“We had people searching in this canyon, under the road, and we had them search the whole greenbelt area,” Parker said later, pointing to a map of the area surrounding Amber's neighborhood, the school environs and beyond. “We had dogs looking in there, and half hoping that we'd find something and half hoping that we wouldn't.”
They used dogs trained to follow “live” scent on February 17 and 18, but not after that, “because there's no good trail” for the dogs to follow, Parker said.
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Two weeks later, the searchers went back to those areas with cadaver dogs for two more days, looking now for a body in the mountainous terrain, which was covered with thick brush. From there, they explored another classmate's reported sighting of Amber near an abandoned structure at the nearby Daley Ranch, a flophouse that Parker first flew over in a helicopter because there was no other easy access. After they touched down, he went through the whole shack, room by room, worried the roof was going to fall in on him, but he found only mattresses, pornographic magazines, empty beer cans and trash.
It was eerie, but still no sign of Amber.
When they didn't find her there, Parker's team searched for three days in early March around the school, including the drainage ditch and creek bed that runs alongside it, behind the nearby apartment complexes, and down to the strip mall on El Norte Parkway. They looked in the drainage area that surrounded the adjacent Christian school and ran under the street in the Reidy Canyon area, down the street from the high school, as well as the old folks' home under construction along North Broadway. They also spent six days searching unincorporated areas to the north of the city, and just south of Deer Springs Road.
“We spent a lot of time looking for poor Amber,” Parker said, noting that the search continued through the end of May. “The thing with Amber was you didn't know anything, so you had to search everything and consider everything.”
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Once law enforcement was able to determine that this case didn't involve a parental abduction or a legal struggle between Moe and Carrie, “We thought we'd better contact the FBI,” Benton said.
The FBI always gets involved in child abduction cases, often working jointly and sharing resources with local law enforcement agencies. “The mysterious disappearance of any minor should trigger an immediate FBI response,” said Alex Horan, a supervisory special agent for the FBI's San Diego office. “It doesn't have to be interstate.” However, he added, sometimes a case may appear to be local when in fact a suspect may have traveled interstate to commit the crime or temporarily taken the victim across state lines.
“This is something we take very seriously,” Horan said.
Within ten days of Amber's disappearance, the EPD quietly convened a task force of ten EPD investigators from school resource officers up to the rank of lieutenant, Parker from the sheriff's SAR unit, two FBI agents, and a representative of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. This group met daily for several months, after which, its core members, including FBI agent Jim Pringle, met twice weekly for the next year. Pringle worked as a conduit to the many analysts and other agents, who were instrumental in conducting interviews of friends and family. The FBI wrote more than fifty search warrants to get electronic data the EPD couldn't get because it still wasn't able to prove that a crime had occurred.
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Over the course of this case, the EPD took hits in the media for what it did and did not investigate. Initially, the task force didn't share many details about its findingsâor lack thereofâwith the media or Amber's family, because at that point everyone, including Dave Cave, was still a potential suspect.
Also, Carrie and Moe were giving constant media interviews. Carrie was also blogging, and she often brought a TV cameraperson with her to meetings at the EPD station, so the police felt the need to protect their investigation. Later, after a gag order was instituted, the EPD kept mum on the advice of its city attorney.
In contrast to the sheriff's swift action in Chelsea's case, it took some time before the EPD and its task force knew what to make of the missing-child report filed by Amber's parents, because they were still unsure if she was a runaway. Amber didn't have a confirmed last known point, as Chelsea did, and Amber's parents also did not come up clean in the routine background check, as Chelsea's had.
EPD found that both of Amber's parents had a criminal drug historyâor so they thought. (These checks are always done to uncover “the dirty laundry and where things can go awry,” as one investigator put it.) Moe Dubois had a felony drug conviction and was still on probation, and Carrie's record showed that she had a felony conviction for attempted first-degree burglary in Orange County, using the alias of Christie Ann Stacy. Los Angeles County court records also showed that Stacy was “a narcotics addict” who had spent time in a state prison drug facility after pleading guilty to possession of heroin and cocaine.
Before the police had a chance to figure out that Stacy was a different woman who had used Carrie's name when she was arrested, they had no way of knowing whether drugs were being used in Amber's home, or whether Amber had been abducted by a friend or an acquaintance involved in these activities. The EPD realized it wasn't Carrie, once the detectives received Stacy's booking photo and compared her fingerprints with Carrie's. Carrie then confirmed she'd known this girl growing up, and had known about the error, but she never saw the need to resolve it. Moe's drug history was real, but in the end, investigators found no current drug use tied to the case. Nonetheless, it took time to process these factors and move on.
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Private investigator Bill Garcia, who often joined high-profile searches for missing children, heard about Amber's disappearance on the news and offered his services pro bono on February 18 to help Carrie and Moe find their daughter.
“It's how I give back,” he told Moe.
After meeting with the family that night, Garcia started his own search the next morning, helped contact the media, recruited dozens of volunteers and interviewed some of Amber's friends. At some point, the family started paying him for his efforts, and Carrie also hired Garcia again in September to help her search for Amber in Mexico, because he is bilingual in Spanish.
