The Last Time We Saw Her. Robert Falcon Scott
him drive over and see what was going on.
Bob said later, “I noticed a girl I knew named Jade, standing by a green Dodge minivan out in the Reser Stadium parking lot. It just didn’t seem like a normal situation. I drove over and noticed that the van had Minnesota plates. I pulled up to the passenger side and tried to get the driver’s attention. But he kind of ignored me. He kept his hands attached to the steering wheel and would not acknowledge my presence. He was wearing a baseball cap, sunglasses, and a light spring coat.
“So I pulled in front of him and put my car in park. I turned around and looked at Jade. Then he and I exchanged quick glimpses of each other. I looked at her again, and she started to walk away.”
Jade was glad that Bob Clifford had arrived on the scene. She wasn’t sure if the man in the van was up to something, but the whole situation just didn’t feel right to her. Jade started walking toward campus, and the man in the van just sat there.
Bob noted, “At that point everything seemed okay. I pulled away, and the van followed me. I took a right onto Twenty-sixth Street, and the van turned onto Western.”
By now, Joel was “really pissed.” Two situations that should have worked for him had now been foiled, but he wasn’t giving up. He remembered a pretty young woman in the parking lot of the Oak Park Apartments who was cleaning lampposts when he had first followed the other girl to Thirtieth Street. The young woman cleaning the lampposts was petite, blond, and pretty. With any luck she would still be out there all alone, cleaning light fixtures.
CHAPTER 3
VANISHED
As luck would have it, the young woman cleaning light fixtures was nineteen-year-old Brooke Wilberger, who was on summer break from where she attended college at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Utah. Brooke was born on February 20, 1985, in Fresno, California, to Greg and Cammy Wilberger. The family soon moved to La Grande, Oregon, and then to Veneta, Oregon, a town in the Willamette River Valley, about forty miles south of Corvallis. Brooke had several older siblings, brothers Bryce, twenty-five, and Spencer, twenty-two, and sisters Shannon, thirty, and Stephanie, twenty-seven. Sister Jessica was six years younger than Brooke.
Although Brooke was bright, she had trouble with her speech as a child. Even though she spoke, many of her words were unintelligible. Cammy, who was a third-grade teacher, told Brooke’s siblings not to tease her. Cammy said later, “I took her brothers aside and said, ‘I don’t care what you say or do, but never tease Brooke about her speech.’ And they never did.”
Eventually, with the aid of a speech therapist, Brooke did just fine in learning to speak. In fact, by high school, she was carrying nearly a 4.0 average. Very bright in academics, Brooke also did well in extracurricular activities, especially tennis and track. By then, she had a long blond ponytail, a trim figure, and was very pretty. Since the Wilbergers lived out in a rural area, Brooke joined 4-H and loved horses. And even though Brooke was quiet, she wasn’t afraid to stick up for herself, and she joined in a high-school play, The Pirates of Penzance.
It was at Elmira High School that she met a boy, Justin Blake, and soon she and Justin were going to dances. Eventually they became girlfriend and boyfriend. Brooke’s mom recalled later, “The church had dances in Eugene, and when Brooke came back, I’d say, ‘Who did you dance with today?’ Pretty soon she started telling me about this boy named Justin. In high school they did most things together. She really liked him.”
After high school Justin, who was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), more commonly known as Mormons, went on a mission to Venezuela. Brooke and her entire family were also Mormons, and Brooke was well aware that many young men in the Mormon Church went off on a mission at about that age in their lives. Brooke wrote him at least once a week. She even thought about going on a mission herself when she turned twenty-one, the minimum age that females could go on missions for the church.
Brooke’s parents, who had atteded nearby OSU, along with all of Brooke’s older siblings, thought that Brooke would go there as well. But Brooke was very independent, and she told them she wanted to go to Brigham Young University in Utah. Her parents told Brooke that she would have to save up money to do that, and she did, taking on jobs during the summer months. Brooke wanted to go to BYU because they had a department that specialized in early childhood speech problems. She was very grateful to her own teachers when she was young, and she wanted to specialize in that area as well. That was a constant in Brooke’s life. She was always giving back to individuals and to the community.
As far as being safe while walking to and from classes at BYU, Cammy later said, “She was a cautious kid. One of the concerns she had about her little car was that it did not have automatic locks on the doors. She even took a class in self-defense, because there had been some issues at BYU.”
In May 2004, classes were over at BYU, and Brooke came home to Veneta, Oregon. She stayed for a short while with her parents and younger sister, Jessica, and then decided to go and help her sister Stephanie and Stephanie’s husband, Zak Hansen, who managed the Oak Park Apartments in Corvallis.
On May 24, Brooke got up about six-thirty and had a bowl of cornflakes for breakfast at her parents’ home in Veneta. Soon her parents were off to work, and Brooke asked Jessica if she needed a ride to school. Jessica said no, so Brooke packed a few bags and took off for Corvallis. In a short while, she arrived at her sister Stephanie’s apartment around eight-thirty. Brooke and Stephanie talked for a bit and then Brooke went outside to clean lamps and lampposts around the apartment complex. It was a job she didn’t relish, since many of the lampposts had spider webs on them. Brooke didn’t like spiders; but as in all of the tasks that she performed, she cleaned them well.
Brooke was wearing a BYU Soccer T-shirt, FreshJive sweatshirt, blue jeans, and flip-flop sandals. Around 8:45 A.M., Brooke started cleaning lampposts at the Oak Park Apartments on the west side and completed those around nine. This area could clearly be seen from vehicles driving along Philomath Boulevard.
Brooke continued working eastward, where trees and twenty-foot shrubs on the back side of the property blocked views from the street. Around 9:30 A.M., a tenant named Mark Wacker spotted Brooke in the parking lot by a light fixture. Wacker saw that the girl was at the third light fixture from the east side of those set of apartment buildings. She was cleaning the bottom of the light fixture with a rag and a bucket of water.
At 9:45 A.M., Brooke’s cousin Kris Horner saw Brooke working on a light fixture, and around ten o’clock, Brooke’s sister Stephanie spied Brooke cleaning near the number 1223 unit. Stephanie took her children to preschool and was gone for a while from the apartment complex.
Sometime after ten, Corvallis Disposal truck driver Jim Kessi drove into the Oak Park Apartments parking lot to pick up material from the recycle bin. As he did so, he spotted a young blond woman cleaning lampposts. He waved at her, and she waved back. He noticed that she was cleaning the third light fixture from the east end of that area. She had its round plastic cover in her hand.
Kessi picked up his load of cardboard from the recycle bin and backed out into the parking lot once again. As he did so, he could see that the blond girl was still cleaning light fixtures. There were no cars in the parking lot near her, and no people around as well.
Sometime after ten o’clock, Nathaniel McKelvey, who lived in the 1229 unit at Oak Park Apartments, heard a loud, piercing scream. He would later describe it as “short in duration and bloodcurdling.” At that same moment Carina Howrey, who also lived in the same unit, heard a female’s scream. She later described the scream as “short in time.” Howrey looked out her back door, then out her front window. But she didn’t see anyone.
Nathaniel McKelvey and Carina Howrey were the last people to hear anything escape from Brooke Wilberger’s lips. All except for the man named Joel, in the green minivan. After two failed attempts he now had what he was looking for: a pretty young woman abducted into his van, and restrained there. Now all he had to do was get her out of town, unnoticed.
As the minivan headed west, out of Corvallis, the only things left in the Oak Park Apartments complex testifying that Brooke Wilberger