8 replies to this topic

[Jenn]

http://www.latestcrime.com/?pjcsx9Kv

Drone Plane Searches For Missing Woman
Fields Missing From Pahrump For More Than 3 Years

POSTED: 10:16 pm PDT October 29, 2009
UPDATED: 11:02 pm PDT October 29, 2009


Maureen Fields (Photo from The CharleyProject.org)

PAHRUMP, Nev. -- She hasn't been seen in three years, and now local deputies are going high-tech to find any clue, no matter how big or small, to locate Maureen Fields of Pahrump.

This year, a judge declared Fields legally dead.

Police said they received no help from Paul Fields, who is the only suspect in the killing of his wife, Maureen.

The 41-year-old was last seen on Valentine’ Day 2006. Two days later, her car was found abandoned near Death Valley, just 10 miles from her home.

“We’re all here for one reason. The sheriff’s office, they want more than anything to find Maureen. So, we’re going to give it our best shot and leave the results up to God," said Equusearch founder Tim Miller.

Now, the Nye Country Sheriff's Office has partnered with Equusearch, a volunteer search and rescue with state-of-the-art technology. A drone airplane is just one of their tools.

“This will easily take the place of 200 ground searchers. It doesn't get tired. It doesn't need water. It doesn't need food,” Miller said. “This drone takes thousands of pictures, and then investigators can zoom in on anything unusual … find what they’re looking for."

“We’ll be up all night looking at pictures, and there will be a tiny dot. We’ll blow up, get the GPS coordinates and go right to it,” Miller said.

The founder of Equusearch has a personal stake in every search.

“When I look back, I was blessed. At least I got to say goodbye, and I made a promise to God I would never leave a family alone because I knew what that lonely feeling was. My daughter was a runaway. We got absolutely zero help,” Miller said.

In the last nine years, Equusearch worked more than 1,100 cases, recovered the remains of 102 victims and brought 300 people safely home.

“We can brag about our success, but we’re only as good as our next search. And Maureen's our next search,” Miller said.

If the search is unsuccessful, Miller said they will keep trying. The search will also use NASA's satellite imaging during the time of Maureen's disappearance.

Anyone with information is asked to call the Nye County Sheriff's Office at 775-751-7000.

[Jenn]

Link to a lengthy article:

http://www.nj.com/ne...the_desert.html

A Mystery in the Nevada desert

By JoAnne Sills
October 19, 2008, 2:14PM

[Jenn]

Charley Project Profile for Maureen: http://www.charleypr...ds_maureen.html

     

[Lori Davis]

http://www.nj.com/ne...ssing_nj_w.html

Search begins for missing N.J. woman in Nevada desert
By Kathleen O'Brien/The Star-Ledger
October 31, 2009, 8:01PM

A chance meeting at the Seaside Heights boardwalk this summer has triggered a renewed search of the Nevada desert for the body of New Jersey native Maureen Fields.

A volunteer organization that looks for missing persons, Texas EquuSearch, is now in rural Pahrump, Nev., employing a drone airplane and other high-tech devices to scour the desert for signs of a grave.

Fields, who moved with her husband to Nevada in 2004, vanished two years later. Her car was found off the road to Death Valley with her keys, purse, wallet, and credit cards still in it. Police said they have only one suspect in her disappearance: her husband, Bloomfield native Paul Fields. But the local district attorney has said there is insufficient evidence to charge him, and Paul Fields maintains his innocence.

"It’s a needle in a haystack, sure," said EquuSearch founder Tim Miller. "But you know what? We’ve located people before when there have been big searches that failed." EquuSearch also has posted a $10,000 reward for information leading to the whereabouts of Maureen Fields, dead or alive. Until now, the only reward in the mystifying case was an unspecified amount offered by her husband in missing-person fliers he distributed in the area.

"The economy’s tough," Miller said. "Maybe someone will come forward."

Paul Fields, who agreed to let Miller’s group search his land, did not return phone messages requesting a comment.

