by Ann Rule
It was eerie that her dream was keeping her alive—at least for the moment.
Even now, the California Highway Patrol troopers and sheriff’s deputies from several counties were spreading out looking for the Ford Granada. But they weren’t likely to find it; it was tucked away back in the brush near the broken-down farmhouse near the Sacramento River. Kari and her captors were in the sporty Thunderbird heading east once more—toward Reno.
Kari’s husband knew that the last time she was seen, she was captive, driving off with two strange and violent men, a knife held against her neck. Ben Lindholm knew that anything might have happened to his wife in the hours since 5:30 A.M. She could be hundreds of miles away, she could be injured, or—and he tried not to think about it—she could be dead. Ben called a close friend, a man who worked at the Solano County Probation Office, and asked him to check for any prior arrests of the man who had given his name as John Martin when he came into Sancho Panza. Ben now knew that Kari was with a sexual predator. Shelly had heard John threaten to kill Kari several times before they drove off with her.
As the morning passed with no word of Kari, it was very difficult to keep hoping for a happy outcome. Ben Lindholm could only sit by his phone waiting for it to ring. He had faith in Kari’s ability to handle emergencies, but this was one in which she was outnumbered and outweighed.
Detective Ray Van Eck of Solano County told him that the entire California police network was now alerted to watch for the Lindholms’ car and for Kari and her abductors. That only reminded Ben of how far away Kari might be by now.
“I knew I had to find some money for them,” Kari said. “John kept asking if there was a highway patrolman behind us. I had to do a considerable amount of reassuring with them, and tell them that, ‘No, there aren’t any highway patrolmen behind us, and we’re not going to see any. We’re in a whole different car now—we look just like anybody else on the freeway.’
“That seemed to relax them, and that was exactly what I was aiming for. I knew if I could get them to feel relaxed around me—and trust me—that I could make my escape when they least expected it.”
Kari planned her words very carefully, determined to make her captors believe that she was very much like them. She created a life story for herself as someone who had also had a rough childhood who was just trying to get by in an uncaring world.
“I had to make them think that I came from a background similar to theirs in order to develop bonds of trust. It made them nervous when I got upset, so I tried to display a positive air—assuring them that I would find a way to get them their three hundred dollars.”
Clearly, Mike and John didn’t draw much strength from one another. Kari realized she was succeeding in bolstering their egos. She could at least put temporary Band-Aids on them by telling them how she had risen above her miserable childhood.
“If I can do it,” she said, “you can, too!”
She wanted to seem very strong to them and still maintain her image as someone who had suffered, too.
She didn’t feel strong. It hadn’t yet been three hours since they left Sancho Panza, but it seemed like days had passed. Every nerve in her body was standing on end; she had believed she was on the edge of death many times as they stumbled around Sacramento, and that wasn’t a feeling that went away easily.
It was close to 9:00 A.M., and the thick commuter traffic was beginning to slack off. Now they planned to get off the freeway at Elkhorn Drive in the North Highlands section. She knew where there was an Albertson’s store, but she pointed out a Safeway, the first supermarket they came to. Once more, John, his knife tucked into his sleeve, walked Kari into a building. This time, she tried to cash her paycheck.
The clerk shook her head. They could not cash checks for any more than the amount of purchases. John turned on the charm while Kari darted her eyes around, looking for someplace she might run, but again, she found no shelter nearby. It would be foolhardy of her to try to run.
Finally, John picked up a twelve-pack of beer and some cigarettes. The clerk, responding to his compliments, grudgingly allowed Kari to write a check for twenty dollars over the amount on the sales slip.
Kari had her role down pat. No matter how frightened she was, she managed to smile and even laugh at John’s jokes so that he would think she was calm and had no intention of bailing on them. But this didn’t give her a chance to signal anyone with her eyes, and she had no way to write a note to leave behind.
They hurried back to the Thunderbird, and drove on the surface street until they came to the Albertson’s store. Once again, the clerk shook her head. Kari’s check-cashing card was for the Fairfield-area stores, and there was no manager on duty to OK handing out over three hundred dollars. Kari nodded and kept her face calm, but she wondered how she could be having so much bad luck. Inside, she felt like screaming.
“So,” John said when they were back in the Thunder-bird, “what’s your next plan for getting our money?”
Kari thought fast. “I have some friends who live in North Highlands—not far from here. They keep money in a safe in their house. They might cash my check.”
“Let’s go,” John said. “Maybe we should drive by their house and see if they’re home.”
There was a car in the driveway, but John said he wanted to be cautious. “We’ll go to a pay phone,” he said. “You call them up, and tell them you have car trouble and you need some cash to pay for the repair job.”
Kari did as she was told, but she felt completely hopeless as her friends’ phone rang a dozen or more times and no one answered. It seemed as if the whole world was turning its back on her.
Only yesterday, Kari Lindholm had been happy and secure. She and Ben had their problems, of course—all couples did. Both of them were bitterly disappointed that she hadn’t become pregnant yet. They wanted a baby so much. They didn’t have a lot of money—but neither did anyone else in their social circle. That wasn’t a top priority on their list of where happiness lay.
