The Last Place You'd Look

by Carole Moore

  In rare instances where foul play was involved, as in the case of Utah resident Elizabeth Smart, who was kidnapped from the bedroom she shared with her younger sister, the missing person is found alive and well and is returned to his or her family. In Smart’s case, her accused abductor—Brian David Mitchell—withstood numerous attempts by the prosecution to bring him to justice by claiming he was too mentally incapacitated to stand trial.

  Not every case has an ending: Elizabeth Rivera says her daughter Elsha vanished from Fort Worth, Texas, in February 2004, leaving her with Elsha’s four children. “She didn’t just pick up and leave them because she was young and had so many children like the police and many have insinuated,” Elizabeth told me.

  Elsha had five kids (one is now deceased), and Elizabeth says she raises the surviving children on a small government stipend. Her days are long and she is weary, but she’s also determined to find her daughter. She also says one of Elsha’s children, Michael, suffers more than the other children from his mother’s absence.

  Elizabeth says Michael (who was eleven at the time I wrote this) has tried to interest the news media in his mom’s disappearance, but no one responds. “I would like for Michael to be heard. He needs this. He needs someone to listen to him so he can heal in case she is never found and before he gives up completely,” she says.

  Elsha is a beautiful Latina woman, with long hair, full lips, and olive skin. So far, according to Elizabeth, the press has been uninterested in her story. She and Michael have begged newspapers and television news shows to feature their loved one, without any interest evinced in Elsha or the children she left behind.

  Other minorities who have missing family members tell me they, too, find the media goes cold when their cases come up. Many claim it is due to something termed the “missing white woman syndrome” (also called “missing pretty girl syndrome”) in which the press reportedly exhibits disproportionate interest in cases involving pretty, missing white girls, even when there are plenty of other missing persons out there who do not fit that description.

  While Natalee Holloway, the teen who went missing in Aruba, did garner a lot of publicity, much of it emanated from the tireless efforts of her family, who devoted tremendous amounts of time generating newsworthy copy. Others work as hard but don’t get anywhere near the press the Holloway case has generated. It’s a disconnect that is hard to understand. Some cases click with the media, and some don’t.

  Kayla May Berg. Courtesy of Hope Sprenger.

  Those who manage to attract constant media interest work 24/7 at it. Hope Sprenger, whose fifteen-year-old daughter Kayla vanished after a friend dropped her off at another friend’s house in Antigo, Wisconsin, on August 11, 2009, has kept her child’s name in front of the media the entire time, but it’s been exhausting, both physically and mentally. Newspapers, television news, and online resources including America’s Most Wanted’s Web site have publicized Kayla’s story—still, there has been no word on her daughter’s whereabouts.

  “This experience has been the absolute worst feeling in the world. It is like having your heart ripped out of your chest, someone coming and taking a part of your soul away without you even knowing what is happening, especially in the beginning,” Hope says.

  Hope says one of the hardest parts has been dealing with the inevitable rumors and gossip that go hand in hand with a disappearance like Kayla’s.

  “We have had to grow a very strong backbone,” admits Hope.

  She and the rest of her family have become pros at handling the media and have learned to ignore the creeps who come out of the woodwork—people who want to be involved in the case because they are attracted to the publicity angle, phonies who pretend to have information, so-called psychics, and others who want to snipe or gossip. What was once a normal, everyday life for the Berg family has turned into a struggle for normalcy ever since the pretty, brown-haired high school student vanished.

  “There are some days I think that the only way I will ever see her again is in heaven,” says Hope.

  “I can’t say that I can put things in perspective until I know what has happened to her. All I do is keep hoping and praying that something will break in her case and we will find out some answers. We will never give up on her. We try to remain sane, but sometimes that is easier said than done,” she says.

  Hope Berg’s raw and ragged honesty has produced in me an unintended consequence: it makes me overprotective toward my own children, and I suspect every parent who reads or hears stories like Kayla’s or Jesse’s or Brandon’s reacts with the same feelings. Some of the stories I’ve read or heard broke my heart. One example in particular stands out. Author Matt Birkbeck chronicled it in his book, A Beautiful Child—The Story of Sharon Marshall.

  Marshall, who went by the name Suzanne Davis as a small child, was raised by a sexual predator and convicted felon named Franklin Delano Floyd. Floyd passed himself off as her father. Authorities don’t know where Floyd obtained the child. Birkbeck says that during a jailhouse interview Floyd claimed a prostitute gave him the girl, but Floyd also told officials he rescued her after her biological parents abandoned her. One thing that’s for sure—the little girl was not related to Floyd by blood.

  Floyd moved around a lot, taking the child with him. When she entered high school, she was known as Sharon Marshall, a straight-A student who moved often, much like I did as a child. Upon graduation from a high school in Forest Park, Georgia, Sharon received a scholarship to Georgia Tech to study aerospace engineering. She never used it.

  Sharon, a beautiful natural blond with a brilliant mind, next surfaced in the Tampa area, still in the company of Floyd, where she gave birth to a little boy. Although Floyd claimed the child was his, later tests proved he was not the father. Sharon was using the name Tonya Tadlock at that time and worked as an exotic dancer. After an exotic dancer with whom she was friends was found murdered, Suzanne/Sharon/Tonya and Floyd fled the area. Floyd then married her, but in 1990, she was killed in a hit-and-run accident that remains unsolved.

  Her little boy, Michael Hughes, then in foster care, was abducted by Floyd and has never been found. Floyd refuses to tell investigators what he did with the child.

  Although his book was published in 2004, Birkbeck continues to search for the boy, as well as the true identity of the child who went by the name Sharon Marshall. I understand his obsession. The stories of the lost, missing, and those found but still unidentified—and their families—will remain with me long after this book is finished.

  In putting together this look at missing persons and those who search for them, I spoke with officials from many agencies, as well as the families and many individuals who feel the call to offer help and support to those who search for the lost. I have talked to parents whose children were abducted by noncustodial parents, families whose loved ones vanished while visiting foreign countries, and scientists trying to match the bodies of the unknown to their identities so they can be returned to their loved ones.

  I learned a tremendous amount—searching for a missing person is not a simple endeavor. There are many who work to help guide families of the missing through the maze in which they’ve been thrust. Kelly Jolkowski, whose son Jason’s story is told in chapter 11, has opened many doors for me and offered guidance born of her painful personal journey. It’s something she does for many families of the missing, but there are others who are in it for a much different reason. For families working their way through this uncharted territory, there are many pitfalls to avoid and very few maps.

  I tell many of the heartbreaking stories I encountered on the following pages, and I attempt as well to offer insight into the agencies that work these cases, including what they are doing right and where there is room for improvement. Some of the suggestions come from members of “the club no one wants to belong to,” as Ed Smart puts it. And they speak, through me, with honesty and the hope that others never, ever have to walk in their shoes.

  In the next chap
ter you will meet Bill Kruziki. I first encountered Bill’s story when we corresponded about something I wrote for a law enforcement trade magazine at which I am a columnist. I later met him and his wife, Ellen, and was impressed with their ability to live their lives after suffering terrible tragedy. They have been kind enough to allow me to share their story with you.

  Brandon Victor Swanson. Courtesy of Brian and Annette Swanson.

  • 2 •

  Two Brothers: A Federal

  Marshal Confronts the Unthinkable

  Don’t expect anybody to do anything. You have to go on the offensive big time. The police are not going to spend all of their time working your case.—Bill Kruziki, retired U.S. marshal

  Matt Kruziki grew up in the upper-middle-class Milwaukee suburb of Hartland. His dad, Bill, was a deputy sheriff, then sheriff, who had made the transition from local to federal law enforcement with an appointment to the U.S. Marshal’s Service. In high school Matt and his older brother, Chris, played sports, made decent grades, and had plenty of friends. As close as two brothers could be, they were, nevertheless, individuals in their outlooks on life. Matt, an outgoing liberal with a penchant for social causes, provided a contrast to the more introspective Chris, who adopted a conservative stance on politics and social issues.