His lawyer, Harry Kuehn, said Miller’s group asked Fields for permission to search his 1-acre property with a lawn-mower-type device equipped with ground-penetrating radar.

"I gave Paul my opinion — that no good deed goes unpunished — but it’s up to him to decide," Kuehn said. "The only danger of talking to volunteers is there’s no credo, there’s no code, there’s no Fourth Amendment."

Fields agreed to the search, provided the searchers do not enter his mobile home, said Detective David Boruchowitz of the Nye County Sheriff’s Office. The detective said Fields rebuffed Miller’s suggestion he take a lie detector test, and told them, "You’re wasting your time because she’s not out there."

The chance meeting that triggered the latest development in the case occurred in July, when Miller was in New Jersey to help search for Julia Madsen, an elderly woman who had left her Shore vacation house for a walk in Island Beach State Park. (Madsen remains missing.) While at the Shore, Miller dined every night at Grif’s Crab House, a landmark of the Seaside Heights boardwalk. That same week in Nevada, Paul Fields went to court to have his missing wife declared dead.

And here is where coincidence came into play: Grif’s is owned by John Grifo, who, along with his wife, had attended North Arlington High School with Maureen Fields.

Grifo showed The Star-Ledger’s account of the Nevada court ruling to Miller. Miller — whose organization receives far more requests for aid than it can possibly accommodate — immediately decided the Fields case deserved his group’s attention.

Miller had founded the volunteer search-and-rescue group in Dickinson, Texas, in 2000, after his family endured a 17-month wait to find the body of his missing teenage daughter, a crime victim. EquuSearch has helped locate over 100 sets of remains since then, along with several hundred missing persons. The unmanned surveillance plane was instrumental in seven of those finds.

In New Jersey, Maureen Fields’ family expressed gratitude for EquuSearch’s efforts. "I don’t know at this point whether it’s going to make a difference, but anything’s worth a shot," said Kathy Errico, Maureen’s sister, who lives in North Arlington. She said word of the search — coming 3½ years after Maureen’s disappearance — made her a bit weepy this week.

DAUNTING TERRAIN

Paul Fields has said he doesn’t know what happened to his 41-year-old wife but believes she may have run off — by herself or with someone else — and perhaps become the victim of foul play. He said he went to court in July to have her declared dead because that was the only way he could free up the couple’s jointly held assets.

Maureen Fields failed to show up for her job as a bank teller in Pahrump — an hour west of Las Vegas — in February 2006. When her car was found the day after she went missing, police initially believed it to be the site of a suicide: The seat was reclined, religious pamphlets were fanned out on the passenger seat, and a container for 30 Xanax pills was empty. They theorized she had taken the pills, then wandered into the desert to die.

As a result of that assumption, the initial search — an extensive one using dogs, horses, ATVs and a helicopter — focused on the area within three miles of the car.

This week’s search is looking miles farther — on the assumption her body was transported elsewhere.

The unmanned surveillance plane employed by EquuSearch flies at about 400 feet in the air, filming the terrain below it. The film is then fed into a computer software program that highlights any ground disturbance — an unexplained depression, for example. It can spot items as small as a Styrofoam cup.

However, the terrain around Pahrump is daunting: a rugged, choppy desert floor dotted with mesquite bushes.

Miller said that even if this week’s search is unsuccessful, it will not end his organization’s effort there. The group was successful in a Beaumont, Texas, case on its fifth visit and has been to Aruba eight times to search for student Natalee Halloway.

"We just don’t quit," he said. "We’re just getting started on this."

[Jenn]

http://www.nj.com/ne...2200.xml&coll=1

It's back to desert to search for woman

Sunday, November 01, 2009
Kathleen O'Brien STAR-LEDGER STAFF

A chance meeting at the Seaside Heights boardwalk this summer has triggered a renewed search of the Nevada desert for the body of New Jersey native Maureen Fields.

A volunteer organization that looks for missing persons, Texas EquuSearch, is now in rural Pahrump, Nev., employing a drone airplane and other high-tech devices to scour the desert for signs of a grave.

