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1968 Adams, David 5-3-1968; Issaquah
Topic Started: Apr 7 2009, 05:34 AM (678 Views)
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Sheriff’s office revives investigation of 1968 disappearance
April 6, 2009

By Warren Kagarise

David Adams
New cold case squad sets sights on missing Tiger Mountain child
The detective who arrested the Green River killer will work to solve nearly 200 cold cases, including the disappearance of an 8-year-old Issaquah boy who vanished four decades ago.

Retired King County Sheriff’s Office Detective Tom Jensen — who arrested serial killer Gary Ridgway in November 2001 — is part of a new, three-member Cold Case Squad formed by the sheriff’s office and backed by a federal grant. Jensen serves as a civilian analyst.

Investigators will examine 193 homicides and missing-persons cases dating back to 1942. The squad will review the unsolved disappearance of 8-year-old David Adams, who went missing May 3, 1968, while hiking on Tiger Mountain with his brothers and sisters. More than 1,000 searchers combed the mountainside in the days following his disappearance, but David was never found.Residents speculated whether David had fallen down an old coalmine shaft, or if an animal had attacked the boy and dragged him off. Others wondered if David ran away.

But Sgt. John Urquhart, sheriff’s office spokesman, said David was likely abducted: “It’s very unlikely a cougar dragged him, or that he ran away, which is unlikely at age 8.”

Detective Scott Tompkins, a member of the cold case team, said investigators will determine whether DNA testing and other techniques unavailable in 1968 could aid the investigation. Jensen, Tompkins and Detective Jake Pavlovich will also look at crimes committed by people connected to the case in the years since the disappearance.

Despite the advances in techniques and technology, Urquhart said old-fashioned “gumshoe detective work” would be crucial to the cold-case investigations. Since the unit began work in January, Tompkins contacted David’s father to request photos of the boy to use on bulletins and an agency Web site devoted to the cases.

Challenges abound for investigators as they seek to unravel cold cases. Evidence gathered in the era before DNA testing may have been contaminated, mishandled or improperly stored. Memories of cases fade and witnesses die.

But the passage of time can also push people with information about a case to talk.

“As many cold cases get solved by people talking as they do by DNA,” Urquhart said.

Investigators said people with information are more likely to come forward as they get older and begin to worry about their mortality.

“Maybe they’re on their deathbed and they want to make it right,” Urquhart said.

Tompkins said people once connected to potential suspects, such as ex-wives and former cellmates, often yield valuable information because the potential suspects confided in them. As time passes, “loyalties change and people are more willing to disclose information,” he added.

Because investigators face so many cold cases, each will be reviewed based on the status of possible suspects, witnesses and evidence, as well as possible threats to the community.

“There’s no way we can actively investigate 193 cases,” Urquhart said.

The sheriff’s office established the Cold Case Squad with a $500,000 grant from the National Institute of Justice, part of the federal Department of Justice. The grant, which will fund the squad for 18 months, covers personnel costs and expenses associated with the investigations.

The grant is eligible for renewal. Evaluators will decide if the squad was productive and is likely to solve additional cases.

Before the cold case unit was established, each detective from the sheriff’s office Major Crimes Unit was assigned to a handful of cold cases. Urquhart said their workload of active cases often prevented them digging deep into the old files. He said solving the cold cases is paramount.

“If we can’t solve it, we have failed,” Urquhart said. “We’ve failed the victim and we’ve failed society.”

On the Web

Learn more about the King County Sheriff’s Office Cold Case Squad at www.kingcounty.gov/safety/sheriff. Follow the link for “Cold Case Investigations.”

Reach Reporter Warren Kagarise at 392-6434, ext. 234, or wkagarise@isspress.com. Comment on this story at www.issaquahpress.com.
http://www.issaquahpress.com/2009/04/06/sh...-disappearance/
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http://www.waspc.org/mp/missing.php?wac=93M0009138


David William Adams


Report Type: Missing Person

Sex: Male

Race: White

Hair: Brown

Eye Color: Blue
Skin: Unknown
Height: 4' 0"

Weight: 50

Date of Birth: Jan-26-1960
Place of Birth: Unknown

Current Age: 48

Last Seen: May-03-1968

Dental X-rays Available: No
Scars, Marks, Tatoos:
Clothes/Jewelry: Unknown
Aliases:
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Cold case squad targets former neighbor in missing child case

by ELISA HAHN / KING 5 News

Posted on November 24, 2009 at 10:35 PM


ISSAQUAH, Wash. - Cold case detectives say they have zeroed in on a suspect in a missing child case, from 4 decades ago. Now they are asking for the public's help in the effort to turn up new information.

