by Robert Scott
Commenting on the array of supposed sightings and tips in the South Lake Tahoe area alone, Roth said, “There’s literally been hundreds of them!” They were, in effect, swamping the investigators as the days went by, and many of the tips went unread simply because there were not enough officers to read them all and still have a large force out in the field.
Not that law enforcement was dismissing any of the tips or supposed sightings at present. All of the tips had to be looked at, no matter how far off-base they might seem. Special Agent Albert Robinson, the lead FBI agent on the case, asked the public to think back a week or two and try to remember any suspicious activity around their children. Robinson said, “Even though it may seem trivial, it may fit into the puzzle.”
Hikers, backpackers, mountain bikers, and horsemen were all asked to keep an eye out as they traveled through the backcountry around Tahoe. And there was a lot of backcountry; some of it wilderness with no permanent human habitation at all. Even an older sedan could make it up many of the dirt roads that snaked off into the trees and mountains. And there were also hundreds, if not thousands, of summer cabins that were generally not occupied that early in the season. A cabin could easily be broken into by the kidnappers, and no one would know if they and the girl were there.
Four days after the abduction, another very promising lead surfaced. Someone near Fallen Leaf Lake, an area about ten miles northwest of South Lake Tahoe, remembered spotting a vehicle matching the kidnappers’ car around 3:30 P.M. on June 10. The vehicle had been around Fallen Leaf Lake, an area with lots of summer cabins and a public campground. The sedan had been driven by a man, with a woman passenger, and there had been a young girl asleep on the backseat. The girl had blond hair and had been wearing pink clothing, according to the person who had spotted the vehicle.
The public campground was scoured by officers and so were the summer cabins. Later, there was a report that officers had entered one cabin with guns drawn. If so, that incident was just as fruitless as all the others. Neither Jaycee nor the car was discovered there.
America’s Most Wanted filmed Carl Probyn in the garage of his house and then Jaycee’s bedroom. Terry was in the bedroom surrounded by Jaycee’s teddy bears and stuffed animals. There was also footage of Jaycee at her recent eleventh birthday party that depicted Jaycee blowing out the candles on her cake.
Carl told a Daily Tahoe Tribune reporter about the kidnapping: “My first reaction was to think somebody was playing a joke. When I saw the door fly open, I immediately jumped on the bike. It hasn’t been fun.” Carl, who was a veteran, added, “I think I’d rather be in Vietnam.”
The Tahoe Daily Tribune noted that on Saturday, June 15, the focus had shifted in law enforcement. They were scaling back on roadblocks, house-to-house searches, and car searches; instead, they took to sitting at their desks and going through the immense piles of tips that had come in. By now, there were over one hundred officers from various agencies working on the case. Sheriff McDonald told the reporters that the investigators’ focus now was getting the facts down on paper, organizing data, and “ensuring nothing has slipped through the cracks.”
One very important fact noted by the Tribune that day was that law enforcement believed there are no indications the kidnappers have left the Tahoe Basin and investigators believe their best chances of recovering the girl is by concentrating efforts locally.
Then in one short sentence, the Tribune added a caveat: Still, the abductors may have escaped the area undetected.
By now, more than ten thousand posters of the missing girl, dark-haired woman, and suspects’ vehicle blanketed the area. Child Quest International director Trish Williams related that the posters were being distributed to gas stations, fast-food restaurants, convenience stores, rest areas, campgrounds, and bus stations. Trish added, “The kidnappers could have ditched their car and taken her someplace.” Trish also said that Child Quest’s responsibility was spreading the information out as far as possible, while law enforcement’s focus was on all the leads and tips that had come in.
Trish added that her first duty had been to get to know Terry Probyn and the family. “I talk to Terry quietly, and get as much information as possible to aid the authorities in the search.” And Trish related that one good thing was that Carl Probyn had seen the abduction vehicle and the woman kidnapper. Trish told a reporter for the Reno Gazette-Journal, “We’ve got a lot more to go on than in many cases, and that makes me hopeful.”
