Lost Girls

by Caitlin Rother

  On December 27, unbeknownst to his family, Gardner attacked a young woman jogging on the same trails in RB where Cathy and her husband’s running group, the Hash House Harriers, were going to have an event that same afternoon. After the incident, “DrZaius,” a group member whose contact information was the same as Kevin’s, wrote this item in its newsletter: Disturbing news at the start. [Two members], who live next to the park, came out to give us word that a girl had been attacked that morning on the trails where we would be running.

  Gardner and Jariah had paid for their Rock Springs apartment through December 31, 2009, but with Jariah in rehab, Gardner couldn’t afford to pay the rent on his own and had to move out. He left the keys in the night drop on January 5, 2010, still owing a balance of $2,759, and moved to his grandmother’s house in Lake Elsinore in Riverside County.

  The one-year anniversary of Amber Dubois’s disappearance was fast approaching.

  Chapter 17

  Amber Leeanne Dubois was a free-spirited, reflective fourteen-year-old with the look of a tomboy, who hated shopping at the mall. She was the kind of kid who read books under the covers with a flashlight after lights out, even after several visits from her mother telling her to go to sleep. She just couldn’t put the book down.

  “In a year, she probably read more books than I have in my life,” said her father, who described her as a “geeky nerd.”

  Her mother, Carrie McGonigle, was quite striking when she was young, and Carrie collected a stack of photos of the mother-daughter duo posing together. They were quite a contrast to each other: Carrie, with her highlighted brown hair and sun-drenched skin, and Amber, with her dark hair and serene, icy blue eyes, framed by freckles and a shy smile.

  Family photos featured a lot of hugging, even though some of the relatives were at odds. Carrie and her mom, Sheila Welch, went through periods of not speaking to each other, as did Carrie and Moe. Moe and Sheila weren’t on great terms either.

  Amber was born on October 25, 1994, and her parents, who were married in September 1995, separated seven months later. Moe filed for divorce in Orange County in May 1996, but the filing was never resolved. Carrie filed in San Diego County five years later, and the divorce was still not finalized by 2009. A hearing on why the case should not be dismissed was set for February 9, 2009, only four days before Amber went missing. Records show that Carrie, who no longer had an attorney, showed up on her own, but Moe did not, so she was referred to the Family Law Facilitator’s Office, which offers advice for finalizing divorces through default judgments.

  Amber spent weekends with Moe and his girlfriend, Rebecca Smith, in Orange County. She also visited with her grandmother, Sheila, a lawyer in Los Angeles County, who liked to tell Amber that she came from a long line of strong Irish women. The rest of the time, Amber lived in Escondido with Carrie and Carrie’s boyfriend, Dave Cave, and the couple’s six-year-old daughter, Allison, Amber’s half sister.

  By all accounts, Amber loved animals more than anything, and already had a career picked out as an animal behavioral scientist. She had a whole menagerie of pets—horses, guinea pigs, fish, birds, rats and dogs—so when she learned about the Future Farmers of America program and its farm on campus at Escondido High School, she wanted to participate.

  In a coincidental similarity with Chelsea, Amber liked writing poetry. However, Amber also had a curiosity about the dark side. She and her friends were into reading about vampires and werewolves in the Twilight series. Above all else, Amber seemed most fascinated with wolves, so much so that her grandmother had given her a necklace with a wolf charm. Even her screen name on Yahoo reflected this obsession: “wolfintheend.”

  “Everything was wolves,” recalled Bob Benton, of the Escondido Police Department, who had overseen this case as a lieutenant and was promoted to captain after it was resolved. “She was an animal lover and kind of termed herself ‘a lone wolf.’”

  On Friday, February 13, 2009, Amber got up and ate some cereal. At 6:20 A.M., she responded to a text that her grandmother had sent her the night before—the seventieth text between them that week.

