Taken Too Soon: Amber Dubois & Chelsea King | Murdered at First Sight | Forensic Files

CARRIE MCGONIGLE: Where is Amber? AMBER MCGONIGLE: Sure! I'm gonna get you! CARRIE MCGONICGLE: Uh-oh.
She's gonna get you. I'm gonna get you! CARRIE MCGONIGLE: She's coming to get you.
(SINGING) Dah, dah, dun-dun, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Doo, doo, doo. [CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS]
[GENTLE MUSIC] Ali was four years old when Amber went missing, so Ali doesn't have any recollection of her sister
at all, which makes her sad. CARRIE MCGONIGLE: Ready? Got to get your balance. You know I'm ready.
Come on. Hey. There you go. Ready? Come on. Oh, there's you and your sissy. Isn't that cute?
[TENSE MUSIC] ROBERT BENTON (VOICEOVER): Amber was last seen just before 7:00. We believe that she did leave the house shortly after
and then walked to school. CARRIE MCGONICGLE: I thought someone had abducted her.
I never stopped looking for her. I mean, there was only so much searching you could do,
but I was coming up with ideas to keep her story alive. ROBERT BENTON: There were over 1,500 tips that
came into our tip line and over 500 potential sightings of Amber. CARRIE MCGONICGLE: I always thought it
was a stranger that took her. Nobody just vanishes without a trace. It just doesn't happen.
DAVE BROWN (VOICEOVER): There are posters on every store you walk into. There are bumper stickers, billboards all over town.
And it was absolutely a stranger abduction. CARRIE MCGONICGLE: I got a phone call from one of my volunteers
that said another girl has gone missing. BILL GORE: As we continued the search through the night
and the next day, it was our hope that she had been abducted, and she was still alive someplace,
and being held. CARRIE MCGONICGLE: Then, of course, my mindset is going, is it a serial killer?
Or, you know, your mind just goes crazy after that. [DRAMATIC MUSIC] CARRIE MCGONIGLE: She was the most beautiful baby ever.
I used to take her to the mall, and I would come back home, and change her outfit, and take her back to the mall
just so people would tell me how beautiful she was. Because she was just like a perfect little angel.
Oh, there you are. There's how you do it. There's How you do it. Say hi. Are you Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?
[CHATTER] [CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS] [DRAMATIC MUSIC] I woke up early for work that morning.
And I went in and woke Amber up and told her I'd be home from work early. And we could go see a movie or do something together,
and she said thank you. And I told her I loved her, and I would see her see her later.
And I left for work. Amber had to be at school at 7:50 or something. The walk would usually take her 10 minutes, 15 at the most.
And she walked to school every day. Amber's stepfather got home and called me, and that was, like,
4 o'clock when he got home from work. --and told me that Amber wasn't home yet and if I knew where she was at.
And at that time, I called her cell phone, and she didn't pick up. And then Dave called me back and said
he went to the high school. She didn't make it to school today. ROBERT BENTON: February 13, 2009.
Our patrol division responded to a call of a missing person, a 14-year-old girl, that the family had reported missing
from Escondido High School. I believe the police were already there when I got home.
And they asked me what she was wearing. And I said, probably jeans and a black hoodie.
And I said something bad has happened to her. Can we do an AMBER Alert? You know, and he's like, you can't
do an AMBER Alert unless there's a vehicle involved that we know of. ROBERT BENTON: Our officer that took the report realized right
away that although he has taken many missing persons reports and especially young juveniles,
this one seemed different to him. He decided to go to Escondido High School, and to search the school, and then
see if he could find any of the teachers there to confirm whether she actually made
it to school or not that day. CARRIE MCGONIGLE: The school called the house and left a message saying Amber didn't make it to school,
but we weren't home. We were both at work, so we didn't get that message. I didn't think she had lost track of time,
because I kept calling her cell phone. And she wasn't answering, and it's just not like her.
I knew the second that she didn't make it to school that something bad had happened.
[BIRDS CHIRPING] ROBERT BENTON: The officer talked to some of her friends. They said that she had not gone to school that day.
And so he had brought in other patrol officers, as well as a K-9, and they searched the entire school grounds,
including kind of a rural river area that's behind the school. They searched that whole area, and they
didn't discover anything. The officer that took the initial report marked it as a suspicious missing which then rose
to the investigation's level. There was obviously a lapse between when she had left the house that morning
and never arrived to school to the time that actually, we got the call for the missing person report,
which was later that night. When any child goes missing, timescales are so crucial.
