Lost Girls (27 page)

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Authors: Caitlin Rother

BOOK: Lost Girls
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But Brown wasn't worried he'd lose the case to Riverside County. This was his team's case, and they'd been working it for more than a week. No other sheriff's department was going to take it from him without a fight. Besides, Gardner told them as much. He said that as soon as he'd seen the sign
WELCOME TO RIVERSIDE COUNTY,
he'd made a U-turn and headed back the other way. If he had continued on, there were houses. People. And that was no good for burying a body.
Looking for a familiar landmark, Gardner said, “I believe it was an access or utility road.”
They drove a little farther, until they came to the right road, marked at the foot by an oak tree with a massive trunk. The dirt road went up a steep hill, which was cordoned off with a metal gate, but it turned out to be unlocked. Driving up the first part of the road was tough, but the rest of the way was so slippery that Brown had to stop at a turnout and drive the rest of the way in one of the SUVs that could make the grade. He drove up a short way to an even more remote area where it flattened out. To the left was a dirt berm, about three or four feet high, which Gardner said had been dumped since he'd been there last.
They all got out of the car, climbed over the berm, and walked along a path that was lined with brush and strewn with debris. They continued a short way as the path curved around to the left, where they came across a rusty, abandoned car that Gardner recognized. From the debris lying around, the place looked as if people came there to use drugs, drink and have sex. They later learned that the property was owned by a water district that had piled the berm there to try to prevent people from driving their trucks up the path and dumping more big items.
The view was spectacular—surrounded by mountains and only the faintest sound of cars in the distance. Gardner had told them during his post-arrest interview that after growing up in the mountains near Big Bear, he liked to come to places like this, with that open feeling of natural wilderness for miles around.
He told the detectives that he hadn't aimed to bring Amber here specifically. He'd just been driving along and said, “Oh, here's a spot.”
“There are no houses, no lights, no electricity, no cameras. Nobody walks there, nobody jogs there,” Brown said later. “It was the perfect place to bury a body.”
Other serial killers apparently had thought so. Several others had buried their victims in this same valley over the years, including seven-year-old victim Leticia Hernandez, whose skull was found near there fifteen months after she'd gone missing in 1989. The bodies of four women were also discovered there during an investigation into forty-five murders, many of them prostitutes, during the 1980s.
Brown walked alongside Gardner, holding the inmate's arm as he shuffled along and tried to remember where he'd put the body. Gardner hadn't left a marker, and was looking for something to refresh his memory. With his hands chained, he didn't have much slack to lift and point, so he gestured by lifting his head or a hand to direct the detectives' attention.
They followed the path a bit farther until it flattened out into a vista, where he indicated they should start searching down a steep incline of about forty-five degrees to the left. Detective Mark Palmer and Sergeant Roy Frank slid down twenty or twenty-five feet in their dress shirt and slacks, tie, and leather shoes, only to report that they saw no recently disturbed or loose dirt, flattened brush or digging-tool marks.
Gardner offered to come down and help them look, but Brown was concerned that Gardner couldn't make it down the incline in those shackles, and he didn't want anyone to think he'd “accidentally” pushed Gardner over the edge. But Gardner insisted he could do it. It was difficult to keep his balance, with his legs and hands chained, so Brown helped to steady him as they shuffled down the dirt slope together.
“Here,” Gardner said. Realizing he was mistaken, he switched directions, the leaves of bushes and trees hitting them in the face as they went. “No, maybe here.”
Up top on the vista, Popkins was getting worried. Brown was too as he and Gardner came back up. They'd been there about twenty minutes, and Gardner was enjoying a few cigarettes that the detectives had given him, a real treat because the jails were smoke-free and he was a chain-smoker.
“I hope this wasn't a long ride just for some free cigarettes,” Brown said.
“Don't even say that,” Popkins said.
Gardner took Brown farther over to the left, about twenty feet, and shuffled down the chaparral-covered incline. As soon as he saw a rusted water heater, he seemed more sure of where he was.
“Oh, it's right here,” he said. Leaning in confidentially to Brown, who was firmly gripping Gardner's bicep, he said quietly, “I can see the shovel marks.”
Brown looked over and, sure enough, he could see the sharp marks etched into the dirt, where Gardner's shovel had left an indentation from digging into the hard-angled surface.
“Her head's there, her body's there,” Gardner said, pointing as best he could with his manacles. “You won't find any clothes or any jewelry. I got rid of it all.”
They took Gardner back up to the vista, where Brown, Brugos, Popkins and a dozen SWAT guys stayed with him, while Palmer searched around for a digging tool with a flat edge.
“We weren't really prepared to excavate,” Palmer said, “but we were looking for evidence she'd been deposited there.”
Palmer picked up a piece of plywood and went back down the hill to scrape away the top layer of dirt. When the stick wasn't doing the job, one of the detectives went back to one of the cars and fished around until he found a ski pole. Carefully probing the area with the pole, Palmer and Frank tried to avoid disturbing any evidence while looking for soft dirt or air pockets, which would confirm that Gardner was telling the truth. Hard dirt would tell them that the area had not been dug up, and that Gardner was lying.
Based on the shovel marks, Brown was confident they were going to find what they had come for, and he was right. After a few minutes of probing, Frank uncovered the first traces of a shallow grave: a tuft of dark hair.
It was about 4:10
P.M.
With maybe a couple more hours of daylight left, they stopped immediately, and trudged their way back up to the vista.
“Did you find anything?” Popkins asked.
“We found some human hair,” Palmer said.
Popkins nodded in understanding, serious but relieved that his client was telling the truth.
“They wouldn't have found the body. Never. Not in a million years,” Popkins said later. “We almost didn't find it, and we knew where it was.”
 
