There’s Still No Closure for Dead O.C. Boy’s Family

They followed false leads for years. There were possible sightings of James “Jamie” Trotter that evaporated, pornographic pictures of a boy who fit his description to a T and private investigators who scoured the nation for the missing 13-year-old.

Now, 17 years after the teenager disappeared on his way to a Costa Mesa school bus stop, it appears that the death of the shaggy-haired youth may be linked to an executed serial killer eight months in the grave.

Investigators, who recently made a near-definite match of charred remains through Jamie’s orthodontic records, say that his profile--his age, how he vanished and where his body was found--matches that of some of the victims of William Bonin, the first inmate put to death in California by lethal injection.

The possibility raises a wealth of torturous questions for a family that has for years prayed for answers.

“Just for the people that [Bonin] killed, I think justice was served,” said John Trotter Jr., 34, Jamie’s older brother. “I would still like to know if that’s how it happened, more for my mother, to get closure. But I don’t think we’ll ever know if it was him.”

Jamie Trotter told his mother he loved her and stepped out of their motel room on April 19, 1979. No one saw him abducted. No one knows whether he ever made it to the bus stop. And no one found his body until a hiker stumbled on charred and animal-strewn remains six years ago in a fire-scarred portion of the Cleveland National Forest in Riverside County.

Even then, a forensic anthropologist thought the bones were characteristic of a young girl, and investigators spent years combing databases for missing girls with braces.

It wasn’t until last week that family members got a call telling them that Jamie’s remains had probably been found. The revelation came after another team of forensic anthropologists determined that the bone fragments belonged to a boy and Jamie’s Fountain Valley orthodontist matched the fragments of bracing and bands to the type he had used on Jamie’s teeth.

“I had always wondered,” said Dr. Bruce Harris, who had only once before identified remains through dental records, when he served in the U.S. Air Force in the 1960s. “It’s just something at the back of your mind that you never quite give up. I have children who were [Jamie’s] age at the time he disappeared. Every now and then I would flash on the thought and wonder what happened.”

Harris, who described Jamie as a “cherubic-looking young kid,” said that a dentist working for the Riverside County coroner’s office contacted him about eight months ago and asked him if he would examine the remains. Officials found Harris because Costa Mesa detectives had visited the orthodontist after Jamie’s disappearance to gather up molds and X-rays of his teeth.

“When we looked at the teeth, some were still intact and still in place in the skull, and the braces on the teeth were compatible with what we were using at the time,” Harris said. “You can’t say 100% that this was Jamie Trotter, but everything fit, so you could say that very possibly this was Jamie Trotter.”

There was far less to go on when Jamie disappeared.

“We had no crime scene,” said Costa Mesa Police Officer Paul Cappuccilli, who worked the case for a decade. “We had nobody who ever came forward who said they saw him being forced into a car. All we had was a missing person. We couldn’t even call it a kidnapping. I did not suspect Bonin, and I don’t know if anyone would have.”

At the time, Costa Mesa police distributed fliers asking for information about the young blond boy with blue eyes, braces and a chipped right front tooth.

“The mother feels foul play may have occurred,” reads the flier--the strongest wording that authorities could muster for a case with so few leads.

Now, however, detectives who investigated the Bonin slayings say that the circumstances of Jamie’s case bear striking similarities to the 14 killings for which Bonin eventually was convicted in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Jamie was nearly 14--the same age as two of Bonin’s victims--and the boy’s body was found along Ortega Highway, where Bonin dumped three other bodies. Jamie vanished after leaving his temporary home at a Costa Mesa motel to catch a bus to school; other Bonin victims were picked up in the same area of Orange County while waiting for a bus or hitchhiking.

“Everything fits--the location of the body dump, the age of the kid, the location of the pickup, the time period,” said retired detective Bernie Esposito, one of a pair of former Orange County Sheriff’s Department investigators assigned to a task force looking into the mysterious wave of bodies that turned up along Southern California freeways in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Jamie’s mother, Barbara Brogli, has been involved in missing children’s issues ever since her son disappeared, and Bonin was no stranger to her. She said that she only learned he was facing execution on the day he was scheduled to die and that she did everything she could to postpone it, if just for one day, so he could be questioned about her son.

“We couldn’t get ahold of the governor,” said Brogli, 57, who remarried and now lives in Colorado. “He was out of town. We tried up until two or three minutes before the execution.”

