Lost Girls

by Caitlin Rother

  Before the police had a chance to figure out that Stacy was a different woman who had used Carrie’s name when she was arrested, they had no way of knowing whether drugs were being used in Amber’s home, or whether Amber had been abducted by a friend or an acquaintance involved in these activities. The EPD realized it wasn’t Carrie, once the detectives received Stacy’s booking photo and compared her fingerprints with Carrie’s. Carrie then confirmed she’d known this girl growing up, and had known about the error, but she never saw the need to resolve it. Moe’s drug history was real, but in the end, investigators found no current drug use tied to the case. Nonetheless, it took time to process these factors and move on.

  Private investigator Bill Garcia, who often joined high-profile searches for missing children, heard about Amber’s disappearance on the news and offered his services pro bono on February 18 to help Carrie and Moe find their daughter.

  “It’s how I give back,” he told Moe.

  After meeting with the family that night, Garcia started his own search the next morning, helped contact the media, recruited dozens of volunteers and interviewed some of Amber’s friends. At some point, the family started paying him for his efforts, and Carrie also hired Garcia again in September to help her search for Amber in Mexico, because he is bilingual in Spanish.

  Garcia helped get the word out by appearing on Nancy Grace on HLN on February 24, where he talked about a number of recent attempted abductions of teenage girls in northern San Diego County, in which witnesses described having seen one to three Hispanic men driving an older white van. Not surprisingly, many of the tips that subsequently came in to Garcia and to the EPD mentioned a white van.

  Two nights later, Garcia, Moe and Carrie were back on Grace’s controversial show to talk more about the case and their search efforts. Carrie said she’d gone through Amber’s room and found eight dollars in her daughter’s secret spot, which was all the money she had. She also said she rode Amber’s horse over fifteen or twenty miles of parkland near Escondido, looking for her. Garcia’s speculation that Amber could have been the target of a cruel Friday the 13th prank was roundly criticized by other talking heads on the program.

  Moe begged viewers to help them find Amber. “Keep her in your mind,” he said. “Go to her Web site. Print up a flyer. Keep it on your dash.”

  That same week, Amber’s case was featured on America’s’s Most Wanted. As thousands of flyers were posted, the tips kept coming in to the EPD.

  In early March, missing-child activist Marc Klaas, the father of twelve-year-old Polly Klaas, who was kidnapped out of her bedroom at knifepoint by a stranger in Petaluma, California, and murdered in 1993, announced that individuals and businesses had donated $60,000 in reward money in Amber’s case. Of that, $50,000 was for information leading to Amber’s safe return, and the balance for information leading to the arrest of anyone responsible for her disappearance.

  Still hoping that Amber was alive, Moe put out a message to his daughter at a press conference: “Amber, if you’re hearing this, just know that your family loves you, and we can’t wait to have you back in our arms.”

  In September, the reward money increased by $40,000 after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger contributed funds from the Governor’s Reward Program, at the request of EPD Chief Jim Maher.

  Garcia searched a wider perimeter than the SAR unit and followed up his own leads, including those from psychics, but he didn’t come up with any trace of Amber either. Ultimately he had a falling-out with the family, and they parted ways.

  As searchers and investigators looked for a motive for Amber to run away, they learned that she didn’t always get along so well with her mom’s boyfriend, Dave Cave.

  “They weren’t living in Shangri-la,” Sergeant Parker said. “There were issues.”

  Although the EPD had interviewed Dave and the rest of Amber’s immediate family, the detectives knew that people don’t always tell the whole truth, so they had to consider the universe of possibilities.

  Bob Petrachek, one of three examiners with the Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory (RCFL) who worked on this case, ran through the possible theories: “Was she kidnapped? Did she run away? If so, why? Were there problems at home? There’s a stepdad at home, was that a problem? Was there a molest situation going on? Usually, when a juvenile goes missing, there’s a boyfriend involved, or there’s turmoil in the family, some romantic interest somewhere, either real or imagined.”

  So the detectives looked carefully at Dave, who admitted that he’d changed his usual routine on the day Amber went missing. He said he’d gone to the gym briefly, then he came home to do his taxes rather than go to work at his scaffolding business, but he couldn’t identify the route he drove.

  “How do you not remember?” Captain Benton recalled thinking. Here was a fourteen-year-old who had disappeared in front of her school. Who else would she have gotten into a car with in front of a crowded school but someone she knew?

  It also seemed odd that Dave had “missed” the call from her school that day because he’d gone to a Clint Eastwood movie, then he’d brought a bouquet of roses and some chocolate-covered strawberries to Carrie’s office that afternoon—the day before Valentine’s Day. He hung around her office for forty-five minutes, until Carrie had to tell him to leave.

  Also important, Dave admitted that he and Amber had been bickering over the past month and had even gotten into a physical fight. “It’s a house. There’s rules,” he said. “She’s a teenager. She doesn’t want to follow the rules. There’s going to be a certain amount of conflict.” In fact, Dave told police, he’d actually taken Amber’s bedroom door off its hinges to stop her from reading after bedtime.

