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Our card this week is Charles and Jennifer Cha, the Jack of Diamonds from Nevada. The kids could see their apartment complex from their school bus stop. That's how close to their building it was. Such a small distance for something to go so terribly wrong. But a couple of hundred feet is all it took for someone to stop the Cha siblings from making it home safely. And that person has gone undetected did for more than 34 years. But present day detectives say that that person's days are now numbered, especially as new technology could soon expose this nameless predator. I'm Ashley flowers, and this is The Deck. When retired Reno Homicide Detective Alan Fox looks back on any cold case, he's always trying to decipher what was different about that day. Was there a change in the victim's schedule? Was there something new going on in their life? As it turns out, on October 18th, 1989, a lot was different for eight-year-old Charles and six-year-old Jennifer. Their mom was on an international trip, so grandma was in charge of babysitting. Not to mention, a nearly seven magnitude earthquake had just ravaged their neighbors across the state line in California the evening before, and it had been all over the news.

So when late afternoon rolled around that Wednesday, the kid's grandma wasn't immediately alarmed when the two didn't show up promptly after school. After all, their typical routine had been turned upside down the past two weeks while their mom, Anne, was away visiting family in Taiwan. Even though they were young, the brother and sister could, for better or worse, already be trusted. They were labeled as good kids, rule followers. The insinuation being that since third-grader Charles already wore a watch at his age, which he was known to check methodically, he'd make sure he and his sister were always where they were supposed to be at the exactly right time. But at the end of the day, they were kids, so maybe they just got a little sidetracked. The two were supposed to ride the bus home after school got out at Anderson Elementary around 3:00 in the afternoon, as they usually did. The bus would stop at the corner right near their apartment complex, and they would hop off along with the other neighborhood kids and walk the short distance home. Sometimes the brother and sister would take a slightly longer way in, which was maybe like a few hundred feet further.

But either way, they would typically get dropped off at around 3:30, quarter to four, arrive inside their apartment safe and sound within minutes. Now, while Anne was gone, her boyfriend had been stopping by every so often just to check in on things. When he dropped by around 5:00 that evening, he was expecting to find Charles and Jennifer there at the apartment, maybe working on homework or even practicing the violin. Although Charles didn't love that particular extracurricular activity, he preferred Taekwondo. But on this day, instead of finding the kids, Anne's boyfriend just found their grandmother who only spoke Mandarin, seemingly trying to communicate something important. Here's retired Detective Fox, who is working the case today, but he's been in the know since it happened more than 34 years ago.

The first thing she said to the boyfriend was, No, Weiwei. Weiwei is Charles's Taiwanese name. So he began to understand she meant the kids haven't showed up.

So that's when Anne's boyfriend began the search in earnest, looking near the bus stop and around the large apartment complex. Back in those days, much of the surrounding area was made up of pasture, so there were plenty of places to check out. With no sign of the kids anywhere, he contacted their school to see if maybe there had been an after-school activity that grandma had forgotten about, but there wasn't. The school confirmed that the siblings had been there the entire day and that their bus had already left on time a few hours ago, so the kids should be home by now if they were on that bus. The boyfriend then checked with the employees over at the family's restaurant, the Imperial Palace. Maybe for some reason the kids went over there after school. But no one at the restaurant remembered seeing the kids at all that day. So after spending nearly three hours searching himself, Anne's boyfriend didn't know what else to do. He couldn't contact Anne because at the time everyone realized that things were wrong, she was somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, actually on a flight back home. So he did the only thing left, and he called the Reno police to report the two children missing.

They responded within minutes, getting there just before 08:00 PM, and they started doing some of the same things Anne's boyfriend already had. But but with more authority and in greater numbers.

They start running down the bus driver. The bus driver that day wasn't normally the bus driver, so she couldn't recall. She could recall where the kids were normally dropped off. There was roughly 10 kids dropped off at that area.

Like I said, nothing about that day was normal. It was the culmination of a bunch of things being different that day. Different enough that this substitute bus driver couldn't say with absolute certainty that the Chaw kids were even on the bus or when and where they got off it, if they were. Officers went door to door canvassing the neighborhood, and they searched the surrounding areas with search dogs to no avail. The dogs didn't pick up the kids sense anywhere. Now, while the detectives immediately took this case seriously, these were two missing children. So panic hadn't completely set in yet.

