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Author Topic: Michelle Pulsifer 3, vanished 1969 Huntington Bch, CA  (Read 8071 times)
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Nut44x4
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« on: December 26, 2008, 06:47:35 PM »

Los Angeles Times
 
December 26, 2008 Friday
 
Still missing, but not forgotten
 
When the end came and yet another jury said it couldn't reach a verdict, the temptation was to say the system did horribly wrong by 3-year-old Michelle Pulsifer.

Maybe that's a no-brainer, that it goes without saying. When a toddler disappears and is presumed dead -- almost certainly by nefarious means and under the supervision of her mother and a boyfriend -- how can no one be held accountable? We put common drunks in jail; couldn't we find a way to bring justice for a 3-year-old?

The short answer is that life is full of square pegs and round holes, even in matters as consequential as a little girl who vanished in 1969 and whom no one seemed to care about for the longest time.

And that's the way the story could have ended. The system could have permanently forgotten Michelle and relegated her disappearance to the deepest, darkest section of the cold-case files, but Orange County prosecutor Larry Yellin insisted that not happen.

And though he lost twice in trying to hold someone accountable, I'd argue that Yellin struck a blow for at least some version of justice. Which is to say, he tried.

Michelle Pulsifer would be 42 had she lived. Odds are that she would have been a wife and mother. She would have gone to high school, maybe college, listened to pop music and gone to movies and, like the rest of us, marveled at how things have changed since the 1970s.

Even these kind of mundane thoughts drove Yellin as he took Michelle's mother to trial twice since 2007 on murder charges. Both ended in mistrials, the most recent being earlier this month with the jury deadlocking 11 to 1 for acquittal of second-degree murder and 7 to 5 for guilt on involuntary manslaughter.

The judge ruled that there won't be a third trial, saying the evidence isn't there to get a conviction. Aside from the difficulty inherent in trying a 39-year-old case and the absence of a body, the boyfriend of the girl's mother -- who also had been charged in the case -- died in custody in 2005. He denied killing the girl, indirectly pointed the finger at her mother, Donna Prentice, but said he buried Michelle in an Orange County canyon. Prentice's attorney argued that the boyfriend was probably the killer.

I'm not writing today about the evidence or the strength of the case. What moves me, in a way that's hard to nail down on paper, is how Yellin's determination to bring a tough case to trial shows that we didn't forget the 3-year-old.

It is a case with many complications. You can see why it could have remained dormant forever. There was no public outcry to solve the Michelle Pulsifer case.

"The clamor is for the current case," Yellin says. "There's no reason to be clamoring over cold cases. But one of the things that makes it poignant is that you get the sense in hindsight as to the life they have missed. . . . You see how life has passed them by, how it went on without them. It's a loss they didn't get to come along for the ride."

That's what I'm trying to say, that even if Michelle didn't get a chance to live a life, at least someone all these years later cared enough to take note of that and assign some responsibility for why she didn't.

I ask Yellin about that aspect. Yes, there's the law to consider, but what about the personal sense of making things right for a forgotten child?

"My personal sense of justice, or sense of compassion, which leans toward the victims, does fuel my efforts," he says. "I don't think I can keep that out of it. But I hope I'm smart enough that I never let it blind me or make a mistake that could lead to an injustice, like if would I feel so passionate that I go after the wrong person."

But even that dispassion didn't keep him from choking up during his closing argument, he says.

It came while he was talking about what might have been for Michelle. "I was trying to catch the jury's emotion, and it caught my own."

The case wasn't prosecuted all those years ago because Prentice told people that she had left Michelle with others when she and her boyfriend abruptly left Orange County for the Midwest. The couple, however, took, two young boys with them -- sons from their previous marriages.

Michelle's biological father says that because Prentice had full custody, he was stymied in learning in the ensuing years of her whereabouts.

I ask Yellin, the father of daughters ages 11, 8 and 5, if the failure to get a conviction haunts him. "I can accept it because I recognize it was a difficult case," he says. People on both sides of the bar in Orange County praised his efforts, he says.

"The most heartening thing is that if nothing else, we did make people remember her. That wasn't really our goal, but there's a component of sort of remembering these lost people, reminding other people who didn't know anything about them or that they even existed. In this case, not even her loved ones knew what happened to her."

The investigation and subsequent trials brought some answers to her biological father and his family, Yellin says. "I take a lot of solace in that. At least I did that for them."

And they left him with something, too. After the second hung jury, Michelle's father gave him a Christmas ornament with his daughter's name on it and asked Yellin to hang it on his tree.

In a very literal way, Yellin says, he took the case home with him.

 http://www6.lexisnexis.com/publisher/EndUser?Action=UserDisplayFullDocument&orgId=574&topicId=100020825&docId=l:903579135&start=6

MICHELLE KELLY PULSIFER 
Case Type: Endangered Missing   
DOB: Mar 17, 1966 Sex: Female
Missing Date: Mar 17, 1969 Race: White
Age Now: 42 Height:  3'5" (104 cm)
Missing City: HUNTINGTON BEACH Weight:  40 lbs (18 kg)
Missing State :  CA Hair Color: Blonde
Missing Country: United States Eye Color: Brown
Case Number: NCMC973335 
Circumstances: Michelle was last seen in 1969, but the exact date is unknown. The above missing date is an approximation. She is missing under suspicious circumstances.
http://www.missingkids.com/missingkids/servlet/PubCaseSearchServlet?act=viewChildDetail&caseNum=973335&orgPrefix=NCMC&seqNum=1&caseLang=en_US&searchLang=en_US

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« Reply #1 on: December 26, 2008, 06:51:16 PM »

I did not put Michelle under missing persons because she is presumed to be dead. I did not put this case under Unsolved Crimes because IMO, it won't be solved. I believe this case belongs here. If Michelle is ever found or the case is solved...or both -- then I/we will/can move it.

I will try and post some history of the case over the weekend. Please feel free to join me.
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« Reply #2 on: December 27, 2008, 12:17:19 PM »

There are more photos available at the Dateline photo album link
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23638663/

I am having problems posting photos today...no clue why. I will eventually get the photos here.
« Last Edit: December 27, 2008, 12:46:40 PM by Nut44x4 » Logged

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« Reply #3 on: December 27, 2008, 12:19:50 PM »

When a 3-year-old named Michelle Pulsifer disappeared, her father couldn't even get police to search for her -- but he never gave up looking

6 page TRANSCRIPT
By John Larson
Correspondent
NBC News
updated 5:56 p.m. ET, Fri., March. 14, 2008
This story originally aired Dateline NBC on March 14, 2008.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23592454/


« Last Edit: December 27, 2008, 12:47:56 PM by Nut44x4 » Logged

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« Reply #4 on: December 27, 2008, 12:23:05 PM »

The Doe Network:
Case File 1252DFCA
Michelle Kelly Pulsifer
Missing since July 1969 from Huntington Beach, Orange County, California.

Circumstances of Disappearance
Pulsifer was last seen in California in 1969. The exact date of her disappearance is unknown, however, she is missing under suspicious circumstances.
She was living with her mom, her mom's boyfriend and her 6-year-old brother in a house on Tigerfish Circle in July 1969 when she vanished. And sometime during the next two or three days the family suddenly moved to Illinois.
No one filed a missing-person report.
In August 2004 her mother was taken into custody on an arrest warrant charging her with the murder of her daughter in 1969. Investigators also arrested her former boyfriend on the same charge.
The arrests ended a year-long investigation. Detectives couldn't find a single public record about Michelle after 1969. Prosecutors concluded that the girl was killed by her mother and the boyfriend, and that they moved so no one would notice that she was missing.
Investigators do not know exactly how Michelle died or where or how her body was disposed of. The arrested man told authorities he buried the body in Silverado Canyon in the Santa Ana Mountains before the family moved out of state. He did not admit to killing Michelle but admitted burying the girl.
Orange County officials have said they were searching for Michelle's body, but declined to say where.
Michelle's brother said he last saw his sister when he was 6 and she asked him to hide her. He hid Michelle under the bed covers, but their mother came and got her. When the family moved to Illinois, officials said the brother was told there was not enough room in the car for Michelle.

http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/1252dfca.html
Photos at the above link
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« Reply #5 on: December 27, 2008, 12:27:00 PM »

Vista man recalls events around 1969 tragedy
Mom charged with murder in disappearance of sister, 3

September 2, 2004

VISTA – Richard Pulsifer Jr. remembers the dream vividly. In it, he is a boy searching for his 3-year-old sister, Michelle. He stands over a square plot of earth and grass. He looks down. He finds her decaying body.

