Without a Trace

Thousands of adults vanish each year. Kristen Modafferi was one of them.

Terrible News
Robert Modafferi picked up the phone in his Charlotte, N.C., office that late June morning and heard the news every parent dreads. "I don't know how to tell you this," said a flustered voice. "Your daughter's missing."

The caller was Griffin Cherry, a 24-year-old website designer. For the previous three weeks, he had shared a house in Oakland, Calif., with Modafferi's 18-year-old daughter, Kristen, and three other men. Cherry, stammering, said that none of them had seen Kristen for three days -- not since she left first thing in the morning for her job at Spinelli's, a downtown coffee shop.

He hadn't called earlier, Cherry explained, because he figured Kristen had just met up with friends. But when the second night went by, still with no word, he'd notified police and then placed the call to Modafferi.

Robert, a 48-year-old electrical engineer, took a deep breath. How would he tell his wife, Deborah? What should they do? It was too soon for him to realize that their life, as they knew it, was over.

On June 23, 1997, Kristen Modafferi, a tall, vivacious brunette, ended her workday and vanished into thin air. An investigation into her disappearance has yet to produce a trace.

For now, Kristen has become a statistic. Each year, there are as many as 200,000 adults who are listed as missing in the United States. The majority turn up quickly -- some having disappeared by choice, some found dead, by accident or foul play. Yet others -- roughly 11,000 last year alone -- remain missing, 3,400 of them deemed by law enforcement to be endangered or abducted against their will. In many of these cases, investigators have little more to go on than the strong belief that the victims were not the kind of people who would have walked away from their lives. Police say Kristen, now gone for more than six years, falls into that category.

She was just a kid, yet in some ways she was mature beyond her years. She had skipped a grade and had traveled as far as Russia to sing with the high school chorus. She was smart. She scored 1570 on her SATs and won a full four-year academic scholarship at North Carolina State University -- tuition, room and board included. Kristen was extremely curious, open to new experience. A student of industrial design, she was a photography buff, read Ayn Rand and sang in an a cappella group. The world, as they say, was her oyster.

Initially, Deborah Modafferi didn't want to let her second oldest daughter move to San Francisco, the city Kristen chose to live and work in the summer between her freshman and sophomore years as part of her scholarship program. But Robert thought it was a good idea, and Kristen twisted her mother's arm. "She was so excited about the whole thing, we couldn't say no," Deborah says. "She was really ready to grow up."

So on June 1, her 18th birthday, Kristen spread her wings. She arrived in the Bay Area, enrolled in a photography class at the University of California at Berkeley, and rented a $500-a-month room in an Oakland house occupied by four young male professionals. Robert would have preferred she stay in the dorms -- but agreed, for this summer, to defer to his daughter's stubborn determination.

It was a concession that plagued him now. As he sped from his office to meet Deborah at home, he was tormented by guilt. Why, he asked himself, had he let his little girl go?

Robert and Deborah took the first plane out to San Francisco. They went straight from the airport to police headquarters in Oakland, where the desk officer told them that the investigators assigned to their daughter's case had gone for the weekend. It was Friday afternoon, just after 4 p.m.

Foul Play
Deborah, a part-time teacher, was near panic. "He basically told us that it was no big deal, that Kristen was just one more runaway, and that postponing the search for another few days wouldn't make a difference." Robert said he felt sick to his stomach. "I just thought, This can't be happening."

Driven by the belief that every minute counted, the Modafferis began the search for their daughter on their own. They went straight from the police station to the two-story stucco house Kristen had rented on Jayne Avenue. A family photograph and a letter from Kristen's younger sister sat undisturbed by her bed. Clothes still hung on the line out back where she'd left them to dry. They talked to her housemates, trying to learn what they could of Kristen's routines in her new city. Their daughter had packed her days with mini-adventures. She'd rise early, throw on high-top sneakers, and head out to work, afterward exploring ethnic neighborhoods, beaches, art galleries. She'd registered for belly-dancing lessons at the local YMCA. "She was looking for something bigger than what she had in Charlotte," says Allison, Kristen's older and closest sister. "She would call and tell us she was learning about life. I was jealous. If I'd had the money, I would have gone with her."

