Читать книгу Missing: The Oregon City Girls - Rick Watson - Страница 15
ОглавлениеOn March 8, 2002, at about 5:30 PM, Oregon City Detective Greg Fryett receives a telephone call from his boss, Lieutenant Jarvis. “You won’t believe this Greg, but a second juvenile girl has turned up missing at the Newell Creek apartments. We need you to take charge. Valenzuela-Garcia has been handling Ashley Pond’s case, so you’ll coordinate with her. Both girls live at the same apartment house, so you’d better get over there and see what you can find out.”
Fryett brings in every available reserve officer to do extensive canvassing of the entire apartment complex. While his assistants ring doorbells, Fryett interviews the latest missing girl’s mother, Michelle Duffey.
With her other children sitting nearby, Michelle tries to explain the unexplainable. “I don’t think Miranda would leave. She’s friends with Ashley Pond and she was very upset over Ashley’s disappearance. My oldest daughter had been staying with the dance team coach. My youngest daughter was here this morning though. She left for school at about 7:10 on the early bus, the one that arrives at about 7:20. Then I was at home alone with Miranda until I left for work at 7:30. The last thing I heard when I left was Miranda locking the door behind me. I heard the clicking of the deadbolt. Then I went to work and I got back home about 2:15 in time to be here when my younger girl arrives, usually about 2:20.”
At the conclusion of his interview with Duffey, Fryett searches the apartment for signs of forced entry but doesn’t find any. His conclusion? It appears as though Miranda Gaddis left the apartment on her own with her books and backpack. He also determines there had been no caller ID phone calls recorded.
Fryett visits with every occupant of Building 1, the building that contains the Gaddis unit, but the interviews prove fruitless. Nobody has seen anything suspicious.
By this time, rain is falling steadily and Fryett, accompanied by Sergeant Lisa Nunes, trudges up the hill to the school bus stop. A lone residence nearby attracts the detective’s attention. It’s the only single family house in the apartment dominated neighborhood.
Night has fallen, but his curiosity prods him to survey the place. They walk through overgrown grass and notice a run-down shed near the rear of the half-acre yard. In the darkness they make their way to the front door and knock. A moment later the door swiftly swings open revealing a five-foot-eleven-inch, white male in his late thirties who throws his arms high in the air. With a broad smile he attempts to charm the policemen when he shouts, “I give up, officers. Take me away.”
Fryett is not amused. “Another neighborhood girl is missing. Fourteen hours have elapsed. She’s thirteen-years-old and her name is Miranda Gaddis. May we come in?”
The man opens his front door and gestures for them to enter. Fryett notices a young girl sitting on a nearby couch. He explains to the man, “We’re looking for any information about Miranda. Have you seen her?”
The man plays with his reddish mustache then shakes his head. “The last fourteen hours? No, I certainly haven’t seen her. But I do know her. She’s a friend of my daughter Mallori.”
The detective opens his notebook and removes the cap from his ballpoint with his teeth. “Can I have your name?”
The smiling man shrugs. “Sure. Ward, Ward Weaver III.”
“Mr. Weaver, is that child on the couch your daughter?”
“Yes she is. Her name is Mallori and like I said, she is friends with Miranda and Ashley.”
“Would you mind if I had a word with her?”
“No, not at all. Mallori, come over here. The officer wants to ask you some questions.”
Mallori obeys and soon is standing next to her dad. Fryett smiles before he asks, “Can you tell me what your day was like today, Mallori?”
“Sure, well, I didn’t go to school today, because I was sick.”
“What time did you get up? Was your dad still here then?”
“I didn’t sleep here last night. I slept at my mom’s. I haven’t been here all day.”
“So you weren’t in school today?”
“There was only a half day of school anyway, so I didn’t go.”
“You haven’t seen Miranda?”
“No, I sure didn’t. I saw her yesterday, but I wasn’t even around to see her today.”
“Your dad says she’s friends with you; is that true?”
“Yes.”
“Does she visit you here in the house?”
“Sure, we hang out here sometimes.”
“Mr. Weaver, let me ask you something. Did Miranda come to your house this morning looking for Mallori?”
Weaver shakes his head. “Oh, no. She didn’t.”
“Was there anyone else in your house this morning?”
“No, just me and Mallori live here now. Nobody else.”
“Would you have any objections if I just looked around your place a bit? It’s just routine.”
