Resident of Storage Unit Missing Since Fire

Storage units are built for boxes and furniture, old clothes maybe, but not people. Usually people come, drop off or pick up things, then leave.

Gloria Plunkett dropped off her things and stayed.

For years, according to friends, Plunkett made her home inside a windowless storage unit at Anchor Self Stor on Alondra Boulevard in Paramount.

Lying on a mattress inside her unit, Plunkett could spend hour after hour watching videos with her cat, Bambi.

If she was hungry, all she had to do was open the refrigerator. To warm herself she turned on the heater. There was a portable toilet. And calling friends was simply a matter of dialing: There was a phone line in the unit.

“It was amazing how stable she was, considering the way she lived,” said Bonnie Parral, a friend from church. “How settled in she was. She had it all down pat.”

Now Plunkett, an eccentric 55-year-old, is missing, and the low-cost haven she rented for herself and her possessions is gone.

Her residency at the facility ended suddenly in December with a fire that exposed her clandestine domicile and left friends and family wondering what they might have done to help her find a real home.

“How could we have let her live there?” asked friend Bonita Pace. “We all think that, but we couldn’t stop her.” Management at the storage facility declined to discuss Plunkett.

That she managed to live in such a place for so long, however, is a testament to her will and her anguish.

Plunkett is a slender, red-headed woman who, according to some family and friends, displays signs of manic depression, also known as bipolar disorder.

One day she is grubby and dirty, the next she is wonderfully coiffed, hair dyed and nails manicured.

One day she is delightful and full of energy, the next she is erratic and angry with God. She loved going to church and singing praise songs. She also enjoyed a road trip to casinos at the state line and in Las Vegas.

Unemployed and on Social Security, according to friends, she is a wiz with electronics and dreamed of converting a huge stash of videos into her own rental store.

Plunkett is a familiar face to some in the neighborhood surrounding the facility, although only her friends and family seemed to know the effort it took for her to make her home work.

For every problem at the unit, she found a solution.

“She would work sometimes hours straightening things around just the way she liked it,” said her father, Don Plunkett.

When she had money, she purchased a membership at a gym and showered there. To get around the storage facility’s gate hours, she entered from the alley and found a way to squeeze into her unit through an electrical cabinet, without opening the roll-up door, friends said.

Although the address of the rental facility appears on her driver’s license and on her car registration, Plunkett tried hard to hide where she lived from most people.

She’d say, “Don’t tell anybody,” Pace recalled. Pace always quipped: “ ‘Gloria, you’re the only one who doesn’t know you live here.’ Everybody knew.”

And everybody wanted her to move. Her father would not set foot in the place.

Some things could be compensated for, like the lack of windows and exits. But friends who visited briefly wanted her to get rid of the mice and warned of the dangers of space heaters.

“I think she would have liked to have [moved], except she couldn’t get rid of her stuff,” Parral said. “She couldn’t pay for the storage unit and live in another place too.”

Gloria’s large unit--for which her father speculated she paid about $260 a month --was packed with all the things she could never throw away, years of treasures pulled from trash bins. What she couldn’t donate to charities, she simply saved. Wooden shipping pallets she sold to nearby businesses.

With so much inside the unit, no one could see the living space tucked behind, friends said.

She cut a pathway that led to the center of the room--a few feet of clear space. There, she placed the amenities of home. The mattress was positioned in a loft, high above her collection.

Moving would probably have meant getting rid of her beloved things, and her many cats. Instead, she rented a second unit at Anchor.

“I’d offered her a free apartment with a provision she couldn’t have any cats around. And she wouldn’t agree to that,” her father said.

By December, things finally seemed to be looking up for Plunkett. Friends and family heard her making plans for a life on the surface--maybe a home in Barstow. Some even thought she’d found a boyfriend.

Years of membership at Emmanuel Reform Church in Paramount seemed to be helping her psychological state too. Pace had even found her a counselor, who visited her at the storage unit.

On the evening of Dec. 11, Gloria and her father had dinner. Then he dropped her off at the storage facility at 8 p.m.

About 2 a.m., fire broke out in an electrical panel at the facility and quickly spread to Gloria’s unit and two others. In minutes, years of collecting and organizing turned to ash.

The blaze caused $40,000 worth of damage to the structure and $11,000 to contents, county fire officials said. They determined that the fire was accidental.

That night, Plunkett was nowhere to be found. Nor did firefighters find a body.

About five days later, facility management notified her father, who had not heard from Gloria. By then, what little was left of Gloria’s place had been cleared away, leaving him and everyone else a slew of questions.

If she survived the fire, where is she? Why would she leave behind her car and Bambi, her favorite cat?

“It’s not like her at all,” her father said. “She got out of there some way and disappeared. Didn’t take her car, didn’t call anybody.”

People turn up missing every day. They sometimes walk away from their lives, shedding them to become other people in other places. Other times, they end up victims.

In this case, there’s no evidence of foul play, said Sheriff’s Det. Diane Harris. No money has been withdrawn from Plunkett’s account since the fire.

“She just kind of dropped off the face of the Earth,” Harris said.

Sherry Lefevre, who works in the area, said she remembered seeing Plunkett at a market, days after the fire.

Lefevre looked at her and thought, “That’s the pallet lady. I wonder what she’s doing way over here in Lakewood?”

Beyond that report, there have been no sightings. And in the absence of any evidence, there is only speculation. Maybe Gloria was kidnapped. Maybe she is somewhere in the city, lost even to herself.

“Sometimes an incident can cause someone to go over the edge,” Harris said.

The family is offering a $10,000 reward through the Sheriff’s Department for information leading to Gloria’s location. The missing person flier includes a photograph of her.