To be honest, the feeling I get when I read the case is that everybody's expecting them to show up because they always do. But one out of a thousand is serious. The feeling I get is they're going to turn up. We just don't know where they are.

Working with that underlying assumption, detectives wanted to talk to Charles and Jennifer's schoolmates who were on the bus that day to see if they interacted with the two kids or if the two kids ever actually made it onto the bus at all. According to a Reno Gazette Journal article published shortly after the kids went missing, at least two children who would have been elementary school age between first and sixth grade, confirmed that Charles and Jennifer were on the bus ride home and that they off at their regular stop. They even told investigators that they watched Charles and Jennifer leave the bus and enter their apartment complex. But detectives today say that those accounts can't be considered definitive.

I've read in a textbook that a child's idea of time and space don't really come together till 12. So how many of those kids were in the sixth grade at the time that remembered? I would have to look.

Here's Reno Sergeant Laura Conklin. You'll hear her jump in from time to time. She's working this case alongside Detective Fox.

We have two probable positions. They either were taken at school prior to the bus So school gets out, they get taken there, or they get taken in that magical minute of getting off the bus and walking the 100 feet, the 200 feet this way. You have two places because they didn't get removed from school.

Another assumption at the time was maybe there was a misunderstanding and their dad had picked the kids up, though that seemed unlikely. The kid's dad, Gordon Shaw, lived in California, and not just over the state line. He lived way over by Los Angeles. Gordon and Anne had been divorced for a couple of years now, and when police contacted him, he seemed to be shocked by the news that his kids were missing. And so he made his way down to Reno the very next day to help with the search efforts. And that same The day Gordon got into town, so did Anne, and investigators had to break the terrible news to her. She was devastated, but she didn't have a clue as to where her only two children could be. So investigators were left to continue down their checklist of things to do following the report of a missing child, which, of course, included scanning the area for any sexual predators that stood out, as well as looking into the person who originally reported them missing. That would have been Anne's boyfriend.

The very next day, they searched his house, his cars, crawled up his butt.

Investigators found nothing of interest. Yes, he had been helping with the kids while Anne was in Taiwan, but there was no indication that he was involved with their disappearance or had harmed them in any way. A few days after the Chaa children went missing, the FBI joined Reno Peedie on the investigation because at this point, law enforcement had no reason to believe they ran away. They had to consider an abduction, either by someone familiar, someone in the family, or a complete stranger. So while the FBI interviewed the family, police handed out flyers all over Reno with Charles and Jennifer's information. Secret Witness, a program in Northern Nevada, where people can anonymously report tips to the police, announced a reward for any information leading to the children's safe return. And then finally, on day four, their first solid clue came in. A man called the Imperial Palace, the restaurant that Anne owned, and this was no takeout order during the usual dinner rush. This man was calling to say that he had Anne's children. The man on the other end of the line demanded $100,000 and said that then, and only then, when he received the money, would he return the children safely?

This was a ransom call. And this anonymous man didn't say much else, just that he would call back, and then he abruptly hung up. Now, Anne hadn't been working when the call came in, so someone else had picked up. And then right after the call ended, that employee immediately rang Anne, who quickly notified authorities, and then bolted over to the restaurant where she continued to camp out, just in case this man called back with more details. Now, around this time, detectives went back to the apartment complex to the area yet again, hoping to talk to anyone they may have missed the first time around.

They bring the entire academy class, still in training, and line them up. They walk through the fields. They help with the canvas, and they recanvass everything. But the problem was back then, our canvases, a lot of times it was no answer.

People are at work.

Yeah. Then when they do talk to someone, we talk to this person, they said they didn't see anything. But back then, they really didn't dig in. Who else lives here? Who else visits here? Things like that.

