Vanished: Amber Dubois & Chelsea King

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Speaker 11 This is an important message regarding a missing juvenile at risk.

Speaker 12 Life stops.

Speaker 11 Amber, Leanne, Du Bois.

Speaker 12 You don't sleep, you don't eat. Nothing matters anymore.

Speaker 2 A teenager disappeared.

Speaker 13 I'm home.

Speaker 13 Please.

Speaker 15 He says, Amber never made it, and I knew right then someone had her.

Speaker 16 Kept us up at nights, going over in our heads heads what happened in front of the school.

Speaker 2 Then another gone.

Speaker 10 He's such a good girl.

Speaker 18 She needs to come home.

Speaker 19 There's a lot of desperation. Maybe she's tied up somewhere.
Maybe she's being held captive. That's to find her.

Speaker 5 Two missing girls, one man with a secret.

Speaker 21 Did you get any sense of the sort of personality you were dealing with?

Speaker 16 Yes.

Speaker 22 Psychotic.

Speaker 19 He came up and he went right to here to the edge and he says right there.

Speaker 24 two families two mysteries two journeys for justice

Speaker 15 if a lesson can be learned from amber then that i want it out there

Speaker 29 on the evening of february 12 2009 in a hillside house north of san diego california the negotiation was finally complete The girl had won.

Speaker 15 I made her write a one-page letter to me, and she made it two pages, but repeated herself multiple times to make it longer.

Speaker 15 I'm like, okay.

Speaker 28 She pestered her mother, Carrie, and her mother's boyfriend at the time, Dave.

Speaker 37 All kids have their own things that they're into. Amber loved animals.

Speaker 39 She'd been campaigning for it during her regular and frequent visits with her father, Mo.

Speaker 12 She had already had it named for probably a month before she even got it.

Speaker 42 What was she going to call it?

Speaker 12 Nanette.

Speaker 12 It's a French name.

Speaker 6 Which made perfect sense to her since her own surname was very French, Dubois, Amber Dubois.

Speaker 24 She was 14 years old.

Speaker 44 In the morning, it would be Friday, February 13th.

Speaker 45 It was to be her lucky day.

Speaker 46 The day she'd walk those few familiar blocks from her home in Escondido, clutching her mother's $200 check, and receive in exchange

Speaker 32 a lamb, of all things.

Speaker 25 She was buying it as part of her high school's Future Farmers program.

Speaker 28 And tonight, as she drifted off to sleep for the last time, every good thing still seemed possible.

Speaker 10 Come home, please.

Speaker 30 None of it had happened then.

Speaker 12 There's not a single day that goes by that I don't break down and cry for hours.

Speaker 44 The extent of the evil hadn't occurred to the sheriff yet.

Speaker 51 All of a sudden, there's a safe zone that's been taken away from you.

Speaker 25 The The DA never imagined she'd say.

Speaker 54 This case rocked San Diego County.

Speaker 31 But this was before all that.

Speaker 56 And Amber was just going about the business of being 14 and slightly quirky.

Speaker 15 Amber was a free-spirited kid.

Speaker 12 She loved reading and writing and she didn't like the normal things that most kids like she had her own pace she liked to take her time you know you constantly come on ever come on she's looking at the flowers the bugs and just whatever she was never in a hurry ever she just wanted to see the world how she wanted to see it and she did no interest in boys yet no girly things either we would have to order her clothes for school online because she hates didn't want to go shopping oh god no not at all that would be torture for her to go to the mall what did other girls think about i mean you know, they're so cliqueish, you know, that page.

Speaker 12 Well, she had her clique, but it was a very, very small clique. One small group of very close friends that were all

Speaker 12 geeky nerds like her, basically. You know, they were all a bunch of bookworms.

Speaker 15 She read the whole Harry Potter series in two weeks.

Speaker 59 Come on. All of them.

Speaker 15 And she couldn't put a book down, you know, she'd get a new 300-page novel and I would have to go in her room multiple times because I knew she was under the blankets with the flashlight reading.

Speaker 12 Probably in a year, she probably read more books than I have in my life.

Speaker 29 Amber, say hi! She was just beginning high school.

Speaker 31 She'd made plans to take extra courses, graduate early, and she vowed never to miss one day of class.

Speaker 15 I'm like, are you sure? You never want to miss school.

Speaker 7 What's wrong with you?

Speaker 15 I would do anything to miss school. She wanted perfect attendance.

Speaker 12 She wanted to be an animal behavioral scientist. She wanted to study animals in depth.

Speaker 25 She'd kept guinea pigs and fish and birds and dogs and rats. She began riding lessons at three.

Speaker 34 By nine, she owned a horse.

Speaker 47 So when the school offered future farmers of America, of course she joined.

Speaker 12 They have a huge, huge farm on the campus and they allow students to purchase and raise farm animals.

Speaker 30 And thus the lamb.

Speaker 63 And the happy walk to school on Friday, February 13th.

Speaker 15 And I remember driving to work laughing, going, I know I'm going to have to take care of that lamb.

Speaker 56 The weather was drizzly that winter's day, mid-50s. It was late in the afternoon when Dave noticed, well, nothing.

Speaker 65 An absence.

Speaker 37 I was at the house and went, wait a minute, why isn't Amber here? Because her mom was still at work. Looked at my watch.
She should have been here an hour ago.

Speaker 15 I called her mom and I go, oh, I wonder where she's at. So I called her cell phone.
I'm like, Amber, call me.

Speaker 25 Dave got in his car, drove to the school.

Speaker 37 So I figured maybe she went to play with her lamb and just lost track of time.

Speaker 38 But then he found one of her teachers and asked if he'd seen Amber.

Speaker 37 And Mr. Rayburn looked at me and said, she didn't show up here today.
I was very surprised that she wasn't here. This was her last day to pay for her lamb.

Speaker 37 And I said, no, no, no, no, no, no. What are you talking about? I gave her a check before I left the house this morning.
And that's when sirens went off. I called Carrie and told her Mr.

Speaker 37 Rayburn said she wasn't there. And Carrie, at that point, you know, kind of went into panic mode.

Speaker 15 Annie says, you know, Amber never made it. And I knew right then something, someone had her.
I knew. I was like, oh my god, something terrible has happened.

Speaker 10 Where was Amber?

Speaker 68 Police and the nation join the search and a new lead sends a mother on a dangerous mission across the border.

Speaker 16 We had advised her not to go because there'd be great reason for them to kidnap her and hold her.

Speaker 29 Amber Dubois, 14 years old, was a young woman of established habits.

Speaker 15 She got out of school at 2.45. I'd give her until 3.30 to be home so she could hang out with her friends.

Speaker 30 Dependable was Amber.

Speaker 31 Predictable even.

Speaker 15 She was always home by 3.30, always called.

Speaker 46 And then came Friday, February 13th, 2009, when she wasn't home, didn't call.

Speaker 20 The day her mother, Carrie McGonagall, discovered she hadn't gone to school at all.

Speaker 15 Amber never wanted to miss school, and she had the check in her pocket for the lambs. I mean, there was no way she was missing that day of school.

Speaker 56 Carrie called her ex-husband, Amber's father, Mo.

Speaker 71 What did her voice sound like on the phone?

Speaker 12 Complete panic.

Speaker 15 Then I went to the school and I started looking all around the school, you know, in dumpsters, anything for a backpack.

Speaker 45 What could they do?

Speaker 28 They printed flyers, called their friends.

Speaker 15 I probably had 15 people show up right away, and we started going door to door.

Speaker 50 As did the police.

Speaker 67 They were out with a black and white pitcher, a fax pitcher of Amber.

Speaker 37 And I handed him a color flyer and said, here, this is a much better picture of Amber.

Speaker 72 That's who she is. She's been missing actually since about Friday.

Speaker 6 Escondido Police combed the neighborhood, the school, the creek behind it, worked all night, said then-Captain Bob Benton.

Speaker 73 Did you see her by chance?

Speaker 16 It's now Saturday morning and still no sign of Amber. Very concerning to us.

Speaker 25 And then later that day, a break, somebody had seen her near the school.

Speaker 16 Describing how she had the hoodie on, that it was drizzly. He described her as walking hurriedly, so he thought she was late to school.

Speaker 17 Then someone else had seen Amber near a fire hydrant with a boy.

Speaker 54 Basically, I said, oh, there's Amber. Made notice that she was there.

Speaker 16 The boy was described as tall, about 68 inches taller than Amber, doughy looking, and dark complexed.

Speaker 44 Who was that boy?

Speaker 41 Was Amber with someone?

Speaker 34 She had been missing a day when the phone company called.

Speaker 29 Her cell was active somewhere nearby.

Speaker 16 Somebody had tried to access voicemail and it hit on the same cell phone tower that covers both Amber's home and the school.

Speaker 67 So police sent out what amounted to a reverse 911 call.

Speaker 11 This is an important message from the Escanito Police Department regarding a missing juvenile at risk. The missing juvenile is Amber Leanne Du Bois.

Speaker 16 It's a recorded message that we can send out to all the homes in the area. We did it for a several mile radius around the cell phone tower.

Speaker 11 Brown hair, blue eyes, last seen wearing all dark clothing.

Speaker 16 If you've seen her, you know her, please call us.

Speaker 29 As the news spread, people did call.

Speaker 46 A classmate reported seeing Amber in downtown Escondido Saturday the 14th, early evening. But local surveillance cameras picked up nothing.

Speaker 76 Then Sunday the 15th, a second classmate said he saw her walking with a boy.

Speaker 77 The sighting on Sunday night was deemed to be as reliable as could be.

Speaker 28 Each sighting sent hope soaring, but not in Carrie, because she knew Amber was not a runner.