"It has been a lot harder than i thought it would be, bringing up old memories," says Ann Adams.

Ann and Donald Adams remember when their son vanished more than 40 years ago. 8 year old David Adams disappeared in may 1968 walking home from a friends house in their Issaquah neighborhood.

Det. Scott Tompkins says the first mistake may have been assuming the boy was lost or stranded. "Initially it was investigated as a search and rescue effort," says Tompkins.

Search and Rescue teams launched a massive search around the Adams home. They came back with bad news. "Their dogs had never failed to find who they were looking for if who they were looking for was there. Based on that, I assumed that someone had taken him out of the area," says his father, Don Adams.

"Since then I have come to the firm conviction that he was not lost, that somebody intervened in some way. Whether it was through an accident or a deliberate malicious act, I don't know," says Ann Adams, the boys mother.

Police agree. Earlier this year, cold case squad reopened the David Adams case. It's one of almost 200 cold cases King County detectives have reopened with the funding of a federal grant.

"When we look at the investigation, back then there was one person who had access to him." Det. Tompkins says the suspect they're focusing on now was a man in his 20's living in the neighborhood at the time. KING 5 has decided not to name the man since he has not been charged with a crime. Court documents reveal he was reportedly "very evasive" during the search. Tompkins says that suspect is now in his 60s, living in Lewis county. "When we interviewed him we didn't have a good feeling about his involvement. We offered him a polygraph which he did fail," Tompkins says.

In a phone conversation with KING 5, the Lewis County man says he's a Viet Nam vet who claims he helped search for the boy decades ago. He says the interrogation made him "nervous and stressed" and that only reason police have focused on him, is because after 40 years he's the only one still alive.

The Adams say whatever happens, their faith has helped them find peace in their heart. Perhaps it's the killer who needs closure.

"He's carrying a terribly heavy burden. And it might bring peace and closure to someone else. But I have all confidence that all is well with David," says Ann Adams.
http://www.king5.com/news/Cold-case-squad-...e-73199097.html
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http://www.seattlepi.com/local/413113_miss...tml?source=mypi

Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Last updated 9:05 p.m. PT
Missing-child case reopened 41 years later
By CASEY NORTON
KOMO-TV STAFF

Forty-one years after a little boy disappeared near Issaquah, a new lead has surfaced in the cold case.

Detectives told the family of David Adams they've named a person of interest who may be talking to someone about the crime.

David Adams disappeared on May 3, 1968 while walking home from a friend's house near Tiger Mountain Road. He was 8 years old at the time.

Ann and Don Adams still lose their breath when they talk about their lost son.

"There will always be an empty place in our family," said Ann Adams.

In the massive search for the missing boy, Marine helicopters used infrared systems -- a new invention at the time. A thousand searchers combed the woods with the help of dozens of tracking dogs.

Detectives assumed the boy fell down a mine shaft, or was attacked by a cougar. They never suspected foul play, until Det. Scott Tompkins started to work this cold case earlier this year.

Tompkins says in 1968, police never followed up on tips about a neighbor, who was then 20 years old.

Forty-one years later, Tompkins called that person and subpoenaed his phone records. Based on his findings, the detective now considers the Lewis County man a person of interest.

"There is evidence in our investigation that our person of interest is trying to steer potential witnesses away from the police," said Tompkins. "That's why we served the search warrant, to contact more people within that inner circle."

Original police reports put that man in the area just minutes before David Adams disappeared. Dogs tracked a scent to his house, but never found a body.

KOMO News contacted that man on Wednesday. The man said the police are fishing for a lead, and that the revival of the decades-old case has been upsetting.

The Adams are more forgiving.

"I just don't want to point a finger of accusation at anyone until there is either a confession or some proof," said Ann Adams.

David Adams' parents say they made peace with his fate decades ago. But they're prepared to learn the truth.

"I think if there was a final resolution, it would put my mind at ease," said Don Adams.

