Lost Girls

by Caitlin Rother

  Chelsea’s black BMW was still parked in the lot near the trailhead. One of Parker’s first orders of business was to find the Kings in the gym and introduce himself so he could later try to insulate them from the searchers’ loose talk. As Parker approached and shook their hands, Kelly King was wrapped in a blanket. Her big, sad eyes were red, her expression pleading with Parker as if to say, “Please help me. Help us find her and bring her home. Please.”

  Parker, whose own daughter was fifteen, didn’t really know what to say to those eyes. What am I going to do? he thought. I can’t manufacture Chelsea out of nothing.

  “It was really tough,” he recalled.

  All he could do was try to reassure her and Brent that his crew would do everything in their power to find Chelsea. Afterward, he went back outside and headed up to the sheriff’s command post, which had been set up in the lower of two parking lots.

  The sergeant quickly ran over the possibilities in his head: If Chelsea had twisted an ankle or injured herself somehow, she could be lying on the ground and need help. She could have been kidnapped from her car or kidnapped elsewhere by an assailant who had dumped her car in this lot. She could also be down and hurt after being assaulted on the trail—or worst case, dead. Obviously, he hoped for the first scenario; but regardless, time was of the essence—either to find her alive and bring her in, or to find her body before the cloudy skies opened up and the forecasted rain began to fall, swelling the banks of the lake, and swallowing her up.

  “Initially we were all hoping and praying that she was injured,” he said. But, he added, “a big storm was coming and I knew we had to get things rolling. I knew we had to get divers in the water before the storm came. If there’s anything that destroys clues—footprints or scents for dogs—it’s rain.”

  And over the next few days, he said, “there was a deluge.”

  Jan Caldwell, the sheriff’s department spokeswoman, was just leaving choir practice at her church in Carmel Valley, when she got a call from Sergeant Parker around nine o’clock in the evening.

  “We have a missing juvenile at the Rancho Bernardo Community Park,” he said. “Why don’t you head this way, because we’re getting quite a lot of media down here.”

  When Caldwell arrived a half hour later, she saw a sea of people. There were only two news cameras, but the same crowd of teenagers and parents were still milling around near the tennis courts and the trailhead.

  “This shouldn’t take too long because somebody reported hearing someone calling out ‘Help me, help me,’” a deputy told Caldwell as she was assessing the situation. Unfortunately, the reporting party was mistaken. The person was actually calling out “Chelsea, Chelsea,” hoping that the teenager would answer the call.

  Caldwell’s heart went out to the Kings, noting the same expression on Kelly’s face that Parker had seen, the “look of a mother that’s missing part of her body.” Feeling protective, Caldwell was irate when she heard that a TV reporter followed Kelly into the park’s outdoor restroom and into a stall, asking her questions for the eleven o’clock news. In response, Caldwell corralled the media into the upper parking lot, which left them with no bathroom access, so this couldn’t happen again. Kelly was distraught enough without having a reporter intrude on such a private moment. “It was rude. It was disrespectful,” Caldwell said.

  The more Caldwell heard about Chelsea in the coming days, the more she knew “what an amazing, amazing child that Chelsea was, and it became scarier to us as law enforcement that something sinister had happened.”

  After getting briefed by Deputy Carrillo and Sergeant Bavencoff, Parker put his head together with members of ASTREA and his SAR team to calculate and define the search area based on where Chelsea might have gone for her run.

  The bulk of Lake Hodges, a serpentine thruway, of sorts, that followed the contours of a canyon, was to the northwest of the command center and branched into fingerlike tributaries, where trees grew into the shoreline. As the trail nearest Chelsea’s car headed west into the park, it quickly split into two trails, which then splintered into numerous others, all part of a network of trails that went around the lake, on both the north and south shores. One of the trails looped around, so even if Chelsea had headed in the opposite direction, she still could have ended up on the trail that led into the neighborhood along Duenda Road and cul-de-sacs, such as Moon Song Court, where the houses looked down the hill and out over the lake. She also could have headed back to the main street from her car, heading east to the footbridge and crossing over to the north side of the lake.

  Even then she could have gone left or right, so it was anyone’s guess which route she’d taken. Searchers decided to start at the most obvious spot—her last known point at her car—and fanned out from there in concentric circles. Knowing she could easily jog eight miles, they figured she could have gone four or even five miles out if she hadn’t been abducted and driven elsewhere, and that became their radius.

  In addition to the trails and the lake itself, the park had all kinds of nooks and crannies to search, a couple of knolls to the north, a valley with a waterfall between two ridges, and an area the searchers called “the greenbelt,” a sticker-filled strip, seventy yards across and thick with bushes, trees, and water, which ran between two long rows of houses off Duenda that looked down from above.

  One of the trickier areas was a creek that ran under an arched footbridge, filled with rocks, forming an eddy in the murky water. The search crews donned wet suits or dry suits, which seal at the wrist and neck but keep the body dry, along with gloves and hoods, and felt around with their hands as they went through the creek, shoulder to shoulder so as not to miss any area. It wasn’t particularly safe work, because they could step on broken glass or get tangled in networks of tree roots or dead branches, and find themselves stuck.

