The Searcher: James Spring

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

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

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

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.

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