Speaker 15 And I'm like, it wasn't her. I'm telling you right now, it wasn't her.
She would not be this close to home and not come home.

Speaker 25 Day and night, the search went on.

Speaker 46 The FBI joined in.

Speaker 42 Volunteers did, too, searching outbuildings, vacant sheds.

Speaker 79 We don't know what's going on here, but we do check that out as a matter of course.

Speaker 44 Search and rescue teams scoured miles of brush-choked ravines, hidden places around rocky hills.

Speaker 16 Also in this area, what we found out was a place where a lot of kids go to party. It's called the Caves.
It consists of a real rocky area, mountainous area.

Speaker 73 But no sign of Hamburg.

Speaker 79 This has been going on now for several days. So as it goes on, we get a little more worried.

Speaker 35 What was it like for the the two of you as those days kept going by and there was no word, nothing?

Speaker 12 Life stops.

Speaker 12 Nothing matters anymore. You don't sleep, you don't eat.

Speaker 15 Go into Great Depression some days and other days you can see some kind of light.

Speaker 42 The police set up a task force, assigned search teams.

Speaker 28 Volunteers came out, hundreds of them.

Speaker 81 I have three daughters myself and I just cannot imagine what those parents are going through.

Speaker 82 I look around, I see a bunch of little flickers of hope is what I'm seeing.

Speaker 15 Someone has her.

Speaker 15 She's not just hiding from me or hiding from the house. Someone has her.

Speaker 16 It kept us up at nights

Speaker 16 going over in our heads over and over of what happened that morning in front of the school.

Speaker 20 If Amber was alive, and that was a big if, where could she be?

Speaker 16 If she left, she left with somebody she knew. So who was that person?

Speaker 8 If you know where Amber Du Bois is tonight, they told the Amber story on America's Most Wanted.

Speaker 46 She was on the cover of People magazine.

Speaker 25 And what happened?

Speaker 17 Suddenly sightings coast to coast, hundreds of them.

Speaker 12 There was one girl who looked so much like Amber that she had to keep carrying her ID on her because law enforcement would stop her so many times. I'm not Amber.
You know, she had to show the ID.

Speaker 12 I'm not Amber.

Speaker 6 Captain Benton's team ran down every tip in every state, 1,200 of them.

Speaker 42 500 interviews.

Speaker 65 Even though...

Speaker 16 The more we investigated it, the the more we came up into dead ends.

Speaker 20 And Carrie ran her own private task force of one.

Speaker 70 When tips came in of sightings in Mexico, Carrie got in her car and drove 45 miles south across the border into Tijuana, another 60 miles to Mexicale to scour the streets for amber.

Speaker 15 I always let law enforcement know what I was doing, you know, and so I called them and I said, I'm going to go down. They're like, you don't know how dangerous this is.

Speaker 16 We had advised her not to go because if somebody down there knew that she had, you know, at that point, I think a $40,000 or $50,000 award, there'd be

Speaker 16 great reason for them to kidnap her and hold her down there.

Speaker 15 I go, it's for my kid. They're like, we're begging you not to go.
I said, I'll call you when I get back. Bye.
And I ended up going down there for, I think, four or five times.

Speaker 6 But no amber in Mexico.

Speaker 39 So at home in Escondido, what did she do?

Speaker 12 She had the list of registered predators and she would drive by one out and she'd take a dozen a night.

Speaker 16 We had a call from an apartment complex manager that a female was yelling at individuals in the apartment complex.

Speaker 16 And when our officers arrived, it was Harry McGonagall yelling at a registered sex offender.

Speaker 16 And the sex register actually was complaining that the apartment manager, and the apartment manager had asked us to ask her to leave.

Speaker 29 The threat of arrest didn't scare her.

Speaker 15 I'm like, so what? I'll get an amber's face out there more. Go ahead.

Speaker 52 But then the weeks became months, and ginning up hope got hard to do.

Speaker 27 The volunteers, once a small army, thinned, stopped coming.

Speaker 12 We had days where we'd have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people,

Speaker 12 but then it would steadily drop down to points where there was weeks when we had like eight people show up.

Speaker 85 Four months after Amber disappeared, the Volunteers Search Center closed.

Speaker 48 On February 13th, 2010, they marked a somber anniversary.

Speaker 16 Our biggest fear is going our entire careers, if not our lifetime, and not knowing what happened to Amber Dubois. And the likelihood of solving this case was very limited, if at all.

Speaker 43 And then?

Speaker 86 The search is on this morning for a missing 17-year-old Powweg girl, Chelsea King.

Speaker 60 It happened again.

Speaker 3 Another mystery, and another anguished mother.

Speaker 18 Please just help us bring her home. She's a great kid.
She's such a good girl. She needs to come home.

Speaker 20 Thursday, February 25th, 2010.

Speaker 24 Just over a year since Amber Dubois vanished.

Speaker 46 Another teenager was missing 10 miles away in a suburb of San Diego.

Speaker 15 I'm like, Happen this happened almost a year,

Speaker 15 you know, same month. I'm like, Happy this, you know.

Speaker 70 It began in a parking lot near a popular local hiking trail.

Speaker 87 We get calls oftentimes about juveniles, girls, you know, runaways.

Speaker 28 Two San Diego County Sheriff's deputies responded to a call from panicked parents.

Speaker 87 This one, I think, made the hair stand up a little bit on Deputy Creo's neck.

Speaker 89 17-year-old Chelsea King, straight-A student, college-bound, had come to Rancho Bernardo Park in San Diego, as she often did, around 2 in the afternoon, for a brisk five-mile run.

Speaker 56 Broad daylight, a well-known, well-used, safe hiking trail that skirted the marshy banks of a long, shallow lake.

Speaker 25 But then she was late, didn't answer her cell, didn't return her parents' messages.

Speaker 76 Chelsea's dad called the cell phone provider, which looked up the tower her signal was hitting, led her dad to her phone.

Speaker 65 which was inside her locked car in that parking lot.

Speaker 12 And just, you know, finding her car, it was unusual. It was not just somebody, a teenager out here with her boyfriend.

Speaker 12 Made me think that maybe something, something had gone wrong.

Speaker 69 It certainly had.

Speaker 91 Chelsea King is described as having strawberry blonde hair, and now another public nightmare began.

Speaker 18 Anybody out there, if you know anything, please just help us bring her home. She's a great girl.
She's such a good girl. She needs to come home.

Speaker 45 Word got around fast.

Speaker 12 We immediately felt what they were going through.

Speaker 15 I was ready to get in my car and go. I'm like, I want to go help search.
That was my instinct.

Speaker 25 Bonnie Dumanis was the San Diego district attorney at the time and one of the first to get the news.

Speaker 54 Everybody began thinking of Amber right from the beginning, I think. And I think that's what made everybody so scared about Chelsea was knowing that this had happened, you know, with Amber.

Speaker 6 Amber, who was, in some ways, so similar.

Speaker 12 Beautiful girls, both 5'5 ⁇ , both light-complexed.

Speaker 55 That very Thursday afternoon, within hours of Chelsea's disappearance, friends fanned out around the park, the neighborhood around it.

Speaker 56 Even total strangers joined in.

Speaker 56 And then, perhaps two miles from Chelsea's abandoned car, between a creek bed and a row of houses, as the cold settled in, the daylight failed.

Speaker 19 One of the people that are coming from the neighborhood to search came across a pair of underwear and socks that did not appear trampled or discarded.

Speaker 19 They were right in the center of the walking trail.

Speaker 34 Could have been anyone's, of course.

Speaker 20 But how did they get there?

Speaker 19 And they seemed to be freshly there.

Speaker 55 Was there a connection? Dave Brown, a sergeant back then, sent a detective out to the trail.

Speaker 36 Right along this trail here, someone?

Speaker 93 Right along this trail, just a little bit further down. The parents said that, yes, that's the type that she wears.

Speaker 71 Was there a clear indication that there might be DNA?

Speaker 93 Yes, there was

Speaker 93 a small amount of blood that was found there.

Speaker 64 Didn't look good.

Speaker 28 They sent the clothes to the DNA lab for confirmation

Speaker 62 and deployed a virtual army.

Speaker 36 Helicopters with infrared tracking, search and rescue teams, hundreds of people began beating the impossibly tangled thickets around thousands of acres of Rancho Bernardo parkland.

Speaker 53 And divers made their way through the lake and its underwater forest.

Speaker 95 You can see the shoreline over there and the shoreline over here.

Speaker 96 It's very, very thick and it's the trees in the middle are hidden by the deep water.

Speaker 25 Sergeant Don Parker, now deceased, led the operation.

Speaker 39 And so you can see a little bit of the difficulty.

Speaker 95 For instance, just here, if you take one step, you have to part the brush. And look, you take another step, you have to part the brush.
And that's the way it was that day, the Thursday night.

Speaker 29 Night fell.

Speaker 42 Still no sign of Chelsea.

Speaker 43 Where was she on these miles of trails in this vast dark park?

Speaker 95 There's a lot of places where you can hide somebody. That's our problem.

Speaker 96 And as you can see, this is a very, very expansive area.

Speaker 46 There's a lot of acreage here.

Speaker 44 By Friday, the day after Chelsea's disappearance, there were canine units, trucks, four-wheelers.

Speaker 95 We had hundreds and hundreds of folks coming from all over Southern California, and people were up for hours and hours and hours.

Speaker 56 County Sheriff Bill Gore manned the phone.

Speaker 51 It was literally calls from the agent in charge of the FBI to me saying, I got 25 agents where you want them.

Speaker 90 Border Patrol got a call, and boom, they were there.

Speaker 46 The FBI canvassed some 300 homes around the park and its lake.

Speaker 75 Police ran down 600 tips.

