The Amber Swartz Case / June 1988 / SOLVED / Pinole CA

[Edward]

Curtis Dean Anderson, who died in prison after kidnapping two young girls and murdering one of them a decade ago, also kidnapped and killed a 7-year-old girl who disappeared from in front of her Pinole home in 1988, police said today.

The disappearance of Amber Swartz-Garcia was one of a string of such crimes that shook the Bay Area in the late 1980s. Three girls, including Amber, vanished within seven months, and none was ever found.

At a news conference today with Amber's mother, Kim Swartz, Pinole Police Chief Paul Clancy said Anderson confessed to the FBI shortly before he died in prison in 2007 that he kidnapped Amber on June 3, 1988, and killed her in Arizona. Authorities spent the past year and a half confirming details of what Anderson confessed to and believe he was telling the truth, Clancy said.

Anderson also "confessed to a number of other open homicide cases," Clancy said, but investigators would not reveal any details.

FBI Special Agent Marty Parker, who interviewed Anderson, said one thing was clear: "This guy is a true psychopath. There's not too many true psychopaths out there."

Anderson was driving through Pinole when he saw Amber standing outside her home, Clancy said. Anderson admitted that he grabbed her, put her in his car and then sedated her with root beer Schnapps "because it was better than duct tape," the chief said.

"He said he was driving to Arizona and decided to take someone with him for company," Clancy said. "In a case of tragic timing, Amber was standing in front of her house at the exact moment Anderson randomly drove through her neighborhood."

Anderson said he killed Amber in a motel in the Tucson area and dumped her body in the desert not far from his aunt's ranch in Benson off Interstate 10, Clancy said. Her body hasn't been found and may have been carried away by wild animals, the chief said. He said authorities do not know how the girl died.

Anderson tried at first to bring Amber's body to Mexico but was turned away by Mexican police because he was drunk, Clancy said.

Kim Swartz, who pleaded for tips after her daughter disappeared and became a crusader for child safety, said she had hoped it wasn't Anderson who killed Amber.

"I think it's because I know what he's done to her, I know what he's done to others, and the fact we can't have her means to me it's not as final as I'd like for it to be," she said. "I would like something of hers to prove it, and I know after 21 years that's close to impossible."

She began weeping as she added, "I hang on to the fact that I had her for at least seven years. I just have to learn to be thankful for what I did have."

Anderson showed no remorse when he was interviewed by FBI agents Charles Dorsey and Marty Parker at Corcoran State Prison on Nov. 5, 2007, authorities said. Pinole police were present during the 5 1/2-hour interview. Anderson died of liver and kidney problems Dec. 12, 2007, at the age of 46 before a second interview could be conducted.

Anderson was serving a sentence of more than 300 years in prison for kidnapping and sexually assaulting two young girls.

He was already serving a 251-year sentence for the 2000 abduction and sexual assault of an 8-year-old Vallejo girl when he was charged with the 1999 kidnapping, sexual assault and killing of 7-year-old Xiana Fairchild of Vallejo. Xiana disappeared as she walked to school Dec. 9, 1999, and her skull was found on a road east of Los Gatos two years later. Her initial disappearance sparked a massive search in the Bay Area.

Anderson pleaded guilty to murder, kidnapping and molesting charges in December 2005.

Police released a copy of Anderson's handwritten confession today to Amber's killing. It read, "I, Curtis Dean Anderson, under no threats, coercion or promise, make the following statement. If there is no pursuit of the death penalty, I will freely admit my role in being responsible for the death of Amber Swartz-Garcia."

Pinole police and the FBI spent the last year and a half corroborating Anderson's statements, Clancy said, and the investigation is now closed.

"We are closing it because we believe Curtis Dean Anderson is the killer of Amber Swartz," Clancy said.

But without Amber's body or any other physical evidence, it will be difficult to find closure, said Swartz, who kept age-enhanced photos in her office showing what her daughter may look like today.

"That's the hard part. We don't have her, we don't have anything of hers, her jump rope, her clothes, her shoes, a bone out of her finger - we have nothing," Swartz said.

After today's news conference, Swartz and several friends drove to the street where she used to live. Next door is Amber Swartz Park, dedicated to her daughter in 2006.

Mindy Kaplan, 53, walked through the park this morning with Beauty, her retriever mix. "It's sad," she said. "It was sad when they decided to name the park after her. We hear about a child being abducted and killed. I think it must be terrifying."

