A family waits and tries to hope

In the two months since the disappearance of 19-year-old Donna Jou, a bookish, sheltered biology student who dreamed of being a neurosurgeon, clues to her fate have been both dramatic and maddeningly inconclusive.

There is an abandoned toolbox with ominous contents. There are puzzling text messages she may or may not have sent her mother. And there is a feeling of certainty, among her family and investigators, that a convicted sex offender named John Steven Burgess -- described by one detective as “a very smooth-talking con man” -- knows more than he will reveal.

“It’s torture,” said her mother, Nili Jou. “My daughter only lived 19 years, and he’s not telling me where she is.”

It was Burgess, 35, investigators said, who somehow lured Jou from her mother’s Rancho Santa Margarita apartment onto the back of his motorcycle June 23. It was Burgess’ dilapidated rental house in Palms where witnesses last saw her alive. It was Burgess, investigators say, who repainted his 1998 Ford Ranger and fled after Jou vanished, and it was his tool box -- containing a motorcycle helmet, his truck’s license plate, rope, rubber gloves and a scrub brush -- that turned up near his house.

So when police caught up to him late last month as he was trying to ditch a bag of crack cocaine in the parking lot of a Motel 6 in Jacksonville, Fla., everyone hoped the case would break wide open.

Instead, Burgess now sits in a Los Angeles jail on an unrelated charge of failing to register as a sex offender. He refuses to talk about Donna Jou, and though police call him a suspect, they have not charged him in her disappearance. Between him and the street stands $250,000 bail.

“It’s an unusual case, where our client is being held on Case A, where clearly the focus is on Case B,” said Burgess’ attorney, George Bird Jr. He said Burgess could not answer questions about his whereabouts around the time of Jou’s disappearance without the risk of incriminating himself in the failing-to-register case.

Jou’s mother, an Iranian immigrant, is outraged that a Los Angeles judge reduced Burgess’ bail from $1 million at his arraignment Monday, where he pleaded not guilty to failing to register as a sex offender. She said she was in disbelief when detectives warned her, before Burgess’ capture, that his constitutional rights prevented them from making him speak about her daughter’s disappearance.

“In my country, by now, they’d take it out of him,” she said, but here “he has the right to keep it to himself and make parents suffer. A convicted sex offender can have a whole family hanging in the air.”

After her daughter’s disappearance, Nili Jou took two weeks off from her job as a phlebotomist at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, but she has since returned to work. She found her mind fraying without something to focus on. Now and then, at work, she pauses to consider what grief and worry have done to her appearance.

“I tell myself, ‘These poor patients haven’t done anything to look at this face, when they’re in pain themselves,’ ” she says.

Donna Jou’s family is one of high achievers. Her father, Reza Jou, works in Houston as a systems integration manager for NASA’s International Space Station. Her older brother, Daniel, studies physics and philosophy at Harvard. Her older sister, Lisa, is an attorney in San Diego. Donna Jou herself excelled academically, with a near-perfect SAT score and a brilliance for math. But in key ways, said those who knew her, she didn’t understand the world.

“She believed people were good,” her father said. “She never had any experience with bad people.”

Her family describes her as physically tiny -- 5 feet 3, about 100 pounds. A biology student at San Diego State, Jou was staying with her mother in Orange County for the summer and working at a Payless shoe store. Investigators say Burgess apparently met Jou on Craigslist.com and passed off another man’s photo as his own.

On the day she disappeared, she told her mother she was going out with a friend but didn’t specify where. Her mother, who was about to leave for a party, said she saw her daughter put on a helmet outside their apartment and climb onto a motorcycle with a man, though she didn’t see his face.

“I was sure that she knows this person,” the mother said.

Because she happened to be heading in that direction, the mother said, she followed the motorcycle for a few miles on the 241 toll road but lost sight of it when it pulled off on Portola Parkway in Irvine. That night, she received two text messages. One said:

Goodnight Momy. Love you

The next said:

battery dead. in san diego and be home later. love you Momy

She has doubts that her daughter sent them, since she usually abbreviated text messages, using “u” for “you,” for example. After her daughter vanished, Nili Jou said, she was able to access her daughter’s voice-mail messages and began dialing numbers she found on it, eventually reaching Burgess. She said he confirmed Donna had been at his house, and said he didn’t know where she’d gone. “He was relaxed and very friendly,” she said.

