By M. Daniel Gibbard, Chicago Tribune
The private investigator who laid the groundwork for charges against a Lake County man in a 1969 California slaying said Tuesday that although he does not usually search for missing children, Michelle Pulsifer, 3, captured hearts in his agency to the point that he stopped taking money from the girl’s aunt.
“It became personal,” said Paul Chamberlain, based in Los Angeles. “Everyone here in the office wanted to see if we could locate this child.”
But no one has seen Michelle in 35 years, and last week police arrested the girl’s mother, Donna Pulsifer Prentice, 57, of Genoa, Wis., and her former boyfriend James Michael “Mike” Kent, 62, of the 100 block of Port Side in Lakemoor. Both are charged with murder in Orange County, Calif.
Before he was extradited to California, Kent gave police a videotaped confession in which he said he helped bury the body in a remote canyon, a Lake County sheriff’s police officer said Monday.
Orange County district attorney’s spokesman Mark Macauley said Tuesday that a search is under way for Michelle’s body but would not say where.
When the girl’s aunt, Ann Friedman, hired Chamberlain in 2001, he was certain Michelle had been given away or even sold.
“From the beginning, I thought we were going to find this kid right away,” Chamberlain said. “When she wasn’t readily findable, it became apparent that my initial reaction was wrong, and something else had happened to her.”
Chamberlain’s team searched “every public record known to man” and chased down lead after lead. Every one came up empty. Soon, he said, his suspicions turned to Prentice, now remarried.
At the time of the disappearance, Kent, Prentice and her two children, Michelle and Richard Pulsifer Jr., lived in Huntington Beach, Calif., Macauley said.
In summer 1969, Kent and Prentice packed up and left--allegedly without the girl. Her father, Richard Pulsifer, told Orange County officials that he tried to file a missing person’s report but was not allowed to because his ex-wife had custody.
After he spoke of his frustrations to one-time sister-in-law Friedman, who had been married to a Pulsifer brother killed in Vietnam, she hired an investigator who turned up nothing. Then she found Chamberlain.
Chamberlain, who spent 20 years with the FBI, worked on Michelle’s case for two years, then turned over his findings to Orange County authorities, who spent another year investigating before bringing charges.
“The prime mover was the mother early on in the investigation, and she remained the prime mover all the way,” Chamberlain said. “If the child was or was not available, the mother should have known.”
Police said Kent did say Prentice killed Michelle but said he helped bury the child’s body in Silverado Canyon, an isolated gorge about 45 minutes from Huntington Beach.
Residents said they had not noticed any police activity near the canyon Tuesday but said bodies are found in the area.
“We have really, really steep canyon sides. There are a million places you could hide a body,” said Mike Boeck, who said he has lived in the area for 50 years.
A search would be complicated, he said. The canyon is about 10 miles long and prone to floods that have changed the topography regularly since 1969. There was also a large strip mine there, since closed. And the canyon is surrounded on three sides by the 650,000-acre Cleveland National Forest.
“You could bury something, and no one in a million years would find it,” Boeck said.