Pulsifer said it was only a bad dream, but it was the first time he realized his little sister, missing for years, was probably dead.

He was 6 when she vanished 35 years ago. The dream came at age 17, he says, shortly after he heard his mother utter the words "Michelle" and "death" in the next room.

"Was the dream telling me what actually happened or confirming what I heard?" he asked in an interview this week at his Vista home. "I think deep down I knew she wasn't alive."

Michelle's and Pulsifer's mother, Donna J. Prentice, and her former boyfriend, James Michael Kent, were arrested last week and charged with murder in connection with the tot's unexplained disappearance in July 1969.

Kent, a 62-year-old truck driver with a criminal record, admitted last week on tape that he buried Michelle's body in Silverado Canyon in the Santa Ana Mountains, along the Riverside-Orange County border, an Illinois sheriff's detective told The Associated Press on Monday.

"I thought that was pretty . . . ," Pulsifer said, his comment trailing off. "I don't know how to put it into words."

Authorities believe that Prentice of Genoa, Wis., and Kent of Lakemoor, Ill., killed Michelle and then moved with Pulsifer and a stepbrother to Illinois to cover their tracks.
They are being held in Vernon County, Wis., and Orange County, respectively, on $1 million bond and face court hearings later this month.

Pulsifer, now 41, said he was 6 years old and asleep in his bed on a warm summer morning in Huntington Beach in July 1969 when Michelle walked into his room. She wanted to hide, he said, and started to climb up onto the twin bed with him.

He had almost worked her under the covers, he said, when his mother walked in and took her away.

"It was like, 'Come here, darling,' just like any mother would do," he recalled. "There was no anger or anything like that."

That was the last time Pulsifer saw his sister. Just days later, he said, the family packed up and left California for Illinois.

Pulsifer, whose mother and father had divorced, said Kent was a strict disciplinarian while he was growing up. He said he buried any talk about the beatings – along with questions about Michelle's whereabouts – because he never wanted to hurt his mother emotionally.

After the family moved again, this time to Kenosha, Wis., his mother asked him if he wanted to know what happened to his sister. He was a freshman in high school at the time.

"I asked, 'Where is she?' " he said. "She changed the subject. It pretty much wasn't brought up again."

His father, Richard Pulsifer Sr., had been looking for his son for years and finally found him, he said, after his mother – then working as a cocktail waitress – applied for government aid and the agency contacted his father.

Pulsifer said one of his last memories of living with his mother before going to live with his father was at age 17, when he awoke to hear her crying in another room of their two-bedroom apartment and talking to her husband, Noble Prentice. He said he caught the words "Michelle" and "death."

At age 19 and living with his father, Pulsifer agreed to meet with a hypnotist his father hired to jog his memories about Michelle. He is unsure if it worked but said he was able to recall some memories without help, such as trying to hide Michelle and the dream.

But it wasn't until 1987, when he was 24, that he phoned his mother and posed the question that had become an obsession for father and son: What happened to Michelle?

"She said, 'I'm not telling you, Rich,' " he recalled. " 'It's been so long I don't want to open up old wounds.' "

Later in the same conversation, she told him Michelle was alive and well and using the Pulsifer last name, he said. Unwilling to probe further, he backed off.

Contact between mother and son became infrequent after that, he said. Prentice knew of her son's impending birth in November 1997 but never called Pulsifer and his wife, Lisa, to ask if it was a boy or girl, he said.

Eventually, detectives pieced Michelle's case together with a little help from a private investigator hired by a family member, Ann Friedman, of Coronado.

Amid the mystery of his sister's disappearance, Pulsifer lived a pretty normal life. He helped run American Karate School in San Marcos and other locations with his father, achieving a seventh-degree black belt, before he had an accident on the job in 1998. Now he is a circulation manager with the North County Times newspaper.

He and his wife have three boys, ages 6 to 20, and live in a duplex near Vista Village. He gets off work around 7 a.m. to take his children to school. They drive a blue minivan and a white Ford station wagon.

Pulsifer knows that his normal life is over, though, at least for a while, and that he may have to take the witness stand.

"The whole thing is very strange," he said. "Right now, I'm on an emotional roller coaster."

He spoke calmly, almost affably, with a chuckle about some childhood memories.

But he said now he feels hate and sorrow, and wonders if after 35 years he can feel forgiveness.