  When the detectives brought Dave in for his first formal interview, they checked his body for marks of a struggle and found none. His body language was open on the interview videotape, as if he wasn’t trying to hide anything, but his story contained all these suspicious details. So the police gave him a polygraph test on February 17, and it proved inconclusive. After spending two months verifying his story and checking him out, they gave him a second test on April 15, which showed no signs of deception.

  “We definitely had to rule him out as a person who had [anything] to do with it,” Benton said.

  Even so, Dave continued to introduce himself as “the guilty stepfather,” possibly joking out of nervousness, but that only prompted reporters and others involved in the investigation to continue to pass on his odd comments and behavior to Benton, and encourage him to investigate Dave further.

  The EPD also gave Carrie a polygraph on February 18, and she passed. Ultimately, though, she moved out of their house, unsure if Dave had had something to do with Amber’s disappearance.

  “I couldn’t lay in the same bed with the man who I thought might have done something to my daughter,” she told 48 Hours.

  Benton said he took some hits from his peers and other investigators in the community for releasing the information that Carrie and Dave had passed their polygraph tests, because police had no way to prove that those tests were accurate.

  “We were fairly sure they had nothing to do with it, but there’s always that two percent what-if,” he said.

  But Benton said he made those comments for a reason. He kept getting the same tips that he needed to investigate Dave and other family members, which his team had already done to their satisfaction, and he was desperately in need of new leads.

  The molest theory never panned out, and after searching through Amber’s computer, Petrachek and his colleague Patrick Lim also found a healthy exchange of e-mails between Amber and her half sister, Allison. The family strife angle was a dead end as well.

  Early on, Escondido detectives had taken all the computers from Amber’s home, and later on, they took computers from family members’ homes in Orange County as well, which they brought to the RCFL to search for leads. The RCFL team also searched through the immediate family members’ cell phones and their call records
, looking at call histories, the list of contacts, noting who had spoken to Amber and when.

  “It’s practically impossible for a fourteen-year-old to stay hidden and stay off the Net,” Parker said. “She’s not an international terrorist who’s trained to [stay below the radar], so she’s going to contact her friends.”

  In particular, the RCFL team searched Amber’s computer for e-mails she could have sent to a boyfriend or stranger, because several boys’ names came up as having crushes on her. Petrachek was given an evolving list of such names, with the instruction, “Here, check this guy out.”

  His team combed through Web sites Amber had browsed, and watched videos she’d made or downloaded, looking for anything that might corroborate or impeach statements from family or friends. One video of Amber standing outside in the rain, which was woven into the memorial video that was made later, was dated within a week of her disappearance. She had apparently shared this video with relatives, because it was found on their computers as well.

  “It’s a haunting video,” Petrachek said. “It shows her innocence.”

  But, he said, “within a few days, it became clear that the answers weren’t going to be found on the computer ... much to our chagrin. Usually, you get a pretty good idea going through the digital evidence, data, the story that was provided, the alibi, motive or whatever, there’s some semblance of truth to it or totally fabricated, and in this one, it was so open-ended because we were looking at all the possibilities. But there was nothing unusual that stood out or where a little red flag went off.”

  Still, a picture of Amber began to emerge for investigators through the artistic Web sites she’d visited. Based on her computer activity, it looked as though she wanted to be a writer or illustrator, and she was interested in journaling and publishing online.

  “She seemed like a smart, articulate young lady, who was probably more mature than her age, and yet we saw some of the little kid of her in the videos,” Petrachek said. “I remember thinking, ‘This is pretty refreshing.’ ... She was obviously a girl whose parents would have been proud of her.”

  Chapter 18

  As time went on, Carrie expressed her frustrations at the lack of progress in the case, not to mention feeling like she was being kept out of the loop on the investigation. When the EPD sat down periodically with Amber’s family to discuss the case, Carrie’s mother, Sheila Welch, was the one who questioned them the most aggressively and accused them of not doing enough, so they figured Sheila was the one behind Carrie’s queries.

  The questions about whether detectives had tried investigating various areas didn’t sit well with the detectives, and the conflict with Amber’s family escalated in mid-May when Carrie told the Union-Tribune that EPD investigators weren’t “missing-child experts.” She also said she believed the EPD should bring in more help to advance the search, which put the department on the defensive. And all of this was played out in public, in the media.

  “I want the experts to go through the case from the beginning to see what the police have missed,” Carrie said. “There was stuff they didn’t touch, things they didn’t do, mistakes they made.”

  EPD lieutenant Craig Carter tried to keep his cool as he responded to her criticisms via the Union-Tribune. “The Dubois case is a high-priority case for us,” he said. “I can understand why she may have frustrations. We’ll have a quick coffee. Anything she thinks we have not covered, we will address it.”

  To ease the conflict and to protect the integrity of the investigation, EPD officials ultimately decided that they would meet only with Carrie and Moe.

  These criticisms the family lodged about “not enough being done, the PD wasn’t taking it seriously enough—honestly, that was totally incorrect, because it seemed to me that a great deal, dozens, of people were working on this investigation at the state, local and federal level,” RCFL’s Petrachek said in the EPD’s defense. And still, “there was nothing you could hold on to. Nothing concrete,” he said, which only bred more speculation and second-guessing.

