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Posted on 05/01/2002 4:03:29 PM PDT by FresnoDA
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—Thomas K. Arnold
Talk show host Rick Roberts made headlines with his KFMB-AM radio show about Damon and Brenda van Dam’s allegedly swinging lifestyle. But he wasn’t the only radio personality—or media outlet—to cast a critical eye on the backstory of the Danielle van Dam kidnapping case.
John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, whose John and Ken Show airs weekdays from 3 to 7 p.m. on Los Angeles station KFI-AM, devoted three shows to the case, even traveling to San Diego to broadcast from the van Dams’ Sabre Springs neighborhood. The week before that, they were the first to cast aspersions on the van Dams, a full day before the Roberts broadcast.
The Millennium Children’s Fund had just announced a $10,000 reward for information leading to the safe return of Danielle. Fund administrator Douglas Pierce had visited with the van Dams, and the next day he called a press conference in Los Angeles at which he voiced suspicions about the couple’s behavior. For an hour, Pierce blasted the van Dams for their apparent lack of emotion and general rudeness to him.
“I don’t know how much was true and how much was hysterical, but that’s what made it fascinating. We tried to unravel it on the air,” Kobylt says. “In retrospect, I think he did peg their personalities very well—the lack of emotion, the detachment, the obsession with the media message—and perhaps he got the vibe that they live a different life than most people.”
As soon as Pierce finished on-air, John and Ken introduced their next guests: an angry Damon and Brenda van Dam, who lambasted Pierce as a nut case. “We had scheduled them in advance, but when they heard Doug was on the show, they canceled, only to change their minds right before show time,” Kobylt says.
After the interview, John and Ken picked apart the conversation and spoke critically about the van Dams’ lack of emotion and their defensiveness about questions pertaining to their own behavior and actions the last night Danielle was seen. The next day, the swinger story broke in The San Diego Union-Tribune—furthered that evening on San Diego radio by Rick Roberts.
“It’s a very dramatic story,” says Kobylt. “Everybody got obsessed with it pretty quickly... We have a pretty fair audience in San Diego—we’ve even made it into the top 10 on occasion—and we started getting calls from people who live in the neighborhood and know the van Dams. As a result, it might as well have been in L.A. I tend to look at the whole [Southern California] area as the same, anyway.”
(By press deadline, the van Dams could not be reached for comment by San Diego Magazine.)
Quoting the proverbial unnamed sources “close to the probe,” the Star reported that later-arrested suspect David Westerfield “was aware of the van Dams’ sexual activities and had approached Brenda about hosting a sex-swap party in his house.” The Star said Brenda had admitted to police “that the couple belonged to a swingers’ club called Club CB” and that sources say she “flirted outrageously and danced with Westerfield” the Friday night Danielle disappeared. “He [Westerfield] knew that Brenda and her friends were sexually involved, and he wanted to be part of the action, but for whatever reason, he was not invited by Brenda to accompany her and her four friends back to her home that night for more partying and sex,” the Star says it was told by a source.
http://www.websleuths.com/dcf/DCForumID4/385.html
http://members.cox.net/jeneal/PrelimTranscripts/020311p1.txtp>
Q. Did he tell you when he'd washed the SUV after he
19 picked it up up there?
20 A. He did not mention washing it after he picked it
21 up.
22 Q. Did you notice -- or were there any other signs
23 in the garage that seemed out of order or unusual?
24 A. Detective Parga had mentioned a bleach smell in
25 the garage around the -- around the area the 4-Runner was
26 parked.
Whoops, there was bleach...
KIM! Don't you dare try and deny that you haven't called Westerfield a Pedophile...You have alot of nerve thinking we are stupid, with your little games. Look up the word "innuendo"...
sw
Or do you mean like the rumors published in the papers about Westerfield which have been completely knocked down in the court testimony? (bleached motor home, 67,000 child porn images--now agreed not to exist, Westerfield's DNA in Danielle's bedroom) What about rumors, Kim? You have embraced every last one of the ones unfavorable to the defendant, while continuing to call these facts about the van Dams "rumors" just because it suits you. The BMW story has now been verified. It has also been verified that Damon had a $100,000 life insurance policy on Danielle. Not a rumor, Kim.