They must have gotten some useful information, though, because soon after, police announced that they were looking for a man who was seen by witnesses leaning against an older white pickup truck by the bus stop around the same time that the children would have gotten home from school. The man had been described as wearing unique John Lennon style glasses, so they were hopeful that someone would eventually call all in saying that that was them, or maybe they knew this guy. Now, they couldn't say that this guy was even a person of interest at this point. They just wanted to talk to him to see what he was up to that day, try and rule him out. But that never happened. To this day, no one has come forward offering an explanation for who that person could be. Now, back at the restaurant, Anne's patience had finally paid off. On Tuesday, October 24th, this is just two days after that first ransom call, the man who claimed to be the kidnapper called again. It was the same male voice, and once again, he demanded $100,000 and said that if he got it, he would return the children safely.

This time, police were ready and waiting for that call, so they quickly traced it to a landline at an apartment not too far away where a 30-year-old man named James Grooms lived. Police were already familiar with James Grooms. Detective Fox described him as a prolific figure in town back in those days. He had a rap sheet involving drugs and fraud, but none of his previous crimes actually involved children. But police swiftly pulled together a plan to surprise James at his home, thinking that they were about to rescue Charles and Jennifer. But when they arrived at 04:00 AM the next morning, neither child was there.

Right away, they hit the search warrants. They go through everything. They start collecting fibers and everything. They bring him in. He denied it and said, Yeah, he was just an opportunist. And what we know of James Gareem is, well, the reason he got caught doing that. He's really bad at what he does. He's a dumb criminal.

There were zero signs that the children had ever been in James's apartment. His excuse for doing what he did was ultimately that he said he'd eaten at the Imperial Palace at some point in the past. So when this story of two missing children was circulating in the news, he thought he could just take advantage of the situation, and he used it as a sick opportunity to try and make some money because apparently he was dealing with substance use at the time and was desperate for cash. Now, luckily, police did have enough evidence to arrest him for trying to extort Anne. So in November, James Grooms pleaded guilty in court to the extortion charge, and he would go on to be sentenced to 10 years in prison for the crime. But with figuring this out, it put police at a dead end, and they were forced to start back all the way back at square one. After the kids went missing, Anderson Elementary held an event to help raise awareness about the cha siblings. The community made flyers and buttons with the kids' school pictures, and Charles and Jennifer's classmates wrote letters to newspapers across the country to spread the word that the kids were still missing.

To do their due diligence, police spent the few weeks following up on Gordon's alibi, confirming that he was, in fact, all the way back at work in California when his children went missing. They also gave him and Anne's boyfriend polygraph exams, which they both passed. With Anne's boyfriend and the kids' family fully cooperating, no one knew where to turn. I mean, it was still possible they were taken by someone they knew. I mean, that might explain why no one heard or saw the abduction, but they didn't have a single person in their life who seemed to have motive. So then they had to consider, was this a stranger abduction? If so, that person might be even harder to find. Though for months, police kept looking, hoping to bring the kids back to their mother safely. But just over nine months later, in late July of 1990, Reno police got a call that shattered any spark of hope that might have been remaining. Officials in Plumas County, California, about an hour away from Reno, told detectives that they believed they'd found the remains of the Chaw children. A group of California Department of Transportation workers veered off US Highway 17 near Portola to park at a popular pullout for a lunch break.

One of the workers made his way about 40 feet away to relieve himself when he saw what he first thought was just a badger hole. As he walked closer to check it out, he saw a human skull protruding from the pit, and that's when he realized what he was actually looking at, a shallow grave. So the workers immediately called law enforcement in Plumas County, who responded right away. These bones were child-sized, and the clothing that they saw matched the clothes that the child children were known to have been wearing before they went missing. There was some other evidence found at the scene that detectives have stayed silent about even after all these years. So I'm assuming whatever they found was pretty important. Our reporter, Madison, pressed for answers on whether either of the kids backpacks or other belongings were found or even if a possible murder weapon was found at the scene. But detectives would just say no comment. All they would give us was that there was something else found at the scene besides the bones and clothing. Now, Sergeant Conklin said detectives can't say if the children were sexually assaulted or if the crimes were sexually motivated due to the skeletal condition of the bodies, but they aren't ruling it out.

Outside of this comment, they've also stayed really tight-lipped about what the autopsy could have revealed. No details have been released in more than three decades, not even a cause of death. And there is reason for them holding back this information.

