‘I Just Kept Hoping’ : Mother’s Effort to Find Missing Son Ends With Tragic Discovery

When Ronald Custer disappeared from his Brentwood apartment last month, his mother thought the city had swallowed him.

On Oct. 18, the 30-year-old USC film school graduate put on blue sweats, sneakers and a jacket, went out for a jog and never came back. His former classmates banded together to canvass West Los Angeles with flyers and to search homeless shelters. And his mother, Dorothy Menard, rushed here from Massachusetts and moved into her son’s empty room, transforming it into a command center for her search--hoping that he would walk back through the door any moment.

But on Tuesday, coroner’s officials affixed Custer’s name to the body of John Doe No. 163, found Saturday night in a wooded area 200 yards behind his apartment. Custer had been Missing Person Case No. 96-0825-791, one of about 100 people whose disappearance is reported every week in Los Angeles. More than 90% resurface--and just a handful of cases result in death.

FBI officials, who were called to the scene because the body was found on the federally operated Veterans Affairs grounds, do not know the cause of death.

For Menard, losing her son in a city of numbing statistics both exacerbated the agony of her search and gave her reason to believe he could be alive. For weeks Menard had been propelled not by clues or tangible leads, but by a mother’s hope that her son was somehow lost in the big city.

“It’s been horrible,” said Menard, 51, whose exhausting hunt took her through a maze of city agencies. “These past days, they’ve been like hell.”

When Custer vanished, Menard worried that his disappearance was linked to the pounding headaches he had been complaining of for months. Doctors had scheduled a CAT scan, but Custer disappeared two weeks before his appointment. “I was devastated right from the beginning,” Menard said. “I knew Ronald would never just leave.”

Menard decided that her son had somehow been stricken, anonymously absorbed by a hospital bureaucracy or the masses who wander the endless grid of city streets.

Every day, she worked her phone list, calling hospitals, the morgue, shelters and police detectives.

She was frustrated that the police had no leads, that detectives said there was little they could do except check John Doe reports and put out national bulletins with Custer’s description. And wait.

But Menard could not stand by idly. She sat at her son’s neat desk, logging her efforts in careful cursive writing inside a blue spiral notebook. Every day, more pages were filled.

On Saturday, 12 of Custer’s former classmates piled into cars and scoured the streets and shelters. It was a somber reunion--many had not seen each other since they were classmates going to parties together or hanging out at Hollywood’s Dresden Room discussing film.

“We definitely feel he’s alive,” George Richards, 26, said at the time. “It’s just a matter of finding him.”

Menard distributed 700 fliers emblazoned with Custer’s picture, called 35 hospitals and flagged down every police officer she saw, handing them extra posters. She was shocked when an officer a couple of blocks from Custer’s apartment didn’t even know about the search.

“Back home, I know that in an instant everyone on the force would have been notified,” said Menard, a retired accountant from Berkley, a small town south of Boston. “There are so many people here that people tend to stay to themselves and not pay attention to those around them.”

On Sunday, the case finally broke.

*

At 10 a.m., six FBI agents came to Custer’s apartment, where a bright green missing poster hung on the door. A body, badly decomposed, had been found in the long grass in the back of the Veterans Affairs grounds where Custer often jogged. Next to it were car keys that fit Custer’s gray Cutlass Supreme parked in the garage downstairs.

They had not identified the body yet, the agents told Menard. They wanted Custer’s dental records.

“I just know it’s Ronnie,” Menard sobbed.

Custer’s roommate Louis Burklow, just getting home from work, looked up the stairs and saw the dark-suited agents standing in a circle around Menard. “I just knew what they told her,” Burklow said.

Sunday, Custer’s former classmates huddled in his apartment, watching short student films he had made, halfheartedly nibbling on food spread out on the table and reminiscing about their friend with his mother.

Custer, who moved to Los Angeles to go to film school, preferred the woods to the urban jungle. He grew up in Berkley, a New England hamlet of 2,500 people where his mother’s family has lived since the days of the Mayflower--a village where life centers around a town commons bordered by a church and a library.

But he wanted to break into Hollywood. Custer sold the 1 1/2 acres of wooded property his mother gave him to pay off his school loans and support himself while he wrote scripts. “Like me, he felt like he didn’t have a lot in common with the people out here,” said Burklow, who grew up in a community of 350 people in Tennessee. “We used to talk about who came from the smaller town.”

Tuesday morning was cold and gray when Menard got confirmation that the body found Saturday was her son’s. She started making the difficult calls back home with the help of her older son, Rudy, who flew in from Boston on Monday night.

Menard is returning home for Thanksgiving with some of her son’s belongings. There are still so many details to work out: deciding what to do with Custer’s apartment, closing his bank accounts, paying his bills. The police investigation could take another month.

“It’s just been so hard,” Menard said, crying softly. “I just kept hoping. I was just hoping and praying that he would still be alive.”