Amber Leeanne Dubois #2 (remains found 3/6/10) 1/15/10 - 7/3/13

[Edward]

God Bless everyone who is at the walkathon today in support of the missing child
Amber Dubois.

[Edward]

This is a link regarding info about Amber one year later. The cell tower was on Amber Lane and has a five mile radius. The Red Truck is no longer in question.

http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/escondido/article_17edfcec-657a-5398-8295-4b1ada991f56.html

http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/escondido/article_17edfcec-657a-5398-8295-4b1ada991f56.html

Not sure how to insert stuff.

A vague description of a boy, a blurry videotape, a brief cell phone signal and two people who said they saw Amber Dubois the morning she disappeared one year ago ---- that is all Escondido police have to solve one of the most mystifying cases in the city's history.

On the morning of Friday, Feb. 13, 2009, 14-year-old Amber ate a bowl of cereal, slipped on a hoodie and jeans, walked to school and was never seen again.

Nothing appeared out of the ordinary that drizzly winter morning.

Her mother, Carrie McGonigle, awakened her to say goodbye before going to work. They spoke about a lamb that Amber, a freshman at Escondido High School, was looking forward to buying that day and raising as part of the school's Future Farmers of America program.

"I went over and I gave her a kiss, and I said, 'I'll be home from work early. We'll go see a movie tonight,'" McGonigle said.

The case of the missing teen has garnered national media attention. Teams of searchers have fanned throughout the region, and police departments across the nation have been blanketed with fliers. Private investigators, FBI agents and lost-children advocacy groups have helped in the search.

Still, Amber seems to have vanished.

Detectives from the Escondido Police Department, the lead agency in the case, are baffled and frustrated, but they have not given up.

"This is still an open case," said Lt. Bob Benton. "The case will remain open as long as she is missing."

Disappeared

Each year, more than 500 people, most of them children, are reported missing in Escondido, police said. Most are found within days. In typical cases, there's an explanation. Most of them are children who leave home because of disagreements with their parents. Few are abducted, police said.

Amber's case doesn't fit neatly into any of those categories, police said.

"Amber has no history of running away before," said Detective Beverly Marquez, who has 15 years of experience working missing-person cases. "She's a pretty good kid, kind of a bookworm. She enjoys school, and there was nothing to show that she planned on running away."

Amber did not take any extra clothes. She did not take any extra money. She left nothing to suggest she was unhappy, police said.

There is no evidence she was taken by force, either, said Sgt. John Russo, who is in charge of the investigation.

"In 99 percent of the cases that we get, we have something that takes us down one of those paths," Russo said. "We have cell phone calls, we have letters, we have notes, we have something to say, 'Oh, yeah, she runs away once a week.' We have something that gives us a pattern. We don't have that here."

Bookish girl

Amber, who was crazy about wolves, had a peculiar walk, her mother said ---- a slow, bouncing stride that resembled her father's. Maurice "Mo" Dubois, an Orange County electrical engineer, and McGonigle separated when Amber was a baby.

McGonigle also has a 6-year-old, a daughter by Dave Cave, a former longtime boyfriend. Depending on her mood, Amber sometimes referred to him as her stepfather, Cave said. The couple and the two children lived in Cave's Escondido home on Fire Mountain Place, about a half mile from the high school.

Cave was the last family member to see Amber that morning. He gave her the $200 check she needed to buy the lamb. Amber was sitting in the living room of their two-story home, eating a bowl of cereal, as Cave walked out the door about 6 a.m. on his way to the gym, he said.

Amber's younger sister was with her grandmother, Sheila Welch, a Los Angeles-area lawyer.

After Cave left that morning, police know little about what happened to Amber. A couple of neighbors told police they spotted her on her way to school. A boy was seen walking next to her minutes before she went missing.

On Saturday, Feb. 14, 2009, Amber's cell phone was turned on briefly and then went silent, police said.

Since then, police said they have received more than 1,600 leads. They have interviewed about 600 people. The case has filled about a dozen 5-inch-thick binders.

But they still don't know what happened to Amber.

Videotape

The last time anyone saw Amber that Friday morning was about 7:09 a.m., police say.

She was walking south on North Broadway near Escondido High School's athletic field. Had she walked another 200 yards, past the school's football stadium, Amber may have come within view of a security camera mounted on top of the gym.

"Every morning, she meets her friends, believe it or not, right under the video camera," Benton said.

A neighbor who had dropped his son off at school said he noticed Amber walking on the sidewalk as he drove north on Broadway. Another neighbor who was heading south on the same road to drop off her son said she nearly stopped to give Amber a ride because it was drizzling that morning.

