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. and now in the last days of august, inspector fraser ritchie was in fact closing in on a very hot target. but to understand how he got there, we need to go back almost to the beginning. it was minutes before midnight, may 28th, 2011. 29 hours after michelle le disappeared. ritchie had gone to pay a midnight visit to michelle s old high school friend, giselle esteban. months in which the family had
every second that you waste is second that she s hurting, we have to find her. saturday afternoon, 18 hours after michel vanished, michael and a group of michel s friends met with inspector fraser rishi at the police department. we had about ten 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 ve been for her to just get up and leave. did you try to call michelle or anything? did you get a response. yes. i sentimental job, this is detective richie, you need to get a hold of me right now. i got the response within several minutes saying that my phone is dying, i need to find a charger, i m having car trouble. the same sort of response received by michelle s friends and family. who had now decided, based on those weird text messages that michele had been kidnapped. but, as far as inspector richie was concerned, just about anything was possible. i kept an open mi
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. how are you doing, the two of you, with all this? i mean, how are you holding up? it s just we re just trying to stay active and just trying to keep the word out and trying to stay positive. right. it s just really trying to stay positive is the hardest part. christine: the hardest times for me are at night. getting in bed and thinking, gosh, i wish michelle s in the i hope michelle s in the bed. yeah. i mean, you clearly have decided she s still alive. mm-hm. it s not over and it s not going to be over until we get her home. keith morrison: (voiceover) and so that very evening, they hosted a fundraising
back in hayward, the police may have been accomplishing something, but they were saying nothing, beyond their belief that michele was dead. as far as the family could tell, the police investigation seemed to get nowhere. now, the family s own private investigator seem lost in the weeds as well. hoping to shake loose a lead, they increase the amount of the reward money. from 20, 000, to 40, 000, to 65, 000, to $100,000. all from private donations. much of, it out of the family s own pocket. so, every day was precious, said her brother michael. every day that passed, a missed opportunity to find her. she was always looking out for me. so, this was my time to do everything i could to look out for her. to make sure, what she was going through, she wouldn t have to go through one day longer. you must have had this sense, any day now, you will find, her and bring her back, and everything will be
okay? every day, we were hoping today was the day. every day. it was obvious, as we talk to michael, the intensity of his devotion. for michelle. the reason for that? he told us a story about their mother. my mom was, pretty much, our superhero. she worked the long hours, and she was a kind, loving mother to us. she always told us stories. stories about what? one that we always loved, it was one called the woman on the moon. it is a vietnamese love story about, how if you look hard enough, the shadows of the moon almost looked like a woman with long, flowing hair. and, at the same day of year, she would come down to look for the one she loved. but, ultimately, she was trapped on the moon, only to watch over him. folklore, the kind of reality that is like armor for a child. it protects, in a time of terror. michael was 11, when his mother learned she had breast cancer, but she did not tell him. she protected him from the worst of it, both he, and it s 14 of, systematize. so,