Fields, who moved with her husband to Nevada in 2004, vanished two years later. Her car was found off the road to Death Valley with her keys, purse, wallet, and credit cards still in it. Police said they have only one suspect in her disappearance: her husband, Bloomfield native Paul Fields. But the local district attorney has said there is insufficient evidence to charge him, and Paul Fields maintains his innocence.

"It's a needle in a haystack, sure," said EquuSearch founder Tim Miller. "But you know what? We've located people before when there have been big searches that failed." EquuSearch also has posted a $10,000 reward for information leading to the whereabouts of Maureen Fields, dead or alive. Until now, the only reward in the mystifying case was an unspecified amount offered by her husband in missing-person fliers he distributed in the area.

"The economy's tough," Miller said. "Maybe someone will come forward."

Paul Fields, who agreed to let Miller's group search his land, did not return phone messages requesting a comment.

His lawyer, Harry Kuehn, said Miller's group asked Fields for permission to search his 1-acre property with a lawn-mower-type device equipped with ground-penetrating radar.

"I gave Paul my opinion -- that no good deed goes unpunished -- but it's up to him to decide," Kuehn said. "The only danger of talking to volunteers is there's no credo, there's no code, there's no Fourth Amendment."

Fields agreed to the search, provided the searchers do not enter his mobile home, said Detective David Boruchowitz of the Nye County Sheriff's Office. The detective said Fields rebuffed Miller's suggestion he take a lie detector test, and told them, "You're wasting your time because she's not out there."...

[Jenn]

http://www.cnn.com/2...case/index.html

DNA twist to woman's desert disappearance

Story Highlights
* Maureen Fields of southern Nevada was 41 when she went missing in 2006
* Her abandoned car, with keys, purse and pill bottles, was found off a desert highway
* Presumed dead, there's been no sign of her body and no evidence pointing to a killer
* Unknown male's DNA, however, was recently discovered and may hold new clues

updated 5:49 p.m. EDT, Wed July 29, 2009
By Philip Rosenbaum

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Off a desert highway, about 15 miles from her home in the southern tip of Nevada, the mystery of Maureen Fields' disappearance began with the discovery of her abandoned car.

Investigators found the 41-year-old woman's 2004 green Hyundai just across the California border on February 16, 2006. It was one day after her husband, Paul Fields, said he last saw her.

Investigators say they discovered Fields' purse and wallet, the keys in the ignition and a fully reclined driver's seat.

There were slippers and eyeglasses beneath the gas pedal, religious pamphlets, a knotted pair of pantyhose as well as three bottles of prescription tranquilizers and pain killers. Video Watch an update on the case »

A small spot of her blood and vomit stained a blanket strewn across the ground beside the car. But Fields, who'd been working as a Wells Fargo bank teller in the small town of Pahrump, Nevada, has never been found.

"Just looking at the circumstances, it could appear staged" by whoever was responsible for her disappearance, said Detective Dave Boruchowitz, an investigator with the Nye County, Nevada, Sheriff's Office.

Reported inconsistencies in her 60-year-old husband's story, police said, paired with the fact that the couple was described as having a stormy relationship, made Paul Fields the initial suspect.

A lack of physical evidence, however, has made the case unprosecutable, said Detective Joe Close, also with the Nye County Sheriff's Office.

Paul Fields, who runs an auto business out of the double-wide trailer he and his wife shared, maintains his innocence. He's speculated that she faked her death before running off with another man. A message left at his home was not returned.

But his attorney, Harold Kuehn, said, "His contention is and my belief is that if she's truly dead, and the court says she is for civil purposes, then he didn't do it. ... What he told police is what he told me. Basically she left one day, never to be seen again."

In a new twist, Nye County District Attorney Bob Beckett says an unknown male's DNA was found on key items at the scene of the abandoned car.

"What we have to explore is the possibility of another suspect," Beckett said. "We have to find out who this male was and whose DNA was found at the scene. It's a lot more complicated than one may think it is."

The prosecutor said he's sure a jury would have reasonable doubt if presented a case with this question mark looming.

