C Box - Three Weeks to Say Goodbye

Aubrey Coates, who worked as a temporary replacement for campground hosts, was questioned on four different occasions because he had his trailer parked in the areas where the children went missing. In each instance, Coates answered all questions asked and was cooperative. More than once, Coates volunteered to help search for the missing children. He had no arrests, and his name didn’t exist on any sexual-predator lists. National Forest Ser vice staffing personnel in all three states knew him to be a kind of eccentric loner with his battered Airstream trailer that bristled with television and Internet satellite dishes and antennae, but he was considered experienced and reliable. Whenever a host got ill, or went on vacation, Coates was contacted to fill in. His job consisted of collecting overnight fees, keeping the campgrounds clean and neat, making sure campers didn’t overstay their limits, and providing advice and assistance to campers in states where camping is part of the common cultural fabric. In twenty years of being a campground host, only two complaints had been filed against him. The complaints-parents in one instance felt he leered at their children, and someone accused him of being rude because he angrily refused to come outside his trailer (“What was he doing in there?”) when a camping family wanted to borrow a tire pump-were minor and filed in two different states six years apart.

Coates covered his tracks very well. Three of the missing children were taken after the regular campground hosts had returned, so his name never came up.

Worst of all, Cody told me, was that the seven children prior to Courtney Wingate was an arbitrary number. The actual number of children Coates took could be ten, or twenty, or fifty. In the three decades across the West-years Coates has not accounted for-Cody said there were over seventy missing-children cases open from Nebraska to California. And dozens more in western Canada.

Why just seven? Because the police found photos of seven missing children on Aubrey Coates’s laptop computer. If there had been others-and Cody thought Coates had been successful in destroying electronic records on a server located in the trailer as well as most of the laptop-Cody and the computer specialists brought in on the case couldn’t find them.

After initially filing charges against Coates for the disappearance of all seven children in the hope Coates would bargain with them-lesser charges in exchange for a confession or the locations of the bodies-the federal prosecutor ran into a brick wall because Coates admitted nothing and proclaimed his innocence. After a few months, the charges were pared down to the disappearance of Courtney Wingate, who vanished most recently, in Desolation Canyon, where Coates had served as temporary campground host. Several digital photos of Courtney were found on Coates’s laptop, and her parents identified him as lurking around their campsite the night before she disappeared.

As Cody and the prosecutor walked the jury through a PowerPoint pre sentation of the photos found on Coates’s computer-evidence Coates had been targeting the little girl for some time, including shots of her riding a big plastic three-wheeler and outside at an unidentifiable location with pine trees in the background-I found her parents behind the prosecutor’s table. It was painful to imagine what they were going through. Crystal Wingate, Courtney’s mother, was thin, pinched, hard, with the wizened face of a woman who’d seen tough times, none tougher than this. Donnie Wingate, who worked construction, had a big mustache and muttonchops, and he looked very uncomfortable being indoors. He was so tense as the photos were shown that I could see cords in his neck popping out. Donnie looked big enough and capable enough to step over the rail barrier and snap Aubrey Coates’s neck before the bailiff could stop him. I wished he would. He glared at the back of Coates’s head as Cody explained the other photos he’d found on the laptop and the extensive-but sabotaged-array of electronics they’d discovered in Coates’s trailer.

Cody testified for another hour and a half, much of it a summary and recap of his all-day session on Friday. I was riveted. In unambiguous language and with a manner that had been honed doing exactly this in years of courtroom appearances, Cody let himself be led by Assistant U.S. Attorney Blair. The U.S. Attorney himself-tall, bald, athletic-looked on with obvious approval.

Cody built his case methodically from the initial missing-child call from the Wingates to his suspicion when he arrived at the scene at the request of the county sheriff and first saw the campground tender’s trailer with so much electronic capability.

He said, “Coates’s trailer reminded me of one of those communications units our military uses overseas. You know, the ones that can transmit audio and visual data to some commander all the way in Florida or Nevada, so they can give orders on the battlefield in real time. There were dishes and antennae all over the trailer, and a generator outside if his campground power source wasn’t enough. So I asked myself why a man who wanted to be so connected to the Internet in such an immediate way would choose to be in an isolated campground when he could be in Denver, or any city. It started with that.”

Without consulting his notes, Cody told the jury how, with that question in mind, he started his investigation of Aubrey Coates. The more he learned about Coates’s habits and travels and the missing children that corresponded with his locations, the more he suspected Coates of taking Courtney. The records of Coates’s satellite Internet provider showed patterns of massive activity, sometimes thousands of megabytes of data being uploaded and downloaded. Most of the activity took place from 2:00 A.M. to 6:00 A.M.

“The Internet activity fit the profile of someone involved in child pornography,” Cody said. “And he was not only receiving streaming-video files and other high-density material, but he was transmitting it-uploading it-as well.”

Aubrey Coates himself sat stock-still during Cody’s damaging testimony. He didn’t shake his head or roll his eyes but seemed to watch and listen carefully. It wasn’t Coates who bothered me, though. Bertram Ludik seemed to behold Cody with amusement and barely disguised scorn. And as Cody built his case-convincingly, I thought, and so did Olive-the more agitated Ludik became. Once, when he sighed loudly, Judge Moreland shot a look in his direction that shut him up.

Blair read from her pad. “So when you entered the defendant’s trailer on June 8 with the federal search warrant, what did you observe?”

Cody said, “We found the defendant in the process of destroying his electronic files. The video camera had been wiped clean, and the memory sticks for his still cameras were missing. He’d already burned a bunch of magazines in a trash barrel next to the trailer, material which through analysis was later identified as photos and magazines containing graphic child pornography. Obviously, he had somehow learned of the raid in advance, but we were still able to find enough evidence to arrest him.”

Blair introduced the exhibits-charred photos and magazine pages in plastic envelopes. Members of the jury passed the evidence from one to the other. Several jurors looked visibly sickened by what they saw, and one lowered her glasses to the tip of her nose and glared at Coates with undisguised contempt.

“And the computers?” she asked, returning to her podium. “What did you find?”

“The photos of Courtney Wingate we showed to the jury,” Cody said, “and photos of six other missing children.”

When Cody said it, there were audible gasps in the courtroom. Heads of jurors swiveled toward Coates, who still sat impassively. It was a defining moment. How Donnie Wingate restrained himself is a mystery to me.