The Last Time We Saw Her. Robert Falcon Scott

reached 1.5 million cable viewers in Oregon, Northern California, and Southern Washington. A website on the Internet about Brooke’s case had 120,000 hits in the previous week.

      The newest areas searched were along the southern border of Highway 20/34, east of the Willamette River, and on some private property near Payne Road and Highway 99W. The reason that property was being searched was because of a tip phoned in by a psychic. Like many of the other tips by psychics, however, this one also came up empty, as far as anything relating to Brooke Wilberger.

      Despite their optimism, the Wilberger family knew that the search effort could not go on forever. On Friday, June 4, the Wilbergers asked for one last major search over the upcoming weekend. They asked landlords to search vacant buildings, vacant lots, and backyards. Greg Wilberger declared, “We really need your help. Then we can be at peace. We’ll let the Lord take care of it after that.”

      Even the Wilberger family was trying to get back to some degree of normality by that point. Cammy had spent the previous day correcting her third-grade students’ papers and writing report cards. It was one small attempt to bring some ordinary structure to her life. She said that she missed her students and they missed her. One little boy in her class told her that he’d been a good boy while she was away.

      In this last rush of searching, two hundred tips came in over a twenty-four-hour period. And it was learned by the media that one “person of interest” had gone beyond that designation. His name was Sung Koo Kim, a thirty-year-old unemployed micro-biologist who lived in Tigard, Oregon. Kim had recently been arrested for stealing female students’ panties at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon. Additionally, he had also been arrested for stealing female students’ panties from Sackett Hall on the Oregon State University campus in Corvallis. When Kim was arrested, officers seized more than one thousand items of evidence. What they found absolutely stunned them and they began to wonder if at last they had found the person who had abducted Brooke Wilberger.

      CHAPTER 6

      KIM

      The incident with Sung Koo Kim came to light when a student named Beth observed an Asian male entering Macy Residence Hall on George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon, on April 22, 2004. Macy Hall was a female-only dormitory on campus. Beth saw the Asian male, who appeared to be about thirty years old, walk up to the third floor of the dormitory and then down the hall. Beth later told police, “The man was acting suspiciously and would not look at anyone in the face.”

      Detective Todd Baltzell, of the Newberg Police Department (NPD), contacted Beth and she told him of her concerns. Around the same time Baltzell contacted other female students who attended George Fox University. One of these was a young woman named Lacey, and she, too, spoke of an Asian man who had been at Macy Hall on April 18, at about 5:00 P.M. Lacey had gone to the laundry room in the dorm and saw an Asian man kneeling down looking into a dryer. When he caught a glimpse of her, he immediately stood up and left the building in a hurry. Lacey didn’t notify police about this until two other female students reported some of their undergarments missing.

      Because of the missing undergarments and reports by Beth and Lacey about a strange Asian man who seemed to be prowling around the women’s dormitory, Detective Baltzell went to George Fox University to talk in person with these women. He eventually contacted Beth and Lacey, along with female students named Jenna, Whitney, Stephanie, and Meredith. Whitney told him that on April 18, at around five o’clock, she noticed that her track uniform and two bras were missing from her laundry load. She checked the laundry basket and the washer and dryer, to no avail. Whitney was sure that she had not misplaced them somewhere, and the last time she saw them they had been in the dryer. She said that the top of her track uniform was a blue spandex top with GFU in gold lettering on the front. The bottom part of the uniform was blue spandex with a white stripe down the side. She was missing two new bras, size 32A, with a bow in the middle.

      Jenna told Baltzell that she was sure she was missing a Victoria’s Secret black strapless bra, size 36C. She was also missing a pair of hot pink Victoria’s Secret panties and a beige pair of Victoria’s Secret panties. She was confident that she hadn’t misplaced these items.

      Stephanie reported that three weeks previously she had noticed that she was missing three brand-new white bras, size 36B, a black spandex thong-type pair of panties, and a beige spandex thong-type pair.

      Beth told the detective that on April 22 she’d spied the Asian man walk into Macy Hall behind a group of female students. She was pretty sure the man was not a student at the university, so she followed him. She walked behind him up a stairway and then all the way down a hallway. He was acting so strangely that she decided to call security from the room of a fellow student she knew.

      Security requested that Beth keep watching the man to see where he was going. She went out the door of the hallway and down some stairs, but she didn’t see him anymore. She stood outside the building for about a minute and a half, when suddenly the man came into view. She called out to him, “Hey!” But he just grunted and walked right past her.

      Now Beth was very alarmed. She went up to a dorm window of a student named Meredith and rapped on the window. When Meredith went to investigate what was happening, Beth told her about the strange man, and they both were soon on his tail. Beth and Meredith followed him through campus and out to a parking lot, where the Asian man got into a black Honda Accord and then drove away. Beth memorized the letters on the license plate, while Meredith memorized the numbers. Then they repeated to themselves what they recalled. It was after this incident that Beth contacted the Newberg PD.

      Detective Baltzell had the various young women walk him through every location where they had spotted the strange man. Baltzell asked Beth if the man had asked her for directions. She said no. Baltzell asked if he seemed to be lost. Once again she said no, and added that he seemed to be “walking purposefully.”

      Lacey took Detective Baltzell to the laundry room in the dorm and showed him the dryer where the man had been kneeling down, looking inside the dryer. When she first spotted him, she thought he might have been a repairman. His hands were actually in the dryer. She passed him and threw something into a garbage can nearby. When she did so, he immediately got up and hurried out of the laundry room.

      It was this strange behavior that made her think that he wasn’t a repairman, after all. She followed him down the hall to see what he would do next. He left the hall in a hurry. Her description of him was an Asian man about five-ten, 175 pounds, clean shaven, no glasses, and no noticeable scars or tattoos.

      After interviewing these students, Detective Baltzell got the identity of the owner of a Honda with the license plate that Beth and Meredith had memorized. It turned out to be Sung Koo Kim, born on April 17, 1974, and now living in Tigard, Oregon. Baltzell requested a photo of Kim from the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). Baltzell later arranged this photo with five others in what he termed a “throw down.” (More commonly known as a photo lineup.)

      On May 7, 2004, Detective Baltzell showed the photo lineup to Beth. Within five seconds of looking at the photos, Beth picked out the photo of Sung Koo Kim as the man she had seen on campus. On May 11, Baltzell showed Lacey the photo lineup. She wasn’t certain if the man she had seen was in the photo array.

      Because of what he’d learned from these women, especially Beth picking out Sung Koo Kim from the photos, Detective Baltzell contacted Detective Hocken, of the Tigard Police Department (TPD). Hocken looked through records and discovered a report from the Portland Police Department (PPD) about Sung Koo Kim. Kim was a suspect in a daytime burglary on the Lewis & Clark College campus. Security found him there with some female undergarments, and they escorted him off campus. He wasn’t arrested at the time, merely told to leave the area.

      On May 12, 2004, Detective Baltzell drove to Kim’s address and noticed a black Honda in the driveway—with the license plate that Beth and Meredith had memorized. Baltzell also wrote down pertinent information about the house in preparation for requesting a search warrant. When he made the request, he noted that he had been a full-time officer with the TPD for nine years, and had over eleven hundred hours of training. His current duties included narcotics and sex abuse crimes. In that regard he