Greg Mengell, of Sacramento’s Interstate Association for Stolen Children, was also monitoring the situation in Lake Tahoe. Mengell said, “I think the family is really fortunate to have the FBI working on the case. I think there is a good chance we can find her and bring her back. We’ve found kids that have been gone a year, a year and a half; that were assumed to be victims of murder. She could be home tonight or be home a year from now. Or never.”
The prospect of “never” was addressed by the Reno Gazette-Journal. It ran an article about Elizabeth Ackerman, whose ten-year-old son, Anthony, had been kidnapped while walking from a school bus stop to his home. This had happened in Lemmon Valley, Nevada, and Elizabeth hadn’t seen Anthony in ten years.
When Elizabeth heard people declaring on the news, “I know how Terry Probyn feels,” Elizabeth said, “No, they don’t! Only a few can say that.” Since Anthony’s abduction, she had cared for his two dozen prized 4-H rabbits for years; then worn out by the task, she gave them all away to friends. Her husband became an alcoholic, and eventually he and Elizabeth divorced. She moved to rural Fallon, Nevada, about eighty miles east of Lake Tahoe, and started a ranch. Elizabeth spoke of starting over with a new life, with a horse, chickens, and geese. But still, the pain of her loss persisted. Elizabeth related, “Peace of mind? No, I have none. Not until I find his body or he walks back into my life. Tell Terry (Probyn) to push the authorities. Don’t give up hope. Don’t give up.”
One of the best leads the detectives had so far on Jaycee Dugard’s case turned out to be just another dead end. It was the tip about the dark-haired woman who had been in contact with a woman’s young blond daughter a week before Jaycee’s kidnapping. This woman turned out to be a Good Samaritan. Sheriff McDonald said that his office and the FBI determined that the dark-haired woman in that incident had seen the young blond girl alone outside the Beverly Lodge, near busy Highway 50, in early June. The woman on her own initiative took the child to the motel office, where she found the mother inside. After handing the child over to her mother, the woman quickly left. Detectives were able to determine that this dark-haired woman was in no way connected to the disappearance of Jaycee Lee Dugard.
On a different subject, FBI agent Robert Mahoney told a reporter that hypnosis had been used on some individuals who had “witnessed” the kidnapping. This seemed to indicate Carl Probyn, but who else might have been hypnotized remained a mystery. Mahoney added that a few more bits of useful information were gathered by this technique. But none of it was important enough to crack the case wide open.
A short time later, Sheriff McDonald related that some self-proclaimed psychics were also contacting authorities. As to this, McDonald stated, “Law enforcement is taking these tips seriously when they are specific enough to be useful.” Unfortunately, the amount of information from psychics that was not useful was staggering. And like all the tips, each bit of information took time to separate the wheat from the chaff.
By the end of the first week since the abduction, Sheriff McDonald spoke of the frustration surrounding the case. Even with a good description of the female abductor and the kidnappers’ car, there were still no solid leads as to where they were or where Jaycee had been taken. And McDonald noted that the segment on America’s Most Wanted had not brought in the amount of tips that were expected. He wondered if this was in light of the possibility that the kidnappers were still in the Lake Tahoe area. They couldn’t exactly be sighted elsewhere if they had never left the Tahoe Basin.
Sheriff McDonald
also said that sex offenders in the Tahoe area were being talked to, and their files reviewed. Then he added that detectives wanted one tipster in particular to call them back. This man had spoken so rapidly on the phone during his first call that he couldn’t be understood. The man had even called in a second time, but his speech was just as rushed and incoherent. Why this particular man might have useful information was not divulged by McDonald.
