STILL MISSING - Anchorage Daily News (AK) - September 4, 1988 - page A1 September 4, 1988 | Anchorage Daily News (AK) | SHEILA TOOMEY Daily News reporter Staff | Page A1 T ouch the Fandel case, then try to let go; try to forget it. Not a chance. T en years ago two children, Scott and Amy Fandel, disappeared from their cabin home in Sterling, on the Kenai Peninsula south of Anchorage. T hey just vanished. Both of them Scott, 13 and Amy, 8. At 10:30 p.m. Sept. 5, 1978, they were happy and safe. At 2 the next morning, they were gone. No sign of them has ever been found. Dozens of investigators spent thousands of hours running down hundreds of angles. Nothing. "Quirks and spider web leads," said a former Alaska State T rooper who spent years searching for Scott and Amy. "Leads that don't go anywhere." T en years have passed since the night the children vanished, years of change for everyone who knew them. T heir parents divorced and remarried; their friends grew up; the cabin where they lived burned down and most Alaskans don't know their names. But the years have not changed Scott and Amy. T hey remain as they were, frozen in time: a brighteyed adolescent and a gaptoothed 8yearold, grinning out from old photographs. T hose faces have been smiling at T rooper Sgt. T om Sumey for a decade. T here at the beginning, as an investigator assigned to the Soldotna trooper post, he's back on the case now. And 10 years after it happened, Sumey has a new lead. Not a big lead. Something that's been in the file all these years. "I can't find anyone who followed up on it," he said, and would say no more. No one noticed the kids were missing for 15 hours or more. T hat was the first bad break in the case. At the Alaska State T rooper station in Soldotna, the missing persons report filed by their mother was logged in at 5:14 p.m. on Sept. 6. Margaret Fandel, then a 31yearold waitress at a restaurant in Kenai, is a small, pretty woman with a friendly disposition and a hearing impairment. In September 1978, Margaret was in a bad place in her life. Roger Fandel, her husband of more than 10 years, had left her in January and then moved out of state. T he marriage had been rocky for a long time. Roger had a strong sense of family and dominated the relationship, but he liked other women and Margaret began to drink. A homebody by nature, Margaret found herself working long hours to pay the bills. She was a woman men instinctively wanted to protect, and she was lonely. She looked for company among the party people who hung out at local bars, sometimes leaving the children home alone at night. But Scott was 13 an unusually mature 13 by most accounts and a competent babysitter for his younger sister. A cloudy sky threatened rain on Sept. 5, typical weather for this time of year. At Soldotna Junior High School, Scott handed in an assignment, a journal, written in pencil on lined notebook paper. T en years later the faded words are hard to read, but the voice is clear: "Dear Journal: T oday at 3:30 an aunt of mine is coming up to live with us. She's never been to Alaska. Matter of fact, she's never been out of Illinois, where she lives. She's going to have a birthday tomorrow. She'll be 20. Cathy is her name. She's going to live with us for the rest of her life. What else can I say? She is going to work with my mom at the Italian Gardens restaurant." Aunt Cathy Schonfelder arrived as scheduled T uesday afternoon and that evening Margaret, Cathy, Scott and Amy had supper at home together, then straightened up the house for a while. T he Fandels lived in a twobedroom log cabin off Scout Lake Road, about half a mile in from the Sterling Highway, just south of the cluster of stores and businesses that make up the town of Sterling. Scout Lake Loop is a wide country road that separates a state campground from acres of private woodland dotted with shacks, trailers, cabins, neat farmsteads and some larger, more expensive homes. In 1978, only a few homes intruded on the forest. T he Fandels lived in a birch woods, their cabin set on a gravel pad that could barely be seen from the road. T he lot had electricity and indoor plumbing, and a bright "street light" mounted high on an outside pole. T he closest neighbors were Nancy and Bill Lupton, who lived with their five children in a Quonset hut about 200 yards away. Children from both families wore a path through the trees, visiting each other. Scott and Amy stopped at the Quonset hut each morning to join the Lupton children for the walk to the school bus stop. After dinner, Margaret, Cathy and the children drove down the highway toward Soldotna to Good T ime Charlie's, a bar that featured video games, pool, Foosball and maybe a dice game or two. By all reports, nothing unusual happened. T he women drank beer and socialized, the kids drank Coke and everyone had a good time. Around 10 p.m., Margaret and Cathy decided to drive to Kenai to see a friend who worked at a