Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writer
March 21, 2004

Bridget Pendell could be "The Crier," a willowy woman who wanders the darkest streets of San Francisco inexplicably weeping. She could be a wasted-thin drug addict with tribal face tattoos who is turning tricks in the Mission.

Or she could be dead.

Her sister, Jackie Horne, wants to know, and for the past seven years, she has been searching for Pendell all over the city.

Horne's pursuit of Pendell, whose 31st birthday is in June, shows just how easy it is for the hard-core homeless to utterly disappear. Wherever junkies hang out or sell their bodies for sex, from the strip joints of North Beach to the roughest alleys of the Mission District -- that's where Horne hands out her 8 1/2-by-11-inch "missing person" posters. She scans the haggard faces, looking vainly for a grown-up version of the girl she played Barbie doll games with, then asks in a quiet, urgent voice: "Can you please help me? Have you seen my sister?"

Judging by the answers Horne gets, her sister -- a former Barbizon modeling student who worked as a nurse before dissolving into drugs and prostitution -- seems to be everywhere and nowhere all at once, like some phantom of the city's homeless netherworld.

"I saw her a couple days ago, I swear," a prostitute named Crystal said as she brushed on heavy mascara, getting ready to turn tricks on Mission Street. "She works this street. Shoots up heavy."

"She's named Butterfly now, and she just left to work at her nice office job," Pirate, a portly punk rocker, said on Haight Street.

"She's probably dead," said Joe, a barker at the Roaring '20s strip club on Broadway.

Nobody knows how many chronically homeless people are missing. They lose touch with family and friends -- who are left to agonize and wonder about what went wrong -- and eventually fold into the stream of panhandlers and sidewalk sleepers. With no ID, no welfare checks, no address, they become impossible to trace.

Even when they die.

More than 17,000 women like Pendell are reported missing in California every year, according to Department of Justice statistics, and no records are kept about which of those might be homeless. About 300 are found dead, and although most of the rest are located one way or another, the whereabouts of about 100 remain unknown at the end of every year -- and those are just the ones who are reported.

Morgues throughout California house the remains of more than 2,000 people, dating back 45 years, who never have been identified. No central database for them exists, said Hallye Jordan of the state Department of Justice.

San Francisco authorities are sure that if Pendell is dead, she hasn't shown up in their morgue. Same with Santa Cruz, the other city where Pendell was last seen.

"We have about two bodies a year we can't identify, and we cremate another 160 or so every year because we ID them but can't find any relatives to come claim them," said Herb Hawley, administrator at the San Francisco medical examiner's office. About 150 homeless people die in the city annually, but Hawley said Pendell probably wasn't one of them because "we've only had two Jane Does since she went missing, and one of them is 60, and the other looks absolutely nothing like this girl."

That doesn't mean she didn't die in some other county. Or some other state. There's no way of knowing, he said.

"It's like she just vanished off the face of the Earth," said Horne, 27, as she walked up and down the line of homeless men and women waiting for lunch at Glide Memorial Church one recent day. "These guys in line, all those other homeless people around downtown -- they have relatives, too, and hopefully some of those relatives know where they are. But Bridget? Nothing."

While in high school in Plattsburgh, N.Y., she studied at a nearby Barbizon modeling school for a year before the $80-a-week tuition became too expensive and she had to drop out, said her mother, Marie Pendell of Corinth, N.Y. After graduating in 1992, she earned her registered nursing degree at a community college. A year later, she married and had a child.

Then the bottom fell out.

She took up with "a bad crowd," her mother said, and began following the Grateful Dead all over the country. She got into heroin and cocaine, split from her husband and wandered between Kansas, Florida, New York and the Bay Area -- sometimes with her daughter, Sasha, sometimes not. By 1996, she was a hooker sleeping in the streets or at ratty hotels in Santa Cruz and San Francisco, turning tricks to get her next bag of heroin, hit of crack or tab of LSD. Her sister came out to the West Coast and took Sasha to live with her grandmother.

Pendell -- who sometimes used her former married name of Williamson -- went back to New York in late 1996 to stay with her mother and to try a two- month drug rehabilitation program. That apparently was her last stab at getting clean. "Above average in intelligence," read the doctor's report from the Seton Health System rehab center. She left the program two days early and went back to San Francisco.

