a teenager disappears. come home. police. amber never made it right then. somebody had her. kept us up at night. going over in your head, what happened in front of the school? then another gone. she s such a good girl. she needs to come home. there s a lot of desperation. maybe she s tied up somewhere. maybe she s being held captive. two missing girls, one man. a secret. did you get any sense of the sort of personality you are dealing with? yes, psychotic. he came up and it came right here, the edge and he says, right there. two families, two mysteries. two journeys for justice. if 11 can be learned from amber, then i wanted out there. on the evening of february 12th, 2009, in a hillside house north of san diego, count fournié. the negotiation was finally complete. the girl had one. i made her writer one page letter to me, and she made it two pages but repeat yourself multiple times to make it longer. i m like, okay. she pestered her mother, kar
else as well, the most important discovery yet, inside that clothing was a second person s dna, and the lab got a hit. it came back to a sex registry. chelsea s parents were standing beside him. did you tell them that? no i didn t. but the tour was not over, sort of ground gathered his team. we have the name, and a prison number, and we need to find out everything we can about this person. the dna match was to a convicted sex offender, named john gardner, a man who had spent five years in prison for a sex assault back in 2000. is it a mixed blessing that it comes back to a sex register? don time in prison? that is not a positive note, but at least we knew who and where he was. we knew we were going to close in. the search for gardner began that afternoon, we sent undercover people to watch the houses that might be
afternoon, more likely they will never know. strange, the difference a week can make, it was april 15 five days after the interview. amber s parents were called into the meeting, where they learned for the first time, who led authorities to their daughters remain. we knew something significant, we had to meet with a district attorney. and they were informed of an offer made by john gardner s attorneys. his attorneys came forward with an offer to plead guilty. to all of the charges, life without possibility of parole. and waving his appellate rights. in exchange, gardner s attorney wanted the death penalty off the table. so, her dilemma. should she continue to develop her strong death penalty case in the murder of chelsea king? should she wait for the task force to link gardner to amber s death to?
for amber, for chelsea. i beg you, please, put one minute of effort, one minute action, into helping protect our children. and when that was going on, investigators searched seriously for any evidence that would independently link zhang gardner to the death of amber dubois. what that included was finding every vehicle that he had, at the time or access to at the time that amber disappeared. i believe there was four different vehicles we had to find, where every one of those vehicles were. have them forensically examined. the investigation continued. the days ticked from march into april, when we sat with amber s parents. remember, they had not been told that gardner led police to amber s remains. or, even that gardner was known to be the man who abducted and killed her. we asked them if they were prepared never to know for certain who killed amber? or how police found her? it may be that nobody is
then out of the blue, in mid interview, said the detectives, gardner surprised them. he brought up a name. the name of a girl who had disappeared more than a year earlier. a photo of chelsea is sitting in front of him, at some point he says, you guys in a sense we re probably going to try and figure me for the amber girl s disappearance. he asked where she was, and he wouldn t even pronounce her last name properly. at that point, the officer, say gordon began laughing hysterically. he rolled back in the chair, did a full billy laugh. he left for an extended period of time. at some point, you re going that is, it you are not going to get anything out of the sky. correct, we definitely knew going out of there who was guilty, there was nothing he could do at that point. nothing but double the effort to find chelsea. still, chelsea s parents could not help but hope the arrest of gardner had brought him a step closer to finding their daughter. it gave us hope that chelsea