She told police she did not stop because she believed Amber was walking with a boy, Benton said. Both neighbors were seen on the school's security camera video dropping their kids off within minutes of each other, between 7:08 a.m. and 7:10 a.m.

The young man is described as tall and dark-skinned, about high school age. No one has come forward to identify him or even to verify he was walking with Amber and wasn't just someone walking past her.

Police said he may have been the last person to see her.

"To this day, we have yet to identify who this boy is," Benton said. "But we believe he holds the key to what happened to her."

Typical day

On any typical school day, North Broadway is a commuter's nightmare shortly before school starts at 7:30 a.m. Hundreds of vehicles crowd the four-lane road as parents drop off their children at the high school.

On Feb. 13, 2009, the road was even busier and harder to navigate, say school officials and police. More parents drove their kids to school because of the wet weather.

Construction trucks delivering material to the school also were lined up by the curb near the football stadium, forcing parents to drop off their students farther north on the road and closer to where Amber was last seen, Benton said.

"Based on the amount of traffic and the amount of people (in the area), her being kidnapped off the street is not likely," Benton said. "If there was a commotion, it would have been seen by somebody."

The following Tuesday, police set up a roadblock at the northern end of the school, where Amber was last seen, to question everyone traveling through the area. They asked whether anyone had seen anything. They also asked the parents who saw her last to look at yearbooks to see whether they could identify the boy.

Their efforts yielded nothing.

Unlike the police, family members don't believe the boy may be the key to unraveling the mystery of Amber's disappearance. They say the girl that people saw may not have been Amber at all, and the boy may simply have been someone walking by.

Amber, who was wearing black jeans and a black hoodie that day, was probably wearing her hood up because of the rain, making her difficult to recognize even for those who knew her, said Welch, her grandmother.

"When you're walking along Broadway and people are wearing hoodies, it's very difficult to spot someone," she said.

Dead ends

The next day, Amber's cell phone was turned on, police said. Someone attempted to check the phone's voice mail. The signal was picked up by a cell tower on Amber Lane in northern Escondido. The tower covers a five-mile radius, which means the phone could have been just about anywhere in Escondido.

Police issued an emergency alert phone call to homes in the area asking whether anyone had seen Amber, but again, they found nothing.

The investigation has produced countless dead ends, police said. Promising leads have withered under closer scrutiny.

Early in their investigation, police said they were looking for a red truck that was seen on the school's blurry security tape for a moment shortly before Amber's disappearance. Police sent the video to Department of Defense image laboratories for sophisticated analysis.

The truck was identified as an early 2000s model red Dodge Ram with aftermarket chrome rails and running boards.

Detectives later learned that the truck belonged to the parent of a student at the high school. They questioned the parent and determined the truck probably had nothing to do with the girl's disappearance.

Fruitless searches

In their investigation, Escondido police have worked with FBI agents and investigators with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They have contacted law enforcement in Canada (Amber has extended family in Montreal), Mexico and across the globe.

Amber's father, mother and her mother's longtime boyfriend all voluntarily took and passed polygraph tests shortly after the teen vanished, police said.

The case has been featured on several television shows, including "America's Most Wanted," "The Tyra Banks Show" and "The Steve Wilkos Show." Family members believe publicity may be the key to finding Amber.

Nationwide exposure has led to some interesting developments, police said. Several girls, including some runaways, have been found because of the publicity. One girl was found in Washington state and another in San Francisco, police said; both could have been Amber's twin sisters.

Since she disappeared, family members and the public have conducted numerous vigils and searches. The pain of losing a daughter and the frustration of fruitless searches has taken a toll on the family.

Maurice Dubois said he has been unable to return to work since his daughter went missing. McGonigle said every waking hour is consumed by her need to find Amber.

McGonigle moved out of the family home six weeks into the search, in part, she said, because reminders of what she had lost were all around. She now lives with a friend just a few blocks away.

"I couldn't function in the house where Amber lived," she said.

'Going through hell'

Amber's grandmother, a trial attorney, said she also has been unable to work.

"You vacillate between hope and despair," Welch said in a phone interview, her voice breaking as she spoke about a bracelet given to her by her daughter as a symbol of hope and faith. "I try to stay on that side (hope), but some days it's really hard."

A rift developed between Amber's mother and grandmother in September, but both McGonigle and Welch said they've moved past the split and are focused on finding Amber.

"I believe I raised three daughters that are individual thinkers," Welch said. "If they agreed with me 100 percent of the time, I would think I haven't been a good mother."

In her Escondido home one recent evening, McGonigle was folding T-shirts in preparation for a walkathon scheduled for Saturday to mark the one-year anniversary of Amber's disappearance.

Numerous pictures of her daughter hang in the hall. In the bedroom, a large calendar keeps track of Amber-related events she has scheduled.

