Even with the suspected man dead, the Smart family continued to lobby for attention to their daughter’s case. Maybe they were just hoping to find her remains, but there was a lesson to be learned. Don’t get too tied to a theory.
On an impulse, I plug twins into the search field along with a couple of my other key words: abduction, missing, disappeared, children.
Google kicks out more than a hundred thousand sites.
I specify missing twins. Still more than thirty-three thousand listings. I scroll through for twenty minutes or so, only to learn that virtually all of the stories are about Kevin and Sean.
I log on to Lexis/Nexis, using my password from the station. I enter the search terms missing twins and restrict the search to news stories published before the date of the boys’ abduction.
The list includes more than a thousand stories, but once I get into it, I see that in real terms there are only three stories about abducted twins.
The Ramirez boys. The press raised this case within hours of the story about Kevin and Sean breaking because the similarities were so striking. Julio and Wilson Ramirez were abducted from a rec-center gymnastics class in West L.A. Not only were the Ramirez boys identical twins, but at the time they were abducted, they were seven years old – almost the same age as Kevin and Sean.
I thought of them in the very first hour of this nightmare, sitting on Gary Prebble’s bench outside Faire Security.
It happened just about a couple of years ago. The boys disappeared and there was a massive hunt – although not so massive as to keep criticism from surfacing about how much greater the effort would have been if they’d been Anglo kids.
Three months after their disappearance, the killer was caught red-handed, so to speak. He was apprehended at a ramshackle cabin in the mountains not too far from Big Sur. The bodies of the dead boys were found at the cabin – one in his refrigerator, neatly packaged like cuts from a side of beef, the other suspended in a well shaft. The killer was taken into custody and promptly identified himself to the authorities. He turned out to be Charley Vermillion, a sexual psychopath who’d been released from a Louisiana loony bin about a month prior to the boys’ disappearance. Vermillion was cuffed and Mirandized and slapped into a squad car. But before the squad car made it to the local lockup, he was dead, having chewed a cyanide capsule he’d taped under the collar of his shirt.
So the Ramirez case was closed, and with the perp dead, there wasn’t any way it could be relevant to my boys. Thank God. Both the FBI and Ray Shoffler explored the notion of a copycat crime – but it didn’t go anywhere.
The second set of sites involves the Gabler twins. This is a false hit, though, because the Gablers were women – and Vegas showgirls, at that. The story showed up because one of my search terms was children and the newspapers reported that the Gablers had recently appeared in a musical revue at a place called the Blue Parrot. The revue was called Children of the Future.
They disappeared about three years ago and turned up a month later, their decomposing bodies recovered in the usual “rugged area” twenty miles outside Vegas. The press photos show the Gabler twins alive, side by side in skimpy costumes, their long legs in fishnet stockings, smiling faces encased in futuristic headdresses. It’s hard to see how they could possibly have any connection to my boys.
Which leaves the Sandling twins: Chandler and Connor. I’m familiar with this one, too – the one with the happy ending. The way I remember it, the mother was implicated in the abduction of her kids – although never prosecuted, as I recall. There was something about a boyfriend, too.
Because of the mother’s alleged involvement, I never really focused on the case. I’m willing to take a second look now, because it’s just occurred to me: Who else do I know wrongly suspected in the disappearance of his children?
I take a look. Initially, it’s as I remember. Unlike me, Emma Sandling was not an upstanding member of the community but a vagabond for whom “unconventional lifestyle” would be an understatement. A heroin addict who’d been through countless rehab programs, she wasn’t much of a mother. Her kids were often cared for by friends or relatives, and they’d been in foster homes more than once.
Some of the news stories mention an incident connected to one of Connor and Chandler’s foster-home stays; terming it “the first abduction.” Reading on, I decide that calling that incident an abduction is unfair, a major (and misleading) exaggeration. It seems to boil down to Emma Sandling’s having returned the boys a couple of days late from an authorized visit – due, she contended, to car trouble.
Then there was the “live-in boyfriend,” plus the fact that at the time of the abduction, Sandling and her two sons were living in a tent in a state park near Corvallis, Oregon.
The boyfriend – whom Sandling insisted was “just a friend” – was a drifter named Dalt Trueblood. Sandling had met him in rehab, and when she bumped into him at the library in Eugene, she’d invited him to stay in her tent for a few weeks. It turned out Trueblood was a parole violator, although Sandling claimed she hadn’t known that.
If child protective services were not happy to learn that home to the Sandling boys and their mother was a tent, they were even unhappier to know that a wanted felon was sharing that space. When the boys disappeared, Trueblood did, too – and until he turned up a few weeks later (drunk and disorderly, directing traffic with a red cape in downtown Portland), it was not unreasonable to think that the Sandling boys might be with him.
Between her addicted past, her lifestyle, and the missing boyfriend – when the boys “vanished,” suspicions settled on Sandling. The idea seemed to be that she and Trueblood were in collusion, that they’d intended to present some kind of ransom plea – although this never happened. As for Trueblood, when the police arrested him in Portland and questioned him, he said he left Eugene because the kidnapping “spooked” him.
The circumstances of the kidnapping were simple enough: Sandling took her boys to the McDonald’s in Corvallis, intending to treat them to a Happy Meal. She left them in the ball pit while she went to get the food. No other kids – or adults – were in the play area. Nine adults – six of them senior citizens holding a book-group discussion – sat in the main area of the restaurant. When Sandling came back with the food, the kids were gone.
Unfortunately for Sandling, the adults and staff in the restaurant remembered seeing her, but none of them saw her children. Some of the stories display diagrams of the McDonald’s, marking the location of customers and staff; these make it clear that Sandling and the boys had to cross the sight lines of other customers and the staff to get to the play area. Apart from the nine customers, six McDonald’s employees were behind the counter when the boys disappeared. Two cars were in the drive-through lane. No one saw a thing.
It didn’t help Sandling’s case that at the time she reported her sons missing, she was known to leave them for hours at a time in the public library while she worked cleaning houses.
What followed was predictable: an explosion of recriminations within the Oregon child-protective bureaucracy and a police investigation with a tight focus on Emma Sandling. The judge who a year earlier had reunited the boys with their cleaned-up mom was condemned on all sides. Social workers who’d attested to Emma Sandling’s newfound reliability were subjected to second-guessing of the most vituperative sort. There was a lot of chest-beating about how the twins – Chandler and Connor – had fallen through the cracks (“chasms,” according to the Portland paper) of the system. There were calls for investigations and the wholesale reform of the child-welfare system.