Police, in Mishap, Overlooked Clues to Slain Girl’s Trail

Anaheim police said Thursday that they had 14-year-old Wendy Rachelle Osborn’s purse and school identification card in a property room for three days after they received a teletype alerting them to her disappearance--and apparently while she was still alive.

But the Anaheim Police Department never connected the Placentia teen-ager’s purse with the teletype--which was read aloud at police roll-calls--in what was described by one lieutenant as a series of unavoidable and tragic circumstances.

Knowledge that the purse had been discovered--less than three hours after Wendy was last seen by her family on the morning of Jan. 20--would have made a difference in the case, spokesmen for both the Anaheim Police Department and the task force investigating Wendy’s kidnaping and murder said Thursday.

“It would have been a tremendous aid to Placentia (police) if we’d been able to tell them about that purse,” Anaheim Police Lt. Bill Wright said Thursday.

“Sure. It would have definitely told Placentia police that whoever abducted her went that direction (to Anaheim),” said Sgt. Mike Stodelle of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, which is spearheading the task force because the girl’s body was found Feb. 1 in the Chino Hills area of that county, 12 days after she was reported missing.

“It wouldn’t have necessarily told us she was there (in Anaheim), but it would have given them a place to go looking,” Stodelle added.

Next Tuesday, investigators will return to the undisclosed area in Anaheim where Wendy’s purse was discovered to distribute thousands of flyers that describe both the handbag and a book bag she was carrying when she disappeared. Detectives also will be questioning people in the vicinity about whether they saw someone dump Wendy’s belongings in a trash can on the morning she was abducted.

San Bernardino County Coroner Brian McCormick said an autopsy showed that Wendy had been strangled, sexually molested and possibly tortured with what apparently were pliers. His report said she may have been alive eight to 10 days after she was last seen on her way to school.

“She was probably alive most of the time,” McCormick said after the autopsy last month.

The fact that Wendy apparently was alive at least a week after she was abducted, McCormick said, raised the possibility that the 5-foot-3, 93-pound girl had been held captive before she was murdered and her body discovered by equestrians on a bridle path.

That she may have been alive, police said Thursday, made the series of mishaps all the more frustrating and tragic.

Wendy’s red leather purse was found by a transient rummaging through a trash can the morning of Jan. 20. Wright said the purse was turned in at a nearby liquor store, whose owner then notified Anaheim police.

An officer picked up the purse at 11 a.m., Wright said, and took it to the police station, where it was booked into the property room.

There, the handbag was logged as “found property”--as opposed to being categorized as evidence that might be linked with a criminal case, Wright said.

It would be seven more hours before Wendy’s parents, believing that she was in school until mid-afternoon, reported to Placentia police that their daughter was missing. It would be nine more days before police investigating Wendy’s disappearance would learn that her purse had been found.

The day after it was found, Wright said, the officer who had picked it up at the liquor store took an emergency leave from work. The officer’s father was gravely ill and would later die. The officer would not return to work until Feb. 3--two days after Wendy’s body was discovered about two miles northeast of the Orange County border.

“I’m sure that, with the media attention about her missing, he (the officer) would have heard about it and it would have jumped right out at him: ‘Hey, I booked in that girl’s purse,’ ” Wright said, his voice sounding grim. “But he was devoting all his time to being with his dying father. . . . Hell, the teletype was read at roll-call meetings.”

Placentia Police Sgt. Russ Rice said Thursday that his department filed a report of Wendy Osborn’s disappearance in a state Department of Justice computer system almost immediately after her parents contacted them on the evening of Jan. 20, a Tuesday.

On Jan. 24, Placentia police made their first public plea for help in finding the missing girl while her parents printed hundreds of flyers containing her picture and physical description, Rice said. By Jan. 26, a Monday, the flyers were being widely distributed.

The same day, regional teletypes were sent by Placentia officers to all California police agencies as well as to those in surrounding states, alerting them to Wendy’s disappearance.

On Jan. 27, Wright said, a civilian clerk assigned to the property room finally had worked her way down a stack of property booking slips to the red leather purse found in a trash can.

“You have to understand, we have thousands of pieces of property,” Wright said. “Because the purse was not immediately flagged as ‘found evidence’ or crime-related, it wouldn’t go to the detectives; it would go into a storage locker until the clerk--she’s the one trying to find out whose bicycle this is and things like that--can wade through all of this stuff.”

Only Wendy’s identification card from Tuffree Junior High School was inside her purse; there was nothing listing her home address, Wright said.

The same day, the clerk typed a letter and mailed it to Tuffree, notifying school officials that a purse had been found and asking them to alert the student.

At 2:30 p.m. on Jan. 29, Rice said, school officials opened the letter and immediately picked up the telephone. They called Placentia detectives, who then notified Anaheim police that they were holding in a storage locker the purse of a girl they were trying to locate, Wright said.

Placentia police retrieved the purse, had the Orange County Crime Lab examine it for evidence--”We came up with absolutely zip on the purse,” Capt. Walter Pichon said--and then “flooded the neighborhood” where the handbag had been found.

Officers intend to canvass the same neighborhood again Tuesday. A similar distribution of flyers was made last Tuesday along the teen-ager’s route from home to school in Placentia, but investigators have said it has resulted in no solid breaks in the case.

Although authorities were quoted Wednesday as saying that Wendy’s pink book bag also was found in the trash can, Placentia police said Thursday that, in fact, they are still hoping to locate it.

Warren James Bland, a convicted sex offender who has been charged with the murder of 7-year-old Phoebe Ho of South Pasadena, is a leading suspect in Wendy’s murder. However, Bland has not been charged.

A Chino man who knew Bland in prison was questioned by San Bernardino County sheriff’s investigators about whether he loaned Bland his van about the time that Wendy Osborn disappeared. Authorities said that man, Joel David Chandler, has been ruled out as having any connection to Wendy’s murder.

Chandler allowed detectives to search his van and demanded to be given a lie detector test this week, San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department Sgt. Bill Arthur said.

Arthur said Chandler passed the polygraph test and added that evidence thus far does not indicate that Bland was in the van during the period of time that Wendy was missing.

Examinations of such evidence as fibers and hair have not been completed, however, Arthur said Thursday.

“We feel that Mr. Chandler came up clean,” he added.