The next April, she was busted for soliciting johns in the Mission -- her fourth bust in two years. As in the earlier arrests, she never showed for her court hearing.

The April arrest was the last record anyone has of her. Pendell stopped calling her family, whom she always contacted at least once a month, even in her worst times.

When leaving for San Francisco that last time in 1996, she left a bag at her mother's doorstep. In it were a couple of photo albums and a book of poems Pendell had penned, with "Limitless Yet Bound" written on the face page.

The poems trace a descent into a hell that her family says they can only guess at.

Kneel next to me, at the bedside of madness, reads one page.

Several explore the agony of her addiction:

I'm tainted,

forever,

due to you

and your evils

Vomit -- on the floor

At the thought of your

Rush

Through my veins.

As a medic in the Air Force in the early 1990s, and now as a social worker counseling prisoners in nearby Albany, Horne has heard more than her share of lies, anguish and promising leads before. But that was for work.

The best luck Horne had in her search for her sister was getting the devoted attention of Debbie Hartman, an investigator with the public administrator's division of the Santa Cruz district attorney's office, as well as that city's Police Department.

Horne had looked just occasionally for the first few years, given up in despair, tried again, then backed off again -- which is not unusual for families of chronically homeless people, experts say. It's an agonizing cycle of starting and stopping the search, almost hoping the addicted, alcoholic or mentally ill homeless person stays away so he or she won't bring trouble home.

But in the past couple of years, as her son, Hunter, got older (he is 6 now), Horne began to grieve for her sister all the more. She talked it over with her husband, James, and decided to renew her efforts. It was back to making phone calls, posting Web notices and coming to San Francisco to talk with homeless people and other street characters -- most of whom say they are afraid to give their full names in a missing-person case.

"Bridget has never seen Hunter, this whole happy life I have now, and that is a terrible loss," she said. "She doesn't even know our father died in 2000, of a stroke.

"I guess my search for her now is also fueled by a selfish desire to ask for her forgiveness -- forgiveness for maybe being too uptight, for not understanding enough of the hurt and rejection she must have felt out there in the world. I know the more we showed our disappointment, the worse she must have felt.

"If I ever see her again, I will tell her I won't judge her. I will just tell her Peach (Horne's family nickname) loves her."

The mystery is hardest on Pendell's 11-year-old daughter, Sasha, who lives with her grandmother in New York.

"I mostly remember that my mom had black hair and she was pretty," Sasha said by phone from her home. "I would really like to see her now."

Sasha likes to paint pastel landscapes and act in the school drama club. She maintains an "A" grade average. She knows little of the life her mother led.

"I know she's on drugs, and my aunt tells me that's really hard," the girl said, and she began to cry. After a moment, she went on.

"Maybe she feels bad, and maybe she doesn't want to come back into my life while she's on drugs. But if I could see her, I would tell her I wasn't mad."

Since April 2003, investigator Hartman has traced hundreds of leads all over the nation. If they led anywhere, it was back to San Francisco and Santa Cruz, where Pendell spent most of her time. Then the leads petered out.

"It's amazing how under-the-radar she is," Hartman said as she walked alongside Horne through the Tenderloin. "I know a lot of people might not be sympathetic to Bridget because of her prostitution and her drug use, but that doesn't mean you don't look for her. She had a life. She has people who care about her."

On a hunch, Horne wrote last year to Jack Bokin, the "Capp Street Rapist" convicted of attacking prostitutes near 16th and Mission Streets -- the strip where Pendell street-walked -- and trying to kill one with a hammer. Bokin's crime spree ended in 1997, several months after Pendell went missing, and investigators told Horne they believe Bokin may have killed prostitutes who never were identified.

So Horne asked Bokin whether he knew what happened to her sister. He denied knowing her. "You should have got help for your sister sooner; heroin is a dead end," Bokin wrote back. "So are the Grateful Dead."

Assistant District Attorney Elliot Beckleman, who prosecuted Bokin, told Horne that Bokin may know more than he is saying.