Sitting in her living room earlier this month, McGonigle veered from nervous laughter to near tears. She said she had come to grips with the possibility that her daughter may be in a horrific situation, but she was not willing to concede that Amber may never come home.

"I know she is alive," she said.

"I mean, I don't know it for a fact, but everything in my heart tells me she is alive."

[Edward]

For dad, an 'unbelievable disaster'

"It is the most unbelievable disaster that can happen to a family," Maurice "Moe" Dubois, father of missing teen Amber Dubois, said last week in a telephone call from his Buena Park home. "You want everyone to drop everything no matter who they are and find your kid.

"It's hard to explain to a person what happens," he continued. "Everything changes, from your relationships with your family and friends to how you look at the world.

"It is a day-to-day struggle. I haven't been back to work. I can't work. I try. I am an electronic engineer ... but when I try to focus on that, I think about Amber and what I could be doing right now and where she is."
Dubois, 40, said he believes his daughter was taken by a stranger in a "brazen abduction," and he has come to grips with the "why": the sex trade, he suspects.

"She fit a specific criteria: a plain-looking white girl with baby fat," Dubois said of his daughter, age 14 when she disappeared.

When Moe Dubois was 16, his brother was the victim of a boating crash. Days passed before his brother's body was found.

"The difficult part was going a week without knowing what happened, because his body disappeared into the lake," he said. "Once he was found and we had closure, it was easier to move on."

With Amber, he said, "Our biggest struggle every day is not knowing. Is she waiting for us to walk in (and rescue her)?"

'This is my granddaughter'

About three years ago, animal-loving Amber Dubois spotted a dog at a horse farm, then matter-of-factly told grandmother Sheila Welch: "You need this puppy."

The girl handed the stubby-tailed Shar-Pei to the reluctant Welch ---- and the little dog promptly wet on her.

Still, the granddaughter prevailed; they brought the dog home.

Later, Welch would find herself turning to dogs to connect to Amber again. In August, she paid to bring trained canines from Maine to try to find the missing Escondido girl.

A trial lawyer living in the Los Angeles-area city of Paramount, Welch has given up her practice and poured her time and money into finding Amber. Welch, 70, said she is too distraught to work and has used her retirement money to fund searches.

"I can be fine and then all of a sudden, boom," Welch said. "No warning. It's not fair to my clients.

"The first time I went to court after Amber went missing, I got as far as 'Your Honor,' and then the tears came. The court went silent and I lost it. I reached into my briefcase, took out the 'missing' flier and said, 'This is my granddaughter.'"

Indeed, the family stress over the search for Amber led to two distinct camps: one headed by the missing girl's parents, the other headed by maternal grandmother Welch.

Last summer, Amber's parents said they wanted the police to lead the investigation and that Welch had taken too much control over the search. Welch brought in a public relations specialist against their wishes, hired a private investigator and controls a new trust fund set up for Amber.

The family fracture led to two separate Web sites and competing efforts for media attention.

Welch blamed the division on the sheer strain of searching for Amber and said the rift no longer remains. Amber's parents confirmed that their differences have been set aside.

Since Amber's disappearance, Welch's oldest dog has died and another has fallen ill. That leaves China, the stubby-tailed Shar-Pei, to comfort the grieving grandmother.

"She was right," Welch said. "I needed this dog."

A teenage cousin 'screaming inside'

Amber Dubois, 14, and her cousin, Kelly Elsbernd, 17, had a silly tradition when they were together. When the digital clock read 11:11, they would make a wish and then look away. If they looked back before the time changed to 11:12, the wish was lost.

In the last year, Kelly said, she has made the same wish every night: for Amber's safe return. And then she looks away for at least 20 minutes.

"Every moment I am screaming inside, wondering if she is OK, if she is alive," Kelly said.

The cousins were two years apart, and grew up as close as sisters. Their family referred to them simply as "the girls."

"I still have her number in my phone as my No. 1 on speed dial," said Kelly, a junior at an Anaheim high school. "Sometimes I still call her, hoping that maybe she will pick up."

Amber's phone has not given off a signal since the day after her disappearance.

"So many people ask if she ran away, ask if her family is bad," Kelly said. "It makes me angry, because they don't know her. ... There is just no way she would leave. Someone took her away."

Kelly said police questioned her during a three-hour interview at the Escondido police station last year.

"I really hated that tiny little room," she said. "Two big guys were staring at me saying, 'Do you know where Amber is?' And I didn't. It's not scary, it's just that they sit there asking questions, questions, questions.

"The only thing that scared me is the questions they were asking ---- I didn't have the answers."

A friend 'way past depression'

Jade Fidel was brittle long before her closest friend vanished. Now she feels broken.

