TWENTY-TWO

By mid-May, in the absence of anything official from the FBI’s TOURNAP task force, the hodgepodge of media rumors from “sources close to the investigation” had begun to abate. In one of his increasingly rare interviews, James Maddock told a reporter for the Examiner that he was “100 percent confident” that the case would be solved.

“I can say that we’ve made remarkable progress,” Maddock told Examiner reporter Ray Delgado. “We are on the right track … it won’t be long [before] we’ll be in a position to charge those responsible for the deaths.”

Maddock may have been “100 percent confident” that a solution to the case was on the horizon, but even he knew there was still a substantial amount of routine investigative work that remained to be undertaken. One task that had to be done was to reinterview all the members of the Cedar Lodge staff, this time with the idea of developing information that might link one or more of the Modesto targets of the investigation to the El Portal area or the lodge itself.

As part of this routine, agents found themselves once more talking with Cary Stayner. At some point during this interview, Cary was asked where he had actually been the night Carole, Juli, and Silvina had last been seen; Cary said he’d been visiting a woman friend in El Portal. Agents checked with the woman, and confirmed that indeed, Cary had been with her on the night of February 15. Similar inquiries were made of others, yet nothing seemed to jump out to investigators as anything close to a smoking gun to link the rogues to the abduction.

By late May, however, the TOURNAP agents had received a report on some potentially important forensic evidence from the lab. It appeared that some pink fibers found on and near the body of Juli Sund had also been collected from a Jeep occasionally used by Rufus Dykes, from a pickup truck owned by a friend of Rufus, and from Larwick’s impounded Corvette. The same sort of fibers were found on Dykes’s jacket. Similarly, there were other fibers, perhaps from Juli’s clothing, that were found in the vehicles.

Fiber evidence has long been considered one of the most potent tools of the FBI lab. The vast profusion of different types of fibers, both natural and synthetic, in recent years, along with their vast array of colors, had made it possible to distinguish types of fibers with a high degree of specificity, far more than hair types. Even more significantly, tiny fibers and fiber fragments are frequently transferred when two objects come into contact. The tiny pink fibers appeared to come from some sort of blanket; the theory was developed that perhaps one or more of the victims had been wrapped in a pink blanket during the transportation process, which would account for how the fibers appeared on and near Juli, and also in Dykes’s and Larwick’s cars and on Dykes’s jacket.

The question was: was there a similar blanket available at Cedar Lodge? Was that where the pink fibers had originally come from?

Agents approached the lodge management and asked for permission to search the lodge’s various rooms to look for such a blanket. The lodge agreed, and assigned Cary Stayner to help the agents with the search. As one of the lodge’s maintenance men, Cary had a key to all the rooms; additionally, the lodge felt that Cary was one of their steadiest and most reliable employees.

Thus, on May 26, 1999, Cary Stayner accompanied the agents from room to room in the lodge as they searched for a blanket or other similar object with fibers that might match those found with Dykes, Larwick, and the third man. Everyone present later recalled how polite, pleasant, and helpful Cary Stayner was during the search.

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By the first of June, investigators had met with Rufus Dykes numerous times, and each time they sat down with him, his story seemed to change. At first, he said that his half-brother had committed the crimes, and that his only role was to help dispose of the stolen property. But after being confronted with the pink fiber evidence, Rufus amended his statement: he’d actually helped transport the bodies.

But Rufus was like quicksilver: he was all over the place, and you couldn’t pin him down. The thing that frustrated investigators the most was that Rufus seemed genuinely unable to tell how, when, where, and why the killings were committed.

That gave the TOURNAP task force doubts; while most believed that Larwick and Dykes had to be somehow involved, they were also aware that they were significantly short of evidence necessary to prove a case to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.

One example was the ring story: Dykes had said he’d been given a ring by Larwick; one of the women who testified before the grand jury said she’d been given a ring by Larwick, which somehow seemed to dovetail with the tale first reported by Mooney in late April, about the young girl who claimed she’d been given a ring by the “two men” she’d shared methamphetamine with, and who had claimed to have killed Juli Sund in the house in Modesto.

Investigators recovered the ring from the witness, and showed it to Carole Carrington, Carole Sund’s mother. Carole Carrington told investigators she was 80 percent sure the ring had belonged to Juli Sund; Juli’s younger sister, Gina, said she was 90 percent sure the ring had belonged to Juli.

Eighty percent on a test score is a fine grade, and 90 percent is even better. But in a court of law, even 90 percent amounts to reasonable doubt. So far, there just wasn’t enough evidence to bring the half-brothers, or anyone else for that matter, to court.

Nevertheless, by the second week in June, James Maddock was feeling particularly confident that his group was well down the right track in solving the kidnappings and murders.

In fact, Maddock said, he was pretty sure everyone involved in the crimes was currently in jail.

“I do feel we have all the main players in jail,” Maddock told a reporter for the Sacramento Bee, Cynthia Hubert. “But we are in no rush to charge them.”

One of the main problems faced by investigators, Maddock said, was that the memories of many of the witnesses so far interviewed were faulty, in part because of habitual drug use; in addition, the investigation was hampered by “the extraordinary lengths” the perpetrators went to in order to conceal evidence.

Not only that, Maddock said, his people were still having a hard time developing a clear motive for the crimes. Was it done for money? Was it a robbery gone bad? A kidnapping for ransom? A sex crime? It was all too fuzzy, Maddock admitted, and even contradictory.

“The problem is that many of the people we are dealing with as potential witnesses are members of a crankster circle,” Maddock said, referring to habitual methamphetamine users. “They deal in the meathamphetamine trade and they have a lot of baggage. These are dopers who can’t remember what they did yesterday, much less weeks ago, or where a suspect was on a particular day, at a particular time.”

Later, Maddock’s critics—including his longtime nemesis, Senator Grassley of Iowa—would point to this and similar statements by Maddock as evidence that he had unintentionally gulled the public into concluding that the threat at Yosemite was over: that, indeed, “we have all the main players in jail.” And even Maddock was to wish he could take those words back and consign them to oblivion.

But Nick Rossi was later to point out that Maddock’s remarks had to be taken in the context of the question: as reporters kept pressing the FBI man as to when the “rogues” were going to be charged, Maddock had simply pointed out that there was no real urgency in laying charges since they were all in jail. But the way Maddock worded his remark, it sounded as if he were saying that the federals had rounded up everyone who needed it, which wasn’t what Maddock meant to say at all.

But the pressure on Maddock only increased two days later, when the Chronicle reported that Rufus Dykes had confessed to the murders.