The Castaway - Chapter 1

It was the summer of 2002 and Pete Garrity was clearing the overgrown sage brush from a steep hillside behind his home. He was using a metal rake to pull at the scrub and suddenly the rake pulled something else out from under the bushes. It was faded green and very weathered. It looked like a blanket. He tried to snag it and pull it closer so he could see it more clearly, but it was brittle and it broke apart. Pete was startled when a human skull rolled out of the blanket and landed at his feet.

Pete ran to the house and yelled for his wife to call 911. He told her that he found a body in the bushes. Within the hour, Pete Garrity's quiet countryside property was swarming with police cars, fire engines, and reporters. I was the homicide detective assigned to the case. My first task was to figure out if we actually had a homicide. As funny as that might sound, you would be surprised how many times we get called out when someone finds old animal bones burried in their yard. And even when the bones are human, it's not always a homicide. Sometimes it's a person who died of natural causes or an accidental death and there is no crime. A homicide is defined as, "The killing of a human being by a human being."

When I examined the hillside where Pete Garrity found the skull, I quickly made the detemination that we had a homicide. Not that I'm actually that good at my job, but sometimes it's a no-brainer. There was an obvious human skull that rolled out of some type of bag. It looked like a large green canvas bag. 100' up the steep hillside there was a paved road that wound through the hills for about 35 miles. The road was not well travelled, but I knew it was there because I patrolled these hills for several years as a young deputy. The location of this canvas bag and the human skull inside told me that someone probably pulled their car over and tossed the body over the edge. That's not an accident. That's a homicide.

As we processed the crime scene we found what we expected. The rest of the bones were still inside the canvas bag. We placed each of the bones anatomically on top of a white plastic tarp until we had a full skeleton. The bones had no flesh on them. When we finished, it looked like one of those skeletons you would purchase at a novelty store to put on your porch at Halloween. With the exception that this one was wearing a purple Le Tigre polo shirt and a bra. A very small bra.

The Sheriff's Department has a Forensic Anthropologist for cases such as this. She responded to the scene to examine the bones and make a determination on age, sex, and how long the bones had been at this location. She conducted her analysis and gave us the bad news, something we all knew was coming after seeing the bra. The bones belonged to a female between the age of 12 and 15 years old. All homicide detectives will tell you the same thing. We can't get emotionally involved in our cases and we can't take it personal. This one just got personal.

The Forensic Anthropologist also determined that the body of this little girl had been inside the canvas bag under these bushes for more than ten years, probably closer to twenty years. That was heart wrenching. Somebody lost their child twenty years ago and they've never known what happened. The horrible grief the parents must have suffered all this time. I had to shake off that thought and stay clear. I couldn't let myself imagine a happy family who's daughter simply didn't return home from school. I had to remember that most child deaths are actually committed by someone in the family. Statistically, they were more likely to be suspects than grieving parents.

My biggest task still lay ahead. How could I question the parents if I didn't even know who the girl was? And how was I going to identify a child who had been dead twenty years when all I had was a skeleton? I had a lot of work to do.