When Jade was 5 years old, her mother was diagnosed with a degenerative illness and has since become disabled and bedridden.

Jade found comfort in her best friend, Amber Dubois, whom she met in middle school. They shared a love of animals, movies and books, especially the many vampire series so popular among teenage girls.

Now a sophomore at Escondido High School, Jade, 15, admits she has "really distanced myself" from other friends after Amber vanished. She also has dropped out of marching band.

Jade's father, Jeff Fidel, said his daughter has gone "way past depression," and her grades plummeted to the point where she is in catch-up classes.

Seated sideways on her living room couch, her legs stretched out, the teenager said she is trying to recover from the disappearance of her friend a year ago.

"I don't cry as often," she said. "I used to cry at the beginning, sometimes three times a day, sometimes 10. It was that way for the first 10 months. Now, I only cry maybe once a week, because, unfortunately, it is something I have to deal with, whether I like it or not."

http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/escondido/article_4b0627b5-3c79-5cf3-93dc-3bb32aecac88.html

[Tracygirl]

Thank you for posting the articles, they are simply heartbreaking to read. In my opinion though some of the information raises more questions. Prayers that some day these questions will all be answered and Amber will be found.

Many, many prayers are being sent to help ambers family some how get through this day. I am so sorry for your pain.   

[Edward]

This was not supposed to happen, this first anniversary marking Amber Dubois' disappearance.

How does a 14-year-old vanish in front of her high school on a crowded Escondido street just 20 minutes before school starts? Everyone is stumped about what happened to Amber after she was last seen at 7:09 a.m. on Feb. 13, 2009.

"I just never thought she would be gone this long," said her mother, Carrie McGonigle. "With nothing, no leads."

Amber, a shy, book-loving teen who had joined her high school's Future Farmers of America group, doesn't fit the profile of a typical runaway. Her family is convinced she was abducted for sex slavery.

In the cruel year since Amber vanished, her mother has found herself disappearing, too.

"I can't focus," McGonigle, 41, said. "I jump all over the place. I can't sit still. Like if I get a tip about a Web site or a blog. Like this one (tip), even though I knew it was deleted, I had to find it. For eight days, I got two hours of sleep until I found it."
In that instance, she said, she had been chasing an odd item found on an out-of-the-way Web site, a posting about a man who said he was keeping a 14-year-old girl in his basement. She found the posting and, as with every tip she gets, passed it on to police investigators. It turned out to be a dead end.

When she stops moving, when all is quiet, "That's when I start freaking out," she said. "How do I find the strength? I don't. People ask me that all the time: How do you keep going? I just have to, I don't have a choice. I have to keep looking for her. And I will."

That search has led her to follow even the vaguest tips.

"Just this week, this lady e-mailed me and said, 'I am not a psychic, but I was meditating and an address came to me,'" McGonigle said. "I never know. I'm not going to dismiss it."

So McGonigle, with a friend in tow, went to the local address at night, armed with flashlights and peeking into vans. They found nothing.

A different person, this one claiming to be a psychic, sent her to a place called Slab City, near the Salton Sea. "It's a wayward place where people live," she said. "It's a place that, if I woke up there, I wouldn't know how to get out or who to trust."

After a number of two-hour treks to the remote site, she learned that a teenager had been spotted out there. But it wasn't Amber.

Three times now, her efforts to meet with well-known psychics have fallen through.

Her search also includes traditional techniques. McGonigle works at Golden State Graphics, a San Marcos printing company. Most recently, she helped design a slick, glossy mailer and sent it to police agencies nationwide. It includes business-card size punchouts, each with Amber's photo, so officers from Washington to Florida can carry it with them if they choose to.

Next up is a mailer directed at high schools across the country.

This is on top of grabbing national media exposure, from talk shows to "America's Most Wanted" to seeing her daughter's picture on the cover of People magazine.

At night, she watches a videotape of her daughter. And throughout the day, she pushes for vigils and plans more searches.

"People ask me all the time, 'How are you so sure?' that she didn't run away," McGonigle said. "Everything she thought she was getting away with, I had already done. I'd go to the store, pull down the driveway, walk back up the hill and peek in the windows to check on her."

She said she sometimes peeked in Amber's backpack, or scrolled through her text messages. Nothing indicated the college-bound girl had a wild side.

"I would tell her, 'You are so boring,'" McGonigle said. "I just know 100 percent she didn't run away."

Six weeks after Amber disappeared, McGonigle moved out, leaving behind her longtime boyfriend, Dave Cave, and their daughter, who is now 6 years old.

"I couldn't function in the house where Amber lived," she said, sitting on the floor of her new residence, a few blocks from the old place. "It was too much. I couldn't be a mom to my little one. She would say something and I would snap."