"Jack is always a prime suspect. He did his crimes for a number of years, and like many sexual predators, he became very good at what he did," said Beckleman. "He spotted the most vulnerable, and that kid Bridget was pretty vulnerable. She'd be his kind of victim."

Descriptions of The Crier also somewhat matched that of a picture in The Chronicle's archives, an outtake from its "Shame of the City" homelessness series this winter -- and Horne thinks the picture resembles her sister. The woman looks weathered, weary and older, and she was photographed in September at the Transbay Terminal.

"The Crier is really thin, like she doesn't eat much. She walks around slowly, weeping all the time, and we never know why she's crying," said Ann, part of a colony sleeping on the Transbay Terminal sidewalk. "She's terribly sad about something." Ann and her friends said they hadn't seen The Crier in a month. Though they said they would pass Horne's poster around, Ann added one caution.

"She might not want to be found, you know," Ann said. "Out here on the street, you just never know."

Hartman and Horne sent dental samples to crime labs in Los Angeles and Sacramento this year to compare with those of unidentified corpses, and this month, they intend to send DNA samples to the state Department of Justice. The samples -- cheek swabs from Pendell's mother -- will be on a waiting list for about a year to be matched against more than 200 DNA samples of unidentified remains on file.

"I hate to say it, but I think this gal's probably deceased," said Santa Cruz Sheriff's Sgt. Fred Plagemon. "There are so many people out there like her, at risk, lost -- and so many families get so worn out by all the troubles that they just give up looking.

"You never find a lot of them. Just think of all the mountains and reservoirs out there where remains can be dumped. It can be pretty awful."

The first stop was a low-rent hotel on Ellis Street, the last address Horne had of her sister. Horne went there in 1996 to bring Sasha back to live with her grandmother.

"We don't have anything that looks like this back home where I live," Horne said, gazing at the peeling beige and black paint on the outside of the unnamed hotel, which is jammed into one of the seedier blocks of the Tenderloin. "It's so sad out here, so many people living on the street."

Nobody inside remembered her sister. And nobody answered Horne's knock on the battered door -- with two doorknobs and four locks -- of the room her sister lived in. Horne shoved "missing person" flyers under several doors and into every mailbox.

In Haight-Ashbury, she ran into the only person she met on this trip who had actually known her sister, a Grateful Dead drifter named "Cosmic Charlie" Aldo. She recognized him from the Ellis Street hotel, back in 1996 -- he was rooming with Pendell then.

"Haven't seen her since 1999, '98," said Aldo, leaning against a lamppost in front of the Haight Street Tobacco shop, which had a Jerry Garcia doll propped in its window. "We saw a lot of great shows over the years, but the last time I saw her was at 16th and Mission Street, where the prostitutes work. " He said he'd check with other Deadheads, but as Horne walked away, he shook his head sadly.

"I'd have seen her, if she was still around," he said. "But maybe we can find out where she went."

Finding someone like Cosmic Charlie gives Horne the sort of hope she needs to keep going. Then there are the other moments -- like the one, in February, when she went into Glide Memorial Church to put up her poster.

The front-desk clerk barely looked up as he pointed at a bulletin board a few feet away. "You can put it up there," he said, and as Horne reached up with a poster, she saw the board for the first time.

She burst into tears.

The board was plastered with dozens of other notices like the one in her hand, each bearing a different name -- Jennifer, Kristi, Marsha, Bob. None had been gone as long as her sister.

"So many, so many," Horne gasped, then shook her head to clear it. She tacked up her poster and walked out the door, fast. A few feet down the sidewalk, she stopped to stare at the hundred hungry-looking men and women waiting alongside the church wall for the daily charity lunch.

"I don't know how anyone can live like this, and I cannot imagine Bridget living like this," Horne whispered. "I just want to touch her, to tell her I love her, to tell her that her life means something.".The Santa Cruz Sheriff's Office asks anyone with information about Bridget Pendell's whereabouts to call the Sheriff's Office at (831) 454-3532. The Santa Cruz Sheriff's Office asks anyone with information about Bridget Pendell's whereabouts to call the Sheriff's Office at (831) 454-3532.

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle