Breakthrough May Be Near in Case of Missing Eureka Teenager

For 17 months, Police Det. David Parris has combed underbrush, searched swamps, banged on doors and run down hundreds of tips--including ones from psychics--in a frustrating search for Karen Mitchell, a high school junior who vanished in broad daylight from a downtown street.

The detective’s almost immediate conclusion that Mitchell had been kidnapped sent a wave of fear through this North Coast town of 28,000, where no one can remember another teenager being snatched off a city street and there are only about three murders a year.

Posters of the oval-faced, green-eyed 17-year-old still hang in shops, and tips still come in to the Police Department. Local media highlighted the case again recently, after two other Eureka residents--Carole Sund and her daughter, Juliana--disappeared on a Yosemite trip and were found murdered in Tuolumne County.

Mitchell has never been found, but Parris believes that he may finally have a solid lead in the case.

The mystery may have begun to unravel in November, Parris said, when a trucker named Wayne Adam Ford walked into the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department and allegedly confessed to killing four women. He brought with him the severed breast of one victim as proof of his crimes.

Ford told investigators that he picked up his victims on the street. They were hitchhikers or prostitutes, who he told detectives died during “rough sex.”

The first killing Ford allegedly confessed to happened one month before Mitchell disappeared while walking to work at a day-care center Nov. 25, 1997.

Mitchell was neither hooker nor hitchhiker, but she was walking down the street when last seen, and three witnesses eventually came forward to say they saw her get into a car that stopped to pick her up. The witnesses, however, differed in describing the car, and the only description of the driver sounded nothing like Ford.

When Parris learned of Ford’s confession, he got in line to interview the trucker, who lived in a trailer park in nearby Arcata and has relatives in Eureka.

It was a long line. Investigators from all over the state and across the West wanted to talk to Ford about unsolved slayings of women dating back to 1986.

Parris spent three hours with Ford. The trucker said he had nothing to do with Mitchell’s disappearance. Unconvinced, Parris said he tracked down cars owned by Ford’s relatives that the trucker might have driven.

Something--Parris won’t say what--that the detective found in one car aroused his suspicion. Parris said that he is awaiting the results of DNA testing and that he should know in a couple of weeks whether the tests link Ford to Mitchell.

Attorney Kevin Robinson, who is representing Ford, declined to comment, citing a gag order that a Humboldt County judge issued in the case.

In the meantime, Parris stays in weekly touch with Mitchell’s family: the aunt and uncle she was living with when she disappeared, the mother who sent her to Eureka because she thought it was a safer place for a teenager than Whittier, where Mitchell lived with her mother and brother until junior high school.

Whatever Mitchell’s fate, the detective has assured the family, he won’t rest until she is found.

Falling In With the Wrong Crowd

Mitchell’s mother, Mary Casper, recalled how she and her daughter decided together, when Mitchell was 13, that the girl should live in Eureka, and how happy they both were with the decision.

“I was a single mom, working full time, and I never got home before 6 p.m.,” Casper said. “Karen was falling in with the wrong crowd.”

Mitchell came home for holidays and summer vacation, and hoped to graduate early from high school and attend Humboldt State. The morning Mitchell disappeared, she and her mother had been filling out the college application over the phone.

Casper remembered well her reaction when Parris phoned to tell her--one year after her daughter vanished--about Ford turning himself in. The detective told her that he considered the trucker a suspect in Mitchell’s case, Casper said.

“Physically, my body just went into shock,” beginning to shake uncontrollably, Casper said. “Still today, when Dave calls and talks about Ford, I still shake.”

And yet, Casper said, she refuses to believe that her daughter--who loved nature and dreamed of becoming a politician--is dead.

“For me not to have closure is OK. I still have hope,” she said.

Ford remains in Humboldt County’s jail in lieu of $1-million bail. He was indicted last month by the local grand jury on one count of murder, for the woman he allegedly strangled to death and dismembered in his trailer. Her identity has never been determined. Trial is set for July 21.

Investigators say the other killings Ford confessed to were in Kern, San Joaquin and San Bernardino counties. No charges have been filed there. Prosecutors are working to consolidate the cases under a new state law that allows suspects accused of multiple murders in more than one jurisdiction to be tried in one county.

Meanwhile, investigators from several agencies are trying to link Ford to other unsolved murders, although none will talk about those efforts because of the gag order.

Parris said that while he awaits laboratory reports, he and Humboldt County Sheriff’s Det. Dave Walker, who has assisted in Mitchell’s case, continue to follow other leads.

For the last year, Parris has been methodically tracking down 1,200 registered owners of 1976-77 Ford Granadas and Mercury Monarchs--the two models are almost identical--in Northern California. That search began six months after Mitchell disappeared, when a man said he saw her get into a car matching that description.

The man said he was driving on the road where Mitchell was last seen, at the time she was believed to have been abducted, and was forced to brake hard when the driver of a light blue car picked her up.

It has taken a year to contact each car owner, Parris said, because his resources are so limited.

Parris said he requested FBI involvement the day after Mitchell was reported missing but was turned down.

“We were told that the FBI’s protocol on abductions says that they don’t get involved in unwitnessed abductions of 17-year-olds,” he said.

Eureka police and the Sheriff’s Department got off to a slow start--taking a report from Mitchell’s family the night she disappeared and only launching a search three days later, after Thanksgiving. They added several detectives, dozens of volunteers, a search and rescue team and search dogs to the hunt. But they could not sustain the manpower commitment for long.

Parris said he couldn’t help but feel a twinge of envy when he saw the FBI dispatch 50 agents to search for Christina Marie Williams, a 13-year-old who disappeared June 12, 1998, while walking her dog near her home in Seaside, just east of Monterey. The girl’s body was discovered Jan. 12, three miles from where she was last seen.

In February, dozens of FBI agents investigated the disappearances of Carole Sund, her 15-year-old daughter and a 16-year-old friend near Yosemite National Park. Parris wondered how things might have been different if the same attention had been paid to Mitchell’s case.

“I try not to think about it, because I don’t have time to argue with them,” he said. “But if they could have given us personnel, we could have pursued the many leads we had in the beginning. We have 14 volumes of lead sheets, and it has taken myself and my staff the last year to go through them.”

FBI Agent Gordon Grotz, spokesman for the San Francisco office, said the bureau did not get involved early on because she was not “a child of tender years.” Federal law says the FBI should investigate an unwitnessed abduction if the victim is a “child of tender years,” and the bureau has interpreted that to mean anyone 16 or younger.

Every year, Grotz said, thousands of teenagers are reported missing and later turn out to be runaways.

Sheriff’s Deputy Dennis Lewis said he again contacted the FBI’s Child Abduction and Sex Crimes Unit a year after Mitchell’s disappearance.

“At first, they couldn’t believe that they weren’t fully involved,” Lewis said. “Eventually, the bureau sent a profiler unit to Humboldt and gave Parris their software for processing leads.”

But that help, Parris and Walker said, came too late to be of much good.

“People ask me: How come you’ve got all these FBI agents working on the Sund case and we didn’t have them looking for Karen?” Walker said. “I don’t really have a good answer for them. We just don’t get the same kind of attention up here that you get in the more metropolitan areas.”

Waiting in Whittier, Casper also wishes that the FBI had become involved sooner. She thought about it again as she watched television coverage of the search for the Sunds and their friend.

“It is hard,” she said. “That would have been very nice, to have had 50 FBI agents involved in Karen’s case.”