The Murder Artist

CHAPTER 15

It doesn’t make sense to get into the dimes or origami without at least looking at the police files first to see what they’ve got. So until Petrich gets back to me, I hit the Internet.

And once again, I descend into the world of missing children. I’ve been to a lot of the sites dealing with abducted children before; maybe there’s something I’ve missed, some angle I’ve overlooked.

I’m back in Milk Carton Land, accompanied by sidebar ads for private eyes who suggest they can find the missing children. I’m engulfed by the faces of the vanished – including the smiling faces of Kevin and Sean.

I correct myself. No one “vanishes.” It’s not a magic act. These kids were abducted. The man who went to the Renaissance Faire dressed up as the Pied Piper is the one who ripped my sons out of my life… and into his world. And I’m going to find out who he is and why he did it.

I visit a website maintained by the IRE – an organization of investigative reporters and editors. At first, it doesn’t seem relevant. Most of the database on kidnappings concerns the online world – as in “Dangers of the Internet.” There are dozens of stories about intrepid cops and FBI agents working stings in chat rooms.

But this can’t have anything to do with my kids. Some six-year-olds have amazing computer skills, but not Kevin and Sean, whose access to computers is strictly controlled by Liz. Anyway, they’re just learning how to read; they don’t know how to spell or type. There’s no way they could get into a chat room, let alone make some kind of arrangement to meet a stranger.

But some of the articles in the IRE’s archives scare the hell out of me. One concerns a churchgoing couple who ran a “foster home” in rural Illinois – from which they sold children to pedophiles. Another is about some killer nerds in Idaho who abducted a ten-year-old with the intention of making a snuff flick. It’s one nightmare after another, each one darker than the one before.

A second site reminds me that there are fewer than one hundred kidnappings by strangers each year and that small children are not the usual targets. Teenagers are. Girls older than twelve make up more than half the cases. I scan through the dozens of websites that one of my search requests prompts, each representing a missing child. It’s depressing, clicking through this forlorn catalog of faces. And the websites themselves seem remote outposts in the vastness of the world, like the photos on milk cartons: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?

Shots in the dark.

The sites for certain children – findkevinandsean.com is one of them, I’m glad to see – surface over and over again while I browse. There are also paid ads for missing children that show up on the right of my screen. I make a note to check with Ezra, my computer-genius friend. How much does that kind of thing cost? Now that the boys are relegated to the occasional news update, maybe a paid ad connected to search terms such as “abducted child” would be worthwhile.

And maybe it’s time, after all, to get a PR person. Someone who might line up a special on 20/20 or Dateline, keep the boys in the news. The Smart family managed this after their daughter had been missing for several months, an hour-long special flooded with images of their missing child. The special, which I watched at the behest of Claire Carosella from the Center, made it clear that the police had fastened their attention on a handyman, an ex-con who died several months after the kidnapping. It was a believable theory, bolstered by some suggestive evidence about a car – although the dead man’s wife insisted on his innocence.

Even with the suspected man dead, the Smart family continued to lobby for attention to their daughter’s case. Maybe they were just hoping to find her remains, but there was a lesson to be learned. Don’t get too tied to a theory.

On an impulse, I plug twins into the search field along with a couple of my other key words: abduction, missing, disappeared, children.

Google kicks out more than a hundred thousand sites.

I specify missing twins. Still more than thirty-three thousand listings. I scroll through for twenty minutes or so, only to learn that virtually all of the stories are about Kevin and Sean.

I log on to Lexis/Nexis, using my password from the station. I enter the search terms missing twins and restrict the search to news stories published before the date of the boys’ abduction.

The list includes more than a thousand stories, but once I get into it, I see that in real terms there are only three stories about abducted twins.

The Ramirez boys. The press raised this case within hours of the story about Kevin and Sean breaking because the similarities were so striking. Julio and Wilson Ramirez were abducted from a rec-center gymnastics class in West L.A. Not only were the Ramirez boys identical twins, but at the time they were abducted, they were seven years old – almost the same age as Kevin and Sean.

