The Searcher: James Spring

James Spring went looking for adventure. What he found: two little girls caught in a fractured family saga.

The girl in the photo had wide eyes and a princess smile, blonde hair, a strand of plastic pearls dangling from her neck. James Spring felt a pang in his heart the moment he saw her on his computer screen. She looked so happy and innocent, so much like his own daughter, Addie, who was tucked in upstairs. When he saw the picture and read what had happened to six-year-old Viana and her infant sister, Faith, he knew what he had to do.

His 40th birthday, on April 29, was just a few weeks away, and Spring was looking to keep a promise to himself. He'd been restless the past few months, distracted by the fear that he'd settled a little too easily into middle age. He was successful and proud of the life he had built: the marketing job in San Diego, the spacious house in the La Mesa suburbs, the loving wife, the two wonderful kids-three-year-old Addie and eight-month-old Caden. But it didn't feel like enough.

When he was younger, he'd been a danger junkie, reporting on civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala for National Public Radio, getting himself captured by Kuna Indians and pursued by paramilitary gangs. "I had an inflated sense of my own invulnerability," he says now.

If he hadn't met Kellie, the woman he married six years ago, he'd probably still be coming up against shady characters. But she convinced him—made an ultimatum of it, actually—that if he was going to be her husband and the father of her children, he couldn't go dashing into any more war zones. He fed his need for adventure by scuba diving and racing his motorcycle in the Baja 500. And then, his birthday approaching, he started talking about doing something that would make him feel better about himself.

"Maybe there will be an earthquake and I can dig people out of the rubble," he told Kellie. "Or a helicopter will go down and they'll need people to search." She tried to ignore him, hoping he'd forget about his quest and just have a party in the backyard. But he wouldn't let it go. "I told her, 'I just want to do something that's going to help somebody else.'"

Which is why James Spring was looking up missing-person cases on the Internet in early April, hoping to find someone who needed him. When he saw that photo and started reading about Viana and Faith Carelli, two girls who'd been taken away by their parents—convicts who were suspects in a San Francisco murder, didn't have legal custody of their older daughter, and had last been seen by a tourist in the Baja peninsula—it became clear what his birthday gift to himself would be. He was going to load up his Ford Explorer, drive across the border, and go looking for those two little girls.

 

The house in Soquel, California, where Gene and Ellen Pauly have lived for 32 years is overflowing with photos of their family: the five children they raised together, the foster kids they took in, the grandkids, including Viana and Faith.

Most of the photos of their daughter Michele, Viana and Faith's mother, were taken during her high school years, when everyone called her the golden child. A cheerleader, a ballet and tap dancer, the president of Students Against Drunk Driving, she was the pretty one, the popular one, the daughter every parent hoped to have. She graduated from Aptos High School in 1988, spent six months with a performance group in Japan, and earned a dance education degree from Western Kentucky University.

Ellen Pauly, 63, still doesn't understand what happened to that Michele. She doesn't recognize the woman her daughter, now 39, has become: a meth user, a thief, a con artist, possibly an accessory to murder. "I still love my daughter," she says, "but she's not the Michele we raised. Whether that Michele can ever come back again, it's hard to tell. I'm not counting on it."

Maybe there were problems all along; maybe her parents just didn't know. But there's no question that Michele's life took a turn for the worse after she left Soquel. In 1994 she married Joe Pinkerton, a ski instructor she'd met while working as a dancer in Lake Tahoe. She moved to Los Angeles and started spending time with Pinkerton's friend Richard Carelli. Eight years into the marriage, she left Pinkerton and moved in with Carelli. The two drifted from one dead-end job to another.

The Paulys know little of Carelli's life before he met Michele, other than that he'd had odd jobs, occasionally tending bar or working construction. The Paulys say he could be charming but also frightening. And, they say, he seemed to have an almost hypnotic effect on their daughter.

"Richard was the one who destroyed Michele," says Gene Pauly, 76, sounding more sad than angry. She would disappear from her parents' lives for years at a time. When she surfaced, she was hostile, resentful, usually asking for money.

Ellen is convinced that she might not have seen much of Viana if Michele hadn't been broke in 2004. But Michele needed help taking care of her then-three-year-old daughter, so she moved into her parents' house and told them she'd left Carelli. She got a job. Things looked promising.

And they were-until a few weeks later, when Carelli showed up and took Michele and Viana away. The couple fell into the same patterns as before and soon racked up convictions for drug possession and arrests for petty theft and credit card fraud. The final straw for the Paulys came in December 2006, when police burst into a motel room in nearby Capitola to arrest Carelli and Michele. Meth was scattered on the nightstand; Viana, age four, was found hiding under the bed.

