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Maddock conducted his press conference at Mi-Wuk (once Miwok, for the Yosemite area tribe) Village, just a few miles from where the car was still being processed by investigators. Both of the bodies found in the trunk had been burned beyond recognition, he said.

“The car was very badly burned,” Maddock said. “The same is true for the victims [who] were recovered from the car. There is no way to make an identification at this point.” Nor, he added, was there any way to say for sure how the victims had died. Maddock said a thorough search of the area was even then underway in an effort to locate a third body in the immediate vicinity.

The car was so badly burned that even the metallic vehicle identification number was obliterated, Maddock said. So was the odometer, as it turned out, which would eventually make it more difficult to reconstruct the actual route of the car from the day it had been rented in San Francisco.

“The car was consumed by fire,” Maddock said. “Everything in the car was consumed by fire. That’s really all I can tell you.”

When pressed about the putative sightings on February 16 in Sierra Village and Twain Harte, Maddock insisted that the last credible sightings of the three women was still at Cedar Lodge in El Portal.

Why hadn’t the FBI opened the trunk immediately after the car was discovered? The implication was that the delay in announcing the discovery of the bodies had cruelly raised the hopes of the Sund, Carrington, and Pelosso families, only to crush them a day later. But Maddock wouldn’t say why the trunk hadn’t been opened first thing; it was pointless to try to describe proper forensic procedures to a crowd of reporters that seemed to be growing increasingly hostile.

When pressed directly about the accounts of the gas station owner and the gift shop operator, Maddock declined to respond.

By this point, several others newspapers, including the Chronicle and the Bee newspapers of central California, had also talked with the two would-be eyewitnesses, who continued to insist they had seen Carole, Juli, and Silvina a day later than the FBI had so far acknowledged.

“The more I’ve thought about this,” the gift shop owner told the Chronicle, “the more I know I’m right.”

Meanwhile, yet another woman in Twain Harte popped up saying, she, too, had seen the trio.

As reporters pressed each of these witnesses for more details of their sightings, more details came forth.

“It was a shiny, sunny day,” the gas station owner recalled. “I pumped their gas and got cash for it. It was just before I saw a report of them missing.”

The prospect that the threesome had indeed been on Highway 108 a day after the FBI insisted they were last seen prompted another spate of telephone calls to the FBI’s hotline, many of them claiming to have seen the trio in the Sonora-Highway 108 area in the middle of February, or even later than that.

The FBI’s continued insistence on Cedar Lodge as the last credible sighting notwithstanding, some of the media now used the Highway 108 accounts as the basis for criticism of the Bureau, and by extension, Maddock.

In DID FBI IGNORE KEY LEADS IN CASE?, the Examiner used the hoary old headline writer’s technique of couching criticism in the form of a seemingly innocent question.

“While authorities embarked on a search for a third missing tourist in the remote, rugged foothills of Tuolumne County,” wrote reporter Ray Delgado, “questions have been raised about why the FBI did not follow up on reports that the trio was seen in the area the day after they vanished a month ago.”

The FBI’s Nick Rossi was forced to admit that the agency did, in fact, receive several tips from people who said they saw Carole, Juli, and Silvina in Tuolumne County after February 15. One call, he said, did come in from the gift shop owner on March 14—the day of the vigil, and almost a month after the trio had supposedly visited her gift shop—and no one had followed up. But Rossi said the authorities had so far received 3,000 tips, some placing the trio hundreds of miles away from Yosemite, in different directions, and on the same days. Other calls from the Twain Harte area included a tip from a psychic who said she had “a feeling” that the women were in the area, and another who claimed to have seen the car in the area as late as March 5. There was no record in the FBI’s database of the gas station owner’s supposed call, Rossi said.

“It has been impossible, with the volume of tips, to give every one of them personal attention,” Rossi said. “Not all of them can be right.”

The authorities, he said, had to prioritize calls, and in the absence of any reports putting the trio on Highway 108 in the days immediately after the disappearance, tips from the Twain Harte area were given a low priority, especially those which came in far after the event.

While Rossi was trying to explain all this, Michael Larwick, was making an initial appearance in a locked courtroom in Modesto. Rumors had already spread that Larwick had just made the FBI’s short list of possible suspects in the Sund/Pelosso case—not least because of his having been raised in the same area where the car had been found.

