The Castaway - Chapter 4

I contacted NCIS at Camp Pendleton and began the search for those two Marines. I was really shocked to learn that Camp Pendleton was home to approximately 36,000 Marines. There were approximately 6,000 homes located on the base and the rest of the personnel lived off the base in neighboring communities such as El Cajon.

This was the year 2002 and I wanted information about who lived off-base 14 years ago in 1988. I was told those records were archived in Washington DC and it was going to take weeks before they could be obtained. I was also told that it would require a physical search of the records by hand, since the computer program was designed to search for a Marine by name, not the neighborhood that he lived in. There were going to be thousands of records to search through.

I was confident that I was on the right track and following the right leads, but while I was waiting for the records from Washington DC, I started looking into some other possibilities for Shelly's murder.

Shelly had been sexually molested in 1986, a couple of years before her disappearance. Her attacker, a family friend, was arrested and sentenced to six years in state prison and he was still in custody at the time of Shelly's disappearance. It would have been rare and unusual, but not out of the question to consider that Shelly's murder was in retaliation for her testimony against that man. Convicted criminals seeking revenge will often pay a fellow inmate who is being released to carry out such deeds. But this was the murder of a child, very rare for even the hardest of criminals to consider. I made a mental note of the possibility and moved on.

I used the Internet and began reviewing the events and archived news reports from the 1980's in San Diego County. Whenever I'm working a cold case I like to familiarize myself with the local events at that time in that area. This is the kind of work that twenty years ago would have meant traveling to the local library and searching old newspaper clippings on microfiche. God bless the Internet. Most of the time this type of research is fruitless but occasionally it pays off. I don't ever want to be responsible for a case going unsolved simply because I didn't take the time to check out the little things.

I found a newspaper article from 1986 in the San Diego Evening Tribune that caught my attention. "Police suspect serial killer in San Diego." The article claimed that in the past five months, the bodies of 15 young women had been discovered dumped in remote areas of San Diego County. Most of the women were from the El Cajon area. Police did not have a suspect.

The more I researched this story, the worse it became. I discovered that San Diego County had one of the worst serial killing sprees in US history during the 80's. 43 young women had been murdered from 1985 to 1988. Most of the women had been strangled. Most of the bodies had been dumped off the side of the road in remote areas. Many of the women were from the El Cajon area and a couple of the bodies had been discovered near the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base. Was Shelly another victim of this serial killer?

My heart began to race a little as I read each of the stories covering the killings over the years. Each new article about the increasing body count - 18, 23, 28, 32! A monster was on the loose, the public was panicking and the only thing the police were catching was a lot of grief. The District Attorney's Office formed a multi-agency task force and poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the investigation.

The San Diego serial killer case was never solved. The killings stopped in 1988 and the task force was eventually disbanded without a suspect ever having been arrested. I had to ask myself if the task force ever knew about the Shelly Phillips case. Shelly was only in the system as a runaway and probably never made it onto the task force radar. If they had the information in 1988 about the two Marines in the pale blue Oldsmobile, they would have certainly been able to locate the house in El Cajon and identify the Marines.

I didn't want to get ahead of myself, but I couldn't help but get excited about the possibility that I might be holding the key to solving a serial killing spree of 44 murders.

Unfortunately, my excitement began to fade as the weeks and the months rolled by. It was mid-2003 now and I still couldn't get anything from Washington DC. Apparently asking National Archives for the home addresses of 10,000 Marines in 1988 was a big deal. Whatever.

I continued to do my own investigation and I even located one of Shelly's former friends that remembered the approximate location of the El Cajon house. He had dropped Shelly off in front of the house one time and he thought he might be able to find the street for me. I met him in the parking lot of a shopping center off the 8 Freeway. I shook his hand and said, "Okay, let's go find this house."

The painful expression on his face said it all. "I think we're standing on it."

The entire neighborhood where the Marines lived in 1988 was now home to The Corners Shopping Pavilion. Because Lord knows we need another fricking Starbucks. Terrific.

So I was going to have to do this the hard way. At least now I knew the general location of the neighborhood. The City Planning Commission would have the names of the former residential streets that occupied this area. I was guessing maybe twenty streets could have occupied this space prior to construction. With the street names I could obtain the names of each owner from the utility companies. I would have to track down each owner and find out who rented their property to a Marine in 1988. This was going to take a long time but what other choice did I have. This case wasn't about one 12-year-old girl anymore. This was about 43 other women as well.

Another six months had passed and I was making progress. I had all the addresses of every home that ever occupied The Corners Shopping Pavilion. I had a lot of the names, addresses and phone numbers of the former owners. The work was tedious and exhausting, but I kept my sights on the big picture. I kept Shelly's picture pinned up over my desk at work. A 6th grade school picture that I got from her mother. I saw her smiling face every day when I came to work and she kept me going. She kept me in the fight. This case was about 43 other women too, but 12-year-old Shelly was my motivation.

Then one morning everything changed. I got a phone call from a lab technician at the Department of Justice in Richmond, Calif. The news wasn't good.

The DNA results came back from the blood work I had done on Mrs. Phillips. She was not the mother of the little skeleton. The bones in the green duffel bag located almost a year ago were not the remains of Shelly Phillips.

Back to square one.