Karen Palmer

And I thought, well, okay, he can get ahead of me and then we'll go to baggage claim and, you know, it'll be okay.

So meanwhile, I'm walking along with Erin, and I look at her, and she looks completely stricken.

And so I knew something was wrong with her, but I didn't know what it was.

And I knelt on the ground to hug her and, you know, hold her and reassure her.

And then when I stood back up, Gil and Amy were gone.

Their response was, what is your custody arrangement?

And the custody had not been settled yet.

And so they said, well, he has as much right to her as you do, and we can't really do anything.

She and I, there was not a lot of, no love lost between us.

And yet, she called me every single day that Amy was gone.

She told me, make sure that Aaron sleeps with you because he'll come in the window and take her too.

And they told me, if and when he calls, keep him on as long as you can.

Because Santa Cruz, where I was living, is an old town.

And the kind of switching stations that they had was, it's not like on TV, where they turn on a computer and two seconds later they locate where the caller is.

It had to go from switching station to switching station to switching station all the way to his final location.

It was the worst phone call of my life.

It was harrowing.

It was just awful.

But I kept him on, and at the end of it, they still couldn't get him.

They didn't know where he was.