  “It’s like an underwater forest,” Parker explained. “They’re doing it literally by feel. The divers, of anybody in the search, worked the hardest.”

  That night, and every day after that, when Parker got frustrated sitting still at his post in the command center, he headed into the muck and helped out the searchers for a while.

  “I had to do something,” he said.

  The first break in the case came that Thursday evening. A civilian sheriff’s department employee who lived in a house on Moon Song Court came out on his deck when he and his wife heard a helicopter making announcements about Chelsea. Knowing the trails well, they joined the search behind their house. Later, around nine forty-five, he went out again alone with a flashlight and walked down the same path they’d taken before. He went only a short distance when he came across something right there in the open: a pair of ankle socks and some ladies thong underwear.

  Knowing these items could be critical, he immediately reported the find to SDPD, which sent an officer right over to collect them. The items were taken to the crime lab the next day. No one wanted to jump to conclusions, but finding a pair of underwear that looked as if they had just been dropped there, two miles from Chelsea’s car, was not a good sign.

  At 11:35 P.M., the sheriff’s department put out a reverse 911 call describing Chelsea to about one thousand homes around the park in RB, not including Cathy Osborn’s condo. The text of the recorded message read:

  We are currently actively searching the area for a missing seventeen-year-old female, Chelsea King... . Her vehicle was found at Rancho Bernardo Community Park. She may be somewhere in the area of Lake Hodges or the trails adjacent to the park. If you have any information or have seen or heard anything please call 911 or the sheriff’s department immediately.

  Around 1:00 A.M., Parker started waking up lifeguards and dive teams from around the region, and they began searching Lake Hodges by boat.

  By three-thirty, he knew he was going to have to call in reinforcements for his ground crew. He couldn’t order volunteer searchers to stay for twelve hours, as he could with sheriff’s deputies, but he also knew he was going to need more hel
p to comb this massive area of land and water. So he called and explained the situation to the warning center in Sacramento, the California Emergency Management Agency, a clearinghouse for natural and other types of emergencies throughout the state.

  “I need help,” Parker told the dispatcher.

  “What do you need?”

  “I could use ground pounders,” he said, referring to trained human searchers, “and canines, trailing dogs and area dogs.” Canine search teams came in from as far away as Nevada County, near Lake Tahoe, to help out. For now, they would use dogs that tracked live scents; if the search went on for more than two or three days, they would have to switch to cadaver dogs.

  By the time they were done with the massive search effort, they would have used 180 different teams, representing forty-five agencies from all over California.

  Chapter 21

  Sheriff’s homicide sergeant Dave Brown was at home on bereavement leave that Friday, planning to spend the day dividing up his grandmother’s jewelry and personal belongings among family members. He also had to move her furniture, which they were going to donate to charity. But at the crack of dawn, he was unofficially notified about the Chelsea King case when his sister, who lived in RB, woke him with a call asking about all the commotion.

  “Helicopters have been flying. What’s going on?” she asked, referring to the choppers that had started searching at sunup.

  “I don’t know. I’m sleeping,” he said.

  Later that morning, a couple of friends called with more questions and gave him some details. Then he heard from Pat O’Brien, one of the three detectives on his team, which was up in the rotation, and had been asked to help work the case.

  Brown’s team was in the middle of an important witness interview, miles away in Fallbrook. After three years of hunting down the witness, this was a pretty big break in an eight-year-old case involving a murdered infant, and they were confident the witness was going to reveal the suspect’s alibi as a fake.

  “Can you cover us?” O’Brien asked, requesting Brown to intercede on their behalf.

  Brown agreed that his team was needed more in Fallbrook than in RB, especially when no one had even found a body in the park yet. They were a homicide team, after all. “That’s not even in our jurisdiction,” he said.

  So he called Sergeant Dave Martinez, who was in charge of the homicide unit that day, and asked if he would go to the park, assess the situation and get back to him on whether the case even looked like a homicide.

  “I don’t want my guys sitting in a parking lot,” Brown said.

  The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department was typically called to check out reports of dead bodies three or four times a week, but its homicide unit only responded to suspicious deaths, teen suicides, infant deaths and kidnappings for ransom, which also often ended in death—and even then, only when they found a body. Half of the three million people living in this expansive county were under the watch of this proportionately small unit, which had four teams, each of which had three detectives and a sergeant who screened out the cases that didn’t warrant special attention.

  At the time, the three teams handling current cases were on a rotation that had them on call for one week of nights, one week of days, and then one week off. The detectives had to carefully plan out their lives according to this schedule, knowing that for two weeks straight, they could be called out at a moment’s notice. No special plans for Friday nights, and no weekend trips.

  When they joined the homicide detail, they knew they were “giving everything up... . You’re never free,” said Brown, whose team was honored with an award for making twenty-two murder arrests in 2008. “Every seventeen days we’d be putting someone away for murder. We were just tearing it up.”

  Sergeant Martinez grabbed Detective Richie Hann from the cold case team to go with him to the park, and when he called Brown to report back, he said things didn’t look good. “The more we’re finding out, the more we’re finding out it’s ours.” When they talked again around 12:30 P.M., Martinez told Brown about the pair of bloodstained ladies’ underwear that someone had found near the park the night before.