These days, McGonigle's youngest child is getting counseling and spending much more time with her mother. McGonigle said being with the little girl keeps her sane.

In the weeks before Amber vanished, there had been two attempts by gun-toting strangers to abduct girls in inland North County. (Police said they were unable to find links between those incidents and Amber's disappearance.) The attempts prompted McGonigle to talk with Amber twice about abduction. She warned her daughter to be more alert and told her to "run like hell" if someone came after her.

"She said, 'Mom, I won't forget,'" McGonigle recalled. She said Amber added: "'And I know you'd find me.'"

http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/escondido/article_ab025bff-a153-5b3e-964e-8808b15a0735.html

 "'And I know you'd find me.'"

[Edward]

I am here to try to help find missing people by doing research. I also at times do searches of areas that I and others have done research on when LE and SAR teams fail to search these areas.
That is my purpose for being involved with the Scared Monkeys Web Site.
I appreciate RED and Klassend for offering us a place to do this research and to post it for family members and Law Enforcement to have access to this research.

Thank ALL Monkey members for doing research on all missing person cases.

Amber Must be found.

ALL missing Americans must be found.

In His Service.
Edward

[MuffyBee]

Thank you Edward.   

[ArmChairAnalysist]

I did go to the walk a thon this morning. I did not talk with anyone because I got there about an hour and a half into the event. I did see Amber's dad, he was running the track raising money for the continued search for Amber. He is a broken man, just my quick observation I could tell the only thing that man wants to hear is "we have found your daughter". I did not see Amber's mother, I'm guessing she was busy with the raffle and other stuff. It was a good turn out, but they really need more exposure to reach a larger scope of people. The town of Escondido residence can not fund the search for Amber alone.

I read the articles in the paper and I was very disappointed to hear that the police (with all their resources) does not know anything more than what the rest of us know. I just get the impression that they are going to sit on their hands till someone confesses.

I have two abandon sites that are in the 5 mile radius of the tower that I wish I could search. One is off 395 an old boarded up building about 500 feet from the road with plenty of vacant land around it. A big "No trespassing sign is posted". A few miles more up the road is an RV park where a sex offender lives or lived ( I did e-mail the RV park, but was told they don't give out that info).


The other location is off of Rincon Road. It was the future site of Hare Krishna's temple, but from the public notice sign next to it they lost the property on Feb 10th making it abandon. Another no trespassing sign. Also within the 5 mile radius of the cell tower.

I know the family is living with hope that Amber is alive and captive some where, but at this point hope has to be left in the hearts of the family.

[MuffyBee]

Thanks for bringing back your impressions from the Walk A Thon ArmChairAnalysist.    I'm sorry to hear there doesn't seem to be much going on with the case from LE aspect right now.     Seeing Amber's dad running the track raising money to continue the search would be bitter sweet, imo.  As a loving, caring parent he's doing what he can to help find his daughter and at the same time it's sad to see victim's families having to fund raise to continue the search.  I wonder if the town/county/state/police dept. could apply for and qualify for federal or state monies, or something from some of the victims' crime organizations.  All of those resources are possibly getting tapped out with the way the economy is, though.   Another thought would be if the FFA could help.    I realize that might not be their mission, but that is a BIG and older organization.  Just thoughts and hoping Amber will be found soon.  Thanks again ArmChairAnalysist. 

And about that RV park where the sex offender lived or lived...You may not be able to get information the RV park, but there are other ways to get information about the whereabouts of a sex offender.  Here is a website :  http://www.sexoffender.com/state.html  You can go to the state of CA like I did and you will see:

California
http://www.meganslaw.ca.gov
California maintains an online sex offender registry.
California provides information on sex offender registration requirements.  http://www.sexoffender.com/caso_laws.html  And this link is titled: "California Sex Offender Notification Megan's Law-Frequently Asked Questions" 

I hope the links are helpful. 

[Tracygirl]

So feeling helpless and hundreds of miles away, I am on google maps, street view right now. I think they shot this when kids were getting out of school as some are walking away from the school, some are waiting for rides and two kids are I think getting into a car on the side of the street.
If that happends a lot, kids are being picked up and dropped off from the side of broadway it may not be that difficult to imagine Amber being taken and no one noticing. There also seems to be a few pick up spots, all are after the bus parking lot. I think this again would make it not seem as strange to have a car parked on the side of the road. Maybe someone did see something but they didn't realize what they were seeing. The answer is right there, within 200 yards.

