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Would You Risk Your Life To Save a Stranger?

Good Housekeeping, July 2003

This Texas nurse is holding the baby she rescued, who’d been kidnapped in another town. Real people catching real criminals: Read their amazing stories.

Dina Leal was on her way to work when her mother phoned. “Did you see the news?” her mom asked breathlessly.

“No, what happened?”

“A baby was kidnapped form a shopping enter in Abilene yesterday—snatched right from the family’s car!”

“What?” Dina exclaimed.

Reading from the news bulletin crawling across her TV screen, Dina’s mother repeated: “Officials ask residents to be on alert. One-month-old baby girl is abducted from Wal-Mart parking lot.”

The two women were shocked—Dina’s mother by the cruelty of the crime, Dina because she thought she might actually know who did it.

The previous afternoon, August 13, 2002, Dina—the assistant director of nurses at a nursing home in Quanah, Texas—had been pulled aside by Sherry Campbell, one of her coworkers, who had big news. Sherry’s daughter, Paula Roach, had called to tell her mother that she’d just given birth. After happily relaying the news to fellow staffers, Sherry jumped into her car to drive to nearby Abilene, where she planned to pick up Paula and her baby girl.

But Dina was more disturbed than delighted by Sherry’s announcement. Sherry’s daughter had been claiming to be pregnant for at least a year. Dina hadn’t seen Paula for a while, so perhaps she was telling the truth, but Dina doubted it. She suspected Paula wasn’t pregnant and never had been. And since this wasn’t the kind of lie you could easily back out of, sometimes Dina had wondered how Paula was going to end it. Now, on this hot morning, she had a terrible feeling that she had just found out.

Worried, Dina called the nursing home to see if anyone had seen the abducted child’s story on the news. The nurse who picked up the phone said she had—that poor mother—then added that Sherry, Paula, and the new baby were visiting the nursing home, and Dina should hurry if she wanted to see them.

“Tell them to wait—I’m on my way!” Dina spoke with forced enthusiasm as she hung up. Her hunch could’ve been wrong, but she didn’t think so, and she certainly wasn’t going to risk letting Paula disappear with another woman’s baby. After a fast call to the town sheriff, she jumped into her car and raced off to Quanah Nursing Home.

Joining the group that had gathered, Dina congratulated Paula, who smiled proudly as a new mother would. Reaching out for her baby, Dina did a quick assessment, and her heart began to pound. This infant was no newborn; she was big enough to be a month old. Dina discreetly ran her hand over the child’s belly, looking for the umbilical cord stump; there was no trace of it, though it usually takes weeks to drop off. And Paula didn’t look like a woman fresh from giving birth. She was clearly nervous, and her eyes kept darting toward the door. Dear Lord, Dina thought, I hope the cops hurry.

Softly, she began murmuring the appropriate things: that this was such a darling baby, such a sweet baby. Dina’s plan was to stall for time, so she worked to keep up a stream of chatter—but the small talk soon faded.

Now Paula was tugging the baby out of Dina’s arms. She was leaving the building, with her mother in tow. Dina was frantic, but didn’t think she could stop them. Fortunately, someone did. As Sherry and Paula left the parking lot, Sheriff Randy Akers pulled Sherry’s car over. Inside, he saw the baby, a perfect match for the missing child. Paula was arrested and charged with one count of aggravated kidnapping; just a few hours later, one-month-old Nancy Crystal Chavez was reunited with her parents, Margarita and Salvatore Chavez. Watching the family later on TV, Dina learned that Margarita had tried desperately to hang on to her baby through the window of Paula’s car, but Paula had just sped away, dragging Margarita halfway across the asphalt parking lot and covering her body with cuts and bruises. Dina, who has four kids of her own, cried softly as she watched the reunited family. “It just felt so wonderful,” she says, “to help this story have a happy ending.”

The Child Who Changed the System
Two years ago, Dina Leal’s heroic efforts would have been nearly impossible. Even if she was suspicious of Paula Roach, Dina wouldn’t have known about the kidnapping, because at that time that Texas had implemented its Amber Alert plan statewide. The program, which uses the Emergency Alert System to post instant bulletins about kidnapped children, was created in memory of nine-year-old Amber Hagerman, who was kidnapped and brutally murdered in Arlington, Texas, in 1996. Her attacker was never found. Advocates of the Amber Alert plan hope that broadcasting information on TV stations and electronic highway signs as soon as abductions occur will save more lives.

Elizabeth Smart is the most recent abductee to be rescued by means of a public alert; after Fox’s America’s Most Wanted aired a photo of her suspected kidnapper, a Utah couple phoned the police to say they thought they’d spotted the man, his wide, and Elizabeth on the street. In the wake of the Smart case and last summer’s rash of child abductions, the Amber Alert plan has become the highest profile law-enforcement program to encourage citizens to take part in crime solving. Today there are 39 statewide Amber Alert plans in the country, and at press time, Congress passed a bill to create a national Amber Alert network.