Garcia helped get the word out by appearing on
Nancy Grace
on HLN on February 24, where he talked about a number of recent attempted abductions of teenage girls in northern San Diego County, in which witnesses described having seen one to three Hispanic men driving an older white van. Not surprisingly, many of the tips that subsequently came in to Garcia and to the EPD mentioned a white van.
Two nights later, Garcia, Moe and Carrie were back on Grace's controversial show to talk more about the case and their search efforts. Carrie said she'd gone through Amber's room and found eight dollars in her daughter's secret spot, which was all the money she had. She also said she rode Amber's horse over fifteen or twenty miles of parkland near Escondido, looking for her. Garcia's speculation that Amber could have been the target of a cruel Friday the 13th prank was roundly criticized by other talking heads on the program.
Moe begged viewers to help them find Amber. “Keep her in your mind,” he said. “Go to her Web site. Print up a flyer. Keep it on your dash.”
That same week, Amber's case was featured on
America's
's
Most Wanted.
As thousands of flyers were posted, the tips kept coming in to the EPD.
In early March, missing-child activist Marc Klaas, the father of twelve-year-old Polly Klaas, who was kidnapped out of her bedroom at knifepoint by a stranger in Petaluma, California, and murdered in 1993, announced that individuals and businesses had donated $60,000 in reward money in Amber's case. Of that, $50,000 was for information leading to Amber's safe return, and the balance for information leading to the arrest of anyone responsible for her disappearance.
Still hoping that Amber was alive, Moe put out a message to his daughter at a press conference: “Amber, if you're hearing this, just know that your family loves you, and we can't wait to have you back in our arms.”
In September, the reward money increased by $40,000 after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger contributed funds from the Governor's Reward Program, at the request of EPD Chief Jim Maher.
Garcia searched a wider perimeter than the SAR unit and followed up his own leads, including those from psychics, but he didn't come up with any trace of Amber either. Ultimately he had a falling-out with the family, and they parted ways.
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As searchers and investigators looked for a motive for Amber to run away, they learned that she didn't always get along so well with her mom's boyfriend, Dave Cave.
“They weren't living in Shangri-la,” Sergeant Parker said. “There were issues.”
Although the EPD had interviewed Dave and the rest of Amber's immediate family, the detectives knew that people don't always tell the whole truth, so they had to consider the universe of possibilities.
Bob Petrachek, one of three examiners with the Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory (RCFL) who worked on this case, ran through the possible theories: “Was she kidnapped? Did she run away? If so, why? Were there problems at home? There's a stepdad at home, was that a problem? Was there a molest situation going on? Usually, when a juvenile goes missing, there's a boyfriend involved, or there's turmoil in the family, some romantic interest somewhere, either real or imagined.”
So the detectives looked carefully at Dave, who admitted that he'd changed his usual routine on the day Amber went missing. He said he'd gone to the gym briefly, then he came home to do his taxes rather than go to work at his scaffolding business, but he couldn't identify the route he drove.
“How do you not remember?” Captain Benton recalled thinking. Here was a fourteen-year-old who had disappeared in front of her school. Who else would she have gotten into a car with in front of a crowded school but someone she knew?
It also seemed odd that Dave had “missed” the call from her school that day because he'd gone to a Clint Eastwood movie, then he'd brought a bouquet of roses and some chocolate-covered strawberries to Carrie's office that afternoonâthe day
before
Valentine's Day. He hung around her office for forty-five minutes, until Carrie had to tell him to leave.
Also important, Dave admitted that he and Amber had been bickering over the past month and had even gotten into a physical fight. “It's a house. There's rules,” he said. “She's a teenager. She doesn't want to follow the rules. There's going to be a certain amount of conflict.” In fact, Dave told police, he'd actually taken Amber's bedroom door off its hinges to stop her from reading after bedtime.
When the detectives brought Dave in for his first formal interview, they checked his body for marks of a struggle and found none. His body language was open on the interview videotape, as if he wasn't trying to hide anything, but his story contained all these suspicious details. So the police gave him a polygraph test on February 17, and it proved inconclusive. After spending two months verifying his story and checking him out, they gave him a second test on April 15, which showed no signs of deception.
“We definitely had to rule him out as a person who had [anything] to do with it,” Benton said.
Even so, Dave continued to introduce himself as “the guilty stepfather,” possibly joking out of nervousness, but that only prompted reporters and others involved in the investigation to continue to pass on his odd comments and behavior to Benton, and encourage him to investigate Dave further.
The EPD also gave Carrie a polygraph on February 18, and she passed. Ultimately, though, she moved out of their house, unsure if Dave had had something to do with Amber's disappearance.
“I couldn't lay in the same bed with the man who I thought might have done something to my daughter,” she told
48 Hours
.
Benton said he took some hits from his peers and other investigators in the community for releasing the information that Carrie and Dave had passed their polygraph tests, because police had no way to prove that those tests were accurate.
“We were fairly sure they had nothing to do with it, but there's always that two percent what-if,” he said.
But Benton said he made those comments for a reason. He kept getting the same tips that he needed to investigate Dave and other family members, which his team had already done to their satisfaction, and he was desperately in need of new leads.
The molest theory never panned out, and after searching through Amber's computer, Petrachek and his colleague Patrick Lim also found a healthy exchange of e-mails between Amber and her half sister, Allison. The family strife angle was a dead end as well.
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