Elizabeth Smart case is painful reminder for Columbia's Dinwiddie family
She was the inescapable name and face, yet no one ever found her.
More than 10 years later, the disappearance of Dail Dinwiddie is as much a mystery as it was that dark, early-autumn morning when the 23-year-old vanished from a busy Columbia entertainment district after attending a U2 concert. Her likeness has been affixed to countless light poles and store windows, circulated in bulk on airlines and, now, Web sites.
Her name and face are a metaphor. She is a symbol – perhaps the symbol, not only in Columbia, but in South Carolina – for how the most unlikely of persons can simply drop off the face of the earth.
For a decade, her parents have walked the line between hope and resignation. The recent safe return of Elizabeth Smart, the 15-year-old who was kidnapped from her suburban Salt Lake City home in June and found under bizarre circumstances, offers Dinwiddie's father, Dan, little comfort personally.
But what the Smart story proves, he says, is that a family can never give up hope, no matter how long uncertainty tears at the soul and keeps a family frozen in a state of grief.
"To give up hope is almost denying that there's a possibility that your child will come back or be brought back," Dinwiddie says of his only daughter.
The Smart case is a mixed blessing of sorts for families of missing loved ones, and there are scores of them. As of March, 879 people, both juveniles and adults, were missing in South Carolina, the State Law Enforcement Division says.
A roommate last saw Jason Knapp, a 20-year-old Clemson University ROTC student, in April 1998. Nine days later, Knapp's car was found abandoned at Table Rock State Park, where police believe he drove on the day he disappeared.
Paula Merchant was 25 when she left home in Columbia in January 1999 to attend a meeting. She never showed up. Her car was found burning, but there's been no sign of her.
A family must always be ready for the return of a loved one with the full understanding that it could never happen. The new hope that Smart provides comes at a painful cost.
But moving on is something a family of a missing child cannot do, says Margaret Frierson, director of the South Carolina chapter of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
What if a missing person sees the family or a neighbor give up? Smart apparently heard her uncle calling for her during search missions.
"Until we have proof to believe otherwise, we are going to operate under the assumption that the child is alive," Frierson says. "Whether it's nine months, 10 years or 15 years, there is that possibility."
To her family and loved ones, Dail Dinwiddie is not a symbol; she's a daughter, sister and friend. A reserved, sweet human being with an engaging personality.
A woman who vanished.
Harold Chambers, the semi-retired Columbia police investigator who has spent a decade sifting through crank calls and promising leads that go bust, always finds himself back where he started – 1:30 a.m., Sept. 24, 1992.
No evidence. No suspect. No witness. No idea where else to begin.
Meanwhile, Dail Dinwiddie herself is frozen in time, branded into the public consciousness by her posterized face, her light-brown hair distinctly swooshed to the left. Strong roots
Dail Boxley Dinwiddie had lived in Columbia almost her entire life.
When Dail was a little girl, Dan and Jean Dinwiddie built a home in the upscale Forest Hills neighborhood, a community straddling the line between the affluence of Forest Acres and the poverty on the other side.
From kindergarten to high school graduation, Dail was nurtured in an educational environment similar to her home.
Heathwood Hall Episcopal School – a pastoral, pine-dotted campus where students feel free to leave their bookbags unattended – offered a comfortable bubble apart from the troubled neighborhoods around it. Jim Gasque, Dail's high school English teacher, watched her grow up. Gasque's late mother had been Dail's baby sitter. Dail was like "a surrogate granddaughter," he says, and his mother never got over her disappearance. Dail was a quiet figure, easily liked. "She had a type of charisma that made people want to be around her," he says. Probably because of her small stature – she was 5 feet tall, 96 pounds when she disappeared – she always seemed vulnerable, he says. Gasque remembers taking her on a 10-day trip to England with 18 other high school seniors. Dail's parents were going to wire her some money, but she didn't want to go the Western Union alone.
"She was the type student who was reluctant to launch out in the city without me," he says. Being small, Dail always found herself having to speak up to be heard.
She had a sweet coating; she slept with her teddy bear, always, on into college. But underneath, others who knew her say, was a feisty spirit tempered with a sharp ability to judge character.
Dail and her mother were close. When Dail was 9, she inspired her mom to take up horseback riding, and the two rode together avidly. When it came time to go off to college, Dail's horse, Double-Time, was sold to help pay tuition.
