man: you re sure it s here? keith morrison: (voiceover) but as the searchers scoured the immediate area, they understood it couldn t be her. the bits of clothing weren t right and the bone was bleached by the sun. must have been there a long time. and when they looked closely that s a six foot something. it s not a 5 foot 5 female. keith morrison: (voiceover) appalling, some other poor soul wound up here, but relief too it wasn t michelle. so the search and the mystery wore on for days and then for weeks. and by the middle of august, it all looked to be losing steam. on a typical san francisco summer afternoon as the fog rolled in, christine and michael brought us up to date on their efforts to find michelle. how long has it been now? it s been over two months. it s been about 72 days.
much of it out of the family s own pockets. so every day was precious, said her brother michael. and every day that passed a missed opportunity to find her. you know, she was always looking for me. and so i this was my time to do everything i can to look out for her, to make sure that the hell that she was going through she wouldn t have to go through a day longer. so you must have this sense that any day now we ll find her and we ll bring her back and everything will be ok again. every day we were hoping that today was the day. you know, every day. keith morrison: it was obvious, as we talked to michael, the intensity of his devotion for michelle. the reason for that? he told us a story about their mother. our mom was pretty much our superhero. she worked long hours as a nurse practitioner and she was an incredible mother to us. she was so loving. she would always tell us stories and
christine: her cell phone last pinged there. so, you know, they tracked where her cell phone ended up after she disappeared. and it s all around the rural [inaudible].. it s such a huge area. keith morrison: (voiceover) it was 100 degrees in the waning days of summer. and it seemed to have impacted turnout as the number of volunteers dwindle. suddenly, the search leader called in the discovery. some female clothing partially buried in the sand. connie, i m down by the creek. it s a woman s underwear by the tree. almost like light pink, white. keith morrison: (voiceover) it is, it turns out, another false lead. so they pack up. another fruitless day in a case gone cold. or so it seemed to michael and christine. but oh, what they did not know. that during all those weeks and months in which the family had been searching for a living woman, a police murder investigation had been very active indeed.
she told me a story about how after her mom passed away she didn t even know what to do at first until she saw michael in the garage holding something of his mom s and crying. she told me, you know, that was the time i knew it was time to be a big sister and be a mother figure for him. overcome her own sense of loss and save this boy. oh, yeah. so you couldn t even tell she s having any trouble. she made a sort of commitment to between her and i that she would look out for me. keith morrison: but not just michael. michelle also kept watch over krystine. she was my like my older sister. she dressed me, she helped tweeze my eyebrows, she taught me how to do make-up. taught you about boys. yeah, we talked about boys all the time. she helped me write my first love letters. oh my gosh, when we were growing up we were so alike that my family called me mini michelle.
michelle needed to be rescued. it s a time critical situation. every second that you waste is a second that she s hurting. we had to find her. narrator: saturday afternoon, 18 hours after michelle vanished, michael and a group of michelle s friends met with inspector fraser ritchie at the hayward police department. we had about 10 or 15 family members and classmates and friends at the police department. they were all talking about how responsible she was, how out of character this would have been for her to just get up and leave. did you try to call michelle or anything? yes. get a response? yes. i sent a message out, this is inspector ritchie of the hayward police department. you need to get a hold of me right now. yeah. i got the response within several minutes, saying that my phone is dying. i need to find a charger. i m having car trouble. narrator: the same sort of response received by michelle s friends and family, who had now decided based on those weird text messages