Now, Brogli said, she must face the possibility that the truth died with her son’s killer. But just knowing that Jamie is not suffering has helped immeasurably, she said.

“I would like to know, definitely,” she said. “It would be a complete closure. If [Bonin] did do it, the man’s been punished and he’ll be dealt with at a higher level. . . . For quite a while, I’ve been really praying to find out, to know whether he’s dead or alive, and I’ve been praying for strength to get through it. I really believe my prayer was answered and God will take care of the rest.”

The investigators who probed the killings said they were not told about Jamie Trotter’s disappearance at the time. Bonin, who eventually confessed to each of his known killings, didn’t mention the Trotter case, said retired detective Jim Sidebotham, Esposito’s partner.

Bonin, a former Downey truck driver who was executed Feb. 23 in San Quentin Prison, was believed responsible for the murders of at least 21 boys and young men during a yearlong spree across several counties. In many cases, the victims--who ranged in age from 12 to 19--were raped and strangled before being dumped behind gas stations or alongside Southern California roads.

Esposito said that DNA samples from Jamie Trotter’s bones might be linked to bloodstains from Bonin’s van but conceded that there is a “slim possibility” of linking the youth’s death to Bonin’s yearlong spree.

No agency is likely to take on that task, however, said Riverside County Chief Deputy Coroner Dan Cupido.

The mere fact that Jamie’s remains may have been identified is an unlikely victory, said Cupido, who investigated the case for years.

“I don’t think we’ll ever even be able to determine a cause of death,” said Cupido, whose department will close its case when more conclusive DNA test results come back, probably within the next month.

“We have fragmented pieces of skeleton, a lot of it as close to cremation as you can get. The braces survived them, thank goodness. . . . If there was any evidence here, we would have turned it over to the appropriate law enforcement agency. But we have no evidence that would be of any use.”

Costa Mesa Police Capt. Rick Johnson said investigators would jump on any leads, but leads at this juncture are unlikely.

“Without a crime scene, without witnesses, without a suspect we can interview, without a victim who can tell us anything, unless they come up with something terribly interesting in the coroner’s report, I don’t see how we can get anywhere with it,” he said.

“Law enforcement would love to pursue it, if we had some information to pursue.”

Esposito and Sidebotham agree that no one can be sure Jamie’s death was the work of Bonin and that, so many years later, there is little chance of proving it.

Jamie disappeared months before Bonin’s first confirmed slayings, in August 1979.

“To me it’s like flipping a coin. I just don’t know,” Sidebotham said. “I’m glad for the parents because the boy was found. Maybe this will relieve some tension in their lives.”

Alexis Skriloff, a biographer to whom Bonin detailed his killings, said that the Trotter case does not seem to fit Bonin’s other murders. Skriloff, who befriended Bonin before his execution and now is writing his biography, said that Bonin mentioned dumping a body along Ortega Highway that was never accounted for. But Skriloff recalled that Bonin said it happened between August 1979 and June 1980--months after Jamie disappeared.

“The timing is wrong,” Skriloff said.

Still, the mere possibility that Jamie was another of Bonin’s victims has resurrected memories thought buried when one of Southern California’s most notorious killers was put to death eight months ago.

“I thought the night we shut the lights out on that bastard was the last time we’d have to deal with him,” said Esposito, who attended the lethal injection. “But it doesn’t look like it.”

Sandra Miller, mother of Bonin victim Russell Rugh, echoed that sentiment.

“My only thought when this came up was the parents’ pain, because I’ve been there,” said Miller, whose 15-year-old son’s body was found near Ortega Highway in 1980 beside that of a second boy. “If I had to wait 17 years to find out where my son was, they’d have had to bury me.”

For Cappuccilli, who made the phone call to Jamie’s mother, the identification of the body only leads to more questions.

“As a police officer, you like to see closure,” he said. “This, in a way, brings closure, but it also opens up another book. How did Jamie die? How did he get there? It was not the phone call I wanted to make to Mrs. Brogli. This finding has probably reopened as many questions as it has answered.”

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Body Trail

Prior to the discovery of Jamie Trotter’s remains, at least three victims of serial killer William Bonin were found along Ortega Highway. The locations:

1. Frank Dennis Fox, 17, found Dec. 2, 1979

2. Glen Norman Barker, 14, and

3. Russell Duane Rugh, 15, both found March 22, 1980

4. James “Jamie” Trotter, 13, who disappeared in 1979

Source: Times reports