Meanwhile, the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit was working up a profile of the abductors. FBI supervisory specialist George Vinson told reporters, “We’ve still got a full court press in place. It’s turning into a complex investigation, because we lack new sightings and eyewitnesses.” What he meant by that was, after the first good witnessing by Carl Probyn of the actual kidnapping of Jaycee Lee Dugard, there had not been one new sighting that was valid. It seemed that they were as far away from solving the case as they had been one hour after it had occurred.
Just how hard investigators had been working for a full week could be gauged by the work log of one El Dorado Sheriff’s Office sergeant. In the last seven days, he had worked from twelve to sixteen hours every day on the case. Undersheriff Jim Roth related, “It’s kind of like putting a puzzle together and trying to figure out just how the little pieces fit together, and not learning how the big picture looks.”
After a week’s duration, the community response in the Tahoe area was still extremely strong, and fifty thousand posters about the case had been run off copy machines and distributed, along with five thousand of them in Spanish. Local businesses raffled off goods and services to raise money for the Tip Line and to give to Jaycee’s family. Radio station KRLT aired three hours of programming in relation to the raffle, trying to drum up even more business. The plight of the Probyns was on many people’s minds in the region, and conversations about the missing girl filled restaurants, coffee shops, taverns, and casinos.
Consciousness about the missing girl spread out in other ways as well. The EDSO set up a location where parents could have their children fingerprinted for free. If the child was ever abducted, there would be prints on file to help in the search. Apparently, Jaycee Lee did not have her fingerprints on file.
On another front, school psychiatrist Dr. Dianne Salzenstein met with classmates of Jaycee to listen to their concerns. Dr. Salzenstein said that one of the main themes coming from the children was: “We thought Tahoe was a safe place.” She tried to reassure the children that Jaycee’s kidnapping was an isolated incident and that their parents would keep them safe. She also emphasized that if their parents went with them to a school bus stop, it didn’t make them “babyish.”
Dr. Salzenstein added, “For many of them, Jaycee was part of their daily lives. Her empty desk is still there. One student told me, ‘We keep thinking she’s going to show up.’”
Fourth grader Jordan Werley told a reporter, “Right now, we don’t have any clues. If we got more clues, we can find Jaycee.”
Another fourth grader, Lindsay Daugherty, related, “I’m kind of scared. I hope she’s okay.”
And one of Jaycee’s fifth-grade classmates, Trevor Lewis, stated, “We’re trying to make it the best we can now.” In fact, Trevor and other boys had been making missing posters about Jaycee’s disappearance even before the official missing posters came out.
In a show of solidarity and remembrance of Jaycee, schoolkids at Meyers Elementary School tied pink ribbons to a chain-link fence around the school grounds. Pink was Jaycee’s favorite color. The schoolchildren also created handmade signs that expressed their hopes that Jaycee would soon be found, and tied pink ribbons to car antennas.
Adding a chill to the atmosphere in Lake Tahoe was a recent article in the Daily Tribune about a kidnapped nine-year-old girl in Chula Vista, California. The girl had been snatched right out of her front yard in broad daylight. A few days later, the girl’s body was discovered in an industrial park. Although no one was saying it out loud, the thought in many people’s minds was that Jaycee Lee Dugard might have suffered a similar fate.
CHAPTER 4
DWINDLING LEADS
In the second week after the abduction, EDSO undersheriff Jim Roth admitted something very important. He said, “Looking back [at the initial hours after the kidnapping] , if we were to do it again, we might have done things differently. I’m sure we would.”
He was addressing the fact that many people wondered why roadblocks had not been set up immediately on the main roads leading out of the Tahoe Basin. There were, after all, very few main roads that led out of the South Lake Tahoe area. Highway 50 went basically east and west, and Highway 89 went north and south.
Roth did go on to say that even though the main roads hadn’t been sealed off immediately, there were patrol cars alongside the roads, with instructions to the officers to be on the lookout for the reported gray sedan. Roth added that roadblocks might have backfired. He said, “It would have created such large traffic jams that it would have been easy for the abductors to turn around and avoid them.” He stressed it was better for hidden patrol cars to monitor the traffic on the main roads, rather than having roadblocks.
