Lost Girls

by Caitlin Rother

  Some in law enforcement said it was good that the sheriff’s department took over the case, alleging that the SDPD would have been overwhelmed trying to search for Chelsea without the help of the well-oiled and established sheriff’s SAR unit, with its mutual-aid network of trained searchers up and down the state. They also noted that the SAR unit may have been called in to help, regardless.

  That Friday morning, Gore also spoke to Keith Slotter, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s local office.

  “Whatever you need, you’ve got,” Slotter said. “Any resources.”

  Alex Horan, the FBI supervisory agent in charge of local child abductions, saw the news coverage of the search on Saturday morning. He called sheriff’s detective Chris Johnson, his colleague from the Violent Crime and Safe Streets Task Force. Horan immediately sent several agents over to the park to “get boots on the ground” and determine whether more resources were needed. By eleven o’clock, he sent a few more agents, and by noon, he headed over himself.

  Just as Slotter promised, Horan said, “all the resources of the FBI were available for this case. We asked for twenty-five more agents, we got it... . SWAT? They came. These cases don’t come around very often. Thank goodness ... We did what we were supposed to do in this case. Nothing special.”

  Some observers disagreed, however, asserting that more resources seemed to be poured into looking for Chelsea King than for Amber Dubois. Like the other law enforcement sources involved, Horan said that may have been because the two cases were so different at the start, particularly in the way the two girls went missing.

  In the Chelsea case, “the pattern of facts was very troubling and very disturbing,” he said. Even in the beginning, the fact that she disappeared without calling, leaving her car in the parking lot, “would not indicate that that was anything normal,” he said.

  On the other hand, he said, “Amber Dubois vanished into thin air. That’s hard. That’s a difficult problem.” But he said any suggestion that the difference in the girls’ family backgrounds or personalities played a role in any perceived disparity in law enforcement response was “not true.”

  Privately, however, investigators involved in the case indicated that this disparity probably did play a role, even if it was unintentional or went unstated. Amber’s case wasn’t any less important, they said. It was more that the Kings were such warm, good people, and the more that law enforcement learned about Chelsea, the more they wanted to help.

  When Horan arrived at the park, FBI agents James “Benny” Stinnett and Kristen Robinson were already there. Robinson, the local coordinator for the Bureau’s Crimes Against Children program, had already been working on Amber’s case.

  Once the question of jurisdiction between the sheriff’s department and SDPD was resolved, Horan said, Stinnett was paired up with sheriff’s detective Mark Palmer.

  Once Sergeant Dave Brown’s detective team arrived at the park, they started tracking down drivers linked to license plates reported by observant parents and neighborhood residents as belonging to potentially suspicious men in the parking lot. By the time the detectives were done with this case, they had 1, 200 reports of suspicious people, some from psychics. They all had to be checked out, and they all turned out to be red herrings. One guy was taking photos, for example. Another guy was with a little kid, talking to other kids, but he turned out to be a friendly divorced dad.

  “It becomes a filtering process of loony tunes,” Brown said.

  Brown showed up at the park around 5:00 P.M. Once he was briefed, he had to acknowledge that the command center had been right to call his team in early—body or not. Only an hour earlier, a search team had found a woman’s silver Adidas running shoe, size 8 with yellow stripes and a yellow sole, near the shoreline just off the Piedras Pintadas Trail. It was lying atop some freshly broken branches some distance northeast of where the underwear and socks had been found. It looked as if someone had tossed—or dropped—the shoe there.

  To the detectives, the fact that these newly found items were so far from the underwear and Chelsea’s car signaled foul play. But rather than show a box full of random clothing items to Chelsea’s distressed parents, Palmer sent photos on his cell phone to Detective Johnson, who was assigned to stay with the Kings to facilitate communication. Johnson showed the photos to Kelly, asked if they matched the brand of socks, underwear and running shoes that Chelsea wore, and she figured out which ones were likely to be Chelsea’s.

  The matching clothing items were taken to the sheriff’s crime lab that evening, along with Chelsea’s hairbrush, toothbrush and retainer. Time was of the essence. Everyone was still hoping to find Chelsea alive somewhere, and detectives and crime lab managers agreed that the items should go to the front of the line for DNA testing. The underwear was, in fact, stained with a small amount of blood, so the first step for criminalist Anne-Marie Shafer was to confirm that it contained Chelsea’s DNA. Next, Shafer would look for male DNA on the panties, and then see if it matched any registered sex offender whose DNA profile was on file with the FBI database—the Combined DNA Index System, known as CODIS.

  As part of the usual protocol, the DNA samples were also sent for a parallel set of tests at the DOJ lab in Sacramento. Tyler Burtis, a supervising DOJ agent attached to the sheriff’s homicide team, persuaded the lab to run these tests over the weekend. Usually, investigators would have to wait until at least Monday, even for expedited results.

  It was good that they found the panties as soon as they did—before the rain and before someone had stepped on them. And they were pleased to see that the socks were clean on the sole, which indicated they had been dropped, not worn, in the dirt.

  “We got lucky,” Brown said. “That’s some good sample.”