Kristen's parents returned to the police station first thing Monday and spent the morning trying to convince detectives that Kristen wasn't some drug-crazed runaway, but rather a hard-working, determined young woman. Their desperate pleas eventually won over Officer Patrick Mahanay, a bear of a man who was new to the department's missing persons division. "It became clear," says Mahanay, who spoke first with Kristen's parents, and later to her sisters by phone, "that she had no reason to disappear on her own. She wouldn't have put her family through that."

By the end of the day, Mahanay had made a number of calls on the case. He interviewed Kristen's housemates. "They were forthright, helpful and all told consistent stories," says Mahanay. The investigator visited Spinelli's, where Kristen, clad in a black T-shirt and khakis, had worked an eight-hour shift, picked up her green Jansport backpack, and walked through the restaurant's doors into the crowded adjacent Crocker Galleria Mall.

Mahanay, assisted by Sgt. John Bradley, a veteran investigator in the division, ran background checks on Kristen's co-workers, who offered as many ideas about where she might have gone that day as Kristen had places to go. One said the bubbly student was headed to the beach at Land's End. Another said she planned to go straight home to Oakland. And a third said he thought he'd seen her outside the restaurant, standing on the second floor of the mall, chatting with a blond woman.

Mahanay brought in a bloodhound, which picked up Kristen's scent at Spinelli's and six miles away at Sutro Baths, a picturesque inlet near Land's End filled with rock formations and caves. Based on the bloodhound's clues, Mahanay followed a trail that placed Kristen at the beach and gave less credence to the possibility that she'd returned home. The only problem was that the beach trail ended on a rocky promenade overlooking the Pacific. Mahanay called in U.S. Parks police and the Coast Guard to scour the area. But they turned up nothing.

"You keep hoping," says Mahanay, "that she's off somewhere trying to find herself. But the circumstances described a girl who had not disappeared willingly." She'd even left behind a $400 paycheck at Spinelli's. "The indication was that there was foul play."

No Clues
Mahanay and Bradley faced two major obstacles in building a case. They lacked a crime scene; there was no evidence of a struggle, no clothes or clues left behind to work with. And in part because Kristen had been in the Bay Area such a short time, they had few additional leads to pursue.

Through further interviews with Kristen's roommates, Bradley learned one telling thing. Kristen, who had never had a steady boyfriend, had a very trusting nature -- perhaps too trusting. She apparently took "casual carpool" rides with strangers over the Bay Bridge. Once, after missing the last train to Oakland following a concert she'd attended, she considered spending the night on a train station bench. When a young man she'd met at the concert told her that was dangerous, she accepted his invitation to sleep on the sofa at his brother's house. Bradley and Mahanay eliminated the man as a suspect, but wondered how many others like him Kristen had run into -- and if one of them had turned out to be lethal.

It came as no surprise to the Modafferis that their daughter gave people the benefit of the doubt, perhaps naively so. In many ways, she'd lived a protected, idyllic life before heading to California.

Robert and Deborah were high school sweethearts from New Jersey who had married 30 years earlier and moved to Charlotte in 1988 for Robert's job. They settled into a five-bedroom colonial-style house on a street lined with crape myrtles and dogwoods, in a neighborhood full of families. Robert coached softball, and Deborah shuttled the kids from soccer to piano. All four girls were as beautiful as they were smart -- Allison, now 26, then Kristen, Lauren, now 21, and the mid-life surprise, Meghan, now 13. Their lives revolved around one another.

The Modafferis stayed in the Bay Area an exhausting 14 days. They were grateful for the increased diligence of the detectives, but couldn't understand why Kristen's disappearance was not attracting more attention. They thought about the milk cartons with missing children on them, the billboards, the television announcements. If their daughter's name and photo were widely broadcast, surely someone would come forward who knew something. Had other area law enforcement agencies been alerted? What if Kristen had been abducted and taken across state lines? Would anyone be watching for her?