Ann Adams says she'd like to believe her son died in an accident that was covered up by someone in a panic.

"I think for us, it's resolved. But I know that somebody out there is carrying a terrible burden," said Ann Adams, "because I know he wasn't just lost."

KOMO News has chosen not to name the person of interest in the case since he has not been charged with any crimes.
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http://abcnews.go.com/US/cold-case-missing...tory?id=9302719

Case of Missing Boy David Adams Has Been Unsolved For 41 Years
Investigators in Washington Say They Believe Adams' Case is 'Solvable'
By EMILY FRIEDMAN
Dec. 10, 2009

David Adams vanished in May 1968 on a walk home from a friend's house where he had been playing in his Issaquah, Wash., neighborhood. He was never seen or heard from again, and a body was never discovered.


Police investigate person of interest in the case of a boy's 1968 disappearance.Today, 41 years after the 8-year-old boy disappeared, police say they have a person of interest in the case and it has risen to the top of the city's other 175 unsolved murders.

This one, they say, could be cracked.


"We believe that the Adams' case is solvable," said King County Sheriff's Office spokesman Sgt. John Urquhart said. "We believe this is different."

Investigators from the sheriff's office Cold Case Squad are focusing their attention on a person of interest in the case, a man they think could have been the last person to see Adams the day he vanished.

Urquhart said this man is being investigated because he "does not have a good alibi."

The spokesman declined to identify the person of interest, but told ABCNews.com that he was in his 20s when Adams went missing and was a neighbor of the family's.

The man, who has so far been cooperating with police, is now in his 60s and is a veteran of the Vietnam War, said Urquhart.

"The person of interest lived in the area and had the potential of being the last person who would have seen the boy," said Urquhart. "We don't know that he was, but because of the route the boy took home, we believe he could have been."


David Adams' Family Not Sure If They Want Case Revisited
One of the hardest parts of retracing the steps of a cold case as old as Adams is notifying the family, said Urquhart.

"We probably get their hopes up and it's difficult," he said of calling Adams' parents, Ann and Don, both of whom are still alive and living in the Kings County area in Washington. "I can't imagine that first phone call after not hearing from detectives in 30 or 40 years."

"It's been 41 years, but they don't even have a body," he said.

While Adams' parents did not immediately respond to messages left by ABCNews.com, the boy's sister, 38-year-old Brooke Vaughan, said that after this many years, some of the family might not even want a body.

"This investigation is good and bad for my family," said Vaughan, who was born four years after her brother disappeared. "It's hard for my parents to go through, to reopen the wounds."

"Obviously we'd like to find out what happened to him, but in some sense my parents feel like he's in a good place and maybe they don't want to know the details of every little incident that happened," said Vaughan.

Vaughan said that her brother's disappearance was not spoken about much when she was growing up. Her other brothers and sisters – four in total – have all reacted differently to the new interest in the case, she said.

Asked whether she believes her brother is still alive, Vaughan said, "No."

In addition to speaking with Adams' neighbor, Urquhart's department has also handed out a deck of playing cards – each emblazoned with a photo of a missing person -- to prisons and jails.

"As time goes on people who might have information or known a suspect tend to come forward," he said. "They're not as afraid of the suspect anymore or they might be on their death bed and what to get it off their chests."

"We are hopeful," said Vaughan. "We always are."

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http://www.timesoftheinternet.com/136908.html
New lead in missing child case in Wash.
ISSAQUAH, Wash., Dec. 10 (UPI) --
Authorities in King County, Wash., said they have identified a person of interest in the disappearance of an area boy 41 years ago.

King County Sheriff's Detective Scott Tompkins said he considers a man who lived near David Adams' family as a person of interest in the 8-year-old boy's disappearance near Issaquah, Wash., on May 3, 1968, KOMO-TV, Seattle, reported Wednesday.

Tompkins said the Lewis County man, whose identity was not reported, was 20 at the time of the boy's disappearance. The detective said he uncovered evidence to support his theory after getting a subpoena for the man's phone records.

"There is evidence in our investigation that our person of interest is trying to steer potential witnesses away from the police," said Tompkins, who began looking into the cold case this year. "That's why we served the search warrant, to contact more people within that inner circle."

