Obsession (52 page)

And they loved it when they got there. Stephanie reported that everyone seemed friendly and sincere. It was a fresh start and she loved the idea of being able to reinvent herself into anything she wanted. She also enjoyed the special treatment she got from the guys at the Sigma Chi chapter because her father was a prominent alumnus and former president of the fraternity chapter.

After her freshman year, Stephanie decided to stay for the summer and go to summer school. She and another girl moved out of the dorm and got their own apartment. As had been her practice, she continued talking to her parents or sister on the phone two or three times a day.

In December 1992, Stephanie got her first off-campus job, as a waitress at a new restaurant called Hamilton’s. It was a small, family-oriented place where the waiters and waitresses wore starched white shuts and white aprons. It was downtown, at the other end of Broadway, the main drag, from the campus. It wasn’t anywhere near her apartment, but by then she’d bought a shiny teal 1989 Honda with her parents’ help and of which she was very proud.

Stephanie loved Hamilton’s for the same reason she’d loved working at the HyVee in high school: she got to interact with people. Stacey Payne, who worked with her at the restaurant, says, “She was hard to bring down. She was a happy person and made a joke out of everything.”

When Peggy and Gene came to visit her the following March, they had lunch there, and Tom Hamilton, one of the three owners, told them how much he enjoyed having their daughter there.

When Gene asked her that night how she liked the other people at the restaurant, she told him that everybody
was fine. Then she added, “There’s one guy there we all feel kind of sorry for. He’s older than the rest of us and he’s been in jail.”

“For what?” Gene asked.

“He was in a bar fight or something,” Stephanie explained. “But he’s very nice. He doesn’t hit on any of the girls or anything.” His name was Don Gideon. He was thirty-one, on parole, and he’d been living with his mother, but then when that didn’t work out, Tom Hamilton gave him a place to live above the restaurant. He started out as a dishwasher, then graduated to busing tables and then helping out in the kitchen with such tasks as making salads. Hamilton considered him a good worker and dependable. Unlike most of the waitresses who were part-timing while going to college, Don was full-time and seemed to enjoy his job.

The summer of 1993, after her sophomore year, Stephanie decided to take a science course and keep her job in the restaurant. But before summer school started, she developed a sore throat so severe that it was almost swollen shut and a friend had to take her to the emergency room for a shot. By the time the infection cleared up, she’d missed the first four days of classes and it was too late to catch up. So when she came home for Father’s Day, Gene and Peggy suggested that she could use a break, and since she couldn’t take the course, she ought to stay home for the summer. But she really wanted to go back to the restaurant.

She still wasn’t feeling well, but felt pressure to show up for her shifts. One day Tom Hamilton yelled at her for having spilled something, either gravy or sour cream. When she protested that she was trying her best even though she didn’t feel well, Hamilton responded, “Well, why don’t you just go home!”

Stephanie interpreted this to mean she was fired. A
friend acted as an intermediary and persuaded Tom to tell her he hadn’t fired her. But the encounter had left a bad taste, and when she learned that she couldn’t have her birthday off in spite of having filled in every other weekend, she decided to leave and go home for the rest of the summer. Once Steph’s mind was made up, that was it. But Tom didn’t want to lose her and assured her that even though she was leaving, her job would be waiting for her whenever she was ready to come back. So she packed up her things and told her parents she’d drive home on Friday, July 2, after a date on Thursday with Matt Schicke, whom she’d been seeing for about two months; they’d had a lot of fun the previous weekend on a Sigma Chi canoe trip. Peggy planned a twentieth birthday celebration for Sunday, July 4.

Several of Steph’s friends from the restaurant, including two who lived together with Stacey Payne—Sloane Kehl and Megan Ewing—wanted to take her out for an early birthday bash on Wednesday. They went out to dinner, after which Stephanie came back to her apartment. She called her parents at about ten-thirty and said she was getting ready to go out with some of her girlfriends to a local bar. Her throat was beginning to bother her again and she confided that she didn’t really feel like going out, but she didn’t want to disappoint the girls.