“Sure, go ahead. Help yourself.”
Fryett and Nunes carefully examine room after room, not even sure exactly what they hope to find. The bedrooms and the closets are first, but they seem fine. The bathroom is next, nothing suspicious there. A pass through the living room and dining room doesn’t reveal anything either. The kitchen is the only room left, but it too yields no clues.
“Could you show me around the backyard while Nunes stays inside with your daughter?” Fryett asks.
Weaver agrees and leads Fryett out the kitchen door to the rear of the house. Though the night is dark, Fryett notices the outbuilding again, but a cursory inspection fails to arouse any suspicions. At the end of the visit Fryett and Nunes shake Weaver’s hand and politely thank him for his cooperation.
Weaver says, “Glad to help, and if I can be of any further help, feel free to call on me any time. I wish I had more information for you.”
Detective Fryett thanks the talkative witness for his comments and hands him a business card. “Call me sir, if you should think of anything else.”1
In these first twenty-four hours after Miranda vanishes, few clues surface. However, soon an explosion of FBI activity erupts. Agents from all over the country quickly swarm the makeshift command center above an Oregon City firehouse, swelling the total of official investigators past seventy. A separate agent is assigned responsibility for each building in the huge Newell Creek Apartment complex. Some inhabitants are interviewed as often as three times in three days. As days pass, the pressure intensifies as authorities become almost desperate to squeeze out a meaningful lead that can break open the baffling mystery.
More days pass and the FBI task force ratchets up its reward fund to fifty thousand dollars. This money is to be awarded to the provider of the one meaningful tip that solves the mystery. Linda wonders if the FBI investigators are following the wrong tips and ignoring the helpful ones. She knows that sifting through mountains of useless information eventually changes attitudes. And the “no crime scene, no witnesses” mantra only adds to collective confusion.
Harry Oakes, a man on the outside looking in, has been a search dog trainer for years and paid his dues to the profession.2 But for mysterious reasons, the established dog handlers in the area have never accepted Harry as a legitimate member of their profession. His dog, Valorie, is just as smart as theirs. Perhaps, he thinks, I’m too outspoken when I think the established handlers get it wrong. When the authorities refuse to allow Oakes to join their official search for Ashley, he calls the girl’s mother, Lori Pond, and offers to search for her daughter. She is ambivalent, but she meets with Oakes and Valorie on the morning of March 7. After he briefs her about his techniques, she is impressed enough to cooperate. “I need a personal item,” he tells her matter-of-factly, “for a good scent…shirt or pants, something like that. Preferably something that hasn’t been washed. Anything she would have worn recently.”
Lori surrenders a pair of knee socks that Oakes carefully places into a plastic bag. He thanks Lori for letting him volunteer his expertise and promises he’ll be returning to conduct a private search.
Incredibly, the very next day, March 8, Miranda Gaddis disappears from almost the exact same location as Ashley. Oakes knows that the FBI and the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Department will be all over that whole area. But it doesn’t mean that he can’t search too. After all, he has secured the permission of the first missing girl’s family.
Harry and his dog Valorie thoroughly search the Newell Creek Canyon on March 10. For hours and hours they methodically prowl back and forth across every square foot of the rugged terrain. Just before dark, while she crawls under some thick foliage at the bottom of a steep canyon below Beavercreek Road, Valorie finally releases one, enthusiastic alert. She howls and howls. Oakes makes note of the location, realizing that it is getting too dark to continue. He resolves to return soon and resume.
Because of several personal conflicts, Oakes isn’t able to return with Valorie until March 15. Early that morning he arrives where his dog had alerted, determined to discover the basis for the disturbance and hopeful it will yield a clue. He begins the ritual as he always does, by giving Valorie her head when they reach the familiar spot. Once again the dog wails in a mournful, whimpering cadence that means, “There’s a dead body here somewhere!” Valorie then unexpectedly bounds up the slope and races frantically under brush and over dead tree limbs, Oakes sprinting to keep her in sight. Finally the dog shifts direction and lopes toward the lone house at the end of the road by the apartment complex. Harry senses excitement. Valorie is definitely interested in something here. He hesitates, thinking, Well I still have to do things right, but this could be our big break. After carefully mulling over the situation, Harry walks up to the front door and knocks. A shirtless teenage boy pushes the door wide open. He stares at Oakes, then at Valorie who is panting and wagging her tail. “What do you want?”
