Lost Girls (16 page)

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Authors: Caitlin Rother

BOOK: Lost Girls
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For example, he didn't like her talking to a particular friend of hers. “And she ended up being my only friend because of the way he would react. They just stopped calling,” Jariah said in 2010. “Gave myself my own little cage without realizing.”
Jariah said she understood how being unemployed could affect a man and cause him to lash out. She called it “the man complex, because they're not providing.” With Gardner, she said, “he was a different person when he was working than when he wasn't.”
She knew he was bipolar, so she tried to find different ways to communicate with him, because sometimes a five-minute conversation could run for hours, and when she paused for a second, he interrupted. That's why she sometimes asked him to write his questions, so she could have her say in the discussion.
“He's very smart,” she said. “That's one of the attractive things. He's a hard worker. He would never put me down, like on my intelligence or my looks. Just other ways, he'd ... assume things and obsess about them.” But at times, if she simply forgot to tell him something, he would grow paranoid and think she was hiding it from him. He also got jealous and accused her of cheating on him. “I'd be like ‘no, no, no.'”
His moods were pretty volatile as well, she said. “One minute, things were totally great, and the next minute, he'd misunderstand what you said ... and get upset about it.”
In October 2009, Cathy could see that he was having a mental break by his behavior and his telling remarks.
“I have weird things going through my head, but I can't talk to you about them,” he told her. “It's kind of like things that were going on in prison.”
During this same period, Jariah called Tricia during a fight with Gardner. The call came as a surprise to Tricia because she and Jariah were no longer close. Nonetheless, she tried to act as a mediator in what Jariah described as a violent argument during which a door and a toilet were broken.
While Gardner continued to do drugs, Jariah said, she entered rehab at Serenity House in Escondido that November, telling Gardner he could drive her black Nissan while she was getting help.
 
 
On December 27, unbeknownst to his family, Gardner attacked a young woman jogging on the same trails in RB where Cathy and her husband's running group, the Hash House Harriers, were going to have an event that same afternoon. After the incident, “DrZaius,” a group member whose contact information was the same as Kevin's, wrote this item in its newsletter:
Disturbing news at the start. [Two members], who live next to the park, came out to give us word that a girl had been attacked that morning on the trails where we would be running.
Gardner and Jariah had paid for their Rock Springs apartment through December 31, 2009, but with Jariah in rehab, Gardner couldn't afford to pay the rent on his own and had to move out. He left the keys in the night drop on January 5, 2010, still owing a balance of $2,759, and moved to his grandmother's house in Lake Elsinore in Riverside County.
The one-year anniversary of Amber Dubois's disappearance was fast approaching.
Chapter 17
Amber Leeanne Dubois was a free-spirited, reflective fourteen-year-old with the look of a tomboy, who hated shopping at the mall. She was the kind of kid who read books under the covers with a flashlight after lights out, even after several visits from her mother telling her to go to sleep. She just couldn't put the book down.
“In a year, she probably read more books than I have in my life,” said her father, who described her as a “geeky nerd.”
Her mother, Carrie McGonigle, was quite striking when she was young, and Carrie collected a stack of photos of the mother-daughter duo posing together. They were quite a contrast to each other: Carrie, with her highlighted brown hair and sun-drenched skin, and Amber, with her dark hair and serene, icy blue eyes, framed by freckles and a shy smile.
Family photos featured a lot of hugging, even though some of the relatives were at odds. Carrie and her mom, Sheila Welch, went through periods of not speaking to each other, as did Carrie and Moe. Moe and Sheila weren't on great terms either.
Amber was born on October 25, 1994, and her parents, who were married in September 1995, separated seven months later. Moe filed for divorce in Orange County in May 1996, but the filing was never resolved. Carrie filed in San Diego County five years later, and the divorce was still not finalized by 2009. A hearing on why the case should not be dismissed was set for February 9, 2009, only four days before Amber went missing. Records show that Carrie, who no longer had an attorney, showed up on her own, but Moe did not, so she was referred to the Family Law Facilitator's Office, which offers advice for finalizing divorces through default judgments.
 