hotel there. T hey gave a bartender Margaret knew a lift to Soldotna, then dropped off Scott and Amy at home. Margaret pulled into the driveway and the kids got out. Aunt Cathy yelled to Scott to be sure to lock the door. Scott laughed. T he lock didn't work. T he kids went inside. T he lights went on. T he adults drove away. Margaret never saw her children again. Nancy Lupton no longer lives in the Quonset hut. Her children are grown and she and her husband have split up. T oday she lives a few hundred yards south of Scout Lake, on a small farm. At her kitchen table Lupton lit a cigarette, digging for details across the years. Scott and Amy came to her house that night, she said, after Margaret dropped them off. T hey were full of talk about their aunt. "T hey were happy. ... T his was family. It was a big deal." T he kids all played in the back room for a while, but the noise level got too high. "T hey got to using the beds for trampolines," Lupton said, so she sent the Fandels home. "It was just that path between the houses. T hey did it all the time. It was no big deal. ... It was just another night. T here was no confusion ... no one was tearing up and down the road in cars, the dogs weren't barking." She didn't hear anything. Margaret and Cathy got home at about 2 a.m. T hey never found their friend in Kenai. Instead, they'd been to Larry's Club and the Rainbow Bar. Margaret wondered about finding the house dark. T he kids were afraid of the dark and usually turned every light in the place on. A neighboring family, on their way home at about 11:45, noticed the house all lit up. But at 2 a.m. the cabin was dark and empty. T here were no signs of a fight, nothing out of place. Scott's jacket was there, and his motorcycle was still outside. A package of macaroni and an open can of tomatoes sat on the kitchen counter, a pot of warm water on the stove. Scott liked to make a macaroni snack before going to bed, and had evidently begun to do so. Margaret concluded the children stayed next door at the Luptons, and she and Cathy went to bed. T he next morning, Margaret called the school from work. "I told them to tell Amy Fandel she was in trouble for not coming home first." T he school said Amy hadn't showed up yet. Margaret's boss said she couldn't leave work until after lunch. She was worried, but not yet seriously alarmed. T here were so many innocent possibilities. Wednesday afternoon, everyone seemed to discover at the same time that the children were really gone. Cathy became alarmed when they didn't come home on the school bus with the other kids. T he Lupton children reported that Scott and Amy hadn't been in school all day. Margaret raced home from work. She began frantically calling the children's friends. "At first it just seemed like she was overreacting," said Danette Hakkinen Boyle, Scott's good friend and contemporary. Now 23, Boyle said she "thought maybe they ran away. T hat was the safest thing to believe." Margaret tried to call Roger in Arizona. Roger was everyone's first thought. But she couldn't reach him, and his family said he did not have the children. When she finally figured out that no one had seen Scott and Amy since the night before, Margaret called the troopers. At 43, Roger Fandel's beard is graying, but he still wears a HarleyDavidson cap on his head, a knife at his belt and a dropdead tone in his voice. He will tell you himself that he is prone to violence. He radiates aggression, and enjoys the effect it has on others. Six feet tall, burly and bearded, Roger is an imposing presence, by nature and by design, a tough guy. Ask anyone. Ask him. A welder, a biker and a sure shot with a pistol, he's been down a lot of mean streets. T hese days he lives somewhere in the West, "on 100 acres in the middle of nowhere" and never mind the name of the town. You want to find him? Leave a message with the Plumbers and Steamfitters Union. Scott was is Roger's son in every way except by birth. When Roger met Margaret, Scott was 2 years old. His natural father lived in another town and wasn't interested. "He couldn't talk," Roger said. "He would only say "no.' He threw tantrums. He was a problem child. ... By 3 he could count, almost read. He flowered with me. I spent the time with him. I took him everywhere for years." Scott cared about things, said Roger. "He was a kid you could teach. He wanted to learn. "He adored me." T he personalities of the children shaped the theories of what happened to them. Scott was savvy, too smart to have gone with a stranger. He was "small and sort of cocky," according to his mother. "He thought he was cool." In school Scott was the class prankster, said his eighthgrade teacher, Jim Brickey. He took dares and would eat flies for $1. He was good looking but hadn't reached the girlcrazy stage yet, a likeable boy who respected authority but wasn't shy about speaking his mind. He got passing but not great grades. He was Amy's devoted protector. As for Amy, "beautiful" is everyone's first adjective. "Beautiful and gentle and kind," said Margaret. "Kind to animals, kind to people. She loved dolls ... she loved pretty clothes and pretty shoes." She was always playing cards rummy and war and was learning to play chess. "A good sport and a fair player," wrote Amy's secondgrade teacher on her 1977 report card. "Well behaved. Gets along well with everyone. Good study habits. T akes pride in neat work. Finishes quickly and to her best ability. She is a joy." "She was real innocent," said Nancy Lupton, "She was just like a walking dollbaby." Motorcycle competition was a family hobby. Roger, Margaret and Scott all rode. Roger gave Scott his first bike at age 6. T he Yamaha YZ80 Scott left behind when he disappeared cost more than $3,000 and was just about the most important thing in his life. He never walked when he could ride. In the days after Scott and Amy vanished, dogs were brought in to search the woods for evidence they had walked away on their own. But no one really believed it. For one thing, Scott had passed a wilderness survival course and would never have run away without taking appropriate gear, Brickey, his teacher, said. And he loved his parents. He was unhappy about them splitting up and was known to chide Margaret about her drinking. He was a 13yearold boy and didn't like mom dating men who weren't daddy. "But he loved his mother to death," Lupton said. "He would never have stayed away." Chuck Hagen, formerly with the troopers in Soldotna, was in charge of the case through most of the 1980s. "T he absolute most unanswered thing to me is why that night, and why was it done, and why the kids left without a struggle." If not a stranger, then a friend? Did a prank get out of hand? Was there an accident someone couldn't bear owning up to? Did Amy attract some unspeakable depravity? Did Scott die trying to protect her? Who took them and why? And where are they now? From the beginning, the disappearance of the Fandel children was a case with too many leads and no answers to all the questions. T rooper John T anguy got the case on T hursday, Sept. 7, 1978. He happened to be on duty that day. He had been a trooper for two years. T anguy found the ages of the missing children odd too young to get very far as runaways and too old to be taken against their will. "T o tell you the truth, the first thought I had ... was that the father ... had either come and got the kids or had someone get the kids." Because of the lapse between the time they vanished and the time troopers arrived on the scene, investigators had little physical evidence to work with. "So many people had already come and gone," T anguy said. "Friends, relatives, neighbors, before we ever got there. People had driven over, people had picked up, moved things. Nothing was as it was." Volunteers searched the woods. Dogs were brought in from Anchorage. T he ferries were searched. T he Canadian border station was notified and Scout Lake dragged. A tap was put on Margaret's phone. Nothing. Roger Fandel flew to Alaska from Arizona and, by the weekend, T anguy was working on the assumption that Roger did not have the children, that they had been kidnapped. T his opened the door to every weirdo who set foot on the Kenai Peninsula that year. And there were plenty. It was the end of summer at the height of the oil boom transients galore. T rooper T om Sumey joined the investigation in the first week. "When you get into that bar crowd," he said, "you've got so many hinks that live in the bars. You've got so many people Margaret hung around with." T oday a task force would be assigned to a case like this, Sumey said. Back then, he and T anguy and whoever else had some free time exhausted themselves, running down paths that led nowhere: Roger Fandel: T he estranged father was bound to be an early suspect, but investigators looked at Roger for a long time. Much longer than he thinks they should have. As recently as three years ago, Hagen went to California and got a warrant to search Roger's home after some insurance investigators reported a young, blonde woman living there. Roger has been a problem for the troopers since the beginning. T hey can't figure him out and that's the way he likes it. Roger deals with men by challenging them. He pushes first, just in case anyone is considering pushing him. He baits and antagonizes. He left investigators feeling, as T anguy did: "You had to keep watching him." A lot of time was wasted following up on Roger's activities, T anguy said, checking where he lived, how long he stayed there, if there were any children around. T oday all three investigators who handled the case say they are convinced Roger had nothing to do with the children's disappearance. Margaret isn't ready to let go of the idea completely. It's her best hope that the children are still alive. Roger said his status as a suspect took him by