ELEVEN

The first day’s search of the Highway 120 corridor went slowly; at first, authorities had only been able to draw on about 30 searchers, who were required to make their way carefully through dense underbrush in a yard-by-yard inspection off both sides of the highway. The searching was complicated by patches of snow and drifts that remained in the higher elevations.

“It’s possible their car went off the road and is covered by snow now, so we’re searching very carefully for that,” said Larry Buffaloe, the head of the state’s Office of Emergency Services.

Still, given the paucity of clues or even what route the women might have taken, there was the very real possibility that the searchers were wasting their time; the car could be anywhere, that was the real problem. But a big part of any investigation is elimination: if it could be shown that the car wasn’t anywhere off the side of Highway 120, at least that possibility could be eliminated, and efforts could be redirected. Another 60 searchers were drafted to continue the hunt for the following day.

*   *   *

As the search of Highway 120 continued, FBI and Mariposa County deputies began interviewing people in El Portal, starting with the staff at Cedar Lodge.

Because of the season, the staff at the lodge was relatively sparse, perhaps less than 20 people altogether. As the media frenzy advanced, the lodge staff went through the four stages usually experienced by ordinary people beset by a news media invasion: first, fascination, followed by bemusement, then boredom at the repetive questioning, and finally, sullen irritation at all the intrusion.

Outside the lodge, the satellite trucks lined up, dishes canted to the afternoon skies, along with the television reporters with microphones in hand, each trying to update their audience on a story that didn’t seem to be going anywhere. All that anyone could say was that three people had stayed at the Cedar Lodge on February 14 and 15, that they were last seen on the evening of February 15, that people were searching for them, and that the FBI had been called into the case, but that no ransom demand had been received.

The repeated shots of Cedar Lodge in connection with the disappearances began to irritate both the lodge staff as well as the customers inside the restaurant and lounge where the trio had last been seen. It was as if, by association, the lodge was being portrayed as some sort of sinister den of iniquity, where unwary tourists were at risk.

The omnipresence of the reporters, coupled with the law enforcement interviews, raised the level of tension around the lodge.

One by one, the employees of the lodge and restaurant were questioned. No, no one had seen Carole and the girls leave on Tuesday morning; no, they hadn’t had breakfast at the restaurant; no one had yet cleaned the room where the trio stayed, at first because of the short staff, and not even later, because Mariposa deputies asked that the room be kept undisturbed until the authorities knew what they were dealing with. The only person who’d been in the room was the front desk employee who’d gone into the room on Tuesday afternoon to reclaim the VCR and the rental movie, and he hadn’t noticed anything unusual. The beds appeared to have been made.

The agents and the Mariposa colleagues looked over the room once again. It was an ordinary motel room, just like millions of others across America, with one large carpeted room with two beds and a couch, and a small bathroom with a shower. Agents pulled the records of the telephone service for the room and found no surprises.

As the agents continued their interviews, an event would take place that would later loom large, although at the time no one gave it any special significance.

As it happened, one of the lodge employees was named Stayner—Cary Stayner, the older brother of little Steven, who had been kidnapped so many years before from the central valley town of Merced.

At 37 years old, Cary Stayner had grown into a strapping man—over six feet and close to 200 pounds. He’d always loved Yosemite, and in fact had been camping there on the day his little brother returned from his seven-year disappearance. At his age, Cary was one of the older members of the Cedar Lodge staff—generally regarded by his employers and his fellow workers as polite, reliable, among the more helpful and capable on the staff. He’d worked for the lodge since 1995, performing maintenance chores; indeed, there wasn’t anything at the lodge Cary couldn’t fix.

During their interviews with the lodge staff, the agents wanted to establish several things: first, whether any of the staff people had had encounters with Carole, Juli, or Silvina; and second, where each staff member was during the evening of February 15, when the trio had last been seen.

Because of the long-ago kidnapping of his brother, Cary’s last name was familiar to the authorities. Indeed, Cary himself brought up the abduction of his brother so long ago.

“He volunteered information about it,” said one officer familiar with the interview. “He said he felt for the people [the Sunds] because of what his own family had gone through.”

But at the time that Carole, Juli, and Silvina were last seen, Cary himself hadn’t been working at the lodge; in fact, he’d been one of those laid off temporarily because of the slack season.

