The Last Place You'd Look

by Carole Moore

  “[Bobby and Christi] have access to the investigation; it’s open records now, [so] they can look and see what was done. I can’t believe intelligent young adults don’t want to know,” Sharp says.

  As for Mark and Debbie, Sharp says it’s been hard knowing their children are so close, yet still so far away.

  “It’s difficult on them. I just can’t put it into words—the sorrow, the hurt, the anger—all the range of emotions they went through,” he says.

  Sharp says Marvin Maple exhibited no remorse when detectives interviewed him, telling them, “I raised the kids the way I wanted to. I won.” Marvin Maple was charged in the case and is still awaiting trial as of this writing. Sandra Maple died before the children were found.

  Despite this, the Baskins still have hope, Sharp says. They believe they’ll be reunited with their children and although the family dynamics have changed, they will adjust to their new reality.

  For the cop who has come to know the family and their heartache, it’s a bittersweet ending at best. Solving the case is what a police officer does. Nourishing the hope it will end well is the human part of the equation.

  R

  Drew Kesse’s voice still retains a touch of Jersey edge. Kesse and his wife, Joyce, are longtime Florida residents now, but they maintain with pride their distinct Yankee attitudes. They also refuse to be pushed around. But as tough and uncompromising as he is, Drew’s words sometimes falter as he talks about his lost daughter—blond, beautiful Jennifer—and what he sees as the failure of police to move forward on her case.

  Jennifer Kesse disappeared on January 24, 2006. Smart and popular in high school, Jennifer moved without effort into college life at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, studying to be a doctor. She decided medicine wasn’t her field and changed her mind, graduating with a degree in business.

  Jennifer loved Orlando and wanted to stay there, so she found a good job as a financial analyst, bought a condo, and maintained a serious long-distance relationship with a young man in Fort Lauderdale.

  “It was pretty much who was going to crack and give up their job [first],” says Drew.

  Jennifer Kesse. Courtesy of the Kesse Family.

  Jennifer was smart and happy—so happy her father says the family had a hard time finding a photo of her where she wasn’t smiling. They needed it for the flyers they distributed when Jennifer vanished.

  Jennifer had returned from a short Caribbean vacation with her boyfriend. The two spoke the night of January 23; they made a habit of talking every morning and again at night before they retired. She also telephoned her family every day. On the following morning, her boyfriend says they did not speak, and Jennifer failed to show up for work. It was so out of character for her to not call in that her employer contacted her family, who lives in Tampa. The family tried to reach Jennifer and, failing that, left for Orlando.

  “Jennifer is very responsible. If she is going to be five minutes late, she will call,” says Drew.

  They first checked Jennifer’s condominium and found that she had slept there and taken a shower earlier that morning. There were clothes laid out on the bed and other signs that she planned to go to work. Under normal circumstances Jennifer left for work between 7:30 and 7:45 in the morning, but no witnesses reported seeing her. They called the jails. They called the hospitals. They called the police.

  The first contact they had with the police came in the form of the officer who took the initial report. Drew says, “He said she probably had a fight with her boyfriend; then he chuckled and walked out. He gave us a two-page incident report.”

  Their son, Logan, Jennifer’s younger brother, “slammed on doors” at the condo complex, looking for clues as to what had happened to his sister. No one admitted to anything. By that afternoon, the family was putting flyers on cars.

  Unhappy with the response of the first officer, Drew made some phone calls until two homicide investigators showed up at eight that night. He says the investigators did little to allay their unhappiness.

  “We’re pro law enforcement, but [police] need to be better at what they are supposed to be doing,” Drew says. He adds that not all of the officers with whom they dealt were insensitive, but in the beginning some were.

  On Thursday, January 26, Jennifer’s car was found abandoned in a parking lot a little over a mile from her condominium complex. Old, grainy tapes showed a man parking the car and then walking away. Because the quality of the tape is poor and there is a barrier in front of the man, it has been impossible to identify him, even after using sophisticated enhancement techniques.

  They searched surrounding fields using volunteers—something that Drew says he now regrets. Unprepared for the reality of dealing with their daughter’s disappearance, the Kesses had no idea that using unqualified search-and-rescue personnel could destroy evidence.

  “We’ve made the mistake of having fourteen hundred people trample a field. At the time that’s what you think is needed: find the areas where she was, which you do, but you do it in the wrong way. And someone teaches you the right way and you think, ‘Oh, God, what did we do?’” Drew says.

  He says families depend on police to guide them. “The first two cops thought they’d find Jennifer in two or three days, dead, and it turned out to be a different situation,” he says.

  After her car was found, he says one investigator told him, “If you don’t find her this hunting season, you’ll find her by next year.” The family engaged the media. They’ve appeared on America’s Most Wanted and many other shows, always advocating for Jennifer. They believe it’s essential to keep her before the public.

  “We’ve been on every show known to mankind, except Dr. Phil and Oprah. When her story goes away, then that’s it,” Drew says.

  Drew admits he is obsessed with finding his daughter and believes she was kidnapped and trafficked. He says no trace has ever been found of Jennifer—not even a rumor. And her bank account and credit cards remain untouched.

