Chapter 21
Sheriff's homicide sergeant Dave Brown was at home on bereavement leave that Friday, planning to spend the day dividing up his grandmother's jewelry and personal belongings among family members. He also had to move her furniture, which they were going to donate to charity. But at the crack of dawn, he was unofficially notified about the Chelsea King case when his sister, who lived in RB, woke him with a call asking about all the commotion.
“Helicopters have been flying. What's going on?” she asked, referring to the choppers that had started searching at sunup.
“I don't know. I'm sleeping,” he said.
Later that morning, a couple of friends called with more questions and gave him some details. Then he heard from Pat O'Brien, one of the three detectives on his team, which was up in the rotation, and had been asked to help work the case.
Brown's team was in the middle of an important witness interview, miles away in Fallbrook. After three years of hunting down the witness, this was a pretty big break in an eight-year-old case involving a murdered infant, and they were confident the witness was going to reveal the suspect's alibi as a fake.
“Can you cover us?” O'Brien asked, requesting Brown to intercede on their behalf.
Brown agreed that his team was needed more in Fallbrook than in RB, especially when no one had even found a body in the park yet. They were a homicide team, after all. “That's not even in our jurisdiction,” he said.
So he called Sergeant Dave Martinez, who was in charge of the homicide unit that day, and asked if he would go to the park, assess the situation and get back to him on whether the case even looked like a homicide.
“I don't want my guys sitting in a parking lot,” Brown said.
The San Diego County Sheriff's Department was typically called to check out reports of dead bodies three or four times a week, but its homicide unit only responded to suspicious deaths, teen suicides, infant deaths and kidnappings for ransom, which also often ended in deathâand even then, only when they found a body. Half of the three million people living in this expansive county were under the watch of this proportionately small unit, which had four teams, each of which had three detectives and a sergeant who screened out the cases that didn't warrant special attention.
At the time, the three teams handling current cases were on a rotation that had them on call for one week of nights, one week of days, and then one week off. The detectives had to carefully plan out their lives according to this schedule, knowing that for two weeks straight, they could be called out at a moment's notice. No special plans for Friday nights, and no weekend trips.
When they joined the homicide detail, they knew they were “giving everything up... . You're never free,” said Brown, whose team was honored with an award for making twenty-two murder arrests in 2008. “Every seventeen days we'd be putting someone away for murder. We were just tearing it up.”
Sergeant Martinez grabbed Detective Richie Hann from the cold case team to go with him to the park, and when he called Brown to report back, he said things didn't look good. “The more we're finding out, the more we're finding out it's ours.” When they talked again around 12:30
P.M.
, Martinez told Brown about the pair of bloodstained ladies' underwear that someone had found near the park the night before.
“The commander wants your team here,” he said.
So Brown pulled Mark Palmer, the lead detective, and his partners, Scott Enyeart and Pat O'Brien, from Fallbrook and sent them to the command post in RB. Brown said he still had family matters to attend to, and he would join them when he could.
Later, Sergeant Dave Brown figured out that while John Gardner was attacking Chelsea King, the sergeant was giving the eulogy at his grandmother's funeral. By teaching Brown a very methodical way to put jigsaw puzzles together, his grandmother had given him a foundation and a similar methodology to the one he now applied to solving murder cases: separate the edges and colors and assign everyone a different task to complete his part of the puzzle.
As the coming days passed, Brown slowly realized just what a personal, emotional and poetic synchronicity it was to have the biggest case of his career start during the ceremony that celebrated the woman who had taught him how to solve it.
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Sheriff Bill Gore had gotten up around four-thirty that morning and checked his e-mails. Seeing that the search was still going on, he headed over to the park around seven o'clock to be briefed on what they'd found, if anything.
Kelly and Brent King had been up all night in the gym, where Gore talked with them and tried to reassure them that they were doing everything they could to find Chelsea. Afterward, he went to the command center to discuss which agency should take the lead on this case. Because Chelsea had gone missing in the park in RB, it normally would be an SDPD case, but Kelly's call to the Poway sheriff's substation had sparked the sheriff's SAR effort, which Gore's department had coordinated all night. And by now, he and his people had developed a good rapport with the Kings.
“The chief wants to talk to you about this,” an SDPD official told Gore, indicating he should give SDPD Chief William “Bill” Lansdowne a call.
“You've been out there. You have the resources,” Lansdowne told Gore. “You and your people have met with the family. Why don't you take the lead, and we'll support you.”
“That's the way you want it? We'll take it and go with it,” Gore said.
If SDPD had wanted to keep the case, Brown said later, “we would have given it to them. People dump murder victims in areas other than where they killed them all the time, but we keep the case because we've [been working] it already.”
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Nonetheless, conspiracy theories about the
real
reasons behind that jurisdictional handoff fueled cocktail party banter for many months to come.
It was an election year for Bill Gore, who had been with the sheriff's department for seven years and had been promoted from undersheriff to acting sheriff nearly nine months earlier when the previous sheriff left midterm to care for his sick wife. A former career FBI agent and U.S. Navy pilot trainee, Gore was also the son of a former deputy chief for the SDPD, and Gore was now running for the permanent sheriff's post.
After heading the Seattle's FBI division during the controversial Ruby Ridge incident, Gore moved to San Diego, where he was the special agent in charge for six years until he retired. Gore's campaign opponents criticized him for using the sheriff's post as a soft retirement landing, accused him of lacking the hands-on experience of a street cop during his thirty-two years in the Bureau, and lambasted him for his part in the Ruby Ridge fiasco, which resulted in three unintended deaths: a U.S. Marshal, a boy and his mother.