Later, it would become unclear just how hard, if at all, the agents initially pushed Cary in accounting for his whereabouts on the night of February 15. While it was clear he wasn’t working at the lodge on the night in question, what wasn’t clear—at least in reports published later—was whether the agents realized that Cary had permanent residence in a room over the restaurant during the time of the disappearance. Nor was it clear whether Cary’s story about his own brother’s abduction made much of an impression on his interviewers; often, such recollections of traumatic life events in an interview can provide a gateway for interviewers to load stress on an interview subject; sometimes, indeed, persistent emotional probing can lead to damning admissions or even confessions.

In any event, the team of agents and deputies interviewing Cary soon dismissed him from having any involvement in Carole, Juli, and Silvina’s disappearance. In some ways, he was too old, too settled, too calm, they believed; in short, Cary Stayner, they believed, was just what he appeared to be: a competent maintenance man, a laid-back hippie-type, someone without grand ambitions who simply enjoyed living near Yosemite for the hiking and swimming opportunities that seemed to be at the center of his existence.

That assessment, as matters were to turn out, was as wildly wrong as it could be.

*   *   *

By Saturday, February 27—12 days after Carole, Juli, and Silvina were last seen—James Maddock and his fellow law enforcement authorities decided for the time being to scale back the search for the car. So far, the efforts of 70 searchers had turned up nine different abandoned or stolen vehicles, none of which was the right one.

If the car couldn’t be found, the next step was to try to find witnesses who might have seen the trio after the night of February 15. To that end, teams of agents and detectives stopped at dozens of restaurants, filling stations, and motels up and down the major routes in the area: Highway 120 where it headed toward Highway 99, on Highway 99 itself, Highway 132 (which ran directly into Modesto from midway between Highway 140 and Highway 120), and Highway 108, which crossed the Sierra north of the park by way of Sonora Pass. These contacts resulted in a slew of possible sightings, but none of them stood out as particularly credible; by now, the publicity over the trio’s disappearance, coupled with the news about the reward, had a number of people seeing things.

The lack of any substantial information had reinforced in Maddock’s mind the idea that almost certainly a crime had been committed. The absence of the car, the discovery of the wallet, and most important, the fact that Carole had been gone for almost two weeks without being heard from all stood as circumstantial evidence that the women had met with some form of foul play, probaly fatal.

“We are all operating under the assumption that a crime did occur,” he said.

At a press conference on Saturday, February 27, Maddock said his agency would now put the possibility of a crime at the forefront of their efforts; to that end, he announced that a pair of psychological profilers from the Bureau would be arriving to help assess the situation. So far, Maddock added, his agents had interviewed a number of people, and had eliminated several as potential suspects in the disappearance.

By the middle of the week, Maddock was able to provide some idea of the effort that had been undertaken so far. At least 60 agents had been assigned to the case to assist police in Modesto and Stockton. As of the first of the week, more than 900 tips had been received, which together generated 223 leads to be checked out. Altogther, searchers had combed more than 7,000 square miles, on foot, by snowshoe, snowmobile, and from the air.

In the absence of any hard evidence other than Carole’s black leather wallet, Maddock said, his agency would have to do the reverse of most investigations: first, form a theory of what might have happened, and then work the theory forward and backward to see whether any suspects might fit the bill.

Maddock said the FBI had developed two different theories to start with: one, a crime of opportunity, such as a carjacking or robbery gone bad, in which the events occurred at random as a result of an impulse; and second, that the crime was planned in advance, such as a kidnapping, or possibly a long-term stalking.

To check these theories, Maddock said, agents had retraced the Sund/Pelosso route in Stockton on the Saturday before the disappearance; had examined video tape from ATM and mini-mart security cameras to see whether any record of Carole, Juli, or Silvina might be found; had questioned scores of residents and business owners near where Carole’s wallet had been found; had intensively interviewed nearly two dozen people, including Jens; had given a number of polygraph tests; and had conducted a thorough search of Carole and Jens’ home and offices in Eureka on the chance that some scrap of paper or note there might shed light on what had happened.

An accident, Maddock added, had virtually been ruled out.

“If it was an accident,” he said, “the accident would’ve occurred in an area that was searched.”

