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D. A. Helmer
Ana
Dia disappeared from Beverly Hills Gateway neighborhood on a blistering day in
June of last year. She was fourteen. After two days of failing to uncover clues
over her sudden disappearance, and with the feeling that it was an abduction
and not a runaway, the Los Angeles Police Department called the FBI.
Ana Dia was with her fourteen-year-old
school friend, Jenny Staple. They had spent the afternoon on Rodeo Drive
enjoying their first week of summer break. Later, according to Staple, they
took buses in different directions to their homes, and according to the FBI
report, the last person to see Ana Dia was the neighborhood mailman at around
five-fifteen-p.m. He saw her getting off the bus a few blocks from her house.
They said hello to each other as she walked in the direction of the park
instead of going to her house in the other direction. She then vanished.
It has been said that if a child is missing
for more than thirty-six-hours then hope for finding them, or worse, for
finding them alive, is slim to zero. The FBI worked the case day and night for
two more weeks with nothing to show. The Feds at least wanted a body for the
parents to bury, to have closure. They worked all the angles, especially the
runaway angle. I thought they had worked that one too hard and were too
desperate to prove themselves right––they emotionally crushed Ana’s parents
with their clumsy arrogance and baseless insinuations. Finally, the Feds needed
to let it go. Ana Dia didn’t run away. She had had an idyllic home life with
loving parents and a caring extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins, and
grandparents, along with a healthy social life.
For a parent to not know what happened to
their child is the worst of living nightmares. Your child is there in the
morning, then gone, vanished without a trace by the afternoon and your heart
turns black, and, on most days, you are gasping for air as if some invisible
punch to the gut had emptied you. On other days you can’t get out of bed
because you have no soul left, no light. You lie there under the covers
shivering, dying, turning to ice. When a child vanishes the chilling emptiness
that lingers is a frozen hole that can never be filled––even if a body is
recovered.
The Ana Dia missing child flyers were
glued, taped, and stapled by the thousands to every telephone pole, business
window, train station, bus station, and airport, from Los Angeles to San Diego,
up to San Francisco, and all cities, small and large, in between. UCLA had
funded the printing and distribution of the flyers, the billboard slots, and
the primetime radio and TV spots
––even
though Ana’s parents were celebrated professors at UCLA there was no ransom
being asked for by the abductors.
Friends of the Dia family flew to Nevada
and Arizona and did the same plastering of flyers in the major cities in those
areas. Other friends and family posted flyers in the desert areas: Anza
Borrego, Joshua Tree, and the Sultan Sea, along with the entire San Bernardino
Mountains.
For nearly two weeks the news coverage was
a constant flood of updates on Ana Dia’s disappearance, but the updates were
empty gestures. There were no real updates, because there were no
new developments. It was just the media’s looping sensationalism created to
keep viewers attached to the tube. It was about program ratings disguised as
heart-felt-caring from pseudo-somber news anchors and chatty talk-show
hosts. They were good actors without dignity, with only that one word on their
minds: Ratings. A high-profile missing child case becomes a media executive’s
gold mine. The corporate advertising slots had tripled in cost during the Ana
Dia coverage. The media chiefs had turned the disappearance into a contemptible
carnival midway with the news anchors as their deplorable midway barkers. Even
though it was a high-profile investigation there was too much Federal and local
cop manpower on a probe that was going nowhere. After two weeks it was time to
lighten the load. The FBI packed up and moved on to the next child abduction
case, the LAPD returned to its regular city crime-busting, and the Ana Dia
media coverage deflated to a sentence or two every few days. But there was
still some lingering FBI presence, the two token agents, for the Dia family to
contact anytime they had questions, even though the Fed’s answers were always
the same, “We’re doing the best that we can. We’re always looking for new
leads. If any new developments come up, we’ll contact you immediately.”
Arnie Bender, Dave Wells, and I were having
lunch at Abe’s Deli when Nick and Bridget Dia walked in. We recognized them
from TV news shows they had appeared on and from the many newspaper photographs
that appeared daily for about two weeks. The Dias were in their late-thirties.
Nick Dia was dark-haired, lean, and handsome, with an intelligent face, and
big, dark eyes. Bridget Dia was dark-haired, lean, and gorgeous, with an
equally intelligent face, and big, dark-green eyes, like the color of avocado
skin when the sunlight hits it. Both were renowned professors of astronomy. And
it was obvious that the weight of their missing daughter had caused them to
sag, bend, and break. When they walked over to our table, they held onto each
other as if to stop the other from collapsing to their knees.
“Mr. Stone. We apologize for interrupting
your meal,” said Nick Dia, in a soft, quiet tone. “We were told by some people
in your building that we could possibly find you here. The woman at the counter
pointed you out.” He stopped talking, took a deep breath, and said, “We need
your help.”
Bridget Dia shook her head up and down a
dozen times with quick snaps, like a puppeteer was in control of her. Nick Dia
pulled her in tighter to his body. She stopped the head gesturing and stood
still, and her dark green eyes overspilled with grief, while her beautiful face
seemed to roll and fold into bundles of pain so thick and heavy that her skin
looked like it would fall to the floor from the weight of it all. Her eyes
welled with tears. Nick pulled her in even tighter. She buried her face in his
shoulder for a few seconds, and then turned and looked at me.
“My daughter is alive, Mr. Stone,” she
whispered, with a wet, shaky voice, “I just know she is.
I–I
just know it.” Her head snapped up and down again several times, while her eyes
were closed. “Please, help us find her.” On that last line her eyes popped
open, like window-shades had snapped up, making her eyes appear as dark scabs
over something that was slowly dying.
“Friends of ours who used your service
directed us to you,” added Nick. “They said that if anybody could find Ana,
then it would be you, Mr. Stone.”
His dark eyes penetrated mine like they had
physically entered my head, as if to pull the whereabouts of Ana Dia out of my
brain. Bridget shook her head rapidly, agreeing with Nick, while her jaw and
lower lip trembled, as if she were trying to say something else, but nothing
came.
I was in the booth on the opposite side of
my friends, who were sitting together. I got up and invited the Dias to sit
with us as I crammed myself next to Arnie Bender and Dave Wells, which left
part of my bottom hanging off the bench, and my legs stretched into the aisle.
The three of us were paralyzed by the Dia’s immense desperation, by their
contagious sorrow. We just stared at them the whole time, speechless, our
expressions taking on the heartbreak of their loss.
The world is concrete-hard and razor-sharp,
and filled with psychopaths and pedophiles who rise out of the skin of God’s
dark side. They were once the purity of egg and sperm, only to evolve into
heartless monsters feeding off the blood of others. And nothing shows more how
hard and sharp the world is than parents who have had their children stolen
from them.
“Mr. and Mrs. Dia,” I said. “We, my
associates and I, can’t do anything more for you than the FBI have already
done. They were complete in their investigation, and …”
“Ana’s alive, Mr. Stone!” snapped Bridget
Dia. Her voice cut like a stropped blade and it felt like it had sliced my
tongue to silence me. “The FBI believes that Ana is dead. Even without a body,
they believe she is dead. That is not complete enough for us.”
Her gorgeous face had taken on the severe
expression of a mother that you don’t want to argue with. Nick Dia put his arm
around her shoulder in an almost condescending manner, as if to stop her from
talking. Bridget yanked her body away from him and threw his arm off her. Nick
put his hands out in front of him, palms toward us, as if to gesture, okay,
okay.
“We have a copy of the FBI file regarding
the investigation.” She slid a manila folder across the table. “At least the
part that we are allowed to have.” She looked me square in the eyes and said,
with a steady, firm voice,
“Before you say no, please, read it.” She
paused, caught her breath, and wiped tears from her eyes. “We can’t stop here.” Said with a staccato
deliver, “we just can’t.”
Bridget Dia leaned across the table and
came close enough to my face so that I could smell the mixture of heavy sweat
and stale perfume, like she hadn’t taken a shower in a week. I could smell the
fear of losing her daughter, of losing her mind, her marriage, her life.