Gene and Ellen Pauly petitioned for custody of their granddaughter and won. But over the Paulys' objections, a judge granted Carelli and Michele the right to unsupervised visits. Viana often spent weekends with her parents and their new baby, Faith, born in October 2007 with Down syndrome.

At the start of one of those weekends, in January 2008, Ellen noticed that something didn't seem right. Michele appeared more scattered than usual as she scooped up her daughter's overnight bag and went off into the rainy afternoon. Ellen had a bad feeling—but no way of knowing it would be ten weeks before she would see Viana again.

Until that day, Carelli and Michele had been living in San Francisco's Mission Terrace neighborhood, renting a one-bedroom unit in a run-down row house. The previous month, according to a neighbor, Carelli had argued with Leonard Hoskins, another tenant. There was shouting, scuffling, the sounds of a fistfight, and moments later, a bloodied Richard Carelli stumbled from the building, the neighbor says. He thought Carelli had lost the fight, that the blood was his own, so he didn't call the police. Investigators would later discover that the landlord had been trying to evict Carelli and Michele and that Hoskins had been drawn into the dispute.

Hoskins's sister, Ureena, reported him missing, but the authorities didn't do much more than file a report. Three weeks later, she went to San Francisco and started investigating on her own. She was the one who found the neighbor and persuaded the police—finally, on January 24—to interview Carelli. He denied the fight with Hoskins, but the police brought in cadaver dogs, who seemed to indicate there was a body in Carelli's van. Carelli at first gave authorities permission to search it but then, according to police, changed his mind and demanded his keys back. They impounded it instead and, amazingly, let him go. Eight days passed before police searched the van and found Hoskins's body inside. By then, Carelli and Michele had fled to Mexico, the children in tow.

Though the murder and kidnapping made it onto the America's Most Wanted website, the official search never amounted to much. Even after a tourist saw the fugitives in San Quintin, 150 miles south of the border, there was no follow-up. The wait was slow agony for the Pauly family.

"I had pretty much given up," Ellen Pauly says, admonishing herself for the thought. "I was just so angry at everyone, all the screwups, no communication between agencies. I thought no one really cared. And then, when you least expect it, here comes this total stranger. And he proves that there is still decency in the world."

 

Kellie Spring cried when her husband first told her what he was going to do. But when she saw Viana's picture, she agreed, reluctantly, that yes, he had to go. She asked him only to wait a couple of days before leaving. He needed a plan. He needed supplies. Mostly, he needed to give her a chance to accept what he was about to do.

Spring agreed to wait—and started working the phones. At first he assumed there would be an official search party to join, but after calling law-enforcement officials, it became clear that no one in Mexico was looking for the fugitives or the children. If he went, he'd be on his own.

Next he contacted the Pauly family. Missing-children cases draw attention from all kinds of characters, so he knew he might be seen as some kind of crackpot. Indeed, when he talked to Rob Doubleday, Viana's uncle and the family's spokesman, they'd just heard from self-proclaimed psychics, sure they knew where the children were. Doubleday thanked Spring for his interest but doubted he could help.

Spring made it clear he was going to try anyway. The next day, he had 2,500 posters printed up in Spanish, with secuestrada ("kidnapped") in bold letters across the top. He included photos of Viana, Faith, Michele, and Carelli, along with a shot of a white 1996 Mercury Mystique, the last car they'd been seen in.

He packed a flare gun, a machete, and all the food he thought he might need. And then, early Sunday morning, 36 hours after his initial Internet search, as Kellie watched with Addie at her side and Caden in her arms, James Spring drove away.

"I knew it was important to him and I had to let him go," Kellie says now, recalling how frightened she'd been. "But he was looking for people who were suspected of murder, and neither of us knew what they might do to protect themselves."

 

As Spring drove across the border that Sunday morning, his plan was to plaster posters at every Pemex gas station and police headquarters between Ensenada and San Quintin.

He never doubted he would find the girls. He'd lived in Baja for four years in his 20s. "I know the whole 1,059 miles of it," he says. "I know every place to look, even the ones the Mexican police don't know about."

Driving through tourist towns and fishing villages, places that weren't much more than a collection of shacks, he thought about what it might be like to confront Carelli: Does he know his way around? Does he speak Spanish? Does he have money? Does he have weapons? That night, in San Quintin, he came across a Mercury Mystique, just like the one Carelli had been driving. What are the odds? Spring said to himself, excited that he might have stumbled onto the couple so quickly.