Oakes extends his hand, but the teen refuses to shake it. “Well, I’m Harry Oakes, a private dog handler. I’m helping in the search for the missing girls and would it be okay, I mean can I have permission to let her explore the ground for scents?”
The shirtless one shrugs. “I don’t even live here. I’ll have to call my dad and ask him. If he says it’s all right, then, okay. I’ll be right back.” He slams the door, leaving Harry standing for several minutes. The door opens again with the teenager, this time wearing a white tee shirt, smiling.
“My dad says it’s okay, as long as you keep your dog away from the new concrete slab in the backyard. He’s getting ready to install a hot tub on it. That slab was just poured and he doesn’t want it messed up.”
Harry thanks the boy for his cooperation and while the kid observes from the kitchen window, Harry takes Valorie around back and puts her to work. Valorie pays no attention to any surrounding ground but instead makes a beeline for the concrete slab. First she merely hovers over it, but soon she is pacing back and forth with increasing intensity. Finally, she throws her head back high in the air and unleashes her unique, blood curdling death alert. She lunges at the slab, scraping its hard surface with her front paws. Harry has to yank her chain to pull her back. Valorie erupts with a thirty-second non-stop bark blast. “Quiet, Girl! Quiet!” Harry commands. Harry is so shaken he pulls Valorie tightly and briskly walks her off the Weaver property and on down Beavercreek Road to a strip mall. He enters a store and asks to use their phone to call the police.
A female officer takes his call. Harry’s heart is still pounding. “I’m telling you ma’am, there’s something under the slab at Ward Weaver’s house. It needs to be checked out.” She records his telephone number and address before thanking him for the tip. That is the end of it! Nothing! When Oakes does not hear from the police, he writes a letter to Oregon City Chief of Police, Gordon Hurias, detailing Valorie’s March 15 reaction to Weaver’s concrete slab. He sends copies to the Pond family and the FBI task force.3
On the same day that Harry Oakes and his dog are investigating Weaver, a blonde young man named Brian Taylor stands in the upstairs apartment above Lori Pond’s unit, involved in an energetic exchange with two middle-aged males wearing FBI windbreakers. “Yes, on March 8, I was camping up at Bagby Hot Springs, out near Molalla.”4
“Camping in March?”5
“Hmm, where are you from?”
“Chicago.”
“Well I don’t know about Chicago, but in Oregon it’s not unusual to go camping in March.”
The second agent asks, “You went camping on March 8. Does that mean that you left for your camping trip on March 7 and spent that night so you were at the Hot Springs on the morning of March 8, or…”
The young man interrupts testily. “No, I spent the night of March 7 here. I went camping about noon on Friday and stayed camping through Saturday night and came home on Sunday.”
“Were you with anybody who can verify this?”
“No, I was alone. I go camping to be alone. How many different guys do I have to say this to?”
The interview comes to an end with nothing accomplished.
At this point, the Newell Creek complex is crawling with federal and county officers and their search dogs. They approach one apartment after another, but the procedures yield no information. Another young girl has vanished into thin air.
Meanwhile, Linda O’Neal is conducting her own investigation. Oliver Jamison is one of the people Linda O’Neal employs for technological work. They rarely interact face to face. Linda pays out hundreds a month in subscription fees to this disembodied voice for access to all of the top-notch criminal and civil databases available. She purchases the technical capacity to find out any fact that is recorded somewhere and can measure that fact against others retrieved similarly. Unfortunately, Linda’s personal computer skills are limited. Thank God for experts! Linda often pats herself on the back for the stroke of great luck that brought techno genius Ollie into her life by random chance. During their many years of working on cases together, she has always marveled at his uncanny knack to write the most astute queries. Not only does he know which database to search, but he can create a query that gets the information wanted and only the information wanted. Linda hates to admit it, but Oliver has evolved to a crucial level of importance in her professional life, because 80 percent of her investigations involve computer searches.
Ollie is a fifty-something, burly, retired army sergeant who is supporting a daughter born in Italy and saving what little money he has left over to afford a shabby inner city studio apartment. The dark walls are covered by bookshelves and file cabinets. Next to a scraggly futon are scattered piles of un-filed documents atop three folding card tables. Beside the tiny kitchen, Oliver has fashioned an elaborate workstation complete with gray cubicle dividers corralling his several computers and assorted accessories. The back wall of the cubicle is formed by an ancient big-screen television ingeniously rigged to display any of the various computer data. Linda’s only visit reminded her of the control room of a space ship.