 
Amber spent weekends with Moe and his girlfriend, Rebecca Smith, in Orange County. She also visited with her grandmother, Sheila, a lawyer in Los Angeles County, who liked to tell Amber that she came from a long line of strong Irish women. The rest of the time, Amber lived in Escondido with Carrie and Carrie's boyfriend, Dave Cave, and the couple's six-year-old daughter, Allison, Amber's half sister.
By all accounts, Amber loved animals more than anything, and already had a career picked out as an animal behavioral scientist. She had a whole menagerie of pets—horses, guinea pigs, fish, birds, rats and dogs—so when she learned about the Future Farmers of America program and its farm on campus at Escondido High School, she wanted to participate.
In a coincidental similarity with Chelsea, Amber liked writing poetry. However, Amber also had a curiosity about the dark side. She and her friends were into reading about vampires and werewolves in the
Twilight
series. Above all else, Amber seemed most fascinated with wolves, so much so that her grandmother had given her a necklace with a wolf charm. Even her screen name on Yahoo reflected this obsession: “wolfintheend.”
“Everything was wolves,” recalled Bob Benton, of the Escondido Police Department, who had overseen this case as a lieutenant and was promoted to captain after it was resolved. “She was an animal lover and kind of termed herself ‘a lone wolf.'”
 
 
On Friday, February 13, 2009, Amber got up and ate some cereal. At 6:20
A.M.
, she responded to a text that her grandmother had sent her the night before—the seventieth text between them that week.
Carrie had gone to work at 4:00
A.M.
, but not before waking Amber to remind her to take the $200 check she needed to buy a lamb for her farm project. After Amber asked Dave several times for the check, Dave left it for her on the couch arm, then he headed to the gym around 6:15
A.M.
Amber had been really excited about getting the lamb, which she'd already named Nanette—French, like her surname, Dubois. She tucked the check away for safekeeping and left the house wearing black jeans, a white shirt, a dark hoodie sweatshirt and a sapphire ring. Inside her computer bag, she had a new book, which Dave had bought the night before when they'd visited Barnes & Noble, and a stash of valentines for her friends.
At 6:44 a.m., she texted her friend Julio, a student with whom she often walked to school, asking, Are you walking with Nancy to school?
Julio texted back to say yes, he'd just left his house, near Rincon and Conway. Typically, they met up at Lehner and Vista and continued on together, but he never saw or heard back from Amber.
When she wasn't going to school with Julio, Amber often had her nose in a book as she walked down her street, Fire Mountain Place, turned right on Paradise, left on Vista and headed down to Broadway. She would wait there for the stoplight to turn green, cross the street and walk up the sidewalk to meet her friends before school at the gym, where a security camera was mounted on the building. It was cold and drizzly that morning, in the low fifties, so the people who thought they saw her walking to school said she'd pulled her hood over her head.
Amber's last class ended at 2:45
P.M.
, so Carrie, figuring that Amber would hang out with her friends for a while, usually gave her until three-thirty to get home. If Amber wasn't back by then, she always called. When Amber didn't come home or call by her regular time, Dave figured something was up, so he called Carrie at work. But Carrie didn't know where Amber was either. She called Amber's cell phone and got no answer, so she left a message to call her.
Dave figured that Amber had stayed at school to play with her new pet lamb, and had lost track of time. He drove over there to look for her and ran into one of her teachers. When Dave asked if the instructor had seen Amber, he was concerned to hear the answer.
“She didn't show up here today,” the teacher said. “I was very surprised that she wasn't here. This was her last day to pay for her lamb.”
“What are you talking about?” Dave asked. “I gave her a check before I left the house this morning.”
Other school officials advised Dave that they'd called the house at 12:30
P.M.
to say that Amber had never made it to school that day; when Dave got home, he checked the voice mail to find a message to that effect. He then told Carrie what he'd learned, and she too could feel that something was wrong. Under normal circumstances, Amber never would have missed buying that lamb.
By the time Carrie called Moe, she was crying hysterically. “I don't know where Amber is,” she said.
At 5:47
P.M.
, Dave called 911 to report Amber missing Within an hour, Escondido police officer Russ Gay was at the house, meeting with Dave and Carrie to write a detailed report in which Gay described Amber as a “missing juvenile at risk, with unknown circumstances.”
“In talking to them, he thought something was wrong,” Captain Benton recalled.
As a result, Escondido police spent the night searching the neighborhood, the school and the creek that ran alongside it, but they found nothing. Carrie and Dave did the same, going door-to-door with the help of more than a dozen friends who showed up to assist.
 
