Shattered Innocence

by Robert Scott

  Dublin police lieutenant Kurt von Savoye was also there, and at the press conference, he told the gathered media, “We are attempting to locate any possible evidence that connects the Garridos to Ilene Misheloff. We have a sedan [that] is similar in description to what a witness observed Ilene getting into on the day she went missing.”

  On January 30, 1989, thirteen-year-old Ilene Misheloff had been walking home from Wells Middle School to her skating practice. It was 3:00 P.M. and she was to meet her ice-skating coach at the woman’s home on Alegre Drive in Dublin. Misheloff’s usual route took her from the school, down Amador Valley Boulevard, toward Mape Park. Someone saw her pass the Fosters Freeze around 3:10 P.M. Then she moved off toward a ditch that ran along the edge of Mape Park, out of the witness’s line of sight. Somewhere in the maze of ditches, she passed out of sight and simply disappeared.

  By 6:00 P.M., Ilene Misheloff’s mother was frantic and phoned the Dublin Police Department. It was not like Ilene to miss an appointment and not tell anyone where she was. There was little hesitation between the phone call and response. Michaela Garecht, who had been kidnapped in nearby Hayward, was still very fresh in all local police departments’ minds. Before long, Dublin patrol units were enhanced by units from the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office (ACSO). Officers spread out, in patrol cars and on foot, to look for the missing girl. And as in the Jaycee Lee Dugard case, two years later, mounted sheriff’s patrol set off on horseback to scour the hills behind Dublin.

  Ilene Misheloff’s father, just like Ilene’s mother, was frantic with worry. He soon told a Tri-Valley Herald reporter, “I searched the creek behind the house. I kept it up until the batteries in the flashlight were completely discharged. I was just frantic afterward and it’s been a long, frightening night.”

  There were many more long, frightening nights to follow. As in Michaela Garecht’s case, all the leads and tips went nowhere. Months turned into years, and by 2009, Ilene Misheloff still had not been found.

  Regarding the present search of the Garrido and Damon Robinson properties, Detective von Savoye said, “It’s a very large piece of property. There are a lot of things on the property to go through. It is equivalent to looking for evidence in a landfill.”

  Asked if the Garridos were “suspects” in the case, von Savoye replied, “We’ve not been able to eliminate them as suspects.”

  Soon Michaela Garecht’s mother, Sharon, was on the scene. She couldn’t stay away with even the slim possibility of Michaela being found alive. Sharon related, “If my daughter comes home, she will be able to see in so many places that we love her. We’ve been looking for her so many years now, and she’ll be able to see on my Web page, on my blog, very clearly that we never stopped loving her.”

  Michaela’s father, Rod, couldn’t stand going to Walnut Avenue, however. Instead, he contacted a reporter and said, “I have a hard time putting it into words. I’d like closure one way or the other. Whether my daughter is dead or alive, whether he did it or not, at least this is getting publicity out on my daughter’s case.”

  The next day, the search on the properties was just as intense, if not more so. Reporters watched a stream of investigators coming and going from the two properties as they sought any shade they could find on a very hot day. Some reporters spent the time between press conferences talking to the Garridos’ neighbors who were still willing to talk to them. By this point, there were many on Walnut Avenue who only wanted the media circus and police presence to end.

  At least this time, there was not a stream of curious sightseers going up and down the street. No one got onto Walnut Avenue from Viera Lane without a press pass, law enforcement identification, or proof that they lived on Walnut Avenue. Every press conference, usually two per day, brought a throng of reporters to the edge of the yellow tape that sealed them off from the Garrido home and Robinson property. And a great deal of their interest focused on scent dogs, which had been brought in by the ACSO. Reporters watched from a distance as a cadaver dog and a “bone-sniffing dog” went up and down and all through the Garridos’ yard and Damon Robinson’s yard. ACSO spokesman J. D. Nelson told reporters, “Each dog works independently of the other. The first dog gave some tentative indications at one spot. The second dog indicated there very quickly. It showed interest there almost immediately, and was forceful.” Sergeant Nelson said that particular location would soon be searched more thoroughly by investigators.

