November 19 of this year marks 21 years since Michaela Joy Garecht was kidnapped from a parking lot in Hayward, California. She was nine years old. Her friend saw a man grab Michaela and force her into a car. Michaela’s mother, Sharon Murch, has never stopped searching, and Jaycee Dugard’s recovery 18 years after her kidnapping has renewed Murch’s hope for some sort of information about what happened to Michaela.

On her blog this week, Murch has written about her hopes that there is a connection between Michaela’s case and Jaycee’s. Michaela and Jaycee looked “a great deal alike.” Michaela went missing from Hayward in 1988, Jaycee from South Lake Tahoe in 1991. Like Jaycee, Michaela was dragged into a car, and the car her kidnapper was driving, “an older, tannish-gold, full-size sedan, boxy in shape, with body damage,” was similar to the car recovered from Garrido’s back yard. (Scroll down to see the sketch of Michaela’s kidnapper.)

“Before this happened I had been thinking perhaps Michaela might be alive, perhaps she might come home,” Murch wrote to me by email yesterday. “There has been so much going on lately, after twenty years, and why?”

Dugard had been living in tents with her two daughters on the property of her alleged kidnapper and rapist, Phillip Garrido, in unincorporated Antioch. It has also been widely reported that a neighbor called police in 2006 to say that five women and girls were living in Garrido’s back yard. Murch speculates on her blog about one of the unidentified women:

Could it have been Michaela? One of the key things the neighbor mentioned is that the girls “all looked the same,” and everyone has commented on the striking similarities between Jaycee and Michaela…Who are the other girls who were kept in the back yard? If some came and went, where did they come from and go to?

On August 27, Murch wrote of her elation at hearing the news that Jaycee was alive, elation which was followed by more sobering thoughts:

And as the day went on, I began to acknowledge that this probably wasn’t going to lead to a solution in Michaela’s case, and that if it did, it likely wouldn’t be a good one. If this guy had kidnapped Michaela in 1988, and then had kidnapped Jaycee in 1991, and she had never seen Michaela, that would not bode well for Michaela… But you never know. This guy seemed to be some kind of a would-be cult leader. Perhaps he had followers, and perhaps they had other people’s little girls also.

It is probable that Garrido, who told neighbors that he was a “sex addict,” knew other sex offenders. According to an article in the Telegraph, “Neighbours have described how unsavoury looking men arrived by car at his house, got drunk, took the drug crystal meth and lined up outside a tent.” The LA Times reports that Garrido’s zip code is home to more than 100 registered sex offenders, dozens of whom were convicted for crimes against children, some of whom live within easy walking distance of Garrido’s property. A search of the sex offender registry for that zip code turns up a map rampant with tiny red rectangles, the code for offenses against children; clicking on the rectangles leads to a photograph of the sex offender, along with his address and the nature of his crimes.

On her blog, Murch shared a poem that nine-year-old Michaela wrote the week before she was kidnapped. Michaela said the poem “was about people who had been kidnapped and were being held captive:”

The people knock on doors of steel
The people knock, the people kneel
They think of things that aren’t real
Outside the doors of steel
The people walk, the people know
That outside those doors
The people know
The people think that you may say
The people think that they, too, may
They lack the confidence you have
They think it’s real, the dreams you have
The dreams they feel

On August 27, Murch wrote of the poem, “I’ve always believed it held some mysterious key to what happened to Michaela, but what? Today I just kept coming back to what Michaela had said. ‘It’s about people who have been kidnapped and are being held captive.’ She didn’t say it’s about people who have been kidnapped and killed. They were being held captive. They were alive.”

America’s Most Wanted, which featured Michaela’s story 20 years ago, will be in the area to do a second piece on her next week. The episode will tentatively air on October 3rd. Watch a recent Channel 2 story about Michaela here.

Murch first wrote to me in June 2008, after having read a a novel I wrote about a missing child. “Over the years, I have taken a lot of criticism for saying that I think my daughter is probably most likely not alive,” Murch wrote. “While it was very painful for me to consider my daughter’s death, to live every day thinking about the million different ways your child could be suffering is the stuff of madness. Who could ever make peace with that?”

So opening up new hopes also opens up old wounds. But one thing that so many parents of missing children talk about is the horror of not knowing, a horror that remains, no matter how many years pass. The wounds are always there. Maybe there is no connection whatsoever between Michaela’s case and Jaycee’s. But perhaps there is. And perhaps Jaycee’s recovery will lead to some answers for other families.

In a message to Michaela on her website, Murch writes, “In the days after you were kidnapped, I’d stand in the doorway gazing down the street, looking for your little blonde head bobbing towards home. For weeks I wouldn’t leave the house because I was waiting for you to call…It has been over twenty years now, and my waiting has changed over those years, but it has not ended. I am still here, and still waiting for you to come home.

If you have any information about Michaela, please contact Inspector Robert Lampkin at the Hayward Police Department: (510) 293-7079,Lampkin@hayward-ca.gov, or Special Agent Marty Parker at the San Francisco FBI:(510)251-4169, maparker@leo.gov.