Nature Noir by Jordan Smith (best summer reads of all time txt) 📕

Hazard Committee released a report saying that even in the case of a moderate earthquake, the Auburn Dam might fail and unleash a wall of water on California's capital and two air force bases downstream. Then no less an authority than the U.S. Geological Survey said the dam was unsafe. The Bureau hired legions of consultants, among them the San Francisco geologists Woodward-Clyde Consultants, to conduct an exhaustive review of the earthquake potential at the dam site. Woodward-Clyde's work was so comprehensive that a quarter century later, quotes from it are the boilerplate of earthquake risk assessments for new structures in the Sierra foothills. When it came out in 1978, the bad news essentially finished off the thin arch—but not the dam. By 1979 the Bureau was back at the drawing board.

The morning after Karen's disappearance, her husband called the dispatcher at the Auburn PD and left a message for one of the policemen to call him. Sergeant Sam Russell, the son of a Placerville logger, returned the call, reaching Les at his office in the jail.

Reflecting on that conversation, Russell later remarked to the captain in charge of the investigation that Dellasandro's voice seemed strangely calm and emotionless as he reported his wife's unexplained absence. During the call Russell collected a few basic facts for a missing persons report, but toward the end of their conversation, he said, Dellasandro asked him not to file the report yet, saying he wanted to look for his wife himself for a couple of days first. In a gesture of professional courtesy, Russell agreed. So it was another two days—three since Karen's failure to show up at Forest Lake Christian—before an investigation started. When it did, the police initially focused on the possibility that Karen had deserted her husband and children and didn't want to be found. They checked local motels, women's shelters, buses, taxis, and the Sacramento airport. But as Karen's friends, neighbors, and parents were interviewed, the investigators gradually changed their opinion of what sort of case they were working on.

Perhaps at that point the circumstantial evidence was too weak to get a search warrant, and maybe the collegial relationship between the Auburn Police and the sheriff's office resulted in a retraction of the usual vigor with which potential crimes are investigated when the suspects are dressed like bad guys instead of police sergeants. Whatever the case, it took several days for the police to get to the Dellasandro residence, and when they did, Les agreed to let them in. They found the house spotless and Karen's jewelry, including her wedding and engagement rings, neatly laid out next to the bathroom sink. Her wallet, cash, and credit cards were all at the house. Investigators checked with the credit card companies for recent activity. None of the cards had been used. For whatever reason, photographs were not made of the home's interior, or if they were, the photos have been lost. Nor did investigators pull up the carpet or pull off the baseboards to look for traces of blood that might have eluded a cleanup. None of the family's three cars and trucks were processed for trace evidence, nor were their carpets pulled up. With 20–20 hindsight, it's clear that the best chance the Auburn police had to gather forensic evidence may have been at the house, where Karen was last known to be alive—her mother had dropped her off there after an errand the night before, and that morning Karen made the call from home to Forest Lake Christian. But it was a consent search, and with no warrant and nothing but circumstantial evidence that a crime had even been committed, such destructive thoroughness might have been justified only by an incriminating statement. However, during repeated questioning, Les Dellasandro stuck to his story.

Here is what Les told the police: In their home the morning of September 8, after the kids had gone off to St. Joseph's, Karen's telephone call to Forest Lake Christian precipitated an argument. In the course of it there was talk about a marital separation. He left the house to go shopping at Kmart and when he returned, Karen was gone. When she didn't come home later that night, he assumed she'd gone to her mother's, so he didn't report her absence until the next day. He couldn't provide sales receipts or any of the things he purchased to substantiate his Kmart alibi, and a check of the store's security cameras proved inconclusive.

Auburn didn't see many homicides, and looking back on it, some of the investigators admit that much has been learned about interrogation techniques since 1982. In retrospect, some of them think that at certain points, had they known some of the psychological tactics they know now, they might have extracted a confession. But that's just their opinion.

It is unlikely that anyone in law enforcement was protecting Dellasandro. Auburn's police chief and officers were known as ethical and hardworking, and they pursued the case diligently for months. They asked for and received the help of sheriff's detectives, who had more experience in homicide, as well as the FBI, the California Department of Justice, and the National Guard, which provided aircraft with heat-sensing instruments capable of detecting a decomposing body from the air. They examined Karen's mother's phone bills to rule out the possibility that Karen had fled with her parents' complicity. They flew an expert in polygraph examination up from Southern California, but Les refused to take the test. They searched the Dellasandros' vacation cabin and the ranch where Les ran his cattle, and for months, the chief told me ruefully, they had a backhoe out digging every time someone in the county saw buzzards circling.

The reopening of the case in which I had a small part was one of several in recent years, and not a whole lot came of it. There was no more reason—other than proximity and opportunity—that Karen's body would have been in the dam site than anywhere else in the