Murder At Yosemite by Carlton Smith

Author:Carlton Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466885004
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

SIXTEEN

Maddock conducted his press conference at Mi-Wuk (once Miwok, for the Yosemite area tribe) Village, just a few miles from where the car was still being processed by investigators. Both of the bodies found in the trunk had been burned beyond recognition, he said.

“The car was very badly burned,” Maddock said. “The same is true for the victims [who] were recovered from the car. There is no way to make an identification at this point.” Nor, he added, was there any way to say for sure how the victims had died. Maddock said a thorough search of the area was even then underway in an effort to locate a third body in the immediate vicinity.

The car was so badly burned that even the metallic vehicle identification number was obliterated, Maddock said. So was the odometer, as it turned out, which would eventually make it more difficult to reconstruct the actual route of the car from the day it had been rented in San Francisco.

“The car was consumed by fire,” Maddock said. “Everything in the car was consumed by fire. That’s really all I can tell you.”

When pressed about the putative sightings on February 16 in Sierra Village and Twain Harte, Maddock insisted that the last credible sightings of the three women was still at Cedar Lodge in El Portal.

Why hadn’t the FBI opened the trunk immediately after the car was discovered? The implication was that the delay in announcing the discovery of the bodies had cruelly raised the hopes of the Sund, Carrington, and Pelosso families, only to crush them a day later. But Maddock wouldn’t say why the trunk hadn’t been opened first thing; it was pointless to try to describe proper forensic procedures to a crowd of reporters that seemed to be growing increasingly hostile.

When pressed directly about the accounts of the gas station owner and the gift shop operator, Maddock declined to respond.

By this point, several others newspapers, including the Chronicle and the Bee newspapers of central California, had also talked with the two would-be eyewitnesses, who continued to insist they had seen Carole, Juli, and Silvina a day later than the FBI had so far acknowledged.

“The more I’ve thought about this,” the gift shop owner told the Chronicle, “the more I know I’m right.”

Meanwhile, yet another woman in Twain Harte popped up saying, she, too, had seen the trio.

As reporters pressed each of these witnesses for more details of their sightings, more details came forth.

“It was a shiny, sunny day,” the gas station owner recalled. “I pumped their gas and got cash for it. It was just before I saw a report of them missing.”

The prospect that the threesome had indeed been on Highway 108 a day after the FBI insisted they were last seen prompted another spate of telephone calls to the FBI’s hotline, many of them claiming to have seen the trio in the Sonora-Highway 108 area in the middle of February, or even later than that.

The FBI’s continued insistence on Cedar Lodge as

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