The Searcher: James Spring (page 4 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

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

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."

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