surprise, but he was willing to accept it at first. He understood the troopers had to check him out. "But they never dropped that to pursue what they did have," he said. "T hey never let go of me. ... I'm a victim. T hey have treated me as a bad guy. ... T hey dwelt on me way too long, too hard. T hey spent way too much money on me. T hat money could have been spent maybe on another blind alley, but not on me." T he Carnival Workers: Among Margaret's acquaintences were two men from the East Coast, who visited the Kenai Peninsula in late August, crashing at least one night at her house. T hey drove a black sedan. Early in the investigation, Sumey found a witness who saw a black sedan speed away from the road in front of the Fandel driveway the night the children disappeared. Suspecting a burglar, he followed the sedan and watched the driver pull into another driveway and turn off his headlights. T he witness continued down the highway a bit, then turned around, just in time to see the black sedan pull out of the driveway and speed off. T his description of the car was all troopers had to go on, that and a nickname for one of the men, which turned out to be wrong, and the description of a third man seen with them. After months of work, the two men were identified and located in Maryland. In the spring of 1979, T anguy went to Maryland to interview them, with high hopes that the case had finally been solved. One man admitted having driven the black sedan down Scout Lake Road to visit Margaret. But he changed his mind, he said, and drove away. But, he said, all that happened the night after Scott and Amy vanished. He was in Anchorage on Sept. 5, he said, waiting for a paycheck from the Alaska State Fair. Fair records indicated both men had worked at the fair on Sept. 4 and gotten paid on Sept. 6, Sumey said. In 1978 and 1979, the black sedan was a hot lead. It was so easy to imagine the children in the back seat as it sped through the night. It's still a compelling vision. Each investigator assigned to the case over the years has checked and rechecked the story. Five years ago, Sumey went back and asked the witness if he could have been mistaken about the night. He said sure. It seems to be a dead end, Sumey said, but the man from Maryland remains on the short list of suspects. T he Dogooders and Satanists: As if she didn't have enough grief to deal with, Margaret Fandel was blamed for the kidnapping by people who disapproved of her lifestyle or thought she shouldn't have left the children alone. Rumors flew that a church group or other alleged dogooders had taken the children to save them. As a counterpoint to this, there was talk that devil worshipers had taken them. In a case with no facts, all things seem possible. T he Strip Joint Operator from Anchorage: In an apparent coincidence that produced a major red herring early in the case, a man involved in the Anchorage sex trade was introduced to Margaret by a mutual friend at one of the bars she and Cathy visited the night the kids disappeared. Mr. W. was in the process of expanding his business by moving a "motel" from Anchorage to Soldotna. T hree days later, when word of the children's disappearance became public, Mr. W. showed up at Margaret's home, with one of her sisters. T hey had coincidentally taken the same plane from Anchorage. In a case with no facts, this was too much coincidence. Investigators ran this guy through a small sieve. Mr. W. seemed determined to attract the trooper's attention. He posted an anonymous $5,000 reward for information about the children nothing more than an effort to generate good will for the new business, according to his partner at the time. But the troopers found it strange. T here was talk of a pornography ring in Sterling and children being sold into sexual slavery. "It didn't help that (he) buried his car on the property he was putting that motel on," T anguy added. "T hey dug (it up) to see if there was a couple of kids in the trunk." When questioned, Mr. W. said he just got tired of the car and had to put it somewhere. "We had this kind of stuff going on all the time." said T anguy, who had the case for two years. "I kept thinking, "T his is not real. T he world is not like this."' T he Union and Revenge: this theory was and remains an impossible tangle of charges and countercharges involving primarily Roger, his Uncle Herman Fandel, a retired union leader, and family feuds that go back decades. T he family started out as dirt poor farmers in Illinois, according to both Herman and Roger 13 brothers and sisters, including Herman and Roger's father. Many Fandels are members of the Plumbers and Steamfitters Union, which is what brings them in and out of Alaska. Roger likens his family to a clan of warring Elizabethans. "It's the kind of family that should have been around when the world began," he said. "T hey would have gone off in different directions and colonized the world because we could not be around each other." For reasons too convoluted to unravel here, Herman and Roger hate each other with a blood heat. T hey call each other evil and each claims to believe the other capable of kidnapping and killing the children. Herman is an affluent and successful member of the Kenai community charter fishing, a small hotel. He wept bitterly about the public humiliation his family endured when a couple of his brothers convinced the troopers to dig up his yard, looking for the missing kids. Over the years, investigators have wasted a lot of time and energy checking out Fandels, mainly at the instigation of other Fandels. But with no facts available, even something as absurd as murdering children for revenge sounds possible. T he Hoaxes: One of the strangest and most disheartening aspects of the Fandel investigation has been a series of phony leads. T he case attracted five or six psychics and the files contain their statements, dutifully recorded by deadlocked and desperate investigators, who felt they had to listen to anyone. Some of the psychics were no doubt wellintentioned but the result of their interference was pain for Margaret, like driving around Sterling with them while they saw visions of her children or felt vibrations. "It's amazing how many people want to get involved," Margaret said. She says she's sworn off all private investigators, psychic or otherwise. T he worst hoax cost Hagen and Sumey months of work. It began with a call from a missing children's organization. T hey said they had gotten a call from the college roommate of a girl whose parents lived in the Sterling area. T his roommate said the girl had terrible nightmares and talked about something dreadful happening at her house the night Scott and Amy disappeared. It sounded so convincing. What motive could anyone have for making up a story like that? Hagen and Sumey thought this was the break everyone had been waiting for. T he roommate turned out to not exist. T he calls had been made by a local woman who wanted the troopers to investigate her favorite suspects. "A lot of desks were kicked," Hagen said. "You never understood why people would screw with you. ... We should have charged her with something." Everyone who works the Fandel case comes away feeling it had more than its fair share of oddballs. Said former T rooper Joe Hoffbeck, who worked on some of the Anchorage angles. "Every person involved in this seemed to be strange. You'd look at them and say, "T here's something here, but does it have to do with this case?"' In the end, none of the leads panned out. A year passed and the children were still missing. On Oct. 21, 1979, shortly before he resigned from the troopers, T anguy wrote in the file: "All leads and extensive investigation failed to disclose the location of the reported missing persons. ... All the logical leads of investigation have been exhausted. Case closed ... pending further investigative leads or suspect." T ouch the Fandel case, then try to let go. It's a tarbaby. It grabs you. A lot of people think not being able to find the children drove T anguy out of the troopers. Now 48 years old, he is a security official on the North Slope. "I don't know," he said. "I don't even know how to answer that to myself." Margaret calls T anguy "the most caring" of all the investigators who tackled the case. "He worked on it day and night. He always wanted to find the kids and who was responsible for it." "When you're dealing with kids, I think you get a little more intense." T anguy said. "I don't think I'm unique in that case. ... Since I didn't come up with the answer, I can find all kinds of things I should have done, or could have done different, or people I could have approached differently. "Somebody knew. T he kids weren't snatched up by a UFO. Somebody knew, and as sure as I'm sitting here, it was somebody I talked to. Somewhere along the line, I touched him and didn't know it." Chuck Hagen, 37, retired from the troopers last year. He now runs a commercial fishing and charter business out of Homer. For years he dreamed about the case and talking about it now turns him into an instant chain smoker. "It was probably the most emotionally draining thing I have ever done in my life. ... I lost I don't know how many weeks on end of sleepless nights, thinking how come? Why that night? Why did they disappear? ... So many times I thought I had solved it. "You hate to resolve to yourself that they were taken and killed. "I think everyone who grabs this case thinks they can solve it." About four years ago, Hagen thought he had it solved when someone reported a man had moved from Haines to Arizona with two children who could be Scott and Amy. After checking out the basic details, "I knew I had found the kids," Hagen said. He flew to Flagstaff, Ariz., then to Page, where children fitting the descriptions had attended school for a month at about the right time. He showed their pictures to teachers. "T hey said absolutely no, it wasn't Scott. But it could be Amy." T he quest led to a man living with a blonde girl in a trailer court. "So I'm up on cloud nine," Hagen said. "T he kids are alive again. ... I called my boss and told him I found her, I found her. He said good, call me at any time of the day or night." When the man returned to his trailer, "I pounced on him and got the little girl. And it definitely wasn't Amy. He had pictures of her since she was born." Hagen thinks Scott and Amy are dead. "One man did it and is not saying anything to anybody. ... Someone who pegged them at Good T ime Charlie's, playing pool. T hey saw the man there. T hat man knew where they lived or followed them home. ... Someone heard Margaret say, "Your auntie and I are going to go out and party for a while. I want you to fix dinner and then go right to bed."' In a case with no facts, it's as good a theory as any. T he disappearance of Scott and Amy upset the lives of the men who failed to find them, but it nearly destroyed their parents. While T anguy and Sumey searched for the children, Margaret made the kids Halloween costumes. When October came and went and the children didn't come home, she began buying them Christmas presents. Most of the time she was on heavy medication and 30 seconds from hysteria. "I don't remember a lot about how I felt," she said. When the backhoes were called in because of some psychic's dream, she refused to watch. Christmas came and went. T hen another. T he finance company eventually took the cabin and, in 1980, she left Alaska. Back in the Midwest, she worked and drank to forget. "I was on a selfdestructive course for five or six years," she said. "I didn't think I had any reason to live. Every job I had I worked from opening to closing." Four years ago she met the man she has since married and walked away from bars for good. She says he saved her life. Margaret lives on a farm now. She raises chickens and runs a small refinishing and upholstery business. "Just what I always wanted," she said. She can't have any more children, but she and her husband take in hardtoplace foster kids and have been approved by the state to adopt a 12yearold girl. She holds tight to the belief that Scott and Amy are coming home. "I'm still waiting," she said. "I watch every talk show where the topic is missing children. ... I'm not going to have any other thought but that my kids are alive. ... If I don't know anything, I'd rather believe they're alive." Roger Fandel looked for his children for years, in bigcity dives and pornographic sinkholes where people who steal children sell them for sex. He lived a reckless, violent life, he said, a danger to himself and others. "I didn't care if I died in this quest, as long as I tried. I knew my chance of success was real slim but it was something I had to put myself through." He won't say the children are dead. "What if my giving up was the last bit of power removed from their survival?" And he won't say they're alive. "From my relationship with my son, I know he would contact me. But I have been wrong about a lot of things in my life. Why can't I be wrong about this?" Roger blames himself for what happened. A man is supposed to protect his children. Instead, because he wanted out of the marriage with Margaret, he left them alone and vulnerable. In his worst nightmares, his children were killed by his enemies. So here he is, 10 years later, sitting in a greasy spoon in Spenard, his eyes filled with tears and his voice breaking. "I carry the guilt that I took the protection from my children. ... I subjected my children to what they went through." Roger's secret hope those are not his words is hard to distinguish from a nightmare: Maybe Scott will see this story and get in touch, he said. Maybe he'll say he didn't call sooner because he didn't think anyone cared. "Maybe he thought because I left that I didn't love him." In the past, Roger has spent Sept. 5 alone. "Everyone that knows me knows that September 5th is a holy day with me." But this year he's going to spend the day with his new daughter, 4yearold T amson Lee. T he aloneness doesn't work, he said. "Grief has to be shared or it will kill you." T en years Monday. Scott would be 23 now, Amy, 18. Who took them, and why? Are they alive somewhere? What kind of person could murder two children and live with it all these years? T he investigation has come full circle. Sumey, who was there at the beginning, inherited the case when Hagen retired in December. T he big green files, thick with old efforts, sit on his desk now. He has other duties and works on the case in fits and spurts. But that's all right. He has time. "T his case can be solved," he said. Surely this feeling of mystery is just imagination, but it's September again and the children are still missing. Copyrig ht (c) 1988, Anchorag e Daily News
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