In the fall of 1987, she enrolled at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Va., but transferred after a year to the University of Georgia.
Dail had intended to take some specialized art courses, but she soon found she was allergic to the trees and grasses in Athens, Ga., and she returned to Randolph-Macon. After graduating in 1991 with an art history degree, Dail returned home to look for a job in art restoration.
But slow economic times made finding work difficult. She hoped for better luck in Charlotte, where she found work at a frame shop. The shop closed six months later, and Dail found herself back living at home in February 1992.
She baby-sat to earn money while she volunteered at the Columbia Museum of Art, all the while preparing for graduate school at the University of South Carolina. By the time she finished grad school, she hoped, the economy would be better. A big night
Sept. 23, 1992, was to be a memorable day in Columbia, even before Dail's disappearance.
U2 was performing at Williams-Brice stadium as part of its "Zoo TV" tour, and even those who didn't have tickets made sure to be a part of the social scene.
The fall semester had begun, and many of Dail's old friends had returned from college or trips overseas and enrolled in law school, graduate school and medical school at USC.
Dail was invited by a friend to be his guest at the concert, where they met two other old high-school friends. After the concert, the group went to Five Points, a college village of boutiques and restaurants. When night falls, it transforms into mecca of revelry where bars stay open into the early-morning hours.
It was a Wednesday night. With U2 in town, the party started early that week, and Five Points was hopping. Dail and her friends ended up at their favorite watering hole, Jungle Jim's, in the heart of Five Points.
Through the night, Dail's friends came and went, and by 1 a.m. she had gotten separated from them. At about 1:15 a.m., she left Jungle Jim's after talking with the bouncer at the door.
A few minutes later, she returned, looked around the bar and then left hurriedly, telling the bouncer goodbye. He was the last person to see her. The search for Dail
Dail's father awoke about 6:15 a.m. As was his routine, he went upstairs to get the dog, who slept in his 16-year-old son's room.
He noticed that the lights in Dail's room were on, as well as her radio. Her bed had not been slept in.
It wasn't uncommon for Dail to call her father for a ride home if she needed it. Five Points is a long but doable walk from the family's home, but the neighborhoods along the way are potentially treacherous, and the drive is brief.
Trying not to panic, Dan awakened his wife and began to call Dail's friends to see if she had spent the night with one of them.
His daughter was not one to leave the family worrying.
At about 8:30 a.m., her parents called the Columbia City Police department, which, at first, was reluctant to treat the case as a kidnapping.
So many cases of missing adults are easily resolved: unexpected sleep-overs, personal sabbaticals or sometimes a stint in jail.
But as her parents described her personality, behavior patterns and demeanor on the night she left, the case was soon labeled a kidnapping.
In the days and weeks that followed, everyone with ears to hear and eyes to see learned the name and face of Dail Dinwiddie.
Her family was all over the news, with a parade of press conferences and rallies at the State House and tearful pleas for her safe return.
And the poster, everywhere – in the record store, on the lightpost, in the supermarket, passed out on passenger airlines and distributed nationwide.
Within a week, Dail was featured on TV's "America's Most Wanted," and a benefit concert at the bar where she was last seen helped raise a $2,500 reward to $50,000.
The strong support network of Heathwood Hall rallied to her cause. Young men and women stood in street medians, holding pictures of Dail, passing out fliers.
Nothing.
"One day she was here, one day she wasn't," Dan says. A frustrating case
Columbia Police investigator Harold Chambers has the look of an old grandpappy; his beige Members Only jacket, a relic of the 1980s, screams unassuming.
But his blue eyes pierce, and beneath his polite stoicism is a grandfather who doggedly wants to bring a child home.
Chambers, now a 35-year veteran, was assigned to the case from the start, and he has put off retirement in part to solve it.
He acts not only as investigator but as a counselor to the Dinwiddies, available at all times whenever they need to talk about theories or frustrations.
The job of cracking the case has been nothing if not frustrating for the grizzled investigator.
"You just can't fathom it," Chambers says. "Absolutely, it's frustrating."
He doesn't entertain theories of what might have happened, for fear that his imagination might be closed to any possibility.
Columbia police, the Richland County Sheriff's Office, the State Law Enforcement Division and the FBI have followed hundreds of leads since the police canvassed Five Points and the possible foot path home to Forest Hills shortly after Dail's disappearance.
