The Last Place You'd Look (21 page)

Suzanne’s Law amended section 3701(a) of the Crime Control Act of 1990. It requires originating law enforcement agencies to enter into NCIC anyone who goes missing between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. A law requiring the entry of children up to age eighteen already existed (the National Child Search Assistance Act of 1990).

The law was named after Suzanne Lyall, a nineteen-year-old student enrolled at the State University of New York at Albany, who disappeared in 1998. When Suzanne, who was last spotted taking a bus following her shift at a local mall, disappeared, police reportedly waited almost two full days before they launched an investigation. The petite student has not been seen since, despite her parents’ continuing and unwavering advocacy for their daughter and, indeed, for the rights of all missing persons. Passage of the law named after their daughter is hoped to speed investigatory efforts into the disappearance of college-age students.

Teenagers in general are often lumped into the runaway, or “throwaway” (also called “thrownaway”), category even when little evidence exists to support the child leaving of his or her own free will. A throwaway is a child who is not wanted by the family or guardians and is forced or encouraged to leave the home.

In decades past, most law enforcement agencies considered a missing teen, without any evidence to the contrary, to be a runaway. Many times this turned out to be true, but not always, as the Clark County (Washington) Sheriff’s Department discovered in 1971 when a high school student named Jamie Rochelle Grissim vanished.

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There is no doubt that something terrible started in the Vancouver, Washington, area in the winter of 1971. Vancouver’s Decembers are so cold they drive all but the heartiest indoors. Even inside, the damp chill has a way of penetrating all attempts to ward it off. But for sisters Jamie and Starr Grissim, the frozen December weather was a small thing: the two young teens were thrilled to be in a warm and loving household. It had not always been that way. The girls had lived in at least fifteen foster homes by the end of 1971 and were used to being moved around. This time, fate had been kind to them: their foster mom, an elderly woman named Grace Stilts, treated them as if they were her own. They felt loved and were happy in her home.

Starr and Jamie came from a large family of ten, but Starr—whose last name is now Lara—says there were many problems in her family situation. “There were very different age groups, and some of us had different fathers,” Starr says. “My mother lost her previous children [to child welfare officials] and then had us four, and we were taken away, too.”

Two younger siblings were adopted, but Starr and Jamie found themselves consigned to foster homes until their mother’s parental rights were terminated when they were grade-schoolers. By then, Starr says, they were too old for most adoptive parents. They spent the next few years shuttling from one foster home to the next. “Some of them were so temporary, I can’t even remember them,” Starr admits.

But of all of their foster moms, Grace was their favorite. Although much older than the rest and in ill health, she wanted the girls to feel as though her home was also theirs, and she went out of her way to try to make them happy. She succeeded.

At that time, Jamie attended Fort Vancouver High School. She was sixteen years old, outgoing, and personable. Jamie didn’t hesitate to try new things, like horseback riding. She also had an artistic streak as wide as her frequent smile and loved both drawing and writing poetry. In fact, she had already decided on an art career and had landed a small scholarship as a result of her artwork.

Jamie Grissim. Courtesy of Starr Grissim Lara.

Her good heart brought her many friends, but she also drew animals to her with her abundant empathy. From horses to dogs to the chickens on the farm where they once lived, Jamie loved them all, and they also took to her. Starr remembers the roosters following Jamie around like a band of paparazzi. Still, no one inspired Jamie’s loyalty and love more than her own little sister. Starr says they made a pact to always stick together and defend one another, no matter what.

“We had an agreement we wouldn’t be separated, even if it meant one of us might [have to pass up being] adopted,” Starr says.

When it came to adoption, Jamie knew the kind of person with whom she didn’t want to live. The girls were once placed with wealthy potential adoptive parents, but when Jamie saw their prospective father beating one of the horses, “she said, ‘We’re out of here,’” Starr relates. Jamie didn’t care about the money. She said she didn’t want to live in a place where they would do that to a horse.

Jamie had a boyfriend, but he had already graduated from high school and was serving in the navy on the other side of the continent. Smart and capable of excellent schoolwork even with her sometimes volatile and always changing home situation, Jamie was on track to graduate a year early and excited about her prospects of studying graphic design in college.

In every way, Jamie Grissim learned to make the most of what life dealt her. Despite early years that would have broken the spirits of most kids and a proliferation of foster situations—some good, some bad—Jamie knew one constant: her close bond with Starr wouldn’t change, no matter what happened. Despite the passage of decades, that bond remains even though Starr has not seen her sister since that cold, damp December in late 1971.

“It was a Tuesday and I was sitting at our kitchen table, and Jamie had to wait for the bus,” remembers Starr. Her sister had gone to the school bus stop outside their door but was soon driven back inside by the chilly weather. Jamie checked in on their foster mom, who suffered from heart problems, then spoke to her sister before returning to the bus stop, reminding Starr to tell Grace, their foster mother, that she would walk home from school because she had a couple of classes that day. Jamie said she would return home around 1:30 p.m. Starr, who was in junior high school at the time, wasn’t released until two hours later.

When Starr returned from school, she noted Jamie had not yet returned home, which she thought odd because her sister had been very specific that she would be out of school early that day. Hour after hour passed, but still no Jamie. As darkness fell, Starr says she knew something was very wrong. At last, Grace called the police to report her dependable, good-natured foster daughter missing.

“She didn’t come home that night. The next day I went to school and it was snowing, and I kept calling home and calling all of her friends,” says Starr.