There's several reasons. One is so we don't get a false confession because we have had them in this case. Joe Bila called us and claimed that he abducted the Chaw kids and killed them.

Joe Bila is the father of James Bila, a convicted murderer and violent sexual predator from the Reno area.

That was after their bodies were found. So they brought a man when he sobered up and he said, Well, I just did that because I'm out of a job and I was hoping I could get the reward money so my kids can be taken care of.

So yeah, keeping how they died close to the vest ensures detectives prove someone who confesses to the crime is telling the truth. Investigators weren't able to determine exactly how long the children had been in the grave, but it's assumed that the kids were likely killed shortly after their abduction. With the kids being found so far away, though, it introduced a whole new element to the crime, a whole new crime scene that they hoped would provide more than the abduction site had. Police were calling on the public to come forward, specifically anyone who had been driving through Plumas County near where the remains were discovered in October of 1989. They were hoping that maybe someone had seen something suspicious, and that even after all this time, people's memory of those days would potentially still be good. And they thought this because of that earthquake that had just struck the day before the kids went missing. Big events like that usually make the time surrounding stick in our memories just a little bit more. It was when looking into this area and asking for more information that Reno police learned about another incident that happened near Portola just a few days before the Chaw kids went missing.

According to reporting from Ed pierce with Kolo TV, an unknown man with long blonde hair driving a white truck tried to abduct two young children who had just gotten off their school bus. Now, fortunately, those kids got away, but police needed to remain open to the possibility that this occurrence could be related. This got splashed all over the news back then, but sadly, this guy, just like the John Lennon glasses guy, was never identified. Now, it is worth noting that this guy in Portola was said to have been a White man, and the guy with the John Lennon glasses was said to have been an Asian man. So it's unlikely that it's the same person. But the fact they were both driving a White truck, the similarities of kids getting off their school busses, again, they had to check if something was there, but we still don't know if there is a there, there, and nothing really came of this lead. The next month in August, the kids were laid to rest together at the Mountainview Cemetery in Reno. Their shared gravestone is engraved with Donald Duck and Cinderella, the kids' favorites. We have a picture on the blog post for this episode.

Ann, who had initially been so distraught when she heard the news of her kid's fate that she had to be taken away in an ambulance, had to watch her own children's burial service from the passenger seat of a van parked a few yards away from their caskets because it was just too devastating. While police continued investigating behind the scenes, the next big developments weren't known publicly until 1993. That's when police announced that they were looking to track down yet another person that they wanted to talk to. According to reporting by the Reno Gazette Journal, a clean, shaven man with sandy-colored hair had gone into a local bank shortly after the children's funeral to donate money to a fund for the Cha family to help them out during their difficult time. Apparently, this guy had such a huge emotional reaction that the teller found it strange enough that they turned on the surveillance camera and then notified law enforcement. Police released a blurry image of this man, eager to locate him. But today, Detective Fox isn't so sure that this guy's odd outburst really meant anything.

I didn't pay much attention to it because that happens on every case. The guy who did this isn't going to have an emotional outbreak about it. We had this happen several times. People would show up, guys would show up at the memorials, and they take their shirt off and throw it down. People do weird shit.

Later that year, detectives, along with forensic scientists and anthropologists, returned to the scene where the kids' remains were discovered to try and find more evidence. Detectives Today told us that they were specifically looking for more of Charles and Jennifer's bones as they were unable to find all of their remains the first time around.

We brought out a woman from UCLA who was very adept at going to body sites and finding where animals run off with their stuff. She was very, very proficient at finding more bones.

There's some contradictory information about whether they found anything during those search efforts at the scene. Old newspaper articles reported that nothing was found, but Sergeant Conklin told us they did find more bones believed to be additional remains of the child's children. She did say believe because they can't say for sure. For some unknown reasons, those bones weren't actually tested. Outside of this update, things stayed fairly quiet throughout the early '90s. Sometimes random calls would come in here and there, and amongst the strange and irrelevant were some meaningful tidbits. But in hindsight, Detective Fox says it's hard to say what was actually connected the case and what wasn't. But in 1995, something major was announced to the public. Police were finally ready to name an official suspect in the murders of Charles and Jennifer Cha. That suspect, who got named years after the kids were murdered was none other than James Grooms. As in James Grooms, who was already in prison for trying to extort Anne shortly after the kids went missing. Apparently, police had been looking into him behind the scenes for some time at that point, and they said that they had found evidence in Grooms' home that may have suggested he knew who the Chad children were before they went missing.