[sebastian]

I too was at the walk-a-thon today. The Master of Ceremonies was a local newscaster. He thought it would be a great idea if everyone would ask friends or relatives in other states to print some fliers and post some around their towns. It sure could not hurt. No only could it help find Amber, but it brings more awareness to missing people. One of my friends who came to walk at the vigil was unaware of how many missing people that there are in the United States. I think that a lot of people are unaware. I was unaware, before Amber went missing. I feel it is so vital to get the word out, so that we, as a country of caring people, will start paying attention to situations that "don't look right". I still feel in my heart that someone saw something the day that Amber went missing and perhaps don't even realize how important that it could be. As always, Amber's family members broke my heart. Moe was drenched in sweat doing lap after lap for his daughter. Carrie was running around doing 20 things at once. Amber's grandmother was talking with people and running the silent auction booth, encouraging people to bid for her Grandaughter. No family should have to go through this. EVER!

[sebastian]

So feeling helpless and hundreds of miles away, I am on google maps, street view right now. I think they shot this when kids were getting out of school as some are walking away from the school, some are waiting for rides and two kids are I think getting into a car on the side of the street.
If that happends a lot, kids are being picked up and dropped off from the side of broadway it may not be that difficult to imagine Amber being taken and no one noticing. There also seems to be a few pick up spots, all are after the bus parking lot. I think this again would make it not seem as strange to have a car parked on the side of the road. Maybe someone did see something but they didn't realize what they were seeing. The answer is right there, within 200 yards.

Too weird Tracy! We were both writing at the same time about "someone had to have seen something"!

[sebastian]

I did go to the walk a thon this morning. I did not talk with anyone because I got there about an hour and a half into the event. I did see Amber's dad, he was running the track raising money for the continued search for Amber. He is a broken man, just my quick observation I could tell the only thing that man wants to hear is "we have found your daughter". I did not see Amber's mother, I'm guessing she was busy with the raffle and other stuff. It was a good turn out, but they really need more exposure to reach a larger scope of people. The town of Escondido residence can not fund the search for Amber alone.

I read the articles in the paper and I was very disappointed to hear that the police (with all their resources) does not know anything more than what the rest of us know. I just get the impression that they are going to sit on their hands till someone confesses.

I have two abandon sites that are in the 5 mile radius of the tower that I wish I could search. One is off 395 an old boarded up building about 500 feet from the road with plenty of vacant land around it. A big "No trespassing sign is posted". A few miles more up the road is an RV park where a sex offender lives or lived ( I did e-mail the RV park, but was told they don't give out that info).


The other location is off of Rincon Road. It was the future site of Hare Krishna's temple, but from the public notice sign next to it they lost the property on Feb 10th making it abandon. Another no trespassing sign. Also within the 5 mile radius of the cell tower.

I know the family is living with hope that Amber is alive and captive some where, but at this point hope has to be left in the hearts of the family.

Can you give me the initials of the SO in the RV park that you are talking about? I think it may be the same one that I have felt hinky about for quite some time. It may also be the same one that someone told me that they went to his door and he supposedly no longer resides there. He is supposed to be registered and if he has moved, why has it not been updated? He is also a high risk SO.

[sebastian]

http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/escondido/article_ab025bff-a153-5b3e-964e-8808b15a0735.html?mode=image This is the photo of Carrie that I love with her dog. She was training him to be a search and rescue dog. That cutie helps to comfort her when she is having a horrible day. Mark Klaas spoke at the walk-a-thon vigil today as well. He thinks that all children 10 and older should have a cell phone. That got huge cheers from the kids in the crowd. He went down a list of things to help keep kids safe. Bob Benton of the Escondido Police Department also spoke. Many of the speakers were in awe of the fact that after a year, the same caring crowd has shown up to help support Amber's family. That says a lot of about Amber's family in my opinion.

[Edward]

[Edward]

Carrie McGonigle, mother of missing teen Amber Dubois, on the balcony of her Escondido home

http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/escondido/article_ab025bff-a153-5b3e-964e-8808b15a0735.html?mode=image

[sebastian]

Thank you Edward! I don't know how to put photos on here.

[ArmChairAnalysist]

Sebastian

That SO's name is MERRIL OLIVER TRACY, LAST KNOWN ADDRESS IS 30012 OLD HWY 395#82, ESCONDIDO, CA 92026. He has a kidnapping conviction. I did send and email to the RV park but the manager sent me back an email stating that they do not give out that information. At the time I was too angry to send her back check your sex offender registry Be-ach.

I take my camera with me every where I go and have pictures of the boarded up building. I use to drive that route every Monday a few years back (had a client in Temecula) and that property always had police chasing off transients. It has just been the last year that they put up the boards and block of the entrance with a No Trespassing sign.

Question: do you have to put photo's on line (photo bucket or Flicker) before you can insert it into the body of your response?