The first hour is known as the golden hour, and that's because that is when we've
got the most chance of finding that child alive and well. And actually, many children go missing,
and they're usually found within that time frame. But then, as the first 24 hours ticks by,
the first 48 hours, and so on and so on, the chances of finding them and finding them alive and well
just diminish by the minute. ROBERT BENTON (VOICEOVER): We accessed all her emails.
We accessed all her cell phone texts that we could get, her voicemail, as well as her internet history.
And what we found was that she liked to read. She had a couple close friends. She was not making contacts on the internet
that we could find. And the websites that she visited were all about animals and learning more about animals.
[GENTLE MUSIC] "God made animals because they are nice and cute. I like horses and cats."
WOMAN: Oh, little baby! [LAUGHTER] CARRIE MCGONIGLE: "And if I found $1, I would buy one tadpole.
And I will watch the first one turn into a frog. When I grow up, I want to be a marine biologist because I
want to work at SeaWorld." In eighth grade, the agricultural teachers came to the junior high school, and Amber was hooked.
She was-- from that day on, she came home and she's like, Mom, I'm gonna raise a lamb.
And I get to go to a fair, and I get to show this lamb. And you know, she was just so excited about it.
ROBERT BENTON: The school had a program that-- they could purchase livestock sheep that she could raise through a Future
Farmers program. I made her write me a letter telling me how she was gonna take care of this animal.
And I wasn't gonna be responsible for doing anything. She would make sure she had it covered
and that she would do a good job raising it. And she had named it Nanette. Well, it was the last day to turn
in the deposit for the lamb. ROBERT BENTON: In talking to the family and Carrie in particular, she knew that Amber would never run away.
She knew how excited she was to get the lamb and that the only thing that would stop her from getting it
would be somebody taking her. [TENSE MUSIC] Our officers started handing out flyers that very next day.
The one thing that we always try to reiterate to the community is that if you see somebody that you think is a missing person,
report it immediately. We had two people step forward, two parents, one that said that they had seen Amber on that Friday walking
to school, and then a second mother who actually had taken Amber to school on multiple occasions
was driving her daughter to school. And that morning on February 13th, it was kind of a drizzly,
rainy day. And so she felt bad that Amber was walking in the rain. When she stopped to pick Amber up,
her daughter said, oh, Mom, it looks like she's talking to a boy. We should leave her alone.
So they continued on to school. I just went in this room, and I started going through all of her stuff, trying
to see if there was a boy, just looking for any kind of clue, you know, going through all of her stuff,
just trying to figure out if she had taken off. Although I knew in my heart she wouldn't take off, but I just--
you know, everything goes through your mind at that time. And you just don't know.
We did get several more phone calls from people who thought that they had seen her
not only in downtown Escondido, but also in the area of her house, up in the area that
was called The Caves. It was kind of a rock area. We went and we investigated all those sightings,
and we were never able to confirm that she was in downtown or in those cave areas.
[TENSE MUSIC] CARRIE MCGONIGLE: Two male detectives and one female police officer came to the house
to interview us. And they asked why so many people were at my house. And I said, they're all looking for Amber.
And we sat in the living room. And it was myself, and the three officers, and Dave.
ROBERT BENTON: So what we did learn was that there was some friction between Amber
and her stepfather, Dave Cave, regarding the amount of time that she would spend in her bedroom with the door
closed reading books. He thought that she should socialize more with the family and she should be more part of the family unit.
Amber was your typical, you know, teenager. And so yeah, they had a lot of-- they had a lot of disagreements.
There was always tension between them as a stepdad and a teenage daughter. We sat in the living room.
And they had me walk through my day at work, and what I did at work, and what time
I clocked in and clocked out, and what time I went to lunch. And I told them all that.
And then it was Dave's turn. I know that Amber got up that morning and asked Dave for the check for the lamb.
And then, when he came down to leave for work, he put the check on the edge of the couch, said,
there you go, and he went to work. Dave was like, oh, I went to the personal trainer
and then I came home. And they were like, which way did you come home? And he couldn't remember which way he came home.
And then he was like, I went to a movie. And I'm like, no, you came by my work. And he's like, oh, yeah.
Then I went to her work. And then I went to a movie. And I was like, you went to a movie in the middle of the day
instead of going to work? He's like, yeah. And I'm like, well, that's weird. And then he goes, I came home and started doing tax papers.