  Other activity that day included the tearing down of a shed and the hauling away of one truckload of debris from the property after another. Lieutenant Chris Orrey related, “There are concrete slabs on both properties and they have been randomly placed. They have piqued our interest.” And Lieutenant Kurt von Savoye added that his department had received dozens of new leads from people about Ilene Misheloff’s disappearance since all the work began on Walnut Avenue.

  One of the main points of interest for the media that day were photos taken by the Contra Costa County Building Inspection Department (CCCBID). In fact, CCCBID had taken 102 images of inside the Garrido home, and the photos revealed the incredible clutter inside the house. In some rooms, it barely seemed possible that a person could move around amidst all the piles of stuff. There were dishes stacked alongside a sink, piles of boxes everywhere, mattresses and magazines and unidentifiable clutter. Almost every chair and couch had items stacked upon them. A can of pinto beans, a jar of peanut butter, and a box of crackers were placed on a microwave oven stand.

  In one room, a projection screen dominated one wall, and above a computer was a sign taped to a wall proclaiming: FAITH and TRUTH. There was a photograph of Phil and Nancy in their younger years stacked against the leg of a table, surrounded by incredible clutter. This appeared to be the photo of Phil and Nancy when they got married in Leavenworth Penitentiary. And there was a painting on one wall of a young blond girl. To many, it seemed like an idealized rendition of what Jaycee might have looked like at one time.

  Outside in the backyard, there were more piles of boxes and scatterd items, which included a child’s bicycle, a plastic white toilet, Barbie dolls, and a stuffed panda. Electrical wires snaked across the backyard and over the tall wooden fence to the secret compound beyond. So did a garden hose, amidst tall grass, weeds, and abandoned piles of junk.

  The building inspectors wrote up a list of violations on the property: Hazardous wiring used for occupancy, piles of garbage, refuse, discarded furniture, discarded appliances, yard cuttings, cardboard boxes and barrels, improperly stored non-operational vehicles parts, tarps, plastic and metal buckets, open septic hole and outside toilet that is not connected to a sewer or septic system. The building inspectors slapped an UNINHABITABLE red tag on the front of the house.

  Meanwhile, investigators kept hauling more and more trash out of the house and yard. Lieutenant Orrey said that ten truckloads of debris and items had been taken out in one day, after everything was looked at carefully for evidentiary value. Late in the day, Lieutenant Orrey added that the search in the interior of the Garrido home was finished, but there was still plenty to be looked for on the Garrido property and next door.

  On Friday, September 18, several concrete slabs were removed from the properties. Lieutenant Orrey told reporters that as far as the Garrido house went, “We know that we may have to pull down some sheetrock and pull up some flooring. But we will probably not be tearing the entire house down.” And Lieutenant von Savoye said that on Ilene Misheloff’s case, “We found several items that we’d like to examine. At this point, we’re unable to determine if they are directly related or not.”

  Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) equipment was brought in by forensic archaeologist Bill A. Silva, of BA Silva Sensing Systems. He and his crew began running the equipment over the yards, especially where the scent dogs had indicated anomalies. After working with his crews, Silva later told reporters on the street, “We did pick up an anomaly that’s denser than the surrounding soil. I know that the land was an almond orchard many ye
ars ago, and what the radar was picking up could be the remains of trees.”

  Lieutenant Orrey also cautioned about the anomalies in the ground. She related, “Obviously they are of interest to us, but it could be nothing. There’s a lot of things it could possibly be.” And then Orrey said that another bone had been found on the Garrido property, but it was too early to tell if it was human or animal.

  CHAPTER 30

  “MY HOPE IS STILL ALIVE.”

