Originally published on Sunday, June 04, 2006 in the Local & State category.
Michelle Bullard Kidnapping
Missing
By Laura Arenschield
Staff writer
More than 150 days after Julie Michelle Bullard disappeared, her family is struggling with the thought that they might never know what happened to her.
Her parents close their eyes and, in excruciating detail, see her being kidnapped, being raped, being murdered. They hoped at the beginning they would find her and that the images would end. But as time goes on, they’re realizing they somehow have to live, that their lives must go on despite the terrible question hanging over their heads.
All the other issues — their frustration with investigators, their bitterness over the rumors, the pain they have dealt with for five months — are secondary.
Michelle, as her friends and family call her, was with three other people on the night of Jan. 1: Her sister’s best friend, that friend’s boyfriend and a man whom Michelle was dating casually.
By 11:30 p.m., the other three told investigators, all four were stretched out on couches around the living room and one had fallen asleep.
The door was unlocked.
The quiet shattered around midnight, when a man wearing a bandanna over his face burst into the house. He waved a gun, shouted at the group and threatened to kill them. He tied them up, separated them and robbed the house.
When he left, he took Michelle.
Will Weymouth, Michelle’s date, got free about 1:15 a.m. and called for help. Lee County sheriff’s deputies arrived around 1:30 a.m. At 5 a.m., deputies notified the family. ***
Julian Bullard, at 41, has a baby face with distant eyes, as if he is always straining to see his missing daughter.
His voice stays calm as he recounts the despair and anger that have poured into his life.
On that first morning, Julian stood outside Michelle’s house and tried to envision the worst that could come from his daughter’s disappearance.
Now he’s accepted that he may never know enough to do any more than imagine the worst.
“The pain that we’ve got to deal with is the not knowing,” he said at his house in Swann Station.
Julian Bullard has three children; Michelle was his first. He and her mother, Karen Riojas, had Michelle and her sister, Lydia, before they separated when Michelle was 6.
It was Julian Bullard, groggy and half-asleep, who got the call from investigators. He had planned to go hunting with friends that morning, and at first he thought the call was a joke from a hunting buddy.
“He said, ‘This is the sheriff’s department, the Lee County Sheriff’s Department, this is Detective Rosser,’” Julian Bullard said. “‘Your daughter’s been kidnapped.’”
The detective had to say it six times before Julian believed him. By that time, his wife was already dressed. ***
Julian Bullard first called Terzel Brown, his former mother-in-law. He couldn’t remember his ex-wife’s number, he said, so Brown had to call her. Something had happened to Michelle. They had to get to Broadway. Now.
Brown listened and her heart raced. Hours earlier, she later said, she had had her first nightmare in more than a decade.
In the dream, she was running for her life through the woods.
As Brown dialed her daughter, she tried to shake the dream and come up with words that would soften the blow. But when Riojas answered the phone, she blurted out the simple truth: “Somebody kidnapped Michelle.” ***
Riojas and Brown pulled into Broadway around 5:45 a.m. Jan. 2. They stopped at Michelle’s house, which detectives had already surrounded with yellow tape and flashing blue lights.
Riojas says she remembers a deputy saying Michelle was involved, not a victim.
“A detective told me that Michelle had robbed those people and that she was in cahoots with her own disappearance,” Riojas said. “And I said, ‘That is very out of character for my daughter.’”
Chief Deputy Kevin Bryant of the Lee County Sheriff’s Office said that he wasn’t aware of any deputy saying anything like that to the family. The Sheriff’s Office has treated Michelle’s disappearance as a kidnapping in its public statements since the beginning.
Michelle’s family describes her as outgoing, happy and sassy, a spitfire waitress who befriended everyone but who never backed down from a challenge.
Riojas has the same fire when she feels she — or one of her daughters — has been wronged.
She said she believes the idea that Michelle had staged her abduction fueled rumors that can’t be quelled.
People stop her in the grocery store to ask whether she’s heard from Michelle. Neighbors approach her in her yard in Sanford asking whether Michelle has come home yet.
Rumors circulated that detectives found drugs in the mobile home from which Michelle disappeared, and family members said they heard the abduction dismissed as “a drug deal gone bad.”
Riojas said she doesn’t believe her daughter used drugs — Michelle worked too much, spent too much time at home to get into trouble — but still, she says, it should make no difference.
“Our point is, it doesn’t matter if Michelle was a heroin addict, street-walking whore,” Riojas says. “She still deserves to be looked for and found.
