Lost Girls

by Caitlin Rother

  Although Cathy felt somewhat relieved to get John’s call that night, she turned around and headed home, too anxious to finish her usual ninety-minute run. After taking a shower, she and her husband decided to wait on dinner until John got back. But as the minutes ticked by, Cathy was too upset to eat. When he still hadn’t shown up by seven-thirty, she turned to her husband and broke into tears.

  “This is killing me,” she said. “I can’t take this.”

  Where is he? she wondered. What is he doing out there?

  Chapter 2

  About five miles east of Cathy’s condo, in the cloistered community of Poway, Kelly and Brent King were just as, if not more, worried about their seventeen-year-old daughter, Chelsea. The pretty strawberry blonde, with blue eyes and a warm smile, had gone for a run on those very same trails that afternoon, and she hadn’t come home for dinner either.

  Poway, an affluent, white, family-oriented suburb of San Diego, called itself “The City in the Country” with good reason. Here, where the mountainous surroundings provided a protective psychological barrier of seclusion, residents had the illusory feel of living in a gated community where the bad guys from the big city didn’t have the punch code to get in.

  Even the landscape felt safe. Tall eucalyptus and pine trees lined the main thoroughfares; the lush, leafy medians were planted with yellow and orange daisies; and the homes, pockets of which sold for more than $1 million, sat on generous parcels set back from the roadway, with a benevolent backdrop of rolling green hills, peppered with beige boulders.

  Deemed one of the best places to retire by U.S. News, Poway was the kind of tight-knit community where the Rotary Club, churches, temples and the PTA ruled the roost, and where urban crimes, such as murder and rape, were so rare they barely registered on the demographic pie charts used to characterize the quiet lifestyle of its nearly fifty thousand residents.

  Chelsea King was born in San Diego County on July 1, 1992. During the C-section delivery, the doctor didn’t remove the entire placenta, forcing Kelly to undergo a D&C and causing her to develop Asherman’s syndrome, which can cause intrauterine scarring. A lawsuit the Kings filed in March 1995 cited potential infertility problems for Kelly, and $30,000 in projected costs of surrogacy for future pregnancies. Although the court record didn’t reflect the specific outcome, the lawsuit was apparently dismissed within a year. This early private trauma must have made Chelsea even more dear to Brent and Kelly.

  Brent loved to feed his baby girl and change her diapers. As she got older, he sang to her: “I am stuck on Chelsea, like Chelsea’s stuck on me,” to which she sang back, “I am stuck on Daddy, like Daddy’s stuck on me,” eliciting a hug and a laugh between them.

  As Brent changed jobs in the banking industry, the family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and then Naperville, Illinois, where they stayed for ten years. They returned to Poway in 2007, when property records show that the Kings bought a house on a one-acre lot on Butterfield Trail.

  Chelsea entered Poway High School as a freshman, discussing heady topics with her father such as the power of words, critical thinking and the presence of God in nature. They laughed together about God’s sense of humor in making the platypus, and agreed that a tree, which gave far more than it took, was one of his most perfect creations.

  In March 2010, Chelsea was a popular senior with a 4.2 grade point average, whose Advanced Placement courses outnumbered her regular classes. She served as a peer counselor, played on the volleyball team, and ran cross-country. She also enjoyed writing poetry, including a poem called “My Great Balancing Act,” an homage to Dr. Seuss that would prove prophetic: “Today is my day, my mountain is waiting, and I’m on my way.”

  An environmentalist at heart, Chelsea was also a vegetarian, known to bring her lunch in a green recycling bag, determined to make a difference.

  “She was all about making the world a better place, so for her it was like an animal shouldn’t have to die for me to eat,” one of her teachers said.

  In the fifth grade, she’d decided to take up the French horn, refusing to be deterred by her music instructor’s caution about how difficult the instrument was to learn.

  “You sure you want to try that one, Chelsea?” the teacher asked.