The first 72 hours, says Columbia Police Capt. Steve Conley, is the best window to solve a missing persons case. From there, the trail only gets colder.
Investigators interviewed residents, looked in underground water lines and checked abandoned houses along the way.
Early on, police thought they might have had their guy. The morning of Dail's disappearance, a man was seen in Five Points forcing a woman into a car.
Investigators located him in Anderson County and brought him to Columbia. After interviewing him and a Sumter woman – his girlfriend – it became clear she was the one forced into the car that morning.
"It sounded real good to start with," Chambers says. "We thought we had it, but it fizzled out on us like so many more have."
Conley says the Dinwiddie case is perplexing: no crime scene, no witness among a crowd of thousands and no one enticed by the $50,000 reward. There is, however, that night, particularly memorable because of the concert, Conley says. Someone, somebody, had to have seen something, but no one is talking.
"People tend to run their mouth," he says. "It's frustrating with the amount of reward out there, when 99 times out of a hundred, a lot of people on the street would give up their brother for 500 bucks, I don't care what he did."
The only information police have ever received, Conley says, is murky at best – someone "acted strange" or "looked like."
The family and law enforcement have even entertained the visions of psychics, in hopes of any kind of lead.
Whenever an accused serial killer, kidnapper or rapist with a tie to Columbia is caught, investigators search for a link to Dail and other missing people.
That was the case in the fall of 2000 with the capture of Reinaldo Rivera.
Rivera has admitted that he raped and killed four young women beginning in 1999 in the Augusta, Ga., area. His attorney is defending him on the grounds of mental illness.
Around the time of Dail's disappearance, the now 38-year-old Rivera lived in Columbia and was a student at USC.
Investigators interviewed Rivera, but could find no link. Rivera had left a suicide note listing his victims, Chambers says, and denied any involvement with Dinwiddie (and Paula Merchant).
The trail to solving Dinwiddie's case has passed through places such as Las Vegas, Atlanta and Clarksville, Tenn. Police have "three file cabinets full" of leads.
The number of leads today has trailed off compared to a decade ago, when investigators could barely keep up with the flood of information.
But they still get them.
Last month, Conley and SLED agents spent two days in Minnesota interviewing a man in jail who was said to be involved with her disappearance.
Authorities couldn't find a connection, but they have not exhausted that lead and plan to investigate it further, says SLED special agent Dave Lawrence.
Too often, leads are built on what turns out to be a prank. Once, police received a tip that Dail's body was buried off Fish Hatchery Road southwest of Columbia.
Conley and Chambers arrived and found mounds on the property and had no choice but to dig them up with a backhoe. Eventually, they traced the call to a pay phone at USC; the date was April Fool's Day.
Some people have tried to pin the disappearance on a rival for revenge purposes. Inmates have used supposed knowledge of her disappearance as leverage to try to get out of jail.
Such is the nature of a high-profile case: a lot of potential leads but also a mess of misinformation. But investigators agree the high profile gives them a better chance at solving it.
"It seems to be the case that will not go away, which is a good thing," Lawrence says. Holding on to hope
"I'd love to see her walk through that door, like that little Smart girl," Chambers says. "Who knows? The day before Elizabeth Smart was found, no one knew if she was alive."
But Dail wasn't 14, and if she had a chance to escape, she likely would.
Because of that, investigators aren't planning to do an age-enhanced sketch of what Dail would look like at 33, soon to be 34 on April 12.
"Here, you're dealing with, if the opportunity presented itself, I feel certain she would make some kind of contact with authorities or home," Conley says.
Chambers says SLED tried to do an age-enhanced sketch four years ago, but it "didn't work out."
Hope in the Dinwiddie home is a commodity bought at an exorbitant price. Holding onto it has taken its toll.
The Dinwiddies watch TV's "America's Most Wanted" and "American Justice," Dan says, "not for the voyeur value, but to see if maybe there's something we haven't thought about. Maybe we could tie that in." Dan says he and his wife handle the loss differently. From day to day, talking about their daughter doesn't come easier, it's measured by how less difficult it is.
To talk about her daughter's case, Jean must reacquaint herself with a box of photos and news clippings. Dredging up the memories is like picking a scab from a wound that has not healed.
But, there is the hope.
"As a family, we're very private," Dan says. "We don't relish the publicity. The only reason we do this is because, one day, something that somebody has written or said might cause somebody to remember something and find Dail."