The idea behind the Amber program isn’t new: A template was created back in 1950, when the FBI started sharing names and photos of its Top Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. The success of the list was immediate. Shortly after the program began, a visitor touring FBI headquarters in Washington D.C., stared intently at a most-wanted poster hanging on the wall. “She said, ‘Hey, that’s my neighbor,’” recalls FBI spokesperson Angela Bell. Not one, but two criminals were spotted in this way by tourists at FBI headquarters, and thousands more have been apprehended thanks to posters throughout the country—a testimony, says Bell, to how much can be accomplished by working with the public. “Releasing as much information as possible makes everyone part of the posse,” agrees Joe Vargas, a police lieutenant in Anaheim, California, which, in the 1990s posted the largest reduction in crime of the country’s 50 largest cities by emphasizing public communication. “It’s almost a throwback to the Old West. Getting people involved works.”

In fact, systems as simple as telephone tiplines have been a huge help to authorities. Crime Stoppers, an organization that assists law-enforcement officers through citizen tips, estimates it has solved 914,000 cases over the last 25 years due to civilian proactiveness. Currently there are 800 Crime Stoppers programs operating in the United States, says the organization’s executive director Richard Carter, and a new program is created each week. The cell phone boom has drastically increased the number of calls to emergency hotlines like Crime Stoppers and 911. “Most authorities will tell you there aren’t enough state troopers on the roads,” explains Clinton van Zandt, a former FBI profiler, “but there are enough drivers with cell phones to act as a network of informants.”

Since last summer, the Amber Alert plan has been expanded in some states to notify truckers via CB radios, cell phones or satellite phones, to help with late-night searches on freeways. Other forms of technology are also being implemented to get the word out faster, such as showing surveillance videos of burglaries in action on police Web sites.

“More than ever before, the mass media—television especially—is like the world’s greatest wanted poster,” says Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, in New York. “The criminal’s picture doesn’t just hang in the post office—it essentially hangs in every living room in America.” The results are clear: Since America’s Most Wanted, premiered in 1988, its viewers have turned in 747 fugitives. The FBI, which has helped the show profile about 2,000 criminals, is happy to take the 23 percent return rate. “Where else can you interview 10 million people at one time?” asked Rex Tomb, chief of the Fugitive Publicity Unit for the FBI, in a New York Times interview after the Smart case broke.

A Neighbor’s Dark Secret
What kind of person responds to a wanted poster, a TV show, or an Amber Alert message? Rudy and Nancy Montoya, of West Jordan, Utah—a Salt Lake City suburb—called the cops after recognizing Elizabeth Smart’s captor on the street from his TV mug shot. Janet Damant, a hero to her California neighbors, is a 61-year-old former Avon lady—who also happened to catch a murderer.

Janet is on a first-name basis with everyone at Laguna del Sol, a resort in Wilton, California, where she’s lived for eight years. The mother of three daughters and grandmother of six, Janet likes living in her close-knit community, where loners stick out like sore thumbs and residents often approach newbies to size them up.

It was this kind of introductory chat Janet was having with Cary Stayner in March 1999, at Laguna’s clubhouse.

“Gary? Larry? Barry?” she remembers asking.

“Cary,” he told her. “With a ‘C’.”

Janet, several inches shorter than her new 37-year-old acquaintance, found herself staring at the Yosemite lettering on his t-shirt. His baseball cap said Cedar Lodge, which she knew was located at the national park. The cap in particular caught her eye—the news had been filled with stories about three women who had disappeared several weeks earlier from the Cedar Lodge. Only the day before, Janet had learned that the charred bodies of two of the women, Carole Sund and Sylvia Pelosso, were found in an abandoned car.

Stayner told Janet that he’d worked at the lodge. “Why did you leave?” she asked. Too many cops, he replied. They’d interviewed him twice about the missing women. Janet nodded casually, as if to acknowledge that would be annoying. “Inside my head, alarm bells were going off,” she says now. But there wasn’t much to go on. Stayner had openly admitted that the police checked him out. That didn’t sound like a man with something to hide.

Jan saw him around the resort during the next couple of months, and they always waved hello to each other.

In July, she was playing darts at Laguna’s lounge, as she did most Friday nights, when she spotted Stayner watching the 11:00 news. She walked over to say hi, but he was in no mood for conversation. “I did something really bad this time,” he remarked, apropos of nothing. “I need to get out of town.” Surprised, Janet asked where he was going; he replied that he was headed up north. She was about to question him further, but then her friends beckoned her back to the darts game, and besides, Stayner looked like he wanted to be alone. I’ll catch up with him later, Janet thought. By the time the game ended, he was gone.

The next morning Jan awoke early and switched on the TV. That’s when she saw it: An FBI all-points bulletin announcement for Cary Stayner, who was wanted for questioning in the murder of a young Yosemite nature guide the week before—the fourth killing in three months. The bulletin gave no photograph. Janet didn’t need a name.