"We have a duty to make sure we're doing the right thing," he said. "There are too many unanswered questions at this time."

Maureen Fields has been declared dead, and the search for her body, and her killer, continues.

Her father, Jim Fitzgerald, has been doing some investigating of his own. The former detective with the Newark, New Jersey, Police Department -- and now a national director with the conservative John Birch Society -- has made repeated trips from his Randolph Township, New Jersey, home to speak with his daughter's former friends and co-workers. He's also consulted with a psychic in his search for clues.

No matter when her body is found, a serial numbered metal jaw implant -- which served to combat Fields' teeth grinding habit -- will stand as proof of her identity, Fitzgerald said.

Since murder carries no statute of limitations, time is on the law's side.
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"The case isn't dead to us," said Boruchowitz, one of the detectives still on the investigation. "We're going to continue to work it until we prove who did it."

Anyone with information about this case should call the Nye County Sheriff's Office at 775-751-7000.

[Lori Davis]

http://www.fox5vegas...eals-suspect-in

DNA reveals suspect in 2006 missing Nye woman case

Posted: Oct 17, 2012 2:52 PM EDT
Updated: Oct 17, 2012 4:22 PM EDT
Posted By Josh Mabry, Continuous News Manager


Keith Holmes (Photo from NCSO)


1965 Ford camper

PAHRUMP, NV (FOX5) - Police have identified an 81-year-old sex offender as a person of interest in the case of a Nye County woman who went missing in 2006.

Maureen Fields went missing on February 15, 2006. She never showed up for work at Wells Fargo bank, where she was employed, and has not been seen since.

Nye County Sheriff's Office detectives located her vehicle shortly after her disappearance in the desert just outside of Pahrump in Inyo County. At the scene was located an "unknown male" DNA, according to detectives.

In August, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Forensic Laboratory identified the male DNA profile found on pantyhose within the vehicle, and determined the DNA belonged to Keith Holmes, 81, from Pearblossom, California.

Keith Holmes is a registered sex offender from California, according to police.

Investigation revealed that Holmes began traveling to Pahrump around 2006 and usually travelled in his 1965 Ford camper.

NCSO detectives are asking anyone with information about Holmes, and anyone who may recognize his vehicle, to call 775-751-7000. Information can also be submitted confidentially to ncso_detectives@co.nye.nv.us.

[Lori Davis]

http://www.sfgate.co...ase-3962878.php

Tips flow in on 2006 Pahrump missing woman case

Published 12:38 a.m., Friday, October 19, 2012
 
PAHRUMP, Nev. (AP) — It's been nearly seven years since Maureen Fields disappeared the morning after Valentine's Day, but her husband, Paul Fields, says he's hardly forgotten.

He still lives at the Pahrump home the couple shared, and Maureen's green Hyundai — the car investigators found abandoned in the Inyo County, Calif., desert the day after she vanished — still sits behind the garage. It still bears customized license plates that read DGSRGR8, a tribute to his wife's love of animals.

"It's never dead in your mind. You're waiting for her to come up the driveway because you never know," Paul Fields, 63, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal (http://bit.ly/QXRfk4).

After years of scrutinizing Fields in his wife's disappearance, southern Nevada investigators announced they have a new lead in the case: A previously unidentified DNA sample found on pantyhose in Maureen Fields' car has been matched to an 81-year-old, incarcerated sex offender from Southern California.

The man, Keith Wayne Holmes, is in California's sex offender database for annoying or molesting a minor and assault with the intent to commit rape. He was arrested in Palmdale, Calif., in June 2011 for allegedly trying to entice a 12-year-old girl into his vehicle, and then following her in the car until her mother intervened.

Nye County Detective David Boruchowitz said he's already interviewed Holmes, who apparently began traveling to Pahrump around 2006 and usually rode in a 1965 Ford camper. But deputies want to talk with people who know him or recognize his vehicle.

Holmes, of Pearblossom, Calif., could not immediately be reached for comment due to his incarceration. Details of his conviction also were not immediately clear.