[Edward]

Right click on the image you want that is already posted some place online.. once you right click on it pick Properties.. Then highlight from the http ..all the way to the end of a JPG...NO MORE THEN THE JPG, Even if there is more.
copy and paste that in the middle of one of these ..

[Edward]

A vague description of a boy, a blurry videotape, a brief cell phone signal and two people who said they saw Amber Dubois the morning she disappeared one year ago ---- that is all Escondido police have to solve one of the most mystifying cases in the city's history.

On the morning of Friday, Feb. 13, 2009, 14-year-old Amber ate a bowl of cereal, slipped on a hoodie and jeans, walked to school and was never seen again.

Nothing appeared out of the ordinary that drizzly winter morning.

Her mother, Carrie McGonigle, awakened her to say goodbye before going to work. They spoke about a lamb that Amber, a freshman at Escondido High School, was looking forward to buying that day and raising as part of the school's Future Farmers of America program.

"I went over and I gave her a kiss, and I said, 'I'll be home from work early. We'll go see a movie tonight,'" McGonigle said.

The case of the missing teen has garnered national media attention. Teams of searchers have fanned throughout the region, and police departments across the nation have been blanketed with fliers. Private investigators, FBI agents and lost-children advocacy groups have helped in the search.

Still, Amber seems to have vanished.

Detectives from the Escondido Police Department, the lead agency in the case, are baffled and frustrated, but they have not given up.

"This is still an open case," said Lt. Bob Benton. "The case will remain open as long as she is missing."

Disappeared

Each year, more than 500 people, most of them children, are reported missing in Escondido, police said. Most are found within days. In typical cases, there's an explanation. Most of them are children who leave home because of disagreements with their parents. Few are abducted, police said.

Amber's case doesn't fit neatly into any of those categories, police said.

"Amber has no history of running away before," said Detective Beverly Marquez, who has 15 years of experience working missing-person cases. "She's a pretty good kid, kind of a bookworm. She enjoys school, and there was nothing to show that she planned on running away."

Amber did not take any extra clothes. She did not take any extra money. She left nothing to suggest she was unhappy, police said.

There is no evidence she was taken by force, either, said Sgt. John Russo, who is in charge of the investigation.

"In 99 percent of the cases that we get, we have something that takes us down one of those paths," Russo said. "We have cell phone calls, we have letters, we have notes, we have something to say, 'Oh, yeah, she runs away once a week.' We have something that gives us a pattern. We don't have that here."

Bookish girl

Amber, who was crazy about wolves, had a peculiar walk, her mother said ---- a slow, bouncing stride that resembled her father's. Maurice "Mo" Dubois, an Orange County electrical engineer, and McGonigle separated when Amber was a baby.

McGonigle also has a 6-year-old, a daughter by Dave Cave, a former longtime boyfriend. Depending on her mood, Amber sometimes referred to him as her stepfather, Cave said. The couple and the two children lived in Cave's Escondido home on Fire Mountain Place, about a half mile from the high school.

Cave was the last family member to see Amber that morning. He gave her the $200 check she needed to buy the lamb. Amber was sitting in the living room of their two-story home, eating a bowl of cereal, as Cave walked out the door about 6 a.m. on his way to the gym, he said.

Amber's younger sister was with her grandmother, Sheila Welch, a Los Angeles-area lawyer.

After Cave left that morning, police know little about what happened to Amber. A couple of neighbors told police they spotted her on her way to school. A boy was seen walking next to her minutes before she went missing.

On Saturday, Feb. 14, 2009, Amber's cell phone was turned on briefly and then went silent, police said.

Since then, police said they have received more than 1,600 leads. They have interviewed about 600 people. The case has filled about a dozen 5-inch-thick binders.

But they still don't know what happened to Amber.

Videotape

The last time anyone saw Amber that Friday morning was about 7:09 a.m., police say.

She was walking south on North Broadway near Escondido High School's athletic field. Had she walked another 200 yards, past the school's football stadium, Amber may have come within view of a security camera mounted on top of the gym.

"Every morning, she meets her friends, believe it or not, right under the video camera," Benton said.

A neighbor who had dropped his son off at school said he noticed Amber walking on the sidewalk as he drove north on Broadway. Another neighbor who was heading south on the same road to drop off her son said she nearly stopped to give Amber a ride because it was drizzling that morning.

She told police she did not stop because she believed Amber was walking with a boy, Benton said. Both neighbors were seen on the school's security camera video dropping their kids off within minutes of each other, between 7:08 a.m. and 7:10 a.m.

The young man is described as tall and dark-skinned, about high school age. No one has come forward to identify him or even to verify he was walking with Amber and wasn't just someone walking past her.

Police said he may have been the last person to see her.

