Nature Noir (14 page)

By April 1973 America's leaders had succeeded in sacrificing the lives of fifty-eight thousand young men to a war they'd just lost in Vietnam. In May the Senate established a committee to investigate President Richard Nixon's rigging of his own reelection, a string of executive office misdeeds known collectively as Watergate. As Watergate unraveled, the Bureau was trying to make its case to the public that drowning the American River canyons was necessary and right, and after a decade of war and domestic turmoil, the federal government's credibility was in sorry shape.

By the end of that decade Americans' prevailing mood toward government was reflected in a reassessment of government's right to tax and spend their money. Big federal dams had originated under the free-spending New Deal in the 1930s, and although the Bureau always made a show of economically justifying its projects, the dams often failed to live up to those justifications. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was sent to the White House promising to cut government and government spending. By the early eighties the price of finishing the Auburn Dam had swelled to an estimated $2.1 billion—too much, thought the Reagan administration and many members of Congress, for something so controversial. Still, the dam might have been a fait accompli by then if not for the Oroville earthquake of 1975.

Oroville was a Gold Rush—era town about forty-five miles north of Auburn, near a strand of the Foothill Fault Zone called the Cleveland Hill Fault. In 1967, the state of California finished building a dam on the Feather River there. It was the tallest dam in the nation when it was completed, a monster pile of rock fill 770 feet high and well over a mile wide, designed to send water through a system of canals and pumps all the way to greater Los Angeles. The Oroville Reservoir took years to fill, and when it did, its 3.5 million acre-feet of water pressed down on the earth with a weight of about 4.72 billion tons.

Unlike most cases of what was now being called "reservoir-induced seismicity," the Oroville event came not during the reservoir's filling but during a rapid drawdown in the dry summer of 1975. On the afternoon of Friday, August 1, a series of violent shocks rocked the area, radiating from an epicenter on the Cleveland Hill Fault just southwest of the dam. The largest reached a magnitude of 5.7. In Oroville, sidewalks and streets buckled and cans and bottles rumbled off store shelves, forming heaps in the aisles. People ran out of homes and businesses into the middle of streets, where some stood thunderstruck, frozen in fear. Others fell to their knees and began to pray, sure that the day of reckoning had come. Schools and county offices were damaged and had to be closed. At a local fire station, firemen watched spellbound as a tank truck full of water jumped up and down on the concrete floor of one of the truck bays. Then the dispatch speaker began to crackle with multiple calls. One man had suffered a heart attack as the ground shook underneath him. Another man had been driving down the main street of town when he looked over his shoulder to watch the buildings wobbling around crazily and collided with a parked car. Falling power lines ignited multiple grass fires. Chimneys fell, or teetered and had to be pulled down.

By September geologists from the U.S. government and the state of California swarmed into the foothills, and as the similarity of Oroville's and Auburn's locations on the Foothill Faults became clear, work on the Auburn Dam was suspended until further geological studies could be completed. Seven months later, the Association of Engineering Geologists' Seismic Hazard Committee released a report saying that even in the case of a moderate earthquake, the Auburn Dam might fail and unleash a wall of water on California's capital and two air force bases downstream. Then no less an authority than the U.S. Geological Survey said the dam was unsafe. The Bureau hired legions of consultants, among them the San Francisco geologists Woodward-Clyde Consultants, to conduct an exhaustive review of the earthquake potential at the dam site. Woodward-Clyde's work was so comprehensive that a quarter century later, quotes from it are the boilerplate of earthquake risk assessments for new structures in the Sierra foothills. When it came out in 1978, the bad news essentially finished off the thin arch—but not the dam. By 1979 the Bureau was back at the drawing board.

The morning after Karen's disappearance, her husband called the dispatcher at the Auburn PD and left a message for one of the policemen to call him. Sergeant Sam Russell, the son of a Placerville logger, returned the call, reaching Les at his office in the jail.