The family has been contacted by national media, including NBC's "The Today Show" and "Dateline." Pulsifer gave a box full of family photos, trinkets and pictures of Michelle to investigators.

"It's scary, I tell you," he said. "I didn't think my part in this was that important."

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040902/news_1mi2brother.html
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« Reply #6 on: December 27, 2008, 12:27:54 PM »

Saturday, June 4, 2005
Mom of long-missing girl says she left her behind

Murder suspect says she let her boyfriend take Michelle Pulsifer to his mother's in 1969 before moving out of state.

SANTA ANA – The mother of a 3-year-old girl who disappeared 36 years ago said she took two dogs and two cats when her family moved from Orange County to Illinois in 1969 - but not her daughter, a detective testified Friday.

Instead, the woman said she allowed her then-boyfriend to take little Michelle Pulsifer to live with his mother while the rest of the family started a new life near Chicago, district attorney's investigator Ed Berakovich testified during a preliminary hearing for Donna Prentice.

Berakovich testified that Prentice, 58, told him she never asked about the welfare of her daughter after that, even when her boyfriend's mother died in 1972.

Prentice and James Michael Kent, the former boyfriend, were charged last year with murdering Michelle, after a lengthy investigation by the Orange County District Attorney's Office determined that the tyke had never been seen alive since the day the family moved to Illinois.

Kent, who allegedly told police after his arrest that he buried the girl in remote Williams Canyon in Orange County, died this year of kidney and liver failure before his case could come to trial.

Before he died, he blamed the child's death on Prentice, telling police that she called him upstairs to the rental home they shared in Huntington Beach one day in early July 1969 and showed him the lifeless body of her little girl.

Defense attorney Ron Brower said Friday that if Michelle was killed, then Kent is responsible. But it is also possible that the girl died of natural causes.

"He admitted that it was his idea to bury the child in the canyon," Brower said outside court.

"He was violent towards Donna in California and he was violent towards Donna in Illinois, and he had a history of violence towards children."

Brower said Kent once fired several rounds from a handgun near Prentice's head, and that he threatened her life if she ever talked about what really happened to Michelle.

The arrest of Prentice and Kent in August 2004 touched off an intensive search in Williams Canyon. But even though Kent led detectives to the spot where he said he buried her body, and after cadaver dogs combed the area, her body was never found.

While Berakovich testified, Richard Pulsifer Sr., Michelle's father, and Richard Pulsifer Jr., her older brother, waited outside the second-floor courtroom, barred from listening because they are potential witnesses. The two men, and several other relatives and friends, have attended every court hearing since the arrests nearly a year ago.

Superior Court Judge John Conley continued the preliminary hearing to June 14. If he decides that a crime has been committed, and that there is evidence that Prentice might have committed that crime, she will be ordered to stand trial.

http://www.ocregister.com/ocr/sections/local/local/article_546914.php
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« Reply #7 on: December 27, 2008, 12:40:01 PM »

Mother re-tried for 29-year-old OC murderMonday
November 10, 2008
SANTA ANA, Calif. (KABC) -- It's a mystery nearly four decades in the making. A 3-year-old girl disappears, never to be seen again. Now her mother is on trial for the girl's murder for the second time.
That woman was first tried for the crime last year, but the jury failed to reach a verdict. Her former boyfriend confessed to burying the young girl back in 1969, before he died in 2005. The retrial began in Santa Ana Monday.

The prosecutor alleges that the defendant, the mother, took part in four decades of deception. She allegedly lied to various relatives over the years when asked about the whereabouts of her daughter; those alleged lies ranged from Michelle, the missing daughter, being cared for by other relatives, to Michelle studying in Canada in high school and doing well. Investigators say there's no trace that Michelle existed after 1969.
Donna Prentice, in court Monday, looked at the last-known photo taken of her daughter, Michelle Pulsifer, before the 3-year-old disappeared nearly 40 years ago. Prosecutors allege the 61-year-old and her boyfriend, Mike Kent, murdered the little girl around July 4, 1969.
"The defendant, from 1969 on, told a lot of lies," said prosecutor Larry Yellin.

