Lost Girls (18 page)

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Authors: Caitlin Rother

BOOK: Lost Girls
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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 Deleon
1
, 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.
On April 12, 2009, at 7:00
P.M.
, Gardner was cited by EPD officer Mark Noyes for driving without a license, having an open container of alcohol and having no front license plate. The gray car was registered to Gardner's girlfriend, Jariah Baker.
Noyes had been flagged down in a Vons parking lot by a twenty-year-old woman who was pointing at Gardner's car. “That gray Ford Focus has been following me all over town!” she said, accusing Gardner of essentially stalking her.
Noyes went after the Focus, and stopped Gardner near Morning View Drive and West El Norte Parkway, about a mile from Escondido High School, where Gardner gave him consent to search the car. The officer found most of an open cold beer in the driver's door pocket, and seeing a three-year-old boy in the backseat, Noyes's immediate concern was the child's welfare.
A year later when this incident was disclosed at a news briefing, Benton said Noyes did “everything he could under the law” by citing Gardner, who was no longer on parole, and calling Jariah to make sure Gardner was allowed to have her son with him. Although this wasn't mentioned on the citation, Benton said Gardner claimed he was upset with the woman because she'd cut him off in traffic, so the officer figured it was “some sort of road rage incident.” Officer Noyes never followed up on the woman's report because she disappeared from the scene and was never identified, Benton said. Instead, Noyes forwarded his report to family protection detectives because of the boy, but he never gave it to the homicide detectives investigating Amber's disappearance.
With all the publicity surrounding this case, the leads continued to flow in, which kept the family and the police hoping that Amber was still alive.
In May, someone sent the EPD a photo of a girl who looked just like Amber, at an outdoor concert. The resemblance was so close, Benton said, “we actually had to show that to Carrie.” During the summer, the EPD also received a report of a seventeen-year-old runaway named Amber in Northern California, where someone had seen a flyer about Amber Dubois posted at one of the Humboldt County sheriff's stations.
“I've seen that girl. I saw her yesterday, riding a skateboard,” this person reported. “She said she was from Escondido.”
When this girl turned up at a campground in Garberville on August 25, the sheriff's department sent EPD her photo. Her name was Amber and she was from Escondido, but it was Escondido
Lake
in the state of Washington. Her resemblance to Amber Dubois was uncanny, but it wasn't her.
Meanwhile, the EPD received a series of reports about another girl named Amber who had been hitchhiking, also in Northern California, from people who were sure she was the missing Amber Dubois.
The EPD thought about sending a team to do interviews and try to find this girl, but after two months of trying to track her down, the FBI ended up sending a local agent, instead.
“They truly are a force multiplier,” Benton said. “It was great.”
Once the EPD finally got a photo of this girl, it was the same story. Another Amber, who looked like Amber Dubois, but still wasn't her.
Even so, Moe and Carrie wouldn't give up. They went on CNN's
Jane Velez-Mitchell,
which aired August 13, announcing they had vigils planned for that night across the nation, including one at Tavern on the Green in New York City's Central Park, in Arizona and in Orange County and Escondido, California.
 
 
Later that month, hopes were raised again when a K-9 team specializing in cold cases claimed to have tracked Amber's “live” scent north on Interstate 15 and into Pauma Valley, near the Pala Indian Reservation and Casino on August 17, 2009—six months after she had disappeared. The dogs, which belonged to the nonprofit VK9 Scent Specific Search and Recovery Unit, were Quincy, a five-year-old yellow Lab retriever, and Jack, an eight-year-old German short-haired pointer.
Lawrence Olmstead, a private investigator in Los Angeles who was hired by Amber's grandmother, went with the dog handlers. He said he saw the dogs alert to several locations, including a ranch and the Santa Catalina Nursery on Pala Road (State Route 76), and one of two houses on the property, where a family with four dogs lived, about two hundred yards from the casino.

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