Police reports indicate the unidentified man was in the area when Adams disappeared and tracking dogs followed a scent to the man's home during the search for the missing boy, KOMO reported.

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Only questions remain after ’68 disappearance
December 15, 2009

By Warren Kagarise

When 8-year-old David Adams disappeared in May 1968, the still-unsolved case generated unprecedented news coverage and attracted hundreds of searchers to Tiger Mountain. Photo illustration by Greg Farrar
Innocence Lost, a three-part series about the 1968 disappearance of David Adams.

Part 1: Missing

The walk home was short, but David Adams never completed the trip.

David left a friend’s house on a late spring day in 1968, and set off down a shortcut worn by neighborhood children. Somewhere along the path — whether by accident, misstep or chance encounter — the 8-year-old boy disappeared from Tiger Mountain.

Searchers volunteered by the hundreds and combed through dense forest for days. Tiny Issaquah, with 4,000 or so people then, was the nexus in the unprecedented search effort.

With the techniques and technology available to investigators and searchers in May 1968, the search for David unfolded as a rescue mission.

Searchers offered theories.

Maybe David fell down a coalmine shaft. Maybe a wild animal attacked the boy. Maybe — a more remote maybe in the 1960s — someone abducted David.

Searchers found nothing.

In the decades since the disappearance, the unsolved mystery baffled investigators and stalled when evidence eluded detectives. The case gathered dust for years at the King County Sheriff’s Office, with investigators stymied by scarce evidence and witnesses whose memories were blurred by time and pain.

Detectives revived the investigation in April with a federal grant meant to solve decades-old cold cases. Days after authorities announced the new Cold Case Unit, a detective interviewed a Lewis County man about the disappearance. But the case has produced no arrests.

The events renewed attention, too, in Issaquah, where longtime residents recall the fruitless Tiger Mountain search. The investigation also forced the Adamses to confront the grief and unanswered questions associated with the disappearance.

As the decades passed, however, accounts and recollections were muddied because news organizations — including The Issaquah Press — repeated incorrect information in the years since the disappearance.

‘A garden-variety 8-year-old boy’

The year he disappeared, David was a third-grader at Clark Elementary School.

“He was like most any other 8-year-old boy, sweet and naughty at the same time, loud, and just liked to play and do the things little boys play,” Ann Adams said when asked to describe her lost son. “He was a bright little boy. He excelled at school.”

Ann and Don Adams raised a close-knit family — six children in the house on Tiger Mountain, where the Adamses still live today. A daughter was born a few years after David disappeared.

“He was just pretty much a garden-variety 8-year-old boy, endearing and frustrating at the same time,” said Ann Adams, now 76. And, she added with a laugh, “probably the bane of his teacher’s existence very often.”

David, the second oldest, had a mischievous streak, Ann Adams recalled. She remembered a photograph from Easter, with her oldest daughter, Jill, in a frilly Easter dress, and David beside her in a holiday outfit. Look closely at the photo, Ann Adams recalled, and notice David holding fingers aloft above Jill’s head to make rabbit ears, with “just a glint in his eye of mischief.”

David had dark hair and striking blue eyes, like his mother. In the most common photo of him — the picture reproduced on playing cards with photos of missing people — David wears a bright rust-colored shirt, but the eyes capture attention first.

Jill Stephenson was not yet a kindergartener when her older brother disappeared. Though she recalls little about David, she said she remembers those blue eyes.

Stephenson also recalls the day David vanished. She was playing in the backyard with her brothers when a neighbor told them David was missing.

Rob Killian shared a desk with David at Clark. The boys went to the same church, and attended each other’s birthday parties.

Killian said he remembers most the brittle silences in the years after David disappeared.

“I am not sure if I have blocked all of these memories, but I remember being quiet around his family a lot in the days and months later,” he recalled. “There was such fragility and silence.”

Killian, now a Seattle physician who runs a group family practice and works with HIV patients, said the 1968 school year came to a hushed, somber close.

“My desk, the double desk,” Killian recalled, “eventually got cleaned out and I sat alone the rest of the school year.”

A fateful day

Friday, May 3, 1968: David rode the bus from Clark to the stop along Southeast Tiger Mountain Road.

David and the oldest Adams son, Steven, walked from the stop to the house where the family had moved less than two weeks earlier.