He had a menu from the restaurant in his apartment.

There were also some rumors suggesting Grooms had a history of molesting children that might have played into their focus on him. But those stories were never anything concrete and couldn't actually be confirmed. He was never charged with any crimes against children. It's a flimsy case against him so far, I know. But the thing is, it wasn't just those rumors and his own extortion plan that pushed police to tell the public he was their suspect. Allegedly, incriminating words were coming from his own mouth, too. Investigators were hearing that Grooms had been bragging about committing the murders to other inmates while he was in jail.

I remember them thinking they got other information that might help get James for the murder, but it didn't pan out.

In 1998, after serving nine of his 10-year sentence, James Grooms was released from prison. While he was still considered a major suspect, there was nothing concrete tying him to the crime that investigators could use to keep him in jail. James continued to take full responsibility for trying to extort the family, but he was adamant that he had nothing to do with the children's murders. Later that same year, another potential suspect came on police's radar when a Reno chiropractor with no prior criminal record was arrested in Fresno, California for allegedly kidnapping two boys from a playground and sexually assaulting one of them. At first, detectives thought 38-year-old Joseph Schoenhoff looked good for the Chao murder due to similarities in the two cases. The boys he'd abducted had been Asian-American, just like Charles and Jennifer. They were 10 and 11 years old, which is not too far off from the Chao children. But ultimately, no real connections between the crimes were discovered. Eager to revamp the case and stir up some new tips ahead of the 10-year anniversary of Charles and Jennifer's disappearance, police encouraged the media to run stories to remind the public that the case was still unsolved.

And They got some response from the public. What they called a major lead came in, someone saying that they had seen a 1966 white Volkswagen near where the children were buried. And guess who owned that same type of car back in 1989? Yeah, James Grooms. But by the time they were able to speak with him about it, he claimed that he didn't have the car at the time the kids disappeared. Apparently, he said he dropped it off at an auto shop to get it repaired and then conveniently never bothered to pick it back up. He said that he only had a bike at the time that the kids were killed. Obviously, though, police weren't just going to take his word for it.

They really ran that down. We found it, and not through DMV, but through another source called CLEAR. It was in a wrecking yard all of those years. And then I think around 2006, it was crushed.

You were unable to look at it.

Yeah.

Now, you're probably thinking the same thing I am. This whole car situation makes our groom's guy look even more sketchy. But as Madison and Detective Fox discussed this more, the less suspicious it became. You see, the tip about the car being seen near the gravesite came around a decade after the kids went missing. So, I mean, not super reliable. Detective Fox also said that the car was taken into the shop a few weeks before the kids went missing. They actually looked into this and was to find out. It's there before they go missing, and it wasn't just conveniently left at the shop after. It had been there because it hadn't been drivable. And once it was repaired, rooms couldn't afford to pick it up.

They were calling up his butt four days after the kids were abducted. The car wasn't anywhere around. James would have just, at the most, cleaned it out if it was still useful. It wasn't useful. That's why it was at the shop.

So while in some reports this tip was made out to be damning evidence, these detectives say it's likely not as serious as it seemed. The next real update that the public got was in 2002. That's when police, who were still not giving any specifics about how the kids died, were willing to announce that they did not have any DNA from potential suspects to work with in this case. So they were either going to need someone to come forward with information, someone to confess, or another similar case to pop up that maybe did have some more evidence to work with. And it was actually the latter that happened. Our crime junkies will know a thing or two about this next prospective suspect that popped up in 2009. Since we covered this case in-depth. 2009 was when J. C. Dugard was found almost two decades after being snatched near her school bus stop in South Lake Tahoe, California, when she was just 11 years old. A then 58-year-old man named Philip Garrido was finally caught after holding J. C. Captive for 18 years. While there was no proof Garrido had anything to do with the Cha siblings' murders, they did go missing from the same general area around the same time frame J.