Reflecting on that conversation, Russell later remarked to the captain in charge of the investigation that Dellasandro's voice seemed strangely calm and emotionless as he reported his wife's unexplained absence. During the call Russell collected a few basic facts for a missing persons report, but toward the end of their conversation, he said, Dellasandro asked him not to file the report yet, saying he wanted to look for his wife himself for a couple of days first. In a gesture of professional courtesy, Russell agreed. So it was another two days—three since Karen's failure to show up at Forest Lake Christian—before an investigation started. When it did, the police initially focused on the possibility that Karen had deserted her husband and children and didn't want to be found. They checked local motels, women's shelters, buses, taxis, and the Sacramento airport. But as Karen's friends, neighbors, and parents were interviewed, the investigators gradually changed their opinion of what sort of case they were working on.

Perhaps at that point the circumstantial evidence was too weak to get a search warrant, and maybe the collegial relationship between the Auburn Police and the sheriff's office resulted in a retraction of the usual vigor with which potential crimes are investigated when the suspects are dressed like bad guys instead of police sergeants. Whatever the case, it took several days for the police to get to the Dellasandro residence, and when they did, Les agreed to let them in. They found the house spotless and Karen's jewelry, including her wedding and engagement rings, neatly laid out next to the bathroom sink. Her wallet, cash, and credit cards were all at the house. Investigators checked with the credit card companies for recent activity. None of the cards had been used. For whatever reason, photographs were not made of the home's interior, or if they were, the photos have been lost. Nor did investigators pull up the carpet or pull off the baseboards to look for traces of blood that might have eluded a cleanup. None of the family's three cars and trucks were processed for trace evidence, nor were their carpets pulled up. With 20–20 hindsight, it's clear that the best chance the Auburn police had to gather forensic evidence may have been at the house, where Karen was last known to be alive—her mother had dropped her off there after an errand the night before, and that morning Karen made the call from home to Forest Lake Christian. But it was a consent search, and with no warrant and nothing but circumstantial evidence that a crime had even been committed, such destructive thoroughness might have been justified only by an incriminating statement. However, during repeated questioning, Les Dellasandro stuck to his story.

Here is what Les told the police: In their home the morning of September 8, after the kids had gone off to St. Joseph's, Karen's telephone call to Forest Lake Christian precipitated an argument. In the course of it there was talk about a marital separation. He left the house to go shopping at Kmart and when he returned, Karen was gone. When she didn't come home later that night, he assumed she'd gone to her mother's, so he didn't report her absence until the next day. He couldn't provide sales receipts or any of the things he purchased to substantiate his Kmart alibi, and a check of the store's security cameras proved inconclusive.

Auburn didn't see many homicides, and looking back on it, some of the investigators admit that much has been learned about interrogation techniques since 1982. In retrospect, some of them think that at certain points, had they known some of the psychological tactics they know now, they might have extracted a confession. But that's just their opinion.

It is unlikely that anyone in law enforcement was protecting Dellasandro. Auburn's police chief and officers were known as ethical and hardworking, and they pursued the case diligently for months. They asked for and received the help of sheriff's detectives, who had more experience in homicide, as well as the FBI, the California Department of Justice, and the National Guard, which provided aircraft with heat-sensing instruments capable of detecting a decomposing body from the air. They examined Karen's mother's phone bills to rule out the possibility that Karen had fled with her parents' complicity. They flew an expert in polygraph examination up from Southern California, but Les refused to take the test. They searched the Dellasandros' vacation cabin and the ranch where Les ran his cattle, and for months, the chief told me ruefully, they had a backhoe out digging every time someone in the county saw buzzards circling.

The reopening of the case in which I had a small part was one of several in recent years, and not a whole lot came of it. There was no more reason—other than proximity and opportunity—that Karen's body would have been in the dam site than anywhere else in the three to four thousand square miles of mountains Les knew better than most, having once worked for my own State Parks Department and the Forest Service, even before he patrolled much of that as a deputy.