While the FBI task force continues to scrutinize Newell Creek and the surrounding area, “Commander Ollie,” wearing a telephone headset with a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth, is ensconced in his pilot’s chair tapping madly on one of his four keyboards. A shrill siren noise pulsates. It’s his personally designed phone ringer. He presses a switch and becomes connected. “Oliver Jamison.”
Linda is on the other end of the line and seems impatient. “Ollie, my good man. First of all, congrats on that great info you dug up on Espinoza. I just heard their whole case collapsed. He pled out to much reduced charges. They think I’m wonderful, but we both know who’s really wonderful.”
Oliver smiles and smashes his cigarette into an overloaded ashtray. “Thanks, Linda. But I have a feeling you’re calling because there’s something else going on today.”
“Very perceptive! I really need some of your genius. Will you check the records and see if there are any registered sex offenders living in the Newell Creek Apartments or in that general vicinity? Also, I need you to run a full background check on Ashley’s birth father, Wesley Roettger. I don’t have his date of birth, but he recently pled guilty to some sex offense in Clackamas County.”
Jamison laughs. “Sex offense? I could have sworn you once told me you’d never ever troll that low for business. Are you sure? Sex stuff can be so slimy the pages will slip from your hands. And sex criminals? The lowest rung of the low-life ladder, to be sure.”
“Roettger is Ashley Pond’s biological father. I found out that he recently was convicted of some sort of molestation of Ashley.6 The family waited a long time to tell us even this much, but we need to find out if Roettger might have something to do with her disappearance.”
“No kidding! Are the cops looking at him as well?”
“Who knows? But listen, I also want you to check out another fellow, a nearby neighbor, Ward Weaver. I don’t know his date of birth either, but he lives on Beavercreek Road in Oregon City across the street from the school bus stop where both Ashley and Miranda were headed when they vanished. Philip’s daughter Maria told me Ashley had a beef with him last summer, but she’s vague about exactly what went down.”
“Okay Linda. Keep your fax on and as soon as I have something I’ll send it.”
An hour later, Linda is still sitting in her cluttered office pouring over a stack of case files, occasionally jotting notations in the margins. She can hear Philip from his side of the house deeply involved in a video editing scheme, the clicks and warped sound track chirping as he runs the tape forward and backward repeatedly. Then, silence, followed by Philip entering. “You have a visitor,” he announces. “A lady. She is very anxious to talk to you.”
Linda is intrigued and quickly examines her day planner. “I don’t have a single appointment today. Did she say what she wants?”
“Something to do with Ashley.”
“Really?”
Linda adjusts her hair and smoothes her skirt, then makes the short journey into the video studio’s reception area where she encounters a striking redhead in her early thirties. She offers Linda a hearty grin and a firm handshake. “I’m Pamela. Remember I called about Rob, my husband, who is a psychic?” she says. “And I’m sorry to barge in on you like this, but you haven’t returned any of my messages for several weeks now and you’d left me with the impression you believed me.”
Linda waves a finger for the woman to follow her out the video entrance, around to the front door of the house and on through to her office where, after clearing a stack of files from a chair, she motions for the visitor to sit.
“I’m sorry, but I’ve been occupied for several weeks. Family emergency. I’m a bit behind on that stuff.”
“Now that this second girl has disappeared, are you ready to do some investigating?”
Linda bristles. “Let me tell you something, young lady. I have been investigating. Ashley Pond is a member of my husband’s family. I’ve been looking for her since the day she went missing.”
Pamela’s mouth drops open. “I had no idea! How weird this is- me picking your name from the private investigators’ listings in the yellow pages. I’m telling you, there is something going on at this house in Molalla. Rob and I have been over there many times. It’s positively spooky.”
“Fair enough,” Linda says pensively. “I believe you may have something here with this Molalla connection. But we need to get a few ground rules straight. I am willing to look at this Molalla connection in my own investigation, but I can’t take money from you. Now, if down the line it turns out that there really is something to this connection and people ask me how I got on to it, do you want me to tell them that I first was alerted to Molalla by you and your husband? I could do that, but I can’t work for psychics, because that’s selling my credibility. And when it’s all said and done, my credibility is all I have.”
