From a young age, thirteen-year-old Ilene Misheloff of Dublin, California, loved figure skating. She won several skating contests around suburban San Francisco throughout the late 1980s.
The Bay Area has produced two of America’s most accomplished figure skaters: Brain Boitano and Kristi Yamaguichi. Ilene had trained at the same gym as Boitano, the gold medal winner at the 1988 Olympics, and she had competed against Yamaguichi, the gold medal winner at the 1992 Olympics.
The odds of Ilene Misheloff her becoming another Brian Boitano or Kristi Yamaguichi were small, but, given her love of her craft and her drive to improve, they were probably greater than those of most who grace the ice. If skating stardom was not in her future, Ilene planned to become a pediatrician.
Perhaps Ilene’s dreams would have changed as she grew into a young adult. Sadly, we will never know.
Ilene Misseloff has not been seen in thirty-five years. The girl who had dreams of becoming another Bay Area skating phenom is instead the figure in a Bay Area mystery.
Ilene Misheloff
Dublin, California, is part of suburban east San Francisco.
Shortly after Wells Intermediate School ended at 3:00 p.m. on January 30, 1989, several classmates saw Ilene walking home. She was alone, taking a shortcut through an alley near the Shamrock Shopping Center.
Ilene Last Seen
Ilene crossed the boulevard and walked through John Mape Park along a dry creek bed. Somewhere in the park, she vanished.
Several days after the area was searched, Ilene’s backpack was found in the park’s creek bed. Authorities are certain it was placed there only after her disappearance and after they had searched the creek.
Few other clues were found indicating what may have happened to Ilene.
Entrance to John Mape Park
Ilene was a good student and had a good home life. She had never been in trouble or shown any signs of wanting to leave home. Investigators quickly concluded she had not run away and was a kidnapping victim.
Presumed Kidnapping
Police identified several persons of interest in Ilene’s presumed abduction.
One was Timothy Bindner, a married sewage treatment worker. He had sent birthday cards to several young Bay Area girls in the months preceding Ilene’s disappearance. Bindner said he sent them because the girls were lonely. Ilene was not one of the girls, however, to whom he had mailed a card.
Bindner allowed police to search his van, which was covered with pictures of children. He said he collected the photos because he enjoyed looking at them and referred to all of the kids as “beautiful.” I could not find anything stating whether or not Ilene’s picture was among those in his van.
Bindner had previously been arrested for trying to lure two young girls into his van, but the charges were later dropped. Conversely, he was also given a heroism award by the California State Patrol for assisting victims of the October 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake during the World Series.
Most investigators believe Bindner has a strange fascination with missing girls and is not psychologically sound, but they doubt he is responsible for Ilene’s disappearance. No evidence has been found suggesting he has any involvement.
Timothy Bindner
Though no evidence links them to Ilene’s disappearance, James Daveggio and his girlfriend Michelle Michaud are also persons of interest. They were convicted in the mid-1990s of several counts of sexual assault and, in 2002, of the 1997 abduction, rape, and murder of twenty-two-year-old Vanessa Samson, who lived in Pleasanton, only six miles north of Dublin.
The killing couple remain on California’s death row.
James Michelle Vanessa
Daveggio Michaud Samson
Former Bay Area taxi driver Curtis Anderson is another person of interest in Ilene’s disappearance. In 2000, he was convicted of the kidnapping and murder of eleven-year-old Xiana Fairchild and the kidnapping and sexual assault of eight-year-old Midsi Sanchez.
Both abductions occurred in Vallejo, California, thirty-five miles northwest of Dublin.
Curtis Anderson
On December 9, 1999, Xiana Fairchild was abducted from a bus stop while waiting for the school bus. In January 2001, her remains were found at the bottom of an embankment in Los Gatos, seventy-five miles south of Vallejo.
Anderson boasted of drugging her to death after weeks of holding her captive and molesting her.
Xiana Fairchild
On August 10, 2000, Anderson abducted eight-year-old Midsi Sanchez as she was walking home from Vallejo’s Highland Elementary school. After spending two nights shackled to Anderson’s car, she found the key to unlock them and escaped.
Midsi Sanchez
Police searched Anderson’s mother’s home in 2001 in hopes of finding evidence linking him to several area missing girls, including Ilene Misheloff, but found none.
Anderson hanged himself in his prison cell in December 2007. In total, he claimed to have murdered eleven young girls, some of whom he named and whose remains have not been found. Police and the FBI are trying to connect him to the crimes.
Commits Suicide
In 2009, police announced that a month before he committed suicide, one of the murders to which Anderson confessed was that of Amber Swartz-Garcia. The seven-year-old had disappeared from Pinole, California, forty miles northwest of Dublin, on June 3, 1988, just under eight months before Ilene Misheloff disappeared.