And I'm like, what do you mean you came home and started doing tax papers? Then you would have been home when the school called.
You didn't check the messages? And he's like, no. I didn't check the messages. I'm like, you always check the messages.
Why didn't you check the messages? ROBERT BENTON: Even Carrie said it was a very unusual day.
He never visited her at her work, and even to the point that she thought, why is he here?
And she knew it was February 13th and they would be celebrating Valentine's Day.
But she even said, this is very unusual for Dave. So that certainly put our attention on Dave.
CARRIE MCGONIGLE: And I'm like, holy crap. Why don't you just arrest him now? I'm like, Dave, your whole day, you're just mixing it all up.
He's like, well, I'm just a little stressed out. And I'm like, no. I mean, you don't remember anything you're saying.
I'm like, I mean, if I were them, I would arrest you right now. Like, you know, this is ridiculous.
[TENSE MUSIC] BRYANNA FOX: There are a few things that police look for when they're investigating
a case of a missing child. Is there any indication that child was abused, traumatized, running away from those parents?
Did the parents have any role to play in that child going missing? All of this information can be gleaned from parents.
And police are obviously trying to weigh these out delicately, because there's also a chance
that that child was abducted. And they don't want to further traumatize the parents by asking these very difficult questions.
[TENSE MUSIC] CARRIE MCGONIGLE: It was kind of a blur. We searched all weekend. And my friend brought over their motor home,
and we put it at the church near our house and set it up like a search center, even though we didn't know what we were doing.
And really, I just spent a lot of time in Amber's room, crying and praying that she would come home.
[DRAMATIC MUSIC] Say hi. WOMAN: Happy birthday, Amber. Say hi for the camera. Say hi.
[LAUGHS] Say hi. Say I love you. I don't know. Say I love you. [CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS]
CARRIE MCGONIGLE: Amber was my best friend. We did everything together. Every time I did anything, I would always ask Amber,
you know, do you want to do this? And we just always had a good time, and a lot of laughs,
and just hung out. This was our last trip we took. My mom, and Amber, and I took it after her eighth grade
graduation. It was actually less than a year before she went missing. [GENTLE MUSIC]
ROBERT BENTON: Obviously, we went through the different options. So did she voluntarily go missing?
Who was this boy that she was potentially walking with that the eyewitness had said--
Did she run away with this person? Did this person take her or kidnap her? CARRIE MCGONIGLE: I knew from day one
that she didn't go with anyone she knew. I knew that she didn't have a boyfriend somewhere.
I knew in my heart that a stranger had taken her. I never thought anything different.
I never thought a family member or anyone else-- I knew that she had been taken.
I just didn't know by who, and I didn't know if I would ever find her again. So I'm looking at a map of Escondido High School.
This is the area where the witnesses said that they last saw her. And so those two independent eyewitnesses
putting her so close to the school, that was our starting point for the investigation.
And what we found was, there is a camera system that was right there at the bus parking lot.
So we looked at all the video of that bus parking lot. And in that, there was a suspicious red truck
that drove in. It stayed for a couple of seconds. No one got in it, no one got out.
You couldn't see it had tinted windows. We couldn't get the license plate. We were never able to determine who owned that red truck
and what that red truck was doing in that area. In a missing person investigation,
you always start with the people closest to the missing person. And so in this case, that was her mom,
her stepfather, which was Dave. And they ruled out Amber's dad 'cause he was in LA.
But Dave and myself were under the eye of them, especially Dave, more than me, the entire time
because that's how society is. KERRY DAYNES: The majority of homicide victims know the person who killed them.
And usually, they're very close to that person. And so of course, suspicion falls on family and friends
first, particularly family. [TENSE MUSIC] ROBERT BENTON: After the first week, we knew that we had a much more serious situation on our hands.
We had yet to determine the whereabouts of Amber. We have yet to determine the circumstances
of her being missing. So we reached out to all the other resources in our county,
including the San Diego Sheriff's Department, San Diego Police Department. And we have a local FBI office, and the FBI
sent us over a number of investigators to assist us. We also contacted the San Diego Search
and Rescue Team to help search areas where Amber might be. We had 148 sex offenders in Escondido at that time.