Nye County Sheriff Tony Demeo told the Review-Journal his office has never given up the search for Fields, who was last seen by Wells Fargo Bank co-workers on Valentine's Day 2006. Paul Fields said he last saw her leaving for work after an argument on Feb. 15, 2006, just 10 months after the couple had moved to Nevada from New Jersey.

For the past few anniversaries of her disappearance, the sheriff's office has put out press releases hoping to remind the public about the unsolved case. In this year's release, they noted Paul Fields refused to cooperate with the investigation since shortly after his wife went missing.

Fields said the investigation has taken its toll.

"The problem with this whole case is the cops. That's the whole problem. They just keep coming back to me, keep coming back to me," he said. "I don't know how I've actually survived it. I can honestly see why people kill themselves. It's been almost seven years now."

The new DNA link, which was actually matched in August but not publicized until this week, has brought an onslaught of tips into the sheriff's office. But detectives note they're still keeping tabs on all possibilities.

"This is a totally separate branch of the investigation," Boruchowitz said. "We have not cleared anyone in this case. We still consider it an open investigation."

[Lori Davis]

http://www.nj.com/ne...ath_valley.html

 

The lady vanishes: NJ native's cold case lead ends in Death Valley

 

By Kathleen O'Brien | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

on August 17, 2014 at 12:02 AM, updated August 17, 2014 at 9:17 PM

 

PAHRUMP, Nev. — For one brief moment, the Nevada detective thought he’d finally learn what happened to Maureen Fields years ago in the desert.

 

Leaning over an elderly sex offender who lay in a prison hospice bed in California, he asked the frail man if he knew Fields’ husband, Paul.

 

"I think so," the man answered.

 

Eager to hear what the man had to say, the detective continued: "Do you remember how you knew him?"

 

The man’s head lolled to one side and a vacant look came over his face. There was a long pause, as the fog of dementia rolled back in. "No," he rasped.

 

And with that, the brief spark of hope extinguished, just another entry on the cold case’s long list of lost chances.

 

When Maureen Fields’ empty green Hyundai was found in 2006, marooned in a stretch of the Mojave Desert near Death Valley, it looked like the New Jersey native had committed suicide. Her purse and wallet were still in the car, as were her car keys and an empty bottle of Xanax.

 

When her body wasn’t located in the surrounding desert — and the pill vial came back wiped clean of fingerprints — police in her hometown of Pahrump began to suspect foul play. Within days, that suspicion settled on her husband, Paul, also originally from New Jersey.

 

After all, in the months and weeks before, his wife talked of divorce, and had begged friends and family with this eerie request: "If I ever disappear, tell police Paul did it."

 

With neither a body nor a witness, however, the circumstantial case against him was never solid enough to prosecute.

 

Then, two years ago this month, authorities got a belated hit on skin DNA found on a knotted pair of pantyhose found in her car. It matched Keith Holmes, an 81-year-old registered sex offender already in custody in California, where he’d tried to lure a girl into his car.

 

Almost as telling as his DNA was what Nevada detectives found under the mattress when they searched his camper truck: A clipping from the Pahrump Valley Times written about the first anniversary of Maureen Fields’ disappearance.

 

Although Holmes admitted last year to crossing paths with Maureen Fields, there was insufficient evidence to charge him with killing her, said Detective David Boruchowitz of the Nye County Sheriff’s Office, who took over the cold case two years ago.

 

Holmes died this past April. Authorities are no closer to finding Maureen Fields’ body, and the barely lucid Holmes never named an accomplice.

 

"We got nothing from him — and it destroyed the case against Paul," said Boruchowitz of his attempts to question the sex offender. "Unfortunately, that was the last lead. It’s definitely a colder case."

 

Paul Fields, whom the Nye County Sheriff’s Office had initially identified as its only suspect, feels vindicated — and angry.

 

"Everything they do here is a joke," he said in a recent interview, complaining authorities ruined his reputation so he couldn’t go into the used car business as planned.