Anderson told police he abducted Amber and suffocated her to death at a motel and left her body near Benson, Arizona. Although her remains have not been found, police believe the confession is credible.
Amber Swartz-Garcia
Anderson has also been proclaimed a suspect in the disappearance of seven-year-old Karla Rodriguez of Las Vegas, Nevada. She was last seen playing outside her neighbor’s home on October 20, 1999.
Karla Rodriguez
Curtis Anderson is a person of interest in Ilene Misheloff’s disappearance, but she was not one of the girls he claimed to have killed, and nothing has been found linking him to her abduction.
Where Went Ilene?
Ilene Beth Misheloff has been missing since January 30, 1989, when she was thirteen-years-old. At time of her disappearance, she was five-feet-three-inches tall and weighed one-hundred-thirteen pounds. She had brown hair and eyes, and wore braces on her teeth. She had freckles on her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, and a small lump on the inside of her left ankle.
Ilene Misheloff would today be forty-nine-years-old.
Computer-Aged Images of Ilene Misheloff
A $95,000 reward is offered for information leading to Ilene’s whereabouts.
If you have any information on the disappearance of Ilene Misheloff, please contact the Dublin, California, Police Department at 925-833-6670 or 800-635-6306.
Substantial Reward Offered
SOURCES:
- Charley Project
- Done Network
- East Bay Times
- FBI
- Los Angeles Times
- San Francisco Chronicle
i went and found some pictures of this area near the creek ..you say she went missing on January 30th i have to ask you a stupid question . did she have her skates with her and were they ever found , this creek looks to have been deep enough to skate on if frozen over ,maybe she left the trail to go skating on the creek , leaving her back pack on the trail , from what i see of the creek . she could have fallen threw the ice and been trapped under the ice .. the creek would take her down stream as look as it was running water deep enough to push her down stream …if that is what happen her own skates would have been almost impossible to swim with ,a lot of creek beds like this one run fast in the winter and melt and run off gets deeper than what you normally would see in the creek ..,i am still getting the feeling she is there somewhere near or in the path of the creek , walk that creek bed down stream and keep in mind the creek was larger back when this event took place , most creeks and streams get smaller over time ..,she went missing in the winter time and with the colder temps no one was out there to find her remains if this is what happen to her ..i feel she is there in the creek bed somewhere down stream ..go to where her back pack was found and go to the creek bed nearest the back pack .. search downstream from there .. i think you will find her remains somewhere in the creek bed down stream ..it is a odd chance worth checking out .
OK, i have researched thousands of cold case in the last 40 years and i do know this area ,, your missing the logical she is said to have vanished in the wooded area ,no other evidence was found . she is most likely still in that wooded area ..here is what i would do .. first off mark the most likely place she entered those woods . than mark where her item was found . this gives you a random direction , like bearing and range . use the distance,from where she entered to where her item was found . take that distance and x it times 3 say is was 50 yards . there is a line of flight . between those two points of interest . make that line of flight go past the last point of interest on ward in the same direction .. so your looking at the area within 150 yards of the last point , now look at the lay of the land how flat is it and is there a given path or trail , than look at all odd structures with in that 150 yards . i got this feeling she must still be there somewhere near those points ..take into account time of day and how far she has already walked to get there .. are there any large animals in that area …any old mines or diggings ..any old homesteads or camping areas . and old rock outcroppings . anything that may have got her to go out of her save zone .. i read cases and do remote viewing and AP . i feel she may still be in that area ..see a lot of times if she was taken from those woods the suspect would have had to see her going into the woods or was laying in wait for any victim to come their way . but they are often seen doing that .. you haven’t stated that in this case yet .. she was a strong healthy young lady , and could put up a fight yet you don’t give any sign of this being the case ..two main reasons why someone leaves items behind . one they are forgotten and two the are unneeded weight ,was the item just thrown away or was it placed upright . ? was it on the trail or beside it .. i ask these questions for good reasons , see your victim has a body index , that tells us how far she could walk or run . you have somewhat of a bearings . we need to work on the range and open the bearing up say 5 degrees at a time till we locate her if she is still in that area , so you draw a line out from the last point of item contact ,150 yards . mark the 150 yard point than go left and right of that 150 5 degrees from your starting point by the time you get out to that 150 yards you may be as much as 25 or 35 yard left or right of the flight of path out to last item point but that is 25 -35 yards for every 50 yards gone by . so you may be 75-100 yards left or right by the time you get to the item point , what this means is your search area gets wider as you get down range from the last item point , i think she is most likely still in that area ..see if this was a suspected running after her he would have gone back and pick the last item up , it was still there ,your missing something in her reasoning factors, she left the item behind for some reason you are missing ..
I wish we could find all the missing ppl 😢
So do I, Tiara.
Any word if they tested the backpack for DNA? Or did too many people handle it?
Pattie, I have not heard anything about that specifically.