And we spoke to each one of those specifically on the AMBER case, and every one of them
had denied having any knowledge or any known whereabouts of Amber. I mean, people just don't vanish off
the face of the Earth, and Amber had vanished. I mean, after all the interviews they did, really,
she just vanished. I mean, they had nothing. [TENSE MUSIC] BRYANNA FOX: Missing persons cases
are incredibly anxiety-inducing for parents, family members, and the community. Everybody is wondering, is she OK and able to be found?
Was she abducted and will be found alive? Or did something absolutely awful that nobody wants to think about actually occurred to her?
As time is going on, the idea that the worst outcome occurred is becoming more and more of a reality.
So the family is dealing with both hope, depression, anxiety, all of this cycling through their minds
over and over again. It's just something that you wouldn't wish on any family. [TENSE MUSIC]
ROBERT BENTON: Carrie had called me about six weeks into the investigation and told me that she had moved out
from the house, away from Dave. That certainly put more concern about what Dave had done on that February 13th.
At that point, I wasn't really speaking to Dave. I didn't want anything to do with him.
And my mind just started racing, and I thought maybe he did something. ROBERT BENTON: So we brought Dave
in for multiple polygraphs. The first one was from our own polygrapher. We followed up based on those results with an FBI polygrapher
who also did a polygraph on Dave. He found some of his statements to be inconsistent.
So you brought him in for a third polygraph, really settling down on what Dave did on that very
unusual day, February 13th. A polygraph test is often called a lie detector test,
but it doesn't actually detect lies. What it does is it shows up when somebody is extremely stressed.
So the chances of him failing a polygraph test, even if he's innocent, are actually relatively high.
They're only 60% accurate, at best. And sure enough, the polygraph results are inconsistent.
Well, inconsistent isn't a yes or a no, is it? So it's not useful to the police.
And all the police really can say is that they don't have anything firm to link Dave
with Amber's disappearance. ROBERT BENTON: We eliminated Dave. We had eliminated the family members.
We had eliminated friends. We interviewed over 500 people in relation to the case.
So at this point, we truly believed that it was a stranger abduction. Without knowing who it was, where do you start?
[GENTLE MUSIC] [TENSE MUSIC] About six months into the investigation, the tips started to really wane off.
The interest within the media had starting to quell. And so at that point, we were really concerned
that we would never solve this case and that we'd never determine what had happened to Amber.
CARRIE MCGONIGLE: I never stopped looking for her. I mean, there was only so much searching you could do.
But I was still coming up with mailers or coming up with ideas to keep her story alive.
ROBERT BENTON: She was doing everything. She would hire psychics. She had hired an investigator.
She had been in contact with dog teams, search teams that came out to see if they could find Amber.
[TENSE MUSIC] CARRIE MCGONIGLE: We decided on the one-year anniversary to do a jog-a-thon/walkathon at the high
school to raise funds to continue searching for Amber. And it was a successful walkathon.
Bob Benton came to me and said, I hate to tell you this, but after a year, we are nowhere closer than we were
from day one in finding Amber. We're at ground zero. We don't know what happened to her.
[TENSE MUSIC] ROBERT BENTON: Just after the one year disappearance of Amber, we learned of another girl that
went missing in a neighboring jurisdiction, Rancho Bernardo, just south of ours.
She just suddenly disappeared while she went for a run. Research shows that the best predictor of future behavior
is past behavior. And if somebody commited a crime and got away with it, the odds that, in their mind, they're
going to be able to commit another crime and get away with it actually go up. [TENSE MUSIC]
BILL GORE (VOICEOVER): I received a phone call late on a Thursday afternoon that a 17-year-old high school student
had gone missing, Chelsea King. She was an avid runner. The girl lived in Poway, but her car
had been discovered at Rancho Bernardo Community Park, which is where a lot of people park
to go running on these trails. DAVE BROWN: Her father calls the cell phone provider, had the phone pinged, located
at the Rancho Bernardo Park. We went to the Rancho Bernardo Park. Her phone, all of her belongings were in the car.
And the car was was locked, and she wasn't there. BILL GORE: Her just disappearing on her own
was so out of character for this young lady that we called in our homicide team that works on, obviously,
homicides and missing persons. So this is where we believe she started her run. Her car is parked here.
From here, she travels, goes that way. This is where the start of the search is.
And the buildings over there, it's a senior center owned by the city. We took that over and made that our headquarters and the search
center. [TENSE MUSIC] We started with an extensive search of the park where we knew she had jogged in the past and couldn't find her.
CARRIE MCGONIGLE: I got a phone call from one of my volunteers that said another girl has gone missing in Poway.