They contacted the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the one agency they'd heard could help. But because Kristen had celebrated her 18th birthday three weeks before her disappearance, they were turned away; the NCMEC's charter limits services to victims under the legal age. Kristen's legal emancipation meant the investigation into her disappearance was ineligible for a variety of resources available for solving missing children's cases in the United States.

When a child turns up missing, for instance, police are required to immediately register all information about the case, including details about possible suspects, with the National Crime Information Center, a sophisticated database managed by the FBI. The NCIC can be quickly accessed by law enforcement agencies across the country. It's this kind of coordination that set the stage for Amber Alert.

In the United States, at least 600,000 children under the age of 18 are reported missing each year. (As many as one-quarter of these cases are classified as family abductions.) Thanks in part to the NCIC database and coordinated recovery efforts, 94 percent of those cases are resolved quickly, the majority with the children found and returned safely home. Missing adults are not as fortunate.

Emotionally Drained
Deborah and Robert decided it was up to them to let the public know about their daughter's case. They bought billboard advertising and pasted Kristen's picture on signs throughout the Bay Area. They notified local television stations and stood on San Francisco street corners passing out fliers, printed for free by a local Kinko's. "This responsible and family-oriented girl," the fliers read, "is considered at risk by her family and law enforcement."

Their efforts began to pay off.

Bay Area TV news stations broadcast details about the case. The publicity did produce leads -- many of them, unfortunately, dead ends. An anonymous caller told police that Kristen was going to show up at a local diner at a specified time, and the cops staked out the place for six excruciating hours before concluding the call was a prank.

"Psychics started calling," says Mahanay. "We got a tip that she might be on her way to Oregon. Later, someone was certain he'd seen her in Nicaragua."

Finally, the Modafferis decided it was time to head home. They were paralyzed by the prospect of explaining to their girls how Kristen could have simply vanished.

"I couldn't talk to them, I was so emotionally drained," Deborah remembers. "I didn't want to lie, but I didn't want to say, 'We're not getting anywhere.'

" The most tantalizing lead came on July 10, two days after the Modafferis' departure. An unidentified male phoned KGO-TV in San Francisco, claiming that Kristen was killed fighting off the advances of two lesbians, her body dumped from a wooden bridge near Point Reyes, just north of San Francisco. Mahanay and Bradley traced the call to Jon Onuma, 38, a short Asian man with waist-length black hair who lived on O'Farrell Street, seven blocks from Spinelli's.

Onuma eventually admitted making the call, but said it was a prank to get even with two of his girlfriend's former co-workers, who he believed had plotted to have her fired. He claimed never to have met Kristen, but Mahanay and Bradley weren't buying his tale. "He gave us too many details," says Mahanay. "When people do that, we know they're not giving us a tip. They're telling us a story." The investigators did a background check, and eventually interviewed a handful of Bay Area women who had responded to classified ads placed by Onuma. They claimed he had tried to steal money from them or coerce them into sex, but fearful he'd seek revenge, they never pressed charges.

Mahanay and Bradley obtained search warrants and combed Onuma's apartment, where they discovered sizeable traces of blood. Subsequent testing showed that it was animal blood, and police maintain it came from cats belonging to a former girlfriend. Their theory is that Onuma killed the cats following a dispute. Police also focused their attention on another former girlfriend who claimed Onuma had gone into a frenzy during an argument and threatened to kill her, saying, "Now you know what happened to Kristen Modafferi."

Kristen's Law
To this day, Onuma, who moved back to his native Hawaii in 1999, maintains he had nothing to do with Kristen's disappearance, and, although police have not eliminated him as a suspect, they say there is not enough direct evidence to charge him either.

Months after Onuma came to their attention, Mahanay and Bradley learned about a personal ad that appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian a week before Kristen's disappearance. It read in part, "Female seeking friend(s) to share activities, who enjoy music, photography, working out, walks, coffee or simply the beach, exploring the Bay Area!" They believe that Kristen may have placed the free ad -- and gotten a response from someone who lured her into bad circumstances. But by the time Mahanay contacted the newspaper, the computer files showing who had placed the ad had been purged.

