About Me
I am not affiliated with Amber Swartz-Garcia's family or law enforcement.
Vital Statistics at Time of Disappearance
Missing Since: June 3, 1988 from Pinole, California
Classification: Non-Family Abduction
Date Of Birth: August 19, 1980
Age: 7 years old
Height and Weight: 4'0, 65 pounds
Distinguishing Characteristics: Caucasian female. Blonde hair, blue eyes. Amber's upper right front tooth was missing at the time of her 1988 disappearance. Her teeth were also crooked. Her ears are pierced. Amber sucked her thumb when she was tired or nervous at the time of her disappearance. She is right-handed. Some agencies refer to her as Amber Swartz or Amber Garcia Swartz. Her nicknames are Am and A. J.
Clothing/Jewelry Description: A short-sleeved white shirt with teal bands around the bottom of the shirt, the neck, and the bottoms of both sleeves and images of multicolored sunglasses printed on it; purple corduroy pants, pink socks, brand-new white LA Gear tennis shoes with pink or white laces, and emerald earrings with gold posts.
Medical Conditions: Amber has a hearing impairment and uses a hearing aid and reads lips. She has a slight speech impediment due to her impaired hearing. She also suffers from migraine headaches due to a concussion she sustained in 1984. The headaches cause loss of balance and vomiting. She took the prescription medication Fiornal for them at the time she disappeared. Amber had neither her hearing aid nor her medicine with her when she vanished.
Details of Disappearance
Amber was last seen jumping rope at approximately 4:15 p.m. in the front yard of her family's Pinole, California residence on June 3, 1988. She was not usually allowed to play in the yard alone but her mother, Kim Swartz, made an exception that day because their neighbors would be arriving home soon. Kim checked outside approximately 15 minutes after Amber left the house and noticed she had disappeared. The child has never been heard from again. She may have been holding an adult-sized leather jump rope with wooden handles at the time of her disappearance. It disappeared along with her and was never found.
Authorities did discover a pair of pink socks near Amber's residence on June 4, the day after her disappearance. The socks were found on a baseball diamond by the creek that flows behind Amber's house. Kim believes that the socks may have belonged to her daughter, but she is uncertain and additional clues were never located. The socks were located after the area had been searched once already; it is believed that they were left after the initial search.
A day after Amber disappeared, a witness reported having seen someone matching her description at Alvarado Park sometime between 4:45 and 5:00 p.m. on June 3. The girl was being roughly handled by an adult white man and was thrown into a car by him at the park entrance. The witness described the girl's assailant was being about forty years old, 5'7, and 160 pounds. He was driving an older model four-door General Motors car, full-sized, and tan in color. Authorities have never been unable to identify the man and are not sure if the girl who was seen was in fact Amber.
Two men have been named as possible suspects in Amber's case. Authorities announced that Timothy James Bindner had a possible connection to her disappearance, as well as the disappearances of Michaela Garecht, Ilene Misheloff, Tara Cossey and Amanda Campbell. A photo of Bindner is posted below this case summary. He maintains his innocence and successfully sued Campbell's hometown of Fairfield, California in 1997 for defamation of character. Bindner, a married sewage treatment plant worker, came to authorities' attention after he began sending birthday greetings and gifts of money to young girls in the East Bay area. One child's parents contacted authorities and handed over a letter Bindner had written to their daughter. The note was printed backwards and could only be deciphered by holding it up to a mirror. Bindner claimed he sent the cards as a kind gesture because the girls were "lonely."
Bindner also visited the Oakmont Cemetery gravesite of Angela Bugay, a five-year-old girl girl who was abducted and murdered in Antioch, California in 1983. A photograph of Bugay is posted below this case summary. Bindner was never considered a suspect in her murder and another man has since been convicted in that case.
Bindner approached many of the mothers of missing girls from the East Bay area offering his assistance, including Amber and Garecht's families. He introduced himself to Kim three days after Amber vanished. He bore a striking resemblance to the man who was seen throwing the girl into the tan car on the day of Amber's disappearance.
Investigators asked Kim to maintain a quasi-friendship with Bindner in hope of learning if he was connected to any of the girls' cases. She and authorities agreed that Bindner appeared to playing mind games with victims' loved ones and law enforcement. Many people theorize that he enjoyed taunting families into thinking that he may have been involved in the presumed abductions. He was once arrested for annoying two little girls whom he was trying to lure into his van, but the charges were later dropped. Bindner often drove around in a light blue Dodge van with a license plate that said "Lov You." Inside the van was wallpapered with many pictures of children. A photograph of the van is posted below this case summary.