What Maddock did not tell reporters at the time was that one possible lead had turned up that might have to do with Carole’s wallet. Twice in the week following Carole’s disappearance, it turned out, someone had called Wells Fargo Bank, inquiring about Carole Sund’s account status; having first faced an automated menu, the caller was soon transferred to a human being at the bank, who realized that she was talking to a woman. But the caller, whoever she was, was unable to satisfy the bank’s security procedures, and the call was terminated.

Who made these calls? The bank’s computer system had logged almost 800,000 calls during the week in question; and while one part of the computer registered the incoming caller’s number, it wasn’t technically possible to match the incoming number to the specific inquiries on Carole’s account. To get there, someone would have to check the incoming calls by hand for the approximate times of the calls, to see where the calls had come from. That would be a laborious process, and one that was still ongoing as the fall of 1999 arrived. Still, the investigators believed the calls showed there had to be at least two people involved in the disappearances: at least one to control the victims, and a second, female accomplice to make the calls to the bank. As of September of 1999, the calls still remained a mystery.

Meanwhile, Jens Sund and his family had taken over a conference room at the Holiday Inn in Modesto, using it as a headquarters to process the tips that kept coming into their hotline, and to keep the news media abreast of any developments in the case. Jens knew, as did his father-in-law Francis Carrington, that keeping the story alive in the media was one way to make sure that if anyone knew anything, they might come forward. The conference room was decorated with photos of the Sund and Pelosso families, going back to the trip to Argentina made by the Sunds in 1985.

By now, Jens had been interviewed countless times, including appearances on America’s Most Wanted, Hard Copy, Inside Edition and Good Morning America. Apart from the strain of being in the public eye, however much he sought it, the emptiness of his situation was beginning to take a hard toll on Jens. In the most visceral way possible, the silence was killing Jens Sund, just as it had Del and Kay Stayner so many years before. It was the not knowing that was the poison, the paralysis that constantly threatened to dim the will; if only he could do something, but there was nothing to do but wait.

“I could,” he told reporter Eric Brazil of the San Francisco Examiner, “have a hundred people here right now to search, but we don’t know where to search.”

Although he didn’t say so directly, it was also clear that Jens was losing hope. When he returned to Eureka to take his three remaining children back to school, he said, it struck him: “Everything’s changed, my whole life.” While in Eureka, he went through Carole’s office, and noticed, as if for the first time, how organized everything was. This was such a part of his life: Carole the organizer, everything arranged just so. And now this force for order, for normalcy, was gone, disappeared, vanished. He realized, he continued, that the outlook wasn’t good for his wife’s survival, and he told the other children that.

“I told them it may be bad,” he said. “It may be the worst news we’ve ever had. It’s been so many days … that we may get the worst news. I believe they understand.”

Jens had just about given up on speculating; it was a form of imagination that did no good.

“I have no theories,” he told Brazil. “I’ve heard so many different theories that I just don’t know. I’d rather wait and see what happens.”

The next day, in the small hours of the morning, Jens decided to try to put his feelings into the written word for the Examiner.

“How do I feel? I have been asked this question countless times during the past two weeks by the many reporters who have taken a personal interest in helping me find my family.”

It was, he said, like a nightmare one couldn’t awaken from.

“And so at 3:00 A.M. I find myself reflecting on how I feel, awakened again to my nightmare, and again wondering where they are.”

Jens went on to describe his wife.

“Carole is a doer. From the first time we met in high school at the age of seventeen, I realized this. Carole would rather change something or at least try and make a difference rather than sit back and complain.”

Carole, Jens continued, was dedicated to making things better for children; she’d volunteered for a county review board that oversaw the handling of abused and neglected children; later she’d volunteered for the court-appointed guardian program for children’s welfare in the Humboldt County court system. She’d served on a board overseeing a county program for adoptions.

Carole was the leader in the Sund family, Jens continued; he still “impulsively” tried to telephone her whenever he had a problem to be ironed out. With Carole gone, Jens said he now realized, “I am heading into uncharted territory.

“How do I feel as I sit here helplessly in Modesto, speaking out publicly in the hope that these efforts may somehow reach someone, anyone who may offer a tip, a lead, or possibly my wish, to extricate themselves from something they never wanted to be a part of?

“Three children need me, seven hours away, yet here I wait in Modesto answering the question … how do you feel?”

The answer, Jens thus suggested, should have been obvious.