The day after Chelsea went missing, Workman and his boy were willingly recruited. The two of them showed up for search training at a business park in RB on that rainy Saturday, February 27, only to get turned away because searchers had to be eighteen years old. So they went to the parking lot across the street, where flyers were being distributed out of an RV. When Workman saw they were running low, he and his son had several hundred more made at a nearby print shop, which were then distributed to volunteers, who posted them in store windows at shopping malls throughout the county.
“You thought, ‘This could be me. I’d want people to help me. What can I do to help?’” Workman recalled. “People really do want to help. I think they’re tired of conflict.”
Chapter 4
John was still in a manic mood when he got home around 5:30 P.M. on Friday, February 26. He insisted that Cathy give him a ride to meet his girlfriend, Jariah, at a Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meeting half an hour away in Escondido, because he had no car of his own. He said he wanted to ask the guys there about drug rehab places that might admit him.
Before they left the condo, Cathy followed up on her promise at the salon. “Did you hear there was a girl that went missing out of the park yesterday?” she asked. “I was just wondering if you’d seen anything while you were walking around.”
John shrugged off her question, later complaining that he thought Cathy was accusing him of something. “No,” he told his mother dismissively. “I wasn’t paying attention to what was going on.”
Thinking the NA meeting would be good for John, even if it was a bit of a drive, Cathy gave him a ride over there. At least, she’d know where he was. After she went back to pick him up at nine-thirty, she told him they were going to visit his grandmother in the hospital up in Inglewood the next day.
Still worried about her son’s erratic behavior, Cathy had decided to take that Monday off from work so she could take him back to the same psychiatric unit in Riverside County and demand this time that he be admitted on a 5150. But she didn’t tell John of her plans, in case he freaked out and ran off somewhere.
As Cathy and John were driving through the neighborhood Saturday morning on their way to visit Linda, they saw a bunch of patrol cars at the park, where the sheriff’s department had set up a command center. Cathy briefly considered helping to search for Chelsea as she had for Amber Dubois, a fourteen-year-old freckled brunette with light blue eyes who had gone missing on her way to Escondido High School more than a year earlier. But dealing with a sick son and a sick mother had sapped any time and energy Cathy normally would have spent watching the news when she got home from work, let alone go out searching for another missing girl.
Not this time, she told herself.
Despite being separated, Amber’s parents, Carrie McGonigle and Maurice “Moe” Dubois, had spent the past year working ferociously together to keep up the search for their book- and animal-loving teenager. Carrie had even tattooed her daughter’s name on her wrist.
But after two initial sightings in front of Amber’s school, downtown Escondido and in the hills near her house, authorities were no closer to finding her—even with the offer of $100,000 in reward money, the work of at least two private detectives and more than 1,200 leads from psychics and others who had called the Escondido Police Department (EPD) with tips. Although not to the same extent as Chelsea’s disappearance, Amber’s missing person’s case was also widely publicized, with her photo making the cover of People magazine in November 2009. But there was still no sign of her.
Moe, an electronic telecommunications engineer, and Carrie, who worked for a printing business, were among the hundreds of volunteer searchers who came out to look for Chelsea and to give the Kings their support. Many of these volunteers were diverted by law enforcement and the yellow police tape from what was soon deemed a giant crime scene, so they headed off with handfuls of flyers they planned to post in their respective communities instead.
Meanwhile, inside the yellow tape, about 160 trained searchers and law enforcement personnel from local, state and federal agencies searched the area that night. And in the coming days, lifeguards and water rescue dive teams from every surrounding county joined the search after a call for mutual aid went out at 3:00 A.M., Friday. They combed the land on foot with tracking dogs, on horseback, on quads and other all-terrain vehicles. They searched the water in boats and walking shoulder to shoulder in diving equipment. Hi-tech drone aircraft were flown by remote control, helicopters searched using infrared scopes and underwater robots took photos on the lake bottom.
The response was overwhelming. Everyone, it seemed, was on the lookout for Chelsea King.
“We’re literally moving heaven and earth to find this little girl,” said Jan Caldwell, spokeswoman for the sheriff’s department.
Standing at Linda Osborn’s bedside in the hospital, John Gardner gave what sounded like a good-bye to his maternal grandmother.
“I know that you just want all of us to get along, and I want you to know that I’m not mad at Uncle Mike anymore,” he told her, referring to a screaming match they’d had a week earlier at Linda’s house. John had always been close with his grandmother, and it seemed to Cathy that he was scared Linda was about to die.
Before Cathy and John got home from the hospital early Sunday, they made a plan to meet at the North County Fair shopping mall, now officially known as Westfield North County, for lunch around noon. Cathy figured she’d take him back to Lake Elsinore later that day, or first thing Monday.
“I’ve got to make sure I don’t go past my five days,” John said, referring to the deadline after which he would need to reregister with a new residential address, or as a transient, under Megan’s Law, the national law governing sex offenders.
Cathy wasn’t sure if the day in L.A. would count toward the five days, but after he’d been cited twice for possessing marijuana while on parole, she wanted to support any effort he made to follow the law.
By the time Cathy got up later that morning, John had already left the condo.
He left her a message at 10:00 A.M. that he was at the park. “I went walking and when I went across the bridge, the search team and the sheriff were there,” he said. “There’s yellow tape up, so I had to go the long way.”
After hearing the park trails were blocked off, Cathy changed her usual Sunday-morning jogging route, heading toward Lake Poway on residential streets, instead. She only made it to a park on the way to her destination before turning back, though, because she was too physically and emotionally exhausted to go the distance.
John left her a second message at eleven-thirty, advising her that he was going to be thirty minutes late for lunch. “I’m going to start heading my way back to the mall,” he said.
Cathy noticed that he was talking a bit fast, as if he were trying to make it seem like nothing was wrong. He explained that she couldn’t call him because his battery was running low, and he was going to pull it out of his phone so it didn’t completely drain before he reached the mall and needed to call her. Knowing that Cathy had been acting highly codependent and worried about him lately—which is typical for any mother, sibling or spouse of any addict or alcoholic, especially when mental-health issues are involved—John added, “I didn’t want you to start freaking out.”
Cathy had informed him earlier that she’d gone through Verizon to put a global positioning system (GPS) tracking device on his phone, so if he was going someplace north of Escondido, near his druggie friends, she would know about it. However, this device was nothing like the GPS ankle bracelet he’d had to wear for his last year of parole. All he had to do to thwart her watchdog efforts was shut off the phone.
As Cathy sat eating tortilla chips