to the coast, south to the border into Mexico, and north past Poway, RB, and Escondido, leading to Riverside and Orange Counties.
Chelsea King, one of the most dependable daughters around, followed a regular schedule like clockwork. She had left the house that morning at six-fifteen for a peer counseling appointment. She was last seen leaving school when classes ended at two o’clock to go for her usual run. She was always home by five-thirty in the evening.
Brent, a mortgage banking executive, and his wife, Kelly, a medical assistant for a dermatologist, arrived home separately around six o’clock. When Kelly didn’t see Chelsea’s 1997 black BMW 528i in the driveway, she assumed that Chelsea had called Brent to let him know where she was.
“Have you heard from Chelsea?” Kelly asked.
“No, I thought you had,” Brent replied.
It was starting to get dark, and because this was such unusual behavior for their daughter, Kelly tried calling Chelsea’s cell phone, but she kept getting voice mail. Something told her to keep trying, so she called Chelsea’s friends, but they didn’t know where she was either. Chelsea had been at school, they said, and had missed no classes.
When there was still no sign of her by 6:49 P.M., Brent called AT&T, their cell phone provider, which was able to locate Chelsea’s cell phone near the Rancho Bernardo Community Park, using technology that determines the cell tower where the phone signal is “pinging.” Brent hopped into his car and sped over there.
In the parking lot, he saw her car sitting next to the tennis courts, one hundred feet from the trailhead. Peering through the windows, he noticed her purse and discarded school clothes lying on the seats, as if she’d changed before going for a run. He took off down the nearest trail, and yelled her name, but all he heard were the sounds of the night.
The sun had set at 5:43 P.M. and the sky was already dark over Lake Hodges, which was circled by a trail network in a fifty-acre section of the expansive San Dieguito River Valley. The perfect respite for those seeking solitude and self-reflection, these trails were used by only a small number of people at one time, often running or hiking a good distance from each other. Thick groves of Arundo reeds, which resembled bamboo, grew as tall as fifteen feet high in and around the shores of the lake and its fingerlike tributaries. Under the murky water, whose level rose with each rainfall, the trees and brush sent their roots deep into the soil.
Chelsea could run for eight miles at a time, so she could be anywhere out there in the dark, lying in the brush with a sprained ankle—or worse—with no way to call for help. She’d also fainted during a recent run, so Kelly wasted no time in calling the Poway sheriff’s station to report their daughter missing at 7:18 P.M.
A storm was coming in.
Chapter 3
When John Gardner still hadn’t shown up for dinner by seven-thirty his stepfather, Kevin, sent him a text message, berating him for putting his mother through all this grief: Why are you doing this to your mom?
John, who was six feet two inches tall and weighed 230 pounds, finally trudged into the condo half an hour later. He was carrying a headless snake, which he held above his head like a trophy. “Look what I’ve got!” he said triumphantly. “It almost got me, but I got it, instead!” John told Cathy later that he’d been so depressed, he’d been contemplating letting the snake bite him and hoped that he’d die from it.
He had a wild look in his eye that night, the same kind of expression that Jack Nicholson’s character had in the movie The Shining when he proclaimed, “Here’s Johnny!”
John was dirty and sweaty, as if he’d been hiking through heavy brush. He also had a scratch near his nose, which, looking back later, Cathy would recognize as a desperate mark of self-defense left by a girl’s fingernail.
Oh, my God, he’s nuts, Cathy thought. He’s lost it. What is happening?
When Kevin chastised John for being so late, John blew up, threw the snake on the floor and stormed out the front door. Cathy ran after him, catching up to him at the front gate.
“It’s eight o’clock,” she said. “Come back inside. Eat some dinner. Get cleaned up.”
Still angry but pouting, John conceded, taking a shower and having some food. He later told Cathy he’d been drinking beer that afternoon, but Cathy didn’t smell it on him because he’d been too grimy for her to get close enough to tell.
An early riser, Cathy was usually in bed by nine, but she stayed up a little later that night to have a heart-to-heart talk with her son.
“You got a scratch on your face,” Cathy said. “What happened?”
“I was going through the brush,” John said.
Cathy thought that explanation was sort of plausible, but she was used to him lying to her initially, and telling her the truth later. Depending on the severity of the situation, this was usually a combination of her asking and him confessing.
During their brief but intense conversation, John’s emotions were like a yo-yo, vacillating from sadness to anger to frustration. He cried as he told her about his lifelong goals and his inability to reach them. When Cathy finally went to bed, she left her son watching TV in the living room.
The next afternoon at three-thirty, Cathy had an appointment to get her nails done at a salon in the nearby community of Carmel Mountain.
A couple of years earlier, Cathy had been getting a pedicure at the same salon and laughing with a red-haired woman in the next chair about how running beat up her feet. Cathy didn’t know it at the time, but the woman, who empathized because her daughter ran cross-country, was Chelsea’s mother, Kelly King. It wasn’t until Cathy saw Kelly on the news after her daughter’s disappearance that Cathy realized she’d been talking to Chelsea’s mom.
“Have you heard about the missing girl?” the manicurist asked Cathy.
“No,” she said.
“It’s the girl that’s in the flyer in the window,” she said, referring to the notices that had been posted in businesses, supermarkets and gyms across the county—anywhere and everywhere that friends and friends of friends could find a place to hang them.
When the manicurist explained that Chelsea had gone missing during a run on a trail at the RB park, Cathy couldn’t believe the coincidence.
“Oh, my God, from RB? Those are the same trails I run on. I ran there last night,” she said, adding that she’d seen the Poway High School track team there just the week before. In fact, she said, “My kid was just out running over there. Well, he doesn’t really run, but he walks. I’m going to call him and see if he knows anything.”
Cathy dialed John’s number, but he didn’t pick up, so she told the manicurist that she’d follow up and call the number on the flyer if she learned anything pertinent. After all, she really did want to help.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of other people had the very same thought, and they acted on their urges. Many sent out alerts about her disappearance on Twitter and Facebook, where a special page was set up as word began to spread: Find Chelsea King: Missing San Diego Teen. Others grabbed a flashlight and hit the trails.
Usually, missing teenagers were deemed runaways before