Amber was the first of three girls in the Bay Area to be abducted over a string of seven months. Nine-year-old Michaela Garecht was snatched in a Hayward grocery store parking lot Nov. 19, 1988, by a stranger in an older model vehicle. On Jan. 30, 1989, 13-year-old Ilene Misheloff vanished while walking to her Dublin home.

The FBI said today that the girls' disappearances remain open cases. However, Parker, said Michaela's vanishing was not among the cases being investigated in connection with Anderson. She did not directly address Ilene's disappearance.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/06/BAGM18JPRT.DTL&tsp=1

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Jul 6, 2009 5:39 pm
Police: Missing Pinole Girl Mystery Solved

The mystery of Amber Swartz-Garcia, a 7-year-old Pinole girl who disappeared after going to jump rope outside her home 21 years ago, has been solved, police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation said Monday.

However, the girl's mother remained skeptical of the claim because her daughter's body has never been found.

Notorious convicted killer Curtis Dean Anderson made a signed confession in November 2007 — a month before dying in prison — that he kidnapped and killed Amber, Pinole Police Chief Paul Clancy announced at a news conference.

Police and FBI investigators said they believe him after spending the past 18 months corroborating the story.

"Everything that he's done indicates he's the type of person who can do this," Clancy said.

"This man is a convicted child molester a convicted murderer," added FBI Special Agent Marty Parker said. "We have a signed confession. At some point you have to say 'We've done everything we can.'"

Anderson, 46, died of natural causes on Dec. 12, 2007, before investigators were able to conduct any follow-up interviews. His death came while he was serving a prison sentence of more than 300 years for kidnapping and sexually assaulting two other young girls from Vallejo.

He was sentenced to 251 years for the 2000 abduction and sexual assault of 8-year-old Midsi Sanchez, who subsequently escaped. He was then sentenced to another 50 years to life after pleading guilty to the 1999 kidnapping, molestation and murder of 7-year-old Xiana Fairchild, whose partial remains were found in the Santa Cruz Mountains in January 2001.

Anderson had not been a suspect in Amber's disappearance until his arrest in 2000, the police chief said.

Then, during a lengthy interview on Nov. 5, 2007 at Corcoran State Prison with the FBI, Anderson admitted kidnapping and killing Amber, officials told reporters.

When asked how Anderson managed to avoid suspicion in Amber's abduction for so long, the FBI's Parker said that Anderson was a "very smart, cunning man."

She said he was also a loner -- he never had anyone help him commit his crimes and he never told anyone what he had done, she explained.

An FBI profiler who was present during the interview told investigators that Anderson was "a true psychopath," Parker said, and that he showed "absolutely no remorse" for his crimes.

While announcing the case was closed, police distributed copies of Anderson's brief handwritten statement that read, "If there is no pursuit of the death penalty, I will freely admit my role in being responsible for the death of Amber Swartz-Garcia."

Anderson told authorities he was driving to Arizona and decided to "take someone with him for company," Clancy said.

"In a case of tragic timing, Amber was standing in front of her house (on Savage Avenue) at the exact moment Anderson randomly drove through her neighborhood," Clancy said. "He opened the car door and pulled her in."

Anderson told investigators he kept Amber "sedated with root beer Schnapps because it was better than duct tape," and killed her at a motel room in the Tucson area before disposing of her body, according to Clancy.

Amber is believed to have died within a day and a half of her abduction on June 3, 1988.

Anderson claimed he put Amber's body in the trunk of his car and tried to cross the border into Mexico to dispose of it, but Mexican authorities didn't let him through because he was too drunk, Clancy said.

He later disposed of Amber's body in a remote, open desert area off Highway 10 near Benson, Arizona where it was likely carried away by animals, Clancy said.

Investigators confirmed that Anderson was in the Pinole area at the time of Amber's abduction and also that he had ties to Benson, Arizona, where his aunt had a ranch, Clancy said. However, they weren't able to find physical evidence in the old case.

Amber's mother, Kim Swartz, said the lack of hard evidence was difficult.

"We don't have her. We don't have anything of hers. Her jump rope, her clothes, her shoes, a bone out of her finger. We have nothing," she said.

She added that over the two decades since Amber's disappearance, many people have contacted her and given false confessions to killing Amber, all of which turned out to be false.

Swartz said she had always "known in my heart that it's going to be a hard case to solve. I just really always hoped that we would at least have something that we could at some point bury with her father."

Amber's father, Pinole police officer Floyd "Bernie" Harold Swartz, was killed while pursuing a murder parolee in 1980. (The suspect, James Odle, was later arrested and sentenced to death.)