“This is our only hope, Mr. Stone,” she
whispered, “it is our last card.”
It has been estimated that about ninety
percent of marriages disintegrate after losing a child to the hands of an
abductor. From what I had observed the Dias were, as a couple, on their way to
becoming a part of that hopelessly high percentage.
It was a hot day. Stifling even. The loud
sunlight crashed through the deli window as if to execute this grieving woman.
It hit the side of her face with a soundless slap, which made her skin bleach
out, and her dark, green eyes became illusions, so far away and falling farther
away. And, suddenly, all her wounds, sorrow, grief, anger, and resentment, had
fallen into my life by the weight of her desperation.
By the time my associates and I started to
work on the Ana Dia case she had been missing for about three weeks. The three
of us, along with Millie Bender working from the office as our phone-answering
service and our research specialist, eight hours a day, scrutinized every page,
every paragraph, every line, of the FBI report. Of all the people interviewed
by the Feds, which included UCLA teachers, and students of both Dias, plus
neighbors, gardeners, pool cleaners, window washers, and so on, it was the
mailman that gave Arnie Bender a gut feeling that we needed to probe deeper
into his statement. Because something felt incomplete.
Brian Whitaker, a U.S. Mail carrier for
twenty years, had told the Feds about a small white pickup truck, maybe used
for landscaping, that had pulled in behind the bus while Ana Dia disembarked.
The Feds brushed it off as normal activity in a neighborhood that had the
presence of so many landscaping trucks. It was nothing unusual, said the
Feds.
Whitaker, a short fifty-year-old, with a
large forehead and thick, silver hair combed straight back, above dark, bushy
eyebrows, was walking his route when Arnie Bender and I located him a block
from Ana Dia’s house. His short stature was made animated by the bulbous size
of his belly along with a ball-shaped face and chipmunk cheeks. His deep-blue
eyes were set forward like enormous spotlights, and they were bright and alert.
Though he carried a lot of body weight he was light-footed, like a gazelle, and
strong, like an elephant. He seemed to walk on his tiptoes and had a
distinctive bounce to his gate. His voice was on the falsetto side.
“Was there anything else, some other detail
that you missed telling the FBI?” asked Arnie, “Something about the truck? The
tires, the bumpers, scratches or dents?”
“Well. Um. I did notice a sign on the
passenger door,” said Whitaker, while holding his chin between his right thumb
and index finger, as his head bobbed up and down, agreeing with himself.
“And the color of the sign, the background,
the lettering?” I asked.
“Black letters on a white background. Big,
bold block-style letters. Nothing fancy,” answered Whitaker, “And after Ana got
off the bus, like I had already said, she walked in the direction of the city
park.”
“What was written on the sign?” I asked.
“From the sideways perspective that I had
it was hard to make out.” Whitaker stopped talking, and his head tilted up
slightly while his eyes lifted farther as if ready to roll into his head, “Ah.
Um. The first two letters were KL, and the third, maybe an E or a B. Some
smaller letters were underneath the larger ones that I couldn’t read.”
“And the truck?” asked Arnie.
“The truck?” asked Whitaker.
“Yes. The truck. What did it do then?”
replied Arnie.
Whitaker had been putting mail into a drop
box that was about thirty-feet behind the truck, which gave him enough time to
observe the activity. Ana Dia stepped off the bus, looked back, saw Whitaker,
waved, and said hi. She then walked in the opposite direction for about a
hundred feet and turned into the park, which was a popular place with
teenagers. The bus pulled away and the truck then drove down the street and
turned into the park.
“So, you didn’t get a look at the driver?”
asked Arnie.
“No. The back window was tinted. Maybe
smokey grey. But I could see movement. Like when the driver had a clipboard in
his hand, flipping the pages sort of fast, like he wasn’t reading them at all.
He seemed to be looking through the windshield and not at the clipboard.”
“And the Feds shrugged their shoulders and
said, okay, we’ll keep that info in mind?” I asked.
