The Searcher: James Spring (page 2 of 4)

Images from this article

Photographed by Tim Tadder

Spring near his home in San Diego: "Baja is my backyard."

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Photographed by Tim Tadder

Viana, right, and Faith Carelli inspired a stranger's quest to do something meaningful.

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Courtesy James Spring

Spring's "kidnapped" poster was crucial to locating the girls.

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Photographed by Tim Tadder

Faith is doing well in the care of her aunt and uncle, Sherry and Rob Doubleday.

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Photographed by Tim Tadder

Viana is back with her grandparents, Ellen and Gene Pauly (background, middle and right).

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Photographed by Tim Tadder

Viana, right, and Faith Carelli inspired a stranger's quest to do something meaningful.

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."

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