When adults vanish

Eleven days passed before Linda Pulliam was told that her son Kurt LeBlanc had vanished. It took three more days for her to coax her small Honda along flooded roads from Humboldt County to the Sierra ski resort where he had last been seen.

Sheriff’s deputies had responded with little urgency when LeBlanc’s dad reported him missing on New Year’s Eve, 2005. After all, LeBlanc was a 34-year-old male. Even his father initially assumed he had simply left Bear Valley to party with friends.

Pulliam felt she knew her only child better than that. But hardly anyone seemed to care.

A full week after authorities were notified of LeBlanc’s disappearance, they summoned an out-of-town search and rescue team to the snowbound Bear Valley basin. A lone cadaver dog sniffed around the condominium where LeBlanc had been staying. A handful of hikers ventured a few miles into the woods.

Pulliam, a 57-year-old sociology professor, waited mutely at a nearby cafe in the blanket of her rising panic. She was unsure how to press for more forceful action.

“They wouldn’t even let me talk to the searchers,” Pulliam said of authorities. “Nothing went right.”

Pulliam soon learned that she had entered a distinct -- and crowded -- purgatory.

In California the year LeBlanc disappeared, 40,715 adults were reported missing. The majority were deemed to have walked away of their own volition. Most turned up. Plenty never did. About 14,000 missing-adult cases remain active in California -- 50,000 nationwide.

Only a few ever bubble up into public consciousness. Disappearing is not a crime. And in a culture that holds almost sacred the right to reinvent oneself or self-destruct in anonymity, vanishing hardly seems suspicious. Privacy laws can hamper searches. Crucial early hours and days are squandered. Cold trails grow colder.

LeBlanc’s case was no different. By the time the skeletal search team made a brief, quickly aborted attempt to find him, a storm had blanketed the valley floor with new snow. If the shy computer geek was in the wilderness of 736-square-mile Alpine County -- California’s least populated -- finding him would have to wait until spring.

If he had been abducted or had left the area, tracking him also would have proved difficult: He had no car, no working cellphone and hardly any money in the bank. His paycheck sat unclaimed.

Overwhelmed by loss and fear, short on social and financial support, Pulliam began a lonely journey shared by countless loved ones of the adult missing: As days turned to months, the duties of investigator, back-country sleuth, agitator and publicist fell largely to her.

KURT LeBlanc’s first hockey stick leans against the wall of Pulliam’s rented Freshwater cottage west of Arcata, next to the tiny skis he wore at age 2. Nearly everywhere, there is Kurt: Laughing in his red shorts at 6 months, swinging from a tree branch at 8, on the ski slopes at 21.

Theirs was a family that never set down roots. Pulliam and Kurt’s father, Richard LeBlanc, split when he was a toddler. Kurt and his mother moved often.

They shared the same laugh -- even strangers told them so. “Kurt,” Pulliam said, “was the only person who I feel really comfortable with. We just understand each other.”

She wrote him detailed letters from her global travels. He thanked her for being a good role model, despite struggles through two failed marriages.

A music lover who cherished his guitar collection, LeBlanc sported a beard and a crooked grin. On his left arm were tattoos of a wizard, castle and dragon. He was 5 feet 10 and slightly built.

Pulliam had been worrying about him for some time.

He had been living with a girlfriend in Las Vegas, but she wanted him out, he wrote in a fearful e-mail to his mother in the fall of 2005. A friend of hers had even threatened to kill him.

By the time he arrived in Bear Valley on Dec. 13 to stay at his father’s condo and work as a ski lift operator, he was despondent over the relationship’s demise. At 3:21 p.m. on Dec. 21, he clocked out of his job at the Bear Valley Ski Resort and seemed to vaporize.

When Richard LeBlanc arrived on Dec. 23 to spend Christmas with his son, the ashtrays were full. Kurt’s beloved guitars sat undisturbed. He told himself Kurt would be back soon.

As days passed, he grew alarmed, but it was a panic that wasn’t shared. When he visited the ski resort to query co-workers, only one even recognized the photo he showed them.

Pulliam got the call from authorities on Dec. 31, the day Richard LeBlanc finally walked into the substation and filed a report.

She was a performance artist whose academic work centered on sociology of the arts. Finding a job had not been easy. But she had recently gotten a decent one: an adjunct slot at Humboldt State University that was to begin in two weeks. She had barely enough money for groceries. Now, she had to use it for gas.

“I knew I had to go,” said Pulliam, a fiercely private woman with delicate cheekbones and a bird-like tremor in her voice. “If there was anything to be done, I knew it was up to me.”