Since June 1997, the Modafferis have visited San Francisco a dozen times. They've fought to keep their daughter's disappearance in the spotlight. They've prodded investigators, hired four private eyes, created a website, manned phones and answered e-mails, hoping to get the tip that will break open the case. Mahanay says he's never seen anything like it. He wishes he could give them the answers every parent deserves. "I lie awake at night," he says. "We want to bring closure to this family. I truly feel this case will be resolved, even if it takes ten years. There are people out there looking over their shoulder, and my word to them is to keep looking."

Deborah says it's the unanswered questions that are the hardest. "It's worse than losing a child in death," she says, "because then you can grieve and go on. We still have the hurt of not knowing." Because she and Robert believe their daughter's case suffered from such a slow start, they have sought to find a way for missing adult cases to get the same attention as missing children cases do. "Had Kristen disappeared just 23 days before she did, when she was still legally a minor, there's a good chance we could have had early success," says Robert.

"It shouldn't matter how old a person is when they go missing," says Deborah. "No one should be turned away from resources for that reason."

In 1998, the Modafferis convinced Congresswoman Sue Myrick of North Carolina to back national funding for a center like the NCMEC, but for adults. Two years later, a bill passed creating Kristen's Law. It provided $1.8 million to the Phoenix-based Center for Missing Adults, which, among other things, is putting together a national registry of missing adults that will serve as a central repository of information accessible to the public, advocacy groups and law enforcement.

"We've always maintained the slimmest hope that our daughter will be found," says Deborah. Kristen's bedroom back home is just as it was when she left; her sisters don't use the two twin beds in her room -- not even for sleepovers. And Deborah hangs a stocking for Kristen each Christmas.

It's for the girls that the couple tries to maintain some semblance of a normal family life. "I thank God we have three other children," Robert says. "They keep us busy and give us a sense of purpose as parents, a reason to go on."

"We're doing the best we can," says Deborah. "What else can we do?"

Source: Reader's Digest

Death Was On Her Shopping List

The teenaged boy drove his car slowly down the dark road, his date snuggled against his side. In the back seat, the other couple was quietly necking. That’s exactly what the young driver had in mind, as soon as he found the right place to park. They’d been in the area before… it was just a matter of coolly stopping the car in such a manner that looked like the most casual thing in the world, even though the teenager was desperate to hold his girlfriend even closer.

The wind had really kicked up since they’d left on their double date earlier that evening. It had been a pretty pleasant afternoon, but now another cold front was blowing in, and that made snuggling conditions even better. Not to mention the location, which had an air of eerie loneliness. Nearby was Walnut Creek, where Indians were said to have camped back before Austin, Texas had even been settled. Indeed, there were holes dug between the pavement and the creek, where amateur arrowhead hunters were said to have made bountiful hauls.

A parked car came to view in the flare of the headlights. That was nothing unusual, since the road, which deadended in a clump of trees near the creek was a favourite place for roadside romance.

But that the driver and his date saw in front of the car would end their planned few hours of closeness and touch off a weekend of horror in Central Texas.

The pool of coagulating blood which spread out from the body sparkled in the headlights of the horrified teenager’s car. The couple in the back seat were startled back to reality by the screams of the girl in the front.

They didn’t stop. The driver wheeled his car around and sped back down Park Plaza toward the east frontage road of Interstate 35. He knew he had to get to a telephone and call police.

Officer Joel Thompson was on routine patrol in his North Austin beat. It was about 11:15pm March 3, 1978, and he was beginning to think about stopping for a cup of coffee. Things had been fairly quiet so far, especially for a Friday night. Of course, his district was not what the crime analysis people at headquarters labeled a “high call” area, though there were occasional problems.

On Rundberg Lane, near an all-night convenience store, the policeman saw someone trying to flag him down. Routinely, he picked up the radio microphone and notified the dispatcher he would be out talking to some one who had motioned for him to sop his car.

