He had a wild look in his eye that night, the same kind of expression that Jack Nicholson’s character had in the movie The Shining when he proclaimed, “Here’s Johnny!”
John was dirty and sweaty, as if he’d been hiking through heavy brush. He also had a scratch near his nose, which, looking back later, Cathy would recognize as a desperate mark of self-defense left by a girl’s fingernail.
Oh, my God, he’s nuts, Cathy thought. He’s lost it. What is happening?
When Kevin chastised John for being so late, John blew up, threw the snake on the floor and stormed out the front door. Cathy ran after him, catching up to him at the front gate.
“It’s eight o’clock,” she said. “Come back inside. Eat some dinner. Get cleaned up.”
Still angry but pouting, John conceded, taking a shower and having some food. He later told Cathy he’d been drinking beer that afternoon, but Cathy didn’t smell it on him because he’d been too grimy for her to get close enough to tell.
An early riser, Cathy was usually in bed by nine, but she stayed up a little later that night to have a heart-to-heart talk with her son.
“You got a scratch on your face,” Cathy said. “What happened?”
“I was going through the brush,” John said.
Cathy thought that explanation was sort of plausible, but she was used to him lying to her initially, and telling her the truth later. Depending on the severity of the situation, this was usually a combination of her asking and him confessing.
During their brief but intense conversation, John’s emotions were like a yo-yo, vacillating from sadness to anger to frustration. He cried as he told her about his lifelong goals and his inability to reach them. When Cathy finally went to bed, she left her son watching TV in the living room.
The next afternoon at three-thirty, Cathy had an appointment to get her nails done at a salon in the nearby community of Carmel Mountain.
A couple of years earlier, Cathy had been getting a pedicure at the same salon and laughing with a red-haired woman in the next chair about how running beat up her feet. Cathy didn’t know it at the time, but the woman, who empathized because her daughter ran cross-country, was Chelsea’s mother, Kelly King. It wasn’t until Cathy saw Kelly on the news after her daughter’s disappearance that Cathy realized she’d been talking to Chelsea’s mom.
“Have you heard about the missing girl?” the manicurist asked Cathy.
“No,” she said.
“It’s the girl that’s in the flyer in the window,” she said, referring to the notices that had been posted in businesses, supermarkets and gyms across the county—anywhere and everywhere that friends and friends of friends could find a place to hang them.
When the manicurist explained that Chelsea had gone missing during a run on a trail at the RB park, Cathy couldn’t believe the coincidence.
“Oh, my God, from RB? Those are the same trails I run on. I ran there last night,” she said, adding that she’d seen the Poway High School track team there just the week before. In fact, she said, “My kid was just out running over there. Well, he doesn’t really run, but he walks. I’m going to call him and see if he knows anything.”
Cathy dialed John’s number, but he didn’t pick up, so she told the manicurist that she’d follow up and call the number on the flyer if she learned anything pertinent. After all, she really did want to help.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of other people had the very same thought, and they acted on their urges. Many sent out alerts about her disappearance on Twitter and Facebook, where a special page was set up as word began to spread: Find Chelsea King: Missing San Diego Teen. Others grabbed a flashlight and hit the trails.
Usually, missing teenagers were deemed runaways before authorities would concede they could have fallen prey to foul play. But in this case, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department (SDCSD) took virtually unprecedented action within minutes of Chelsea’s parents reporting their daughter missing. Why? Because not only was she a good, straight girl who kept a rigid schedule, but her car gave investigators a clear indication of her LKP, search-and-rescue lingo for a “last known point.”
The fact that news of her disappearance spread so fast and so many miles from her hometown was not only noticeable, but extraordinary, a factor that only served to draw even more of the public’s attention. Typically, the only flyers posted on random telephone poles around the region were for missing dogs, cats and the occasional Alzheimer’s patient.
San Diego has its roots as a conservative military town, recently attracting biotech and communications sectors. Yet, the county’s 3 million residents have traditionally been somewhat uncommunicative, partly because they’re so spread out—a problem worsened by the lack of a cohesive public transportation system. Strangers in this fragmented, transient and geographically disconnected region have rarely talked to each other, and those with personal networks have usually kept to themselves, their own church groups or book clubs.
The timing of this case and the emotions it elicited, however, generated a virtual tornado of goodwill, galvanizing the community unlike any other missing juvenile case in the region’s history.
In the midst of the Great Recession, as the unending war in the Middle East and banking bailout drove up the national debt to unprecedented heights, many people were going through tough times. Folks everywhere were losing their jobs and their homes to foreclosure and health insurance costs were soaring. More people were communicating online, telecommuting from home or stuck at home without a job, which often meant less face-to-face contact with other people and more stress.
At a time when people were hungry for connection and fellowship, the search for Chelsea King seemed to fulfill those needs. As her loss resonated throughout the region, people came together to look for this pretty young girl with so much promise, an effort that seemed worthwhile when they had so little else positive in their lives. Chelsea helped them become part of a community again, to feel they were part of something bigger than themselves.
This sense of alliance, hope and affiliation spread like the wildfires that had devastated much of Rancho Bernardo in 2007, when many folks also came together to try to help each other. With assistance from the Texas-based Laura Recovery Center, the Chelsea King Search Center was set up to print flyers and distribute maps out of the RB United office, a remnant of those wildfires.
As Poway High School (PHS) junior Jimmy Cunningham wrote in the Iliad, his school newspaper: The more people who knew, the more ground that was covered. Searching eyes were everywhere, and at the rate that the awareness was being spread due to network communication, it wasn’t long before every pair of eyes in a fifty-mile radius knew exactly who she was: Chelsea King—[an] intelligent, willful, and loving girl.
News of Chelsea’s plight soon went viral, spreading not only across the county and the nation, but around the globe, with well-wishing strangers conveying their sentiments online from Australia, Germany and even Pakistan. A world away, they were just as moved by the sheer goodness, the promise of a bright future and the angelic expression they could see reflected in those blue eyes of hers.
Back home, Kelly King, her eyes red from crying, made tearful pleas on the local TV news: “She’s such a good girl. She needs to come home,” she said, her voice breaking with grief.
The King family was well-off and well connected in a community that already had established social networks—business groups, sports teams or dance troupes—it’s just that they’d never been called into action for this purpose. As parents and their kids e-mailed or texted news updates to each other, they were retexted, re-Tweeted and reposted, spreading the infectious inspiration to