Hope Keeps a Search Alive : Missing Woman’s Parents Also Sustained by Toiling to Find Her

Ione Huber hardly ventures from her house now for fear that she may miss a call from police--or worse still--miss a call from her daughter. Her husband, Dennis, distributes flyers and checks leads.

In between, at their comfortable Upper Bay home, the couple run a makeshift command center for their missing daughter, Denise Anette Huber, who disappeared after a rock concert three weeks ago.

“We try to keep busy,” Dennis Huber, 52, said Wednesday as he thumbed through a folder stuffed with handwritten pages. The pages are scrawled with the names of various contacts and the names of friends and relatives assigned to do the job.

“People call up who I haven’t heard from in years and say, ‘How can I help?’ ” Huber said.

Since their 23-year-old daughter vanished from the Corona del Mar Freeway in the early morning of June 2, the Hubers have become experts in designing flyers, recruiting help, raising reward money and contacting nationally televised programs in an attempt to make the name of their daughter a household word.

If they allow the public to forget about Denise, they fear that she will never be found.

“We have to put the pressure on,” Dennis Huber said.

For the past three weeks, the Hubers have gone through an emotional roller-coaster, experiencing first terror, then confusion and despair.

The one emotion they have steadfastly denied themselves is resignation.

Although they have considered the possibility that Denise is dead, the Hubers said they still believe that their daughter is alive, possibly being held captive.

“I have a gut feeling,” Dennis Huber said. ‘We just don’t want to give up.”

A 1990 UC Irvine graduate in social sciences, Denise was living with her parents and working as a waitress and a department store clerk while deciding on a career, her parents said.

It was a bright Sunday afternoon when the Hubers last saw their daughter. She was her usual outgoing self as she got dressed for a Morrissey concert at the Great Western Forum in Inglewood, her parents said.

“She was in a good mood,” Ione Huber, 48, said. “She was all excited about the concert.” After telling her parents that she was going to a Mexican restaurant after the concert, she and a friend, Robert Calvert, left the Huber home.

The two friends did spend some time at the restaurant, where they met a few people, Ione Huber said. Back in Orange County, Denise dropped Calvert off at his Huntington Beach residence at about 2 a.m., then headed home.

But her rear tire blew out as she drove on the Corona del Mar Freeway, and she was forced to pull over to the side just south of the Bear Street off-ramp.

It was there that she disappeared. Her abandoned car was discovered the next day by police, who began a search that eventually attracted national interest.

About 30,000 flyers have been distributed to shoppers in malls, business owners--even Angel fans as they left Anaheim Stadium. Donations have poured in from friends in Orange County and in Northridge, where Denise graduated from high school, to enable the Hubers to offer a $10,000 reward.

Costa Mesa police, who are handling the investigation, have posted a squad car on the freeway at night to write down license plate numbers of passing cars as a way to locate witnesses. They plan to mail letters to the registered car owners, asking if they saw anything that night.

And last weekend, Denise was profiled on the television show, “America’s Most Wanted.” The television show received more than 20 tips, show spokesman Jack Breslin said.

The tips from callers, who live as far away as New Hampshire, Texas and Pennsylvania, were quickly dispatched to the Costa Mesa Police Department.

The Hubers said they also have talked to writers from a similar television show, “Unsolved Mysteries,” which is considering doing a segment on the disappearance.

Costa Mesa Police Sgt. Ron Smith said that all those tips have been checked out. But so far, police have no leads.

“Some of them don’t really give us much to go on,” Smith said. “But we will follow each one as far as we can.”

The Hubers have received their own tips, including several from psychics.

“I don’t put much stock in that,” Dennis Huber said, adding that he has referred them to police.

After the first week of shock, Huber, an independent real estate and financial broker, became energized, he said. With the help of old and new friends and his pastor at Aliso Creek Presbyterian Church in Laguna Niguel, he began to organize efforts to find his daughter.

He even took the family dog, Sam, to the area where Denise disappeared and walked him along the shoulder of the freeway and the embankment below. Along one section of the fence, the dog started “going crazy,” Huber said.

Sam eventually led his master to a hotel room at the nearby Marriott Courtyard. The next day, the dog followed the same routine, and Huber believed that he was on to something.

“It was a weird, weird thing,” Huber said.

He immediately told police, who checked it out. That lead also led nowhere, Smith said.

Meanwhile, Ione Huber waits by the phone.

“If she’s alive, she’s being held; I know for sure,” Ione Huber said. “She would call if she could.”