After school, David went to play with Kevin Bryce, then 6, a friend from church. Although the Adamses were new to Tiger Mountain, the family had worshipped with the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints congregation for years.

Don and Ann Adams and their five children settled on the Eastside after Don Adams accepted a job with Boeing. Don Adams, a captain in the Air Force Reserve, was called back to active duty after the Pueblo incident — a Cold War flashpoint in January 1968, when North Korea seized a U.S. Navy surveillance ship. By early May, Don Adams, now 77, was stationed in Oklahoma for Air Force training.

Meanwhile, on the first Friday in May, David and Kevin walked on Tiger Mountain from the Adams house to the Bryce residence. The boys used the fateful shortcut, a path beaten across a field. The trail led behind the Adams house to a gravel road, now 241st Avenue Southeast.

David and Kevin crunched down the gravel road, crossed a bridge above 15 Mile Creek and headed up the hill toward the Bryce house. The boys used a trail worn by the Bryce children, instead of using the driveway circling the front of the house.

At about 5 p.m., David was due home for dinner. Ann Adams planned to take the children to J.C. Penney in Bellevue to buy shoes.

David asked his mother on the telephone if he could stay awhile longer.

“I did tell him to come home because dinner was nearly ready and we were going to go down” to Bellevue, Ann Adams recalled.

Kevin walked with David to the 15 Mile Creek bridge, and then asked if David knew how to get home. David said he could find the way, and he headed down the trail.

After 15 minutes or so, Ann Adams called back to the Bryce house to tell David he needed to leave. David, she was told, left right after she had first spoken with him.

Ann Adams and neighbors canvassed the neighborhood, calling for David and asking others if they had seen the boy.

“Hours passed and they couldn’t find him. The authorities became involved,” she said.

Within hours, a massive search would unfold on Tiger Mountain. Neighbors looked through the night.

David was nowhere to be found.

Warren Kagarise: 392-6434, ext. 234, or wkagarise@isspress.com. Comment at www.issaquahpress.com.
http://www.issaquahpress.com/2009/12/15/on...-disappearance/
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http://www.issaquahpress.com/2009/12/22/se...or-missing-boy/

Innocence Lost, a three-part series about the 1968 disappearance of David Adams.

Part 2: Search


Only memories and frayed newspaper clippings remain from the fruitless search for David Adams.

Ask any longtime Issaquah resident about the mystery, and talk turns to the May 1968 search for the missing 8-year-old boy. Many old-timers scoured fields and forests in the frenzied days after David vanished.

The search drew people in the hundreds — perhaps even 1,000 searchers — to Issaquah, just a flyspeck on maps back then. Volunteers swarmed Tiger Mountain in the days after David disappeared, but the first searchers were bound together by faith, community and the desire to find the lost boy.

The first teams included members of the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where the Adamses worshipped. The call for help rippled through the congregation hours after David failed to return home. Searchers combed the mountain through the night. By the next morning, the King County Sheriff’s Office arrived, and the case caught the attention of Seattle news organizations.

Searchers said the effort represented the best qualities in humanity. But no trace of David was ever discovered.

Don Cronk organized the volunteer search effort. From headquarters at the Adams house, he plotted a search grid and sent search teams into the thick forest.

Cronk and other tireless searchers imagined David lost on the mountain, “out there somewhere, weaker and colder” as time passed.

“We were just going for 24 hours a day,” Cronk said. “I don’t think I slept for a day or two.”

Eileen Erickson heard about the case the Sunday after David disappeared. A call for volunteers came during a church service in Magnolia, the Seattle neighborhood where the Ericksons worshipped with the local Mormon congregation.

Issaquah claimed about 4,000 residents then. Seattleites viewed the outer suburb, beyond Lake Washington and nestled in the Cascade foothills, as rugged and wild.

“Enough people knew Issaquah well enough that we thought of Issaquah as the end of the world,” Erickson said.

Kevin Bryce was the last known person to see David. Bryce, then a 6-year-old neighbor, played with David in the hours before the May 3, 1968, disappearance. When David headed home for dinner, he walked with Bryce to a bridge across 15 Mile Creek, and then set off down a trail toward home. Bryce was confused hours later when he heard David had never returned.

“It’s so easy to get there,” Bryce recalled. “I don’t know how he could have not made it home.”