“Yeah. Something like that. It seemed
incidental to them,” answered Whitaker. “They didn’t even write it down.” There
was an obvious disappointment to his tone. His expression turned somber.
“What were the agents like?” asked Arnie.
“They were older. Probably older than me.
And tired looking.”
“Like they were biding their time until
retirement?” I asked.
“Yeah. Just like that,” answered Whitaker
with a quick response, while his spotlight eyes widened and grew brighter, as
if they had zeroed in on something suspicious.
Arnie and I looked at each other and nodded
with our lips pressed tightly together.
“Oh.” Whitaker said quickly, “The bed of
the truck was clean. Without garden debris. I thought that was strange. There
were no tools anywhere.” He pressed his thin, almost non-existent lips together
then nodded several times rapidly. His lips made a faint, pink line, as if a
dash had been penciled in just above the chin.
“What about a license plate number?” I
asked.
“It was too far away. My vision is not what
it used to be,” replied Whitaker. “I really need to make an eye examination
appointment. I should be wearing glasses for distant reading.”
Arnie and I thanked him, and as we walked
away Whitaker called out, “Mr. Stone, Mr. Bender.” He ran toward us, as light
as a gazelle, even with the added weight of his letter satchel. “One more thing.”
he said, “There was a bumper sticker on the right-rear bumper with extra-large
letters. It was torn across the top. But I did make out “SAN”, but the rest of the letters were
missing, and below that it said, GUN CLUB.”
“Good job, Mr. Whitaker.” I said, “It could
mean something.”
“What color was the sticker?” Arnie asked.
“Red. Deep red. With yellow letters. Bright
yellow,” answered Whitaker.
“Did you tell this to the Feds?” I asked.
“No. It had slipped my mind,” replied
Whitaker, as he shrugged his shoulders and said, “I don’t think it would have
mattered to them anyway.”
Later that day at the office with Arnie
Bender, Millie Bender, and Dave Wells, we learned that Wells had interviewed a
few professors at UCLA. According to Wells’ report, one of the professors, who
was from San Luis Obispo, held a tight-crusted resentment toward Nick and
Bridget Dia over the “way-too-much fanfare” the two Nobel prize winners had
constantly received.
Professor Jack Arnold, a tall, skinny,
totally bald man of about forty-years old, with a head as round as a soccer
ball and laced with bulging veins that seemed to be holding his skin to his
skull, had stated,
“It was too much.” Said with a baritone
voice, “It was as if the rest of us didn’t count.”
Jack Arnold was a nervous man with deep,
almost hidden, dead-grey eyes and thin, dark eyebrows. Wells said that Arnold
never looked at him when answering the questions.
“They had everything,” continued Arnold,
with heated resentment, “The big Academic prize, the movie-star looks, a house
that I certainly couldn’t afford, in a neighborhood that I could only dream of
living in, and a gorgeous daughter who was ahead of her class in everything she
did.” He stopped, pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket, and wiped the
sweat from his head, which made his eyebrows rise like the wind had blown them
upward. “It doesn’t surprise me that Ana was abducted, not one bit.” Said with
the conviction of a hateful man, “The two of them, and especially Nick, had
gained a number of enemies on this campus.”
“Were these enemies all professors like
yourself?” asked Wells, “Would any of them have been so hateful, in the way
that you are, that they could have committed this heinous crime?”
“I have this feeling …” replied Arnold,
with a quick snap of his tongue, “That you are indirectly asking me if I had
anything to do with the abduction.” He wiped his head and the back of his neck
with the handkerchief, while his hidden grey eyes appeared to come forward from
his head, as if they were separate entities ready to attack.
“I am making no assumptions,” replied
Wells, “I’m just asking question. Looking for leads.”
“In my opinion,” said Arnold, with the
heartlessness of a dire enemy, “they got what they deserved.” Sweat poured down
his face, dripped from his chin, and landed on his white dress shirt, “And I
have no sympathy for them.”