They picked her up about fifteen minutes later and took her to a place called Bootleggers Bar and Grill in Frontenac, where they joined other friends and co-workers. Frontenac adjoins Pittsburg on the north. Stacey, who was nineteen, came with another friend a year younger, and that night they weren’t letting eighteen-year-olds into the bar, so the two of them left with Don Gideon and went to another bar, where they stayed until about midnight, then brought Don back to Bootleggers where his truck was parked. As it happened,
Bootleggers was right across the street from the police station, something Stephanie would have noticed since she left at one point to buy some lozenges for her increasingly sore throat. Don went back into the bar, and when Stephanie declared that she wasn’t feeling well and wanted to go home, Don offered to drive her.

Peggy and Gene and Jeni didn’t hear from Stephanie on Thursday. Though she called regularly, they weren’t overly alarmed. They knew she was busy getting ready to leave, they knew she had an appointment to see the doctor about her throat, and she’d undoubtedly be rushing to get ready for her date that night. It was okay, though. They knew she’d be home the next day because, earlier in the week, she and Jeni had arranged to go to the movies together Friday night. Jeni, who had a boyfriend who was an exchange student in Germany, had planned to go with his parents to meet him in Florida and so would miss Steph’s birthday on Sunday.

Friday morning, excited by the prospect of her daughter’s returning home that day, Peggy said to Gene, “Let’s call Stephanie.”

Gene replied, “No, let’s let her sleep.”

Later on in the day, they did call, and when they got no answer, they left numerous messages on her answering machine. There was a severe storm warning with high winds, and Peggy was worried about Stephanie’s possibly having to drive through it.

When she hadn’t arrived home and they hadn’t heard from her by three o’clock, they began to be seriously concerned that she’d had an accident on the road. Jeni reached Matt at the grocery store in Pittsburg in which he worked and asked how late they’d been out the night before and if he knew when Steph had left to drive home.

Instantly, his voice sounded troubled. Stephanie
hadn’t shown up for their date the previous night. He’d tried calling and calling, then assumed she’d just forgotten about it and then had gone home the next day. In fact, he called Hamilton’s and talked to Stacey. “Where’s Steph?” he asked.

“She went home,” Stacey replied, because that was what Stephanie had told her she was doing. But when Matt went over to check and found her car still parked at her apartment, he’d gotten very worried, too. He was about to call the Schmidts to ask them where Stephanie was.

Gene got on the phone. “Call the police right now,” he told Matt. Then Peggy called Hamilton’s. They were able to piece together that Stephanie and her friends had shown up at Bootleggers Wednesday night, and someone else recalled that she hadn’t felt well, but that the girls she’d come with wanted to stay so she’d caught a ride with some guy—it might have been Don Gideon. He was there that night and was rumored to have a crush on one of the girls. Everyone was surprised to hear that Stephanie was missing. They hadn’t expected to see her after that night for the rest of the summer, so no one thought anything of it.

That was when Stacey got worried.

Don Gideon had showed up at the restaurant Thursday morning looking tired and unshaved. They asked him if he knew what had happened to Stephanie since they thought he was the last one anyone had seen her with. He confirmed that it had been him leaving Bootleggers with her, but when they went outside to the parking lot, she’d gotten in a car with another friend of hers whom he didn’t know. That was the last he’d seen of her.

The Schmidts’ closest friend, and the best man at their wedding, Ron Seglie, was a doctor in Pittsburg. He always looked out for Stephanie, and he was the
one she was to have seen on Thursday. Gene and Peggy called him at his medical office, and together with a police officer and a locksmith, he went over to Stephanie’s apartment. They found no evidence of struggle, but they found no evidence of Stephanie, either. Her pocketbook was there. Only her keys and ID were missing—the two items she would have taken with her to the bar.

They called all the local hospital emergency rooms. None of them had seen her, either. The police had become convinced that Stephanie was not the type of person just to take off somewhere without telling anyone. “We’re going to go full blast with this thing,” a detective told Gene. They asked him to supply a good photograph. Searches were launched throughout much of the state. Kansas Wildlife and Parks officers handled the most remote and rural areas.

None of the Schmidts slept at all Friday night. Early Saturday morning, they had to make a collective decision about Jeni: Would she still go to Florida? Jeni wanted to stay with her parents and help them through the ordeal, but Peggy encouraged her to go. “I did it because I had no idea what was in store for us and how long this was going to be, and I thought maybe it would be better for Jeni—because I know Jennifer—to be away from all of this.”

