She walked out the door, and she was gone.
The 10-year-old girl with the gap in her front teeth, who liked to play cheerleader and waitress, giggled a lot, loved the color purple and couldn't wait to be a teenager, was on her way to school, alone.
She was supposed to meet a friend, a boy her age. The 1,000-foot walk down the street to his home should have taken four minutes, maybe five.
But Jessica Ridgeway, bundled against the cold in a black puffy jacket, never arrived.
The hours and days that followed brought confusion and false leads, moments of hope and dread, leading to the devastating announcement a week after her disappearance that human remains found in a desolate open-space park 9 miles from
her home were Jessica's.
A family that describes itself as ordinary wrestled with the unimaginable, and spoke of forgiveness. An entire community was both terrified and unified — and started being more careful.
"We have dealt with ugly. That is our job," said Westminster police Investigator Trevor Materasso. "But we haven't ever dealt with something like this."
Police have been careful to not divulge too much about the case, walking a fine line between advising the public of a genuine threat and inciting panic. Nevertheless, young students throughout metro Denver are now escorted to and from school, and children in public without an adult nearby are a rare sight.
More than 4,000 tips have flooded the suburban police department, which is getting assistance from about 1,000 law enforcement personnel from 40 agencies — including local, state and federal forces.
"I have never seen an investigation that involves so many agencies, people and resources," Materasso said. "The sheer number, the instant response by the entire community. It wasn't just police agencies; it was the entire state. We had people driving in from all over. People were spending their own money to print fliers
and drive around their personal cars to post them."
It began with a girl walking out her front door.
The alarm clock rang at 7:45 a.m. Jessica had asked for the clock so she could get up on her own, part of her push to be more self-sufficient and look grown-up, her mother recalled.
That Oct. 5 morning, Jessica followed her normal routine. She watched TV, ate a granola bar, went back upstairs to dress, then peeled an orange with her mother to take to school.
Sarah Ridgeway, a 31-year-old single mom, had just come home from working her regular 10 p.m.-to-7 a.m. tech-support shift at a software company in Boulder.
The shift is not a desirable one, but it worked for the Ridgeway family, said Stephan Teske, a
co-worker and friend of Sarah Ridgeway's.
While Jessica was at school, her mother slept, waking at 4 p.m. so she could greet her daughter.
Before leaving for school that day, Jessica called a friend who lives a few blocks away to see if he would be walking to nearby Witt Elementary School, according to police dispatch tapes.
It was 8:25 a.m. She spoke to the boy's father, who said his son would wait for her.
"It is snowing," Sarah Ridgeway recalled in an interview four days after her daughter disappeared. "I watch her walk out the door.
I shut the door. And that is the last time I saw her."
Jessica headed out at about 8:30. The walk to her friend's house is slightly more than 1,000 feet.
The route through the modest neighborhood of single-tract homes leads past Chelsea Park — a pocket park with playground equipment.
On some days, Jessica would meet friends at the park for the walk that a few blocks later cuts across open space and leads to Witt Elementary.
But on that chilly day, Jessica planned to meet her friend at his home. By 8:40 a.m., she had not arrived. With only 10 minutes until the bell rang, father and son drove off to school.
Reached last week by The Denver Post, the father declined an interview request.
The
morning of Oct. 5 was unremarkable at Witt Elementary — a school of about 330 students on the northern edge of the Jefferson County School District.
The school prides itself on community engagement, hosting family dance nights, a school spirit club and community-service projects such as picking up trash around Ketner Lake Open Space.
Jessica Ridgeway, who loved going to school, never arrived. Her mother did not call in the absence, so after roll call in Shelia Grice's class, a note went to the office.
Within the next hour, the school's secretary began calling parents of students with unexcused absences. Police say that shortly after 10 a.m., the secretary called the cellphone on file for Jessica's mother to report that her daughter was not in school that morning.
By that time, though, Sarah Ridgeway was already asleep in her upstairs bedroom. Her cellphone was in another room, she explained later, because a college she had applied to would not stop calling, and she needed her sleep.
The other adults who lived in the home — Jessica's grandmother and her aunt — were at work.
Sarah Ridgeway awoke that afternoon, picking up the message about her daughter's absence.
Maybe there was some sort of mistake, she thought.
She drove past Chelsea Park. No Jessica.
She went to a friend's house. No answer.
She drove to the school. No one had seen Jessica all day.
With each dead end, Sarah Ridgeway recalled, she lost a little hope.
"And then you get a pit in your stomach you don't want any parent to experience in their entire life — when you know your child has been taken," she said.
She called Westminster police. It was 4:23 p.m.
At first, officers went about their usual routine. One officer went to the Ridgeway home. Another went to the school.
Dispatch tapes recorded from that day show police trying to piece together the events and find people who knew Jessica.
They discovered that Sarah Ridgeway and Jessica's father, Jeremiah Bryant, hadn't been together for years and that Dad lived in Missouri.
The couple had been fighting over the $267 in child support Bryant had been ordered to pay every month. A court hearing had been held that day about the matter, and investigators were trying to determine whether Bryant had appeared.
Meanwhile, officers began sifting through details of Jessica's morning — talking to the neighbor boy, teachers and school staff.
After police contacted Bryant in Missouri — and learned he had been at work all day and had appeared in court — the search intensified.