“You have to realize my frustration with them. ‘What do you mean you don’t know? After a hundred days you don’t know? When are you gonna figure it out?’
“It’s like we think that Michelle would be found if she would just flop out somewhere, if she could just fall over out in the middle of the road, then they could find her.” ***
The first week Michelle was missing, Lee County investigators had tracking dogs brought in from Virginia. They gave the dogs some of Michelle’s belongings and set them loose from the house on Bradley Road. Time after time, the dogs led them to the end of Bradley Road and down Thomas-Kelly Road, which starts as a paved street and ends in a gravel driveway.
Thomas-Kelly Road is secluded and private, with a few houses protected by thick woods and briars.
On the Saturday after Michelle was kidnapped, after several sets of dogs had tracked Michelle’s scent down Thomas-Kelly Road, Brown and three other family members drove down it, just to see. As the pavement petered out and the trees narrowed the roadway, Brown looked up and saw a house on a small hill.
“It frightened us,” Brown said. “Because here we are on private property, don’t know the people, and I said, ‘Well, gosh, we better get out of here.’”
As they pulled into the house’s driveway to turn the car around, the people who live in the house came home.
The cars idled side-by-side while Michelle’s family explained their presence.
Tammy Jones, who lives in the house, said she was awakened by her dogs barking about 1:30 a.m. on the night that Michelle disappeared. She was just getting back to sleep when she heard what sounded like a single gunshot. Jones looked at the clock: 1:47 a.m.
“My heart went to my feet,” Brown said. “Because it met the time frame, where Michelle was tracked to and the gunshot.” ***
About 17 hours after Michelle was kidnapped, a deputy with the Harnett County Sheriff’s Office turned around on McArthur Road to stop a man whose wife had reported him missing.
The man, David Earl Wilson, lived outside Broadway in Harnett County. He had gone to a convenience store in the town about 10:30 p.m. Jan. 1 to buy paper towels and never came home.
When the deputy hit his lights Jan. 2, Wilson pulled over. But he took off when the deputy got out of his car. Wilson drove about 100 yards away, pulled over again and shot himself in the chest. He died.
The same day, officers looking at the Broadway convenience store surveillance tape discovered that Wilson had indeed been there. And that Michelle was right behind him in line. She disappeared a little more than an hour later.
As details about Wilson’s past emerged, his death became intertwined with Bullard’s case.
Wilson had spent nearly half his life in prison after being convicted of second-degree murder in 1975. He was released in 1998.
Investigators requested an autopsy on his body, in part to see whether her DNA was anywhere on him. But by the middle of March, the Harnett County Sheriff’s Office had ruled out Wilson as a suspect.
To some members of Michelle’s family, though, there are still questions to be answered about Wilson.
“The man had nine bruises and contusions on his body,” Riojas said. “Michelle was a fighter.” ***
Julian and Beth Bullard didn’t work for five weeks after Michelle disappeared. The first week they spent in interviews with detectives, watching police dogs search the woods, filtering tips that came in by the minute.
They had little time to think, to let the details sink in during the day. But their nights were haunted by thoughts of the worst.
Rain poured down the night of Jan. 2. Michelle’s shoes were left behind when she disappeared.
“Was she cold? Was she hungry?” Beth Bullard remembers thinking. “We wondered if her feet were cold or was she out there crying for us to come find her.”
Friends called offering help, reporters called requesting interviews, groups called suggesting searches, but the Bullards didn’t know how to respond.
“It would be nice if someone could write a book on what to do when this happens,” Beth Bullard said. “Because we were a mess. We didn’t know what was going on, we didn’t know what to say, what we could say or what we couldn’t say.”
She and Michelle’s father hiked through woods around Broadway and along the Cape Fear River together, chasing rumors.
Eventually, the Bullards and Riojas connected with the North Carolina Missing You Foundation, a volunteer group that helps look for people.
The organization coordinated searches around Broadway and into Harnett County. Leads came in and searchers went out. Every day they came back with nothing.
Then, on Jan. 20, 2 weeks after Michelle disappeared, a man working on a backhoe along a road in southeast Cumberland County found a wallet along the road.
It had Michelle’s identification inside. ***
Michelle’s family and friends, volunteer searchers and detectives flooded the area. They focused on Bogie Island Road, where Michelle’s wallet was found, and combed the woods nearby.
Over the next week, they found more clues: paycheck stubs with Michelle’s name on them, wallets that belonged to the other people in the house the night of the kidnapping, Michelle’s purse.