  “Yeah, the more challenging, the better for me,” she replied.

  Chelsea proved her determination by practicing until she was good enough to audition and win a coveted spot in the San Diego Youth Symphony for its 2009 to 2010 season, performing, no less, with its two most advanced ensembles. She was one of three French horn players in the Symphony Orchestra, which included about 150 students. She was also one of two horn players in the Philharmonia, a chamber orchestra of about eighty students.

  Although Chelsea still slept with a stuffed creature she’d taken to bed since she was a child, she was also a sophisticated thinker who inspired others with her achievements, posting quotes on her bathroom wall: “They can because they think they can,” from Virgil, and “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams,” by Eleanor Roosevelt.

  Admired and respected by her peers, this five-feet-five-inch, 120-pound achiever was the female role model the other girls wanted to emulate, and the adults could see her promise and potential as well. She was the kind of daughter parents dreamed of having—a fact that was never overlooked by her own, who cherished her.

  “We are blessed,” they would tell each other at least once a week.

  Chelsea had a strong spirit, a love for life and her family, and a strong mind all her own. Inseparable from her thirteen-year-old brother, Tyler, the two were best friends, looking out for one another, and rarely, if ever, fighting the way many siblings did. She made sure he did his homework, didn’t stay up too late or play too much PlayStation. He, in turn, wanted to know her friends, and ensure that the boyfriend passed muster.

  Given her grades and all her extracurricular activities, this bright and well-rounded teenager was viewed as such a strong candidate by the eleven colleges to which she applied that, ultimately, they all accepted her.

  Chelsea usually went for a jog after school in Poway, but on February 25 she decided to run on the trails at the Rancho Bernardo Community Park, apparently scouting out the area for an environmental cleanup project she and her friends had planned for that Saturday. It was not for class credit or recognition, but rather to increase awareness.

  Driving from Poway into neighboring Rancho Bernardo, the environs changed, but only subtly. It still looked lush, green and open, and it was still largely a family-oriented white community, but the area, known as “RB” to the locals, was home to more strip malls, senior communities and franchise restaurants. It felt a bit more urban.

  As the nation’s eighth largest city, San Diego was a metropolis where 1.2 million people lived across 324 square miles of vastly differing geography, carved into subregions by urban planners. Each had its own unique population and distinct character—east toward the desert, west to the coast, south to the border into Mexico, and north past Poway, RB, and Escondido, leading to Riverside and Orange Counties.

  Chelsea King, one of the most dependable daughters around, followed a regular schedule like clockwork. She had left the house that morning at six-fifteen for a peer counseling appointment. She was last seen leaving school when classes ended at two o’clock to go for her usual run. She was always home by five-thirty in the evening.

  Brent, a mortgage banking executive, and his wife, Kelly, a medical assistant for a dermatologist, arrived home separately around six o’clock. When Kelly didn’t see Chelsea’s 1997 black BMW 528i in the driveway, she assumed that Chelsea had called Brent to let him know where she was.

  “Have you heard from Chelsea?” Kelly asked.

  “No, I thought you had,” Brent replied.

  It was starting to get dark, and because this was such unusual behavior for their daughter, Kelly tried calling Chelsea’s cell phone, but she kept getting voice mail. Something told her to ke
ep trying, so she called Chelsea’s friends, but they didn’t know where she was either. Chelsea had been at school, they said, and had missed no classes.

  When there was still no sign of her by 6:49 P.M., Brent called AT&T, their cell phone provider, which was able to locate Chelsea’s cell phone near the Rancho Bernardo Community Park, using technology that determines the cell tower where the phone signal is “pinging.” Brent hopped into his car and sped over there.

  In the parking lot, he saw her car sitting next to the tennis courts, one hundred feet from the trailhead. Peering through the windows, he noticed her purse and discarded school clothes lying on the seats, as if she’d changed before going for a run. He took off down the nearest trail, and yelled her name, but all he heard were the sounds of the night.