I can hardly wait to see Kim's next post stating that "never knew any of this" material I've just posted. Wait a day or two, and when we bring it up again, she'll have "forgotten."
But can we agree that:
* a garage is not the same thing as a motor home
* an SUV is not the same thing as a motor home
* many people store swimming pool supplies in the garage
* many people store laundry products in the garage
* things--bleach, pool chemicals (chlorine)--sometimes spill
?
Meanwhile, you've quoted the "bleached motor home" story often. It wasn't true Kim.
sw
Guess it's true.
By Kelly Thornton and Chet Barfield
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITERS
May 2, 2002
San Diego police have concluded that 2-year-old Jahi Turner and his stepfather did not visit a Balboa Park playground the day the stepfather reported the child missing.
Police have discounted the story of the stepfather, Tieray Jones, because of inconsistencies in his account of what happened and because results of a lie-detector test indicated deception by Jones, said county law enforcement sources familiar with the case.
Jones, 23, told police he left Jahi in the play area at 28th and Cedar streets last Thursday while he walked to a soda machine 100 yards away, then returned 15 minutes later to find the toddler gone. Police classified the case as an abduction.
However, evidence technicians found no fingerprints from Jahi on the playground equipment, such as swings or the slide, indicating the boy likely had not played there recently, sources said. Criminalists lifted Jahi's fingerprints from inside the family's Golden Hill apartment for comparison, the sources said.
Jones was questioned extensively yesterday by homicide detectives, who for the first time confronted him about inconsistencies in his story, said the sources, speaking on condition of anonymity because details of the case are confidential.
The sources stopped short yesterday of saying Jones is a suspect, and declined to indicate whether they believe Jahi is dead. However, police continued to sift through tons of garbage at the Miramar landfill. Trash collected from the Joneses' apartment complex and from the playground is taken to that dump site.
The child's mother, Tameka Jones, an 18-year-old Navy seaman assigned to the amphibious ship Rushmore, was aboard the ship when the child went missing.
Although police have said little officially about the investigation, department spokesman Dave Cohen confirmed yesterday that detectives have found nothing or no one to confirm Tieray Jones' account of how and when the boy disappeared. He said police are still searching for a woman Jones described as being at the park with two children last Thursday.
Police thought they had found and talked to the witness, whose composite sketch is being circulated by hundreds of volunteer searchers. But the woman interviewed this week turned out to have been in another area of Balboa Park, Cohen said.
Yesterday, dozens of detectives in protective gear continued searching debris from a specific section of the massive Miramar landfill. Police will not say what they're looking for, but landfill officials said the detectives are focusing on trash collected on one day last week, from neighborhoods that include South Park and Golden Hill.
Trash is picked up on Wednesdays in that area. Jahi's stepfather reported him missing last Thursday.
At the landfill, bulldozers carry loads of trash to a wide area, where it is spread out. Detectives work in a penetrating stench day and night, sifting the ankle-deep garbage with rakes and shovels. A search of this magnitude is believed to be unprecedented.
Some 100 Marines were expected to be brought in at 7 a.m. today to assist in the landfill search, which Cohen said is likely to go on for several days.
"I can't tell you specifics, but there is a particular area of the dump we want to focus on," Cohen told reporters in a late-afternoon briefing at the landfill. "We will continue to be here 24 hours a day as long as it takes to get through the area we want to.
"We're looking for any clue as to what happened to Jahi," he added. "We have to be out here in a certain time frame to do it, or it gets much more difficult to do."
About 5,000 tons of trash is collected and dumped in one day, landfill officials said.
In another development, a retired Navy master chief from Rancho Bernardo offered a $10,000 reward "for the safe return of Jahi Turner to his family."
The 48-year-old donor, David Curry, said he is not a deep-pocket philanthropist but was moved by the family's ordeal.
"Being a father and being in the Navy, I could not even imagine what it would be like to lose a kid that way," he said.
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