His wife was pregnant with Amber at the time of his shooting death.

"I almost lost her at the time my husband died and I had made a prayer that if I could be allowed to keep her only for a little while just to not lose her then," Kim Swartz said. "And I got that little while."
http://cbs5.com/local/amber.swartz.missing.2.1073503.html

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The San Francisco Chronicle (California)
July 7, 2009 Tuesday
 
Killer, now blamed in girl's death, a 'monster'
 
Everyone, it seems, hated Curtis Dean Anderson.

Except his mother. And even she had doubts.

After dropping out of school at 13, Anderson spent the rest of his 46 years in and out of prison for boozing, thieving, false imprisonment and dozens of other charges. When he confessed to kidnapping and killing 7-year-old Xiana Fairchild of Vallejo in 1999, his neighbors said they were afraid of him, his lawyer called him a liar, and his own brother said he would have killed him if he was one of his victim's parents.

So on Monday, when Pinole police announced they concluded that Anderson kidnapped and killed 7-year-old Amber Swartz-Garcia in 1988, the reaction of revulsion had an almost weary character to it.

"He was an absolute monster," said Xiana's great-aunt, Stephanie Kahalekulu, who raised the girl for several years before she disappeared. "He has no conscience, no heart, no feeling for another human being."

Kahalekulu played a cat-and-mouse game with Anderson for years before he pleaded guilty in 2005 to Xiana's murder, and in doing so she came to know his mind as well as most of the investigators did. He wrote letters to her and taunted her when she visited him behind bars, claiming one day to know nothing, and then the next saying Xiana was still alive but that he had killed other people.

Kahalekulu said she fully believed Anderson was capable of killing Amber, and that the investigators working that case had done exhaustive research. But she agreed with Amber's mother, Kim Swartz, that there would never be emotional closure on the case unless physical evidence turns up.

Without remains of the girl or her belongings to tie everything together, there will always be the possibility that Anderson was lying "to get a joy ride out of it," Kahalekulu said.

Indeed, in a 2001 interview with The Chronicle, Anderson took obvious delight in recounting different methods of molesting girls, and smirked as he first bragged about killing Xiana and others, and then said, "Maybe I'm full of s-."

"I like to keep you all guessing," he said with a chuckle.

No further information will be coming from Anderson, who died in prison in 2007 after confessing that he had killed Amber and possibly others. But even back in 2000, after he was convicted of abducting and sexually assaulting an 8-year-old girl who escaped his clutches, relatives and neighbors of the middle-class home in Vallejo where he grew up were eager to be free of him and his mouth.

"A true -hole," one neighbor told The Chronicle at the time, adding that he was too afraid to give his name. "Argued all the time. Threatened. I always thought he'd kill someone."

Anderson had "no respect, no care, no concern for people," his brother, Zack Anderson, told the San Jose Mercury News then.

If the abducted 8-year-old "was my kid, Curtis Anderson would be dead already," the brother said.

When Curtis Anderson started saying in 2001 that he had kidnapped Xiana and 11 other girls over the past 30 years, his lawyer, Carl Spieckerman, said the confessions were probably a manipulative lie.

"I'm really kind of pissed," Spieckerman said then. "He may have a death wish."

The only one, it seems, who continues to give Anderson the benefit of the doubt is his mother, Corinne Anderson of Fairfield.

She gave birth to Anderson in April 1961 at Vallejo General Hospital, and as she raised him and his three siblings, the home became a dysfunctional horror.

According to probation reports, her sheet-metal worker husband beat her in drunken rages. Curtis Anderson, the reports said, sometimes defended her and got smacked for his trouble.

The kidnapping and murder convictions "made no sense at all," Corinne Anderson said Monday. "Curtis was just a normal kid. He liked to play baseball, ride his bike. I don't know what could have gone wrong.

"I just don't know," she said. "It's all very confusing."

Criminal justice experts, however, look at Anderson's record, confessions and behavior over the years as good indicators that investigators have it right about his involvement in Amber's disappearance.

"Certainly someone who had developed a bizarre taste for taking young children would unfortunately be prone to doing it again," said Richard Ofshe, a UC Berkeley sociology professor emeritus and specialist in police interrogations. "If you can corroborate it, why would you doubt him when he confesses?" 
 
Curtis Dean Anderson was already sentenced for killing Xiana Fairchild. 
http://www6.lexisnexis.com/publisher/EndUser?Action=UserDisplayFullDocument&orgId=574&topicId=100020825&docId=l:1001979258&start=10