  Carrie had gone to work at 4:00 A.M., but not before waking Amber to remind her to take the $200 check she needed to buy a lamb for her farm project. After Amber asked Dave several times for the check, Dave left it for her on the couch arm, then he headed to the gym around 6:15 A.M.

  Amber had been really excited about getting the lamb, which she’d already named Nanette—French, like her surname, Dubois. She tucked the check away for safekeeping and left the house wearing black jeans, a white shirt, a dark hoodie sweatshirt and a sapphire ring. Inside her computer bag, she had a new book, which Dave had bought the night before when they’d visited Barnes & Noble, and a stash of valentines for her friends.

  At 6:44 a.m., she texted her friend Julio, a student with whom she often walked to school, asking, Are you walking with Nancy to school?

  Julio texted back to say yes, he’d just left his house, near Rincon and Conway. Typically, they met up at Lehner and Vista and continued on together, but he never saw or heard back from Amber.

  When she wasn’t going to school with Julio, Amber often had her nose in a book as she walked down her street, Fire Mountain Place, turned right on Paradise, left on Vista and headed down to Broadway. She would wait there for the stoplight to turn green, cross the street and walk up the sidewalk to meet her friends before school at the gym, where a security camera was mounted on the building. It was cold and drizzly that morning, in the low fifties, so the people who thought they saw her walking to school said she’d pulled her hood over her head.

  Amber’s last class ended at 2:45 P.M., so Carrie, figuring that Amber would hang out with her friends for a while, usually gave her until three-thirty to get home. If Amber wasn’t back by then, she always called. When Amber didn’t come home or call by her regular time, Dave figured something was up, so he called Carrie at work. But Carrie didn’t know where Amber was either. She called Amber’s cell phone and got no answer, so she left a message to call her.

  Dave figured that Amber had stayed at school to play with her new pet lamb, and had lost track of time. He drove over there to look for her and ran into one of her teachers. When Dave asked if the instructor had seen Amber, he was concerned to hear the answer.

  “She didn’t show up here today,” the teacher said. “I was very surprised that she wasn’t here. This was her last day to pay for her lamb.”

  “What are you talking about?” Dave asked. “I gave her a check before I left the house this morning.”

  Other school officials advised Dave that they’d called the house at 12:30 P.M. to say that Amber had never made it to school that day; when Dave got home, he checked the voice mail to find a message to that effect. He then told Carrie what he’d learned, and she too could feel that something was wrong. Under normal circumstances, Amber never would have missed buying that lamb.

  By the time Carrie called Moe, she was crying hysterically. “I don’t know where Amber is,” she said.

  At 5:47 P.M., Dave called 911 to report Amber missing Within an hour, Escondido police officer Russ Gay was at the house, meeting with Dave and Carrie to write a detailed report in which Gay described Amber as a “missing juvenile at risk, with unknown circumstances.”

  “In talking to them, he thought something was wrong,” Captain Benton recalled.

  As a result, Escondido police spent the night searching the neighborhood, the school and the creek that ran alongside it, but they found nothing. Carrie and Dave did the same, going door-to-door with the help of more than a dozen friends who showed up to assist.

  In a highly unusual move, the EPD watch commander called a couple of family protection detectives to come in Saturday morning to work the case, based on the first interview with Carrie and Dave. For Escondido police, this was practically unheard of in a case that couldn’t be definitively linked to a crime.

  As the detectives were interviewing Carrie and Dave on Satur
day, they were notified that someone had briefly turned on Amber’s cell phone at 2:30 P.M. for about thirty seconds to check voice mail messages, then shut it off, which prevented the detectives from tracking the caller any further. Carrie had called Verizon the night before to have the password changed to allow her to check the messages for clues, so the police didn’t know if it was Amber trying to access her messages that afternoon or someone else.