The youngster who had waved at him said he and his companions had found a body and would lead him to it. Thompson hopped back in his blue-and-white patrol car and called the dispatcher again. As he followed the teens and saw the direction the young driver turned, he realized he wouldn’t have the needed directions. He’d been there before, plenty of times. In fact, he or one of the fellow officers in his sector liked to make at least one circuit through the area a night. Places like that, he knew, attract a variety of people. He’d arrested people for smoking marijuana, drinking under age and, occasionally, even more serious offenses.

When officer Thompson pulled up next to the parked car, he reached for his radio a third time. One look made it obvious that this was not a one-office call. He told the dispatcher he needed a supervisor and someone from homicide.

After getting the names and addresses of the frightened teens, the officer told them to go home and expect to be contacted later to give statements. Then, for a few lonely moments, the officer stood guard over the bloody body of a young woman.

The lover’s lane area was at least a 20-minute drive from police headquarters, though other uniformed officers reached Thompson’s location faster. Still, the basic function of the patrol officers was to preserve any evidence at the scene and stand by pending the arrival of homicide detectives and some one from the Medical Examiner’s office.

The body in the pool of blood was that of a young woman, fully clothed, except for one knee boot, which lay nearby. Even in the harsh illumination of headlights and flashlights, the officers could tell the woman was attractive. And brutally slain.

Judging from the amount of blood which had spread onto the ground, the woman had been stabbed to death, not shot, though only an autopsy would determine that for a certainty. One thing was obvious her throat had been slashed. In fact, she had virtually been decapitated.

By now, the three homicide detectives Sergeants Bill Landis, Jack Moody and Bob Jasek were on the scene and had taken charge of the investigation.

As police photographed the scene, the officers stood quietly staring at the body, noting the position of it in relation to the parked car. A large, brown purse found near the body contained a billfold and identification in the name of Ann Tracy Drummond, 22, and a Austin address. There was money in the billfold.

The most puzzling item was also cause for alarm. Why had a car been left behind? I was registered to another Austin woman, not the victim. Could the two women have been out together and run into trouble? If so, there was the grim possibility another body might be in the area.

Or, if the victim had been at the lover’s lane with a date, where was he? And, again, why was the car registered to a different woman?

Officers scoured the area of the car, searching for another body or additional evidence. Within a short time, the officers were fairly certain no one else had been slain in the area, excluding the chance a body had been taken down to the creek or otherwise hidden.

The search for evidence brought to light a mountain of litter, but nothing that looked like it pertained to the case. But a daytime search, the officers knew, would still be necessary.

Dr. Robert Bucklin, the County’s Medical Examiner a highly trained and well known forensic specialist who had been a medical examiner in Los Angeles examined the body on the scene and theorized she had been dead only a few hours.

The wind was still howling from the north, and the chill factor was down in the north, and the chill factor was down in the teens. After the last measurements and photographs had been taken, Bucklin ordered the body removed to the morgue at Brackenridge Hospital. The car was driven to the police pound for more thorough examination by police laboratory specialists.

People in most professions enjoy the luxury of being able to work set hours from 8 to 5, or 9 to 6. Homicide detectives, however, have no such leisure, especially in a growing city like Austin. In the first two months of 1978 almost half the total number of killings recorded in Austin the year before had already occurred. The men of homicide are used to sleepless nights and another was under way.

Lt. Roger Napier, head of the 13-man detail, knew he had a difficult case before him. There were no ready witnesses to the girl’s death, no significant evidence left at the scene, no clear indication yet of where the girl lived, what she did, or who she knew. The only certainty was that she died violently, and even the “why” of that was unclear: There was still money in her purse, which would tend to rule out robbery, and she was fully clothed, which did not eliminate, but tended to, the possibility of a sex killing. Of course, the veteran officers knew, she could have been killed by someone who had been unsuccessful in his sexual advances.

By early Saturday morning, the detectives on the case had located Ann Drummond’s father, who lived in Houston. The stunned but cooperative parent said his daughter had attended the University of Texas in Austin and had only recently moved back to town from Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she had gone after graduation the previous summer. She was living in Austin with another girl she’d known about three years, her father told police.