Speaker 46 The area's known sex offenders were tracked down as well.

Speaker 47 And by that weekend, two days missing.

Speaker 99 We're looking for what? A 5'5 ⁇ , 115-pound girl with the 12th.

Speaker 20 Thousands came to look for Chelsea.

Speaker 88 Amber's parents among them.

Speaker 12 It was huge. I mean, the line of people was eight people wide, went around the whole building all the way out to the street.

Speaker 46 But this was not like the search for Amber.

Speaker 40 There were no sightings of Chelsea.

Speaker 51 This case was pretty specific. We believe that she was out and went jogging to that park.

Speaker 51 And the fact she didn't come back leads you to believe there was some type of foul play right from the beginning.

Speaker 100 Which is why the sheriff called Dave Brown and his team of homicide detectives.

Speaker 19 There were certain things about this missing person case that concerned the people that were investigating.

Speaker 19 And one of them was the clothing found and found really far away, a couple miles from where a car was found. There's a rational explanation for it.

Speaker 46 No rational explanation except foul play.

Speaker 76 And then, next day, a second discovery.

Speaker 29 It was a mile from the place where the underwear and socks were found, near a running trail, a shoe, which appeared to be the very shoe Chelsea was wearing in this photo.

Speaker 95 It was laying on the brush on top. Looked like someone either had thrown it or dropped it.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 95 Right there.

Speaker 19 the way these things are are so far apart from each other we figured foul play whether or not she's deceased or whether or not she's just being held somewhere it we can't answer that the chance they'd find chelsea alive was growing slim the chance they'd find her at all was not much better now there were two girls gone but where

Speaker 16 There's more of a hope that they were somehow connected.

Speaker 30 Chelsea, Amber, might there be a link?

Speaker 65 Police are about to get a break.

Speaker 19 And we need to find out everything we can about this person.

Speaker 19 There's a lot of desperation. In the back of your mind, you're hoping that someone has her held against her will.
And so the detectives don't want to go home. Nobody wants to go home.

Speaker 19 Nobody Nobody wants to sleep. We have to find her.

Speaker 24 It was like some nightmarish deja vu.

Speaker 85 Amber Dubois vanished in San Diego County.

Speaker 42 A search turned up nothing.

Speaker 45 Then a year later in a neighboring town, another teenage girl was gone.

Speaker 85 Another search going nowhere.

Speaker 24 Were the two connected?

Speaker 23 That's what the cop who'd searched for Amber wondered.

Speaker 16 It was more of a hope. that they were somehow connected and would help us solve the Amber case.

Speaker 72 And so he watched, as search and rescue literally beat the bushes and probed the treacherous muddy water.

Speaker 65 And detectives in suits worked the neighborhoods nearby.

Speaker 19 They're finding out who her friends are or where she was. Talking to anybody and everybody who might have been in that park that day, hoping to find something.

Speaker 20 And they were trying to make sense of evidence scattered around the park.

Speaker 56 Chelsea's car, underwear with a slight stain of blood found on a trail, a shoe a mile away.

Speaker 19 In the back of our minds, we know it's a matter of time before we're going to, we may get the results from this DNA. And that will also prove if those are actually her items of clothing and shoe.

Speaker 48 Then, three days after Chelsea disappeared, more clothes surfaced not far from where the first items were found.

Speaker 29 The mate to the first shoe and a sports bra in a ditch.

Speaker 93 It was an area that we had searched and didn't find anything of value.

Speaker 71 What did you think when you found that stuff?

Speaker 93 There was an idea that maybe articles were being being randomly thrown or scattered to throw us off of a trail, or to throw us off of a lead.

Speaker 73 Was Chelsea still in that park?

Speaker 53 Was she dead or alive?

Speaker 34 And one more question.

Speaker 25 Had anyone else been attacked in that park?

Speaker 25 And, sure enough, a student home for the holidays, also a jogger, reported that she'd been attacked while running on a trail near where those first items of clothing were found.

Speaker 29 That was December, two months before Chelsea vanished.

Speaker 36 What's chilling is it happened literally within feet of a whole row of houses.

Speaker 71 But what was good was the young woman could provide a description of her attacker and what he tried to do. He was white, she said, maybe 25 or 26, stocky, muscular, brown hair, military type cut.

Speaker 71 She was running along the path and this guy tackled her from the side, pinned her down. And she, understanding what was coming, said, you'll have to kill me.

Speaker 96 He said, that can be arranged.

Speaker 71 But she knew Taekwondo, and she caught him in the nose with her elbow, and he reacted.

Speaker 66 She wriggled away and ran like the wind out of there.

Speaker 34 Other witnesses offered a vague description of a man they had seen in the park the day Chelsea disappeared.

Speaker 85 White male, heavy set.

Speaker 57 Did they have a serial attacker on their hands?

Speaker 48 Was this part of the park his territory?

Speaker 42 It was now Sunday afternoon, February 28th.

Speaker 23 Chelsea had been missing for for three days.

Speaker 101 How do you deal with the parents?

Speaker 19 I didn't have any answers for them. At one point, they asked for a tour of the various items that were found.

Speaker 20 So Sergeant Brown showed the Kings where some of Chelsea's clothing was found.

Speaker 19 We got to positions where we could point it out, you know, that's where we found this, that's where we found that.

Speaker 63 And that's when the detective's phone rang.

Speaker 19 The DNA came back.

Speaker 70 The DNA on the clothing, it confirmed.

Speaker 23 It was Chelsea's.

Speaker 46 But the test produced something else, too.

Speaker 27 The most important discovery yet.

Speaker 76 Inside that clothing was a second person's DNA.

Speaker 19 And the lab got a hit. And they came back to a sex registrat.

Speaker 20 Chelsea's parents were standing beside him.

Speaker 19 Did you tell them that? No, I did not.

Speaker 14 But the tour was over.

Speaker 23 Sergeant Brown gathered his team.

Speaker 19 Well, we have the name and a prison number. And we need to find out everything we can about this person.

Speaker 102 The DNA match was to a convicted sex offender named John Gardner, a man who'd spent five years in prison for a sex assault back in 2000.

Speaker 19 Is it a mixed blessing that it comes back to a sex registrant that's been, you know, done time in prison?

Speaker 19 That's, you know, that's not a positive note, but at least we knew who and where it was, and we knew we were going to close in.

Speaker 34 The search for Gardner began that afternoon.

Speaker 19 We sent undercover people to watch the houses that might be where he lives.

Speaker 69 They approached carefully, watched from a distance.

Speaker 75 It was a slim chance, but what if he was holding her?

Speaker 29 Saw the cops, panicked.

Speaker 19 And in the back of everybody's mind, she's alive, and

Speaker 19 you think maybe she's tied up somewhere. Maybe she's being held captive.
And we're going to find her. And we're going to find her tonight.

Speaker 46 But she wasn't in any of those houses, and neither was he.

Speaker 76 Instead, they found Gardner in a bar on the north side of the lake in the very park where Chelsea had been running, Hernandez hideaway.

Speaker 33 And this was weird.

Speaker 56 Gardner's clothes were wet and muddy, as if he'd been wading in the lake for some reason.

Speaker 70 They took him to the sheriff's lockup, sent lineup photographs to the young woman now back at college who'd survived that earlier attack in the park.

Speaker 19 And she picked John Gardner instantly.

Speaker 34 What had this man with the wet and muddy clothes done with Chelsea King?

Speaker 25 And for that matter, did he know anything about that other missing girl, Amber Dubois?

Speaker 57 The interrogation begins, and police are into a ride.

Speaker 94 Rolled back in the chair, did a full-on belly laugh, laughed for an extended period of time.

Speaker 56 He was a young white male, burly, short-cropped hair, matched perfectly the descriptions of the suspected attacker in Rancho Bernardo Park.

Speaker 3 Now, John Gardner, 30 years old, was behind bars.

Speaker 101 How did he react to being arrested?

Speaker 66 Very unhappy.

Speaker 22 Wanted to know why he was being arrested, believed the accusations were false.

Speaker 76 Detectives Pat O'Brien, Scott Enyart, Mark Palmer confronted Gardner in an interrogation room.

Speaker 22 We believed and we hoped that Chelsea was still alive someplace, so we just kept asking, where is Chelsea King?

Speaker 28 How'd he respond to that?

Speaker 22 He denied everything.

Speaker 22 He denied ever coming to contact with her. He basically said the only information he had was from the television.

Speaker 90 But you're able to say, listen, pal, we've got your DNA.

Speaker 22 We did. We approached him with the DNA and he called us liars.

Speaker 75 What was his demeanor?

Speaker 97 He was all over the place. He was calm one minute, angry, one minute, you know, on the verge of crying the other minute.

Speaker 22 He thought part of it was humorous to him and part of it was just offensive. How dare we

Speaker 22 even consider him as a suspect? He actually made it perfectly clear that he hated law enforcement.

Speaker 22 He said he was treated poorly while he was in the Department of Corrections, and he hated cops for that reason.

Speaker 25 Gardner had been arrested at a bar called Hernandez-Hideaway, drunk, wet, muddy.

Speaker 17 He told the detective he slipped in some mud and hopped in the lake to rinse off.

Speaker 97 First thing that comes to our mind is, why is he in the lake? Hernandez-Hideaway is on the north end of Lake Hodges.

Speaker 48 But the evidence, those bits of Chelsea's clothing, were found on the south end of the lake.

Speaker 97 So now we're thinking, has he placed Chelsea somewhere on the north side of the lake and he's going to retrieve or see if she's still there?

Speaker 93 And you're looking for clues that he's going to give you, either verbally or non-verbally or whatever.

Speaker 40 The questioning was strictly limited to this.

Speaker 48 Where was Chelsea?

