Dead And Buried by Corey Mitchell Read Free Book Online

assurances. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes a number of these before police realize a pattern, like four or five.”
    Some of the residents were tired of the terror. Some expresseda strong desire to move out of their little oasis because of the crimes. Erica Ruiz seriously contemplated packing up her stuff and moving out. “It scared me because it’s so close to home,” she recalled. “This definitely is encouragingme to move. I’m thinking about it even more.”
    Her husband, Benjie, weighed in on the latest disappearance:“I’ve been here twenty-two years and never seen anything like this. Tourism could drop because of this, and there might be a drop of students who come to Cal Poly.”
    Captain Topham knew it was going to be rough. He could sense that the people of his community were changing. The humble little area, hidden off the 101 Freeway, engulfed in the grassy, mountainous protective arms of the Nine Sisters volcanoes, was no longer a safe haven.
    “I think things are changing, and we’ve just been incrediblylucky for a long time,” observed Topham.
    Now he hoped he could be lucky in tracking down another missing college student. He hoped he was lucky, not for his sake or even the sake of his town, but because of concern for one person—Aundria Crawford.
    The prospects for finding her were not positive. Despite extensive searches for four months, the authorities in San Luis Obispo had never located Rachel Newhouse. Her uncle Peter Morreale had reached a point of resignation upon the news of Aundria’s disappearance. He was no longer optimisticthat the police would find Rachel: “After four months it doesn’t look real good that she’s alive.”
    The spring of 1999 had gotten off to a rotten start, even beforeAundria’s mysterious disappearance. On February 16 a mother, Carole Sund, her daughter, Juli, and foreign exchange student Silvina Pelosso disappeared from the Cedar Lodge in El Portal, California, near the basin of the Yosemite National Park. The three women were celebrating Juli’s participation in the American Spirit Association cheerleading competition and had decided to take a side trip to the famed park of naturalwonders before returning to their home in Eureka, California. The last time anyone saw the three women, they had just eaten at the Cedar Lodge Restaurant at 7:35 P.M. No one had seen or heard from them since.
    Carole’s husband, Jens Sund, and her parents, Francis and Carol Carrington, relocated to El Portal in an attempt to locatetheir daughter, granddaughter, and charge. They scoured high and low in the mountains and valleys outside and insidethe park. They checked gullies in case Carole’s red Pontiac Grand Prix rental car may have plunged over the side. They checked old mines. The kidnappers may have tossed their bodies into deep chasms off the roads of the mountainousarea. They interviewed several former convicts who populated the outskirts of the park in secluded trailer homes, but they found nothing.
    The combination of Rachel Newhouse’s disappearance and the three missing women from Yosemite had everyone on edge in Central California. Emotions were even tauter in San Luis Obispo after Aundria Crawford’s disappearance.Captain Topham organized two neighborhood searches on Friday, March 12, and a more thorough search the following day. By Monday, March 15, the police called the searches off. Captain Topham had to concede that AundriaCrawford had more likely than not been abducted. The break-in at her apartment, the blood on the floor, the missingitems, and the Mustang in the driveway all pointed to her disappearance as a kidnapping.
    Police Chief Jim Gardiner informed the media that the Aundria Crawford investigation would include possible kidnapping and maybe murder.
    “We’re hoping that’s not the case,” he cautiously intoned.
    Captain Topham continued his stubborn refusal to acknowledgethat the Crawford and Newhouse disappearances had any correlation.