  District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis first learned of the case while she was at a luncheon that Friday, listening to the FBI’s Keith Slotter give a speech. He mentioned that his pager had just gone off with a text from his daughter, who had been following the Chelsea King search.

  That day, Dumanis said, she watched the “rocking of the community” start its trajectory. Because her department liked to get in early on homicide cases, her liaison with the sheriff’s department kept her updated from that point on. Over the weekend, Dumanis personally decided who would be the best of her thirty-two prosecutors in the Superior Court and Pretrial Division to handle the case: forty-four-year-old Kristen Spieler, an attractive and talented blonde who had been hired in 1998 by the previous DA.

  “Kristen is one of their hitters,” Brown said of Spieler, who was named Prosecutor of the Year in 2008. Spieler had won convictions in high-profile cases before: one against a fourteen-year-old girl tried as an adult for killing her mother with a claw hammer, and another against Gerald Nash, who had chopped up a homeless man he’d befriended and spread his body parts throughout the county.

  “Prosecutors love these kinds of cases because it’s the closest they can come to being police officers,” Dumanis said.

  That afternoon, about one hundred agents from the FBI’s Safe Streets Task Force, as well as additional officers from the SDPD and sheriff’s department, began knocking on 360 doors of homes surrounding the park. They checked every room in these houses, as well as the backyards, thinking that Chelsea might have gone for help but passed out before she reached the door. Virtually all residents agreed to let the agents enter without a fight.

  “The big thing on child abductions that we really feel is important is the neighborhood, the neighborhood, the neighborhood,” Alex Horan said.

  At the same time, the Sexual Assault Felony Enforcement (SAFE) team, a group of officers from the state DOJ and the sheriff’s department, interviewed violent sexual offenders who lived in the area. Drawing a ten- or fifteen-mile radius, the SAFE team did a bed check of all “290” sex offender registrants, and also checked activities over the past thirty-six hours on all the 290s who wore the same type of GPS ankle bracelet that John Gardner had worn while on parole. All
they found was one man who had ridden a bike across the bridge over Lake Hodges.

  “We were striking out,” Brown said.

  That evening, Detectives O’Brien and Enyeart went to the Kings’ home to do a cursory interview and search their house for signs of foul play. When they were done, they told Palmer they were confident that the house and the Kings were clean.

  Meanwhile, the helicopters searched all night long using infrared and FLIR thermal imaging equipment, which sees through brush in the dark by searching for anything releasing heat, as a live person would, or even a dead person within ten or twelve hours of death.

  Brown sent O’Brien and Enyeart home to shower and catch a few hours of sleep while he and Palmer tried to get some rest in the front seat of their cars at the command center. But it was no use.

  “There’s a million puzzle pieces and they’re all flying around in your head,” Brown said.

  Chapter 22

  By midday Saturday, February 27, a search team had also found a sports bra in the culvert on Duenda Road between Smoke Signal Drive and Moon Song Court. Because some rain had fallen, Parker and the detectives theorized that these items had been dropped into a drainage area upstream in the neighborhood, and had floated down to the culvert on Duenda.

  Kelly said the sports bra was the same size, color and brand that her daughter had recently purchased in a two-pack. The Kings also produced a receipt and a box for the new yellow-and-silver Adidas shoes Chelsea had ordered from Road Runner.

  The detectives spoke some more with Chelsea’s parents, and interviewed her ex-boyfriend and neighbors, delving deeper into her life to see if she might have run off with or been abducted by someone she knew.

  “Everybody could have done it,” Brown said. “You always start there.”

  In San Diego County, he said, 99.9 percent of missing girls had run away, not been abducted, and in most homicide cases, murder “boils down to love, money or drugs.” But after these interviews and the sheriff’s computer crimes team had checked the Kings’ computers, the detectives were confident that the “parents didn’t do it, the ex-boyfriend didn’t do it. She doesn’t use drugs. She didn’t run away. This girl is as good as gold,” Brown said.

  It was cold, it was raining, and Brown was starting to worry. They still hadn’t found Chelsea, and he wondered if she might be alive, but somewhere else. And now that they’d reached the forty-eight-hour mark, they were also starting to think that “somebody killed this girl and it wasn’t somebody close to her,” that she could have fallen prey to a practiced killer.

  “We really did think we had a Silence of the Lambs thing here,” he said. If somebody had killed her in the park, surely the dogs would have found her already.

  In most murder cases they dealt with, they could tell when a killer didn’t know what he was doing. “Most of these things are sloppy and easy to figure out,” Brown said. But in this case, the assailant seemed to be “a lot smarter than your average killer. He’s covering his tracks.”

  Brown asked an analyst to do a computer search for any reports of recent crimes in the park. After consulting the Area Regional Justice Information System (ARJIS) criminal database, which was shared by law enforcement agencies throughout the region, the analyst gave Brown a report about an attack on a jogger the morning of Sunday, December 27, 2009, as well as the detective’s phone number.

  The report, written by SDPD officer David Nilsen the day of the ten-thirty incident, listed the assault on twenty-two-year-old Candice Moncayo as an “attempted robbery.”