Sgt. Doyne Bailey, whose speciality is the investigation of sex crimes, finally reached Drummond’s roommate late Saturday morning. The detective asked if she minded coming down to police headquarters to fill officers in on Drummond’s background, and names of the dead woman’s other friends and acquaintances.

The roommate displayed admirable composure in talking with the detective sergeant. Drummond, her friend related, had told her Friday afternoon that she needed to go shopping, then planned to come home and go to bed early.

Her car had been leaking oil, the roommate continued, so Drummond borrowed her car for the shopping trip. En route to a mid-town shopping center, Drummond dropped the roommate off at a friend’s house.

It was the last time the roommate ever saw Ann Tracy Drummond.

The information explained the package and shopping list found in the abandoned car, but still shed no light on how the 22-year-old got to the lonely area in North Austin a little more that four miles from the shopping center that had been her destination. But it pointed to a likely possibility: Abduction.

Though Drummond was dating several persons, her roommate said she did not have any social plans for that Friday night. She would not have gone to the remote area alone, and would not have hidden the fact from her roommate had she planned to go there with a boyfriend.

By noon Saturday, Bailey and other detectives had taken statements from several other friends of Drummond, including those she had dated. All were almost immediately cleared of any suspicion in the case. None were even asked to take polygraph examinations.

Miss Drummond had a lot of friends in Austin, which was one of the reasons she had returned from her short stay in New Mexico, Bailey learned. She had traveled to Austin from Albuquerque late the previous fall to attend a wedding and stayed about a week. During that time, her roommate said, she decided to come back to Austin for good, and did so in December.

Her degree was in art and she had plans to be a freelance artist. But that is not the most lucrative of careers, especially for someone just starting out, so she had worked as a waitress on a part-time basis.

Only the previous Tuesday, her roommate told Bailey, Drummond had been hired full-time by an elegant, downtown café in a restored vintage building. This was in an older section of the city which was becoming increasingly popular with both tourists and locals. She was to have started the job Saturday.

Bailey and his colleagues were now fairly sure Drummond had not known the person or persons who killed her. Contrary to the glamourized, Hollywood version of murder, in the vast majority of all murders, the victim is found to have known the killer. Cases where the victim is killed by a stranger are the most difficult to solve, unless the killer gets in the habit of murdering repeatedly, when patterns begin to emerge.

This case, so far, did not match any existing patterns in Austin. There had been no recent rash of parking lot abduction-rapes.

However, there was one possibility. Posted on every bulletin board in the police station was a photocopy of a composite drawing of a black rapist who had been operating in the area just north of the sprawling U.T. campus, an area made up mostly of students. The suspect had been breaking into apartments and raping coeds. And he was believed potentially violent, though he had not yet inflicted any serious physical harm on anyone.

Drummond lived at 408 Eberhart, only a few blocks from the location of the last known attach by the suspect in the composite drawing. It could be, Bailey feared, that the man had seen Drummond and her roommate leave their small rent house and had followed them, waiting for a chance that finally came in the parking lot under cover of darkness.

The investigation of a murder is not always a matter of waiting for divine inspiration. A good detective will ask for help from public. A city has more eyes and ears than his squad, or the whole department.

Lt. Napier and Bailey issued a plea to the citizens of Austin, through the local news media, for anyone who might have seen something suspicious the night before at the shopping center. The lieutenant released a photograph of a smiling, long-haired brunette, her glasses pushed back over her head. Thousands would have seen the picture of the attractive woman on television and in the newspaper, but only a handful would know the horror of seeing what had become of the beautiful artist.

The autopsy showed Drummond had been stabbed 38 times, not including “defensive” wounds on her hands and fingers, caused by attempts to shield her chest and neck from someone who was savagely vicious with a knife. And the post mortem also indicated that victim had sexual relations a short time before her death, although that in no way proved rape.

Donning disposable rubber gloves, Bailey and another detective went over Drummond’s clothing in the homicide detail office. She had been clad in jeans and a pullover sweater with broad plum and white horizontal stripes. The sweater was now full of narrow slashes, each about a half-inch across, and stained a deep purple.

