TWELVE

A week passed since Jens Sund had bared his soul in the Examiner, and still nothing seemed to be happening. The car was still missing, and the $250,000 reward remained unclaimed. But as the second week of March arrived, a flurry of rumors swept through the 680-odd permanent residents of El Portal: something big was about to happen.

In fact, the FBI had hardly been idle during the previous two weeks. Having adopted an inductive method to their investigation—creating a theory and looking for facts to support it—the FBI and the local authorities had dipped into the obvious wellspring of possible facts: the criminal histories of those closest to the most likely scene of the crime, El Portal itself.

Indeed, the FBI with the cooperation of the Mariposa authorities, had decided on a thorough sweep of all parolees and probationers in the county. If the evidence couldn’t lead them to the crime scene, perhaps the known criminals could.

Of the 16,000 or so permanent residents of Mariposa County, there were a number of individuals on parole; a state-compiled list of registered sex offenders totaled 55 individuals in the county—including, as it turned out, a prominent member of the Mariposa Chamber of Commerce. Who knew what might turn up if enough rocks were turned over?

If, as one theory held, the crime was one of opportunity, rather than advance planning, the task was to review those with previous criminal histories to see who might be capable of kidnapping and possibly murdering three people; at the very least, those with a predilection for breaking the law might be made to account for their whereabouts during the critical days.

One condition of parole and probation in California grants law enforcement the right to conduct searches without warrant; indeed, a probationer or parolee must account for his or her whereabouts whenever requested to do so by a law enforcement official. The Great Mariposa County Parole Sweep of 1999 was about to net some interesting subjects, indeed. Ideally, some subjects might be isolated who had the capability of committing crimes associated with the trio’s disappearance, who had no verifiable alibi, and—was it too much to hope for?—also some record of associations in the Modesto area. Once those individuals were identified, the game of sweatbox could commence.

One of the first to fall into the net was a worker at the restaurant at Cedar Lodge, one Billy Joe Strange. Billy Joe, 38, was the night cleanup man at the restaurant where Juli and Silvina had been eating hamburgers the night they were last seen. A former worker at the local El Portal garage, Strange had been quietly picked up the previous Friday night for violating his parole by reportedly being drunk in the restaurant’s lounge. Billy Joe was on parole for an earlier domestic violence conviction.

Billy Joe’s arrest had many in El Portal angry; after all, he was pretty much a regular at the lounge, and if drinking was a violable offense, he should have been nabbed months, if not years earlier. To many, it seemed that the authorities were just looking for an excuse to grab someone, anyone. But the Sweep was in full-press mode, and Billy Joe’s transgression gave the authorities the opportunity to yank him in and subject his small cabin and his car to a thorough search. As it happened, Billy Joe’s girlfriend was the night clerk at the Cedar Lodge; her car was seized for examination as well.

Within hours of his arrest, the searching officers had also seized a small amount of marijuana from Strange’s cabin—another no-no for a parolee—and had taken substantial swatches of carpet from the interior of the small house.

Not only was Strange stashed in the Mariposa County jail, a number of his friends were given polygraph tests over the weekend, a move that outraged many of Billy Joe’s friends in El Portal.

“They are really fishing,” one of Billy Joe’s pals told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I don’t see how they can make anything stick. There’s nothing there.” And Strange’s girlfriend, the night clerk at the motel, was particularly upset at the way the agents and parole officers had swept through their tiny dwelling.

“All I know,” she said, “is that me and Billy didn’t have nothing to do with the disappearance of that family.” One friend of Billy Joe’s told the Examiner that Billy Joe had prevously been interviewed several times in connection with the disappearance, and claimed that Strange had told him that he’d failed a lie detector test. But lying about drinking or smoking marijuana was one thing; lying about kidnapping and murder was another matter entirely.

Billy Joe’s friend told the Examiner that Strange hadn’t helped himself very much earlier in the week; when agents came into the motel lounge looking for him, he jumped off his stool and ran away.

“He was tired of being hassled,” Billy Joe’s friend explained, “and they wanted to question him again and he just ran.” A few days later they grabbed him for drinking in violation of his probation, which led to the discovery of the marijuana and his subsequent arrest.

Billy Joe’s arrest was one factor in the rumors that were sweeping through El Portal by mid-March; another was a statement from Jens Sund himself. In Modesto, Jens confided to reporters that he’d been given devastating news by the FBI.

“My worst possible fears have come true,” Jens said. “They’ve made some discoveries, but I’m not supposed to comment on it. It doesn’t look good for my family.”

Thus, Jens’s remarks, coupled with Billy Joe Strange’s arrest and the search of his house and car, fueled the speculation that a break in the case had either occurred or was imminent. That was just what the newspeople had been waiting for so long; all those days in front of the Cedar Lodge with nothing to say were wearing thin on reporters and news producers alike.