Karen has not been seen or heard from now for over two decades, and the case sits like a permanent wound on the idea of justice in the minds of everyone who ever worked on it. The evidence custodian at the Auburn Police Department keeps a framed photograph of Karen on a shelf next to her desk and beside it, a bouquet of fresh flowers. Les was never charged and still works as a policeman. He is close to the age now when he can retire on a pension. Karen's mother was so demonstrably bitter toward him that Les eventually got a restraining order prohibiting her and Karen's father from having any contact with their grandchildren. Karen's parents have grown old and the police have taken samples of their DNA, because they probably won't live to see Karen found. For my part, I am haunted by what little I had to do with the case, because I cannot seem to separate it from the feeling I now get whenever I'm around the yawning hole of the dam site.

Just over five years before the National Guard's search aircraft flew over Placer County looking for Karen's grave, similar flights were made by Woodward-Clyde Consultants. That time, they were looking for alignments of topography called lineaments—lines of springs, straight valleys, ridges that suddenly zigzagged, or any other sign of faulting. From the dam site they traced these lineaments south down the front of the Sierra as far as Stanislaus Table Mountain, a volcanic flattop split in two and left like a broken child's toy. To the north, they traced them past Les's jail and up the De Witt Lineament past the court where he would get his restraining order and the judgment allowing him to dispose of his wife's property. From there they followed them north through Spenceville, where the shattered hills had been used for artillery practice during World War II, to the Cleveland Hill Fault, which shook Oroville.

After locating these faults from the air, Woodward-Clyde's geologists dug trenches across some of them on the ground. The point of this was to discern—by looking at soil layers displaced upward, downward, or along the faults—how recent and severe earth movements had been in the last hundred thousand years.

Of the forty such trenches Woodward-Clyde geologists made from Lake Oroville to well south of the Auburn Dam, two run under the beginning and aftermath of the eighth of September. One, which Woodward-Clyde called "St. Joseph's Exploration," was dug behind the Catholic school over which, in Les's account, his final argument with Karen had occurred. The other excavation, which they called "Radio Towers," was made below the antennas where the psychic later directed the Auburn Police to look for Karen's grave. This begs the question: Did the psychic see a grave, or was the malevolent mound of earth she was visualizing a fault trench?

In China one branch of earthquake prediction research has focused on the behavior of animals and people, which by anecdotal accounts seems to change in response to strains accumulating in the rocks along faults. Even now, the largest well-drilling company in Placer County still employed two full-time water witches, men who walk through the knee-high meadows of August and September holding copper rods in their hands until the rods wiggle in a certain way, and then drill there. Admittedly, cracks in the ground and water witching are of little relevance to finding Karen Dellasandro, and these details would interest only poets, park rangers, and anyone else who thinks about the mysterious connections between the land and the people on it. But to such as us, the blood that ran in Karen Dellasandro's veins and the cold water in the ground and the water in the American River are all of the same stuff. Everyone in these hills comes from the ground, and we will all return to it, and maybe for the brief period when we are walking around on it, whether with copper rods, murder weapons, or shovels in our hands, the connection between us and it is stretched but never really broken. And so we know things about the rocks we cannot say except with copper rods, and we yearn to have returned to us people whose presence we feel in the rocks and soil beneath us, and in a story told in whispers around town, like the wind that always comes in late September, just before the first rains bring life back aboveground.

R
OBERTA WAS A SHORT
, round woman in her mid-fifties who worked the swing shift at our dispatch office in Folsom. She liked to remind me that she had been dispatching for the Highway Patrol the year I was born. When I phoned to ask her to fax a printout on a stolen car or some miner with a price on his head, she would answer, "Radio," as if the word had all of the cutting-edge potency of "biotechnology." Her short hair was copper red and always neatly coiffed. She wore sleeveless floral tent dresses and wouldn't have thought of coming to work without her pale makeup on. Her musical tastes ran toward Ella Fitzgerald and Diane Schuur, and she liked to go to jazz clubs in San Francisco whenever she could.