Pamela ponders then nods. “Sure, that’s fine. Our main concern is that the girls get found, before, God forbid, another one disappears. Rob is convinced that there will be more. Like I told you before, Rob has strong visions of Ashley at this location asking for help, and after Miranda was gone, he had an equally strong pull from her.7 Maybe it has more to do with the school bus stop that they both used or the fact that they were friends, but there is something going on in that creepy house in Molalla.”
Linda agrees to visit the location in question herself. “Give me your phone number and I promise I’ll call to tell you anything that I find. I promise.”
Meanwhile, the FBI task force and K-9 units continue the methodic searching of every square foot of land in and around the Newell Creek Apartments. In the rear of Ward Weaver’s place a large, disassembled hot-tub leans precariously against the house. A lanky teenaged boy clutches a garden hose8 that sprays a stream of water onto a two-foot wide slab of freshly poured concrete.9 He is so engrossed that he doesn’t even notice the various dogs and cops wandering around.
The next few days pass slowly with no information surfacing for investigators, public or private.
Linda presses her own search. Linda and Philip are parked a hundred yards from a rural Molalla residence with an overgrown yard and so many derelict vehicles it seems abandoned except for one light reflecting dimly from the kitchen window. They’ve been in surveillance for an hour, hoping to discover some human movement among the stillness. As dusk approaches, they see a rusty Ford van with Virginia license plates chugging its way into the driveway.
Philip scrambles to attach a telephoto extension to the front of his camcorder.
The van slowly pulls up and parks. Within seconds the sole occupant emerges. At the same moment Philip captures the driver’s image in his viewfinder. “I’ve got him; I’ve got him,” he whispers jubilantly to Linda sitting beside him peering through binoculars. The man being videotaped is tall, thin and angular. A patchy gray beard and bald head stand out before he turns to head for the house.
“Get me a good close-up of his license plate.”
“You got it.” For several quiet minutes Philip continues to zoom his camera onto assorted objects. Next he exits the car and begins walking toward a distant fence.
Linda rolls down the window. “Where do you think you’re going? Get back here before someone sees you.”
He laughs. “It’s almost dark, nobody’s going to see me. Look at all those woods. I’m just going to slip over that fence and wander around, see what I can tape. I’ll tell you one thing for sure, your psychic lady got it right. This house is very, very creepy.”
At 9:15 PM the pair of video sleuths finally return home. As they cross through the living room, they are semi-acknowledged by their sons who are engrossed in a video game.
Once inside his studio, Philip hooks up the tape he shot at Molalla and soon is examining his playback. Linda notices a stack of pages dangling from the front of her fax machine. She puts on her reading glasses and snatches a fistful to peruse. While she saunters toward Philip’s space, she becomes transfixed, absorbing paragraphs, slowly switching from page to page. Fully engrossed, Philip stares at some Molalla house footage showing the bald man with the scraggly beard. Linda startles him when she places a hand on his shoulder. “Philip,” she exclaims, “I’ve just got the background checks on Roettger and Weaver. Ollie’s note on the cover page says that while there were over five hundred registered sex offenders in Clackamas County, not one of them was registered as living in the Newell Creek Apartments.”
“What about Roettger? What have you got on him?”
“Pretty much what we expected. They initially hit him over the head with a lot of counts. It looks like thirty-nine total counts of sodomy and child rape, but inexplicably it was all plea bargained down to just one count of ‘attempted unlawful penetration of a minor’. But here’s a really strange thing, the background check on Ward Weaver10 says that right this minute he resides in San Quentin Prison on death row, awaiting execution for a double homicide committed in 1981.”11
Philip shuts the video off and stares at Linda. “That’s impossible, he’s in Oregon City!”
Linda shakes her head and rattles one of the papers. “No, no. It says he had clubbed a stranded motorist to death.” She runs her fingers along a paragraph. “It says he raped and strangled the guy’s female companion before finally burying her in a grave and sealing it with concrete. This was all done in Weaver’s own backyard. And he got the death penalty for it in 1984, yet incredibly, according to this, he’s still alive. Unbelievable!”
Philip asks the obvious. “What the hell is going on, Linda?”
Linda reluctantly comes to the only conclusion she can. “There must be more than one Ward Weaver! I guess I need to get the date of birth on the Oregon City Weaver so we can find out if there is any connection between him and the one on death row.” She shakes her head and shuffles the many pages. “You know, this is beginning to feel like that old movie, The Hills Have Eyes.”