And I went home, and laid in bed, and watched the news on it. And then I looked at Chelsea.
And I'm like, wow, she looks a lot like-- not a lot like Amber, but the light skin, the pale eyes,
and they were a lot alike. Then, of course, my mind starts going, is it a serial killer or-- you know,
your mind just goes crazy after that. [TENSE MUSIC] BILL GORE: As the word spread throughout the community,
and the police presence was known, and we got the word out that we were looking for a missing
17-year-old in the park, neighbors from all around the park came out and tried to join in the search.
DAVE BROWN: The first item of evidence were found, were found by somebody who lives in the neighborhood.
They're walking on this path, walking their dog to go out into the open part of the park.
And they come across the socks and underwear right in the center of the path. They're not wet, and it had rained hours earlier.
And they thought that to be significant. When they get to the search party, they tell the San Diego Police.
BILL GORE: These early items of evidence that were found on the trail were presented to the King
family, and they identified them as most likely belonging to Chelsea. As we continued the search through the night,
and the next day, and the next day and nothing turned up, I think it was our hope, maybe, that she had been abducted,
and she was still alive someplace and being held. DAVE BROWN: We could see there was going to be blood
evidence on the underwear. We don't publicize that. That's called a holdback. And we don't want the suspect to know that we might have
evidence that's gonna lead us to them, because the suspect is somewhere. We don't want them fleeing.
We don't want to destroying evidence, and we certainly don't want him harming her.
[TENSE MUSIC] So this is one of the many inlets to the lake. And we had searched all of this area, line by line,
you know, person-- shoulder to shoulder, checking for things, and we found nothing.
And then it rained really hard. And then the next day, we found a shoe and a sports bra
in these bushes here, and rains were coming through and deposited it. One of the things very early on was, we have crime
and intelligence analysts. And I think I told the analysts right away, I want to know everything that's ever
happened here in a year or two. Give me every crime that's happened in this park.
And it was within a day or so I'm given this report, and it shows there was an attack closer to where the socks
and underwear were found on that side of the lake of a woman who was tackled or grabbed,
bear hugged. BILL GORE: There was a confrontation. She pushed away from-- got away from him.
He was never identified, and that was another potential victim. This individual lived in Colorado,
so contact was made with her in Colorado. And we started looking into the details of the San Diego Police
Department's investigation of that confrontation and potential assault in the park.
[TENSE MUSIC] DAVE BROWN: Chelsea's family had asked for a tour, and they'd asked a few times.
They wanted the tour of the items and the area, because it's hard to visualize that area
and where the items are found. And I took them on that tour on Sunday morning, midday.
As soon as I got out of the car, my phone rang. And it was one of the detectives,
and there was a hit on the DNA found on the underwear. And that hit was in the database of sex offenders,
and it gave us a name. And I had to stop the tour. I told them that we've had a break in the case
and I have to go, because now we have a name. And that was the exciting part of, if we're going to save her,
it's gonna happen now. BILL GORE: And they identified Chelsea's DNA, so we knew it was Chelsea's underwear.
And second DNA from a previous sex offender, John Gardner. [TENSE MUSIC] We identified the house he lived in.
And the main thrust of our investigation at that time was to find John Gardner in the hopes
that he might have still had Chelsea King with him and she was alive. So where was John Gardner?
DAVE BROWN (VOICEOVER) Before this day is out or the next few hours, we're going to go to every house this person's possibly
living in simultaneously and aggressively. And if she's alive, we're gonna find her.
John Gardner was located and arrested in the vicinity of the northwest side of the Regional Park
by a restaurant in that area. --very disappointed that he did not have Chelsea. Soon as he was arrested, we had
surveillance on all the three locations he might live. As soon as they had handcuffs on him,
I ordered the entry of all three locations. Let's break into those three houses and see if she's in there, see if she's tied up.
She wasn't in any of them. So when we read him his Miranda rights and asked to talk to him.
He said he wanted an attorney. So at that point, we can't ask him any questions.
BRYANNA FOX: There's immense media attention on this case. And all the while, the police are working as fast as possible
to try to identify all the circumstances of what this person had committed and how many
other victims may be out there. [TENSE MUSIC] DAVE BROWN: So once Gardner was arrested,
we bring him here to headquarters. He's downstairs. I know I have to take him very soon to jail.
The second he's in jail, that's public information. So I had to get the girl in Colorado who's at a dorm.
