Lost Girls

by Caitlin Rother

  Brown walked alongside Gardner, holding the inmate’s arm as he shuffled along and tried to remember where he’d put the body. Gardner hadn’t left a marker, and was looking for something to refresh his memory. With his hands chained, he didn’t have much slack to lift and point, so he gestured by lifting his head or a hand to direct the detectives’ attention.

  They followed the path a bit farther until it flattened out into a vista, where he indicated they should start searching down a steep incline of about forty-five degrees to the left. Detective Mark Palmer and Sergeant Roy Frank slid down twenty or twenty-five feet in their dress shirt and slacks, tie, and leather shoes, only to report that they saw no recently disturbed or loose dirt, flattened brush or digging-tool marks.

  Gardner offered to come down and help them look, but Brown was concerned that Gardner couldn’t make it down the incline in those shackles, and he didn’t want anyone to think he’d “accidentally” pushed Gardner over the edge. But Gardner insisted he could do it. It was difficult to keep his balance, with his legs and hands chained, so Brown helped to steady him as they shuffled down the dirt slope together.

  “Here,” Gardner said. Realizing he was mistaken, he switched directions, the leaves of bushes and trees hitting them in the face as they went. “No, maybe here.”

  Up top on the vista, Popkins was getting worried. Brown was too as he and Gardner came back up. They’d been there about twenty minutes, and Gardner was enjoying a few cigarettes that the detectives had given him, a real treat because the jails were smoke-free and he was a chain-smoker.

  “I hope this wasn’t a long ride just for some free cigarettes,” Brown said.

  “Don’t even say that,” Popkins said.

  Gardner took Brown farther over to the left, about twenty feet, and shuffled down the chaparral-covered incline. As soon as he saw a rusted water heater, he seemed more sure of where he was.

  “Oh, it’s right here,” he said. Leaning in confidentially to Brown, who was firmly gripping Gardner’s bicep, he said quietly, “I can see the shovel marks.”

  Brown looked over and, sure enough, he could see the sharp marks etched into the dirt, where Gardner’s shovel had left an indentation from digging into the hard-angled surface.

  “Her head’s there, her body’s there,” Gardner said, pointing as best he could with his manacles. “You won’t find any clothes or any jewelry. I got rid of it all.”

  They took Gardner back up to the vista, where Brown, Brugos, Popkins and a dozen SWAT guys stayed with him, while Palmer searched around for a digging tool with a flat edge.

  “We weren’t really prepared to excavate,” Palmer said, “but we were looking for evidence she’d been deposited there.”

  Palmer picked up a piece of plywood and went back down the hill to scrape away the top layer of dirt. When the stick wasn’t doing the job, one of the detectives went back to one of the cars and fished around until he found a ski pole. Carefully probing the area with the pole, Palmer and Frank tried to avoid disturbing any evidence while looking for soft dirt or air pockets, which would confirm that Gardner was telling the truth. Hard dirt would tell them that the area had not been dug up, and that Gardner was lying.

  Based on the shovel marks, Brown was confident they were going to find what they had come for, and he was right. After a few minutes of probing, Frank uncovered the first traces of a shallow grave: a tuft of dark hair.

  It was about 4:10 P.M. With maybe a couple more hours of daylight left, they stopped immediately, and trudged their way back up to the vista.

  “Did you find anything?” Popkins asked.

  “We found some human hair,” Palmer said.

  Popkins nodded in understanding, serious but relieved that his client was telling the truth.

  “They wouldn’t have found the body. Never. Not in a million years,” Popkins said later. “We almost didn’t find it, and we knew where it was.”

  They’d seen enough for now. It was time to call in the FBI and crime scene investigators to do the delicate work of recovering and preserving the remains. For all they knew, there was more than one body to be found there. Dave Brown tried to call the ME’s office, but he couldn’t get a live person, so Roy Frank called Madeleine Hinkes, the forensic anthropologist.

  They drove back to drop Gardner at the jail with the same carload of folks they’d come with. Afterward, they called the small, trusted circle of people who would have to keep the findings secret, including EPD lieutenant Bob Benton.

  “We have Amber,” Brown told Benton, whose heart went cold when he heard those words.

  “What do you mean, ‘We have Amber’?” Benton asked, hoping for a split second that she was still alive.

  “We have Amber,” Brown said again.

  “Okay, where’s she at?”

  Brown told him to meet him at a gas station near the Pala Indian Casino. “We’ll take you to her. We’re going to have to do some excavation.”

  As soon as Benton heard that last word, he stopped hoping. Brown settled in with this thought as well, as he realized Brugos had been right. Brown was going to miss his daughter’s fourteenth-birthday celebration. “And I couldn’t even tell her where I was,” he said.

  It was going to be a long night.

  Madeleine Hinkes got the call from Sergeant Roy Frank at four-thirty in the afternoon. It had been only two days since she’d been called out to look at the animal bones at the park in RB.

  “We need you to come out with us and look at a clandestine grave,” Frank said.

  “Okay,” she said. “Can you give me any details?”

  “No. We’ll just pick you up and we’ll bring you out there, and don’t tell anyone where you’re going,” he said, instructing her to meet him at a giant oak tree marked USA at the bottom of an access road off Pala Temecula Road.

  By the time she got to the tree around six o’clock, it was still light out, but not for long.

  “We have information that this might be where Amber Dubois is buried,” Frank told her as they made their way up the steep grade, leaving her car at the turnout and driving the rest of the way up in Frank’s Expedition. He didn’t tell her how they’d found the scene, and she didn’t ask. She could tell that he was purposely keeping those details close to the vest.

  As Hinkes made her way past the abandoned car to the vista, and scaled down the hill, she saw the same shovel marks that Gardner had pointed out. Kneeling down in the dirt to get to work, she saw the hair that the detectives had already unearthed, and then some. Carefully digging down deeper, she found some duct tape, but nothing that looked like bone. It was essentially an empty pit.

  Despite Frank’s attempts to keep this a secret, Hinkes deduced what was going on. “Gardner was here?” she asked.

  “Yes, an hour before we brought you up,” he replied.

  After searching through hundreds of homicide scenes and the debris of homes ravaged by wildfires, Hinkes had seen a lot of tragedy over the years. She’d found skulls and skeletons in closets, garages and trunks of cars. One body buried five feet deep had to be excavated and pieced together after investigators had stood in the grave, crushing the bones, then used a Shop-Vac to pull them up, all of which impaired her ability to help determine the cause of death.

  Hinkes was a member of a different breed, and what often offended regular folks fascinated her. Except for when it came to dead kids. That was never easy.

  “Kid cases bother me a lot,” she said later. And digging in the grave of a teenager who was the same age when she disappeared as Hinkes’s own daughter was even more difficult than that.

  Dave Brown’s crew of detectives and forensic investigators, along with Bob Benton’s team from the EPD, arrived around 8:30 P.M., and set up some artificial lights for Madeleine Hinkes to do her work. Before that, she said, it was “impossible to see beyond the range of the flashlight.”

  Nearby, Roy Frank found more remains and showed them to Hinkes, who said they were that of a young fe
male. That’s when her maternal instincts kicked in. All she could do was think of how she would feel if this had happened to her daughter. She didn’t want any part of this girl lying in the dirt one minute longer, so she took the skull and cradled it in her hand, wanting to take the utmost care of it. She could feel the tears start to come up, but she blinked them back, telling herself that she needed to be professional, even at a time like this.

  She reminded the detectives that they needed to alert the ME’s office that they had found human remains, following protocol that required this notification be done before the evidence was bagged and catalogued.

  “Since this was going to be a very high-profile case, we wanted to make sure everything was done right,” she recalled.