I thought of them in the very first hour of this nightmare, sitting on Gary Prebble’s bench outside Faire Security.

It happened just about a couple of years ago. The boys disappeared and there was a massive hunt – although not so massive as to keep criticism from surfacing about how much greater the effort would have been if they’d been Anglo kids.

Three months after their disappearance, the killer was caught red-handed, so to speak. He was apprehended at a ramshackle cabin in the mountains not too far from Big Sur. The bodies of the dead boys were found at the cabin – one in his refrigerator, neatly packaged like cuts from a side of beef, the other suspended in a well shaft. The killer was taken into custody and promptly identified himself to the authorities. He turned out to be Charley Vermillion, a sexual psychopath who’d been released from a Louisiana loony bin about a month prior to the boys’ disappearance. Vermillion was cuffed and Mirandized and slapped into a squad car. But before the squad car made it to the local lockup, he was dead, having chewed a cyanide capsule he’d taped under the collar of his shirt.

So the Ramirez case was closed, and with the perp dead, there wasn’t any way it could be relevant to my boys. Thank God. Both the FBI and Ray Shoffler explored the notion of a copycat crime – but it didn’t go anywhere.

The second set of sites involves the Gabler twins. This is a false hit, though, because the Gablers were women – and Vegas showgirls, at that. The story showed up because one of my search terms was children and the newspapers reported that the Gablers had recently appeared in a musical revue at a place called the Blue Parrot. The revue was called Children of the Future.

They disappeared about three years ago and turned up a month later, their decomposing bodies recovered in the usual “rugged area” twenty miles outside Vegas. The press photos show the Gabler twins alive, side by side in skimpy costumes, their long legs in fishnet stockings, smiling faces encased in futuristic headdresses. It’s hard to see how they could possibly have any connection to my boys.

Which leaves the Sandling twins: Chandler and Connor. I’m familiar with this one, too – the one with the happy ending. The way I remember it, the mother was implicated in the abduction of her kids – although never prosecuted, as I recall. There was something about a boyfriend, too.

Because of the mother’s alleged involvement, I never really focused on the case. I’m willing to take a second look now, because it’s just occurred to me: Who else do I know wrongly suspected in the disappearance of his children?

I take a look. Initially, it’s as I remember. Unlike me, Emma Sandling was not an upstanding member of the community but a vagabond for whom “unconventional lifestyle” would be an understatement. A heroin addict who’d been through countless rehab programs, she wasn’t much of a mother. Her kids were often cared for by friends or relatives, and they’d been in foster homes more than once.

Some of the news stories mention an incident connected to one of Connor and Chandler’s foster-home stays; terming it “the first abduction.” Reading on, I decide that calling that incident an abduction is unfair, a major (and misleading) exaggeration. It seems to boil down to Emma Sandling’s having returned the boys a couple of days late from an authorized visit – due, she contended, to car trouble.

Then there was the “live-in boyfriend,” plus the fact that at the time of the abduction, Sandling and her two sons were living in a tent in a state park near Corvallis, Oregon.

The boyfriend – whom Sandling insisted was “just a friend” – was a drifter named Dalt Trueblood. Sandling had met him in rehab, and when she bumped into him at the library in Eugene, she’d invited him to stay in her tent for a few weeks. It turned out Trueblood was a parole violator, although Sandling claimed she hadn’t known that.

If child protective services were not happy to learn that home to the Sandling boys and their mother was a tent, they were even unhappier to know that a wanted felon was sharing that space. When the boys disappeared, Trueblood did, too – and until he turned up a few weeks later (drunk and disorderly, directing traffic with a red cape in downtown Portland), it was not unreasonable to think that the Sandling boys might be with him.

Between her addicted past, her lifestyle, and the missing boyfriend – when the boys “vanished,” suspicions settled on Sandling. The idea seemed to be that she and Trueblood were in collusion, that they’d intended to present some kind of ransom plea – although this never happened. As for Trueblood, when the police arrested him in Portland and questioned him, he said he left Eugene because the kidnapping “spooked” him.