Pulliam did not succeed in conveying a sense of urgency.

“He’s probably just living on the streets somewhere in a big city, looking for drugs,” a deputy assured her, before the search team briefly perused the area. She was certain he was wrong but couldn’t stick around to convince him otherwise.

“My job was starting,” she said. “There had been so much snow. I felt totally helpless.”

BACK in Humboldt County that winter, Pulliam faced her students by day, earning just $1,500 a month teaching two classes. She could not afford to leave. Still, as grief and anger welled up, she challenged her students to deconstruct social hierarchies.

By night, more than 440 miles from where her son had last been seen, Pulliam searched the Web for answers.

It was there she found the little practical help she received. The National Center for Missing Adults, the only federally sanctioned clearinghouse for missing adult cases, is in the throes of a severe budget crisis. Because missing adults as a group do not engender the same alarm as missing kids, the center receives a fraction of the funding of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Still, it posted LeBlanc’s photo -- next to nearly 1,400 others -- on its website, and it provided the “missing adult” fliers that Pulliam later plastered all over Bear Valley.

Pulliam’s Web searches unearthed other sites -- cries for help from distressed families of the adult missing, who were trying to spread the word, to keep hope alive. The families shared a fierce underlying ethos, Pulliam noted, that in absence all are equal and equally deserve to be found.

“No comments as to character of family members of the missing or the missing person themselves,” warns a posting rule on www.truckingboards.com, which grants space to www.ProjectJason.org, founded by an Omaha mother whose 19-year-old son vanished five years ago.

“The guilt is enormous,” wrote one mother, who said she had run up her credit card debt to $10,000, searching. Even though she knew she shouldn’t quit her job at 59, she said she felt compelled to move to Denver, where her son was last seen, to “work the case.”

A father -- needed at home -- wondered how in good conscience he could stop looking for his son.

“What if Jared did not die that night?” he wrote. “What if he is alive out there and wandering homeless with schizophrenia? My God, he could be waiting for me to find him right this minute. How could I have let him down like that?”

Sleepless in her one-room bungalow, poring over postings from heartbroken relatives, Pulliam felt strangely separate. She was not one to grieve publicly, and besides, doing so seemed to accomplish little. Rather than commiserate, she reached for her other hat. No one, she soon determined, had studied the sociology of this subculture.

In the agony of her spring break, with 17 feet of snow blanketing Bear Valley, she crafted a grant application, full of queries to be researched.

How did families respond to the disappearance of adult loved ones? How did their search tactics differ? Whose cases got media coverage and why? And why and when did law-enforcement officials step up aggressively to solve them?

Searching in the Sierra was still impossible. Here, at least, were questions that could be answered, details that could be put in order.

Pulliam’s research would serve as shield and salve. It would give structure to her grief.

ALPINE County Sheriff’s Detective Edward Braz began working the case shortly after LeBlanc was reported missing but at first did so by phone, because winter travel from Sheriff’s Department headquarters in Markleeville to the Bear Valley substation requires a snowmobile.

“Time is of the essence,” Braz said, noting that detectives need some information to launch a meaningful investigation.

“Is the person missing willfully? Is there reason to believe he was abducted? Was he involved in some kind of criminal act? Those are all things we can focus on quickly,” he said. In LeBlanc’s case, “there really aren’t answers.”

In time, Braz concluded that LeBlanc had not been involved in drugs before he disappeared. He classified the disappearance as “suspicious.” But the investigation proceeded slowly.

Rather than seek a subpoena to obtain the condo’s phone records, Braz asked LeBlanc’s bewildered father to request them. It took Richard LeBlanc weeks to find the right person at the telephone company to help him.

Ultimately, the records confirmed his son’s despair: He called his ex-girlfriend 16 times in one day.

In February 2006, Pulliam shared Kurt’s distressing e-mail about the alleged death threat. Braz followed up and interviewed the man in Las Vegas -- 10 months later.

Braz, who doubles as the small department’s chaplain, insists the department is doing the best it can. He recently tracked down in state prison an old buddy of Kurt’s who skied the mountain with him 15 years ago. Did Kurt have a favorite ridge or lake he liked to visit? he asked. Volunteer search and rescue teams followed up.

“My heart goes out to the family,” he said. “It’s a frustrating thing.”

Still, Pulliam cannot hide her anger. Like hundreds of family members who express frustration with law enforcement in the online chat room of the National Center for Missing Adults, she has felt compelled to search on her own.

Even the worst news -- that her son is dead -- would in a way be welcome. Then, at least, her grief would have a shape.