Prosecutors allege that days after her disappearance, the couple left Huntington Beach for Illinois. They packed up their two boys, their family pets, and allegedly told the children there wasn't enough room in the car for Michelle. She had been left with relatives in California.
For years, the prosecutor alleges, Prentice lied to relatives who asked about Michelle. Michelle's brother will testify about the last time he saw her, in July 1969, when he was 6 years old.
"The door opens and in comes his sister Michelle," said prosecutor Yellin. "And she's trying to climb up in his bed, and she's saying, 'Hide me, hide me.' And Richie says that his mother, the defendant, came in, took Michelle out of there."
Michelle's father, Richard Pulsifer, eventually hired a private investigator. The Orange County District Attorney's Office then reviewed the case, filing charges against Kent and Prentice in 2004.
While in jail, Kent called his son Jamie. "He told him that he buried Michelle's body -- he buried that little girl -- in Williams Canyon here in Orange County," said Yellin in court Monday.
Kent died of natural causes before the first trial, which ended with a hung jury in 2007.

"That statement -- 'I buried her in the canyon' -- did not come from her mouth," said defense attorney Ken Norelli. "Donna Prentice did not have anything to do with the disappearance of that child."
The defense told jurors Prentice was a loving, nurturing mother under the control of an extremely abusive man, and paralyzed by fear.
"This case will be all about whether or not she should have not gone and had the courage and the strength to find out where her daughter was, because she didn't," said Norelli. "And that does not make her a murderer of her child."
Prentice faces a maximum of five years to life in prison if convicted, following sentencing guidelines that were in place in the 1960s when Michelle disappeared.
http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/local/orange_county&id=6498775
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« Reply #8 on: December 27, 2008, 12:42:46 PM »

Monday, December 8, 2008
Not-guilty deadlock in cold-case murder trial

Mistrial declared in 2nd trial of woman charged with killing her 3-year-old daughter in Huntington Beach in 1969.

SANTA ANA – After eight days of often heated and emotional deliberations, jurors deadlocked late Monday at 11-1 for not guilty on whether a Wisconsin woman murdered her little girl in Huntington Beach in 1969.

Defendant Donna Pulsifer Prentice, 62, stifled tears after the stalemate was revealed in her second trial for the death of 3-year-old Michelle Pulsifer, who disappeared on the Fourth of July weekend in 1969 and has not been seen since.

Her first trial ended with a 10-2 hung jury in favor of guilty in June 2007.

Superior Court Judge Richard M. King declared a mistrial late Monday afternoon after the seven-woman, five-man jury insisted during individual polling that further deliberations would not result in a verdict.

King scheduled a hearing Dec. 19 to consider dismissing the case – as requested by defense attorney Ken Norelli, or setting dates for a third trial – as requested by prosecutor Larry Yellin.

Prentice will remain in custody on $1 million bail until then.

Jurors said after the mistrial was declared that bitter words were exchanged during the eight days of deliberations, that some members cried, and that the majority leaned toward not guilty from the outset.

The jurors who voted for not guilty said the facts surrounding Michelle's death were clouded by the passage of time, and that there was insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Prentice knew what happened to her daughter.

Juror Jennifer McCulloch, 60, of Mission Viejo, said she thought there was never enough evidence to convict Prentice of murder.

McCulloch said she was surprised to learn that Prentice, of Wisconsin, has been in custody for more than four years while the case was in progress, adding that she felt there should not be a third trial.

"She's been punished enough for whatever she did," McCulloch added.

Juror Roni Taylor, 41, of Yorba Linda, said she followed the judge's instructions that if there are two logical versions of the facts, with one pointing toward innocence and one pointing toward guilt, the jury was obligated to go with the one that tilted toward innocence.

"I believe she was guilty of something, but I just don't believe she was guilty of murder," Taylor said.

She said most members of the jury voted Prentice guilty last week of the lesser crime of involuntary manslaughter.

But the panel could not officially consider that charge until they voted to acquit Prentice of second-degree murder.

Holdout juror Bob Gomez, 58, of Tustin, said he voted guilty in part because he did not think that Prentice was credible and that she tried to cover up Michelle's murder for nearly 40 years.

"She lied through her teeth," said Gomez, a retired Los Angeles deputy marshal. "Her lies were such whoppers they were ridiculous."

Gomez, the jury foreman, also said he felt that Prentice's sudden move to Illinois with her then boyfriend after Michelle disappeared showed flight to avoid prosecution, and that he felt Prentice never showed remorse.