She ran to the phone and dialed the 800 number flashing across her screen. When the operator answered, Janet hurriedly told her that Stayner was there, at Laguna del Sol. Asking Janet to remain calm, the operator suggested scoping out the grounds to see if he was still around. Janet didn’t have to walk far—Stayner was camped out at Laguna’s lake, about 100 yards from Janet’s house. His car—which the operator had described to Janet—was there too. She turned and hightailed it back to her home. Heart racing, she called the hotline again: Yes, she confirmed, Stayner was still on the grounds. Approximately 30 minutes later, agents arrested Stayner as he sat down in the resort’s restaurant for breakfast.

Grandma to the Rescue
Law enforcement experts say that beyond better technology, immediate access to information—offered by the Internet and 24-hour news networks—has given rise to a new model of neighborhood watch.

Six months ago, Linda Martin, 59, a bookkeeper at a refrigeration company in Portland, Oregon, found herself riveted by the story of Edward Morris, a local man charged with murdering his pregnant wife and their three children. The bodies had been found along a snowy road in Oregon just before Christmas. Linda’s ten-year-old grandson, Hayden, played soccer in the same league as the oldest Morris child. Upset, he’d shown her a news clipping about the murders. Linda was at a loss for what to tell her grandson; for several weeks, she did her best to shield him from the gruesome news coverage.

But she couldn’t forget Edward Morris’s hideous crime. It was impossible to turn on the TV or open a paper without being bombarded by details: Morris on the run, Morris’s escape vehicle, a gray Dodge van. Linda had seen its license plate flashed across the screen so often, she knew the numbers by heart.

On Saturday, January 4, 2003, Linda and her brother, Thom, were returning from Idaho, after helping their mother move into a new apartment. The drive was 12 hours, and Linda and Thom fell into a familiar routine: After breakfast, Thom took the wheel while Linda played DJ, fiddling with the radio and popping in tapes.

Just over the Idaho border on the interstate, they noticed a gray van in the right lane going ten miles per hour slower than the state limit of 65. Other drivers were cruising by the slowpoke, shaking their heads and sometimes their fists. Thom was getting ready to do the same—until he and Linda noticed the Oregon license plate: WSH 171. “I looked at Thom to see if he’d recognized it, too, and his face was white,” recalls Linda. “We were saying to each other, ‘Could it be? No. Could it be?’”

“Let’s go!” Linda urged her brother, wanting to get a closer look at the plate. Thom inched into the left lane, hoping to glimpse the driver’s face. Through the window, Morris looked older than in televised photos, but it was definitely him. Thom ducked behind the van again while Linda dove into her purse for her cell phone, throwing her wallet, tissues, and lipstick haphazardly into the cab of the pickup. She grabbed the phone and flipped it on, only to discover she was out of range and couldn’t get service.

At the next exit, Linda and Thom pulled off the freeway and searched in vain for a cop. Back on the road, they soon caught up to Morris, but decided to exit again at Baker City, where Linda was certain they’d find a police station. Thom’s old pickup skidded into the station lot, and Linda leaped from the cab, sprinting as fast as she could for the building door—which she ran smack into. It was Saturday, she realized: This station was closed. Meanwhile, Thom darted around the side of the building to use the emergency phone. Like a pro, he gave the operator all of the stats—description of the van, the mile marker at which they’d spotted it. Feeling somewhat relieved to have unloaded the problem on the authorities, brother and sister climbed back into their truck, in search of a bathroom and something to eat.

Winding through Baker City’s back roads, they were about to turn into a Subway when Linda gasped in disbelief: Morris’s van had suddenly reappeared and was heading right towards them. “Oh my God, there he is,” she whispered. Thom waited until the van sped by, then turned and followed. Morris headed into the lot of a nearby shopping center, where he parked and proceeded into a Rite-Aid. While Morris was in the store, the police finally arrived.

In minutes, it was all over. Morris emerged from the store, the cops moved in, and the murderer was surrounded. “At that point, I was so high on adrenaline,” admits Linda sheepishly. “I was running around the parking lot screaming, ‘We caught the bad guy! We caught the bad guy!’’”

Back home, Linda was welcomed as a hero—a title she thinks is too grand. Still, she’s happy to have provided peace of mind for the family of Morris’s murdered wife, who not only mourned her but were afraid the killer was going to target them next.

Too Much Information?
Some criminologists worry about the negative impact of so much civilian sleuthing. If police investigate a suspect who turns out to be innocent, friends and neighbors would never know. But if he is made the target of a public alert, his reputation or even his safety might be at risk. There’s also the fear that broadcasting a partial license plate number could result in an unsuspecting person being forced off the road by ill-informed drivers. And there’s the worry that too many bulletins could dilute an Amber Alert program’s effectiveness.

These concerns must be balanced against the joy and gratitude of people like Margarita Chavez, who found herself holding baby Nancy less than 26 hours after she was kidnapped. Almost a year after the horrible episode, Margarita and Dina Leal still find time to visit each other regularly. Dina’s seven-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, get along well with seven-year-old Elizabeth Chavez, Nancy’s older sister. When the two families hang out, the kids eat pizza and play board games while their moms exchange tales from two very different lives—worlds that would not have crossed but for an early-morning televised alert and one woman’s sense that something was amiss. It may be the cops’ job to solve the crime, but everyday heroism starts much closer to home.

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