  The sun had set at 5:43 P.M. and the sky was already dark over Lake Hodges, which was circled by a trail network in a fifty-acre section of the expansive San Dieguito River Valley. The perfect respite for those seeking solitude and self-reflection, these trails were used by only a small number of people at one time, often running or hiking a good distance from each other. Thick groves of Arundo reeds, which resembled bamboo, grew as tall as fifteen feet high in and around the shores of the lake and its fingerlike tributaries. Under the murky water, whose level rose with each rainfall, the trees and brush sent their roots deep into the soil.

  Chelsea could run for eight miles at a time, so she could be anywhere out there in the dark, lying in the brush with a sprained ankle—or worse—with no way to call for help. She’d also fainted during a recent run, so Kelly wasted no time in calling the Poway sheriff’s station to report their daughter missing at 7:18 P.M.

  A storm was coming in.

  Chapter 3

  When John Gardner still hadn’t shown up for dinner by seven-thirty his stepfather, Kevin, sent him a text message, berating him for putting his mother through all this grief: Why are you doing this to your mom?

  John, who was six feet two inches tall and weighed 230 pounds, finally trudged into the condo half an hour later. He was carrying a headless snake, which he held above his head like a trophy. “Look what I’ve got!” he said triumphantly. “It almost got me, but I got it, instead!” John told Cathy later that he’d been so depressed, he’d been contemplating letting the snake bite him and hoped that he’d die from it.

  He had a wild look in his eye that night, the same kind of expression that Jack Nicholson’s character had in the movie The Shining when he proclaimed, “Here’s Johnny!”

  John was dirty and sweaty, as if he’d been hiking through heavy brush. He also had a scratch near his nose, which, looking back later, Cathy would recognize as a desperate mark of self-defense left by a girl’s fingernail.

  Oh, my God, he’s nuts, Cathy thought. He’s lost it. What is happening?

  When Kevin chastised John for being so late, John blew up, threw the snake on the floor and stormed out the front door. Cathy ran after him, catching up to him at the front gate.

  “It’s eight o’clock,” she said. “Come back inside. Eat some dinner. Get cleaned up.”

  Still angry but pouting, John conceded, taking a shower and having some food. He later told Cathy he’d been drinking beer that afternoon, but Cathy didn’t smell it on him because he’d been too grimy for her to get close enough to tell.

  An early riser, Cathy was usually in bed by nine, but she stayed up a little later that night to have a heart-to-heart talk with her son.

  “You got a scratch on your face,” Cathy said. “What happened?”

  “I was going through the brush,” John said.

  Cathy thought that explanation was sort of plausible, but she was used to him lying to her initially, and telling her the truth later. Depending on the severity of the situation, this was usually a combination of her asking and him confessing.

  During their brief but intense conversation, John’s emotions were like a yo-yo, vacillating from sadness to anger to frustration. He cried as he told her about his lifelong goals and his inability to reach them. When Cathy finally went to bed, she left her son watching TV in the living room.

  The next afternoon at three-thirty, Cathy had an appointment to get her nails done at a salon in the nearby community of Carmel Mountain.

  A couple of years earlier, Cathy had been getting a pedicure at the same salon and laughing with a red-haired woman in the next chair about how running beat up her feet. Cathy didn’t know it at the time, but the woman, who empathized because her daughter ran cross-country, was Chelsea’s mother, Kelly King. It wasn’t until Cathy saw Kelly on the news after her daughter’s disappearance that Cathy realized she’d been talking to Chelsea’s mom.

  “Have you heard about the missing girl?” the manicurist asked Cathy.

  “No,” she said.

  “It’s the girl that’s in the flyer in the window,” she said, referring to the notices that had been posted in businesses, supermarkets and gyms across the county—anywhere and everywhere that friends and friends of friends could find a place to hang them.