He said he felt the other jurors were "super naive and super inexperienced" and that the majority vote favoring acquittal was "gender biased," where most of the female jurors were sympathetic toward Prentice.

Yellin argued during the trial last month that Prentice either killed her daughter on her own, or helped boyfriend James Michael Kent kill the child for an unknown reason.

Kent then buried the body in a shallow grave in remote Williams Canyon in east Orange County, Yellin argued, and the family quickly moved – with their two young sons from prior marriages – to Illinois to cover up the deed. Friends they left behind in Orange County did not know that they didn't take Michelle with them.

After that, Yellin said, Prentice engaged in nearly 40 years of lies to cover up the slaying, telling different stories to different people who asked about little Michelle.

But Norelli insisted that Prentice was "a good, loving, nurturing mother" who "loved every single child who came into her life."

He insisted that Kent was the person solely responsible for killing Michelle.

Kent, Norelli insisted, was "a psychopath" and "a monster" who was abusive to women and children and who deceived and manipulated Prentice for years during their stormy relationship, Norelli said.

Prentice does not know what happened to her youngest child, Norelli argued.

The quest to find out what happened to Michelle was renewed in 2001 when a wealthy former in-law of Richard Pulsifer – Michelle's father – hired private investigator Paul Chamberlain to locate the missing girl.

Chamberlain, a former FBI agent, found absolutely no evidence that the little girl ever existed after July 1969. No school records, Social Security data, marriage, court cases, driver's license. Nothing.

Chamberlain turned his findings over to Orange County district attorney's investigator Ed Berakovich, a veteran homicide detective.

One of Berakovich's first tasks was tracking down Donna Prentice to a home she shared with her third husband, Nobel Prentice.

She told Berakovich in September 2003 that Kent gave Michelle to Kent's mother to care for when they relocated to Illinois. But authorities quickly learned that Kent's mother was an alcoholic who was suffering from a cancer that would cause her death in the early 1970s.

Berakovich later tracked down Kent at his home in Illinois.

Kent told the detective that Donna Pulsifer – as she was known then – called him upstairs to the rental home they shared in Huntington Beach one day in early July 1969 and showed him the lifeless body of her little girl. Kent admitted that he buried the little girl in Williams Canyon. Her body was never found.

Prentice and Kent were arrested and charged with Michelle Pulsifer's death in August 2004. Prentice has been in custody ever since, held in lieu of $1 million bail.

Kent died in custody of liver failure in 2005 before he could be brought to trial.

The key witness during Prentice's two-week second trial was Richard Pulsifer Jr., her son and Michelle's older brother. He was 6 when his sister disappeared.

He testified that Michelle, a big-eyed, chubby-cheeked towhead, burst into his bedroom one hot summer night close to the Fourth of July and pleaded, "Hide me. Please hide me!''

Then the 3-year-old crawled under the covers. "And then my mom came into the room and got her," Richard Pulsifer Jr. said. "I never saw her again."

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/prentice-michelle-kent-2250868-guilty-pulsifer
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« Reply #9 on: December 27, 2008, 12:44:05 PM »

Posted on Mon, Dec. 15, 2008 07:00 PM

Murder charges dropped in Calif. girl's 1969 case

California prosecutors say a judge has dismissed charges against a woman accused of killing her 3-year-old daughter nearly 40 years ago.

An Orange County district attorney's spokeswoman says a judge dismissed second-degree murder charges Monday against Donna Prentice of Wisconsin. Two juries failed to reach a unanimous decision.

A jury deadlocked a week ago after leaning toward acquitting Prentice. She was suspected of killing little Michelle Pulsifer before moving with her boyfriend from Huntington Beach to Chicago.

A jury deadlocked last year as it leaned toward conviction.

Michelle disappeared in July 1969. The murder allegation arose when a private investigator hired by the child's aunt in 2001 concluded she was dead.

http://www.kansascity.com/440/story/938295.html
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« Reply #10 on: December 27, 2008, 12:45:13 PM »

No answers in missing child trial, but a sense of remembering

Case against Donna Prentice ended after two mistrials. But the legal process showed Michelle Pulsifer isn't forgotten.

Dana Parsons
December 26, 2008

When the end came and yet another jury said it couldn't reach a verdict, the temptation was to say the system did horribly wrong by 3-year-old Michelle Pulsifer.