Speaker 16 Our sole purpose was to find Chelsea King alive

Speaker 97 and get her some kind of help so we couldn't go into too much detail about why and what you were doing. You know, we kept trying to keep them focused to find out, you know, where is she at?

Speaker 19 What did you do with her?

Speaker 13 The suspect wouldn't budge.

Speaker 62 They kept prodding.

Speaker 97 So Scott's got a photograph of Chelsea King and continually pushed it in front of him. He would glance at it.

Speaker 16 He wouldn't look at it very long,

Speaker 97 but then he'd continue deny, deny, deny.

Speaker 23 Scott would keep keep talking to him.

Speaker 97 Where is she? Where is she?

Speaker 97 And then he would go off on some tangent.

Speaker 21 Did you get any sense of the sort of personality you were dealing with when you talked to him?

Speaker 65 Yes.

Speaker 22 Psychotic.

Speaker 73 Had some major anger issues.

Speaker 25 They left the room for a few minutes, watched him on a video monitor as Gardner looked at a photo of Chelsea.

Speaker 22 And basically called Chelsea a bitch. Why are you doing this to my life? And flipped the paper away.

Speaker 29 And then, out of the blue, in mid-interview, said the detectives, Gardner surprised him.

Speaker 32 He brought up a name.

Speaker 39 The name of a girl who had disappeared more than a year earlier.

Speaker 97 The photo of Chelsea is sitting in front of him. At some point, he says, you guys, in essence, are going to probably try to finger me for that Amber girl's disappearance.

Speaker 94 I asked where she was, and he played it off.

Speaker 22 He wouldn't even pronounce her last name properly.

Speaker 56 And at that point, the officers say, Gardner began laughing hysterically.

Speaker 94 Rolled back in the chair, did a full-on belly laugh, laughed for an extended period of time.

Speaker 27 And at some point, you realize that's it. You're not going to get anything out of this guy.

Speaker 103 Correct.

Speaker 97 We definitely knew walking out of there he was guilty. There's nothing we could do at that point.

Speaker 25 Nothing but redouble the effort to find Chelsea.

Speaker 46 Still, Chelsea's parents couldn't help but hope that the arrest of Gardner had brought them a step closer to finding their daughter.

Speaker 18 It gave us hope that Chelsea's still there. We just have to find her.
So, I I'm not going to think about who he is, what he is.

Speaker 79 There's an incredible amount of rage that boils, but right now we're focused on Chelsea.

Speaker 65 Rage?

Speaker 29 Yes, of course.

Speaker 28 But imagine what Brent King might have thought when he learned just a little more, as you will too,

Speaker 62 about the history of Mr.

Speaker 6 John Gardner.

Speaker 104 The man was evaluated 10 years previously by a board-certified psychiatrist who found that he was a danger and a continuing danger to the public. And apparently, that warning was not listened to.

Speaker 44 I was shocked.

Speaker 8 Who was John Gardner, really?

Speaker 30 Good friend?

Speaker 105 John told us what had happened.

Speaker 25 Or sinister offender.

Speaker 104 This was a man who started out being violent.

Speaker 101 Two very different pictures come into focus.

Speaker 68 Sunday, February 28th, 2010, three days of searching.

Speaker 8 No Chelsea King.

Speaker 100 But there was an arrest, and John Gardner in custody was at least some kind of comfort for Chelsea's parents.

Speaker 18 I was relieved that this

Speaker 18 monster is no longer out there

Speaker 18 and able to do this to anyone else.

Speaker 25 Who was John Gardner?

Speaker 56 By the time they arrested him, police had assembled some disturbing information.

Speaker 42 This would not go down well in San Diego County.

Speaker 22 He had been a convicted sex offender. The initial crime was serious.
He was convicted for six years for sexual assault in 2000, I believe it was.

Speaker 56 In fact, he'd served five years of that sentence for sexually assaulting and brutally beating his 13-year-old neighbor.

Speaker 71 This is where in March 2000 Gardner became a sex offender.

Speaker 101 It was daytime his own mother's house.

Speaker 71 He was 20 then, invited a 13-year-old over to watch videos with him.

Speaker 36 He began groping her.

Speaker 71 She begged him to stop. He intensified his attack.

Speaker 20 She resisted.

Speaker 101 He began beating her severely.

Speaker 71 The incident left her so traumatized her family had to move to a different part of California.

Speaker 66 But Gardner denied it all.

Speaker 36 He even blamed the beating on the victim's mother.

Speaker 67 Jennifer Brandt was a friend of Gardner's back then.

Speaker 105 I remember John had come up to the mountains and told us what had happened and that he was going to have to go to court for this.

Speaker 68 They went to high school together in the San Bernardino Mountains, 100 miles from San Diego.

Speaker 105 He told us it wasn't him, it was the girl had a boyfriend, and he thought that the girl just didn't want to admit to her parents that she was having sex with her boyfriend because it might have gotten her in trouble.

Speaker 105 And so she was going to blame the neighbor being John.

Speaker 53 She and their circle of friends all believed him, she says.

Speaker 40 The John Gardner they knew was a good friend, always helpful.

Speaker 47 He confided in her that he'd been diagnosed as bipolar.

Speaker 105 He did display the, I guess, symptoms of it, really high highs and really low lows.

Speaker 105 And on one of the occasions that he was in a low, he started telling me about some things that happened in his childhood that a family member had had actually molested him.

Speaker 70 Gardner and his mother moved to San Diego from the mountains in 1998.

Speaker 42 According to court records, he was working at a sporting goods store when he was arrested in 2000.

Speaker 73 He was about to turn 21, had wanted to become a math teacher.

Speaker 56 His arrest put an end to those plans.

Speaker 75 Gardner always proclaimed his innocence.

Speaker 56 but agreed to a plea deal, telling his probation officer three attorneys warned him he'd get reamed if he went to trial.

Speaker 45 But before he was sentenced, the court ordered a forensic psychiatrist to evaluate Gardner to help determine whether he should receive probation or how long he should be imprisoned.

Speaker 104 It was a very serious offense, even though it was the first time. This was a man who started out being violent.

Speaker 88 Dr. Mark Kalish is a forensic psychiatrist who's read the documents on this case.

Speaker 23 He's also a colleague of the doctor who wrote the evaluation.

Speaker 88 That doctor, Matthew Carroll, declined Dateline's request for an interview.

Speaker 104 It's a rare case where the individual starts out in their first offense by assaulting the victim. And so that was a warning sign to Dr.
Carroll that this was not the typical case.

Speaker 104 This was a man who was on a very, very steep trajectory for future violence.

Speaker 45 The psychiatrist's warnings, as noted in Gardner's probation report, were dire.

Speaker 25 The defendant manifests significant predatory traits to underage females.

Speaker 39 The defendant would be a continued danger to underage girls in the community. And it would be unlikely that the defendant would be amenable to treatment.

Speaker 34 The psychiatrist recommended the maximum sentence allowed by law.

Speaker 104 In my experience, I don't think that I've ever seen a psychiatrist make a louder and clearer

Speaker 13 call.

Speaker 61 And the doctor who evaluated Gardner was apparently so concerned about him, he followed up his report with a phone call to Gardner's probation officer with yet another warning.

Speaker 25 The defendant does not suffer from a psychotic disorder, he said.

Speaker 75 He's simply a bad guy who's inordinately interested in young girls.

Speaker 32 Such calls are rare, says Dr.

Speaker 56 Kalish.

Speaker 104 When psychiatrists become desperate, we pick up the phone.

Speaker 100 Yet despite those warnings, the prosecutor, probation officer, and judge all decided that John Gardner should get a mid-level sentence of six years rather than ten years, which would have been the maximum sentence under the plea deal.

Speaker 54 I have reviewed this case with the glasses of having been a prosecutor, having been a municipal court judge, superior court judge, and now the DA.

Speaker 56 We asked to speak to the prosecutor on that case.

Speaker 20 Instead, we were told Bonnie Dumanis, then San Diego District Attorney, would answer our questions.

Speaker 54 What happened in this case was appropriate under the law that existed.

Speaker 20 And this was, what, a mid-range sentence as opposed to the maximum sentence?

Speaker 7 That's possible.

Speaker 78 That was in spite of a psychiatrist report that said this guy is really dangerous and he always will be dangerous.

Speaker 23 Now, why would that not have jacked it up to a full 10-year sentence?

Speaker 54 Well, first of all, there were two psychiatric reports.

Speaker 106 Right.

Speaker 54 One was saying he was a danger. One was saying that he was treatable and recommended inpatient treatment for 90 days and probation.

Speaker 78 But this is a guy who'd seen him once in five years.

Speaker 54 But he examined him just as much as the guy who saw him for an hour. He had actually treated him.

Speaker 98 But that report was only one factor in the sentencing decision.

Speaker 43 There were glowing character references.

Speaker 41 I know in my heart of hearts John Gartner is a rare and good breed.

Speaker 100 I dated him for a year and a half.

Speaker 50 John is the one person who made me feel feel completely safe in the world.

Speaker 25 I believe John will become a great man, husband, father.

Speaker 54 He was 20 years old, no prior record, and the presumption of the law was the middle term.

Speaker 29 Six years, out after five.

Speaker 3 And now, this.

Speaker 20 But the second guessing went on hold for the moment because just now there was a far bigger issue.

Speaker 38 What had John Gardner done with Chelsea King?

Speaker 49 Was she still alive?

Speaker 29 And if so, where?

Speaker 54 Everybody's pager went off, and everybody's heart sank.

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Speaker 61 As John Gardner sat in the San Diego Sheriff's lockup, Sergeant Dave Brown, working the Chelsea King case, took an urgent phone call.

Speaker 19 The investigators from Escondido called us.