‘The world was a lot safer place’

David and Bryce parted ways at about 5 p.m. near a shortcut from modern-day 241st Place Southeast to the next street, where the Adamses had moved from Eastgate less than two weeks before. David planned to take a shortcut worn by neighborhood children. Bryce, now 48, explained the route before David left.

“For me, being a grown adult, looking back on it and knowing every inch of that land, I think he got to that lot, balked at the trail and then left the area under someone else’s guidance,” Bryce said.

Investigators and volunteers handled the disappearance as a search-and-rescue mission. Issaquah was safe; some residents left doors unlocked, because crime was almost nonexistent.

Ann Adams, now 76, said the Tiger Mountain neighborhood seemed like a safe place where she and her husband, Don, could raise their family.

“At that time, everyone was just assuming that he had become lost; 40 years ago, the world was a lot safer place and we were in a very undeveloped neighborhood at that time,” she said. “The idea of crime in Issaquah just had not really raised its ugly head that much.”

Cronk and the search team set up in the first floor at the Adams house. The family had just built and moved to the house; the first floor was fairly empty, with little furniture. Women from church transformed the kitchen into a soup kitchen to feed searchers. The group received help when the American Red Cross set up another soup kitchen in the driveway.

Investigators set up the sheriff’s office command post at another site, though searchers could not recall the location.

Investigators integrated volunteer efforts into the official search; detectives and deputies focused on the area where Bryce last saw David. Volunteers fanned across Tiger Mountain.

“The idea of someone doing harm to a young boy was really not the first concern at that time,” Ann Adams said.

Clark Bean joined the initial search. Bean, now 76, was in the Air Force Reserve, like Don Adams, and the families knew each other through church.

Bean recalled the effort to “comb the area foot-by-foot.” In the days after David disappeared, searchers were optimistic he would return.

“We had every reason to believe he could find his way home,” Bean said.

When David failed to return in the first hours after the disappearance, a call for help reached other Mormon congregations in Western Washington.

“When you tell the Mormons you need a couple people, you get a couple hundred,” Bryce said.

Soon, other searchers tromped across Tiger Mountain — Explorer Scouts, mountain rescue teams, German shepherd teams, high school students, servicemen and congregations from other faiths.

Exhaustive search, inexhaustible searchers

Ava Frisinger and her husband, Bill, moved from Michigan to a May Valley house near Tiger Mountain the previous winter.

Ava Frisinger was a University of Washington graduate student then. Nowadays, she serves as the mayor of Issaquah. Bill Frisinger, now retired, worked as a Boeing engineer.

The couple joined a search party a few days after a disappearance, and scanned brush near Issaquah Creek. About 15 people fanned out across that search area, kept arms’ lengths apart and ran wands through the brush to look for signs of David.

“People thought this was something that happened in big cities,” Ava Frisinger said. “Small towns were safe places. They were good places for kids.”

Bill Frisinger recalled when military helicopters equipped with then-secret infrared sensors buzzed the area at night. Noise from the rotors, and lights from the helicopter, startled the Frisingers awake.

The infrared technology offered the Adamses new hope for resolution.

“I said, even if there’s a body, would they find it?” Ann Adams recalled. “And they said, yes, that they could.”

But the helicopter search, like the ground effort below, failed to find anything.

Despite widespread efforts by area residents, and news coverage the case received, the disappearance received little attention in the Clark Elementary School classroom where David attended third grade. Rob Killian shared a double desk with David, and attended the same church.

“Nothing was said at school,” Killian recalled. “It was not discussed. And, now that I think about that, in memory that seems so odd. We weren’t warned or counseled or offered grief counseling or interviewed.”

At the Adams house, search organizers reached a grim conclusion. After days spent scouring Tiger Mountain, teams had found nothing.

Investigators searched the area for about five days, while volunteers kept up the unofficial search for another five days or so.

Cronk recalled how businesses donated food and batteries to the search teams. Volunteers were so committed that some searchers refused to leave the mountain, and lost jobs because they wanted to continue.

Inside the search headquarters at the Adams house, however, Cronk and other organizers knew the search was done. Cronk walked outside and addressed the crowd — between 75 and 100 people — through a bullhorn and called off the search. People broke down, overcome with emotion.