I had to get her to look at six photos and pick him or not pick him before he lands on TV.
Because if he lands on TV, then the defense will just say, well, she just recognized him from TV.
We got a six pack, six photos. Five people aren't Gardner, but they look like him.
One is. And we took it out to the girl in Colorado. And we showed it to her and said,
do you recognize your attacker here? And she did. She said, that's him. 20 minutes later, he's on national TV.
I had to get that ID before he went on TV or it's tainted. He's still in my office in the interview
room being interviewed. Then we have a serial attacker, and it even more solidifies I know he's the one.
Chelsea was attacked by him. So this whole time this was going on, there's a thought,
it could be related to Amber Dubois. They're not far apart. They're a couple of off-ramps away.
He brought up, you're probably gonna try to pin that Amber girl on me, too. We didn't bring her up.
I remember doing a few interviews, and they asked me if I thought they were connected.
And I didn't, because he liked older girls. He liked, you know, 17-year-olds, not 14-year-olds.
[TENSE MUSIC] DAVE BROWN: So the next morning, on Monday morning, I go to the Escondido Police, meet with Lieutenant Bob Benton and
his whole team of detectives. And we spent a couple of hours, and they walked me
through the whole case. And from that moment on, they joined the team. And so it switched from the Chelsea King murder
to the John Gardner task force. What emerged quickly was that John Gardner not only was
a registered sex offender who spent five years in prison for beating and sexually assaulting a young 13-year-old,
but he'd also lived in the Escondido area. When he got arrested, his previous record came out.
And they saw he had hundreds of parole violations, and he should have been back in jail multiple times.
But they don't check, because he was considered low risk, even though there was reports of psychologists
saying that he will attack again, that he's a monster, this and that. ROBERT BENTON: But when the information came out
about John Gardner and his background, that enraged the community. It enraged us.
How can this guy be out on the streets after so many violations and the crimes that he had committed previously?
When Amber went missing, we had actually interviewed John Gardner in regards to her disappearance.
And he had come up with the alibi for where he was that day, that he was at work.
DAVE BROWN: So on Tuesday, I was scheduled to go to the District Attorney's Office for an issuing conference
because we had a suspect in jail for murder, and we didn't have a body. BRYANNA FOX: If there's no body, the defense attorneys
are typically able to establish reasonable doubt by saying, we don't know what happened.
So for police and prosecutors, when there's so much reasonable doubt, it's almost impossible to charge somebody
with homicide successfully. DAVE BROWN: While we were explaining to the district
attorney, laying out the evidence, everybody at the table's phone started vibrating.
And we all were getting a call. They'd found Chelsea. It's with great sadness this afternoon
that we discovered shortly after 1 o'clock human remains near the water's edge in a shallow grave
within the area in which our search efforts had been concentrated. Although positive identification has not been made,
there is strong likelihood that we have found Chelsea. I have just left the home of Brent and Kelly King,
where I shared this information. It was one of the dive teams in the water on Lake Hodges
that looked on the shoreline. And they thought what they saw was some hair on top of some sand on the side of the shoreline.
And closer examination pulled back, and it was the body of a young female. [TENSE MUSIC]
DAVE BROWN: It was sad. It was heartbreaking. There was no possibility she was alive.
So that's the end of that, so now it's time to go to work. We're already exhausted emotionally,
and now she's not alive. So all hope is gone, but we have a job to do. When Chelsea's remains were found, I was heartbroken.
I mean, who wouldn't be? It was horrible. My tears and heart went out to the Kings.
Their case went so fast. It was, what, five days, I think, from start to finish.
Mine was over a year, and I still had no answers. [TENSE MUSIC] DAVE BROWN: I get a phone call to come to this office,
to go to the undersheriff's office at the time. And I'm brought in the room. And I'm told, go to the jail.
Pick up John Gardner. Don't tell anyone. No one can know you have him. And he's going to show you a body.
Then take him back to the jail. Then we'll go from there. BILL GORE: The deal that John Gardner's attorney had
presented to the district attorney, that he would be willing to show them where a body was buried,
but we could not use the fact that he showed us where that body was buried in prosecuting.
In the Chelsea King case, we had DNA, location, proximity, all that stuff. There was no doubt in my mind he would have
been convicted in that case. But we still had the unknowns, no body in the Amber
Dubois case, so I agreed. DAVE BROWN: So we had to do it in secret. And we were fearful it could be an escape attempt, because we
already had enough evidence on the murder of Chelsea King that he would probably never see the light of day.