He had the cops check it out, but it wasn't Carelli's car. If the police, skeptical of the American with the posters and the staple gun, had doubted his veracity before, they were really questioning it now. He couldn't afford to cry wolf. "I'm sorry," he told the officers. And then he moved on.

On Monday morning, he headed farther south, to the small village of Santa Marie. A gas station attendant said yes, he'd seen the couple within the past three weeks. An off-duty cop confirmed the sighting. Spring was already closing in. "I can't tell you why, but I woke up that day feeling great," he says. "I felt like something was going to happen."

At a gas station in El Rosario, 36 miles south of San Quintin, he began taping up a poster when an attendant said to him in Spanish, "I have seen this woman."

"When?" Spring asked.

"Three days ago," the man said. "She was asking about a cheap place to eat."

Spring walked 100 yards to a motel he knew to be popular with Americans. Sure enough, two men at the front desk told him, the couple had rented a shack a few doors away. Michele was giving dance lessons to local kids to earn a few pesos. "I could feel the goose bumps forming," Spring says. Carelli and Michele were his.

He drove to the police station, a small cinder-block building on the town square, asked for the comandante, and informed him that he had a suspected murderer in his village. The comandante requested help from the state attorney general's office, the Baja equivalent of the Texas Rangers, but they wouldn't get to El Rosario before dusk. Until then, Spring and the comandante would have to wait and hope.

Spring kept the Pauly family informed and told Kellie he was safe. He spoke briefly to a U.S. marshal in San Francisco. "This is a tiny village," Spring warned. "Carelli is going to find out I'm here. And when he learns that, he'll leave. And I have him. He's here. Now."

As the sun began to set, Mexican authorities swarmed the house where Carelli, Michele, and the kids were staying. Spring was ordered to remain at the police station during the actual arrest. "I was pacing the whole time, literally doing laps around the station," he says. The officers-"big guys in five unmarked trucks, with big mustaches, black leather jackets, and AK-17 rifles," according to Spring-made the arrest. Spring listened on the police radio. "I hear the guy kind of giving a play-by-play at the dispatcher desk," he remembers. "'Okay, they're at the house. One of the cars is circling around. They got 'em!'"

The officers returned to the station five minutes later, Carelli shackled in the back of one pickup truck, Michele and the kids in another. "They pull right up in front of me on this little patio area and yank Carelli out of the truck," Spring recalls. "He looks at me, and you can just see that whatever he had alive in him is gone. He sees a white face and he knows the jig is up."

Viana looked nervous but unharmed as Spring assured her that everything would be all right. He promised to stay with her and Faith until they were reunited with the Paulys. "Whenever something bad happened, like seeing her father shackled in a cell, I'd see Viana's eyes get really wide," Spring says. "I'd talk to her and say, 'I have a little daughter myself. And she thinks she's a princess. Just like you.'"

 

Gene Pauly was waiting on the U.S. side of the border. He hugged his granddaughters, Viana yelling, "Grandpa, Grandpa!" He did not speak to Carelli or to his daughter—or even look at them—as they were turned over to federal marshals and escorted back to San Francisco, where Carelli awaits trial for murder and Michele for accessory to murder for helping him avoid capture. Both also face child abduction charges.

By Tuesday evening, Viana Carelli was back in her grandmother's arms. Viana told her that she'd been hungry and dirty in Mexico. And whenever she saw a police officer, in real life or on TV, she seemed frightened.

The family decided that caring for a traumatized six-year-old and an infant with special needs was too much for the Paulys. So Rob Doubleday and his wife, Sherry, Michele's sister, took custody of Faith.

James Spring went back to San Diego, to his coat-and-tie job, no longer feeling so restless. On his birthday, his wife threw a big party that was also a fund-raiser for the Polly Klaas Foundation, a missing-children's charity.

The Pauly family has invited Spring to visit the girls in Soquel whenever he wants. They'd like to thank him in person. He appreciates the gesture but has so far declined. "I feel like I've done my bit," Spring says. "In my mind, this was always about the kids. I was never looking for attention or praise. I just wanted to do the right thing."

The Pauly home features new photos of the children, together and happy. Faith is alert and healthy, and although Viana remembers her ordeal and misses her parents, she's full of smiles and hugs most of the time. "That little girl," Gene Pauly says as he watches her skip across the living-room floor. "Ten weeks without her was just too long."