In this week's edition of "The Missing," we revisit the mysterious disappearance of Donna Jou, a 19-year-old resident of Rancho Santa Margarita, California, who went missing on June 23, 2007.
"We as a family are devastated, and our life has been torn apart," Donna's father, Reza Jou, said in a telephone interview with Investigation Discovery. "Every single day we hope and pray that we will find her."
On the day of her disappearance, Donna told her mother, Nili Jou, that one of her friend's boyfriends was going to pick her up and take her to a house party in Santa Monica. At about 5:30 p.m., a man on a motorcycle pulled up in front of the house, and Donna ran out to meet him. Moments later, she was on the back of his bike, and they were on their way down the street.
"When he came here, he had a helmet on, and nobody saw his face," Reza said, adding, "Donna didn't even see his face."
Later that night, Donna called a friend in San Diego and said that she was calling from a bathroom inside the house where the man had taken her.
"She said her friend was not there and that the guy who had picked her up was really freaking her out," Reza said. "She said he was acting odd and would not get the hint that she was not interested in him. She did not ask for help, so I think she thought that the man would take her back home."
Sometime after midnight, Nili received a text message from her daughter that read, "I WILL BE HOME SOON. LOVE YOU MOMMY." Nili found the message odd because it was written in all caps, and "Mommy" was not a term her daughter would typically use. The next day, at about 6:08 p.m., Nili received a second text message from her daughter, which read, "I am in San Diego. I love you Mommy. I am coming home." That would prove to be the last contact ever made from Donna's phone. The following day, her parents called the police and reported their daughter missing.
"When the police came, they took the laptop that Donna had been using to the crime lab," Reza said. "When they looked at it, they discovered that Donna had been corresponding with a man she [had] met on Craigslist [an Internet community for posting classified advertisements]."
According to Reza, Donna, an honor student at San Diego State University, had offered tutoring services on the Web site, and the man had contacted her in response to her advertisement.
"We really don't know how my daughter was convinced to meet him," Reza said. "The police found photos on the computer that the man had sent her, in which he looked to be about 20 years old."
Investigators traced the Internet messages to 35-year-old John Steven Burgess, aka Sinjin Stevens, a sex offender who had been convicted of performing a lewd act against a child, in 2003, and of three counts of battery, in 2002.
On July 5, investigators traced Burgess to a West Los Angeles area house that he had been renting with five other people. Unfortunately, he was nowhere to be found. When questioned, Burgess's roommates told police that they had last seen him earlier that day loading his truck with cardboard boxes. When asked if they had seen Donna, all of the roommates reported that she had been at the house on the night of June 23, but none of them had seen her since. The following day, police issued an APB on Burgess's black motorcycle and his 1998 blue Ford Ranger pickup, with California license tag SIN-JIN-1.
While police actively searched for Burgess and his truck, a man called police on July 8 and reported finding a plastic tool box in the weeds, approximately a mile and a half from Burgess's apartment. Inside, police found a black motorcycle helmet, rubber gloves, rope, a scrub brush and the SIN-JIN-1 vanity plate. The following day, police executed a search warrant on Burgess's apartment and confiscated several knives.