Mike and John were swigging down the beer she had paid for at the Safeway store, and getting more unstable with every bottle. They hadn’t made a lot of sense when they were sober, and now Kari wondered if their inhibitions would disappear and all her efforts to reason with them wouldn’t count for anything.
She should have been home by now. Surely, her husband would have called Sancho Panza to see why she was late. She prayed that someone was looking for her. And then she felt a new kind of panic. What if they did encounter the deputies or the highway patrol? Would there be a car chase—bullets fired into the car she was in? She knew John and Mike wouldn’t hesitate to push her out of a moving car if they had to save themselves.
It seemed as if whatever was going to happen, she might not see the end of this day.
The “getaway” was proving to be one of the most inefficient escapes in California’s criminal history. With all their turns, returns, missed freeways, and stops, in four hours they had logged less than fifty miles toward Reno. Mike had now decided to head to Auburn, northeast of Sacramento on U.S. 80. Both men were growing more insistent that Kari get them their three hundred dollars—or else.
Kari knew there was one last person she could ask for money. Her mother. She told her captors that she would ask her mother to wire three hundred dollars to the Western Union Office in Auburn.
“We can just pick it up there,” she promised. “Within fifteen minutes of when she sends it.”
Kari knew her mother would be able to hear tension in her voice, but she couldn’t think of any way to tell her what was really happening. She would have to think of some code phrase that might work. John and his knife would be right there next to her, and he was likely to listen in to the conversation.
They pulled in beside an outside pay telephone booth in the North Highlands area of Sacramento. John walked Kari into the booth, holding his sleeved arm against her back. She felt the unyielding surface of the long knife blade there as it pressed against her. If she m
ade a mistake, she could be dead within a few minutes, her life’s blood gushing from her lungs or heart.
She tried to keep her voice steady as her mother answered her phone. She wondered what Kari was doing— knowing that at this time of morning, shortly after nine, she was usually sleeping after working all night.
“I’m on the road, Mom,” Kari said. “And my car broke down. Could you wire me three hundred dollars?”
“Well... yes, I think so. What’s wrong with your car?”
“I don’t know for sure—but it will take three hundred dollars, and I don’t have the right credit cards with me—”
“Are you OK? You sound kind of funny—”
“I’m fine, just tired.”
“Where’s Ben?”
“He’s at work.”
“And you’re by yourself?”
“Sort of— Can you wire me the money?”
There was a long pause, and then Kari’s mother asked, “How do I send it?”
“Just call Western Union, and you can put it on your credit card. I’ll pick it up in Auburn at their office there. Send it to Kari Rowe. . .”
“Your maiden name? Why?”
“No reason.”
“But—what are you doing in Auburn?”
“I’ve gotta go now.”
John had been about to grab the phone away from her, and Kari didn’t want him asking her why she’d told her mother a different name. Kari hoped against hope that her mother would put two and two together, and know that her using her maiden name—when she never did—was a code. At least her mother knew now the general area where she was. It sounded as though her kidnapping still hadn’t been reported. Her mother certainly didn’t know about it.
Where was everybody? Were they really just waiting around for her to call back at two? She desperately needed them to call the police. At this point, Kari was willing to risk a police chase, and even a shoot-out. John and Mike were getting drunker and drunker.
Ben Lindholm’s phone rang, and it was his mother-in-law. She had immediately picked up that something was wrong, but she’d come to the wrong conclusion. She thought that he and Kari had had an argument or something.
“Kari just called me from a phone booth someplace, and her car’s broken down,” Mary Rowe said. “Are you two having trouble? Did you break up? What is going on?”
Ben tried to convince her that everything was fine, but she grew more concerned, convinced that something was very wrong.
“Kari sounded breathless and nervous,” Mary Rowe said. “And she talked so fast. I know that something’s wrong and I want you to tell me. She asked me to wire her three hundred dollars. Why didn’t she call you?”
Ben Lindholm sighed. Now he had to tell Mary the truth—that her daughter was missing. “Kari’s been kidnapped,” he said. Mary drew her breath in sharply.
“What can I do?” she asked.
“Send the money,” he said. “If she’s going to be in Auburn, I’ll alert the police there. I’ll have the detective in charge call you. At least we know where she is. And that she’s alive.”
Ray Van Eck called Kari’s mother and explained what had happened, trying to reassure her that there were dozens of police officers looking for Kari.
“We know where she’s headed now, and we’ll find her. If she calls back, just go along with whatever she says.”
“Why—?”
“We think that one of the men with her is listening in on her calls.”
It was a terrible thing for a mother to hear, and all the assurances in the world didn’t make Mary Rowe feel better. Van Eck promised to call her the moment they had any news at all. In the meantime, he asked her to wire the money to Kari.
Now Ray Van Eck had an alert sent out notifying CHP officers and city and county patrol officers to surveil Interstate 80 from south of Auburn to Reno, and Highway 50 from Sacramento to Lake Tahoe as well as Highways 49 and 89. In addition to California law enforcement officers, Douglas and Washoe counties in Nevada were placed on alert for Kari and the men who had her. Van Eck also arranged to work with Douglas County, Nevada, and the Casino Security network.