 

He has told police he doesn’t know Holmes and never met him. Police have no evidence to dispute his claim.

 

When word of the new DNA match got out, Fields says a woman at the local casino gave him a hug and said, ‘I knew you had nothing to do with it.’ "

 

Not so fast, say authorities.

 

"Paul gave this agency reason to believe he was guilty," said Boruchowitz. "And we have nothing to indicate Paul had nothing to do with it."

 

RELATIVES FRUSTRATED

 

The way the mystery has amassed more questions than answers leaves Maureen Fields’ relatives back in New Jersey weary and frustrated. Her father, sister and brother still live here. Her mother died a few years ago, shortly after giving her own DNA sample to police to help with identification should they ever find Maureen Fields’ body.

 

"We still have hopes we’ll find Maureen," said her 79-year-old father, Jim Fitzgerald of Randolph.

 

Authorities continue to believe Paul Fields knows more than he’s telling about his 41-year-old wife’s disappearance. There remain far too many

inconsistencies in his story, they say, including one they are only now revealing:

 

Fields says that on the last night his wife was seen alive by others — Valentine’s Day — he went out to dinner with a friend, brought home a meatball sub and rice pudding for his wife, then spent the rest of the evening in his double-wide mobile home watching television. He told police Maureen Fields left for her job as a bank teller as usual the next morning. (She never arrived.)

 

But police say a call he made from his cellphone to an acquaintance that night "pinged" off a cellphone tower that could have been accessed only if he were calling from the other side of town. Clearly he lied when he denied leaving his home that night, they say.

 

And his account has changed in another detail. A .22-caliber rifle was found in the back seat of the car, although police withheld that detail in their public pronouncements. At the time, they asked Fields if he were missing any weapons. Police said he looked in his closet and expressed surprise his rifle was

missing.

 

During a recent interview, however, he now says he had given the old rifle to Maureen Fields to take to a local gun shop for an estimate on how much it would cost to get it repaired.

 

"What!?" exclaimed Boruchowitz when asked about this explanation. "That’s a new one."

 

Theories about the case abound. But they are just that: theories.

 

Authorities speculate perhaps Fields convinced Holmes to help him transport his wife’s body and car to the portion of the desert where it got stuck about 150 feet off the road.

 

TWICE A VICTIM?

 

They even wonder if Maureen Fields was unlucky enough to have been the victim of two separate, sequential crimes — the first at the hands of an angry husband, the second at the hands of a transient sex offender.

 

Officials had other reasons to suspect Holmes. He had a long record of sex offenses, and Boruchowitz said he learned Holmes had a habit of picking up prostitutes, "beating the snot out of them," then abandoning them at the side of the road.

 

The police investigation placed Holmes in the Pahrump area around the time of Maureen Fields’ disappearance; he was a fixture at area campgrounds, where other campers remember a genial man who sang church music around the campfire.

 

He used to bring his wife with him on trips to Pahrump, but eventually began to leave her at home, said police.

 

His widow is still alive, living in a small town in the California portion of the Mojave. A pretty woman with an open, welcoming face, her expression changed when she heard her visitor was inquiring about "the woman who disappeared from Pahrump."

 

Her smile vanished, like sunlight suddenly blotted out by a passing cloud. "I don’t have nothin’ to do with that," she said, handing back a business card she’d been given. "Thank you," she added politely, but with a firmness that conveyed the phrase actually meant, "We’re done here."

 

Police don’t know what attracted Holmes to Pahrump. He had no "player’s card" at any of the local casinos. The staff at the town’s two legal brothels didn’t recognize his photo, and besides, say police, Holmes probably couldn’t afford that. (The basic rate at the Chicken Ranch would run at least a few hundred dollars, a manager confirmed.)

 

Boruchowitz got Holmes to admit he crossed paths with Maureen Fields. But Holmes, his health and memory clearly failing, claimed the two had consensual sex before he left her in Death Valley, still alive.

 

By this time, said Boruchowitz, the goal wasn’t to charge Holmes — he’d never live to see a trial — but to find Maureen Fields’ body so her family could at least hold a funeral.