  Both boys attended college for a while, but neither was quite sure what he wanted from life. Matt found his calling in the nonprofit realm. He started as a volunteer, then parlayed one gig into a paying job. The gregarious young man thrived in his position’s travel, mission, and, most of all, opportunities to make a difference.

  “He was hooked on nonprofit work,” says his dad, Bill.

  During his nonprofit career, Matt encouraged inner-city voters, worked with unionized health care, and made sure the less advantaged had a say in the issues that affected them. He was passionate in his quest to represent the voiceless and unabashed when it came to meeting new people and making friends. Relationships were as necessary to Matt’s existence as air.

  “He wasn’t afraid of anything,” Bill says. “He could make friends with a wall.”

  It was later, after Matt vanished in a tiny town hundreds of miles from home, that Bill would discover how many friends Matt had and how many other hearts he touched along the way. But the journey to finding out how much Matt meant to others was first complicated by the journey to find Matt—and to find out what happened to him.

  R

  On an icy-cold Christmas Eve in 2005, twenty-four-year-old Matt Kruziki disappeared while on a trip that led him to the city of East Dubuque, Illinois. With a couple thousand residents, the small river town once known as Dunleith flanks the muddy Mississippi and is connected by a bridge to the larger metropolitan area of Dubuque, Iowa, with its population of more than fifty thousand. Dubuque, perched at the juncture of three states—Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin—is a college town dominated by schools with religious affiliations, a place where the proverbial sidewalks roll up early. Many who hope to party late into the night slip across the Julien Dubuque Bridge to head for the strip of bars clustered along Sinsinawa Avenue in East Dubuque, where the fun continues until the wee hours of the morning.

  It was one of the bars in this strip noted for Dubuque college kids, late hours, and a rough clientele that drew an unsuspecting Matt and his traveling companion. Matt’s car had given out on him over Thanksgiving while he was on the road for his job. He left it behind on the interstate outside of Des Moines, Iowa, and flew home to Hartland, where he lived with his mother. He planned to return later and pick it up. Matt asked several people to drive with him to get his abandoned automobile, including his brother, Chris, but ended up with a neighborhood acquaintance when no one else could make the trip. The pair left on December 23 and later that day, exhausted by the drive, they checked into a hotel in Dubuque. After having a few drinks at the hotel bar, the two young men crossed the river and hit the bar scene in East Dubuque.

  Some time during the predawn hours of December 24, Matt was relieved of his cash, coat, gloves, and hat by some of the questionable characters that frequented the bar. He’d been carrying $380 and, for reasons no one understands, had not brought along his cell phone. Intoxicated and alone, Matt was ejected from the establishment dressed in a shirt and jeans and wearing a pair of work boots. As he stumbled along in the numbing cold, he was stopped at about 1:10 Christmas Eve morning and questioned by a local police officer. The officer instructed Matt to go back to his hotel and then left the coatless and drunken young man to find his way alone back to that hotel room across the river in Dubuque in seventeen-degree weather.

  He never made it.

  R

  At 9:30 a.m. on the same day, Bill Kruziki and his current wife, Ellen, who is also a law enforcement officer, received a call from his eldest son, Chris: Matt had not returned to his hotel room. Bill and Ellen went into cop mode.

  “I knew what to do,” Bill says. “I spent the first day on the phone talking to law enforcement agencies, even calling thrift stores to see if they’d sold Matt a coat.”

  The town and its law enforcement nearly ground to a halt on Christmas Day, but on December 26, Bill met with the police chief in East Dubuque.