“Kari Lindholm has her paycheck with her and she may attempt to cash it,” Van Eck said. “The most likely place to have that much money on hand would probably be a casino. And the suspects talked repeatedly about ‘going gambling’ so we expect them to show up at one of the casinos.”
Van Eck called the Western Union Office in Auburn, and the phone rang until an answering machine came on and said it was closed. Next, he talked with detectives in the Auburn Police Department and asked them to locate the owner or operator so that the facility would be open as soon as possible. “We want the money drop to be completed under controlled circumstances,” Van Eck said.
Ray Van Eck talked to the counselors at Sancho Panza, trying to get more of a handle on what kind of men they were dealing with. He spoke with the social worker named Matteo* who John Martin had specifically asked for.
“I know him,” Matteo said. “He often came to Sancho Panza as a drop-in client or just to visit so he could talk with me. I established some rapport with him while he was a residential patient.”
“Do you know who the other man with him might be?”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t. I left Sancho Panza last May to help run the Horizon House in Vallejo. I haven’t seen John since that time.”
John Martin’s file held the names of many people he had allegedly been associated with, but most of them turned out to be fictitious. The only “real” people in his file were his mother and an ex-girlfriend. Otherwise, he had either made up people or concocted fake names for those who came up in his therapy. He had served time in prison at Vacaville, and been arrested for rape since his parole. Counselors who had worked with him noted the rape he was arrested for during the previous May. They said he respected his mother but hated his father, who he claimed had brutalized him. He was totally unpredictable, but clever and charismatic when he wanted to be.
Kari had certainly seen that. Now, in her fifth hour of captivity, she could see that both John and Mike were on the verge of being intoxicated. They vacillated between telling her that they weren’t going to hurt her to hinting darkly about how close she had come. “If you had been hysterical and tried to fight us,” John said, “we probably would have killed you.
“We still might.”
Still, they were headed toward Auburn and she felt she was very close to freedom. Something had to happen at Western Union. John and Mike, their tongues loosened by alcohol, appeared to have another change of heart. Now they apologized to Kari for kidnapping her, for the rape, and for scaring her.
“Maybe we should go back to Fairfield,” John offered. “We can drive you back and surrender.”
“Let’s go,” Kari said. “Let’s do it now.”
John smirked slyly. “No. I’m not that stupid. I’m not going back.”
John had been playing head games. Kari made up her mind that she would seize the first possible chance to escape. She couldn’t trust him at all. But he and Mike were growing sloppy and careless. The more they trusted her, the more lax they would become. She would pick her place to run. She felt she had nothing to lose.
They were driving into Auburn, but they made no effort to stop at Western Union, and kept right on going.
Kari’s stomach flipped over.
John said he had to go to the bathroom and Kari said she did, too. They pulled into a Shell station, and John warned her, “Don’t you try to split,” as he went into the men’s side. She had every intention of doing just that, but she could find no way out of the women’s restroom other than the door, and one of the men stood outside all the time.
Police were already stationed all around the Western Union Office, watching for a car with two men and a woman in it.
Now Mike came up with another crazy plan. His grip on reality had weakened as he drank beer after beer. He wanted to go to the North San Juan area to find h
is mother. “She put a hex on me,” he told Kari. “If I take you to see her and tell her that you’re my wife, she’ll just die to see I’m married and that will take the hex off me.”
“We’ll make it a picnic,” John said cheerfully.
Kari almost gave up. Instead of heading toward Reno, they were turning north toward Grass Valley. The area was sparsely populated, and she knew she would have less chance to escape with every mile.
“She lives in North San Juan,” Mike said. “We’ll go there and surprise her, and then we can go back and get the money in Auburn.”
They stopped at the S&C Market in the little town to buy bread and bologna and more beer. John went to the bathroom again, and Mike stayed with Kari.
But Mike didn’t have any money to pay for the groceries and he looked angry. John had kept it all in his pocket. They had to wait until he came back. Mike got fidgety whenever John was out of sight.
Kari didn’t try to run. There was only one woman behind the counter, and she didn’t look strong enough to be any protection. Mike drove up Highway 49, and slowed down to study the mailboxes alongside a dirt road. Kari saw he was looking at one that said something like “Hostead” on it.
“If we show up and she just looks at us, she’ll fall down dead,” Mike said grimly. “She’ll see you and fall down dead...”
Kari hoped that he didn’t mean that literally.
But his mother wasn’t home. “We’ll come back after we eat,” Mike said.
They went a few miles farther and pulled into the Oregon Creek Campground just beyond the Nevada County/Yuba County line. They parked in an almost deserted part of the campground near the Yuba River, and Kari made sandwiches for them.
She had been with them for almost eight hours on a meandering, aimless journey. Before long it would be 2:00 P.M., and she didn’t think she would be calling to let her husband and her coworkers back in Fairfield know that she was safe at that deadline. She wasn’t safe—not at all.