Lost Girls

by Caitlin Rother

  In the meantime, Detective Palmer got the Colorado Springs Police Department (CSPD) to work with Candice to get a composite sketch—better late than never. The CSPD made an appointment for Candice at 2:00 P.M. on Sunday to sit down at the police station with a sketch artist. They got it done that afternoon, then digitally scanned and sent it to Palmer.

  The suspect, she said, had the build of a wrestler or football player. “He was a big bulky guy,” with a head that looked a little like her Uncle Matt’s. She said she would definitely recognize him if she saw him again.

  There was some debate over how much public notice the SDPD had put out about Candice’s attack. The SDPD later said the assault had been mentioned on two TV news channels, in a regional daily paper and on the Web site for the local weekly papers that covered news in Rancho Bernardo and Poway.

  “We didn’t pay much attention to it because it was initially reported as an attempted robbery,” said Pomerado News editor Steve Dreyer, noting that the story ran online as a “routine brief” of two or three paragraphs and didn’t even make the printed version of the paper. “I do remember putting it up on the Web, and then we lost track of it. Obviously, if it had been presented to us in another way, we would have paid more attention to it.”

  Once news of the attack got out after John Gardner’s arrest and arraignment, the citizens of Rancho Bernardo were outraged, claiming that the SDPD had not protected them properly by warning them there was an attacker on the prowl, either by posting flyers or by alerting the media, as they did when a mountain lion was loose in the neighborhood.

  “There’s a lot of frustration and anger out there right now,” Gary Carlson, RB’s neighborhood watch coordinator, told . “The San Diego Police Department did not personally notify us after the December twenty-seventh attack occurred. It was a failure in communications that the attack was classified as a simple robbery on the crime log.”

  If the SDPD had notified his group, he said, it would have been able to post warnings online and throughout the community.

  “First we would have notified all of our district leaders who would bring neighbors up to speed. The community would have mobilized and put together flyers to post at local businesses, entrances to the park as well as post flyers door-to-door... . Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but I can say we would have been proactive.”

  Those same questions also arose from the major media later. However, by then, their immediacy had diminished. At a news conference on May 17, 2010, SDPD lieutenant Jim Collins was questioned about why Candice Moncayo’s assault had been characterized as an “attempted robbery,” why no composite sketch was done at the time, and also why the DNA hadn’t been tested earlier.

  The officer wrote it up as an attempted robbery, Collins said, because Gardner never tried to touch Candice’s private parts. Collins said that SDPD attempted to have Candice meet with a sketch artist, but scheduling conflicts on both sides prevented that from happening before she went back to school. The robbery versus rape categorization was based on the evidence they had and could prove in court, he said, not the rape Candice feared would happen.

  Collins also noted that they had a helicopter on the scene within thirteen minutes of her report. “We did get a lot of information out there,” he countered.

  During the speculative talk of why the SDPD had passed this investigation on to the sheriff’s department, the “egg on face” theory was also suggested. By passing the case over to Sheriff Gore’s department, the SDPD was able to duck, or at least postpone, having to answer many of these questions. These SDPD decisions—or failings, depending on your perspective—were cited as moves that contributed to John Gardner remaining on the streets, and, if handled differently, could have saved Chelsea’s life.

  By 9:18 A.M. on Sunday, February 28, criminalist Anne-Marie Shafer had developed a DNA profile for Chelsea and had matched it to the blood on the underwear. She’d also found semen on the panties, and ran the male DNA profile through CODIS.

  Around eleven, during a line search with a team of thirteen, starting at the trailhead at Moon Song Court, a second yellow-striped Adidas shoe was found in a streambed near a culvert off Duenda, below Poblado Road. The shoe turned up near an outlet from the storm drain just off Duenda and about one hundred yards south of where the panties had been found. After the heavy rains on Saturday, detectives figured the shoe had been dumped elsewhere, and had been carried down the drainage system to this area.

  At 11:55 A.M., Shafer got a match between the semen on the panties and John Gardner’s DNA on file, and immediately contacted the detectives.