“That’s a damn harsh statement,” said
Wells, with an edge of anger, “One would think that a man of your intelligence
and education, and a father, would have at least a grain of compassion for the
Dia family.”
“If you’re looking for compassion, Mr.
Wells, then go to a Buddhist temple. But from me you’ll get the truth.” Arnold
wiped his head, neck, and face again, while his eyebrows fluttered, and then he
asserted, “We are done here, Mr. Wells. And don’t harass me again, or there
will be a lawsuit filed by my attorney.”
Professor Jack Arnold walked away with the
ticked-off body language of a school boy who had been disciplined by a teacher.
To cut a long story short, we discovered
that Noah Klein was a thirty-year-old loner living in a trailer in the back
country of San Luis Obispo. His occupation was garden maintenance. We drove out
to his place to ask a few questions. The white pickup truck with the torn
bumper sticker and tinted smokey-grey back window was parked in the dirt
driveway. When he stepped out of the trailer-home to see who had pulled onto
his property Noah Klein held a shotgun in which he had then pumped a round into
the chamber. He was a short, woolly man with a small Afro of black hair and a
full-face beard, so only his dark eyes peered out from what looked like a bushy
ball. Standing there barefoot in ripped and dirty jeans, wearing a soiled white
tank top, and with an extremely hairy-body, Noah Klein looked like a pet
chimpanzee. Taking no chances, we had spread out so that Arnie Bender, Wells,
and I, covered the front of the trailer from three sides. Arnie with his .38
Colt, Wells with his .357 Magnum, and me with my .38 Ruger. Without incident
Noah Klein lowered the shotgun to the ground and raised his hands.
Ana Dia was inside locked in a bedroom
which had make-shift bars attached to the windows. She had been well taken care
of and was in good physical condition. Ana had had everything that she needed
to stay comfortable: food, clothes, bathroom access and so on, but she was
emotionally traumatized. While Arnie Bender held Ana Dia in his arms she shook
like a leaf on a stormy day, and she sobbed uncontrollably. She had been
missing for four weeks.
Noah Klein was not a pedophile. He had not
raped nor physically abused Ana Dia in any way. But he was emotionally unstable
and had been under the care of a psychiatrist, who said that in his head Noah
had an unnatural, intimate love affair with his cousin Sara––which caused him
to act like he was protecting her. By the time the FBI, the local sheriffs had
arrived, Noah Klein had confessed to us that his motive for the abduction was
driven by his cousin’s staggering depression over her low grade, and he wanted
Nick Dia to emotionally suffer, like Sara Klein had suffered. Sara knew nothing
of Noah Klein’s plan for the abduction, and Noah had no idea how long he would
have kept Ana, but that he was going to take her back to where he had abducted
her. It was all crazy to him. He was confused and blathering while he kept
apologizing to Ana Dia.
I asked him how he did it, abducting her in
the park. He said that he had had two rabbits on a leash. He also had one arm
in a sling, faking an injury. He said that he had set himself up in her path so
that she would see the rabbits and see him struggling with one arm to get the
pets into his truck. Ana, of course, offered to help. When she bent down to
place the rabbits inside on the floor of the truck, Noah gagged her with
chloroform. He said the park was empty of people, no witnesses. It was just
luck. He had had no real plan other than luck. Due to the fact, that Noah Klein
had not physically harmed Ana Dia, he was handed a second-degree kidnapping
charge with a reduced sentence of eight years in prison. While in a non-juried court,
where he had pleaded guilty to all charges, Noah Klein apologized profusely and
expressed a sincere remorse to the judge, and to Nick and Bridget Dia for the
distress that he had caused them.
To wrap it up, my associates and I had made
sure that Postman Brian Whitaker was acknowledged for his keen sense of
awareness and for his attention to detail. It was with his help that Ana Dia
was found and returned to her parents. The Mayor of Los Angeles presented Mr.
Whitaker with a key to the city along with the ten-thousand-dollar reward money
from UCLA for helping Joe Stone and Associates in the recovery of Ana Dia.