  “Everyone involved was working very diligently and focused,” Petrachek said. “The effort from all of us was extraordinary.”

  Family members weren’t the only ones frustrated. Even the investigators were griping to each other that they hadn’t found anything of significant interest. For months, they tried to track down a red Dodge Ram truck that was captured by one of the video cameras pulling into the school bus yard at 7:10 A.M., when Amber was last reported seen, and heading out onto Broadway three minutes later. The problem was that the video didn’t catch the license plate. What it did catch were certain unique features on the truck—what looked like a fifth wheel attachment, chrome running boards and a chrome bar that ran along the top edges—which detectives tried to use to locate and question its owner. This was the only vehicle during the time span of Amber’s last sighting that couldn’t be accounted for.

  The detectives repeatedly watched the videotape, frame by frame, analyzing and reanalyzing, and finally sent it to a crime lab in Washington, D.C. That’s when they learned that the light and reflection captured on the tape, coupled with the fact that they were looking at a string of images taken at intervals, had created the illusion of a missing tailgate. Once they tracked down the owner, they realized he was just another parent dropping off his kid. One more dead end.

  Even the EPD was second-guessing its own work and going back over its earlier investigative steps. About nine months after Amber went missing, the EPD asked the RCFL team for copies of forensic images from the computer to send to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which was going to retrace the RCFL’s steps. Petrachek was initially insulted that someone would question their work after they’d poured several weeks around the clock into the case, but he eventually made peace with the idea.

  “I thought, why not? There is a possibility that we missed something.”

  But what could they do? As the leads flowed into the EPD, each and every one of them was investigated.

  “We had nothing on anybody,” said Officer Lee Anne McCollough, who was tasked with following up tips from psychics, and organizing the hundreds of other tips into a spreadsheet for easy reference, should it become a cold case. “If someone found a suspicious piece of clothing, we went and picked it up... . We all wanted to bring that little girl home.”

  The idea that Amber had just vanished right in front of the school, crowded with kids and parents dropping them off, didn’t make sense to investigators. “If this is a stranger, boogey man in the bushes, somebody would have seen something,” she said.

  McCollough knew firsthand what it was like when a loved one went missing. Her uncle Tom Hawks, a former Carlsbad firefighter and the brother of retired Carlsbad police chief Jim Hawks, had disappeared with his wife, Jackie, back in November 2004. The family had filed a missing person’s report, and Tom and Jackie were ultimately determined to have been murdered at sea by a clan of outlaws led by Skylar Deleon1, a man posing as a buyer for their yacht who was now on death row. Deleon had tied the Hawkses to the anchor of their boat and had thrown the couple overboard—alive—near Newport Beach.

  After McCollough pointed out to her colleagues that it was virtually impossible for families with missing loved ones to sit still and refrain from trying to help or suggest avenues to investigate, the EPD tried to communicate more openly with Amber’s family. As a mother pregnant with her second child, McCollough’s heart went out to this poor, distraught family, and she prayed every day that their freckled teenager would be found alive.

  Looking back later, even Escondido’s police chief, Jim Maher, admitted that they’d been relying on two early witness reports, which turned out to be wrong. That’s what kept them looking for the “doughy” teenage boy supposedly seen with Amber in front of her school, and chasing down that red pickup truck, he said.

  In hindsight, obviously, it would have been better to look more closely at sex offenders who lived in the area. One detective was
assigned the task of interviewing the approximately twenty local sex offenders who lived in the immediate neighborhood surrounding the school and who were on the EPD’s list of “290” registrants. These twenty men were “the ones that were either on her way to school or in the immediate area,” Benton said.

  But that detective never broadened his scope outside that immediate radius, which meant he didn’t question John Gardner, who lived in an apartment only two miles from Amber’s school on Rock Springs Road, because Gardner was outside the perimeter of the area that either this detective or his superiors had decided was most important.

  Asked in 2011 why the department never expanded the perimeter, Benton said, “How far do you go? We’ve got one hundred and eighty 290s in Escondido, and at some point you’ve just got to look at, where are our investigative leads taking us? And at that point, we had nothing to connect John Gardner in this case or any other case. He was actually a model, if you will, 290.”

  Petrachek said he could see how Gardner’s name never came up on the EPD’s radar. “Does that make it right? No. When you’re down in the weeds, you often don’t see what’s hiding right next to you.”

  Carrie and some of her friends, a team of vigilante searchers, knocked on the doors of sex offenders and questioned them, which resulted in complaints to the police department about being harassed. Apparently, they went to talk to Gardner, but he wasn’t home when they tried his apartment.

  In the overall scheme of this case, that’s about as close as anyone got to finding out about what John Gardner had been up to.

  Some might differ with Benton’s description of John Gardner as a model 290 registrant, including Gardner’s own mother, given his parole violations and two marijuana misdemeanor citations. In addition, Gardner also liked to drink while driving and to follow young girls and young women around, which didn’t come out until after his arrest in 2010.