  Of course, one of the people most interested and concerned about the bones was Michaela Garecht’s mother, Sharon. She said at a press conference on Walnut Avenue, “As much as I hope, as much as I believe, I do realize . . .” Then her voice trailed off. When she began again, Sharon said, “For her to be found alive and come home would be so good. It would be too good to be true.” Sharon also said that it alarmed her that Michaela might have been killed recently enough so that a cadaver dog could have picked up her scent. “I guess I always thought that if Michaela had died, it would have happened soon after she was taken. She would’ve spent the last twenty years in peace.”

  Peace of mind was hard for anyone to get on the Michaela Garecht case, and that included her friend Katrina “Trina” Rodriguez. Katrina, of course, had been at the store with Michaela on November 19, 1988, and witnessed Michaela being kidnapped. Even now the memory was still raw and painful for Katrina. She told a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, “I looked up when I heard her scream. I saw a man putting her into his car. She was still screaming. I just stood there and watched, frozen and in shock.”

  Katrina was now also on Walnut Avenue, watching all the investigators’ activity. She said that she had looked at photos of Phil Garrido from that era, and said there was a similarity to the man she had seen kidnapping her friend Michaela. Katrina related, “Michaela’s abductor was tall and slender, like Garrido. He drove a car that was similar in shape, though different in color. I really thought that of all the pictures I’ve seen, at least recently, he looks more like the kidnapper than anyone else. I think there’s good cause to look at him as a suspect.”

  Katrina spoke to the reporter about how the kidnapping had made a major impact on her life. Her parents stopped allowing her to be home alone as a child in the afternoon, instead putting her into after-school care. Three years later, her parents divorced, in part from the trauma in the wake of the kidnapping. Katrina eventually became a youth minister at a church, to try and help children with problems. She said that she couldn’t watch any movies about kidnappings or psychopaths. She was very emotional all the time, and cried easily. “All of this made me grow up faster, and left a hole in my heart. I feel so sad that Michaela hasn’t had the experiences I’ve been able to have. I was able to go to college, get married, have kids, have a normal life. I’m always going to be more overprotective than other moms, and a little more afraid of the dark. But compared to what Michaela had, I’m blessed.”

  The parents of Ilene Misheloff were also very interested in all the activity of investigators on Walnut Avenue. About Jaycee, Ilene’s father, Mike, said, “It just goes to show that good things can happen. Miracles do happen.” And Mike pointed out a report by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. “About sixty percent of the children who are abducted the way Jaycee, Ilene, and Michaela were—stereotypical kidnappings by strangers who do not plan to return them—are found alive.” These were scenarios where kidnappers planned to raise the children as their own, not to murder them right away. Of course, this was using a premise that Michaela Garecht and Ilene Misheloff fell into the same category as Jaycee Dugard.

  Not only debris was removed from the Garrido property, but a number of animals were taken away as well. These included five shorthair cats, a Labrador mix, a Rottweiler mix, three cockatiels, a pigeon, and a mouse. All of the animals had been part of Jaycee, Angel, and Starlit’s lives. Animal services lieutenant Nancy Anderson said that all the animals were in good health. “They are doing really well. Really friendly and well-taken care of. The cats are really sweet.”

  And Anderson said that Jaycee and her daughters would like to have the animals back. For Jaycee’s daughters, especially, it would help link them to a life they were used to and lessen the impact of being uprooted. For the daughters, the backyard compound was the only life they had ever known.

  By now, there were seventy law enforcement investigators going over the two properties. More ground was being cleared to help scent dogs when they returned for another round of sniffing for evidence. And it was reported that one more human bone had been found on the Garrido property when debris was being cleared away. The proceedings were intense on Friday, since most of the investigators were going to be given the weekend off. It was a chance to give them some rest and also cut down on the huge expenses that were being incurred from all the overtime pay. ACSO sergeant J. D. Nelson said that only a skeleton crew would be working on the properties over the weekend.

  Lieutenant Orrey added, “It’s not just about the money. We have a lot of worn-out people who have really worked hard for four days in a row under really hot, dirty, dusty, labor-intensive conditions. On Monday, they can come back fresh and do this better.”