  When the manicurist explained that Chelsea had gone missing during a run on a trail at the RB park, Cathy couldn’t believe the coincidence.

  “Oh, my God, from RB? Those are the same trails I run on. I ran there last night,” she said, adding that she’d seen the Poway High School track team there just the week before. In fact, she said, “My kid was just out running over there. Well, he doesn’t really run, but he walks. I’m going to call him and see if he knows anything.”

  Cathy dialed John’s number, but he didn’t pick up, so she told the manicurist that she’d follow up and call the number on the flyer if she learned anything pertinent. After all, she really did want to help.

  Hundreds, if not thousands, of other people had the very same thought, and they acted on their urges. Many sent out alerts about her disappearance on Twitter and Facebook, where a special page was set up as word began to spread: Find Chelsea King: Missing San Diego Teen. Others grabbed a flashlight and hit the trails.

  Usually, missing teenagers were deemed runaways before authorities would concede they could have fallen prey to foul play. But in this case, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department (SDCSD) took virtually unprecedented action within minutes of Chelsea’s parents reporting their daughter missing. Why? Because not only was she a good, straight girl who kept a rigid schedule, but her car gave investigators a clear indication of her LKP, search-and-rescue lingo for a “last known point.”

  The fact that news of her disappearance spread so fast and so many miles from her hometown was not only noticeable, but extraordinary, a factor that only served to draw even more of the public’s attention. Typically, the only flyers posted on random telephone poles around the region were for missing dogs, cats and the occasional Alzheimer’s patient.

  San Diego has its roots as a conservative military town, recently attracting biotech and communications sectors. Yet, the county’s 3 million residents have traditionally been somewhat uncommunicative, partly because they’re so spread out—a problem worsened by the lack of a cohesive public transportation system. Strangers in this fragmented, transient and geographically disconnected region have rarely talked to each other, and those with personal networks have usually kept to themselves, their own church groups or book clubs.

  The timing of this case and the emotions it elicited, however, generated a virtual tornado of goodwill, galvanizing the community unlike any other missing juvenile case in the region’s history.

  In the midst of the Great Recession, as the unending war in the Middle East and banking bailout drove up the national debt to unprecedented heights, many people were going through tough times. Folks everywhere were losing their jobs and their homes to foreclosure and health insurance costs were soaring. More people were communicating online, telecommuting from home or stuck at home without a job, which often meant less face-to-face contact with other people and more stress.

  At a time when people were hungry fo
r connection and fellowship, the search for Chelsea King seemed to fulfill those needs. As her loss resonated throughout the region, people came together to look for this pretty young girl with so much promise, an effort that seemed worthwhile when they had so little else positive in their lives. Chelsea helped them become part of a community again, to feel they were part of something bigger than themselves.

  This sense of alliance, hope and affiliation spread like the wildfires that had devastated much of Rancho Bernardo in 2007, when many folks also came together to try to help each other. With assistance from the Texas-based Laura Recovery Center, the Chelsea King Search Center was set up to print flyers and distribute maps out of the RB United office, a remnant of those wildfires.

  As Poway High School (PHS) junior Jimmy Cunningham wrote in the Iliad, his school newspaper: The more people who knew, the more ground that was covered. Searching eyes were everywhere, and at the rate that the awareness was being spread due to network communication, it wasn’t long before every pair of eyes in a fifty-mile radius knew exactly who she was: Chelsea King—[an] intelligent, willful, and loving girl.

  News of Chelsea’s plight soon went viral, spreading not only across the county and the nation, but around the globe, with well-wishing strangers conveying their sentiments online from Australia, Germany and even Pakistan. A world away, they were just as moved by the sheer goodness, the promise of a bright future and the angelic expression they could see reflected in those blue eyes of hers.

  Back home, Kelly King, her eyes red from crying, made tearful pleas on the local TV news: “She’s such a good girl. She needs to come home,” she said, her voice breaking with grief.