  “The commander wants your team here,” he said.

  So Brown pulled Mark Palmer, the lead detective, and his partners, Scott Enyeart and Pat O’Brien, from Fallbrook and sent them to the command post in RB. Brown said he still had family matters to attend to, and he would join them when he could.

  Later, Sergeant Dave Brown figured out that while John Gardner was attacking Chelsea King, the sergeant was giving the eulogy at his grandmother’s funeral. By teaching Brown a very methodical way to put jigsaw puzzles together, his grandmother had given him a foundation and a similar methodology to the one he now applied to solving murder cases: separate the edges and colors and assign everyone a different task to complete his part of the puzzle.

  As the coming days passed, Brown slowly realized just what a personal, emotional and poetic synchronicity it was to have the biggest case of his career start during the ceremony that celebrated the woman who had taught him how to solve it.

  Sheriff Bill Gore had gotten up around four-thirty that morning and checked his e-mails. Seeing that the search was still going on, he headed over to the park around seven o’clock to be briefed on what they’d found, if anything.

  Kelly and Brent King had been up all night in the gym, where Gore talked with them and tried to reassure them that they were doing everything they could to find Chelsea. Afterward, he went to the command center to discuss which agency should take the lead on this case. Because Chelsea had gone missing in the park in RB, it normally would be an SDPD case, but Kelly’s call to the Poway sheriff’s substation had sparked the sheriff’s SAR effort, which Gore’s department had coordinated all night. And by now, he and his people had developed a good rapport with the Kings.

  “The chief wants to talk to you about this,” an SDPD official told Gore, indicating he should give SDPD Chief William “Bill” Lansdowne a call.

  “You’ve been out there. You have the resources,” Lansdowne told Gore. “You and your people have met with the family. Why don’t you take the lead, and we’ll support you.”

  “That’s the way you want it? We’ll take it and go with it,” Gore said.

  If SDPD had wanted to keep the case, Brown said later, “we would have given it to them. People dump murder victims in areas other than where they killed them all the time, but we keep the case because we’ve [been working] it already.”

  Nonetheless, conspiracy theories about the real reasons behind that jurisdictional handoff fueled cocktail party banter for many months to come.

  It was an election year for Bill Gore, who had been with the sheriff’s department for seven years and had been promoted from undersheriff to acting sheriff nearly nine months earlier when the previous sheriff left midterm to care for his sick wife. A former career FBI agent and U.S. Navy pilot trainee, Gore was also the son of a former deputy chief for the SDPD, and Gore was now running for the permanent sheriff’s post.

  After heading the Seattle’s FBI division during the controversial Ruby Ridge incident, Gore moved to San Diego, where he was the special agent in charge for six years until he retired. Gore’s campaign opponents criticized him for using the sheriff’s post as a soft retirement landing, accused him of lacking the hands-on experience of a street cop during his thirty-two years in the Bureau, and lambasted him for his part in the Ruby Ridge fiasco, which resulted in three unintended deaths: a U.S. Marshal, a boy and his mother.

  Skeptics suggested that it would help Gore’s candidacy to be the face of a high-profile investigation into the disappearance of a pretty missing teenage girl, and that Bill Lansdowne, being a political animal himself, may have even gone along with this to help out his colleague, a triad that, with District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, had often forged political pacts. Even before Gore retired from the FBI, Dumanis had recruited him to work for her as a special advisor and chief of investigati
ons, which he did for a year until he went to the sheriff’s department.

  Publicly, Gore dismissed these political theories, as did others who worked for him, saying he wasn’t a politically motivated type of lawman.

  “He’s the antipolitician,” said Jan Caldwell, who had also worked thirty-two years as an FBI agent, including some time under Gore when he headed the San Diego office.

  “Why would Bill Gore want to spend one million dollars?” Brown asked rhetorically. “It’s called duty. If you think Bill wanted this, you’re crazy... . We stopped the mine-yours-ours a day into this.”

  Privately, Gore was infuriated by these allegations, calling the idea “ludicrous” that he and Lansdowne, with their combined eighty or ninety years of law enforcement experience, would use this young girl’s disappearance for political advancement.

  “I’m not even going to talk about it, it’s so ridiculous,” he told his colleagues.

  To him, the chances were greater that his department would be cast in a negative light by this case, just as the Escondido Police Department had taken heat for not being able to locate Amber Dubois for the past year.

  “Who could ever imagine we could find that it put me in a positive light?” Gore asked rhetorically, looking back in 2011.

  But that it did. Even in the short term, working this case definitely gave political juice to Gore and the other major players involved. In June 2010, he won the primary election outright with 56 percent of the vote, eliminating the need for a general election. After this case was adjudicated, Dumanis, a Republican who was one of the nation’s first openly gay district attorneys, entered the nonpartisan 2012 race for the mayor of San Diego, as did Republican assemblyman Nathan Fletcher, after he sponsored a piece of highly publicized legislation called none other than Chelsea’s Law.