But the day after his remarks, Jens recanted, saying that no matter what else had so far happened, the authorities still had yet to find any real evidence of any crime besides the recovery of Carole’s wallet.

“I’ve been on an emotional roller coaster,” Jens said. “You caught me in one of my lows. It drains me. You get the feeling that maybe there was some kind of answer. You get strung out, expectant, and hopeful, and you just kind of let loose.”

Although it wasn’t made clear, it seemed obvious that the violation of Billy Joe’s parole, his arrest, and the thorough search of his house and car had been communicated to Jens, and that Jens’s expectations had risen dramatically, only to be dashed when a confession (or even solid evidence) wasn’t forthcoming from Bill Joe Strange.

The FBI moved quickly to pour cold water on the rumors, in part because of the prospect that still more parolees would soon be pulled in for grilling. If every time a potential bad guy was hauled in for questioning a news media firestorm erupted, nothing would get accomplished, the FBI knew.

“There are no major new developments to report,” the FBI’s Nick Rossi said. “Rumors that the FBI has discovered the bodies of the victims or their vehicle are false.”

The rumors about the possible discovery of the bodies undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that teams of FBI agents had begun combing the wooded hillsides near Cedar Lodge itself; the obvious implication was that the remains of Carole, Juli, and Silvina might be found nearby in shallow graves. These rumors were pumped up by unconfirmed talk that agents were digging in certain areas near the lodge.

“The investigative process that we’ve been pursuing is one of identifying and then eliminating possibilities,” Rossi said. “It’s only natural that we would focus on the area where they were last seen.”

But at least with Billy Joe in the slammer, the reporters had something new to focus on. Soon reporters were working down Billy Joe’s backtrail to see what had made him of such interest to the authorities. Court records in Mariposa led to Bill Joe’s former mother-in-law, who clearly had no great affection for her former son-in-law.

“I’m not surprised his name has come up,” she told the Examiner. “I’ve suspected it would from the get-go.” It turned out that Billy Joe had twice been convicted of domestic violence, beating both his ex-wife and her sister. Sentenced to prison in April of 1996, Billy Joe had been released in July of 1997. While on parole from the first conviction, Billy Joe went after his wife once more in December of the same year, and went back to prison until April of 1998.

The root of Strange’s problem, however, appeared to be alcohol. His former mother-in-law described him as a person with a mean temper that wasn’t improved by liquor.

The mother-in-law’s assessment of Billy Joe notwithstanding, many in El Portal told reporters they considered Billy Joe a good guy, quiet and friendly—hardly the sort of demeanor one might expect of a potential triple kidnapper/murderer, let alone someone capable of executing what was looking more and more like the perfect crime. In fact, in El Portal there were vastly more votes for Billy’s innocence than guilt.

The owner of a nearby trailer park, where Billy Joe lived, was livid over the presence of the FBI on his property during the search.

“The FBI and the searchers, about twenty-four of them,” the owner told the Chronicle, “just showed up Tuesday morning and started walking shoulder to shoulder through my RV park. It was really irritating. They didn’t say a thing. They just started walking.”

It wasn’t only the FBI who took criticism for the bust of Billy Joe; so, too, did the news media, for publicizing his name and suggesting that he’d had something to do with the Sund/Pelosso disappearances. Soon reporters in El Portal were being reminded of the saga of Richard Jewell, the Atlanta security guard who was incorrectly labeled a suspect by the FBI and the media in the Atlanta Olympic bombing; the same situation applied to Billy Joe, his friends said.

But that didn’t mean that Billy Joe wasn’t somehow peripherally involved in the disappearance, perhaps without even knowing how. That was one reason the FBI had searched his house and his vehicles: in case Billy Joe had somehow come into possession of something belonging to one of the victims.

“We’re forced to treat a large number of things as potential evidence,” the FBI’s Rossi explained, “which in the end may not pan out. We’re going through the process of elimination.”

*   *   *

The day after the rumors blew up and were then extinguished, the FBI’s James Maddock held another press conference.

“We felt almost certain,” Maddock said, “that the women were the victims of a violent crime. After this length of time, it would be a miracle if the victims were recovered alive.”

Meanwhile, Maddock said, the search was still going on, although on a lesser scale. By this point, he said, the searchers were looking for bodies—in old mine shafts and tunnels, and in potential shallow graves. The problem, Maddock pointed out, was the entire countryside was a vast repository of potential hiding places.

But Maddock said he was increasingly convinced of one thing: whatever had happened to Carole, Juli, and Silvina, it had happened at or around Cedar Lodge.

“I can tell you,” Maddock said, “that we feel almost certain that the women were the victims of a violent crime. We are now focusing on one theory that we believe to be the most likely scenario.

“That scenario includes a violent crime occuring at or near the Cedar Lodge on the evening of Monday, February 15 or during the early morning hours of Tuesday, February 16.”