"To this day, we have yet to identify who this boy is," Benton said. "But we believe he holds the key to what happened to her."

Typical day

On any typical school day, North Broadway is a commuter's nightmare shortly before school starts at 7:30 a.m. Hundreds of vehicles crowd the four-lane road as parents drop off their children at the high school.

On Feb. 13, 2009, the road was even busier and harder to navigate, say school officials and police. More parents drove their kids to school because of the wet weather.

Construction trucks delivering material to the school also were lined up by the curb near the football stadium, forcing parents to drop off their students farther north on the road and closer to where Amber was last seen, Benton said.

"Based on the amount of traffic and the amount of people (in the area), her being kidnapped off the street is not likely," Benton said. "If there was a commotion, it would have been seen by somebody."

The following Tuesday, police set up a roadblock at the northern end of the school, where Amber was last seen, to question everyone traveling through the area. They asked whether anyone had seen anything. They also asked the parents who saw her last to look at yearbooks to see whether they could identify the boy.

Their efforts yielded nothing.

Unlike the police, family members don't believe the boy may be the key to unraveling the mystery of Amber's disappearance. They say the girl that people saw may not have been Amber at all, and the boy may simply have been someone walking by.

Amber, who was wearing black jeans and a black hoodie that day, was probably wearing her hood up because of the rain, making her difficult to recognize even for those who knew her, said Welch, her grandmother.

"When you're walking along Broadway and people are wearing hoodies, it's very difficult to spot someone," she said.

Dead ends

The next day, Amber's cell phone was turned on, police said. Someone attempted to check the phone's voice mail. The signal was picked up by a cell tower on Amber Lane in northern Escondido. The tower covers a five-mile radius, which means the phone could have been just about anywhere in Escondido.

Police issued an emergency alert phone call to homes in the area asking whether anyone had seen Amber, but again, they found nothing.

The investigation has produced countless dead ends, police said. Promising leads have withered under closer scrutiny.

Early in their investigation, police said they were looking for a red truck that was seen on the school's blurry security tape for a moment shortly before Amber's disappearance. Police sent the video to Department of Defense image laboratories for sophisticated analysis.

The truck was identified as an early 2000s model red Dodge Ram with aftermarket chrome rails and running boards.

Detectives later learned that the truck belonged to the parent of a student at the high school. They questioned the parent and determined the truck probably had nothing to do with the girl's disappearance.

Fruitless searches

In their investigation, Escondido police have worked with FBI agents and investigators with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They have contacted law enforcement in Canada (Amber has extended family in Montreal), Mexico and across the globe.

Amber's father, mother and her mother's longtime boyfriend all voluntarily took and passed polygraph tests shortly after the teen vanished, police said.

The case has been featured on several television shows, including "America's Most Wanted," "The Tyra Banks Show" and "The Steve Wilkos Show." Family members believe publicity may be the key to finding Amber.

Nationwide exposure has led to some interesting developments, police said. Several girls, including some runaways, have been found because of the publicity. One girl was found in Washington state and another in San Francisco, police said; both could have been Amber's twin sisters.

Since she disappeared, family members and the public have conducted numerous vigils and searches. The pain of losing a daughter and the frustration of fruitless searches has taken a toll on the family.

Maurice Dubois said he has been unable to return to work since his daughter went missing. McGonigle said every waking hour is consumed by her need to find Amber.

McGonigle moved out of the family home six weeks into the search, in part, she said, because reminders of what she had lost were all around. She now lives with a friend just a few blocks away.

"I couldn't function in the house where Amber lived," she said.

'Going through hell'

Amber's grandmother, a trial attorney, said she also has been unable to work.

"You vacillate between hope and despair," Welch said in a phone interview, her voice breaking as she spoke about a bracelet given to her by her daughter as a symbol of hope and faith. "I try to stay on that side (hope), but some days it's really hard."

A rift developed between Amber's mother and grandmother in September, but both McGonigle and Welch said they've moved past the split and are focused on finding Amber.

"I believe I raised three daughters that are individual thinkers," Welch said. "If they agreed with me 100 percent of the time, I would think I haven't been a good mother."

In her Escondido home one recent evening, McGonigle was folding T-shirts in preparation for a walkathon scheduled for Saturday to mark the one-year anniversary of Amber's disappearance.

Numerous pictures of her daughter hang in the hall. In the bedroom, a large calendar keeps track of Amber-related events she has scheduled.

Sitting in her living room earlier this month, McGonigle veered from nervous laughter to near tears. She said she had come to grips with the possibility that her daughter may be in a horrific situation, but she was not willing to concede that Amber may never come home.

"I know she is alive," she said.

"I mean, I don't know it for a fact, but everything in my heart tells me she is alive."