  Her car was processed and one unidentified latent print was found. But finding a latent fingerprint is of no value unless there is another one on file somewhere for comparison. This one has not yet been matched.

  Leads poured in—more than eleven hundred calls were received—and none panned out. The Kesses turned up the heat at the police department. They say they had been meeting with the police chief on a regular basis when one day she told them that the detective assigned to the case was being removed. The relationship with the Orlando Police ended on a sour note for the Kesses.

  Drew is bitter. He says no one at the department would return his calls. He says the police made mistakes that “could not be undone,” mistakes he believes could have cost both time and information.

  He admits that many of the officers they met during this ordeal were good, hardworking police who did everything right. His bitterness is for the things that were not done well and his feeling that his daughter’s case was kicked to the curb.

  Drew Kesse is not an easy person to be around. He demands attention and is prepared to go to any length required to get it. When he’s stymied in court by a prohibitive law, he presses his state legislature to change that law. He’s been successful.

  Some find it uncomfortable to be around Drew. Hurt flows from him like a river. He’s drowning in it. He says, in fact, his whole family is drowning.

  “We are a house of broken dreams,” he says.

  The FBI now has the case. Drew says they told him they would find his daughter. As for the police, he believes they were well intentioned and, “except for that first week, everybody has been on the same page for four years.”

  Drew says the biggest problem he sees with police and missing persons cases is the lack of training. “Homicide detectives should not be working missing persons cases,” he says.

  And he thinks the mistakes made in the case have cost them: Drew says Jennifer’s dental records and other vital information have been misplaced, and she was not entered int
o all available databases at the beginning of the investigation.

  Drew now works with families of the missing, helping them avoid the missteps that took place in his daughter’s case. It’s rewarding, but not a job he wishes on anyone.

  “You’re only as good as your first responder. Police really need sensitivity training,” he says.

  If anyone can empathize with Drew, it’s Abby Potash, the program manager for Team Hope (www.teamhope.org), a volunteer arm of the National Center for Exploited and Missing Children (NCMEC): her ten-year-old son, Sam, was abducted by his father in July 1997.

  Sam’s father was supposed to drop the boy off at camp in New Jersey. Instead, the two lived for months on the run, and Sam would learn to call himself “Ben.” They ended up in Texas.

  Abby discovered Sam was missing when she went to pick him up at camp. “He wasn’t there. The first thing I thought was that he’d had an accident,” she says.

  Soon it became apparent that Sam was still with his father, who relatives later told her had been acting strangely. Friends and family suggested she call the police, which she did. Soon she felt like a ping-pong ball.

  “I called the police in the town where I lived and they couldn’t take the report. They told me to call the town in which Sam’s father lived. I did. They said it wasn’t their jurisdiction and they couldn’t take the report, either. Finally, the police in my town agreed to take it,” says Abby.

  Abby checked her ex-husband’s apartment and found “everything gone but the garbage.” And even though she knew her son had been abducted, she still had to battle the criminal justice system.

  “The prosecutor thought it was okay because he was with his father. I had to convince him this was a crime,” she says.

  Victim’s assistance had no idea how to help her, so Abby had to help herself. She had an old computer and searched the Web looking for help. And she set up her own site, www.findsam.com, which pulled in three hundred thousand hits.

  “The computer felt like my umbilical cord,” Abby says.

  She says she ran into closed doors everywhere, even with the media. “They’d say, ‘Write something up and we’ll see what we can do.’ They’d say, ‘If I help you, I’ll have to help everyone.’”

  She was not sleeping or eating and her life was falling apart. “The walls kept coming down in front of me.”

  Abby was in need of some emotional assistance, but no one—least of all the law enforcement officers with whom she was dealing—knew how to give it to her.

  Duane Bowers, a therapist, educator, and author, says what Abby needed was someone trained to deal with events like Sam’s abduction.

  “She’s second-guessing herself all the way down the line. She needs to think the community is supporting her,” Bowers says.

  Bowers and Potash now team up to educate law enforcement and other first responders about how to approach families in crisis mode. They are interested in helping individuals deal with the discovery that a loved one is missing, as in Abby’s case.

  Bowers points out that police first responders most often deal with something that has already transpired. A homicide, while terrible, is over when they make contact with the victim’s family. A missing persons case is active. “The trauma is still going on and you’re still in it; it’s still happening,” he says.

  Bowers says the victim’s family is going to feel overwhelmed and sometimes without hope. It is up to the officer to be reassuring yet at the same time realistic.

  Police need to build bridges with the families of the missing, and when that doesn’t happen, sometimes the families need to be the ones who make the first move. Abby says she dropped by the police department one day and heard a couple of investigators talking about how everyone dumped on them.

  “I started bringing them food. I wanted them to want me to come to the station,” she says.

  Abby and Sam’s ordeal has a happy ending: he was found and returned to his mother on March 29, 1998, after a woman recognized his image from a picture postcard distributed around the country.

  Abby knows that when it comes to the police, the street runs both ways. They are not often thanked for what they do. “I always call them on the anniversary of Sam’s recovery each year,” she says.