  In the thirty minutes it took for investigators to get approval to proceed from the ME’s pathologist on duty, Hinkes kept Amber’s precious skull in her hands for safekeeping until she could pack it up with the rest of the remains. She couldn’t even imagine what Amber’s parents must have been going through this past year, not knowing where their daughter was.

  “It’s okay,” she said to the skull, comforting Amber in the only way she knew how, by telling her that she was in safe hands now, with “the good guys.”

  “We’ve got you now,” she said. “You’re going to go home.”

  As she analyzed the piece of bone, she noted that none of the wisdom teeth had erupted yet, confirming that these were the bones of a teenager. She recognized some interesting, rather rare features—a swollen part of bone known as a mandibular torus in the lower jaw, and a corresponding palatine torus in the upper jaw, most often seen in African Americans or Native Americans. Hinkes wasn’t sure what to think because she knew Amber was white. She also noticed a pattern of irregular bones that came together in the skull, again common in Native Americans.

  Is this Amber? she wondered.

  Hinkes spent the rest of the night standing on the vista above, where they’d set up a tarp and a blue canvas tent, and stacked up some wooden pallets they’d found nearby, so she could sift through the buckets of dirt the investigators carried up. She poured the dirt into a screen, carefully shook it a little and manually searched for more remains and any trace that Gardner might have inadvertently left behind that could link him to Amber’s murder. Although she had found that duct tape, Gardner told detectives later that he hadn’t used any in his abduction of Amber Dubois, and they believed him.

  Knowing it was going to rain that weekend, the investigators stayed there until well after midnight before quitting for the night. The ME’s office said it was too late for anyone else to head up there, so Hinkes was directed to pack up the remains and bring them to headquarters. They were all fatigued, and Brown didn’t want all these people trampling the crime scene in the dark. The best thing to do, he said, would be to come back when they could see properly and go over the area inch by inch.

  The EPD had already collected Amber’s dental records, preparing for this day. Her last dentist had gone out of business, so the only records to which the investigators had access were six years old, when she still had most of her baby teeth. But Brugos, Brown and Benton didn’t want to tell Amber’s parents anything about their findings until they knew for sure that it was her. “It’s bad business,” Brown said. The family had already been through enough.

  Besides, the EPD and the city crew had not finished searching through Kit Carson Park, and even though Benton and Sergeant Don Parker were longtime friends, Benton had instructions to keep most everyone over there out of the loop.

  As Benton, Brown and Brugos discussed how to proceed, they all agreed that they didn’t even know yet if the remains they’d found at Pala were Amber’s. Benton mentioned that the searchers had found a plastic bag at Kit Carson, which looked as if animals had torn through it, similar to the bag the little girls had described with the hair floating in the creek.

  “We’ll keep searching at Kit Carson Park,” Benton said.

  They agreed that there were more killers out there than John Gardner, and it was also possible that either of these victims was someone else’s work.

  “If there are two [victims], why couldn’t there be three?” Brown agreed.

  Most of what Parker’s team had found at the park that day and night, when the effort stopped and picked up first thing Saturday morning, was a mass of animal bones. “This was due diligence,” Parker said, but “it was for nothing.”

  Weeks later, when Benton was finally allowed to tell Parker, he pleaded with him to repeat his discussion with Brown and Brugos to the SAR unit and explain that they honestly didn’t know if they had Amber’s remains. Gardner had told a reporter that the Kit Carson search was just a ruse to hide the fact that he was taking the detectives to the real grave site. Thinking that Gardner should get over himself, Benton wanted Parker and his team to know the truth.

  “Make sure you tell your people I’d never subject them to these kinds of conditions unless we absolutely had to,” he said. He never would have put the SAR through such a dangerous exercise in “hepatitis-type” waters just to create a ruse.