Maybe that's a no-brainer, that it goes without saying. When a toddler disappears and is presumed dead -- almost certainly by nefarious means and under the supervision of her mother and a boyfriend -- how can no one be held accountable? We put common drunks in jail; couldn't we find a way to bring justice for a 3-year-old?

The short answer is that life is full of square pegs and round holes, even in matters as consequential as a little girl who vanished in 1969 and whom no one seemed to care about for the longest time.

And that's the way the story could have ended. The system could have permanently forgotten Michelle and relegated her disappearance to the deepest, darkest section of the cold-case files, but Orange County prosecutor Larry Yellin insisted that not happen.

And though he lost twice in trying to hold someone accountable, I'd argue that Yellin struck a blow for at least some version of justice. Which is to say, he tried.

Michelle Pulsifer would be 42 had she lived. Odds are that she would have been a wife and mother. She would have gone to high school, maybe college, listened to pop music and gone to movies and, like the rest of us, marveled at how things have changed since the 1970s.

Even these kind of mundane thoughts drove Yellin as he took Michelle's mother to trial twice since 2007 on murder charges. Both ended in mistrials, the most recent being earlier this month with the jury deadlocking 11 to 1 for acquittal of second-degree murder and 7 to 5 for guilt on involuntary manslaughter.

The judge ruled that there won't be a third trial, saying the evidence isn't there to get a conviction. Aside from the difficulty inherent in trying a 39-year-old case and the absence of a body, the boyfriend of the girl's mother -- who also had been charged in the case -- died in custody in 2005. He denied killing the girl, indirectly pointed the finger at her mother, Donna Prentice, but said he buried Michelle in an Orange County canyon. Prentice's attorney argued that the boyfriend was probably the killer.

I'm not writing today about the evidence or the strength of the case. What moves me, in a way that's hard to nail down on paper, is how Yellin's determination to bring a tough case to trial shows that we didn't forget the 3-year-old.

It is a case with many complications. You can see why it could have remained dormant forever. There was no public outcry to solve the Michelle Pulsifer case.

"The clamor is for the current case," Yellin says. "There's no reason to be clamoring over cold cases. But one of the things that makes it poignant is that you get the sense in hindsight as to the life they have missed. . . . You see how life has passed them by, how it went on without them. It's a loss they didn't get to come along for the ride."

That's what I'm trying to say, that even if Michelle didn't get a chance to live a life, at least someone all these years later cared enough to take note of that and assign some responsibility for why she didn't.

I ask Yellin about that aspect. Yes, there's the law to consider, but what about the personal sense of making things right for a forgotten child?

"My personal sense of justice, or sense of compassion, which leans toward the victims, does fuel my efforts," he says. "I don't think I can keep that out of it. But I hope I'm smart enough that I never let it blind me or make a mistake that could lead to an injustice, like if would I feel so passionate that I go after the wrong person."

But even that dispassion didn't keep him from choking up during his closing argument, he says.

It came while he was talking about what might have been for Michelle. "I was trying to catch the jury's emotion, and it caught my own."

The case wasn't prosecuted all those years ago because Prentice told people that she had left Michelle with others when she and her boyfriend abruptly left Orange County for the Midwest. The couple, however, took, two young boys with them -- sons from their previous marriages.

Michelle's biological father says that because Prentice had full custody, he was stymied in learning in the ensuing years of her whereabouts.

I ask Yellin, the father of daughters ages 11, 8 and 5, if the failure to get a conviction haunts him. "I can accept it because I recognize it was a difficult case," he says. People on both sides of the bar in Orange County praised his efforts, he says.

"The most heartening thing is that if nothing else, we did make people remember her. That wasn't really our goal, but there's a component of sort of remembering these lost people, reminding other people who didn't know anything about them or that they even existed. In this case, not even her loved ones knew what happened to her."

The investigation and subsequent trials brought some answers to her biological father and his family, Yellin says. "I take a lot of solace in that. At least I did that for them."

And they left him with something, too. After the second hung jury, Michelle's father gave him a Christmas ornament with his daughter's name on it and asked Yellin to hang it on his tree.

In a very literal way, Yellin says, he took the case home with him.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-parsons26-2008dec26,0,3572250.column
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Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware/Of giving your heart to a dog to tear  -- Rudyard Kipling

One who doesn't trust is never deceived...

'I remained too much inside my head and ended up losing my mind' -Edgar Allen Poe
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