Girl Found in Alaska Is Venice Kidnap Victim

A 5-year-old girl found living in an Anchorage trailer park with an unemployed California drifter was definitely identified Thursday as the missing daughter of a Venice couple and she will be reunited with them here this morning after 3 1/2 years, the FBI announced.

FBI spokesman John Hoos said blood tests and other laboratory examinations finally established that the child taken by Alaskan authorities from 58-year-old John Robert Altig 2 1/2 weeks ago is Elvia Vasquez, the daughter of Javier and Juanita Vasquez.

The curly haired girl was only 19 months old when she disappeared from Penmar Park in Venice on Aug. 25, 1981, as her mother was bottle-feeding a baby and other family members were playing baseball.

The parents, who live in a small Venice apartment with their four other children, were not available Thursday night to talk about the impending reunion. Hoos said they will be allowed to receive their daughter privately, before seeing the press.

He added, “We’re very sensitive to their personal needs.”

Even before the FBI disclosure that identification was final, Los Angeles Police Officer Joe Aparicio said detectives were convinced that the Crystal (Crissie) Morgan whom Altig took to Alaska last year was in reality the long-missing Elvia.

“There’s no doubt on this side,” said Aparicio, one of two Los Angeles policemen who never gave up trying to find her. “But that is not enough to convince a judge.”

By Thursday night, the FBI said, there was enough.

It was Aparicio and Officer Ken Majors who made the connection between Elvia and the “Crystal Morgan,” whom the bearded, heavy-set Altig allegedly claimed was his daughter by a former woman friend named Shirley Morgan.

Altig was arrested by FBI agents and Anchorage police when other trailer camp residents became suspicious that the child was not his.

Medical examination, according to the FBI, showed that she had been sexually abused.

She was placed with a foster family in the Alaskan city, while the painstaking identification procedure went on. It was made more difficult by the fact that the parents were unable to recognize her in recent photographs.

Nor, said police, was she able to tell them much about her past. Fact and fantasy seemed to become intertwined.

In the meantime, Altig was in jail in Anchorage, held in lieu of a $250,000 cash-only bond. Already accused by the state of Alaska of three counts of first-degree child sexual abuse, he was indicted Tuesday by a federal grand jury in Anchorage on a federal charge of taking the child across state lines for immoral purposes.

Altig pleaded not guilty to the state charges.