  Meanwhile, Amber’s family was getting restless. Benton had alerted Moe Dubois and Carrie McGonigle on Thursday night that they were going to start searching Kit Carson the next morning. He even gave them a briefing Friday at the park, being honest about his doubts they were going to find anything because the ME’s investigators had told him as much.

  “If there had been a body in there, we likely would have found it already,” he told them. “I don’t think it is there, but you never know. We have to search it.”

  While the Pala search wasn’t made public, the Kit Carson Park search was all over the news by six o’clock, Friday evening. Most everyone else was wondering, was that Amber in the creek or wasn’t it?

  Benton had just gotten home from Kit Carson that evening, and was thinking he could spend some time with his family, when he got Brown’s call to come up to Pala.

  Meanwhile, attorney Michael Popkins got a worried call from his co-counsel, Mel Epley, who had seen the news report televising the search at Kit Carson. Epley was worried that the media had found out about the secret trip to Pala. As they talked, Popkins searched online for a news article and was relieved to see that the media were nowhere near Pala.

  “That’s not where we were,” he told Epley as their worry turned to gratefulness for their good fortune with the media distraction. The search at Kit Carson hadn’t been planned, but it couldn’t have been timed more perfectly.

  “I thought it was an incredible benefit to us and took the focus off what we were doing,” Popkins said later. “It was a gift from God.”

  Because the investigators couldn’t compare the teeth found at the Pala site with Amber’s childhood X-rays of her baby teeth, they decided to fly a DNA sample from one of the molars to the DOJ lab in Sacramento, with the hope of getting an answer by Sunday or Monday. What no one expected, however, was that Rick Cardoza, the ME’s contract dentist, was able to identify Amber within twenty-four hours because of the unique features in her jaw that Hinkes had recognized, which were evident in both the childhood X-rays and the skull.

  Brown wanted to wait for the DNA test results to confirm that finding while they finished scouring the Pala site for remains and evidence, but he was overruled. “I thought we were going to get to sleep one day while we waited for the answers,” Brown joked.

  When Bonnie Dumanis got word that Amber Dubois had been identified, she was at the funeral for a CHP officer who had crashed on State Route 52 during his shift, an unfortunate accident that elevated the emotions for law enforcement personnel working this case.

  “My mind went to, ‘are there other bodies?’” she recalled.

  Lieutenant Benton had made an agreement with Moe and Carrie about how they wanted to be notified if Amber’s remains were found: they wanted to come in together to hear the news.

  So Benton and investigator Beverly Marquez, who had been working th
e case for the past year, each called one of the parents around eight o’clock on Saturday night and told them as little as possible.

  “Can you meet us down at the station?” they asked.

  After Moe and Carrie arrived, they sat in shock as they listened to medical examiner’s investigator Gretchen Geary break the news: they had found Amber’s remains.

  Carrie, who had been holding out hope that Amber was still alive, started shaking. “When they told me, it was a sense of relief. Closure. Denial,” she said.

  Understandably, after a year of wondering where their daughter had gone, Moe and Carrie wanted to know more. Sheriff’s sergeant Roy Frank apologized that he couldn’t tell them anything else. “We were led to this location,” he said. “I can’t give you details at this time.”

  As they continued to ask questions, Frank just kept repeating his statement. “This is a homicide investigation. We can’t release anything more at this point, but we will, when we can.”

  He did say, however, that they hadn’t finished gathering Amber’s remains, which was difficult for Moe and Carrie to hear.

  “Her entire body has not yet been recovered,” Moe told 48 Hours. “We don’t know if it’s because of wild animals or what. But we just know our whole baby has not been recovered yet.”

  Chapter 29

  It was cloudy that Sunday afternoon when EPD Chief Jim Maher called a press conference to announce that Amber Dubois’s remains had been found, thanks to “a tip.” Moe and Carrie stood at the podium, with tired red eyes, as if they had been up all night crying. Carrie refused interviews and said nothing. Moe simply thanked all the volunteers for their efforts over the past year.