So we were nervous. We drove up this road, Pala Temecula Road, and then at a at an access road turnoff to a bad road
is where he told us to go left. And we came up this road. I drove up this road as far as we could get the car,
and then we walked the rest of the way. [TENSE MUSIC] We walked down. It was difficult, because we were sliding
and climbing down the hill. And then eventually, we got to a spot where I could see a shovel mark.
Even though it had been a year, the ground here is really tough, and the shovel mark had held.
And he pointed to that spot. I saw the shovel mark. And so we turned around, backed up, climbed back out of here,
put him back in the car, and took him back to jail. [TENSE MUSIC] ROBERT BENTON: My phone rang, and it was Dave Brown
from the Sheriff's Department. And Dave said, hey, I think we've got Amber. And I said, what do you mean?
And he said, I think we've got Amber. And he said, you need to come up here right now.
DAVE BROWN (VOICEOVER): And then we began bringing the lab out. We have a very robust crime lab, field
evidence technicians, criminalists, forensic archaeologists. And essentially, an army of people came up here that night
and assembled on the top of this hill, all pretty much in secret. It was a dark night.
It was foggy. It was cold. And we spent the night exhuming the remains of Amber Dubois.
[TENSE MUSIC] DAVE BROWN: So this tree marks the spot on the road. It's sort of the marker of where to turn
off to go up into the hills where Amber's grave was. And for the last 11 years, her family and friends
and just people in general have decorated the tree with the number of gifts. It'd be seasonal, different holidays.
You'll see stuffed animals. This is on my drive, my commute to and from home. So I see it every day, and I see throughout the year
how it changes. And to this day, they've still come and decorated the tree. CARRIE MCGONIGLE: Good shot.
Boy, when you're 16, you're gonna hate this one. [LAUGHS] Amber would have just turned 27 on October 25th.
And I think by now, she probably would have a kid, and I'd be a grandma. She definitely would have finished college and either
been doing something with horses, because she did have a horse, or something with animals.
I don't really know what. But she would be in the animal field for sure. [CHATTER]
[LAUGHTER] [TENSE MUSIC] ROBERT BENTON: So the next step was, after we found the remains, we confirmed
that those remains were Amber. --was we had notified the family. First, we certainly wouldn't want
them to hear it from any other source other than us. So it was late on a Saturday night
that we brought them in to the Escondido Police Department. And we had myself, a chaplain, and some other family members
there. And we had told them we found Amber's remains. CARRIE MCGONIGLE: They said they identified
her from dental records. And I said, are you sure it's her? And they're like, yeah, we're sure it's her.
I don't recall. I mean, when you find out your daughter's remains have been found, it's a blur.
I can't tell you how I reacted, because I don't remember. ROBERT BENTON: We couldn't tell the family
initially that Gardner had led us to Amber's remains. That was a deal that Gardner's attorneys
made with the attorney. We had to build a case against Gardner without using that information.
DAVE BROWN: We went to all the houses, and we got search warrants, and we didn't
find the matching shovel. That's the problem with old cases, is finding that that kind of connection.
ROBERT BENTON: So what eventually occurred was that there was a deal between the attorney's
office and John Gardner's attorneys and facilitated by the King family. The King family knew that they had gone for several days
without knowing what had happened to her. And they could not conceive how Carrie and the family
had dealt with this for over a year. CARRIE MCGONIGLE: And so the Kings and the district attorney
talked. And they said, let's take the death penalty off. The Dubois family needs to know what
happened to their daughter. They can't go the rest of their life not knowing that it was this monster that killed her.
ROBERT BENTON: And so there was a deal that this attorney would not seek the death penalty as long
as John Gardner would confess to Amber Dubois's killing. CARRIE MCGONIGLE: I was in tears, I mean,
when I found out. I mean, how would any parent feel, you know? I mean, they gave me closure that I needed.
And I got the closure because they wanted our family to have the answers. DAVE BROWN: He would plead guilty to two murders
and one assault, the one on the girl that was the college student. He would plead guilty to all three
of those, no parole, no appeal, never to be heard from again. ROBERT BENTON: It was just tragic
how a 14-year-old girl had been abducted and killed by somebody in our own community.