At any moment at the Dinwiddie home, an upsetting call can come – from an investigator, a prankster, a reporter, a tipster – the kind that Dan says "always makes our hearts go back in our throats."
At 3 in the morning, a woman called the Dinwiddie home, drunk, to let them know she was looking for their daughter in Five Points – a few years too late.
Sometimes, the calls are entirely well-meaning.
Dan says he got a call from a man in a bar in Green Bay, Wisc., one night: "He said, I know that your daughter is here in the bar tending bar.'"
By the next morning, law enforcement had met up with the woman in Green Bay. She indeed bore a striking resemblance to Dail, but she was nearly six feet tall.
Still, it was that type of dogged concern that found Elizabeth Smart. A couple passing by on a suburban Salt Lake City road insisted on following their instinct when they recognized Smart's suspected abductor from a sketch.
The public's vigilance is the only comfort Dail's father finds in the Smart story. Dail's case is entirely different.
He knows that if his daughter is ever to be found, it will be because people speak up about what they know, whether they realize they know it or not.
"I was very encouraged that the citizens found this child," he says. "The citizenry: That's who's going to find Dail. Insist. Just insist."
And never give up hope, no matter how much it hurts.
—
April 18, 2004
Above and beyond
Until his death, Harold Chambers stayed true to his pledge to keep working until he found missing Columbia woman
AFTER SURGERY to remove a deadly brain tumor, Harold Chambers might have been expected to give up the search. But those who were close to the semi-retired Columbia Police investigator already knew what he would say. It was the same thing he had said for more than a decade. "I won't retire until I find that girl."
That girl is Dail Dinwiddie, a young woman who nearly 12 years ago vanished in Columbia and became, perhaps, the symbol in South Carolina of how a person can simply disappear off the face of the Earth.
Chambers never did quit, and he never found Dinwiddie.
But his search is over. Chambers, who two weeks ago at age 62 died from complications of his illness, refused to retire from the force, even as the case had constantly perplexed him to the point of utter frustration.
Despite the frustration, nearly every week he was investigating, searching for any shred that might set the Dinwiddie family free from their perpetual grief.
Where there once was a force as unyielding as the Dinwiddies' suffering – a particular comfort for a family who has lost a child – there is a void, one the Dinwiddies says leaves yet another hole in their hearts.
"He would always tell me," says Jean Dinwiddie, Dail's mother, "`We can do this. We can do it together. You don't have to do it yourself.' I don't think this family would have made it this far without this man."
Such personal relationships between police officer and distraught family are not the norm, law enforcement veterans say, but where they do exist, the professional commitment is equally as personal. Harold Chambers was a case study in the marriage of professional duty and personal mission. If anybody understands that, Tom Siegler would. Since 1978, Seigler has refused to let the case of Donna McCracken and David Clemishaw go – even though he left the Greenville County Sheriff's homicide force in 1981.
The young Asheville couple was found dead — murdered and apparently robbed — in a rural creek off Barton Road.
Seigler, now the head of the sheriff's Office of Professional Standards, says he's pretty sure he knows who did it — based on a statement implicating two suspects — but can't find enough evidence to win in court. One of the suspects is now deceased.
While he now oversees internal investigations, this is one external investigation Seigler says he will not let go. Providing peace to McCracken's family is what drives him.
He speaks regularly with McCracken's sister in Colorado and her mother in North Carolina, sharing any potentially useful information.
Cases like this aren't common, Seigler says, because "you don't have too many whodunits. Most cases clear after at least two years."
While rare, law enforcement veterans say, the commitment isn't surprising, because in every case like this, there is a personal connection with a suffering family.
"When that happens, friendships develop, and it's hard to let it go," says Columbia police Capt. Steve Conley, Chambers' boss before he died. "Anytime you can do that with a victim's family, you're better off."
In Chambers' case, the Dinwiddie family says, the grizzled but grandfatherly part-time investigator wasn't just close to the family.
"He was a member of our family," says Dail's father, Dan Dinwiddie.
A man on a mission
Dail, 23 at the time, disappeared in the early morning hours of Sept. 4, 1992, after losing friends in a bar in Five Points, the nightlife district for University of South Carolina students.
It was quickly established that Dinwiddie was kidnapped. She was not the type to leave her parents worrying, and she had no motivation to vanish.