What was it Maddock had said? That the person who put the burned-out car in its location had to be someone intimately familiar with the area around Long Barn? And wasn’t Larwick a convicted rapist and kidnapper who had grown up in Long Barn? When it was learned that the FBI had led a raid on Larwick’s apartment in Modesto on the same day the car had been found, reporters put two halves together to make a story. The locking of the courtroom doors for Larwick’s arraignment in the shooting of Modesto Officer Silva only fueled the speculation.

But Judge Susan Siefkin said the barring of the courtroom to the press and the public was inadvertant. Although Larwick’s arraignment had been scheduled for 1:30 P.M., it was decided to hurry it up a bit; Siefkin simply hadn’t realized the doors to the courtroom were still locked when the hearing was held, she said, and apologized to the suspicious media.

Although Larwick was assigned a lawyer from the public defender’s office, his formal arraignment was postponed to give him time to find his own. Modesto County authorities said Larwick would be charged with attempted murder (of Silva, who was shot in the lower abdomen, but recovering in Modesto hospital), assault with a deadly weapon, brandishing a weapon, brandishing a weapon for the purpose of making an escape, being a felon in possession of a firearm, and burglary (to wit, the Grijalvas’ house and refrigerator).

In addition to those charges, Larwick also faced outstanding warrants from Tuolumne County for drug possession and several driving offenses. If convicted on any of the felonies, Larwick was in line to go to prison for the rest of his life as a “three-strikes” offender. That indeed may have been the reason he initially fled from Officer Silva’s routine traffic stop—with a felony drug warrant out on him, Larwick knew he was about to become a hardtime loser.

Still, there were those who readily linked Larwick’s behavior on March 16 with the discovery of the Sund/Pelosso car just two days later in his old stomping grounds of Long Barn.

A Modesto Bee columnist, Diane Nelson, took all this into account the day after Larwick’s brief, closed-door court appearance.

The newspaper, Nelson wrote, had received nearly four dozen telephone calls from readers who wondered why the FBI hadn’t landed all over Larwick as the most likely suspect in the Sund/Pelosso case.

Many said they called the paper because the FBI’s hotline was always busy—presumably jammed. The callers’ theme, Nelson wrote, was consistent: somebody should be putting Larwick under the proverbial’ bright lights until he squealed.

“‘Is it just my imagination, or are there some connections here?’ asked Caller Number Twenty-two,” Nelson wrote.

Nelson checked with the Modesto Police Department to see if they were grilling Larwick about the Sund/Pelosso case.

“He’s no more a suspect than anyone else with a history of violent crime,” a spokesman for the Modesto Police Department told Nelson. Which wasn’t saying much, given that under the Bureau’s solution-by-induction procedure, nearly everyone in the general vicinity with a history of violent crime was a suspect. But Nelson didn’t seem to be buying the department’s one-size-fits-all theory.

“You know how they say most killers return to the scene of the crime?” Nelson asked. “Well, here’s what’s odd to me,” and she went on to relate how one caller put the case against Larwick succinctly:

“A few weeks later, last Sunday,” the caller told Nelson, “they hold a march for the missing women. And two days after that, a few blocks from the intersection where that student found Carole Sund’s wallet, Michael Larwick has a shootout with the police. Over what seems to be a simple traffic violation. Why would he shoot a police officer over that?

“And the day after Larwick ends up in jail, someone finds the women’s missing car in the very town where he grew up. They say whoever stashed the car would have to have known the area.”

Other callers likewise pointed out what appeared to be a string of coincidences apparently connecting the multiple felon Larwick to the Sund/Pelosso case; a few even claimed that Michael Larwick was bosom buddies with Billy Joe Strange and Darrell Stephens, the two El Portal men who had already been jailed after the FBI began poking into their pasts, although as far as any of the authorities could so far determine, that wasn’t the case at all.

Nelson ended her column with an apparent question to one of the callers: why were people calling?

“Maybe we call because we just don’t want to stand by,” said one woman, a grandmother. “The world is so upside down now, it brings me to tears. We want to help catch who’s responsible. Because one thing I know is, killers tend to do it again. And they can get away with it, if the rest of us act like we don’t care.”

The caller’s words would turn out to be quite prophetic.