EUREKA, Calif. — For 17 months, Police Det. David Parris has combed underbrush, searched swamps, banged on doors and run down hundreds of tips--including ones from psychics--in a frustrating search for Karen Mitchell, a high school junior who vanished in broad daylight from a downtown street.
The detective's almost immediate conclusion that Mitchell had been kidnapped sent a wave of fear through this North Coast town of 28,000, where no one can remember another teenager being snatched off a city street and there are only about three murders a year.
Posters of the oval-faced, green-eyed 17-year-old still hang in shops, and tips still come in to the Police Department. Local media highlighted the case again recently, after two other Eureka residents--Carole Sund and her daughter, Juliana--disappeared on a Yosemite trip and were found murdered in Tuolumne County.
Mitchell has never been found, but Parris believes that he may finally have a solid lead in the case.
The mystery may have begun to unravel in November, Parris said, when a trucker named Wayne Adam Ford walked into the Humboldt County Sheriff's Department and allegedly confessed to killing four women. He brought with him the severed breast of one victim as proof of his crimes.
Ford told investigators that he picked up his victims on the street. They were hitchhikers or prostitutes, who he told detectives died during "rough sex."
The first killing Ford allegedly confessed to happened one month before Mitchell disappeared while walking to work at a day-care center Nov. 25, 1997.
Mitchell was neither hooker nor hitchhiker, but she was walking down the street when last seen, and three witnesses eventually came forward to say they saw her get into a car that stopped to pick her up. The witnesses, however, differed in describing the car, and the only description of the driver sounded nothing like Ford.
When Parris learned of Ford's confession, he got in line to interview the trucker, who lived in a trailer park in nearby Arcata and has relatives in Eureka.
It was a long line. Investigators from all over the state and across the West wanted to talk to Ford about unsolved slayings of women dating back to 1986.
Parris spent three hours with Ford. The trucker said he had nothing to do with Mitchell's disappearance. Unconvinced, Parris said he tracked down cars owned by Ford's relatives that the trucker might have driven.