C. Disappeared. And So for these reasons, investigators felt like he was at least worth looking at. What if Garrido had committed other crimes prior to kidnapping JC? Unlike other leads, this one wasn't in limbo for too long. Later, in 2010, Reno Police Lieutenant Mike Juan told the Associated Press that after searching records, contacting retired investigators, and pursuing other physical evidence, they had ruled out Garrido as a suspect in the CHA case. Juan announced, We were just looking for facts, and everything came to a dead end. There was nothing. For close to another decade, there wasn't too much coverage on Charles and Jennifer, as nothing new seemed to be shared with the public regarding the case. But as current detectives can attest, there was always something going on in the background. Trust me, our reporter saw the room where they keep the stacks and stacks of binders full of case files that they recently finished digitizing. During the pandemic, Detective Fox said that he was consumed with, quote, thinking about things that were at the gravesite. And it was while he was thinking about things that were at the gravesite that he came to the realization that there might actually be more that could be done with that evidence.

Just because they didn't find any suspect DNA back in 2002, doesn't mean there isn't DNA we could find today with new technology. When he took a closer look and consulted some experts, it turned out that there is new testing that can be done on the old evidence. It's actually why Detective Fox decided he wanted to come out of retirement to work the CHA case, along with several others, on his own time. He's too humbled tell us in his own words, but Sergeant Conklin said that he donates his time because he has hope, hope that there can be resolution in this case. Now, Detective Fox wouldn't say too much, but they are currently working on sending off this mystery evidence for DNA testing. And although they don't want to reveal what the evidence is, it was something that was found day one at the gravesite. It's wild to me how something that was there all along could now be the key to finding justice more than 34 years later. Detectives know that putting a name to this faceless predator would bring peace for some people. But for Anne, they're not sure it would mean closure. They've seen it too many times before.

It would only be the beginning of a brand new battle.

This is going to then bring up more chaos in her life saying, What could I have done to prevent this? If we have this person that we think comes out of this discovery, she's going to go back into self-blame mode. As a parent, what could I have done to protect? Why did I go out of town at this time? It was a perfect storm of all of the things that could have gone wrong went wrong.

A theory Detective Fox and Sergeant Conklin both believe today is that it's more likely the children were taken by someone they were at least familiar with. They wouldn't have easily gone with a stranger like James Grooms without a struggle, and that struggle would have likely been noticed. Some past investigators had their sights set on Grooms, and honestly still do to this day. I mean, if you Google this case, his name is mentioned over and over again. And while Detective Fox and Sergeant Conklin say they can't completely rule him out, at least not yet. He is actually not their favorite suspect for several reasons.

He is the guy that I think would have capitalized on this. He would have said, I did it. He would have dragged cops out there. He would have had something left at his house. Something would have associated James Grooms because he was not the criminal of the century that could get away with anything. James Grooms got away with nothing in his life.

After our interview, Sergeant Conklin was able to obtain DMV records that confirm James Grooms has since passed away, although we don't know how or when or where. She said their motivation to keep moving forward is to find answers for Gordon and Anne. If all goes well, justice for Charles and Jennifer.

Even though she has moved on somewhat with her life and has another child and has a life outside of this, every day, probably for the first 2 seconds before she realizes she's waking up, her life is okay until she remembers that Jennifer and Charles were murdered.

To the person responsible for this heinous crime, the clock is ticking.

There was a brief moment in time when Jennifer and Charles knew they were with a monster, and there was nothing they can do.

If you know anything about the murders of Charles and Jennifer Chau, contact the Reno Police Department's Homicide Unit at 775-334-2188. Or you can anonymously report information by calling Secret Witness at 775-322-4900. And if you don't feel comfortable calling on the phone, there's also a Secret Witness link on the Reno PD's website where you can submit tips online anonymously, or you can send an email right to the Reno PD. I'm going to have those links in the show notes. The Deck is an audio Chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about The Deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast. Com. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?