Chapter 19

Vanished

On the morning of June 10, 1991, pretty, blond-haired, blue-eyed Jaycee Lee Dugard of South Lake Tahoe got ready for school. The eleven-year-old girl gathered up her books and lunch and was glad that spring had finally arrived at her home of 6,200-feet elevation. Except for a scattering of snow on surrounding peaks, winter was over—a vast relief in this region where “winter” can be seven or eight months long. She lived in a typical neighborhood of modest homes on Washoan Boulevard. Almost every driveway held a Subaru station wagon, Toyota 4x4 pickup or some other form of four-wheel-drive vehicle, ready to take on the long snowy season and icy roads. And the yards were filled with children’s bikes and toys, attesting to the fact that this was a young family neighborhood. On cool mornings like May 10, the pungent smell of woodsmoke from fireplaces drifted through the neighborhood, giving it a pleasant woodsy smell.

Dugard tied her long blond hair into a ponytail, put on a white T-shirt, pink stretch pants and pink windbreaker before she left the house. Then she said good-bye to her stepfather, William Probyn, who was working in the front yard. She walked down Washoan Boulevard toward her school bus stop on the Pioneer Trail, a route once used by the Pony Express riders. The morning was cool under the dark shadows of the tall Ponderosa pines and Jaycee Lee hurried her steps to ward off the cold.

It was 7:50 A.M.

Probyn puttered around in the front yard, his mind still not quite fully in gear, when he suddenly heard a squeal of brakes and a loud scream down the street. Looking in the direction of the commotion, he stared in stunned disbelief as a two-toned 1970s or early ’80s American sedan flipped a U-turn right in front of his stepdaughter. The vehicle screeched to a halt as Jaycee Lee stood frozen in shock. In the next instant a woman with long dark hair leaped from the car and swept Jaycee Lee into the vehicle, the girl screaming in terror. Before Probyn could even react, there was a screech of tires and the car was off, roaring down the street in the opposite direction with his stepdaughter inside.

In one terrible moment eleven-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard vanished right in front of her stepfather’s eyes, on one of Lake Tahoe’s supposedly “safe streets.”

It took only a moment for the shock and disbelief to wear off before Probyn ran to a nearby bicycle, hopped on, and began pedaling furiously down the street toward the departing car. His legs pumped in fevered haste and it felt as if his lungs would burst as he skidded around the corner onto the Pioneer Trail, searching everywhere for the vehicle. But it was already too late. The car and his stepdaughter inside were already gone. Worst of all, he had never caught a glimpse of the driver or the license plate. As far as he knew, the car could have been carrying California, Nevada or some other state plates.

He knew that further pursuit of the car would be fruitless and he pedaled back to his home and called the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Department.

At forty-seven years old Sergeant Detective Jim Watson of the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Department looked every bit the outdoor Tahoe type. With sandy brown hair and windburned complexion, he had deep lines around his eyes from so much time spent out in the Sierra sun and wind. He was soft-spoken and serious, in the Gary Cooper mold, and his staff and superiors admired him greatly.

Detective Watson was just taking his wife to Meyers Elementary School when he learned about the Jaycee Lee Dugard kidnapping over his radio. Rushing back to his office, he became the coordinator for the entire operation, and he put everyone available on the case. The situation demanded urgency.

Almost immediately an all points bulletin (APB) was issued for a four-door American sedan carrying a dark-haired woman and a blond-haired girl wearing pink clothing. Detective Watson knew that they’d been lucky when the girl’s stepfather spotted the car and abductor. In most stranger abductions this was not the case. They were lucky in another instance too: the Tahoe Basin had very few blacktop roads that led elsewhere. All of them funneled down to a few easily patrolled bottlenecks that the police knew very well. In a very short time the El Dorado Sheriff’s Department was joined by the South Lake Tahoe Police Department, Douglas County Sheriffs Department, California and Nevada Highway Patrols, Forestry Service rangers and even CalTrans roadworkers. Within the hour local radio stations KRLT-FM and KTHO-AM were broadcasting descriptions of the car, Jaycee Lee Dugard and the woman abductor. It seemed like it would be only a matter of hours before some officer or local citizen would spot the vehicle.

But all of this didn’t take into account one critical factor, the maze of back roads and dirt trails, hardly more than tracks, that snaked in all directions from the Pioneer Trail back into the wilderness. Branching through thick forest and rocky terrain, they wound everywhere with no seeming purpose or direction. Many had been logging roads, others were the work of off-road enthusiasts, and it would have taken an army on foot to scour every square inch of this region. Despite the big call out, the authorities at work on the case were more of a scouting expedition than a full-sized army at this point.

One officer who well knew the ruggedness and complexity of the dirt roads was Deputy Randy Peshon of the El Dorado Sheriff’s Office. He had once been a backcountry ranger in the wilds of Canyon Lands National Park, and he knew just how “lost” someone could get if they wanted. When he got the call about the Dugard abduction, he was working the west side of Lake Tahoe in Tahoma, where he was the only resident officer. Quickly jumping into action, he began scouring the “Wild West Side,” driving down its twisting hidden lanes, going door to door, canvassing the area, doing vehicle searches and looking for witnesses. He went forty-eight hours straight without sleep, doing every thing humanly possible to find the little girl, until the intensity of the experience burned itself into his very soul. He was eating, breathing, living the Jaycee Lee Dugard case. This kidnapping had happened in his backyard, and he took it personally. As he said later, “No cop likes it when something bad happens on their watch. Especially if the bad guys get away. One thing was for certain from that day on, I would never give up trying to find out what happened to Jaycee Lee.”

