In the two months since the disappearance of 19-year-old Donna Jou, a bookish, sheltered biology student who dreamed of being a neurosurgeon, clues to her fate have been both dramatic and maddeningly inconclusive.
There is an abandoned toolbox with ominous contents. There are puzzling text messages she may or may not have sent her mother. And there is a feeling of certainty, among her family and investigators, that a convicted sex offender named John Steven Burgess -- described by one detective as "a very smooth-talking con man" -- knows more than he will reveal.
"It's torture," said her mother, Nili Jou. "My daughter only lived 19 years, and he's not telling me where she is."
It was Burgess, 35, investigators said, who somehow lured Jou from her mother's Rancho Santa Margarita apartment onto the back of his motorcycle June 23. It was Burgess' dilapidated rental house in Palms where witnesses last saw her alive. It was Burgess, investigators say, who repainted his 1998 Ford Ranger and fled after Jou vanished, and it was his tool box -- containing a motorcycle helmet, his truck's license plate, rope, rubber gloves and a scrub brush -- that turned up near his house.
So when police caught up to him late last month as he was trying to ditch a bag of crack cocaine in the parking lot of a Motel 6 in Jacksonville, Fla., everyone hoped the case would break wide open.
Instead, Burgess now sits in a Los Angeles jail on an unrelated charge of failing to register as a sex offender. He refuses to talk about Donna Jou, and though police call him a suspect, they have not charged him in her disappearance. Between him and the street stands $250,000 bail.
"It's an unusual case, where our client is being held on Case A, where clearly the focus is on Case B," said Burgess' attorney, George Bird Jr. He said Burgess could not answer questions about his whereabouts around the time of Jou's disappearance without the risk of incriminating himself in the failing-to-register case.
Jou's mother, an Iranian immigrant, is outraged that a Los Angeles judge reduced Burgess' bail from $1 million at his arraignment Monday, where he pleaded not guilty to failing to register as a sex offender. She said she was in disbelief when detectives warned her, before Burgess' capture, that his constitutional rights prevented them from making him speak about her daughter's disappearance.
"In my country, by now, they'd take it out of him," she said, but here "he has the right to keep it to himself and make parents suffer. A convicted sex offender can have a whole family hanging in the air."
After her daughter's disappearance, Nili Jou took two weeks off from her job as a phlebotomist at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, but she has since returned to work. She found her mind fraying without something to focus on. Now and then, at work, she pauses to consider what grief and worry have done to her appearance.
"I tell myself, 'These poor patients haven't done anything to look at this face, when they're in pain themselves,' " she says.
Donna Jou's family is one of high achievers. Her father, Reza Jou, works in Houston as a systems integration manager for NASA's International Space Station. Her older brother, Daniel, studies physics and philosophy at Harvard. Her older sister, Lisa, is an attorney in San Diego. Donna Jou herself excelled academically, with a near-perfect SAT score and a brilliance for math. But in key ways, said those who knew her, she didn't understand the world.
"She believed people were good," her father said. "She never had any experience with bad people."
Her family describes her as physically tiny -- 5 feet 3, about 100 pounds. A biology student at San Diego State, Jou was staying with her mother in Orange County for the summer and working at a Payless shoe store. Investigators say Burgess apparently met Jou on Craigslist.com and passed off another man's photo as his own.
On the day she disappeared, she told her mother she was going out with a friend but didn't specify where. Her mother, who was about to leave for a party, said she saw her daughter put on a helmet outside their apartment and climb onto a motorcycle with a man, though she didn't see his face.
"I was sure that she knows this person," the mother said.
Because she happened to be heading in that direction, the mother said, she followed the motorcycle for a few miles on the 241 toll road but lost sight of it when it pulled off on Portola Parkway in Irvine. That night, she received two text messages. One said:
Goodnight Momy. Love you
The next said:
battery dead. in san diego and be home later. love you Momy