Skeptics suggested that it would help Gore's candidacy to be the face of a high-profile investigation into the disappearance of a pretty missing teenage girl, and that Bill Lansdowne, being a political animal himself, may have even gone along with this to help out his colleague, a triad that, with District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, had often forged political pacts. Even before Gore retired from the FBI, Dumanis had recruited him to work for her as a special advisor and chief of investigations, which he did for a year until he went to the sheriff's department.
Publicly, Gore dismissed these political theories, as did others who worked for him, saying he wasn't a politically motivated type of lawman.
“He's the antipolitician,” said Jan Caldwell, who had also worked thirty-two years as an FBI agent, including some time under Gore when he headed the San Diego office.
“Why would Bill Gore want to spend one million dollars?” Brown asked rhetorically. “It's called duty. If you think Bill wanted this, you're crazy... . We stopped the mine-yours-ours a day into this.”
Privately, Gore was infuriated by these allegations, calling the idea “ludicrous” that he and Lansdowne, with their combined eighty or ninety years of law enforcement experience, would use this young girl's disappearance for political advancement.
“I'm not even going to talk about it, it's so ridiculous,” he told his colleagues.
To him, the chances were greater that his department would be cast in a negative light by this case, just as the Escondido Police Department had taken heat for not being able to locate Amber Dubois for the past year.
“Who could ever imagine we could find that it put me in a positive light?” Gore asked rhetorically, looking back in 2011.
But that it did. Even in the short term, working this case definitely gave political juice to Gore and the other major players involved. In June 2010, he won the primary election outright with 56 percent of the vote, eliminating the need for a general election. After this case was adjudicated, Dumanis, a Republican who was one of the nation's first openly gay district attorneys, entered the nonpartisan 2012 race for the mayor of San Diego, as did Republican assemblyman Nathan Fletcher, after he sponsored a piece of highly publicized legislation called none other than Chelsea's Law.
Some in law enforcement said it was good that the sheriff's department took over the case, alleging that the SDPD would have been overwhelmed trying to search for Chelsea without the help of the well-oiled and established sheriff's SAR unit, with its mutual-aid network of trained searchers up and down the state. They also noted that the SAR unit may have been called in to help, regardless.
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That Friday morning, Gore also spoke to Keith Slotter, the special agent in charge of the FBI's local office.
“Whatever you need, you've got,” Slotter said. “Any resources.”
Alex Horan, the FBI supervisory agent in charge of local child abductions, saw the news coverage of the search on Saturday morning. He called sheriff's detective Chris Johnson, his colleague from the Violent Crime and Safe Streets Task Force. Horan immediately sent several agents over to the park to “get boots on the ground” and determine whether more resources were needed. By eleven o'clock, he sent a few more agents, and by noon, he headed over himself.
Just as Slotter promised, Horan said, “all the resources of the FBI were available for this case. We asked for twenty-five more agents, we got it... . SWAT? They came. These cases don't come around very often. Thank goodness ... We did what we were supposed to do in this case. Nothing special.”
Some observers disagreed, however, asserting that more resources seemed to be poured into looking for Chelsea King than for Amber Dubois. Like the other law enforcement sources involved, Horan said that may have been because the two cases were so different at the start, particularly in the way the two girls went missing.
In the Chelsea case, “the pattern of facts was very troubling and very disturbing,” he said. Even in the beginning, the fact that she disappeared without calling, leaving her car in the parking lot, “would not indicate that that was anything normal,” he said.
On the other hand, he said, “Amber Dubois vanished into thin air. That's hard. That's a difficult problem.” But he said any suggestion that the difference in the girls' family backgrounds or personalities played a role in any perceived disparity in law enforcement response was “not true.”
Privately, however, investigators involved in the case indicated that this disparity probably
did
play a role, even if it was unintentional or went unstated. Amber's case wasn't any less important, they said. It was more that the Kings were such warm, good people, and the more that law enforcement learned about Chelsea, the more they wanted to help.
When Horan arrived at the park, FBI agents James “Benny” Stinnett and Kristen Robinson were already there. Robinson, the local coordinator for the Bureau's Crimes Against Children program, had already been working on Amber's case.
Once the question of jurisdiction between the sheriff's department and SDPD was resolved, Horan said, Stinnett was paired up with sheriff's detective Mark Palmer.
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Once Sergeant Dave Brown's detective team arrived at the park, they started tracking down drivers linked to license plates reported by observant parents and neighborhood residents as belonging to potentially suspicious men in the parking lot. By the time the detectives were done with this case, they had 1, 200 reports of suspicious people, some from psychics. They all had to be checked out, and they all turned out to be red herrings. One guy was taking photos, for example. Another guy was with a little kid, talking to other kids, but he turned out to be a friendly divorced dad.
“It becomes a filtering process of loony tunes,” Brown said.
Brown showed up at the park around 5:00
P.M.
Once he was briefed, he had to acknowledge that the command center had been right to call his team in earlyâbody or not. Only an hour earlier, a search team had found a woman's silver Adidas running shoe, size 8 with yellow stripes and a yellow sole, near the shoreline just off the Piedras Pintadas Trail. It was lying atop some freshly broken branches some distance northeast of where the underwear and socks had been found. It looked as if someone had tossedâor droppedâthe shoe there.