Chambers was assigned to the case. He never knew that the trail would grow so cold, even as an outpouring of support from the community put the case squarely in the local and national media spotlight.
Up until his death, Chambers could claim not one shred of substantive evidence to work with.
In an interview with The Greenville News 13 months ago, Chambers stoically expressed his befuddlement.
"Absolutely, it's frustrating," he said at the time. "You cannot fathom it."
As a police officer, he was a rare breed, says Jenny Jacobs, a retired State Law Enforcement Division agent who worked the Dinwiddie case along with Chambers from day one.
Jacobs, too, would talk with the family, but somehow, she says, she couldn't rival Chambers' zeal and calm reassurance.
Chambers, she says, was not a man of words. "I knew him by his actions."
It was a pattern woven throughout his life, says his brother, Louie Chambers, a Fountain Inn city councilman and retired West Columbia police officer.
The two grew up together in Greenville, and Louie remembers distinctly how his younger brother always felt to him like his older brother.
Most people called Harold "Chub."
Years ago, he would go every night to a Columbia bar that Louie says had a history of rowdiness and drink coffee.
While "relaxing," he would make sure the place cleared out peaceably, Louie says.
Once, Louie remembers hopping in a car to answer a call of a robbery in progress, clear across town.
When they got to the scene, there was a cadre of police cars and blue lights. Inside was a robber who was holding a hostage.
Louie says his brother grabbed his shotgun and walked inside. Soon after, he came out with the hostage, a handcuffed suspect and the suspect's pistol in his hand.
Chub Chambers, he says, was the last guy the person who kidnapped Dail Dinwiddie would want to run into.
Chambers' daughter, Tammy, says her father was always a mixed bag. "We never knew what he was going to do next."
One predictable trait, however, was that Chambers cared for others, and far outside police work, his brother says.
"My brother took people off the street, homeless people, and carried them home to feed them," Louie says. "I could write a book about him."
More than a cop
At any hour of the night, Chambers made himself available to talk with anyone who wanted to offer ideas or ask questions about the Dinwiddie case.
To Dan and Jean Dinwiddie, Chambers was a counselor more than a cop.
Dan says Chambers would call the family on holidays, just to check in, knowing that holidays are difficult. It was his way of trying to provide assurance that there was someone out there who was committed to making it better.
Chambers also acted as a protector of the family as they answered prank calls.
Sometimes drunks in Five Points would call the home years after Dail's disappearance to tell the family that they would look for Dail.
If there was a lead, he was a conduit, a shortcut, to get the information checked out, whether he acted on it or had someone else act on it, says Shirley Haselwood, a longtime friend of the family who has helped extensively with the case, even after she moved to Greenville in 1998.
Jacobs believes that while Chambers is irreplaceable in so many ways, a set of fresh eyes could be good for the case.
Chambers, throughout his work on the case, tried to keep a fresh approach.
He said last year that he didn't entertain theories on what happened, because he didn't want to close any doors.
That, his daughter Tammy says, was a lesson learned the hard way. Chambers kept a file on a little girl who had been abducted and murdered.
He kept it, she says, long after the case was closed. Chambers homed in on one guy, only to find out someone else did it.
"I asked him why he had that file," Tammy says. "He said, 'I look at it every now and then, to remind me to never to do that again.'"
For his part, Conley, the police captain, has assured the Dinwiddie family that the case will not be shuffled under the pile. Chambers' relationship with the family can't be duplicated, he says, but the search for truth will continue.
It was Conley who just last year flew to Minnesota with Chambers to check out a lead that didn't pan out.
"It's not like he had all the files and nobody has access to them," he says. "It's not inactive by any stretch of the imagination."
In many law enforcement agencies, a special unit is assigned to longstanding cases.
In the Greenville County Sheriff's Office, Seigler says, a cold case unit spends its time on just such matters. The level of personal connection is different from case to case, and a lack of a deeply intimate relationship doesn't mean a cold case can't be solved.
Even so, once death removes the assurance that someone is on a personal mission, a large chasm opens.
A hole, a sinking feeling, but also, says Haselwood, the Dinwiddies' longtime friend, a warm sense of gratitude that will never fade.
"It is an empty feeling," Haselwood says, "like, 'What do you do now?' Besides his family, I know we'll miss him the most, because he was a part of our family. Under no circumstances would he quit — except, I guess, under these."