Speaker 45 The investigators on the Amber Dubois case in the neighboring town of Escondido had a question.

Speaker 7 Was your guy also our guy?

Speaker 19 I sat in my car and had a teleconference with them.

Speaker 8 The arrest of John Gardner set off a small earthquake among the cops searching for Amber.

Speaker 19 They've been sending emails to me trying to get a hold of us. We were a little busy to talk about their case,

Speaker 57 but they kept talking, even as they ramped up the search for Chelsea around Rancho Bernardo Park.

Speaker 29 Hope that she was alive flickered, but held.

Speaker 57 It was Tuesday, March 2nd, day five of the search for Chelsea.

Speaker 46 That day, her parents worked on plans for a vigil, a sign no one was giving up.

Speaker 18 It's just going to be one more thing that Chelsea's, when she comes home,

Speaker 18 she's going to see and want to give back a thousand times over.

Speaker 88 If Amber's parents hadn't given up, they said, neither would they.

Speaker 25 The Kings met Amber's parents when they came out to help in the search.

Speaker 80 But the strength that they display is driving us.

Speaker 85 You know, when Mo looks me in my eyes and says, don't worry, we're going to find her,

Speaker 19 that's strength.

Speaker 20 Out in the park Tuesday morning, search and rescue teams continued to search the brush and waterway.

Speaker 95 They would do shoulder to shoulder, go underwater, look,

Speaker 95 come back up, check to make sure that they were in line because they have to do it systematically. How many times did they do that?

Speaker 95 I want to say we did this six times, six or seven times. We searched this entire area here.

Speaker 7 That area of shoreline had particular interest because Chelsea's shoe had been found just a few feet away.

Speaker 95 So the shoe

Speaker 95 was basically in this area. It was laid on top of the brush.

Speaker 95 And then from here we go north

Speaker 19 straight to the water.

Speaker 42 That afternoon, downtown, the homicide team was called to a meeting with D.A.

Speaker 25 Bonnie Dumanis.

Speaker 54 Once he was arrested, we knew that there was going to be a prosecution.

Speaker 50 Dumanis, by that Tuesday, had few illusions left about finding Chelsea alive.

Speaker 54 The circumstances were such that we felt it was a murder case and a potential death penalty case.

Speaker 67 Thus, the meeting with homicide detectives.

Speaker 19 What case are you going to present? We charged him with murder, and we still didn't have a

Speaker 5 we didn't have a body.

Speaker 31 And then mid-meeting, that's when it happened.

Speaker 54 The detectives were presenting the case

Speaker 54 when everybody's pager went off

Speaker 54 and everybody's heart sank.

Speaker 57 It was Chelsea.

Speaker 76 Rescue divers had found her body.

Speaker 95 One of the dive personnel

Speaker 95 was in a boat and beached the boat literally right here. And then him and

Speaker 95 his partners actually started walking this way

Speaker 95 and shortly thereafter noticed an area a little bit further this way.

Speaker 95 And that's when Chelsea was found.

Speaker 44 It was that small area which had been searched so many times, the place the shoe was found, 15 feet from the edge of the water, a shallow grave.

Speaker 44 A little shrine was created there, a patch of decorated earth.

Speaker 20 Sheriff Gore delivered the news.

Speaker 51 That was

Speaker 51 probably

Speaker 51 the longest drive I've ever had in my life to go to the King House. And it was just news that nobody in law enforcement ever wants to deliver.

Speaker 51 It was just

Speaker 4 heart-wrenching.

Speaker 101 It's the worst day of our lives ever. And there's no deeper pain that we'll ever feel again.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 I

Speaker 101 the depth of despair

Speaker 31 is endless right now.

Speaker 24 What type of creature would do this?

Speaker 17 Not far away, Amber Dubois' mother Carrie heard the news too.

Speaker 27 The reaction was almost physical.

Speaker 15 When Chelsea's body was found, I started panicking. I'm like, I don't want to bury Amber, you know.
I'm like, I'd rather have her missing than have to bury her and stuff. And it hit me really hard.

Speaker 25 That evening, what was to have been a search vigil for Chelsea became a memorial instead.

Speaker 61 Thousands came.

Speaker 72 She's my angel forever.

Speaker 77 I want to thank you.

Speaker 91 Chelsea wants to thank you.

Speaker 91 Keep her spirit alive for us.

Speaker 46 John Albert Gardner.

Speaker 70 Gardner was in court the next day, charged with murdering Chelsea King while committing a rape.

Speaker 48 He was also charged with assault with intent to commit rape for the attack on that student back in December.

Speaker 19 Mr.

Speaker 71 Gardner wishes to enter a plea of not guilty to both counts.

Speaker 46 Amber's father was at the hearing.

Speaker 20 Afterwards, he worried what this meant for his daughter.

Speaker 12 In the back of our head, we are kind of concerned that there is a connection.

Speaker 43 And though no one had proved John Gardner's guilt, around San Diego, he had become infamous, public enemy number one.

Speaker 56 And as people here learn more about that 2000 case, the psychiatrist report, and Gardner's failure to reveal where he was staying, The outrage boiled over.

Speaker 80 Because I think pretty much all of San Diego County is completely disgusted with this.

Speaker 75 During the week before the attack on Chelsea, Gardner had been staying with his mother a few blocks from the park in which Chelsea was murdered.

Speaker 20 In fact, it was the very same house in which he attacked that 13-year-old back in 2000.

Speaker 39 But when police had gone round the neighborhood looking for sex offenders, they did not come to this house.

Speaker 5 No reason to.

Speaker 97 He was actually registered at his grandmother's house in Lake Elsinore, so Gardner would not come up in that search because he was registered in Lake Elsinore.

Speaker 101 And that was 50 miles away, another county.

Speaker 46 The mother never forced John to report it.

Speaker 22 He may have met all the guidelines, only coming down a certain amount of days, but people felt

Speaker 22 threatened, not knowing that a sex registrant was living that close to them.

Speaker 25 Once the news broke, Gardner's mother seemed to be trying her best to hide from the media and the public anger.

Speaker 20 Anger so strong, someone spray-painted the words, Chelsea's blood is on you.

Speaker 17 Move out, on her house, holding her, along with her son, accountable for Chelsea's death.

Speaker 80 If I was them and I saw that, I'd move out.

Speaker 108 Move out of the area.

Speaker 56 And when some of Gardner's friends came by to paint over those words,

Speaker 5 they were driven away.

Speaker 10 Get the hell out of here.

Speaker 108 I can see the sympathy you have for her.

Speaker 108 I can see it in your eyes. Get the hell out of this neighborhood.

Speaker 13 You don't belong here.

Speaker 61 In the midst of that public shock and anger, detectives in the Chelsea case again considered those calls and emails from their fellow cops who'd been looking for Amber Dubois.

Speaker 88 Was there a connection?

Speaker 30 Maybe.

Speaker 16 We realized that John Gardner was a resident of Escondido

Speaker 16 and was one of our registered sex offenders back in the time that Amber disappeared. That's when the light bulb went off.

Speaker 35 The race to find Amber.

Speaker 15 I'm absolutely 100%. Hopeful she's alive.

Speaker 35 Were detectives getting closer?

Speaker 20 The arrest of John Gardner for the murder of Chelsea King prompted some serious rethinking a few miles up the road in Escondido.

Speaker 67 Amber Dubois' parents, for example, remembered something about that man.

Speaker 21 He was a registered sex offender in Escondido at the time Amber vanished.

Speaker 25 This was one of the people on your crazy list of going around at night.

Speaker 66 Yeah, it was. I think there was

Speaker 15 148 at that time. But yeah, it was one of them.

Speaker 46 John Gardner, it turned out, had been living in an apartment complex in Escondido at the time Amber disappeared.

Speaker 15 Some of my volunteers did wait outside of his apartment looking for him and just, you know, see what he drove or whatever, but they never made contact with him.

Speaker 42 After his arrest, Carrie couldn't see how Gardner could be connected to her daughter's disappearance.

Speaker 15 Gardner seems to attack girls that are by themselves. And Amber was last seen by two eyewitnesses in front of the school.

Speaker 15 And for him to do that in front of all those kids, it just seemed really unlikely.

Speaker 40 Police had also been aware of John Gardner but finding evidence now that he was somehow involved in Amber's disappearance was not going to be easy.

Speaker 25 Yes, Gardner was a known sex offender who in fact lived two miles from the school.

Speaker 44 Police here in Escondito had regular contact with him as they do with all sex registrants.

Speaker 76 But there was no reason then to suspect him.

Speaker 16 In every one of those contacts, Mr. Gardner was in compliance with his sex registrant requirements.
And he wasn't in the area of where she went missing. He wasn't in the area where the sightings were.

Speaker 16 And he was not considered to be high risk.

Speaker 65 Not officially, at least.

Speaker 27 Though there was, as everybody would discover, much more to learn about that.

Speaker 101 Gardner did have a brush with the law in the spring of 2009 after Amber disappeared. A woman in a parking lot flagged down a police officer to complain Gardner had been following her in his car.

Speaker 65 But when a cop confronted him,

Speaker 16 he had asked him why he was following this female, and he had responded that this woman had cut him off in traffic.

Speaker 101 As the cop talked to Gardner, something else caught his eye.

Speaker 67 This known sex offender had a three-year-old in the car with him.

Speaker 16 That was of obvious concern to the stopping officer. Why is the sex registrant with a three-year-old child?

Speaker 101 It turned out it was his girlfriend's child.

Speaker 44 She verified the story.

Speaker 101 And besides, he was off parole, had no restrictions at all about being around small children.

Speaker 69 But now, after his arrest for the murder of Chelsea King, the Amber Task Force went back and reviewed everything.