Jeni was torn. “Stephanie and I had a relationship of always looking out for each other. I didn’t know if going away would be a good thing or if I was letting my parents down or not watching out for Steph. It was quite a decision to make.”

When they’d confirmed that Jeni could fly back immediately if anything changed, she finally decided to go. The entire time she was in Florida, she had difficulty eating and sleeping. Her preoccupation was to find a nice birthday gift for Stephanie, and she looked
for one every day, all the while knowing in the back of her mind that she might never see her sister again.

Eric Rittenhouse had met Stephanie at Pittsburg but knew of her dad even before she came since Eric was also a Sigma Chi and Gene had been one of the luminaries of the chapter. Eric and Stephanie had gone out together, but more than that, they were close friends. He was home for the summer in Overland Park, the community that adjoins Leawood, working in a Sherwin-Williams paint store, when his mother called him with the news that Stephanie was missing.

He immediately felt something was very wrong. He knew Stephanie too well to believe she would go off anywhere without telling her family. It would be totally out of character.

The rumors started almost immediately: that some of the tenants in Stephanie’s apartment complex had a band, that they were involved with drugs, and that they wanted to take her away for the weekend with them, possibly to the Ozarks. Someone else had seen a young woman resembling Stephanie walking down a road near campus around midnight on Thursday. Gene checked her bank account. There was a routine $20 withdrawal, but no suspicious activity.

“I think in our minds, the worstcase scenario would be if Stephanie had to be in the hospital for a while,” Gene said. “I don’t think we ever thought of anything worse than that. It just wasn’t possible.” Using their promotional and photographic skills, he and Peggy sent a recent photo, which the Kansas Highway Patrol drove to Pittsburg for publication in newspapers.

A crisis response team was brought in to Blue Valley North High to help students and Stephanie’s friends. Paul Chinn, the school psychologist who headed the effort, said, “They used to feel safe with one another. They grew up real fast. It’s a loss of innocence.”

“I’m running on hope,” said Shannon Marsh.

Meanwhile, Don Gideon, the last person anyone had seen with Stephanie, had suddenly left town on Friday afternoon, having asked Tom Hamilton how he might go about renting a car. He was a material witness, and the police started looking for him. Monday was the legal Fourth of July holiday, so they would have to wait until Tuesday to see whether he contacted his probation officer as required or whether he broke parole.

The story hit the media on Sunday, July 4—Stephanie’s twentieth birthday. Anyone with information was urged to contact the Pittsburg police or the Schmidts. It was a harrowing and agonizing day for Gene and Peggy. Flyers were distributed at Independence Day celebrations and fireworks displays. The search quickly became a huge media event, and the Schmidts’ house became a nerve center, flooded with people. All of their friends and neighbors pitched in. Soon, thousands of cards and letters would begin pouring in. Stephanie’s friends began calling and stopping by, which Gene and Peggy found immensely touching and comforting. Gene Fox, a media consultant and former television sportscaster and writer for the
Kansas City Star,
virtually took over. His daughter Kristi was a close friend of Stephanie’s. Shannon Marsh organized the circulation of flyers around Pittsburg.

On Tuesday, Don Gideon failed to report in to his probation officer, and the Schmidts learned from Craig Hill, a local Leawood police detective who was acting as liaison, the specific nature of his criminal record. He hadn’t been in a bar fight as he’d told the girls at the restaurant. He was a sex offender who had raped and sodomized a college coed in Parsons, Kansas, in 1983 while holding a straight razor against her throat and threatening to kill her if she resisted. He’d been
granted early release from prison the previous November and got the job at Hamilton’s when they opened a month later. Tom Hamilton reported that Gideon checked “no” on the employment application form that asked if he’d ever been convicted of a felony.

Gene urged the police to check Gideon’s apartment, but they said they didn’t have justification for a search warrant. Gene countered angrily, “If she’s in there, I don’t want my daughter dying because you don’t have a warrant. There’s got to be a way you can get in there.” Tom Hamilton, the landlord, let police in. They found nothing. And since no one had actually seen Stephanie get into Don’s truck outside of Bootleggers, they were pursuing the hope that maybe, as he’d said, she actually hadn’t.