  But because the signal had pinged off a tower north of her home and the high school, a tower that covered a five-mile radius, the EPD immediately put out a reverse 911 call for a several-mile radius around the school. The transcript of the alert read as follows:

  This is an important message from the Escondido Police Department regarding a missing juvenile at risk. The missing juvenile is Amber Leeanne Dubois, who was last seen on Friday, February the thirteenth at 07:00 hours, walking south on Broadway near Escondido High School. She’s a white female, fourteen years old, five foot three, hundred and forty pounds, brown hair, blue eyes, last seen wearing all dark clothing. She never arrived at school, she has no prior history of running away, and this is out of character for her ... If you have any information concerning Amber Dubois, please contact the Escondido Police Department.

  And call they did.

  In the next few days, several seemingly credible reports of sightings came in, which helped police put together a timeline for Amber’s trip to school that morning.

  At 7:09 A.M., parent Dave Walquist had just dropped off his kid at school when he was sure he saw Amber, walking rapidly by herself in the drizzly cold, as he was driving north on Broadway.

  Right around the same time, Pam Sams, a mother who lived in the neighborhood and had watched Amber walking to school many times, said she was driving her son to school when she saw Amber walking up Broadway. Her report put Amber closer to the school than Walquist’s sighting, and Sams said Amber was talking with a dark-skinned “doughy boy,” about six to eight inches taller than she was. Sams slowed down to pick up Amber or say hello, but decided not to interrupt the conversation. Amber and the boy, she said, were approaching the yellow fire hydrant just down the street from the bus yard driveway.

  Both of these parents’ cars were captured by the video cameras posted at the school, and police estimated it was thirty to forty-five seconds between the times they dropped off their kids and when they thought they saw Amber. Through interviews with Amber’s family, neighbors, her friends and their parents, the authorities learned that the teenager had a certain routine each morning, and although she had appeared on camera on previous days, walking to school, she never came into view the day she went missing.

  “That’s why we kept saying, ‘What happened between here and here?’” Benton said.

  Also on Saturday, the EPD got a tip it viewed as highly credible: a fellow student said he’d seen Amber that evening at five-thirty, walking with two other teenagers in downtown Escondido, eastbound on Grand Avenue, not far from Palomar Medical Center.

  On Tuesday, February 17, when school was back in session after the three-day Presidents’ Day weekend, yet another classmate reported seeing her walking with a boy on Sunday evening, west on Rincon Avenue near Creek Hollow, toward the surrounding rural area, which was known as a magnet for kids who partied.

  These witness reports contributed to the theory that Amber could have been a runaway, but Carrie insisted that Amber wasn’t the type to take off partying, let alone run away from home. The police, however, weren’t so sure. And what exactly, they wondered, could she be running away from?

  When detectives were able to check family court records after the holiday weekend, they learned about the February 9 divorce hearing, theorizing that Amber could have gotten caught up in a family struggle and would reappear once those issues were resolved.

  “So we sent detectives to all relatives’ homes—grandma, cousins, aunts—thinking that she may be at one of those homes, and also took that opportunity to interview them,” Benton said.

  But none of the relatives knew where Amber was either.

  Starting that Tuesday, the sheriff’s Search and Rescue (SAR) unit set up a command post at Rincon Middle School, the center of a search by one hundred people, including EPD officers and volunteers, who spent two days going door-to-door in a several-mile radius, passing out flyers. Fairly certain Amber was in that area because of the latest witness statement, sheriff’s sergeant Don Parker, who coordinated the SAR unit and its army of 180 volunteers, directed the searchers through the avocado groves and up in the hills, where their orange shirts dotted the landscape like poppies. The searchers also went through more than fifty foreclosed and abandoned buildings, where police were investigating a recent rash of break-ins. Unfortunately, they learned that the witness who had seemed credible was either lying or just plain wrong.

  “We had people searching in this canyon, under the road, and we had them search the whole greenbelt area,” Parker said later, pointing to a map of the area surrounding Amber’s neighborhood, the school environs and beyond. “We had dogs looking in there, and half hoping that we’d find something and half hoping that we wouldn’t.”