Since the first dreadful visit in January 2006, Pulliam has made the eight-hour drive to Bear Valley half a dozen times.

Many summer days, she hiked alone, a pale woman straining for breath at 8,000 feet, searching for the sole of a boot, a shred of her son’s ski pants.

In August, behind the Bear Valley Mountain Resort, at the top of a steep slope, she discovered a trash heap, probably covered in snow all winter. In it was an empty can of Dr. Pepper, Kurt’s favorite drink.

Maybe, Pulliam reasoned, some terrible fate had befallen Kurt here. Maybe other clues had washed down the slope in the rush of snowmelt.

Winding her way down the steep mountain, she searched for signs. Each quadrant she scoured, she marked with red and yellow fabric that she had cut into strips at home.

At the bottom, her heart jumped. Here was a mud-encrusted Bear Valley T-shirt and, on it, a hair.

She labored back up the mountain and rushed to the Alpine County Sheriff’s substation, the hair tucked in a small plastic bag.

“I was in tears,” said Pulliam. “I thought, this must be important.”

She returned home to Humboldt County with a sense of hope. But when she called a few weeks later, the hair was still sitting in an evidence locker.

Kurt’s father also searched alone. Though Pulliam stuck to ridgelines, Richard LeBlanc, 59, sought out animal trails. Last October, he rushed to Braz with his own discovery, a box of bone shards.

The lab results disappointed: deer and coyote.

PULLIAM got her research grant last spring, and since then she has collected more than 300 accounts of missing adults reported in small newspapers around the country. She also has scribbled down phone numbers from handmade fliers about other missing adults up and down the state.

The type of sociology Pulliam practices acknowledges that there is no such thing as an objective observer. Her interview subjects know she has a vanished son, and they relate to her. Most weep. But Pulliam felt her own tears well up only once, sitting next to a woman so very much like herself: single, her only child was gone, leaving her with a truncated life story.

Much of her analysis is still a way off. But she can’t help but notice a great divide. There are families whose lack of education renders them helpless in seeking support or press coverage -- and whose poor grammar would likely land their queries in the trash if they tried. There are many who believe that their loved ones’ race or a perception of a seedy lifestyle relegates their cases to the bottom of the heap.

Then there are the fortunate, if such a term could ever apply.

The daughter of 65-year-old Nita Mayo, who disappeared August 2005 from Tuolumne County’s Donnell Vista overlook, has rallied as much support as possible. Since Mayo disappeared on her way home from a shopping outing, her story has appeared on Fox TV’s “America’s Most Wanted,” on the Headline News show “Nancy Grace” and the nationally syndicated weekly TV show “Missing.” Volunteers have held smoked beef brisket raffles and 5K runs to raise money. A volunteer team of equestrians traveled from Texas to scour nearby terrain.

Mayo has not been found. But Pulliam said her case illustrates the importance of savvy family members -- her daughter works in marketing -- and the draw of apparent innocence.

“Here this dependable 65-year-old woman out for a drive just vanishes,” Pulliam said. “People seem mesmerized by that kind of story. It’s like someone from Mars came down and grabbed her.”

Young men, who disappear in greater numbers than women, are “more likely to have something in their biography that makes them not look like a saint,” said Pulliam.

“I don’t think the public relates very well to someone who is just kind of a low-profile regular Joe, somebody who you can’t really say anything terrific about,” Pulliam said of her son. “Kurt was one of those people.”

PULLIAM expects to finish her research this year. As time has passed, her heart has opened to its own distress. She now is contemplating a one-woman performance on her experience.

For solace, she hikes often down a softly padded trail near her cottage to a regal redwood tree, split open by lightning. Its massive trunk forms a cave large enough for Pulliam to enter.

With her hands on the cool bark, the light streaming in from above, she prays and asks divine providence to give her the strength of the tree.

“I have finally been able to absorb what happened and feel grief,” she said recently on such an excursion.

Seven months after Pulliam raced up the mountain in Bear Valley clutching the 7-inch hair she believed might be her son’s, the state Department of Justice laboratory at last responded to Braz: “Due to limited amount of sample,” the letter read, “item not examined at this time.”

In February, near a Humboldt County trail head, Pulliam came upon an adolescent deer that had been hit by a car and killed. She called animal control. But two weeks later, no one had come. The carcass was left to rot, pecked by crows

“The parallel is too obvious,” she said. “I want to scream: ‘Damn it, why doesn’t someone care?’”

Last month Pulliam did not wait. When she came across a yellow-breasted bird, dead on asphalt, she took it and buried it in the tall grasses -- a burial, she said, “with dignity.”

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lee.romney@latimes.com