The circumstances of the kidnapping were simple enough: Sandling took her boys to the McDonald’s in Corvallis, intending to treat them to a Happy Meal. She left them in the ball pit while she went to get the food. No other kids – or adults – were in the play area. Nine adults – six of them senior citizens holding a book-group discussion – sat in the main area of the restaurant. When Sandling came back with the food, the kids were gone.

Unfortunately for Sandling, the adults and staff in the restaurant remembered seeing her, but none of them saw her children. Some of the stories display diagrams of the McDonald’s, marking the location of customers and staff; these make it clear that Sandling and the boys had to cross the sight lines of other customers and the staff to get to the play area. Apart from the nine customers, six McDonald’s employees were behind the counter when the boys disappeared. Two cars were in the drive-through lane. No one saw a thing.

It didn’t help Sandling’s case that at the time she reported her sons missing, she was known to leave them for hours at a time in the public library while she worked cleaning houses.

What followed was predictable: an explosion of recriminations within the Oregon child-protective bureaucracy and a police investigation with a tight focus on Emma Sandling. The judge who a year earlier had reunited the boys with their cleaned-up mom was condemned on all sides. Social workers who’d attested to Emma Sandling’s newfound reliability were subjected to second-guessing of the most vituperative sort. There was a lot of chest-beating about how the twins – Chandler and Connor – had fallen through the cracks (“chasms,” according to the Portland paper) of the system. There were calls for investigations and the wholesale reform of the child-welfare system.

If my experience is any guide, Emma Sandling must have been subjected to some heavy interrogation, although she, at least, seems to have had the wit to ask for a lawyer. She was not charged but held “for questioning” for thirty-two hours.

The boys showed up eight weeks later at a shopping mall near Eureka, California. According to a feature story in the Sacramento Bee, the boys had been riding in a small motor home for “a long time” when the driver stopped for gas. It was the kind of RV – a truck and trailer, really – where the driver’s cab is separated from the passenger compartment. The boys waited for the driver to let them out. They wanted to tell him it was too hot in back; they wanted ice cream; they wanted to pee. But the driver didn’t come. They banged on the side of the trailer and yelled; then one of them threw himself at the door and, to their surprise, it fell open.

They climbed out. One boy wanted to go into the convenience store attached to the gas station, find the driver, and get money for ice cream. But the other boy had come to doubt the story their abductor told them. He was worried that he and his brother never left the compound where they were being kept. This trip in the RV was the first time. He wanted to telephone their mom’s best friend, Phoebe. So he and his brother ran toward the shopping plaza, went inside, and looked for a pay phone. They were old hands at making collect calls, but the pay phone wouldn’t work. So they went into a gift shop to ask if they could use the phone to make a collect call. The clerk recognized them and called the police.

By the time a squad car came to the scene, the RV was gone.

In the aftermath, press coverage of the happy reunion of Sandling with her sons was muted. There was cynical speculation about how that RV door “fell open,” about Sandling’s successful efforts (enlisting a helpful lawyer working pro bono) to protect the boys from aggressive interrogation by the authorities. Against this kind of negative stance on the part of the police and the larger community, it was not surprising that despite a wave of testimonials from employers, personnel at the school the boys attended, and friends about how Sandling really had turned her life around – it took several months and a lawsuit for her to regain custody of her sons.

I expand my search and pull down everything I can about the Sandling case; a couple of hours later, I’m convinced that my whole impression was biased by coverage that scapegoated Emma Sandling. Shoffler seemed to have bought into that, too, along with Judy Jones of the FBI – at least they never talked as if the case was relevant, despite its obvious parallels to my own.

The parallels – six-year-old twin boys kidnapped from a public place – are so striking I can’t stop reading the clips. Maybe there’s something I overlooked when I bought into the assumption that Sandling’s sketchy personal history meant she’d somehow rigged the kidnapping of her own sons. Reading through it all, though, there’s no evidence that anything other than what Emma Sandling said happened did, in fact, happen. Trueblood had an alibi. No other accomplice surfaced. Sandling never once changed her story. And although the gift store clerk was allotted a portion of the reward, none of it ever trickled down to Sandling.