And certainly, it's been hard on our investigators. But I could not put myself in the shoes of the family
and not knowing what had happened to their daughter for as long. I'm just so glad that, at the end of the day,
we've been able to get closure for the family. BRYANNA FOX: Gardner is one of the worst types
of offenders we can imagine. He abducted these girls and murdered them, discarding their bodies in the way he did,
and then refusing to tell the families or do anything positive to help bring them closure, even
when he knew he was still going to prison, unless he got something out of it. It's just really despicable, and that's the exact kind of person
that Gardner was. [TENSE MUSIC] CARRIE MCGONIGLE: So she used to walk to school that way,
where she'd go past that old school, you know, and then cross the street right at the light right
there. And what's sad is I know that she was in the car, like, when he was at one of the lights.
And her friends were probably crossing the street right in front of her. I didn't know what happened to her until I met with him.
So right before his sentencing is when I found out all the information. I mean, of course it hurt to hear it.
But I had the answers I needed that I waited 13 months to have. It was like I could breathe, finally.
Right about where I'm standing is where Amber was taken. And as you can see, there's nowhere for her to run.
There's fences on both sides, so she was kind of just stuck here. He was a complete stranger to Amber.
He had never seen Amber before. He actually thought it was an older girl that he
was pulling up and taking. He didn't know she was so young. He preferred girls about 16, 17 years old, not a 14-year-old.
So this was unplanned and just an opportunity. BILL GORE: I probably don't have the right adjective
to describe him or the way I feel about him. He's a horrendous individual. When you look at the crimes that he
committed against poor, young, unsuspecting women, it's just tragic. [GENTLE MUSIC]
CARRIE MCGONIGLE (VOICEOVER): After Gardner pled guilty, it was probably, I want to say, a week or maybe two.
It wasn't very long after that that I moved back home. David came home. He's like, what are you doing?
And I'm like, oh, I'm moving back in. He goes, I don't want you to move back in.
I don't like you. I don't want you here. And I'm like, oh, you'll learn to love me again.
And he said, I don't want you in my room. I don't love you. I don't want to be with you.
And in time, he learned to love me again. [LAUGHS] DAVE BROWN (VOICEOVER): I thought after 10 years
of not speaking about the case that it would be fine, but it isn't. These things don't go away, no matter how
many years you put between you. So it's made me a little emotional now. It's made me a little cranky throughout the day.
I've avoided this on a personal level, because we don't go to these and walk away unscathed.
CARRIE MCGONIGLE: Without Amber, there is no Chelsea. And without Chelsea, there is no Amber.
There just comes a time when we have to breathe and say, OK, you know what? It's time to live our lives, and move on, and remember
our daughters, and mourn the loss of them, but try to live our lives to the best that we can.
And we're doing that, I think. Hey. So are you going now? Yeah, she's going bye.
CARRIE MCGONICGLE: Bye! Can you say bye? Bye! CARRIE MCGONICGLE: Give me kisses.
Bye. CARRIE MCGONICGLE: Real kisses. [KISSES] [TENSE MUSIC]

EPISODE 3 – AMBER DUBOIS & CHELSEA KING

In February 2009, Amber Dubois vanishes while walking to school in Escondido, California. A year later, detectives are no closer to finding Amber when 17-year-old Chelsea King disappears. The local community is left paralyzed with the fear that there is a killer hiding in plain sight. No one wants to imagine that there’s a predator secretly living among them within the community. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, comment and subscribe. Murdered At First Sight is a true crime documentary series that tells the first-hand stories of the most complex and hard-to-solve homicide cases: murders committed by strangers.

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Brief Summary

Amber Dubois went missing in 2009; her case connects to Chelsea King's disappearance and leads to John Gardner's confession.

Key points

Amber's Disappearance. Amber McGonigle went missing on February 13, 2009, leading to a frantic search.
Suspicion on Stepfather. Dave, Amber's stepfather, became a person of interest due to inconsistent statements.
The Search Efforts. Over 1,500 tips and 500 potential sightings were reported in the search for Amber.
The Search for Chelsea King. A 17-year-old girl goes missing, prompting an extensive search in her community.
Breakthrough in the Case. DNA evidence leads to a suspect in Chelsea's disappearance, raising hopes for her safety.
Discovery of Remains. Tragic news breaks as Chelsea's remains are found, ending hopes of her being alive.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

Nobody just vanishes without a trace.

Carrie McGonigle reflects on Amber's disappearance.

1:24WatchNov 10, 2022

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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