 

The video recorded by police shows the young detective leaning within inches of the bedridden suspect, addressing him in the loud voice people use with the hard-of-hearing.

 

"I’ve looked through a lot of desert over the years to try to find her. Can you help me?" he asks the old man. "Once you’re dead, I have no way of finding her." Over and over he asks for any scrap of memory that could aid their search.

 

'I'M SORRY'

 

"I don’t know," says Holmes plaintively, his words difficult to understand because he’s missing his dentures. "I’m sorry. I’m sorry," he rasps.

 

When police returned the day after that questioning session, Holmes had deteriorated. He thought Boruchowitz was his son, and "confessed" to killing both his mother and his wife.

 

"He was so old and decrepit, I don’t know if he was lucid," said Boruchowitz. "It’s what you would expect from a hospice patient."

 

Plenty of cops hope they’ll get a death-bed confession; this one, however, was little more than tantalizing clues spliced with gibberish. "You could never use it in court," Boruchowitz said.

 

It wasn’t enough to charge Holmes with anything, said Tony DeMeo, a retired Jersey City cop who relocated to Nevada and became Nye County sheriff. "We had nothing. We had the DNA and nothing else."

 

As for the delay in the DNA match, Boruchowitz ascribed it to a clerical error.

 

Authorities had long known about the mystery DNA on Maureen Fields’ pantyhose, but they didn’t get any hit on it from the national data base, so they said they assumed it came from one of the many rescue workers who had pawed over the car in the two days it sat out in the desert. (In the language of law enforcement, that rendered the crime scene "contaminated.")

 

The plan was to get DNA samples from all those first responders in hopes of finding a match. If that went as planned, they would have eliminated one obvious source of reasonable doubt in any trial. When cooperation with neighboring Inyo County, Calif., lagged, Boruchowitz started compiling a list of names to receive warrants to speed the process.

 

That’s when he noticed the DNA lab report didn’t appear to have been entered in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS. (Whether that oversight originated in Pahrump or at the lab in Las Vegas was never determined.)

 

Once they entered it properly, they got a hit on Holmes.

 

Fields continues to believe there’s something fishy about the delay, and it was not the result of something so mundane as an error in paperwork.

 

He points out the delay meant police missed the chance to do a timely forensic examination of Holmes’ truck. If they’d been able to arrest him in 2006, that might have spared other victims he later encountered. And what if Holmes had kept Maureen Fields captive for months, or even years, because of the DNA delay?

 

Fields said his worst fear is that she’s a sex slave. "I would hope she didn’t get sold. She could be in Europe right now. Maybe this guy knew someone and hooked up and sold her," he says of Holmes. "You have no idea how many women are snatched and sold."

 

But he says he has no insights as to how or when the two crossed paths, and certainly no idea how his wife’s empty car ended up in the desert. "How she got out there, I have no frigging clue," he said.

 

Fields now lives quietly on Social Security, making a little extra money tinkering on cars. He’d like to move back to Florida, where the couple first lived after they left New Jersey. He isn’t dating anyone: "Ain’t nobody here I want to be with." Besides, he says, by his estimate 50 percent of the women in Pahrump are lesbians.

 

DENIES ANY KNOWLEDGE

 

He continues to deny he had anything to do with his wife’s disappearance, pointing out that if he’d wanted to get rid of his wife, he could have easily done it in Florida, when they lived near "Alligator Alley."

 

Three years after Maureen Fields vanished, before the customary waiting period of seven years, he went to court to have her declared dead. He bristles at the notion that made him look uncaring. He did it because he needed to get her name off some deeds so he could sell investment property, he said.

 

However, the court declaration of death knocks her out of the national missing persons database every year. That means Boruchowitz has to re-enter her name each time just in case her body shows up somewhere.

 

That puts Maureen Erin Fitzgerald Fields in a unique category in the nation’s criminal computer records, Boruchowitz said:

 

"She’s missing, and alive … and dead."