On top of this, Roth noted that there were other smaller roads out of the basin as well. For instance, by using the Pioneer Trail eastward, a vehicle could use side streets around the casino area bottleneck and eventually make its way up over the Kingsbury Grade into Nevada. From there, a person could go any numbers of ways across Nevada or back into California. In fact, in the first vital minutes, the abductors might have already been past the areas where law enforcement vehicles were stationed.
The news spread across the country about the missing girl, and People magazine ran an article on the abduction. Much of it focused on Terry and Carl Probyn and how they were coping. In fact, in the first few days after the abduction, Terry had barely been coping at all. She admitted, “I went into a dark hole of drunkenness, tears, and heavy troubled sleep. I couldn’t function. I was walking the floors, ranting and raving, thinking the worst.”
It didn’t help matters that often, irrationally, Terry lashed out at Carl, asking why he hadn’t done more in the first few minutes after seeing the abduction occur. On one level, Terry knew that he had done all that he could have done by pedaling his bike after the sedan, and then calling 911 within two minutes of the kidnapping. But still, her emotions were running so strong, they overcame rational thought.
Making matters worse, the investigators were asking Carl many of the same questions, knowing the majority of kidnappings are family related. At one point, an investigator asked Carl, “Did you ever wish Jaycee wasn’t here?” This question came during one of the two polygraph tests that Carl took and passed. Carl admitted later that he had replied to the investigator’s question, “Sure, there were times I wished Jaycee wasn’t in our life. I think every parent has wished that about their kids.” And, of course, with Carl, part of it was that Jaycee took a protracted period of time in accepting him into the life she had shared alone with her mother for so long.
Eventually authorities agreed that Carl had nothing to do with Jaycee’s abduction. EDSO sergeant Jim Watson said, “We’re 99.9 percent sure this is not a family abduction.”
Even Terry came around to the notion that she and Carl had to work together as a team if they were ever going to see Jaycee again. Terry told the reporter for People, “One Sunday I was by myself, and suddenly I just got this inner strength to quit crying and get on with it.” The “getting on with it” included distributing thousands upon thousands of posters that detailed Jaycee, the car, and the dark-haired woman.
Possible sightings were still coming in from every point of the compass, and Terry let it be known that some of them were disturbing and frightening. She got multiple tips about Satanists who had kidnapped her daughter to use in horrifying rituals. Another tip was from a woman who “felt” that Jaycee was in a car trunk at one of the local casinos in Stateline. Terry and Carl went to the casino parking lots and pounded on the trunks
of vehicles that even remotely matched the abductors’ car.
One new lead swerved back to the fact that Carl had thought the woman abductor might have been of Middle Eastern descent. In the week before the abduction, the Probyns had been working at an art fair in the Tahoe area. Some people who had been at the art fair remembered a woman matching the description as being there. And Terry related to People that Jaycee Lee had been troubled on the night before she was taken. Now Terry wondered if Jaycee had wanted to talk about the dark-haired woman at the art fair and her concerns. Had the woman made Jaycee feel uneasy? Had the woman spoken with Jaycee there? These were just more questions that Terry could not answer.
In a strange way, the dark-haired woman at the art fair was somehow comforting to Terry. It raised the possibility that the dark-haired woman had lost a child at some point and had stolen Jaycee to replace her own child. If that was the case, it might mean that Jaycee had not been taken to be sexually exploited and then murdered. Terry said, “Maybe she (the dark-haired woman) took Jaycee because of her grief. If that’s true, all I can say is, ‘Please let my child go!’”
While talking to the reporter for People, Terry sat in Jaycee’s room. The walls were covered with family photos, and there were stuffed animals everywhere. Terry admitted that she often looked out the window, up toward the bus stop on the Pioneer Trail. She daydreamed that Jaycee would come walking down the road from the bus stop, and all of this was a nightmare that would end.