  Soon after the incident, Candice’s sister Kayla, a student at Rancho Bernardo High School, wrote an editorial about the incident in the Silver Spur, her school newspaper, but it didn’t run until the day after Chelsea went missing.

  One needs to be cautious of what is around, and not take for granted the stillness that Rancho Bernardo is known for, Kayla wrote. We should not live in fear, but we should be aware.

  Candice was just finishing an eight-mile run, heading south on the trail off Duenda, near Poblado Road, on this sunny morning when she saw a man walking toward her. Candice described the suspect as about twenty-five years old, five feet eleven inches tall and about 230 pounds, with a heavy-to-muscular build, brown hair and brown eyes. She said he was clean shaven, with a “military crew cut,” and was wearing a blue sweater with a horizontal white stripe and blue jeans. The man had grown to six feet two inches (Gardner’s actual height) in her sister’s news account.

  “Good morning,” Candice said as she approached the man. She thought it was a bit strange for someone on a running trail to be wearing jeans, but she figured he lived in one of the houses nearby and was just out taking a walk.

  The man responded in kind, but then, without any warning, he tackled her from the side as she was running past him. He knocked her down, climbed on top of her and pinned her shoulders to the ground, leaving bruises on her shoulders and scrapes on her knees. When she started screaming for help, he tried to quiet her.

  “Shut up!” he ordered.

  But Candice kept screaming. “No!” she yelled. “You’ll have to kill me first.”

  “That can be arranged,” he replied, telling her again to shut up.

  “No,” she yelled.

  The man said a few other things to Candice, which, she later explained on Larry King Live, were crude and she didn’t feel comfortable repeating.

  Gardner later claimed that when he realized she was scared he was going to rape her, he said, “I don’t want that. I want your money,” to which she replied, “I don’t have any money.”

  Moncayo, in fear of being raped, was now in fear for her life, Nilsen wrote in his report, noting that the suspect did not touch Moncayo in a sexual manner.

  Then the man ordered Candice to “give me all your money.”

  After she told Gardner she had no money on her, Candice said, he grabbed her by the shoulders and began to shake her frenetically, “the way you’re not supposed to shake a child.”

  But when he chose her as a victim, he didn’t bargain on the fact that she was the daughter of John Moncayo, a five-time world kickboxing champion, or that she’d been involved in jujitsu for most of her life, which taught her the skills to defend herself. Thanks also to her training and natural instinct, she said, she was able to fight him off due “to the grace of God.”

  Managing to work her left hand into position behind her, she was able to pivot and jab her right elbow sharply into the man’s nose. As she felt the crunch of his cartilage, he let go of her and grabbed his nose, which was dripping with blood. Candice ran as fast as she could toward the nearest house, where she called police, while he ran in the opposite direction, heading north into the hills. Several patrol units responded and checked the area, but found no witnesses or any trace of him.

  Candice was left emotionally shaken by the experience, she said, but she was determined to overcome the trauma. The very next day, she went out running with a pit bull belonging to her sister’s boyfriend.

  “I felt that if I didn’t get back on the horse right away, that I never would,” she told Larry King when she appeared on his show with Chelsea’s parents and Amber’s mother on March 16, 2010.

  “What mark has this left on you?” Larry King asked.

  “A deep one. It’s something I think I’ll be dealing with for the rest of my life. Just the other week, I was running and I had to pass a gentleman on the trails. And he was also—he was going for a hike. And I ... He had to stop and let me pass. So I had to come close to him. And, you know, I burst into tears and, I think, ruined his run. So I’m ashamed about that a bit.”

  Candice didn’t mention this on TV, but she told the probation officer who wrote Gardner’s sentencing report that she was so upset after the attack that she had to drop two college courses midterm. She also required more than a dozen counseling sessions to deal with the aftermath, knowing that she, too, could have been murdered.

  The SDPD report included no follow-u
p on the case, so sheriff’s sergeant Dave Brown asked the police detective for an update on the investigation. Detective Phil Bozarth said that because of Candice’s blood-drawing jab, Officer Nilsen had her elbow swabbed for DNA and the sample had been submitted to SDPD’s crime lab. However, Brown said, “because they have a backlog, and because this was listed as a robbery,” the swab was still in line to be tested.

  Furthermore, Bozarth said, no composite sketch of the suspect was ever done. Candice had been visiting her family for Christmas vacation, and had to return to the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, where she was studying to be a teacher.

  According to Bozarth’s report, he’d shown Candice a photo six-pack, including a “wanted fugitive” who was arrested in her parents’ neighborhood, but she said he wasn’t the guy. He deemed the case “inactive” on February 10, 2010, while awaiting lab results, because “no other related cases were reported in the area and there were no additional leads.”

  Candice Moncayo’s assault was the only potentially related and recent crime in the area, making this unknown suspect Sergeant Brown’s favorite. But the evidence didn’t go far enough to constitute a real lead without some kind of sketch or ID, not to mention the DNA test results, a deficiency he made clear to every SDPD boss he saw at the command post.

  “Test it or give it to us and we’ll test it,” he urged. “This is the closest similar case that might be ours. We don’t know, but it’s the best one we’ve got.”

  When Brown got the DNA results a few days later, the swab had picked up only female DNA.