Central Valley canal’s murky waters hide dark secrets

On a pretty day from a vista point a few miles south of here, you can look over green grazing lands, almond orchards, row crops and the blue ribbons of canal water that run through California’s Central Valley.

This isn’t a pretty day.

The valley’s infamous Tule fog has leached the color from the scene, leaving the hills pale and the sky gray. The water in the Delta-Mendota Canal is rust-brown — and day after day yields ugly secrets as divers search for what they hope they won’t find: the body of 4-year-old Juliani Cardenas, kidnapped from his grandmother’s arms two weeks ago.

A farmworker said he saw a car go into the canal 45 minutes after Juliani was taken.

On this late January afternoon, the sixth day of the search for the kidnapper’s silver Toyota, authorities so far have fished up a Lexus, an Infiniti, a red Mustang, four economy-sized sedans, an SUV, two pickup trucks, a motorcycle and parts of a decaying Trans Am. Before the eight-day search ends, they will pull up four more vehicles — 16 in all — that are not the car they are looking for.

In other years, along with hundreds of vehicles, the canal has offered up weapons, remnants of meth labs and the bodies of murder victims, suicides and hapless fishermen. The severed limbs of one victim washed up 12 miles apart.

People in these parts know the canal as a dumping ground, especially for things people want never to be found. But the near-daily dredging up of wreckage has the rest of California wondering: “What’s in that water?”

“It caught people off guard. People who aren’t familiar with the canal don’t realize how big it is, how accessible,” said Seth Harris, assistant superintendent of water operations for the Delta-Mendota Canal.

“They think, ‘If they found 11 cars in a few miles, how many thousands of cars must be in there?’ But at this particular spot, the canal goes right through a town. There are other places where the canal runs for miles with maybe one farmhouse, and dumping isn’t as much of a problem,” he said.

The canal stretches 117 miles from the Sacramento River Delta to Mendota, a farm town in western Fresno County. The canal authority pulls out 50 to 100 cars a year, mostly at spots where the canal passes through populated areas. Lately, a lot of those cars have had the keys in the ignition. Times are tough, and reporting a car stolen is one way to stop making payments on it.

At Crow’s Landing, another town the canal crosses about six miles from Patterson, men at Dick’s Bar are talking about “our underwater junkyard.”

“There’s cars that have been in there for decades,” says a retired ranch worker who won’t give his name. “Maybe one of those cars is mine.”

The cars, the gas and the oil, the bodies and the meth ingredients and everything else people dump in the canal go into water used to irrigate crops. Pollution control relies on sheer dilution — the canal holds 5 billion gallons of water that move at 4,200 cubic feet per second.

Among the few who have seen what’s really down there are the divers searching for the silver Toyota Corolla, although “seeing” is a misnomer.

Visibility is near zero in the 100-foot-wide, 18-foot-deep concrete-encrusted canal. Drop a rock in, and it disappears from sight in less than a second.

“People always ask me, ‘Doesn’t it freak you out to be down there in the dark, knowing there are bodies?’ ” said Mark Cardoza, a Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department Dive Team leader. “I tell them, ‘It’s the stuff that’s alive that scares me.’ ”

Cardoza said he was once hit by a fish so big it felt like he’d been punched in the gut by a grown man. Then the fish’s tail almost knocked off his diving mask.

Those kind of tales keep fishermen coming to the steep banks even though if they fall in, they’re probably not coming back out.

Cardoza didn’t see the fish. He couldn’t see anything.

“It’s black-black down there.”

Searching in the dark

Authorities say Jose Esteban Rodriguez grabbed Juliani from his grandmother, Amparo Cardenas, on the afternoon of Jan. 18. A farmworker told police he saw a car that matched the description of the silver Toyota go airborne and plunge into the canal near Zacharias Road bridge.

Rodriguez, 27, is the ex-boyfriend of Juliani’s mother, Tabitha Cardenas. She is eight months pregnant with Rodriguez’s child. Rodriguez is not Juliani’s father, but Tabitha Cardenas says he wouldn’t hurt the boy and she doesn’t believe they’re in the canal.

Diving teams from Stanislaus and Merced counties started searching where car tracks led to the water. It’s a dangerous spot for divers. At that point, the canal goes into a siphon and through a 15-foot underground tunnel beneath a creek. A diver sucked into the siphon would be unlikely to survive.

Geoff Crowley was one of the divers who went in at that spot on the first day of the search.

“It narrows up, and the water force is tremendous. It felt like the water was going to pull off my face mask. It was vibrating with the force,” he said.

When they didn’t find Rodriguez’s car, the divers moved farther along, searching 12 miles over six days.

On the sixth day, the team pulled up the hood of a Trans Am, some 10 miles from the original search site. As the afternoon light was fading, they decided to go back by the bridge one more time.

Steve Macedo dropped sonar equipment into the water. He’s the co-leader of the team with Cardoza, who is nicknamed “Dozer.”

“For bulldozer, not for snoozing,” says the beefy man, watching the sonar scan on a computer screen. He sees an object and the shadow behind it.

“What does that look like? That’s a car,” he says. He calls over diver Randon Kirkbride.

Kirkbride takes one look and says, “Let’s send down a diver.”

Cardoza is shaking his head.

“We search all this damn week and it’s right here?” he says, then adds, “Maybe.”

“Cops are pessimists. We don’t believe anything until we see it.”

This sonar hit is different from the 11 others that led the rescuers to submerged vehicles. It’s in an area that was already searched — and thought to be clear. It’s on the other side of the canal from the tracks, but then the witness did say the car was airborne.

Calvin Watson, the one they’ve dubbed “Hollywood” because they say he’s ruggedly handsome, is gazing across the canal.

“I hope that car is not here and they are alive somewhere,” he says before suiting up as the safety diver. He will go in the water if anything goes wrong for the first diver.

Kirkbride, the primary diver, climbs down a metal ladder a few yards from the siphons. He is wearing a vulcanized rubber suit and a full face mask. He communicates with team members on the canal bank through a radio in his mask.

Deep below the water, Kirkbride’s foot hits something. He asks for two more feet of rope. He scrapes mud off his mask and, even through the murky water, sees enough to report back: It’s not a car. It’s a truck.

Murky findings

On Friday, authorities lowered the water level in the canal by turning off three feeding pumps. With a calmer current, a remotely operated rover sonar with a camera captured an image of the Toyota’s license plate. The car was wedged about 60 feet inside one of the three tunnels of the siphon.

A diver was beneath the water trying to hook the car when officials called to say they could keep the pumps turned off for only 20 more minutes without risking flooding.

The tow truck pulled the Toyota up just in time. Its windows were down.

There were no bodies inside.

Cardoza is sticking to his philosophy of nothing-less-than-seeing-is-believing.

“Until there’s a body I’m still of the opinion that it’s 50-50. The Delta-Mendota is a nasty mess, the perfect place to dump things and I sure wouldn’t eat any fish that came out of it,” he said.

“But in 12 years searching … I’ve never seen it keep a body this long. Even this canal can’t hide things forever.”

metro@latimes.com

Marcum is a Times special correspondent.