Speaker 32 Amber's cell phone records, internet hits, all those needs during a year of searching.

Speaker 16 Looking at all 1,200 tips, seeing if there was anything in there on John Gardner. And there wasn't.
There was no connection at all linking him and Amber Dubois.

Speaker 53 So they looked back to the day she went missing.

Speaker 42 Two witnesses had seen Amber in front of the school.

Speaker 20 One of them said she was with a boy.

Speaker 16 Must be somebody that knew her or she knew that she felt comfortable with.

Speaker 16 And again, we were looking for

Speaker 16 a boy.

Speaker 100 A year later.

Speaker 42 Detectives began thinking back to that particular witness description.

Speaker 16 One of the witnesses had last seen Amber walking with a tall doughy dark-skinned boy which somewhat described John Gardner and we were thinking well it's possible that based on it being a drizzly day lighting's limited a parent who's just driving up and looking at a boy maybe appears to be younger than he actually was.

Speaker 69 So now police re-interviewed the witnesses.

Speaker 60 and the residents of Gardner's apartment complex and his girlfriend all dead end.

Speaker 25 Then a tip came in, which sent the divers to a park in Escobedo.

Speaker 70 Two children told their mother they might have seen a body in a bag around a pond.

Speaker 15 And I was watching all the divers in there going through all the muck, and I'm like nervous, of course, when they're doing this.

Speaker 25 Search and rescue teams drained the pond,

Speaker 6 searched through reeds and brush surrounding it, and nothing.

Speaker 39 Yet another dead end.

Speaker 15 And I'm like, whew. You know, it was such a relief knowing that there's no way she could be in there because they were all down to the bottom.

Speaker 40 And so a little spark of hope rose to the surface again.

Speaker 15 Oh, I'm absolutely 100% hopeful she's alive.

Speaker 42 Still, had John Gardner ever run into Amber?

Speaker 61 Was he involved?

Speaker 70 Even if no one could prove it?

Speaker 12 If we ever start to believe that Gardner's connected to Amber, it's basically us losing hope.

Speaker 46 And we're never going to do that.

Speaker 12 We're going to deny it until we have an answer and we have our daughter home.

Speaker 40 But out there among the searchers at that sad little pond, Mo Dubois could have no idea that farther south in San Diego, Sergeant Brown had already embarked on a very unusual errand.

Speaker 19 You could say it was a unique day.

Speaker 101 But just where he was going, he had no idea.

Speaker 19 He just guided us up the street.

Speaker 19 And he explained where we would probably turn off on a dirt road.

Speaker 19 And we did just that.

Speaker 31 A journey down a dirt road?

Speaker 84 Where could it possibly lead?

Speaker 19 This could be an escape attempt. Come on, why? A guy's in jail for murder, and now he wants to go on a field trip.
This might not go well.

Speaker 68 It happened even as search and rescue teams were wading through that Escondido pond, following what might be a lead in Amber Dubois' disappearance.

Speaker 42 20 miles south in downtown San Diego, D.A.

Speaker 25 Bonnie Dumanis received a mysterious request to meet with Gardner's attorney.

Speaker 54 Wouldn't discuss what it was.

Speaker 25 Gardner had been claiming, remember, he had nothing to do with Amber's disappearance.

Speaker 69 But this morning, his lawyer offered a deal and it was huge.

Speaker 34 Gardner would lead detectives to Amber but he'd only do it on one condition that they couldn't use it against him.

Speaker 54 If we didn't use the fact that he took us there in any as evidence in any court proceeding and that

Speaker 54 his attorney had to be present and we couldn't question him in any way.

Speaker 25 She took the deal and Sergeant Brown's phone rang.

Speaker 19 We got told to go down to the jail and we were going to go on a field trip with Gardner.

Speaker 101 And Sergeant Brown and his men were told the rules.

Speaker 19 This was not his confession, but he was going to show us where it was.

Speaker 25 They had 30 minutes to prepare.

Speaker 45 Called the SWAT team for backup.

Speaker 67 Why?

Speaker 19 This could be an escape attempt.

Speaker 7 Come on, why?

Speaker 19 The guy's in jail for murder.

Speaker 19 We have his DNA, and now he wants to go on a field trip with with a couple of detectives. Maybe he and he's a big guy.

Speaker 19 This might not go well.

Speaker 46 And so off they went, Gardner showing them the way.

Speaker 57 A detective surreptitiously texting directions to the undercover SWAT cars around them.

Speaker 19 We set them up in a few strategic locations and as we began driving on the freeway we knew where we were going to pick them up different cars, different on-raps.

Speaker 20 They drove through an Indian reservation, up a dirt track, to the top of a rocky hill. She's in there somewhere, he told them.

Speaker 98 This is 20 miles from where she disappeared.

Speaker 63 Did you have any idea where you're going or get a sense of what she's doing?

Speaker 19 No, he can't really point. He's wearing waist chains.
But if you notice, this cliff goes off the cliff here. And to get his bearings and to try to remember, he would go off.

Speaker 83 Exactly.

Speaker 19 And I would grab him and go,

Speaker 19 if he goes off this cliff, no one's going to believe me that he accidentally went off this cliff. So I was...

Speaker 32 He looked around, seemed confused.

Speaker 19 He came up and he went right to here, to the edge, and he says, right there, right about here, and he's not exactly certain.

Speaker 19 Then he takes a few steps this way,

Speaker 23 changes his mind.

Speaker 40 What were you thinking as you're looking down at this?

Speaker 19 Well, this isn't going to be a fun walk. And also, how did you get there?

Speaker 19 He tries to go here. He can't make it.
Then he comes back and he resets. And then he says, oh,

Speaker 19 I think it's this way. Honestly, we were frustrated.

Speaker 19 We still don't know if he's doing this to just

Speaker 19 get out of jail for for the day.

Speaker 46 They were still watching for any escape attempt.

Speaker 30 And then Gardner found a familiar area.

Speaker 46 Then he gets to about here, and then he remembers.

Speaker 19 And he says, this is it, this is it. And she was,

Speaker 19 I dare say, excited.

Speaker 101 Detectives walked their shackled prisoner down a steep incline.

Speaker 109 And so we were just sliding down this.

Speaker 110 I can see why you would.

Speaker 76 This is very steep.

Speaker 60 Pushing their way through the thick brush and trees

Speaker 19 until they got to an old rusted water tank this is the tank i remember holding him right there and he's pointing here saying this he goes right about here and he's also unsure of himself he's like yeah i think right there i think right there

Speaker 19 then he saw something a reminder he leaned into me and he said that that he could see he goes see the shovel mark and there was a distinctive mark that it held in the dirt like a nice clean slice against the mountain right there.

Speaker 19 It's going to be right there. I know it's going to be there because I had a shovel.
So that was enough. So we pulled him out of here.

Speaker 101 Who were you thinking?

Speaker 19 I work in the homicide division.

Speaker 24 I'm just used to it, let's just say.

Speaker 19 But this was just absolutely surreal that he would bring me here. And I know this case.
I know this girl. I live in this community.

Speaker 19 This is on my newspaper and I see her face or her poster on every business and store I go into.

Speaker 97 So,

Speaker 19 you know, and here I am and he's walking me to the to the grave.

Speaker 56 To the spot where he claimed to have buried Amber Dubois in February of 2009.

Speaker 67 In a thicket of trees on a hillside in the middle of nowhere.

Speaker 60 No houses anywhere.

Speaker 45 Accessible by one dirt road.

Speaker 19 I don't believe anybody would have ever found this site.

Speaker 20 And then a small army was called, still in secret, to that lonely hill.

Speaker 52 Detectives, a forensic archaeologist, medical examiner.

Speaker 20 For 12 hours, they sifted meticulously through the dirt to find.

Speaker 25 Well, it had once been a person.

Speaker 75 Up on the hill, Captain Benton made the next decision.

Speaker 16 We didn't want to notify the family, not knowing whether it truly was Amber or not.

Speaker 46 But the next day, Saturday, the medical examiner had made a positive identification.

Speaker 96 Gardner had indeed led them to Amber's remains.

Speaker 32 More calls to make.

Speaker 12 When we receive the calls on Saturday night, we immediately get a sinking feeling in our stomach because we've been called in many times to have talks.

Speaker 12 Never at a

Speaker 12 Saturday night at 8 p.m. at night.

Speaker 75 Would they come to the Escondido police station?

Speaker 12 Walking in there, seeing the medical examiners, all of our investigators were there, the minister, the

Speaker 12 Sheriff's Department, DA's office, you know what you're going to hear next.

Speaker 15 Medical examiner told us that her remains were found today. Possibly I beat her through dental records.

Speaker 12 I can't say I was prepared to hear it, but after 386 days of searching, we're ready for anything they can tell us. Give us an answer.

Speaker 12 Make this stop.

Speaker 59 What did you do after that? After that meeting, two of you.

Speaker 16 Cried

Speaker 12 for days.

Speaker 27 The Escondido Police Chief made the announcement the next day, Sunday, March 7th, 2010.

Speaker 61 Two teenagers found dead in less than a week.

Speaker 111 Human skeletal remains have been positively identified as being those of our missing 14-year-old Amber.

Speaker 60 But what he didn't say to Amber's parents or to anyone was,

Speaker 6 call it the official secret,

Speaker 45 the fact that Gardner had led them to the body.

Speaker 31 Why not tell?

Speaker 45 Because now investigators needed to prove Gardner's guilt without using a shred of what he had shown or told them.

Speaker 111 Eskindale Police and Sheriff's Homicide Detectives were following the lead in the case when they made this discovery.

Speaker 6 But frankly, they were stuck.

Speaker 41 Independent evidence?

Speaker 69 So far, none.