Medical examiner Bucklin, who had a hand in the investigation of the so-called “Skid Row Slasher” deaths in Los Angeles, remarked to one officer that Drummond’s body was one of the most brutally stabbed he’d ever seen.

Napier’s plea to the news media began to bring results, though no dramatic developments in the case. Numerous calls came to homicide, but the one thing the officers wanted most did not happen. They had yet to find a witness to the abduction, or come up with a satisfactory explanation of why Drummond’s car had been abandoned after the slaying. If she had been taken there by force in her roommate’s car, how could the killer have gotten away? Surely he could not have forced the young artist to drive her own car, while following her in his vehicle.

Early Saturday afternoon, a young uninformed officer walked into the homicide office. He looked almost physically sick, like a rookie patrolman who had just worked his first suicide where considerable time had elapsed between the moment of death and discovery of the body. Bailey and the other investigators knew the feeling.

Officer Daniel Pena had graduated from the police academy in 1975. He worked a North Austin patrol district and had been on duty the night before. It was 2pm, and he was just beginning his Saturday shift.

The young officer blurted out that he was afraid he’d made a terrible mistake. Bailey and Napier told him to fill them in.

Pena said he had been driving south on busy Highway 35 about 9:30pm Friday, heading to the police station, his shift about over. It had been a quiet night, and Drummond’s body would not be found for another two hours.

Like any other worker, Pena was tired and looking forward to getting home. He hoped he wouldn’t have to make any more calls.

But if one thing is drilled repeatedly in young officers it is this: Always be suspicious when you see someone in a setting that doesn’t seen quite right, like a beat-up old car parked in the driveway of a $150,000 house, or an open window on a cold night.

When Pena saw a man running down a grassy median near the expressway, the officer’s internal alarm went off. Considering a northern was blowing in, it was 9:30pm and the busy freeway was not a normal area for joggers. It just didn’t seen right.

Pena pulled his patrol car off the pavement ahead of the running man, hopped out and yelled for the man to stop. As he did, the man appeared to toss something away. Pena tensed. When someone makes a sudden movement when approached by a policeman, something is usually out of order. It could have been a baggie of marijuana, a weapon or nothing, Pena knew, the man probably wouldn’t have thrown it away.

Bailey and Napier didn’t interrupt the officer’s story. They’d ask questions later, if necessary. So far the patrolman was relaying his information thoroughly, just as if he was laying it out in a written report.

When Pena approached the man, he said, he appeared nervous. The officer asked him what he had discarded and told him to retrieve it. The man did, handing Pena a pocketknife.

Pena asked the man for some identification, which he readily proffered. Then he asked why the man had tried to get rid of the knife.

As Pena examined the knife, which appeared clean and no different that the type of knife many men routinely carry in their pocket, the man explained he had been in the military, was from out of state, and didn’t know for sure what Texas law had to say about a pocketknife.

Pena said the knife was a legal length, but continued to press the man on his nervousness. He had remained elusive when asked why he had been running on an expressway median, on a cold night.

The officer escorted the man to the warmth of his patrol car and made him a proposal: Either he came up with a satisfactory explanation for his unusual behavior, or he’d be arrested for suspicion and taken down for further questioning.

Finally, the man told Pena he had been visiting an acquaintance his wife would not approve of, and that he was on his way back to his parked car. He was nervous, he told Pena, because he didn’t want his wife to find out where he’d been.

The young officer then made a judgment call. The man was not intoxicated, a radio check showed he was not wanted for any outstanding traffic cases or other violations, and the weapon he had was not illegal. After writing down the man’s name and address on a “Field Observation” card, Pena released the fellow and headed back to turn in his car and get out of uniform. The man went on his way.

Earlier that Saturday afternoon, when Pena reported back to police headquarters for another night’s work, he heard about the discovery of the woman’s body in North Austin the night before. The sickness hit him when he realized he had questioned a suspicious man with a knife only about a mile from the scene of the slaying.