  They used dogs trained to follow “live” scent on February 17 and 18, but not after that, “because there’s no good trail” for the dogs to follow, Parker said.

  Two weeks later, the searchers went back to those areas with cadaver dogs for two more days, looking now for a body in the mountainous terrain, which was covered with thick brush. From there, they explored another classmate’s reported sighting of Amber near an abandoned structure at the nearby Daley Ranch, a flophouse that Parker first flew over in a helicopter because there was no other easy access. After they touched down, he went through the whole shack, room by room, worried the roof was going to fall in on him, but he found only mattresses, pornographic magazines, empty beer cans and trash.

  It was eerie, but still no sign of Amber.

  When they didn’t find her there, Parker’s team searched for three days in early March around the school, including the drainage ditch and creek bed that runs alongside it, behind the nearby apartment complexes, and down to the strip mall on El Norte Parkway. They looked in the drainage area that surrounded the adjacent Christian school and ran under the street in the Reidy Canyon area, down the street from the high school, as well as the old folks’ home under construction along North Broadway. They also spent six days searching unincorporated areas to the north of the city, and just south of Deer Springs Road.

  “We spent a lot of time looking for poor Amber,” Parker said, noting that the search continued through the end of May. “The thing with Amber was you didn’t know anything, so you had to search everything and consider everything.”

  Once law enforcement was able to determine that this case didn’t involve a parental abduction or a legal struggle between Moe and Carrie, “We thought we’d better contact the FBI,” Benton said.

  The FBI always gets involved in child abduction cases, often working jointly and sharing resources with local law enforcement agencies. “The mysterious disappearance of any minor should trigger an immediate FBI response,” said Alex Horan, a supervisory special agent for the FBI’s San Diego office. “It doesn’t have to be interstate.” However, he added, sometimes a case may appear to be local when in fact a suspect may have traveled interstate to commit the crime or temporarily taken the victim across state lines.

  “This is something we take very seriously,” Horan said.

  Within ten days of Amber’s disappearance, the EPD quietly convened a task force of ten EPD investigators from school resource officers up to the rank of lieutenant, Parker from the sheriff’s SAR unit, two FBI agents, and a representative of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. This group met daily for several months, after which, its core members, including FBI agent Jim Pringle, met twice weekly for the next year. Pringle worked as a conduit to the many analysts and other agents, who were instrumental in conducting interviews of friend
s and family. The FBI wrote more than fifty search warrants to get electronic data the EPD couldn’t get because it still wasn’t able to prove that a crime had occurred.

  Over the course of this case, the EPD took hits in the media for what it did and did not investigate. Initially, the task force didn’t share many details about its findings—or lack thereof—with the media or Amber’s family, because at that point everyone, including Dave Cave, was still a potential suspect.

  Also, Carrie and Moe were giving constant media interviews. Carrie was also blogging, and she often brought a TV cameraperson with her to meetings at the EPD station, so the police felt the need to protect their investigation. Later, after a gag order was instituted, the EPD kept mum on the advice of its city attorney.

  In contrast to the sheriff’s swift action in Chelsea’s case, it took some time before the EPD and its task force knew what to make of the missing-child report filed by Amber’s parents, because they were still unsure if she was a runaway. Amber didn’t have a confirmed last known point, as Chelsea did, and Amber’s parents also did not come up clean in the routine background check, as Chelsea’s had.

  EPD found that both of Amber’s parents had a criminal drug history—or so they thought. (These checks are always done to uncover “the dirty laundry and where things can go awry,” as one investigator put it.) Moe Dubois had a felony drug conviction and was still on probation, and Carrie’s record showed that she had a felony conviction for attempted first-degree burglary in Orange County, using the alias of Christie Ann Stacy. Los Angeles County court records also showed that Stacy was “a narcotics addict” who had spent time in a state prison drug facility after pleading guilty to possession of heroin and cocaine.