Lost Girls

by Caitlin Rother

  “We had searchers go through every foot of this area,” Sergeant Don Parker said, as he stood at the scene a year later. “My regret is we didn’t find her until we did. It wouldn’t have changed anything. It just prolonged everybody’s agony.”

  As TV news cameras captured some blurry shots of the boats pulling over and finding Chelsea, they also captured Brown putting his arm around Palmer. From the camera’s perspective, it looked almost as if Brown was comforting Palmer, a rare show of affection between two seasoned homicide detectives, although in this case, that didn’t seem all that extraordinary.

  In fact, however, Brown was simply telling Palmer how it was going to be. They were already exhausted after working with no sleep for several days straight as they watched the case unfold, and they were only just now at the point where they normally began working a murder.

  “These thousand people are going to leave,” Brown told Palmer. “It’s just going to be the seven of us who are always here. Our job starts now, Mark.”

  This case had been very different from their normal fare from the start. They typically began their investigation after they knew the victim was dead, but in this case, they’d hoped that Chelsea was still alive. They’d learned who she was, and they’d become emotionally invested in her fate. This case had been more tiring and more disappointing than usual, and now they had less than twenty-four hours to gather evidence before Gardner would be arraigned. They were going to have to dig even deeper than usual.

  Sheriff’s spokeswoman Jan Caldwell could feel a change in the air as soon as Chelsea’s body was discovered that afternoon.

  Always very focused, Don Parker was usually an easygoing guy, and so full of life. They’d had some false starts in the past few days, but judging by the look of anger mixed with sadness on his face, Caldwell could see that this was the real thing. As he stood in the command post with a walkie-talkie in one ear and a cell phone in the other, he turned to the incident commander and said, “They found her.”

  It was up to Caldwell to notify Sheriff Gore. In the first couple of days after Chelsea disappeared, Gore had instructed Lieutenant Brugos to let Caldwell talk to the media so as not to send the message to the Kings that they should give up the hope of finding their daughter alive. The last thing the Kings needed was to see Brugos being interviewed, with his “homicide lieutenant” tagline on the TV screen.

  After Gore had announced John Gardner’s arrest to the media, he didn’t want to keep going on TV simply to say, “Nothing new,” so he had told Caldwell that morning that he was leaving her in charge of talking to the media once again.

  “Scoop, you take it from here,” he’d said. “I’m overexposed.”

  As soon as she got word that afternoon, Caldwell called Gore right away. But as one former FBI agent to another, they didn’t want to say much on an unsecured cell phone, knowing their conversation could be monitored by the more technologically savvy people out there.

  “You need to come up to Rancho Bernardo right now,” Caldwell said.

  “Is this significant?” he asked.

  “Yes, you need to be here.”

  “I’m on my way,” he said.

  After that call, Caldwell walked outside to see one of the King family’s friends approaching. She didn’t have to say a word; he could tell by her expression what had happened. His eyes were brimming with tears by the time they met face-to-face.

  “I’m so sorry,” Caldwell said as she hugged him. “She’s going to make a difference.”

  “And she did,” Caldwell said later. “It’s not in the way we wanted, but she did, and she’s going to continue to make a difference.”

  Some people looked for a higher meaning to this tragedy, something to help them make sense of it. Chaplains were milling around the command center that afternoon, and Caldwell couldn’t help but ask one of them for some kind of spiritual explanation.

  “Why?” she asked. “How could this happen?”

  “This makes God sad too,” he said. “God didn’t want this to happen. There is evil in the world. But there was a reason for this.”

  Spending so many years in law enforcement, Caldwell had learned to find ways to release the emotions of her job. Inside her file for Chelsea’s case, she had pinned this quotation from author and historian Washington Irving (1783–1859): There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief ... and unspeakable love.

  Sheriff Gore took it upon himself to notify the King family personally, which Sergeant Brown considered a favor to him.

  “I’ll do it,” Gore said, taking on a task that no one really wanted.

  First he went to the RB park to gather information on how and where Chelsea was found, then he called Detective Chris Johnson to find out who was home at the King house. This was something he dreaded doing, but out of respect to the family with whom he had developed such a bond, he felt it was his obligation.

  “It was the longest drive of my life,” he said, “and the longest walk up the driveway. What do you say?”

  Inside, Johnson was there with Brent, Kelly and Kelly’s brother, a retired school superintendent. They watched, with the hope of good news in their eyes, as Gore walked in—just as they had done during his daily visits since Chelsea had gone missing.

  The bonds of trust between the Kings and Gore had deepened since they’d met in the park’s gym four days earlier. During one visit, Brent brought down Post-it notes with inspirational messages and quotes that Chelsea had posted on her bathroom wall, sharing with Gore what kind of marvel their daughter was. As upset and worried as the Kings were, Gore had encouraged them to get up in the middle of the night to do a satellite interview with him for Good Morning America, trying to get the word out about Chelsea’s disappearance. Gore felt Kelly grip his hand tightly for support throughout the entire interview.

  But on this sad afternoon, as much as he wanted to, Gore didn’t have any good news or hope to give them. “We believe we’ve found Chelsea,” he said somberly.

  “Are you sure?” Brent asked.

  “I’m sure enough that I’m here.”

  After days of listening to Gore encourage them to keep hoping, Kelly and Brent broke into tears, devastated.

  “There was hugging and crying,” Gore recalled later. “Everyone is crying. Chris, me.”

  Detective Johnson had practically lived with the family since Chelsea had disappeared, which was the sheriff’s department’s way of keeping them informed while also obtaining necessary information quickly for investigators.

  “He was their bodyguard, family member, support system,” Gore said. “It was tough on him.”

  And for Gore too. “Nothing in my career has had the emotional impact that this case has,” he said.

  When Gore returned from the Kings’ house in Poway to lead a news conference at the park, his eyes were still welled up with tears. To Caldwell, it looked as if he’d aged two years during the past hour.

  Surrounded by top officials from every law enforcement agency in town that had worked some aspect of this case, Gore spoke soberly to the reporters and their cameras about finding a body they thought was Chelsea’s. But he wouldn’t say for sure because she had yet to be officially identified.

  “Had you searched the area before?” a reporter asked.

  “This is an area we had been searching over the last five days, but unfortunately we missed it because it was in a shallow grave,” he said. “It’s a heavily wooded area and not observable from the homes up on the hillside or if you’re standing in the park, so it gives some amount of cover to whoever did this.”

  Gore declined to answer questions about the state of the body or describe what Chelsea’s assailant had done to her. “I don’t want to talk about that,” he said.

  No one broke down and sobbed. But everyone who had been scouring the trails and the lake for signs of the missing girl—the de
puties, detectives and chiefs who had invested their emotions in the chance that she would be found alive—hugged and touched one another far more than usual that afternoon, expressing a primal need for the comfort of human contact. Caldwell took note of this, unable to think of another news conference where she’d seen so much bonding behavior among her colleagues.

  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.