When the young officer went to homicide, he knew what to expect. For all he knew, he could lose his job for what he’d done. But Bailey and Napier did their best to assure the officer he had done more that many officers would have. “I probably wouldn’t have stopped to question that man”, Napier said.

The two detectives told Pena it wasn’t too late to pursue the information he had provided. And just because a man with a knife could now be placed in the area of the slaying, that still didn’t make a murder case. I could be, the veteran officers knew, that the man questioned by the officer had been telling the truth. A man seeing a woman other than his wife had a right to be nervous.

Still, it gave the officers something to work on. Bailey quickly made some preliminary checks. The man Pena had questioned had no previous record and was not wanted. He had never been photographed or fingerprinted by the Austin Police Department.

The investigator then discreetly began learning a little about the man. The officer went to the address provided by Pena and talked to a neighbor, who said the man and his wife were out of town for the weekend. A check of the man’s place of employment – a building supply firm – showed he had shown up for work as scheduled Saturday morning and had put in half a day.

Bailey viewed the fact that the man was out of town with concern, but not necessarily alarm. It didn’t look like sudden flight since the man had worked as usual on Saturday morning. The detective arranged to have the man’s address checked occasionally throughout the weekend. When the man returned, Bailey and Napier were to be notified. Both detectives then went home for some needed sleep.

When the two investigators got to headquarters Sunday morning, they learned the man who had been questioned by Officer Pena still had not returned. If the man didn’t show up for work Monday, Bailey knew, he would have a problem. But the officer had a feeling the man would be back.

Crime in Austin had not come to a halt after the slaying of Ann Drummond. Napier spent part of his Sunday typing up the loose ends of another homicide investigation, this one much more cut and dried. Two men had gotten in an argument over a small amount of money. A knife was pulled and one of the men fatally stabbed. A suspect was quickly jailed… the easy kind of case. There was still the paperwork, though. Even the routine cases take time.

Napier and Bailey, both normally off on Sundays, finished their reports and went home. The man they wanted to talk with still hadn’t shown, and the order that they be called if and when he did still stood.

The call from the police station came before Napier was ready for it. He had just begun to relax when the phone rang, the officer on the other end informing him that the man Napier had been looking for was back in Austin. Napier called Bailey and both officers were soon standing outside the man’s residence in Del Valle, a small community adjacent to Bergstrom Air Force Base just east of the Austin city limits.

Napier and Bailey identified themselves and told the man he was considered a suspect in a homicide. The man denied any knowledge of the slaying, but readily admitted having talked with Officer Pena the previous Friday night. The homicide lieutenant asked the man if he would mind voluntarily submitting to fingerprinting.

His prints, Napier told the man, could eliminate his as a suspect, assuming they did not match any latent prints found on the car belonging to Drummond’s roommate. The man agreed, and rode with the two officers to the police department.

He was taken to the police identification section, where a technician took a set of his prints. The two officers then escorted the man to the homicide detail offices on the third floor of police headquarters. He continued to deny any role in the slaying.

The man, who said he was originally from New York, told Napier and Bailey he had been in Austin about six months. Prior to that time, he had been in the Army, stationed at Fort Hood in Killeen, about 65 miles north of Austin. At the sprawling fort, he met the woman he later married. She, too, had been in the army.

The interview was interrupted by a telephone call from ID technician John Williams. The fingerprints of the man stopped by Officer Pena matched a print lifted from the car driven by Drummond. The comparison, he said, had more than enough “points” required for use as evidence in the courtroom.

Napier calmly appraised the suspect of that latest development. It was 8pm, Sunday March 5, not quite 48 hours since Drummond’s slaying. The suspect, 22-year-old George Edward Clark, gave Napier a statement in connection with the case.

A short time later, Napier took Clark before Municipal Court Judge Harriet Murphy who advised him of his rights and accepted a complaint of capital murder sworn to by Napier. She denied bond.

On November 20, 1978, Judge M.B. Thurmond, Jr., sentenced Clark to death after the murder trial. Clark is on Death Row at Texas State Prison in Huntsville at this time.

Taken from a magazine entitled 'Detective Dragnet (February 1980)'. Reported by Mike Cox.