Detective Jim Watson had this dedicated officer and a dozen others like him on his team. And even though the hours were ticking away, he still felt confident as the afternoon of May 10 wore on. A special kidnap hotline number was set up and calls were coming in at the rate of one every five minutes about possible sightings of the girl and car. It seemed as if all of Tahoe was awake and searching for one of its own this day, alerted by word of mouth as much as anything else on the invisible mountain grapevine. Dozens of late ’70s and early ’80s two-toned American sedans were spotted by investigators all over the Tahoe Basin and checked out. A particularly exciting lead popped up at 3:30 P.M. A man and woman were seen driving a sedan on a remote road in the Fallen Leaf Lake area, about five miles northwest of Dugard’s home, with a girl wearing pink clothes in the backseat. This was a region of log cabins set so far back in the woods that they could hardly be seen from the dirt road, a perfect site for kidnappers to hide out while things cooled down.

The police and sheriff’s department officers descended on the area in a wave, scouring the woods and cabins for any clue. They spread out through the trees and wild tangle of boulders, searching through the maze of cabins and shacks. Every parked car was checked out, every possible hiding place among the shrubs and tiny crawl spaces too. But in the end the car and the girl were just as elusive as ever.

The calls kept flooding in, coming from farther and farther away. The car had supposedly been seen in Placerville, sixty miles to the west. The girl had possibly been seen in Carson City forty miles to the east. A combination of both had been spotted in Sacramento, in Reno and in San Francisco. Someone was sure they’d spotted Jaycee Lee four hundred miles to the south in Los Angeles. Calls came from as far away as Minneapolis, Minnesota. Nothing was too outrageous or too fantastic to be discounted.

The FBI was now involved too, and Albert Robinson, special agent in charge, asked people to think back one or two weeks and try to remember any suspicious people who might have been hanging around school yards or their homes. He explained in the Tahoe Daily Tribune, “Even though it may seem trivial, what may seem trivial (to you) may fit into our puzzle.”

Hikers, cyclists, mountain bikers, and just plain sightseers were asked to keep on the lookout for the girl or the car. Once again a particularly promising lead surfaced on May 12. A car matching the description of the vehicle was found parked on Pine Avenue near the Stateline casinos with a pair of pink sweatpants inside. But further investigation proved that the pants could not have possibly been worn by Jaycee Lee. Later that same evening, police in Vacaville, California, a city 120 miles away to the west, sprang into action as they ran down a sighting of the missing girl. But in the end it proved to be just as ephemeral as all the rest.

Slowly but surely, Detective Watson knew that the good luck of William Probyn’s sighting of the abduction was slipping away. Every hour past the first twenty-four decreased the odds of ever seeing the young girl alive again. He was not giving up hope, not by a long shot, and he was still the dynamo at the heart of this massive manhunt. But Sergeant Detective Watson was also a realist. He could plainly see the clock on the wall ticking away.

So could Jaycee Lee’s mom, Terry. She bounced erratically between sheer panic, terrible anger, tears and despair as the hours became days. Although surrounded by friends, neighbors and family, there was now an invisible barrier between all of them and herself. No one else could plumb the depths into which she had been cast. The only one who could even vaguely glimpse that gulf of despair arrived on the afternoon of the twelfth. She was Trish Williams from San Jose, a director of Child Quest International, a missing children’s hot line center.

In her own quiet way, Trish Williams talked with the distraught mother, getting to know her and calming her down. She decided the best way to do that was to keep Terry busy. “We wanted to get her out of the house and doing something. Something positive.”

In that regard they soon found a useful outlet. Thousands of posters bearing Jaycee Lee’s likeness, a police sketch of the two-toned car and composite of the woman William Probyn had seen, were being printed and distributed. The depiction of the female abductor revealed a woman in her thirties, front and profile, with shoulder-length dark hair, parted in the middle. Her face was thin with arching dramatic eyebrows, and she had dark eyes. The nose was long and slightly ridged in the center. The expression she wore was one of deadly seriousness.

These posters kept Trish Williams and Jaycee Lee’s mom busy at St. Teresa’s Catholic Church in South Lake Tahoe as a flood of volunteers came by to distribute them. The posters popped up on walls of mini-marts, cafes, liquor stores and motels all over the Basin until it seemed a person couldn’t go anywhere without seeing a depiction of the smiling eleven-year-old girl or the dour dark-haired woman. These posters even spread over the mountains to Carson City and Reno, Nevada, in the east, and Placerville, Auburn, and Sacramento in the west. Within weeks Jaycee Lee Dugard’s face was seen in almost every state of the Union.

Some local had the bright idea of placing pink ribbons around Tahoe as a reminder of the girl, not that anyone was likely at this juncture to forget her. Pink had always been Jaycee Lee’s favorite color, and in a duplication of the yellow ribbons that had sprouted on light poles around the United States to remember the American Embassy hostages in Tehran in the late 1970s, pink ribbons began to spring up all over Lake Tahoe like a profusion of alpine wildflowers. Slowly blowing in the breeze, they evoked a sense of caring and commitment that this community would never forget its lost daughter. For in a strange way, Jaycee Lee Dugard had become a daughter to them all now.

But spring turned to summer, and summer faded into fall. With it so did the ribbons. And so did hope.