I spend the next two hours talking to the police stations in Corvallis and Eureka. At first, when I introduce myself and explain my area of interest – the Sandling case – I get the runaround. When I push it, the reaction surprises me: I get stonewalled.

Using names published in the newspaper accounts of the kidnapping, I hunt down the telephone numbers of Emma Sandling’s clients, her social workers, her lawyer, and anyone else whose name I can prise out of the media coverage. I reach about half of them and I get the same reaction. They don’t know where she is. They can’t help me.

I push myself out of my chair, realizing that it’s dark outside and I’ve been hunched over the computer for hours. I intend to continue my pursuit of Emma Sandling, but I know I should eat something. I’ve been losing weight steadily since Liz left me; people are beginning to remark on it.

I head for the kitchen to forage, although I know there’s not much left. In the fridge are a couple of dried-out pieces of cheese, a moldy cantaloupe, and a half gallon of milk that proves to be sour. A rotisserie chicken I failed to wrap is now as desiccated as a mummy. The freezer holds nothing but shrunken ice cubes and a single frozen pizza. I look on the pizza box for the pull date and find it under an encrustation of frost crystals. The date, faint and purple, is more than a year ago.

Even this depresses me. The pizza has been in the freezer since before my bust-up with Liz, since before my life disintegrated. It was probably bought as dinner for the boys. I have a moment during which I elevate the pizza to some kind of talismanic status. I find I’m reluctant to throw it away. I shake my head, upend the milk in the sink, and toss everything else.

I’ve been eating out most of the time. That’s got to stop; it’s too expensive. I tell myself I’ll go shopping tomorrow, get some TV dinners. And some healthy stuff. Apples. O.J.

For the first time since the boys were kidnapped, I pull on my running shoes and head out into the humid Washington night. I’m way out of shape, but running is a relief. I enjoy the sensation of moving, of the sweat collecting on me, of the labored rhythm of my breathing. I like the way the cars rumble past, the haloed lights in the mist, and how my attention focuses on basic issues: where to put my feet, how to angle my run to pass pedestrians most efficiently, how to time street crossings in such a way that I don’t have to break stride.

I go out for about fifteen minutes and then head back. I stop at the 7-Eleven on the corner of Porter and Connecticut, breathing hard, sweat pouring off me as I dig out the five-dollar bill from the key pocket of my shorts. It, too, is damp with sweat.

The clerk is the one Jack started calling Slo-Mo – as in “Oh, no, it’s Slo-Mo.” She’s a shy, thin woman, little more than a girl, with beautiful features. She does everything at such an exasperatingly deliberate pace that customers who know her have been known to turn around if they see more than one person in line.

“Two Jamaican beef patties,” I tell the clerk. These will be dinner: tasty, if greasy, meat pastries.

The clerk looks at me with enormous brown eyes and then looks down at her hands.

“You the man who children is gone,” she says.

“That’s right.”

“My uncle – he know these thing from the other world.” She presses one finger to her forehead. “He say your boys all right.”

“Your uncle? What other world? Does he know where the boys are?”

“No, no.” Her fingers twist together and she looks to the side, eyes cast down. “It’s – what you say? – spirits world. He say your boys not there, still in this world. I tell him that you live near this shop, that you come in here many day. My uncle say this – your boys all right. I think myself you like to know.” She fashions her facial expression into a shy smile that is also a kind of shrug.

“Thank you.” And I mean it. I’ll take whatever glimmer of light I can find in the world. “Thank you for telling me.”

“You welcome.” She pauses. “Spicy or plain?”

I toss the change into a big glass jar set out to collect funds for a child named Belinda, who has leukemia. Another shot in the dark – like the websites, like the milk cartons, like all of it. When it comes to children, you can’t go with percentages or probabilities; you do what you can, whatever you can.

“Thank you for telling me what your uncle said.” My gratitude is heartfelt; it’s amazing how this unsolicited bit of encouragement lifts my heart.

The Madonna of the cash register rewards me with a beatific smile.