  Brent and Kelly King had been asking for a briefing from detectives every four hours, and they wanted it straight.

  Around noon, Sergeant Brown, Lieutenant Dennis Brugos and Detective Johnson were taking the Kings on a tour they’d requested of the sites where the search teams had found Chelsea’s belongings. Brown was giving them a bird’s-eye view of the valley from the neighborhood up above, pointing out the various locations, when he got a call from Detective Pat O’Brien.

  “I’m on the phone with the lab,” O’Brien said. “We got a name.”

  “Hold on a sec,” Brown said as he backed out of the Kings’ earshot and walked to his car.

  Once Brown was in a safe zone, O’Brien continued. “We got a hit on a name that’s a 290, and we have a confirmation that it’s Chelsea,” he said, meaning they’d gotten a match linking Gardner’s DNA with Chelsea’s.

  “Get everybody and meet me in the office in Kearny Mesa, and don’t go to the command post,” Brown said.

  He was worried that the media, posted around the clock at the park, would find out somehow about this big break. Detectives always had to pass through a gauntlet of cameras and satellite trucks as they left the command post, and the media also followed them by car. Brown was sure the photographers were watching their every move at the command center using telephoto lenses from the upper parking lot, because he’d seen such broadcasts on TV.

  Brown needed to move fast, so he pulled Brugos aside and whispered, “We got a hit.” Then he apologized to the Kings. “We have to go. We have a lead,” he said. “The tour’s over.”

  The Kings seemed to understand and appreciate the urgency. “No, you need to do your work,” they said.

  The ride to the command post with Brugos was intense, as Brown felt his body surge with adrenaline. With still no body yet, he and his team weren’t even at the typical point in the case where they would normally start their work, and they’d already been up for more than twenty-four hours. But this case was different. “We were at the spent part and we hadn’t even gotten to the pregame warm-up,” Brown said.

  Acting as nonchalantly as possible, Brown dropped off Brugos at the command post to get his car, grabbed Detective Palmer and tried to keep his cool while gathering up his troops. He signaled what was up by winking at sheriff’s captain Todd Frank, the de facto chief of police in Poway, and Commander Michael McNally, who was in charge of all sheriff’s operations in the North County.

  “Is everything going good?” Captain Frank asked.

  “Yeah,” Brown said. “I think this is going to be a good day.”

  Within moments, Dave Brown went into action and called investigative specialist Sandy Curry, a computer expert considered a detective without a gun. It was her job to do what Brown called an “information enema” on suspects, like Gardner, putting together a package with photos of the perp, details about his finances, places he’d lived, all his vehicles and any tattoos. While she went to work, Brown and his crew developed a game plan for bringing in John Gardner—and hopefully finding Chelsea King alive.

  In less than an hour of searching, Curry came up with a list of four vehicles to which Gardner had had access, which the detectives then tried to locate for search, seizure and/or purchase. Ultimately they found them all: the black Nissan; a Pontiac, which was found totaled in a junkyard; a white Silverado pickup truck, which had been repossessed and purcha
sed by someone in L.A.; and a gray Ford Focus, which also was found in L.A. with new owners. Because the testing was going to destroy the cars by ripping seats apart and tearing out the carpets, the FBI ended up buying the cars from the new owners. The junkyard donated the Pontiac to detectives.

  “They don’t want a serial killer car, anyway,” Brown said.

  Brown asked Russ Moore, the sheriff’s sergeant in charge of the Fugitive Task Force, to get his team together to discuss strategy. The task force consisted of sheriff’s detectives and U.S. Marshals who wore shaggy hair and casual clothes, drove a variety of undercover cars to do surveillance and made most of the department’s serious arrests.

  “We wear shirts and ties,” Brown said. “We don’t chase and tackle people. That’s their job. They’re good at it.”

  The plan was for the fugitive detectives to set up surveillance and to try to gather intelligence at Cathy’s condo in RB, and to sit outside and watch Linda’s house in Lake Elsinore, and Gardner’s last known apartment in Escondido—not knowing he hadn’t lived there in months.

