Boy’s Death Appears to Fit Bonin Victims

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 executed serial killer William G. Bonin--himself now eight months in the grave.

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

The possibility raises a wealth of tortuous 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 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 Cleveland National Forest in Riverside County.

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

It wasn’t until last week that family members got a call telling them 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 after Trotter’s Fountain Valley orthodontist matched the fragments of bracing and bands to the type he had used on young Jamie’s teeth.

“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,” read 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 the circumstances around the discovery of Trotter’s remains bear striking similarities to the 14 killings for which Bonin was convicted in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Trotter was nearly 14--the age of two of Bonin’s victims--and the boy’s body was found along the Ortega Highway, where Bonin dumped three other bodies. Trotter 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 general area of Orange County while waiting for the 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 Det. 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 ‘80s.

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

Bonin, a former Downey truck driver who was executed Feb. 23 at San Quentin, was believed responsible for the murders of at least 21 boys and young men during a yearlong rampage across several counties.

In many cases, Bonin’s victims--who ranged in age from 12 to 19--were raped and strangled before being dumped behind gas stations or alongside roads.

Esposito said DNA samples from Trotter’s bones might be linked to bloodstains from Bonin’s van, but conceded that there is a “slim possibility” of connecting the youngster’s death to Bonin.

Some people raised doubt that the serial killer was responsible. Trotter 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 the Trotter case did not seem to fit Bonin’s other murders. Skriloff, who befriended Bonin before his execution and is writing his biography, said Bonin mentioned dumping a body along Ortega Highway that was never accounted for. But Skriloff recalled that Bonin said that happened between August 1979 and June 1980--months after Trotter vanished.