Family Keeps Vigil for Girl Missing 6 Days

Toting a pink book bag, Wendy Rachelle Osborn left her family’s Placentia home on foot the last morning they saw her. And she was in a hurry.

“She was quite late that morning,” her worried father recalled Sunday, as a sixth day ticked by without a clue of her whereabouts.

The bespectacled Placentia eighth-grader normally rode with neighborhood parents who car-pool their children to Tuffree Junior High School--less than two miles from the Osborn home. But classes start at 8 a.m., and last Tuesday the brown-haired, brown-eyed 14-year-old didn’t leave her home until 8:10 a.m, Jack Osborn recalled Sunday as he waited in hopes that the phone would ring with information on the whereabouts of his only daughter.

Placentia police detectives said Sunday that they were as baffled as the family about Wendy Osborn’s disappearance.

A Good Student

Jack Osborn said his daughter had never run away from home before, nor was there anything to her family’s knowledge that had been troubling her. He said Wendy was a good student who had had no crisis at home or school, no boyfriend woes, classwork problems or broken friendships. Along with the rest of the family, Wendy had regularly attended Eastside Christian Church in Fullerton since they moved a year and a half ago from Oregon.

“We had a very good, happy family,” Osborn said, his words measured, his voice calm but weary. “It just seems so strange that this would happen. . . . That’s one of the reasons we’re so bewildered. We have no explanation. We have little bits of this, little bits of that. But none of it adds up.”

Detectives said they have found no evidence to suggest foul play. They have had no reports from witnesses who might have seen her being abducted, nor have they found any personal belongings, such as her book bag. Neither have they established any reason for the teen-ager, whom they described as “bright,” “family-oriented” and “reserved in public,” to leave home and not return.

When she left for school Tuesday morning, Wendy carried a pink duffel bag for her books, a red leather purse and a brown paper lunch sack. She was wearing a pink polo-type blouse with black checks, pink knit pants and white high-top shoes, officers said.

Tuesday morning, Osborn, a service manager for Kis Photo, a manufacturer of photo processing equipment, said goodby to his children about 7 a.m. and left for work.

“The last time she was actually seen by a family member was at 8:10. Everybody kind of goes out the door at the same time so some of them think she was here and some think she wasn’t here when they left,” he said Sunday.

She was last seen shortly after that in the area of Berkenstock and McCormick lanes in North Placentia. The trail, her father and police said Sunday, seems to end there.

By 6:37 p.m. that day, her frantic parents had called police and reported Wendy Osborn missing.

At 5 feet, 3 inches tall and 95 pounds, Wendy has just begun to gain a few pounds, to “fill out a little,” Osborn said. “She’s getting to the place where she’s getting to be more of a woman than a little girl,” Osborn said wistfully.

Wendy, he said, is a good student who earned As and Bs in school, a “bookworm” whose only other hobby besides reading is sewing. He recalled that she had given him a book for Christmas, a book he still hasn’t read. He tried to find it Sunday and concluded that his daughter probably has it with her--wherever she is--in her book bag.

Osborn said he and his wife, Wendy and her two brothers, ages 17 and 9, had spent a whole day together at Magic Mountain the Saturday before her disappearance.

“We had a great time,” Osborn said, adding that his daughter seemed in good spirits.

Placentia Police Sgt. David Taylor said Sunday that there were few leads to work with in Wendy’s disappearance.

“Usually with juvenile missing persons,” he said, “we’ll get some whisper of something, like they were on restriction or they had a fight with their parents or something.

“Not a thing in this case. And our investigation has included talking to anybody who might know Wendy. . . . We’re hoping we’ll get some rational explanation and that Wendy’s OK, but so far we haven’t heard anything like that,” Taylor said.

Police are asking the public’s help in finding the girl, who has shoulder-length brown hair and wears round prescription glasses and has braces on her teeth. Her route when she occasionally walked to school, officers said, would have included a stretch of Bastanchury Road until she reached Kraemer Avenue near her school.

Anyone with information is asked to call Lt. Bob Jones or Detectives Dick Machlan or Rick Miller at 993-8164, or the Adam Walsh Center in Orange at 547-1361.

“We’re getting responses from people who say they think they saw somebody who looks like Wendy and we’re following those up,” Taylor said, estimating that police had received three or four such calls on Sunday. “Usually it’s been a (call from a) restaurant or a shopping center in another city. But there has been no suggestion as to how she left and why she’s gone.”

The family, described as very private, kept its own vigil at home Sunday.

“We’ve got somebody here . . . watching the phone. No telephone call is going unanswered,” Osborn said.

In the meantime, they struggled to understand.

“Nothing makes sense to us. Nothing fits,” Osborn said. “The puzzle is still laying on the table.”