  There wasn’t much activity on the properties over the weekend, and little news as well. But archeologist Bill A. Silva did relate, “I was up until one-thirty last night processing the data. There’s a set way of doing it. I’m using three-dimensional software called GPR slides that will allow me to create 3-D images and then slice down into it so that I can look layer by layer to determine exactly what it is. One of the things I stress is the use of multiple technologies. They see similar things, but different aspects of those things.”

  Silva added that a magnetometer recorded a location and looked for organic material that filled a pit. If something of interest showed up there, then scent dogs would be brought back to that location. Silva related that scent dogs were best for that type of work instead of electronic and mechanical devices. He also said that there was still a lot of ground to cover on both properties.

  During the “downtime,” Lisa Campbell was honored in her own ceremony in San Ramon, where she lived. Attended by police officers, UC Berkeley PD personnel, and city council members, Congressman Jerry McNerney told the gathering, “This is a true occasion of heroism. It just took the intuition of one officer to recognize that something didn’t look right. That’s the essence of good police work, in my opinion.”

  Contra Costa County supervisor Mary Piepho called Campbell’s contribution to Jaycee’s discovery “profound.”

  “That little voice in the back of your head—you acted upon it. And because of it, so many lives have been changed forever. Just that little action changed the world forever.”

  San Ramon mayor H. Abram Wilson presented Lisa with flowers and a plaque. Wilson said, “We’re just so happy that you chose San Ramon as your home.”

  Obviously touched by all the attention, Campbell replied, “It was a collaboration of great police work that enabled us to accomplish something [that] we had no idea would be so monumental.”

  Also over the weekend, reporters learned from Lieutenant Orrey that investigators from Hayward and Dublin had not directly spoken with Jaycee Dugard about their cases. Orrey related, “She’s not saying anything that helps us solve our case. I just know that there’s nothing definitive in our case.”

  Also, over the weekend, Kevin Fagan, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, spoke once again with Kathy Russo, who lived a few doors down from the Garrido home. It was Russo’s niece, fifteen-year-old Lisa Norrell, who had been a focus of the initial round of investigation into possible links with Phillip Garrido. Fagan wanted to know what Russo’s reaction had been to the second round of frenzied activity on Walnut Avenue. During the first round, reporters had constantly been seeking interviews with Russo. That was not the case now.

  Russo told Fagan that as awful as it would have been, had Phil Garrido been tied to the murder of Lisa, it wo
uld have been preferable to the situation as it stood. Russo said, “People just can’t realize how hard it is never knowing. The pain never goes away. We’ve always hoped for something, but after all those years you just kind of give up. Then two weeks ago, it was hopeful, but hard when all this came up. Now, it’s back to square one.”

  Russo and her family were very happy for Jaycee and her family, but she added, “We would just like to have some resolution of our own, too.” Then she gazed at a photo of Lisa and said, “She was such a wonderful girl. It’s such a shame. Such a shame.”

  As a reminder to reporters about Lisa, Russo kept a sign on her front yard’s chain-link fence. The sign stated that there was a reward for $60,000 in Lisa’s case if her killer was arrested and convicted. Most of the reporters passed by with barely a glance at the sign. All the attention was now on the Michaela Garecht and Ilene Misheloff cases.

  Down the street at the Garrido property over the weekend, the Contra Costa County Fire Protection District poured 3,600 gallons of water to help the scent dogs when they came back and also to keep the dust down for the work crews. There was some GPR scanning and a skeleton crew cleaned more debris from the area. However, compared to the frenzied activity of seventy investigators and officers earlier in the week, it was quiet and calm by comparison.

  When the investigators did come back to the properties on Walnut Avenue on Monday, September 21, Lieutenant Orrey said that they would be concentrating on one particular area. Orrey stated, “One of the search dogs did alert to an area where another search dog alerted previously. Now we basically have to see what they’re alerting to. Today we’re going to be briefed by Bill Silva from his analysis over the weekend. There’s a small section where he needs to finish the GPR scanning, and by the afternoon, we estimate we will begin digging the one area of interest.”