The girls’ caseworker, Jeannine Gillas, from child protective services, knew Jamie didn’t vanish on her own, even if police did not. Starr says law enforcement dismissed her disappearance because she was a teenage foster kid. They thought she had run away, but the caseworker pressed them to take a report. They filed a missing persons report after thirty days—on January 7, 1972.

“Our caseworker was furious. She went to the school and questioned people and looked for her, but she never did find Jamie,” says Starr, today a resident of Hillsboro, Oregon.

Five months later, in May 1972, Jamie’s purse and identification, along with some of her other belongings, were discovered “up in the hills,” in a wooded area northwest of Vancouver, according to Starr. It was a desolate area, far from their home, a place where Jamie would never have ventured by herself. But there was even worse news for Jamie’s family: authorities had found the bodies of other missing teenage girls. In fact, two of those bodies would be discovered within one hundred yards of Jamie’s belongings.

As the investigation into Jamie’s disappearance continued over the years, the authorities asked Starr repeatedly for Jamie’s dental records. Each request cut her to the heart. “Haven’t you kept them?” she would inquire each time, adding, “I’ve given them many times, and none of the girls turned out to be her.”

The truth of it is that authorities lost some of the evidence in Jamie’s case. Her pocketbook vanished from police custody. Her savings account, containing $80 was confiscated by the state. “That was a lot of money back then,” Starr notes. The state refunded the money to Starr in 2009 after a medical examiner issued a death certificate for Jamie.

Starr says there is an enormous difference between the way the Clark County Sheriff’s Department handled Jamie’s case in the beginning and the manner in which modern investigators are approaching it.

“At the time, it was harder to convince anyone that a foster kid wasn’t just a runaway. Not everyone took it as seriously as my caseworker did. People heard about her and just assumed she had done something wrong in order to be a foster child. At the time they just didn’t take [a teen’s disappearance] seriously,” she says.

Although they may be working harder to find Jamie now, one thing remains clear: teens who disappear are still considered runaways unless there is a clear indication of foul play. “The sheriff’s department tells me they classify kids by age. If they are twelve and under, they are ‘missing children’ and above that they call them ‘runaways.’ That’s how they classify it to this day,” says Starr. “That’s insane.”

A park employee who was a popular graduate of Jamie’s high school was arrested in connection with the murder of one of the six young girls whose bodies were found in the area, as well as an attack on one victim who survived. At least one of those bodies has never been identified; the others who died were local teenagers, all of whom reportedly had been hitchhiking. Jamie was not known to hitchhike, but Starr believes that since the suspect was a well-known, high-profile student at Jamie’s high school who graduated five years earlier, she may have felt comfortable accepting a ride with him. He also lived ten blocks away from Grace and the girls, so they were used to seeing him around the neighborhood. Jamie’s body, despite many searches over the years, has never been found.

The suspect received a life sentence for attempted murder following his trial in 1978. He will be eligible for release in 2014. He has never been charged with nor officially connected to Jamie Grissim’s disappearance, nor with the murders of the other five women.

“My number-one thing is I’m hoping to keep this guy in jail,” Starr says. “I am hoping that someday I will find her—that someday he has a change of heart when he figures he’s not getting out.”

In the meantime, Starr plans to attend the man’s parole hearings. “It’s like a form of continuing abuse,” Starr says of the parole attempts. “But my sister would have done this for me, and I just can’t let her be forgotten. I just can’t.”

Starr, like so many relatives of missing persons, needs to be able to grieve for her sister. But she faces a delicate and often incompatible balance between hope and reality: hope that her suspicions and the evidence are wrong and Jamie is still alive somewhere; reality in the form of the evidence in the case that has prompted even law enforcement to say Jamie is no longer alive.

Part of Starr’s healing process includes something she both longs for and dreads: finding her sister’s remains. Without a body to bring Jamie’s case to a hard and inarguable conclusion, there is always the wisp of a chance that everyone has gotten it wrong and Jamie is alive after all, that despite the odds, the evidence, and plain old-fashioned common sense, Jamie really did run away or survive an abduction. It has happened before—for proof, look at Jaycee Dugard.

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Jaycee, who lived in South Lake Tahoe, California, was kidnapped in 1991 at the age of eleven, after being dragged into a car while walking to the bus stop. In 2009, Jaycee, who was twenty-nine at the time, was discovered living with a man identified as Phillip Garrido and his wife, Nancy, near Antioch, California, outside of San Francisco. Held captive with two children she bore after her abduction, Jaycee and her children lived in a shed and some tents behind the Garrido home.

Unlike most stranger abduction cases, positive proof that Jaycee had met with foul play was established early in the case. Her stepfather watched from a distance as a car drove up and Jaycee was pulled into it against her will. He gave chase but was unable to catch the vehicle. In the majority of similar cases, the victim is murdered within hours of abduction.

Added to the grave circumstances of Jaycee’s disappearance was the length of time she remained missing, despite hundreds of hours of searches and investigation into the case. Widespread publicity also did not help to find Jaycee, and no one could fault her family for believing her dead and moving on with their lives.

But even when the facts are as grim as they were in Jaycee’s case or in the matter of Jamie Grissim or Keith Call of Virginia, there is always that tiny bit of hope nourished by the family that they, too, will one day experience a miracle.

And, the families say, if they are not going to get their miracle, if their loved one is gone, then they want proof. They want to provide a proper burial or cremate their loved ones’ remains. Without this important step in the grieving process, it is difficult to advance from an emotional standpoint, even if they have already done so on an intellectual basis.