“We chased every loose end,” Cronk said. “We chased every possible lead we could find.”

The case would gather dust at the King County Sheriff’s Office for the next 41 years.
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http://www.issaquahpress.com/2009/12/29/de...with-few-clues/
Detectives re-examine ’68 cold case with few clues
December 29, 2009

By Warren Kagarise
Innocence Lost, a three-part series about the 1968 disappearance of David Adams.

Part 3: Clues

Investigators scoured Tiger Mountain for almost a week. Volunteers searched for days more. Still, the mountain yielded no secrets in the search for David Adams, the 8-year-old boy last seen near 15 Mile Creek in May 1968.


Scott Tompkins (left) and Jake Pavlovich, King County Sheriff’s Office detectives, working out of their office at the Norm Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent, have a three-inch binder compiling the available information on the David Adams disappearance. — By Greg Farrar
The disappearance baffled investigators. Left to work with few leads and scant evidence, the case faded into memory for more than four decades — until now.

In the spring, King County Sheriff’s Office investigators received a $500,000 grant to re-examine cold cases. The agency established a cold case unit; detectives treated the Tiger Mountain disappearance as a priority.

When David vanished May 3, 1968, authorities handled the case as a search-and-rescue effort. Perhaps the boy fell down a defunct coalmine shaft or suffered a wild animal attack. After exhaustive searches for David turned up no traces, people suspected something more sinister.

David played with a friend after school, and then left for the short trek home at about 5 p.m. Ann Adams, now 76, asked her son to return home for dinner just before he vanished.

“I have the firm, firm feeling that this was not an accident, that somebody was involved,” she said. “Now, whether it was an accident on their part, I don’t know if they deliberately set out to do harm to him. But somehow along in the association that they had, harm was done to him.”

The lead detective, Scott Tompkins, believes someone else caused the disappearance, too. Everything Tompkins knows about the case is contained in a binder labeled “homicide” — 41 years condensed into three inches.

Detectives collected little evidence from the area where 6-year-old Kevin Bryce last saw David. Nobody knows if searchers damaged other evidence during the hunt for the lost boy.

Tompkins said he was amazed by how little detective work was conducted in 1968, because authorities managed the disappearance as a search-and-rescue effort instead of a child abduction.

“If the community felt that he was attacked by a cougar or fell down a well, then it wasn’t on people’s minds,” he said.

‘Time is the enemy’

Robert Lowery, executive director of the missing children division for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said high-profile abductions and technological advances since 1968 reshaped the way investigators and people approach missing child cases.

“We’re more sensitive now about what happens in these cases,” he said.

Although people opened newspapers, listened to radios or watched television broadcasts filled with information about the case, many reports contained incorrect information.

The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer misidentified the lost boy as “David Adam.” Articles in the days after the disappearance carry reports about bogus sightings. Tompkins said a few reports turned out to be cruel hoaxes.

David disappeared almost a full day before the case received widespread attention. The disappearance received unprecedented coverage, but a key tool investigators use today to locate missing children — the AMBER Alert — was nonexistent in 1968.

Nowadays, information about a missing child can be beamed across TV news tickers, electronic highway signs and mobile phones minutes after authorities determine a child is lost.

But 41 years ago, authorities were unable to saturate the airwaves with the description for a slender boy, 4 feet tall, with dark brown hair and intense blue eyes, dressed in green-and-brown plaid shirt, jeans and high tops.

“Time is the enemy when it comes to finding a child,” Lowery said.

DNA technology, another crime-solving tool, was unimaginable 41 years ago. Detectives now collect a comb, toothbrush or another item chockablock with DNA traces from missing people to aid investigations.

Not long after the King County Sheriff’s Office revived the Adams investigation, agents collected DNA samples from Ann and Don Adams and uploaded the information in a national database. The agency also collected DNA — through a quick, oral swab — from the oldest Adams child, Steven, who lives in Alaska.

Known as the Combined DNA Index System, the database helps investigators compare forensic DNA evidence nationwide.

Tompkins said DNA samples are key in cold cases. If another law enforcement agency had recovered unidentified human remains, DNA from them could be matched against genetic profiles in the database.

Searchers recovered no traces of David. The first search teams scanned the forest near the Adams house in the hours after David failed to return home. King County investigators arrived the next morning, and volunteers came to Issaquah by the hundreds to search.

