmer said—what with the helicopters flying and the bullhorns echoing throughout her neighborhood. “I will not accept the fact that she says she never suspected that it could have been him.”
From now until the end of time, he said, she will have to answer this question for herself: “Could I have prevented the murder of those two kids?”
All that aside, he said, “I don't blame her for wanting or feeling the need to separate herself from two of the most horrendous and tragic murder cases in San Diego County history. Her name will always come up in [relation] to that.”
 
 
As the media looked for a law enforcement source to officially connect the two cases, the EPD threw reporters a one-sentence update on March 8: “The Amber Dubois crime scene is still being processed, and John Albert Gardner III remains a focus of the investigation.” Other than that, no one was talking because of Dumanis's e-mail. Meanwhile, the Gardner task force continued to work behind the scenes, processing his cars and preparing warrants for additional searches as they tried to find that precious link between John Gardner and Amber Dubois.
The chilling effect on the media went into deep freeze on March 9, when Judge Danielsen granted the defense's request for a gag order that was so vague and expansive that it gave anyone even tangentially related to the case a convenient excuse to stop talking about it.
The order may have prevented Moe Dubois from discussing Gardner's potential guilt in Amber's death, but his presence in the courtroom that day only underscored the speculation raging across the nation—that the unemployed electrician had murdered Amber as well.
 
 
That same day, investigators served the next round of search warrants, looking for digging tools and clothing that matched witnesses' descriptions of what Gardner had been wearing in the RB park on February 25.
At Linda Osborn's gray two-story stucco house in Lake Elsinore, they found five pairs of Gardner's blue jeans, a pair of men's size-12 Reebok shoes, a pair of size-11½ New Balance shoes, a pair of size-12 Montrail boots and several T-shirts with the logo
HARD ROCK CAFÉ BAGHDAD, GET BOMBED FOR FREE.
Outside in her shed, they collected a cache of digging tools: ten shovels, a yellow plastic carrier with assorted hand-digging tools and a saw, two pickaxes, along with another shovel and pickax in front of the house. They took three more shovels from Mike Osborn's house in Murietta.
In addition, they searched Gardner's unit #F120 at American Mini Storage on West Mission Road in Escondido, where they found still more shovels and the contents of the Rock Springs apartment that Gardner had shared with Jariah.
But even after going through all that stuff, detectives still couldn't find a single fiber or piece of evidence that tied Gardner to Amber's murder.

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