 
They'd seen enough for now. It was time to call in the FBI and crime scene investigators to do the delicate work of recovering and preserving the remains. For all they knew, there was more than one body to be found there. Dave Brown tried to call the ME's office, but he couldn't get a live person, so Roy Frank called Madeleine Hinkes, the forensic anthropologist.
They drove back to drop Gardner at the jail with the same carload of folks they'd come with. Afterward, they called the small, trusted circle of people who would have to keep the findings secret, including EPD lieutenant Bob Benton.
“We have Amber,” Brown told Benton, whose heart went cold when he heard those words.
“What do you mean, ‘We have Amber'?” Benton asked, hoping for a split second that she was still alive.
“We have Amber,” Brown said again.
“Okay, where's she at?”
Brown told him to meet him at a gas station near the Pala Indian Casino. “We'll take you to her. We're going to have to do some excavation.”
As soon as Benton heard that last word, he stopped hoping. Brown settled in with this thought as well, as he realized Brugos had been right. Brown
was
going to miss his daughter's fourteenth-birthday celebration. “And I couldn't even tell her where I was,” he said.
It was going to be a long night.
 
 
Madeleine Hinkes got the call from Sergeant Roy Frank at four-thirty in the afternoon. It had been only two days since she'd been called out to look at the animal bones at the park in RB.
“We need you to come out with us and look at a clandestine grave,” Frank said.
“Okay,” she said. “Can you give me any details?”
“No. We'll just pick you up and we'll bring you out there, and don't tell anyone where you're going,” he said, instructing her to meet him at a giant oak tree marked USA at the bottom of an access road off Pala Temecula Road.
By the time she got to the tree around six o'clock, it was still light out, but not for long.
“We have information that this might be where Amber Dubois is buried,” Frank told her as they made their way up the steep grade, leaving her car at the turnout and driving the rest of the way up in Frank's Expedition. He didn't tell her how they'd found the scene, and she didn't ask. She could tell that he was purposely keeping those details close to the vest.
As Hinkes made her way past the abandoned car to the vista, and scaled down the hill, she saw the same shovel marks that Gardner had pointed out. Kneeling down in the dirt to get to work, she saw the hair that the detectives had already unearthed, and then some. Carefully digging down deeper, she found some duct tape, but nothing that looked like bone. It was essentially an empty pit.
Despite Frank's attempts to keep this a secret, Hinkes deduced what was going on. “Gardner was here?” she asked.
“Yes, an hour before we brought you up,” he replied.
After searching through hundreds of homicide scenes and the debris of homes ravaged by wildfires, Hinkes had seen a lot of tragedy over the years. She'd found skulls and skeletons in closets, garages and trunks of cars. One body buried five feet deep had to be excavated and pieced together after investigators had stood in the grave, crushing the bones, then used a Shop-Vac to pull them up, all of which impaired her ability to help determine the cause of death.
Hinkes was a member of a different breed, and what often offended regular folks fascinated her. Except for when it came to dead kids. That was never easy.
“Kid cases bother me a lot,” she said later. And digging in the grave of a teenager who was the same age when she disappeared as Hinkes's own daughter was even more difficult than that.
 
 
Dave Brown's crew of detectives and forensic investigators, along with Bob Benton's team from the EPD, arrived around 8:30
P.M.
, and set up some artificial lights for Madeleine Hinkes to do her work. Before that, she said, it was “impossible to see beyond the range of the flashlight.”
Nearby, Roy Frank found more remains and showed them to Hinkes, who said they were that of a young female. That's when her maternal instincts kicked in. All she could do was think of how she would feel if this had happened to her daughter. She didn't want any part of this girl lying in the dirt one minute longer, so she took the skull and cradled it in her hand, wanting to take the utmost care of it. She could feel the tears start to come up, but she blinked them back, telling herself that she needed to be professional, even at a time like this.
She reminded the detectives that they needed to alert the ME's office that they had found human remains, following protocol that required this notification be done before the evidence was bagged and catalogued.
“Since this was going to be a very high-profile case, we wanted to make sure everything was done right,” she recalled.
In the thirty minutes it took for investigators to get approval to proceed from the ME's pathologist on duty, Hinkes kept Amber's precious skull in her hands for safekeeping until she could pack it up with the rest of the remains. She couldn't even imagine what Amber's parents must have been going through this past year, not knowing where their daughter was.
“It's okay,” she said to the skull, comforting Amber in the only way she knew how, by telling her that she was in safe hands now, with “the good guys.”
“We've got you now,” she said. “You're going to go home.”
As she analyzed the piece of bone, she noted that none of the wisdom teeth had erupted yet, confirming that these were the bones of a teenager. She recognized some interesting, rather rare features—a swollen part of bone known as a mandibular torus in the lower jaw, and a corresponding palatine torus in the upper jaw, most often seen in African Americans or Native Americans. Hinkes wasn't sure what to think because she knew Amber was white. She also noticed a pattern of irregular bones that came together in the skull, again common in Native Americans.
Is this Amber?
she wondered.
Hinkes spent the rest of the night standing on the vista above, where they'd set up a tarp and a blue canvas tent, and stacked up some wooden pallets they'd found nearby, so she could sift through the buckets of dirt the investigators carried up. She poured the dirt into a screen, carefully shook it a little and manually searched for more remains and any trace that Gardner might have inadvertently left behind that could link him to Amber's murder. Although she had found that duct tape, Gardner told detectives later that he hadn't used any in his abduction of Amber Dubois, and they believed him.

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