The Last Place You'd Look by Carole Moore Read Free Book Online Page B

followed up by RCSO investigators. None brought home the gold, though.
    Then the Baskin case was assigned to Bill Sharp and Dan Goodwin. Sharp has worked for the sheriff’s office since 1993. With headquarters in the county seat of Murfreesboro, the RCSO is the fifth-largest jurisdiction in the Volunteer s tate. It lies southeast of Nashville.
    The lieutenant’s voice is soft and polite, laced with the distinctive twang of his home state. Sharp says he and Goodwin were transferred from criminal investigations and put into cold cases to work homicides, but his captain had investigated the Baskin abductions when they first occurred and asked them to take another look. They did.
    They worked the case like it had just happened, interviewing the original detectives and following up on telephone numbers and leads. When a tip from a woman who recognized the children from age-progressed photos hit their desk, Sharp and Goodwin chased it and found the Baskin children, now grown, in San Jose, California. Sharp was overjoyed to tell Mark and Debbie that after two decades, their missing kids had been located safe and alive.
    “They’re fantastic people. I don’t know that I could have handled the situation as well as they did,” says Sharp.
    But Bobby and Christi were no longer the same children raised by the Tennessee minister and his wife. They were grown-ups who called the Maples “mom” and “dad.” And they no longer answered to Bobby and Christi; instead they went by the names Jennifer and Jonathan Bunting.
    Debbie Baskin didn’t care. She did what any mother who has not seen her children for twenty years would have done and hopped onto a plane for California. But this tale of two little kids taken from their parents was not resolved as well as Sharp and Goodwin had hoped: the kids—now adults—were shocked by the story told by investigators and—at least so far—have decided they want nothing to do with their biological parents. It was a tough blow for both investigators, who wanted so much for this story to have a happy ending, and for the Baskins, who spent a large part of their lives searching for their children.
    “[Bobby and Christi] have access to the investigation; it’s open records now, [so] they can look and see what was done. I can’t believe intelligent young adults don’t want to know,” Sharp says.
    As for Mark and Debbie, Sharp says it’s been hard knowing their children are so close, yet still so far away.
    “It’s difficult on them. I just can’t put it into words—the sorrow, the hurt, the anger—all the range of emotions they went through,” he says.
    Sharp says Marvin Maple exhibited no remorse when detectives interviewed him, telling them, “I raised the kids the way I wanted to. I won.” Marvin Maple was charged in the case and is still awaiting trial as of this writing. Sandra Maple died before the children were found.
    Despite this, the Baskins still have hope, Sharp says. They believe they’ll be reunited with their children and although the family dynamics have changed, they will adjust to their new reality.
    For the cop who has come to know the family and their heartache, it’s a bittersweet ending at best. Solving the case is what a police officer does. Nourishing the hope it will end well is the human part of the equation.
    R
    Drew Kesse’s voice still retains a touch of Jersey edge. Kesse and his wife, Joyce, are longtime Florida residents now, but they maintain with pride their distinct Yankee attitudes. They also refuse to be pushed around. But as tough and uncompromising as he is, Drew’s words sometimes falter as he talks about his lost daughter—blond, beautiful Jennifer—and what he sees as the failure of police to move forward on her case.
    Jennifer Kesse disappeared on January 24, 2006. Smart and popular in high school, Jennifer moved without effort into college life at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, studying to be a doctor. She decided medicine