Desert Town Loner Hunted After He and 2 Girls Vanish

Pioneertown is a place apart, a tiny desert outpost on the road to nowhere. Once a backdrop for Hollywood Westerns, the town today is home to folks fed up with street lights and sidewalks, with crowds and freeways, with city noise and scrutiny.

Alan Erickson, acquaintances say, is just such a person. A loner who lived in a rustic cabin that lacked utilities, Erickson, 36, is “quiet, not the social type at all,” recalled the town’s postmaster, Doreen Thompson. “He had a box here once, but that was years ago. Haven’t seen him much since.”

On Friday, Erickson left Pioneertown, 75 miles east of San Bernardino. Moving on is not unusual for desert dwellers, but Erickson did not depart alone. Setting off on what he described as an errand, the bearded handyman took two neighbor girls--Silver Putnam, 6, and her 3-year-old half sister, Kristina Johnson--along with him.

The three have not been home since.

Locals, noting that Erickson was a longtime resident and friend of the family, initially suspected the episode was a misunderstanding. But authorities disagree and are treating the case as a kidnaping.

More than 100 volunteers and San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies are combing the surrounding desert and mountains for signs of Erickson and the girls, while authorities from Sacramento to El Centro are following up on reported sightings of the primer-gray pickup truck he was driving.

“The reports are coming in from everywhere,” Sgt. Dennis Casey said. But so far, “we just don’t have any solid developments.”

As the hunt intensified Tuesday, the people of Pioneertown grew worried. At first many figured it was all a mistake, that Erickson--a camping enthusiast--had merely taken the girls for a weekend outing and would call any time to straighten things out.

But doubts and a sense of dread have crowded out those optimistic musings. At the post office and in the handful of businesses along Pioneertown’s dusty main thoroughfare, conversations Tuesday echoed a single theme: Had something awful happened to Silver and Kristina, and could another community member be to blame?

“It’s spooky, like a bad dream,” said Harriet Allen, owner of Pappy and Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace, the community’s only restaurant. “We’re a small town, and these are all people we know. It’s not like somebody you read about in the newspaper.”

Erickson vanished with the brown-haired, brown-eyed sisters about 12:30 p.m. Friday. A neighbor of the family, he was working that day on a motorcycle at the Parson’s Ranch Road home of Linda Johnson, her daughters, Silver and Kristina, and her boyfriend, Paul Frisbe.

Saying he needed a part, Erickson borrowed the family’s 1968 Chevrolet pickup to drive to town. Frisbe allowed Silver, who had graduated from kindergarten just hours earlier, and Kristina to go along.

When they failed to return, Frisbe went to Erickson’s house to investigate. There, he found a backpack and ice chest missing.

Alarmed, Frisbe followed the truck’s tracks along Pioneertown’s sandy roads for seven miles, but the trail ended at the pavement.

In the days since, sheriff’s deputies and a small army of volunteers have plastered the area with flyers bearing pictures of the missing girls and of Erickson, described as 5-feet, 8-inches tall, heavyset, with blue eyes, a full black beard and black hair usually worn in a ponytail.

Investigators are also searching parks and national forests throughout the West because of Erickson’s known passion for the wilderness.

Thompson, who has been postmaster for 16 years, said the girls’ disappearance has sent a spasm of fear through Pioneertown.

“All the women with little ones are particularly upset,” she said. “When you lose two little girls, it hits home.”

Allen, a 15-year-resident of Pioneertown who has known Silver and Kristina “since birth,” called Pioneertown “a peaceful, family-oriented place” where kidnaping “is not supposed to happen.”

“This is a place where you trust each other. You may not see a lot of your neighbors, but you trust them.”

Others, however, note that the girls’ disappearance is not the first strange episode to unfold in or near Pioneertown. The town got its start as a movie set, but later its isolation made it an attractive haven for Hells Angels. Today, authorities say, the rugged region harbors drug labs and cults.

In 1988, third-grader Sylvia Mangos was kidnaped from a swap meet just down the road from Pioneertown and later found murdered. And Laura Bradbury, the Huntington Beach girl who disappeared in 1984, was abducted from nearby Joshua Tree.

“They’ve had more than their fair share of unhappy things out there,” sheriff’s spokesman Jim Bryant said. “The desert attracts good people, but it attracts a lot of bad people too.”