A year after his daughter’s death, and a month after her young killer was sentenced, Joe Bellinger is still a man in pursuit of other truths.

Like all of those whose manner of death becomes a matter of official inquiry, Michelle Bellinger died twice.

The first time, she died privately, her hands and chest and ankles bound with duct tape, she asphyxiated inside three brown plastic trash bags that were tied up and tossed down a Silver Lake hillside.

Then, in a Juvenile Hall courtroom, she died all over again, on the record this time. The circumstance of her dying was dismantled and examined, and eventually, a young man of 15--a few months younger than Michelle when she died--was found to have killed her . He was sent into custody for 28 years to life, which under juvenile law usually means until age 25.

It was, noted Deputy Dist. Atty. Deborah Kranze, a “particularly vicious” killing.

A year after his daughter’s death, and a month after her young killer was sentenced, Joe Bellinger is still a man pursued by, and in pursuit of, other truths.

He is relieved that someone is behind bars. In a statement he submitted to the judge, Bellinger wrote that the defendant “has personally deprived us of our dearly loved daughter, and continues to mock her even as she lies in her grave. . . . The defendant has psychologically and spiritually devastated what remains of our family.”

Others Involved?

But he is convinced that more than one person was involved in his daughter’s slaying.

In the months after Michelle’s body was found by a construction worker, Bellinger dogged the investigation, worrying each piece of data. He learned that his daughter had been struck and apparently raped and sodomized. Someone had braided her blond hair and wrapped it oddly around her neck.

To understand the particulars of police and coroner’s reports, Bellinger steeled himself and steeped himself in forensic minutiae: patterns of rigor mortis; the behavior of flies and maggots, which can indicate time and circumstances of death.

He drove the streets of Silver Lake and sat on hillsides with binoculars, searching for a car that a friend of Michelle’s had said might belong to someone who might know something about what happened. He brought home garbage collected from cans outside certain houses and searched it for clues. He tried to decipher local graffiti, seeking hints. He posed his sister in the fetal posture in which Michelle had been found, and he tried to wrap her with tape as Michelle had been wrapped, to see if it could be done by one young man.

“He spent a lot of hours investigating the case,” acknowledged Kranze, “and some of the information he turned up was helpful to me.”

To the police, Detective Hank Petroski said, Bellinger provided a “moral support, a go-out and get ‘em, you can do it” attitude.

Even with one person found culpable, Bellinger is convinced that it did not stop with the one youth, and Bellinger still presses, still asks questions. It is hunches and linkages, but it is not evidence.

“If some information came up that there was some other person involved, then we would work on it, but we don’t have a person or persons,” Petroski said.

The justice system has moved on, to adjudge other deaths. One young woman was slain, and one young man is behind bars; the balance is restored. But not for Joe Bellinger. “I will never stop. Never.”