  Reflecting later on what happened to his son, Bill says he learned that the bar ran a scam that defrauded customers of their cash. He says the traveling companion, who later took a polygraph that came out inconclusive but deceptive, never answered to his satisfaction why he didn’t leave the bar with Matt. But the one answer Bill would like to have is why the police officer that conducted the field interview with Matt after he left the bar did so little.

  “That officer knew what happened in the bar, so why not go back and get him his coat?” Bill asks.

  It is this question and others that prick at Bill Kruziki, who says of local police, “They could have done more, but that, of course, is a parent talking.”

  But Bill Kruziki is no ordinary parent. This one has juice. His connections in Wisconsin and federal law enforcement, as well as his experience on missing persons cases, makes him savvier than most parents whose adult child might be missing. Bill began summoning resources, calling in favors, working the system.

  On December 26, the same day he met with the police chief, the Kruzikis began plastering the area with posters featuring Matt. The posters went on cars, college campuses, restaurants, bars, and hotels. The following day, Bill sought out the media. He didn’t wait for them to come to him.

  The family garnered newspaper, radio, and television coverage—every willing and interested media outlet they could find. A week later, the story went national. Back in Wisconsin, older son Chris worked the phones, calling all of Matt’s friends, acquaintances, and coworkers, hoping they could shed some light on Matt’s disappearance. There were no leads.

  At the scene in East Dubuque and its sister city, Bill and Ellen continued to work their contacts. Not all attempts to drum up interest in Matt’s case were successful. The Coast Guard, with its vast search capabilities, didn’t respond to Bill’s requests for search assistance.

  “I knew by then if he wasn’t somewhere alive, he was in the river. It was a recovery situation,” he says.

  Search dogs were brought into the area. Authorities dragged the river but couldn’t search it without a special type of sonar. Bill found a team with that sonar capability. After several days exploring the area, all the team located were a few abandoned, submerged cars and a lot of trash.

  Witnesses—about fifty of them—gave statements that Matt was tossed out on the street in the dead of winter without his coat or anything to keep him warm. More than one hundred volunteers completed a grid search, covering every square inch of ground they could in the two weeks following Matt’s disappearance. Still, they could not find Matt.

  The Kruzikis checked Matt’s cell phone records and found 988 phone calls within a six-week period.

  “It was then we realized just how many people he knew, how many friends he really had,” Bill sa
ys.

  Witnesses vanished, running rather than talking to investigators. A $25,000 reward was posted. The family and their friends put out the word everywhere they could. They contacted John Walsh’s show, America’s Most Wanted. Despite their efforts, nothing happened for a frustrating three months. The case went cold at the beginning of March.

  Then, on March 18, the wait was over as abruptly as it began. Matt’s body was found five miles downriver, spotted by an airplane flying over a spot with the ironic name of “Dead Man’s Slough.” Search-and-rescue teams had to break the ice to pull him out.

  Bill and the rest of his family had to take what little comfort they could in the fact that they had Matt’s body—they could at least put him to rest. But what they couldn’t put to rest was what had happened to this bright, energetic, and popular kid, someone who was starting what would have been a good and productive life.

  Matt’s blood alcohol level of .11 (most states consider .08 too drunk to drive) revealed that he had indeed been intoxicated at the time he was thrown out onto the streets of East Dubuque to fend for himself. But his alcohol level, while indicating he was legally intoxicated, wasn’t that alarming in a healthy young male who had been drinking all evening.

  Matt’s death is still an open investigation and that, says Bill, is a “double-edged sword,” because as long as the case remains unresolved—neither a homicide nor an accident—the case file is closed to Bill. The police department is steadfast in its refusal to share any of the reports with the Kruzikis. Unless the case is inactivated, Bill will never know what, if anything, the police unearthed in their investigation.

  R

  Gone was the boy who knew everything there was to know about sports. Matt could rattle off statistics about football players and games with the same ease as he could summon batting averages for baseball players. His father characterized Matt’s mind as a “steel trap” and says his second love was music.