“What about the stuff we taped tonight?”
“Did you get a clear shot of the license plate?”
For an answer Philip begins playing the videotape and initiates a freeze-frame depicting a close-up of the Virginia plate. She smiles and quickly kisses the back of his head before jotting the number down. “Tomorrow morning I’ll have Oliver run that plate through DMV and the utility bills for that old house. Maybe we’ll get the lead we need.”
With no new information forthcoming on either Ashley Pond or Miranda Gaddis, frustration and fear build. On Saturday evening Linda, Philip and the two boys are in the living room watching America’s Most Wanted. During a commercial break, Linda reminds the others about an important event scheduled early Sunday morning. “Maria called and said a massive private search for the missing girls has been organized.12 Tomorrow morning, they plan to scour every inch of that whole canyon around Newell Creek,” she says solemnly. “They need more volunteers. I think we should all participate.”
Her son, Jonathan, immediately protests. “Aw Mom, I’m going fishing with a friend tomorrow, I told you about it last week.”
Philip’s son, Damon, also complains. “I’m going bowling tomorrow.”
Philip squeezes her hand. “I’ll go for sure if you want to.”
“I need to. I think a day of physical searching will do me some good. It’s all so frustrating.”
“Okay Love, but I’ve got to warn you, it is very rugged terrain with a lot of brush. You don’t do well with sticker bushes and pine cones.”
Linda’s reply surprises him. “I don’t care. I’ve got to look for these girls myself.” At this moment, Linda feels like she’s gotten nowhere and let Ashley and Miranda down. She is determined to do anything that will help find them or at least eliminate a place where they might be.
The commercial ends and the TV screen flashes a large graphic containing Ashley and Miranda’s photos with a large caption underneath, “1-800-CRIME-TV.” Then, for a few minutes, a full segment airs profiling the basic facts of the mystery before ending with a desperate plea for viewers to come forward with any tips that could be useful.13
Early the next morning, Linda, Philip and twenty other adult volunteers assemble in the back parking lot of the Newell Creek Apartments. They’re joined by a platoon of uniformed, teenage Explorer Scouts, wearing backpacks and carrying walking sticks. A stocky thirty-year-old man approaches with a bullhorn. “Thank you all for your assistance this morning. This is the third search that I’ve organized.14 Today, we will spread out and look over every square foot of both sides of the canyon. There are four sector leaders. They are the fellows wearing white armbands and whistles. If you come across anything, anything at all that seems suspicious, holler loudly and the nearest leader will take command. Any questions? Okay, let’s proceed.”
Clusters of citizen searchers slowly fan out from one another, walking one step at a time, eyes glued to the ground. Linda does her pacing between Maria and Suzie. She painstakingly explores her assigned area, but finds nothing. Turning to climb back up the steep slope, Linda trips over a protruding root and rolls into a patch of thick ivy. Philip rushes to her aid and pulls her up. “Are you okay, Sweetie?”
Upset at what she perceives as her own clumsiness, Linda scrapes some mud from her jeans and straightens her glasses. “I’m fine. I’m fine, really.” A shrill blast from a coach’s whistle rings out. The entire party converges on the sound, hiking up and over a steep embankment. They discover a skinny, dark haired fourteen-year-old scout on his knees, bending over a round white object and shouting excitedly.
Somebody asks, “What’s he doing?”
Finally Linda and Philip have gotten close enough to recognize the round object. It is unmistakably a human skull. The feeling of accomplishment felt by the search party upon the discovery quickly dissolves when the Deputy State Medical Examiner15 concludes that the bones are those of an adult who has likely been dead up to a year. The local press is puzzled by the fact that the FBI task force had supposedly traversed this same territory during several of their intensive sweeps. Why wasn’t the skull spotted then?
The Medical Examiner tells newspaper reporters the remains could have been washed into the area by heavy rains after the initial FBI searches. An alternative theory suggests that despite the fact the FBI had searched Newell Creek Canyon six or seven separate times, they had not necessarily examined the spot where the skull was found, because there was no evidence that any human had been there in the months since Ashley disappeared. After all, he reminds them, the skull was discovered in a very steep, overgrown area near a stream that feeds Newell Creek. The bottom line: there is still no suspect and no crime scene.