  They hoped Gardner was holding Chelsea somewhere, had her tied up and held captive, perhaps right under his mother’s nose. With exigent circumstances, meaning that Chelsea’s life was in the balance, they had the right to search the residences without a warrant.

  I don’t give a shit about John Gardner, Brown thought. I want Chelsea.

  Chapter 23

  While John Gardner’s mother and girlfriend were waiting for him at Cathy’s condo in RB, he was walking around Lake Hodges. Gardner ended up at Hernandez’ Hideaway in Del Dios, a tiny community within the city of Escondido on the north shore of the lake, where the locals know each other by name. For at least fifty years, this dimly lit Mexican restaurant-bar has been a neighborhood gathering place, where patrons can sit in a row of wood-backed swivel chairs at a faded red bar counter and watch TV, or in an adjacent room of tables and booths.

  Gardner sat in the last seat at the end of the bar, in front of the cash register and three black refrigerated cabinets, each of which was painted with a festive Mexican theme and a caption: a pretty Latina waitress holding a platter of margaritas (“Call me Margarita”), a series of cartoon fruit characters with legs—two limes, a bunch of grapes and a giant strawberry—climbing up a ladder and jumping into a pitcher of margaritas (Home of the Real Margarita) and dancing tamales (Some like it hot). He ordered a beer and the special, a stuffed quesadilla, and sat calmly while he ate it.

  “Never would have guessed,” Debbie, the bartender, said later. “He was very polite.”

  Neither Debbie, who had worked at the bar for five years, nor any of the other regulars had seen him there before. She said she also didn’t notice that his legs were wet or muddy, as the detectives later described. He stayed for about forty-five minutes, she said, then paid his bill around 4:15 P.M. and walked out the opaque-windowed doors.

  George Morgan, a lawyer who lived down the street from the bar, had gotten up around three o’clock that morning to go to the bathroom when he saw quads and searchlights moving around the mountain across the lake. Morgan couldn’t believe so much activity was going on at that hour, especially in the pouring rain.

  This is incredible, he thought.

  Figuring it had to be the search for the missing girl he’d heard about, he was so inspired that he decided to join the effort first thing.

  “I’ve never seen such a public outpouring,” he said. “That touched me, and I’m not usually touched. So I felt compelled to be a part of it and get involved.”

  He did exactly that, arriving home around three-thirty that afternoon. At 4:08 P.M., he heard the thunder of a helicopter landing on the asphalt parking area in front of his house and saw three guys jump out and take off down the street.

  He’d seen the news choppers flying all over the area since Chelsea King had gone missing a few days earlier, but now that something was going on right outside his house, Morgan grabbed his binoculars to take a look off his back deck.

  About eight minutes later, he saw a bunch of men and one woman surround a guy across from the bar down the street. Within moments, they had forced him to the ground.

  Mike Kratz, an engineer for the city of Vista, had lived in the neighborhood for the past eighteen years. He decided to go down to the bar and grab a beer that afternoon.

  When Kratz walked into the bar, he noticed a thirtyish man, sitting at the end of the counter. He got a very different feeling from him than the bartender had.

  “He had this heavy hunched shoulder kind of bad vibe,” Kratz recalled, saying that the man, who he later learned was John Gardner, didn’t seem like the kind of guy he’d feel comfortable approaching. “This wasn’t a person I wanted to sit by.”

  Kratz was sitting on the wall outside, around four o’clock, when a couple of friends came out and joined him. While they were chitchatting, a black SUV pulled into the parking lot off the patio, stopping abruptly at a skewed angle, then another black SUV shot up right behind it. Glancing back at the first SUV, Kratz saw a big guy with silver hair, dressed in a plaid flannel shirt, jump out, and he heard a man near the second SUV shout: “Freeze or I’ll blow your f---ing brains out!”

  Turning to see who was yelling, Kratz saw a physically fit, gray-haired man pointing a gun at Gardner. The first silver-haired man also had a weapon aimed at Gardner, when a metallic silver car drove up. Out jumped a third guy about Gardner’s age, also wearing a plaid shirt. Gardner was now surrounded by a group of armed men shouting expletives at him and ordering him to put his hands up.