Riojas says she keeps asking detectives whether those clues have led anywhere. Could they lift fingerprints from anything?
She says every time she asks, detectives say they don’t know. And she grows more frustrated.
Nothing has been found in the Bogie Island Road area for months. ***
The N.C. Missing You Foundation continues to coordinate searches. Volunteers have covered more than 700 square miles in five counties, including the banks of the Cape Fear River from Elizabethtown in Bladen County to the Avents Ferry Bridge in Chatham County.
Jackie Cox, the foundation’s director, said earlier this month that initial searches focused on roads and waterways.
Because they haven’t found Michelle, she said, searchers plan to go back and start combing the woods off the roadways. ***
At the beginning of May, 10 days before Michelle’s 24th birthday, a man and his dog went for a nighttime walk along Watson Lake, on the edges of the Broadway town limits. As they walked, the dog started barking, tugging the leash and pulling the man toward the lake.
The man peered into the water and saw a pile of clothes. He called the Broadway Police Department.
The next morning, investigators were on hand with divers. They had notified Michelle’s family. Julian Bullard went down to the lake, but Riojas said she couldn’t do it.
Midway through the morning, a diver groping along the bottom of the lake came to the surface and reported feeling something hard and round, kind of like a skull, lodged in the mud at the floor.
A television station aired the story and Michelle’s family watched with apprehension.
“I felt like, I want it to be her but I don’t,” Beth Bullard said. “Because there’s still hope that maybe she’s somewhere alive and somebody’s just holding her ... but then again, how long do you have to wait before they do find her?”
The diver went back down, pulled the object free and brought it to the surface for inspection.
The “skull” was just a vase someone had tossed into the lake. Another lead gone. ***
Unless Michelle’s body is found, unless they see the evidence firsthand, her family holds onto the hope that she is still alive.
But the not knowing keeps them constantly on edge.
“About every time the phone rings, it jogs you,” Julian Bullard said. “Like maybe this could be it.”
So Michelle’s family waits, believing that somewhere, someone knows the truth. And they hope against hope that person will come forward and give them some peace.
On May 13, Michelle’s 24th birthday, her family and a small group of friends and volunteers gathered on Bradley Road, a few doors down from where she was kidnapped, and prayed.
Some held hot-air balloons tagged with fliers about Michelle. Julian gave a short speech while Michelle’s sister and grandmother stood a few yards away, holding each other and brushing away tears.
Then they broke into small groups and walked into the woods along Bradley Road, continuing the search. ***
Searching For Michelle Bullard
Divers have scoured three lakes and searchers have combed more than 700 square miles searching for Michelle Bullard. Their hunt has focused around the town of Broadway, where Bullard was kidnapped Jan. 2, and in southeast Cumberland County, where a man working on a backhoe found her wallet Jan. 20. Searchers have scouted the Cape Fear River from the Avents Ferry bridge in Chatham County to Elizabethtown, said Jackie Cox, director of the North Carolina Missing You Foundation, which has organized many of the searches.
(Maps, one of Broadway, one of Cedar Creek)
In Broadway:
A house at 6504 Bradley Road, where Michelle was kidnapped on Jan. 2
Watson Lake. Divers inspected part of the lake earlier this month, after a man walking his dog found clothes in the water. Investigators thought they might find Bullard, but found nothing.
The Pantry, a convenience store at 200 N. Main St. in Broadway and the last public place Bullard was seen. A surveillance video camera in the store showed that she was in the store at the same time as David Wilson, a Harnett County man who killed himself the day after she disappeared. The tape did not show the two interacting.
McArthur Road in Harnett County just outside Broadway, where Wilson shot himself in his car.
In Cedar Creek:
Jan. 20: A man working on his backhoe finds Bullard’s wallet on Bogie Island Road.
Jan. 22: Searchers find more clues on Stedman-Cedar Creek Road: The wallet of a woman who was in the house the night Bullard was kidnapped, two check stubs with Bullard’s name on them, a pair of women’s socks, a ski mask and a woman’s purse.
Jan. 23: Investigators find a purse, T-shirt and pair of boxer shorts along Bogie Island Road but say they cannot link the items to Bullard.
Sources: North Carolina Missing You Foundation; staff research information compiled by staff writer Laura Arenschield
Staff writer Laura Arenschield can be reached at arenschieldl@fayettevillenc.com  or at 486-3572.