Military helicopters equipped with then-secret infrared sensors buzzed the area. Volunteers traveled south toward Mount Rainier to investigate reported sightings. Searchers used fabric strips torn from bed sheets on which David slept to help dogs pick up the scent.

Unanswered questions

Don Adams, then a captain in the Air Force Reserve, remembers the search dog teams well. He returned from Air Force training in Oklahoma days after his second-oldest son vanished.

But the dogs, like the searchers and the helicopters, found nothing. Don Adams, now 77, recalled a follow-up visit from searchers after organizers called off the hunt for David.

“A few weeks later, they came back, and they said the dogs had never failed to find who they were looking for if who they were looking for was there,” he said. “Based on that, I just assumed that somebody had taken him from the area.”

Detectives eyed a 20-year-old man early in the investigation, a U.S. Navy corpsman whose family lived near the Adamses. Police reports from the days after David disappeared show the man piqued detectives’ interest.

A search volunteer and Tiger Mountain residents said the man behaved in a strange way when asked about the disappearance. Neighbors told police they saw a man walking along Tiger Mountain Road the day David vanished.

A detective interviewed the man May 6, 1968 — three days after a schoolmate last saw David near 15 Mile Creek. The man told the detective he had been taking tranquilizers because, he said, he was “a very nervous person,” court documents state.

Tompkins requested a warrant in October to search mobile phone records because he felt the man, now a Lewis County resident, steered potential witnesses away from investigators. Tompkins described the man as a “person of interest” in the case.

The man agreed to a polygraph test, administered in April at the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office. The man told Tompkins he assisted with the search. The man failed the test, court documents state. A technician recorded the strongest deception reading when the man was asked, “Do you know where the body is?”

The man also told Tompkins he passed a polygraph test in May 1968, court documents show. However, the test is not included in the modern-day Adams case file.

No conclusive evidence links the man to the disappearance. The Issaquah Press typically does not name people until they are charged with a crime.

Patrick Tiekamp, 64, is the older brother of the man interviewed by investigators. Tiekamp said Tompkins targeted his brother because the former neighbor happens to be “the last man standing.” Tiekamp said the investigation aggravated the post-traumatic stress disorder his brother developed in Vietnam.

“If my brother had done anything like that, he would have confided in me,” Tiekamp said.

Tiekamp said his brother served in Vietnam soon after David disappeared. In Vietnam, the man worked in a military morgue, and the word body still provokes strong reactions, Tiekamp said.

“Corpsman don’t kill people,” he added. “They save lives.”

‘All is well with David’

Ann and Don Adams never left Tiger Mountain where the family settled with David in 1968.

“There for a long time, we kept thinking maybe one day there would be a knock on the door and there he would be,” Ann Adams said. “We wanted to be there.”

They raised a close-knit family — six children in the house. A daughter was born a few years after David disappeared. Despite the disappearance and unsolved mystery, the Adamses said tragedy never forced them to become overprotective with the other children.

“We’ve had a happy, good life,” Ann Adams said. “Whoever was involved with this, I think I feel sorrier for them than I do for us. My life is just overflowing with good memories and happy days, but they must be carrying a terrible burden.”

The children biked, swam, hiked and picked berries in the thick forest nearby. Still, questions about David remained. Jill Stephenson, the Adamses’ oldest daughter, recalled how she walked through the woods as a child and wondered, “What if I came across him or his bones?”

When detectives renewed the investigation in April, the new attention the case received forced the Adamses to relive the pain from 41 years earlier.

Eileen Erickson, a longtime family friend, described Ann and Don Adams as hospitable, open people unlikely to become distracted by self-pity.

“I don’t think they’re the kind of people who would sit there and say, ‘Why me?’” Erickson said.

Searchers left the Adamses’ house about a week after David vanished. Grief lingered long after a family friend hoisted a bullhorn and ended the search.

“You just deal with grief as anyone deals with grief,” Ann Adams said. “Actually, when they contacted us last spring that they were going to open the case again, now and at this point, I can’t say that I hope they find out what happened. We’re at peace. I know all is well with David, whatever the circumstances are or were.”


Warren Kagarise: 392-6434, ext. 234, or wkagarise@isspress.com. Comment at www.issaquahpress.com.
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