Body of student missing for 9 years is found in Santa Clarita

After nearly a decade of steadfast denials, three interrogations and two inconclusive polygraph tests, the man who last saw 20-year-old Lynsie Ekelund alive led detectives to a tree-dotted Santa Clarita hillside last week and indicated where to start digging. He had done a construction job there, police said, and it was where he had buried her.

Tearing into the hillside with a backhoe Wednesday, investigators unearthed a blue sneaker. They got on their knees and continued searching with small shovels and handheld buckets. Under several feet of dirt, they found bones.

Christopher McAmis, 31, an unemployed construction worker with a young family, had long maintained that he dropped the Fullerton College student off near her suburban northern Orange County home on the morning of Feb. 17, 2001, after she joined him on a trip to San Diego.

But Ekelund, a hazel-eyed journalism student who lived with her mother in Placentia and was partially paralyzed from a childhood car accident, was not seen again. With her disabilities, family members thought it unlikely that she would run away and be able to survive on her own. She didn’t drive, and had little money with her.

Though searches of his house and car yielded no hard evidence, investigators were convinced that McAmis, of Fullerton, was involved in her disappearance.

“For many years we were often in a place of ‘Yes, you did,’ ‘No, I didn’t,’ ‘Yes, you did,’ ‘No, I didn’t,’ ” Placentia Police Det. Corinne Loomis said.

Last Wednesday, detectives confronted McAmis with fresh evidence, including enhanced footage from ATM cameras that contradicted his statement that he had driven up Rose Drive in Placentia and gone home after dropping her off, police said.

“The statements that he made were laid against the information we had and it didn’t match up,” Loomis said, adding that detectives confronted him “in a way that made him realize he had nowhere to go.”

As Loomis watched the interrogation through a window, she said the man who had always maintained his innocence uttered a sentence that stunned her: “I might as well tell you.”

In a confession that Loomis described as “unemotional” and “matter-of-fact,” McAmis said he attempted to rape Ekelund at his Whittier apartment and strangled her in the struggle, then drove her body more than 50 miles to a Santa Clarita construction site where he had worked with his father and dug the grave with a backhoe, police said.

“I really couldn’t believe that I was hearing him confess to what we knew in our hearts for years,” Loomis said.

That day, she said, he pointed out the burial spot on a satellite map, and detectives accompanied him to a hillside in Bouquet Canyon, near a ranch-like facility for the mentally disabled.

The topography had changed slightly since 2001, but police said McAmis indicated the general area in which he remembered burying the body.

McAmis has been charged with murder during the attempted commission of a rape and remains in custody.

In an interview last year with a Fullerton College student magazine McAmis maintained his innocence. He speculated that Ekelund may have encountered a burglar, or been picked up by someone else after he dropped her off. Neither his attorney nor family members could be reached for comment Thursday.

Police believe the sneaker and the excavated remains belong to Ekelund, though they have not been officially identified.

Some in Ekelund’s family had held out hope that she might still be alive, though they knew the odds were against it.

She had already survived one close brush with death when she was 5. Her father, Stewart, recalled doctors telling him that she wouldn’t survive the car accident that put her in a coma for months. He remembered her waking up and saying, “I love you, dad.”

He said that although police were vague about McAmis’ involvement in his daughter’s disappearance, he always suspected that McAmis had killed her.

The possibility that she had run away didn’t make sense to him. She lacked motor control of her left arm, and would have had trouble surviving on her own. “I thought the worst had happened a long time ago,” he said. “There was just nothing to indicate that she was alive.”

Ekelund’s older brother, Scott, described her as an upbeat and caring person who never complained about her disability, “though she had every reason in the world” to do so.

For years, he said, he had not understood the strategy of Placentia detectives investigating the case, but now he praised the work that culminated in the confession. “They played a psychological game with this guy,” he said. “They poked at this guy little by little by little, all along knowing that he was the one who did it.”

With no crime scene and no body, the investigation dragged on for nine years. Loomis said the break came after her department asked the Orange County district attorney’s office for help in 2008. Investigators reexamined McAmis’ statements and studied video cameras that would have captured him on streets he said he passed.

During the investigation, Loomis said, she spoke often with Lynsie Ekelund’s mother, Nancy, who would call with questions and feared that her daughter might have been the victim of a human trafficking ring. Mother and daughter had been close.

After the confession, Loomis arranged to meet Nancy Ekelund at her home to inform her of the development.

By Loomis’ account, Ekelund said she suspected the news would be bad, but

told her, “I held out hope that you had found her, and that when I came home you were going to be standing on the porch and Lynsie would be with you.”