At Morgue, Girl Is but a Number; To Parents, She Was Everything

In the official paper work that noted her departure from this life, the cops had misspelled her last name. And the coroner had gotten her first name wrong.

Someone noticed the mistake and wrote the right name on the envelope containing what they call the personal effects of Coroner’s Case 87-03113 .

It was not a very big envelope to hold the incidentals from a girl’s 15 years of life. But because she had been murdered and stuffed into a plastic garbage bag and left on a dusty hillside in Silver Lake, whatever else Michelle Bellinger had on her when she died was no longer personal possessions. It was evidence.

Michelle’s father stood unsteadily in the lobby of the coroner’s office Friday and upended the envelope into his hand. Out tumbled the woven gold ring they had given her, with her initial on it in silver; a braided black cross on a cord, something a friend had made for her, and a single gold stud earring.

She Loved Earrings

It was the earring that made Joe Bellinger cry. Michelle loved earrings, and when her mother loaned her a favorite pair of Mexican earrings, she told her to be careful with them. It was those earrings she had worn the last time they saw her, he believed--last Thursday morning, when she left for school.

Last year 784 people were killed in Los Angeles, dispatched by all varieties of mayhem. Michelle Marie Bellinger, whose 16th birthday would have been on Bastille Day this July--a date her father made sure she understood--had been asphyxiated by chest compression, the coroner said. Her body was found last Tuesday.

Around Joe Bellinger and the handful of inexpensive jewelry, people came and went with their business. Coroner’s Case 87-03113 was not Marilyn Monroe or John Belushi. The world was not clamoring for the story of Michelle Bellinger’s life or the details of her death. She was a small, frail blonde, with braces that made her too embarrassed to smile anything but a sweet, thin-lipped grin, and no one saw most of her poems until her parents went through her papers after she was killed.

Perhaps she was not the most brilliant student in the world, but she was loving and tried to please. Perhaps she had given them some moments of worry, along with moments of joy. But she was his daughter, and her body had been dumped “like an animal” down a grassy hillside, and all there was to mark it, all that showed the world that his daughter had lived in it, was a four-paragraph newspaper story on Page 31, a story that got her last name wrong.

She disappeared on the evening of March 19, after messing around with a girlfriend in Poinsettia Park--a place where her purse had been stolen last month. Until last year, her parents had been “especially concerned with her choice of friends,” her father said. “I guess that’s why we let the (other) kids come over, so they’d be here and we’d know where they were.”

A year ago, Michy had taken up with an older boy, and when her parents disapproved, she ran off for two or three weeks. But she never went far and even sneaked home for a change of clothes.

‘A Few Misadventures’

“She got into a few misadventures because of her friends,” her father said. “For a certain time, people did get her involved in drug use” and she was caught with marijuana in her purse, he said. “She learned her lesson from that,” and in the last year, “there had been no problem whatsoever . . . regardless of what was done, she was a good girl.”

The death of her grandmother last year had shaken her; she spent hours writing poetry. She kept a journal, “My Personal Thoughts,” at West Hollywood Opportunity Center, a continuation school where she had decided not long ago that she actually liked Chaucer.

She liked old rock ‘n’ roll, too. She cranked up the Shirelles even louder than her ex-musician father liked, as she lay on her bed poring over heaps of grocery-store paperbacks that list babies’ names, looking for “the prettiest ones,” her mother said. She fretted in her adolescent worries: Was she pretty? Did people really like her for herself?

Before Christmas, she inked a rose and the word MOM above her right ankle; when it showed signs of fading, she touched it up with a felt-tip pen.

And “she always called, she always called” when she was out with friends, her parents said.

So by the morning of March 20, when she had still not phoned, the Bellingers panicked.

“We were looking desperately, calling anyone our daughter might have known,” driving into the San Fernando Valley, walking around West Hollywood, buttonholing kids and asking about her.

‘She’s Not a Runaway’

When they went to file a missing-person report, he said police told him that policy required they could not start looking for 48 hours. “At the station, someone mentioned runaway, and I said she’s not a runaway, she’s missing. “

“Her and her friends were all over the city, and they were trying to make it out like she was a street girl,” he said. “They better not.”

She was “a smart girl, but street-smart too; in spite of the poetic side, she thought that she was tough.” Michy was small and worryingly thin, but she once told her uncle that “‘if anyone tried to rape me, he’d have to kill me first.’ I don’t know if that’s what happened.”

“We don’t even know if she was sexually molested; they wouldn’t tell us,” or whether she was even clothed when found. “I can understand withholding certain information . . . to help them put a case together . . . but to withhold certain vital information from her parents, I don’t think that’s necessary.”

He slipped the jewelry back into the envelope. In a shirt pocket, written on a white tablet page, he carried a poem Michelle had written in a ragged schoolgirl hand:

“If I die tomorrow, where will I go?” it began. “I wonder what people see in me? I’m just a child who wants to be free. I tried my best, but I always feel less. I wish I could have been the way my parents expect. But when the time comes to say goodby, never let my memory die. Just remember me as the little blonde girl with braces and bright blue eyes.”

From the coroner’s office, the Bellingers drove to Silver Lake, looking for the place where “they left my daughter like an animal.”

It was on a hillside far above a supermarket and next to a house being built. Neighbors said young people often come to party, and they pointed to the scattering of beer cans and bottles.

Workers Find Body

A Spanish-speaking workman said Friday that the construction workers had discovered the body late Tuesday; they had been looking for a sack to hold some of the fruit they had plucked from a wild citrus tree. When they opened the plastic bag, the workman said, there was a hand, or maybe a foot--Michelle’s.

Joe Bellinger clambered down the dusty incline and paced the hillside, looking for some clue, trying to turn his pain to fruitful logic. Look, he pointed--all those boards. They could have used those boards to suffocate her and not leave any bruises.

He inspected the retaining walls, the castor-bean bush, the dirt heaps and climbed back up. “That’s it,” he said, dusting off the black dress pants he had put on for the trip to the coroner’s office. “I think they killed her there,” he said evenly, “and dragged her body over there.”

His wife, Phyllis, put her hand on his arm. “We may never know,” she murmured .

“ We may not know, Phyllis. But I know,” he replied.