 
In a highly unusual move, the EPD watch commander called a couple of family protection detectives to come in Saturday morning to work the case, based on the first interview with Carrie and Dave. For Escondido police, this was practically unheard of in a case that couldn't be definitively linked to a crime.
As the detectives were interviewing Carrie and Dave on Saturday, they were notified that someone had briefly turned on Amber's cell phone at 2:30
P.M.
for about thirty seconds to check voice mail messages, then shut it off, which prevented the detectives from tracking the caller any further. Carrie had called Verizon the night before to have the password changed to allow her to check the messages for clues, so the police didn't know if it was Amber trying to access her messages that afternoon or someone else.
But because the signal had pinged off a tower north of her home and the high school, a tower that covered a five-mile radius, the EPD immediately put out a reverse 911 call for a several-mile radius around the school. The transcript of the alert read as follows:
This is an important message from the Escondido Police Department regarding a missing juvenile at risk. The missing juvenile is Amber Leeanne Dubois, who was last seen on Friday, February the thirteenth at 07:00 hours, walking south on Broadway near Escondido High School. She's a white female, fourteen years old, five foot three, hundred and forty pounds, brown hair, blue eyes, last seen wearing all dark clothing. She never arrived at school, she has no prior history of running away, and this is out of character for her ... If you have any information concerning Amber Dubois, please contact the Escondido Police Department.
And call they did.
 
 
In the next few days, several seemingly credible reports of sightings came in, which helped police put together a timeline for Amber's trip to school that morning.
At 7:09
A.M.
, parent Dave Walquist had just dropped off his kid at school when he was sure he saw Amber, walking rapidly by herself in the drizzly cold, as he was driving north on Broadway.
Right around the same time, Pam Sams, a mother who lived in the neighborhood and had watched Amber walking to school many times, said she was driving her son to school when she saw Amber walking up Broadway. Her report put Amber closer to the school than Walquist's sighting, and Sams said Amber was talking with a dark-skinned “doughy boy,” about six to eight inches taller than she was. Sams slowed down to pick up Amber or say hello, but decided not to interrupt the conversation. Amber and the boy, she said, were approaching the yellow fire hydrant just down the street from the bus yard driveway.
Both of these parents' cars were captured by the video cameras posted at the school, and police estimated it was thirty to forty-five seconds between the times they dropped off their kids and when they thought they saw Amber. Through interviews with Amber's family, neighbors, her friends and their parents, the authorities learned that the teenager had a certain routine each morning, and although she had appeared on camera on previous days, walking to school, she never came into view the day she went missing.
“That's why we kept saying, ‘What happened between here and here?'” Benton said.
Also on Saturday, the EPD got a tip it viewed as highly credible: a fellow student said he'd seen Amber that evening at five-thirty, walking with two other teenagers in downtown Escondido, eastbound on Grand Avenue, not far from Palomar Medical Center.
On Tuesday, February 17, when school was back in session after the three-day Presidents' Day weekend, yet another classmate reported seeing her walking with a boy on Sunday evening, west on Rincon Avenue near Creek Hollow, toward the surrounding rural area, which was known as a magnet for kids who partied.
These witness reports contributed to the theory that Amber could have been a runaway, but Carrie insisted that Amber wasn't the type to take off partying, let alone run away from home. The police, however, weren't so sure. And what exactly, they wondered, could she be running away from?
When detectives were able to check family court records after the holiday weekend, they learned about the February 9 divorce hearing, theorizing that Amber could have gotten caught up in a family struggle and would reappear once those issues were resolved.
“So we sent detectives to all relatives' homes—grandma, cousins, aunts—thinking that she may be at one of those homes, and also took that opportunity to interview them,” Benton said.
But none of the relatives knew where Amber was either.
Starting that Tuesday, the sheriff's Search and Rescue (SAR) unit set up a command post at Rincon Middle School, the center of a search by one hundred people, including EPD officers and volunteers, who spent two days going door-to-door in a several-mile radius, passing out flyers. Fairly certain Amber was in that area because of the latest witness statement, sheriff's sergeant Don Parker, who coordinated the SAR unit and its army of 180 volunteers, directed the searchers through the avocado groves and up in the hills, where their orange shirts dotted the landscape like poppies. The searchers also went through more than fifty foreclosed and abandoned buildings, where police were investigating a recent rash of break-ins. Unfortunately, they learned that the witness who had seemed credible was either lying or just plain wrong.

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