Bindner refers to himself as a "good Samaritan." He asked Linda Golston, a reporter for The San Jose Mercury News, to interview him at Oakmont Cemetery at 4:30 a.m. He played his favorite song on her car stereo, "Jesus, Here's Another Child To Hold." Bindner told Goldston that he thought of the missing girls as "his children." She asked him how he believed the abductions occurred and he said one child was submissive, but another fought back against her assailant. Bindner added that he was "guessing" about the girls' reactions.
Bindner wrote a letter to a law enforcement agency in the late 1980s, stating that he believed the next girl who would be abducted from the area would be nine years old. Garecht disappeared shortly thereafter; she was nine at the time of her abduction. Bindner also sent a holiday card to a profiler for the Federal Bureau Of Investigation (FBI) in 1990. The card depicted an image of a young Russian girl holding up four fingers. Campbell vanished in 1991 at the age of four; she bore a striking resemblance to the girl in the card.
Search dogs traced both Campbell and Amber's scents to Bugay's grave. Authorities never had enough evidence to prove Bindner was connected to their cases, although he was known for visiting the cemetery on occasion.
Bindner was given a heroism award by the California State Patrol after assisting victims in the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. He has never been charged in any of the cases.
Curtis Dean Anderson, who was convicted of the 2000 kidnapping and molestation of a young California girl, was also mentioned as a possible suspect in Amber's case. Investigators searched Anderson's mother's residence in June 2001 for evidence linking him to other missing girls' cases, but nothing was located.
James Daveggio has been considered as a possible suspect since the early 1990s. He and his former girlfriend, Michelle Lyn Michaud, were charged with the 1997 abduction, rape and murder of Vanessa Lei Swanson. Swanson's remains were discovered approximately five miles from the site of Jaycee Lee Dugard's 1991 California abduction. Photos of Daveggio and Michaud are posted below this case summary. They were also charged with additional counts of sexual assault in unrelated cases in the mid-1990s. In 2002, Michaud and Daveggio were convicted of Swanson's murder and sentenced to death. They are awaiting execution. Michaud claims that she met Daveggio in 1996 and therefore was not involved in Dugard's abduction. There are striking similarities between Michaud and the female suspect in Dugard's case, but the FBI no longer believes she and Daveggio were involved.
Daveggio is also considered a possible suspect in Garecht and Misheloff's disappearances. Neither he nor Michaud has been charged in connection with any of the cases.
Kim received a phone call from a resident of the Pinole area in 1991. The man said that he was in a park near her home on the day of Amber's 1988 disappearance. He stated that he saw an unidentified bearded man force a young girl into a vehicle in the park and drive away. The witness said that he copied down the car's license plate and contacted authorities shortly afterwards. He believed that the child matched Amber's description. Investigators stated that they did not believe the possible suspect was Bindner, as he did not have a beard at the time of the incident. The vehicle's license plate was traced to an impounded car in the Los Angeles area. Authorities have never confirmed if the child in the park was Amber.
A defrocked priest named Stephen Kiesle became a suspect in Amber's case in mid-2002. He was suspected because he lived in Amber's neighborhood, one block away from her home, at the time of her disappearance and because he has since been arrested and charged with molesting three girls at the Santa Paula Catholic Church in Fremont, where he worked from 1968 to 1971. The victims of the alleged molestations physically resembled Amber. Kiesle did not know Amber and denies any involvement in her case. Police searched his yard three times, using cadaver-sniffing dogs, radar, and a backhoe. They were looking not only for evidence in Amber's disappearance but also evidence in Dugard's kidnapping. They found no clues pertaining to either case and the searches concluded in July 2002.
Kim founded The Amber Foundation For Missing Children after Amber's 1988 disappearance. A photo of Kim is posted below. She was married to Amber's father, police officer Floyd "Bernie" Swartz, when he was killed in the line of duty in May 1980. A photograph of Floyd is posted below this case summary. Amber was born three months after her father's death. Any connection between her and James Richard Odle, the man who murdered her father, was ruled out. He was on death row in in 1988.
Kim Swartz was the victim of a break-in and theft in 2000. She was attending a fund-raiser benefit for another missing child, Xiana Fairchild, with her fiancee. When she left the benefit she found her car's front passenger window had been smashed and some things were missing from inside. No other vehicles in the lot were damaged. The items taken from Kim's car included a laptop computer, a briefcase containing pictures of Amber, and a list of missing-child activists and their phone numbers. A very expensive pair of sunglasses in the car was not stolen. Kim believes she was targeted due to her high-profile involvement in the search for Amber and many other missing children.
Amber's case remains unsolved. A park near her home was dedicated and named in her memory in 2006.