  R

  Angela is one of those girls who attracts attention: the brunette stands a willowy five feet, seven inches tall, but it’s her smoky hazel eyes that grab the viewer and make it hard to look away. Being sexy is a good thing if you live in Las Vegas.

  Angela worked in Vegas as the head cage cashier at the Monte Carlo. She had a good work history with the club and a great relationship with her family. Then, without warning, things changed. Angela Marie Finger from Salem, Oregon, began dressing and acting like a stranger. It all started, her mom, Michelle Finger, says, when she met a man on the Internet who called himself Craig.

  “She was dressing more seductively and acting rude to us. It was uncharacteristic,” says Michelle.

  But Angela’s behavioral changes would become even more radical. She quit her job and moved in with Craig. Her parents didn’t trust him, and the more they pushed Angela for answers, the more she in turn pushed them away. Michelle argued with her daughter and Angela either disconnected or changed her phone number. Now, Michelle could neither find nor reach her.

  Michelle suffered a heart attack. After she recovered, she says, all she could think about was reconciling with her daughter. She began looking for Angela, but every lead turned cold, and by this point, Michelle had grown suspicious of Craig.

  As it turned out, she had good reason to suspect Angela’s new boyfriend. She says after she posted on classmates.com and made a MySpace page using Craig’s assumed name, the real Craig contacted her. He told Michelle that the man impersonating him was William Matthew Smolich, a former classmate.

  Researching Smolich on the Internet, Michelle found something that disturbed her even more: pornographic Web sites that appeared to be Smolich’s, featuring nude photographs of Angela.

  “My daughter was very modest and dressed very conservative before she met him,” Michelle says.

  But that wasn’t the only thing giving Michelle pause. She also discovered that Smolich is a man with a dark and disturbing legal history: he is wanted by the Boulder, Colorado, sheriff’s department on charges of attempted sexual assault on a child and nonconsensual sexual contact.

  Michelle tracked Angela down through the Web sites. When she called Angela, she says Smolich answered and put her daughter on the phone. Michelle told her what she had found out about the man and within thirty seconds the phone went dead. She called back and the call went straight to voice mail. It was the last time she or anyone she knows had any contact with her daughter.

  Michelle says one police officer told her that if she was going to pursue the case on her own, then he wasn’t going to waste his own time. When police showed up at the residence Smolich was sharing with Angela, they found the place had been deserted: all of Angela’s stuff was still there, even her kitten. A stakeout of the place revealed the couple was not coming back. Michelle is heartbroken that her daughter has disappeared from her life. She fears the worst.

  “It is like she has fallen off the face of the earth. Another birthday, another Christmas, another New Year’s without her. We are heartsick,” she says.

  The Finger family has been unhappy with law enforcement’s response. They have dealt with several levels of bureaucracy, from local to federal, and with agencies from several different states. Many times it is this mix of agencies that frustrates families.

  When David Potts of Florissant, Missouri, went missing, his parents also found themselves dealing with more than one police agency. The experience has left them perplexed, upset, and feeling as though they’ve been given the runaround.

  Robin Potts says her family’s nightmare started when a then twenty-one-year-old David went out with a friend on October 28, 2006. The two men had left a club and were traveling along Hig
hway 70 in St. Ann, Missouri, when an officer spotted the car and ordered the driver to pull over. Instead, a high-speed pursuit ensued.

  The Missouri State Highway Patrol joined the chase. When they hit a bridge, they say David jumped out of the car and ran. Officers chased him and one said he jumped over the railing. No one knows if he landed on the catwalk below or fell into the water.

  His family had no idea that David had vanished until October 30, when he failed to show up for work. On October 31, they contacted St. Ann’s police department and were told that David was considered a fugitive rather than a missing person. Robin asked that an officer contact her. No one did.

  Frustrated, Robin called back the next day and was told that her son was “wanted,” not missing, and that the officer involved in the pursuit would contact her.

  “No one has ever called me,” says Robin almost four years later.

  Robin reported her son missing to the St. Louis County Police later that same day. On November 2, she says they asked the St. Ann police to launch a search for their son but never heard back. With assistance from the Shawn Hornbeck Foundation (www.shawnhornbeckfoundation.com), the Potts family and volunteers, along with the Missouri Water Patrol, searched the banks of the Missouri River, as well as the water. Robin says the river was dragged, but nothing—not even a footprint—was found.

  Today, the Potts family worries and wonders what happened that night. They remain unimpressed by the efforts of law enforcement agencies.

  For every family like the Potts or the Fingers who comes away from their experience with little faith in their police, there are those who report better rapport. Christy Davis says that although her son remains missing, she believes the police are sincere in their efforts to locate him.

  Austin Davis was born on April 24, 1981, and disappeared on June 26, 2007, in Jacksonville, Florida. His dimpled smile, which gives him an almost cherubic appearance, did not reflect his frame of mind when he disappeared, according to his mom. Christy says that before he vanished Austin had suffered some personal difficulties that “left him depressed and looking for direction.”