  Gardner didn’t try to run. He just stood on the white line at the edge of the two-lane Lake Drive, holding a couple of cigarettes that he’d bummed from the bartender and a patron.

  “I don’t think I’m the guy you want,” Gardner said.

  “F---ing asshole!” one of the men yelled. “Get down on the ground!”

  Not seeing anyone wearing a uniform, Kratz didn’t know what to think. Are these cops? Or is this some hit?

  Kratz glanced around again, trying to find a safe escape route to avoid getting caught in the cross fire by a stray bullet. He ended up crouching behind the wall, leaving his beer sitting on top. When Kratz peeked up again, he saw the young guy on top of Gardner, whose face was now down on the asphalt, with a gun pointed at the back of his neck.

  Kratz looked at his two buddies and laughed nervously. “They either got the guy who got that girl,” he said, “or they got the biggest drug king in North County.”

  Only after another man came forward with a pair of handcuffs, which he gave to the guy on Gardner’s back, and took off his shirt to reveal a black law enforcement vest, identifying him as a U.S. Marshal, did Kratz begin to relax.

  Soon more cars with more men—and one woman—all dressed as if they were going hunting or fishing, drove up to circle Gardner with a protective barrier in case he tried to run. If they hadn’t been carrying guns and pointing them at Gardner, they would have fit right into the neighborhood.

  At their direction, Gardner stood up and emptied his pockets into a paper sack. Then they took him away.

  By 5:00 P.M., John Gardner was back at sheriff’s headquarters on Ridgehaven Court, where Detectives Scott Enyeart and Pat O’Brien interviewed him after getting some legal advice from Bob Amador, the DA’s liaison with the sheriff’s department. Deputy District Attorney Kristen Spieler was there to watch the questioning as well.

  Because they were still hoping to find Chelsea alive, Amador told detectives they didn’t need to Mirandize him just yet. That meant they couldn’t ask him questions about the crime or where he was Thursday night when Chelsea went missing. They had to focus on her whereabouts to determine if she was safe somewhere.

  “Where is Chelsea King?” Enyeart demanded. “What did you do with her?”

  “I don’t know her,” Gardner replied.

  Gardner claimed he’d had four or five beers, and the detectives could smell the alcohol on him. But
he wasn’t blotto, nor did he act like a slurring, stumbling drunk. He was more like a combative, angry caged animal, which wasn’t the best condition to get good information out of him.

  Asked why his pants were wet and muddy, he said he fell near the restaurant, and decided it was better to be wet than muddy when going inside for lunch, so he washed himself off in the lake.

  “We were thinking he moved the body, got her into the water, or got her out of the water,” Brown said later, acknowledging, however, that Gardner’s rationale did make sense.

  As the lead interviewer, Enyeart hammered at Gardner to give up Chelsea’s whereabouts, but he couldn’t get him to admit anything. Gardner tried to get control of the interview, and sensing the more laid-back O’Brien seemed more reasonable, Gardner often directed his answers to the calmer detective. But they were getting nowhere.

  “We know you had something to do with her disappearance,” they said. “What did you do with her?”

  Gardner continued to deny coming into contact with Chelsea, saying all he knew about her case had come from watching TV. His emotions were extreme—calm one minute, angry the next, punctuated with eruptions of inappropriate laughter. He seemed to think his arrest was humorous and yet offensive, as if he were thinking, How dare you even consider me a suspect?

  “We have your DNA,” Enyeart said. “How do you think we linked you to Chelsea?”

  But that didn’t faze him either.

  Every time they tried to make him believe they knew he was guilty, he tried to turn it around as if he were the victim. Detectives had wrongfully arrested him in 2000 for a crime he didn’t commit and lied about having his DNA linking him to the molestation and assault of his thirteen-year-old neighbor, he said, so he didn’t believe Enyeart and O’Brien now. He also had been mistreated in prison, he said, and he hated cops because of that too.