Two days after she disappeared, when she didn’t show up for a physics class she was taking at a local community college, her mother reported her missing.

The case is being handled by Orange County sheriff’s detectives and the Los Angeles Police Department. Police say they don’t know what Burgess might have told Donna Jou to entice her onto his motorcycle, but her family says she was lonely and bored in Orange County and might have been looking to meet friends. Investigators have performed forensic testing on Burgess’ truck and his toolbox but won’t say what, if anything, the tests revealed.

Burgess, who uses the alias Sinjin Stevens, was convicted of three counts of battery in 2002. The next year, he was convicted of performing a lewd act on a child.

Police say Burgess made a living by using Craigslist to find international students -- many of them from Eastern Europe -- and charging them to sleep on mattresses strewn about his rented house on Faris Drive in the Palms area.

“He subletted it so many times, he probably had a good income,” said Orange County Sheriff’s Department Det. Dan Salcedo. He said some prospective tenants became wary of Burgess on meeting him, and others left after a few days even though they had paid a month’s rent.

Tuesday afternoon, Donna Jou’s father, Reza Jou, and his niece, Behnaz Nikfarjam, sat in the office of Sheriff’s Department spokesman Jim Amormino while he tried to explain the complications surrounding the case. Because Burgess is believed to have traveled to Northern California, Nevada, Arizona and Florida after Jou vanished, Amormino said, it’s impossible to know where to look for her.

Amormino explained that the charge Burgess faces -- failing to register as a sex offender -- is relatively easy to prove. With his prior felony conviction, it carries a possible sentence of six years in prison.

“If he’s put away for a while, hopefully we have time to put the case together,” Amormino said.

“You’re not worried that someone will try to bail him out?” asked Nikfarjam.

“I am worried,” he said.

“Are there any legal remedies that you can do?” asked Reza Jou.

“I wish,” Amormino said. “I wish there was something I could tell you that would increase it to $10-million bail. But there’s another law in this country -- no excessive bail.” He tried to reassure them that if Burgess disappeared again, they would find him. “The world is too small. He has no place to run.”

“We don’t have a life anymore,” Reza Jou said. “For the past two months I haven’t worked. I can’t focus on anything else but Donna -- if she’s hungry, if she’s thirsty, if she’s sick.”

Jou’s family did not attend Burgess’ arraignment Monday -- they said they were not informed of it -- but they have read a news account that described Burgess as smirking.

“Some people are just sick, and it’s a thrill for them to watch people experience pain,” said Jou’s older sister, Lisa Jou, a civil attorney in San Diego. She said the family wishes it had done more to warn Donna about the dangers of meeting people over the Internet.

“We feel guilty,” she said. “How do you think any family feels that their child is facing something like this because you didn’t prepare them?”

She has trouble thinking of a circumstance in which her sister remains alive. Donna was not the kind of person to run away from home, she said. Even if she wanted to, she did not have the savvy to do it. “She might run out the door and slam the door in someone’s face and tell them off, only to come right back,” she said. “It wasn’t disappearing off the face of the earth.”

Burgess, who pleaded guilty to the drug-possession charge in Florida and received time served, will appear in court again Sept. 5 for a pretrial conference on the failure-to-register charge. Jou’s family plans to demonstrate.

Donna Jou’s brother, Daniel, is a soft-spoken 21-year-old student at Harvard who is staying with his mother for the summer and studying for the LSAT. He is troubled by the $250,000 bail for Burgess. “I understand the constitutional issues at play here,” he said. “It’s not like they’re going to change any time soon. It’s just unfortunate to be on this side of it.”

Sitting beside his mother in the small, well-appointed Rancho Santa Margarita apartment, he tried to think of hopeful scenarios in which his sister might still be alive.

“She might be extremely disoriented, living under a bridge somewhere. She might be restrained by some other person, some accomplice,” he said. “You can imagine things.”

--

christopher.goffard@ latimes.com