Speaker 46 Meaning Gardner might never be charged with killing Amper.

Speaker 43 Unless.

Speaker 6 Unless someone offered an incredible gesture.

Speaker 25 One heartbroken family reaches out to another, paving the way for a stunning moment in court.

Speaker 110 Do you admit that? Yes.

Speaker 32 Hey, weirdos.

Speaker 82 I'm Elena, and I'm Ash, and we are the hosts of Morbid Podcast.

Speaker 112 Each week, we dive into the dark and fascinating world of true crime, spooky history, and the unexplained.

Speaker 82 From infamous killers and unsolved mysteries to haunted places and strange legends, we cover it all with research, empathy, humor, and a few creative expletives.

Speaker 112 It's smart, it's spooky, and it's just the right amount of weird.

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Speaker 82 Use as directed.

Speaker 20 There were memorials then.

Speaker 18 I wake up every morning now, and I have to remember how to breathe.

Speaker 29 The searches were over.

Speaker 47 They tried to figure out how to go on.

Speaker 113 I will channel my rage and commit to spending my life making

Speaker 53 our society safe from the incurable evil.

Speaker 46 There were thousands of these events, a measure of the upset, the impact of the killings.

Speaker 91 For every single person person out there who's ever shed a tear for Amber, for Chelsea, I beg you to please put one minute of effort, one minute of action into helping protect our children.

Speaker 55 And while that was going on, investigators searched furiously for any evidence that would independently link John Gardner to the death of Amber Dubois.

Speaker 16 What that included was finding every vehicle that he had at the time that, or access to, at the time that Amber disappeared and I believe there was four different vehicles.

Speaker 16 We had to find where every one of those vehicles were, have them forensically examined.

Speaker 34 The investigation continued and the days ticked from March into April when we sat with Amber's parents.

Speaker 32 Remember, they had not been told that Gardner led police to Amber's remains, or even that Gardner was known to be the man who abducted and killed her.

Speaker 40 We asked them if they were prepared never to know for certain who killed Amber

Speaker 25 or how police found her.

Speaker 46 It may be that nobody's ever charged. It may be that you just have to live with the rest of your lives with that not knowing.

Speaker 12 I'm more fearful that there might be another predator out there as opposed to more upset of not having the answer. I want to make sure that whoever did this to Amber is off the street.

Speaker 12 That's what scares me the most.

Speaker 37 You know,

Speaker 12 what if they never connect this to somebody and the person who actually did this is still out there and can do it again?

Speaker 76 But it was a different question Carrie had on her mind.

Speaker 64 What happened to Amber?

Speaker 55 She wanted to know, had to know everything.

Speaker 53 You want to hear whoever did this tell you exactly what happened?

Speaker 32 You do.

Speaker 15 Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 12 I couldn't hear it from the person's mouth saying, I did this, I did that.

Speaker 83 I could.

Speaker 12 I couldn't. I couldn't do it without wanting to reach over

Speaker 12 and cause myself to be in jail for a long time.

Speaker 46 But here on this April afternoon, the question was academic.

Speaker 27 More likely, they would never know.

Speaker 25 Strange, the difference a week can make.

Speaker 32 It was April 15th, five days after our interview.

Speaker 25 Amber's parents were called to a meeting where they learned for the first time who led authorities to their daughter's remains.

Speaker 12 We knew of something significant because we had to go to downtown to go meet with the district attorney.

Speaker 30 And they were informed of an offer made by John Gardner's attorneys.

Speaker 54 His attorneys came forward with an offer to plead guilty to

Speaker 54 all of the charges with life without possibility of parole and waiving his appellate rights.

Speaker 40 In exchange, Gardner's attorney wanted the death penalty off the table.

Speaker 33 So, her dilemma: Should she continue to develop her strong death penalty case in the murder of Chelsea King?

Speaker 6 Should she wait for the task force to link Gardner to Amber's death too?

Speaker 33 Or would that ever happen?

Speaker 16 There was absolutely no link that anyone was able to find between John Gardner and Amber.

Speaker 25 And so D.A.

Speaker 73 Dumanis was faced with the choice, proceed only in the Chelsea King case or make another deal to get some kind of justice for Amber.

Speaker 24 You could have won pretty easily a death penalty case in the Chelsea King case.

Speaker 23 Why not just do that?

Speaker 20 Get the death penalty for that one.

Speaker 54 The question was for the family. So the family I talked to was Chelsea's family because we had no case on Amber.

Speaker 54 And we talked about the fact that the end result with a life without possibility of parole is he'd die in prison.

Speaker 54 And there would be no appeals.

Speaker 68 So the Kings were faced with a decision.

Speaker 92 Would Amber's parents ever learn what in fact happened to their daughter and would they see her killer pay for this crime?

Speaker 46 April 16th, the day after Mo and Kerry learned about the plea deal.

Speaker 72 This is a special news report.

Speaker 42 San Diego television stations interrupted their afternoon programs.

Speaker 108 A hearing is scheduled in the courthouse for John Gardner.

Speaker 31 There was news, a lot of it, all at once.

Speaker 108 Let us take you live. There's John Gardner right there.

Speaker 37 You admit the truth of that allegation.

Speaker 106 Yes.

Speaker 35 A stunning admission of guilt.

Speaker 48 First for Chelsea King.

Speaker 110 You're admitting that on February the 25th, 2010, you attacked Chelsea King while she was running.

Speaker 110 You dragged her to a remote area where you raped and strangled her.

Speaker 110 You then buried her in a shallow grave. Do you admit that? Yes.
Do you also admit that the killing was done with premeditation and deliberation?

Speaker 110 Yes. And the murder took place within an hour of your initial contact with Chelsea King.
Do you admit those facts as well. Yes.

Speaker 25 Then, the jogger in December.

Speaker 110 Do you admit that on December the 27th, 2009, you attacked Candace Moncayo while she was running and unlawfully assaulted her with the intent to rape her?

Speaker 110 Yes.

Speaker 69 And after 14 months, an end to the mystery of what happened to Amber Dubois.

Speaker 110 You admit that on February the 13th, 2009,

Speaker 110 you took Amber Dubois to a remote area of Paula where you raped and stabbed her. You then buried her in a shallow grave.
Do you admit the truth of those facts? Yes.

Speaker 110 You're also admitting that this murder took place within an hour and a half of your initial contact with Amber Dubois. Do you admit all of those facts as well? Yes.

Speaker 75 In exchange for a life sentence, Gardner admitted all and pleaded guilty.

Speaker 47 It was a deal made possible because of a choice willingly made by one grieving family in an effort to spare more pain for another.

Speaker 113 The Dubois family has been through unthinkable hell the past 14 months.

Speaker 113 We couldn't imagine the confession to Amber's murder, never seeing the light of day,

Speaker 113 leaving an eternal question mark.

Speaker 63 And Amber's parents were grateful.

Speaker 15 Going the rest of my life without knowing would have been horrible. We would have been always wondering if he was connected and or if there was someone else out there.

Speaker 31 But now that she knew, now she was determined to come face to face with her daughter's killer,

Speaker 30 no matter what it took.

Speaker 15 I want to talk to your son and find out why he murdered my daughter.

Speaker 89 An emotional meeting behind prison doors.

Speaker 35 What did you ask him?

Speaker 56 It was after John Gardner stood in a San Diego courtroom and pleaded guilty to the murders of Chelsea King and Amber Dubois.

Speaker 110 Probation hearing and sentencing in this department then.

Speaker 50 It was as he waited for the formal sentencing, life in prison, that he knew was coming.

Speaker 41 From the San Diego County jail cell, Gardner gave an interview to a local TV station and said he would only talk to the families about what happened to Chelsea and Amber.

Speaker 15 As soon as I heard those words, it's all I focused on.

Speaker 25 Because Carrie, remember, was determined to know what happened to her daughter during the last minutes she was alive.

Speaker 15 I think if you're a parent, you want to know what happened. You want to know how they took your child.
If a lesson can be learned from Amber, then I want it out there.

Speaker 46 And so, early in May, she began trying to arrange a visit.

Speaker 15 Went through all the correct legal channels to to try to get it, and they kept insisting that I would meet with them after sentencing. And I didn't want to meet with them after sentencing.

Speaker 25 She had to know now.

Speaker 25 She tried to schedule a visit, was told none was available.

Speaker 36 So Carrie had a bold idea.

Speaker 28 Why not ask Gardner's mother to give up one of her visits with her son?

Speaker 27 And so one afternoon she waited outside the jail as Gardner's mother approached.

Speaker 64 It didn't go well.

Speaker 111 Look,

Speaker 15 I just want to visit your son. Excuse me.
Don't touch me. I'll get you.

Speaker 13 I'm not. Stay away from her.

Speaker 13 I'm hungry.

Speaker 15 I'm not here to harass you. I want to talk to your son

Speaker 15 and find out why he murdered my daughter.

Speaker 34 The next day, there was a phone call from the jailer.

Speaker 15 Can you be here in a half hour?

Speaker 20 Somehow, the time was found for her talk with Gardner.

Speaker 46 What was it like to walk in there and know you were going to talk to the guy who killed your daughter?

Speaker 15 I was real nervous up until I got there. Going in there and

Speaker 15 talking with him just didn't really have any feelings with me. I'd forgiven whoever had done this to Amber when I got her remains back.
So to me, it was just a person talking.

Speaker 56 He was already sitting behind the partition.

Speaker 20 when she arrived.

Speaker 15 I think maybe I glanced at him once.

Speaker 63 Where were you you looking?

Speaker 15 Just down.

Speaker 15 Just not just not at him. I really had no desire to look at him.
Why not?

Speaker 15 I didn't want to get angry or upset or

Speaker 15 I just wanted to stay focused. And so for me to stay focused, I just looked down or doodled on paper or whatever.
I just really wanted to stay in a mindset where I didn't start crying or get upset.

Speaker 35 So, what did you ask him?

Speaker 15 Walk me through your day.

Speaker 32 And now, Carrie would finally learn what happened to Amber in the last hours of her life.

Speaker 15 He started, you know, in the morning, him and his girlfriend got in a fight.

Speaker 40 So he took off in a car to blow off steam, he said.

Speaker 15 And he happened to drive by the street where Amber was taken. Why she was on that street, I don't know.

Speaker 35 It was not the way Amber usually went to school.

Speaker 15 My guess is that she was probably going by her girlfriend's house that lives right around the corner.

Speaker 24 He snatched her here, Gardner told Carrie.

Speaker 15 He saw Amber walking by herself.

Speaker 15 He turned and cut her off and told her, if you don't get in this car, I have a knife and a gun and things will be real bad for you.

Speaker 15 And she got in the car. He didn't have a gun, but I don't know if he showed her the knife or not.

Speaker 103 I'm not sure.

Speaker 15 But he said, you know, she knew by the look in my eyes.

Speaker 15 That I was serious.

Speaker 15 There was no questions about it.

Speaker 15 And honestly, I think if she would have tried to run, he might have just killed her right there on the spot.

Speaker 71 Did you ask him for more than that?

Speaker 15 Yep, he told me which way he drove. You know, he's very detailed about the streets he went on.

Speaker 76 He stopped the conversation repeatedly, said Carrie.

Speaker 15 Asked me if

Speaker 15 I wanted him to continue. You know, he got real upset every time I told him, continue.
And he's like, you know,

Speaker 15 I don't want to upset you. And I'm like, you've already taken my daughter.
Continue.

Speaker 15 When it got to the rape part of it,

Speaker 15 he

Speaker 15 pretty much begged, please can I stop? Can I stop? And I'm like, continue. And he's like, I don't want to.
And

Speaker 15 by the time I left there, he was pretty much curled over,

Speaker 15 sweating, just complete crying. He was a mess.
So.

Speaker 101 He did have some feelings.

Speaker 15 Or he's a very good actor.

Speaker 96 So once you'd got the answers you knew you could get from him, did you say anything else to him then?

Speaker 15 No, he asked me, Are you going to tell me you hate me? Are you going to yell at Scream? I'm ready to hear that. And I said, Nope.
And I hung up the phone and I walked out.

Speaker 114 Did you walk out of that place a different person than when you went in?

Speaker 54 I walked out of that place very

Speaker 15 happy, very just kind of giddy. And I'm like, oh my god, I can breathe.
You know, it's just like such a relief. It really, it was,

Speaker 15 it was a great feeling.

Speaker 20 An unexpected reaction?

Speaker 64 Perhaps.

Speaker 8 Though, how could anyone know how it feels to be Carrie McGonagall?

Speaker 43 Or to be the parents of Chelsea King in court on sentencing day?

Speaker 112 Look at me.

Speaker 3 One last haunting question.

Speaker 114 Are you saying then that the deaths of these two girls would have been prevented?

Speaker 8 And a revelation from a mother.

Speaker 15 I said, wow, you just showed the whole world what Amber and and Chelsea saw.

Speaker 53 A look into the soul of a killer.

Speaker 17 John Gardner was guilty.

Speaker 39 No doubt about it.

Speaker 20 He was a predator and a murderer.

Speaker 27 All that was left to do was sentence him.

Speaker 65 So, case closed?

Speaker 30 Not really. For three months, a steady drip of news seemed to ask over and over, how did they miss him?

Speaker 20 Gardner remembered spent five years in prison for sexually molesting and beating a 13-year-old girl back in 2000.

Speaker 47 He was paroled in 2005.

Speaker 12 It was maddening to us at the time. Everything that led up to his being free on the streets,

Speaker 12 allowing him to stalk

Speaker 57 our children.

Speaker 20 Maddening because there had been fair warning. A psychiatrist a decade earlier warned that he was very dangerous and should receive the maximum 10-year sentence under his plea deal.

Speaker 42 Had that advice been taken, Gardner might still have been in prison back in 2010.

Speaker 12 There's numerous, numerous times that he fell

Speaker 19 through the cracks.

Speaker 63 Like, for example, his parole violations once he was released.

Speaker 25 The cops found marijuana in his car.

Speaker 75 For a time, he lived too close to children.

Speaker 26 But the judgment of the parole department was not to bust him.

Speaker 78 And then the public discovered that Gardner wore a GPS monitor, his last year on parole, which ended in 2008, just four months before Amber disappeared.

Speaker 25 But no one was watching.

Speaker 32 And...

Speaker 106 We found over 100 violations of parole that hadn't been previously discovered by the department. We missed some opportunities to remove him from society.

Speaker 56 Dave Shaw was the inspector general for the California Department of Corrections, the agency's watchdog, which after the fact looked into the Gardner case.

Speaker 106 He spent time at,

Speaker 106 you know, adjacent to daycare centers, to schools, to parks, to playgrounds, to the beach, all places that he shouldn't have been at. And we didn't catch it because we weren't looking.

Speaker 17 Nor was anyone watching when Gardner drove into the parking lot of a state prison. Gardner said it was to drop off a friend, but it's against the law for an ex-con to enter prison grounds.

Speaker 25 And that, San Diego's DA at the time told us, was a felony that would have locked him up for a very long time.

Speaker 54 We would have filed a three-strikes case because his 2000 case was two strikes and he'd be facing 25 years to life.

Speaker 114 Are you saying then that the deaths of these two girls would have been prevented?

Speaker 106 What we're saying is that had he been incarcerated, it would have been impossible for him to commit these particular crimes.

Speaker 106 And there were ample opportunities to either revoke his parole or to prosecute prosecute him.

Speaker 25 But no one at the time was monitoring Gardner's GPS.

Speaker 35 Did you find fault really with somebody's or with some systems?

Speaker 106 We think it was a system that was at fault. We didn't find any particular fault on the part of the parole agent.
The agents just weren't looking at it because they weren't required to.

Speaker 76 Listen to this.

Speaker 28 They weren't expected to track Gardner's GPS monitor because of the way a standardized assessment used at the time classified Gardner's risk potential as medium-low risk.

Speaker 107 For the lower-risk offenders, it was used only as a crime-solving tool.

Speaker 70 Matthew Cate was the head of the California Department of Corrections.

Speaker 107 And so, if a crime's reported, then we would go back and look at the tracks to see if we could place the offender at the scene of the crime.

Speaker 29 Gardner, a lower-risk offender?

Speaker 56 Again, says Matthew Cate, it was the assessment method itself, its limitations, that failed to spot Gardner's potential to be dangerous.

Speaker 28 But when Gardner was paroled.

Speaker 109 This was the most accurate tool in the world, and so we used it. I wish we knew then what we know now, but the department just didn't have anything else to use at the time.

Speaker 20 It was based on factors such as age, number of offenses, type of crime.

Speaker 107 I think the public wants us to be able to predict who exactly is going to do what.

Speaker 39 We'll never be able to do that.

Speaker 109 Low risk doesn't mean no risk.

Speaker 68 Improvements have been made.

Speaker 44 There is required GPS tracking of all sex offender parolees and treatment for those parolees.

Speaker 14 The treatment includes the use of polygraph tests in an effort to keep track of them to see if they're in danger of re-offending.

Speaker 16 We'll move then to the victim impact statements.

Speaker 20 There's an emotional structure now to sentencing days in American courtrooms.

Speaker 88 Wrenching, often deeply angry.

Speaker 113 And I pray every night that God shows you no mercy.

Speaker 35 And this is how it was with John Gardner, listening sometimes attentively, sometimes not, to Chelsea's parents.

Speaker 18 You dismantled a family life that was built on love, trust, and faith.

Speaker 18 But you did not destroy it.

Speaker 112 Look at me.

Speaker 18 Why am I not surprised?

Speaker 34 And to Ambers.

Speaker 15 No one can appreciate the horror that is my life until they can appreciate the joy that was my amber.

Speaker 29 Then the earlier survivor of a gardener attack spoke.

Speaker 87 Every day I laced up my shoes and relived the moments of terror. The utter conviction that I was going to die.

Speaker 1 And she reminded him how she elbowed his nose to escape.

Speaker 87 And finally,

Speaker 18 to ask him how his nose is.

Speaker 36 He turned to his attorney and appeared to say, she didn't hit me.

Speaker 24 And even add, she's saying it for publicity.

Speaker 15 Man, you saw that look of rage. Then I said, wow, you just showed the whole world what Amber and Chelsea saw before you killed him.

Speaker 98 But all this was formality, really.

Speaker 20 Already the people who must live with the deaths this man left in his wake had struggled with what to do after.

Speaker 20 Amber's mother is involved in search and rescue.

Speaker 15 Building her legacy is going to be

Speaker 15 the search and rescue team.

Speaker 35 And Chelsea's parents took on the system.

Speaker 72 If our laws were smarter and bolder, Chelsea might still be here.

Speaker 20 They pushed for a new law named for Chelsea and signed by the governor in 2010, imposing stiffer sentences for sex offenders, increased terms of parole, and improved monitoring and assessment of parolees.

Speaker 18 Governor Schwarzenegger, I thank you for your support and commitment.

Speaker 18 You've helped us fulfill our dream of doing everything in our power to prevent this tragedy from ever happening to another family again.

Speaker 29 Chelsea should have been a college graduate by then, and Amber a future farmer.

Speaker 56 Instead, all their parents could do was watch authorities lead the killer away to a life in prison

Speaker 42 And try, best they can, to stop the next one out there, somewhere.

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