Bloodhounds canvassed Chelsea Park, the school and around homes and cars along her walking route, trying to pick up a scent. Officers and firefighters began walking the fields and parks.
By 9:15 p.m., investigators believed they had enough information to suspect Jessica had been abducted and issued an Amber Alert.
Firefighters used thermal-imaging equipment to peer through the darkness and set up lights that illuminated Chelsea Park.
Police inquired about getting a helicopter from Denver that has night vision, but it was too cold to fly without blades icing up.
One of Jessica's relatives posted a message on Facebook, saying the girl was missing. Not long after, neighbors and friends — about 100 total — began arriving at a nearby community center to offer their help in the search.
At about 2 a.m., authorities told the group to go home and come back later in the morning. Nearly 1,000 people showed up Saturday to walk the fields around Jessica's home — friends and acquaintances, but mostly strangers wanting to help.
The backpack sat upright on the sidewalk, like it had been left there with care rather than tossed. The Superior man who found it in his Rock Creek neighborhood told the Daily Camera he first spotted it Oct. 7 just after midnight.
Thinking little of it — it was late — he waited until the next morning for a closer look. On the backpack was a key chain with the name "Jessica" and the water bottle.
Making no connection with the frantic search for a missing girl 6 miles away, the man posted on the Westminster town list server: "If this is yours come and get it."
Someone replied, pointing to the backpack's significance. The man called 911.
Finally, a break.
"I felt a sliver of hope," Sarah Ridgeway said. "I figured, if something really bad happened to her, they wouldn't have left the backpack just sitting there. It wouldn't have been in plain sight."
Speaking to reporters, Jessica's relatives described the girl they hoped would come walking through the door at any moment. Sarah Ridgeway was watching her only child growing into that awkward preteen stage, with one foot in childhood and one in adolescence.
Her father had traveled from Missouri after learning the backpack had been found. He sat tear-filled with the rest of the family during the interview.
"Is there anything that you want to do?" asked the interviewer.
"Don't know where to start. Don't know what to do," Bryant said. "I just want to find my daughter and bring her back home."
Jessica loved to dance, play with fashion dolls and care for her menagerie of animals — a dog, two fish and two frogs. Her favorite TV shows were "Victorious," "Shake It Up" and "Wizards of Waverly Place." She loved attending her cousin's ballgames and inventing nicknames for the players and cherished the responsibility of caring for her neighbor's hairless cats.
She signed up for the Standley Lake Pee Wee Cheer Clinic and told her mom she wanted to be a cheerleader when she reached high school. She promised she would be a cheerleader "who will be kind to everyone."
The family pleaded with the public to get the word out, to use social media, to phone Westminster police with anything that might bring their Jess home.
The fifth-grader had been missing for four days.
Back at the Ridgeway home, Jessica's alarm clock continued going off each morning at 7:45.
Just east of Colorado 93 along 82nd Street in Arvada, Pattridge Park Open Space is a barren, isolated area of prickly pear cactus and yucca. The land is pocked with the ruins of mine shafts and barbed-wire fence.
There are tumbleweeds, coyotes and, on weekends, the buzz of model airplanes.
On the afternoon of Oct. 10, maintenance workers were out picking up trash — a routine exercise in a park neighboring a landfill.
Earlier that day, police announced they had ruled out Jessica's parents as suspects and believed an unknown person abducted her.
At about 2 p.m., workers came across a plastic garbage bag in plain view near a culvert on the side of the road, said Arvada police spokeswoman Jill McGranahan. The bag was heavy and "seemed kind of strange," she said.
At that moment, animal-management officers who typically chase down stray dogs and escaped livestock drove by.
The maintenance workers flagged them down. An animal-control officer looked inside the bag and saw human remains, McGranahan said. Law enforcement officials have declined to be any more specific than to say they discovered a body that was "not intact."
Within hours, hundreds of local police and FBI agents descended on the open space to walk the area and look for evidence.
It was 9 miles from Jessica Ridgeway's house.
Two days later, grim-faced state and local law enforcement officials announced that DNA tests had confirmed that the remains were Jessica's.
"The focus has changed from the search for Jessica to a mission of justice for Jessica," said Westminster Police Chief Lee Birk.
"There is a predator at large in our community."
A community that had plastered signs and fliers with Jessica's face and marched through fields now was faced with the horrifying truth that someone had snatched and killed a young child. Police increased patrols around schools, parents walked their children to class, and school districts sent out communiques on "stranger danger" and how to talk to children about death.
In time, police began focusing on an attempted abduction of a 22-year-old woman who was jogging on Memorial Day around Ketner Lake — an open space near Jessica's home. Police on Thursday asked anyone who saw anything unusual at the lake that day to call investigators.
And on Friday, police released photographs of a wooden cross found in the investigation that they believe could be pivotal to finding Jessica's killer.
After the abduction, friends and strangers rushed to the family's side. Teske, Sarah Ridgeway's co-worker, created a website to provide an outlet for people to share their thoughts about Jessica on an "encouragement board" and donate to offset the family's funeral costs.
"There has been a lot of good," Teske said. "A lot of people showing more love, being more caring, looking out for each other. People are starting to act like neighbors in the 1950s when everyone really did know their neighbors."
The Ridgeway family, he said, are "very humble people." Sarah Ridgeway "always puts other people before herself," offering rides to work and staying late to help when necessary, he said.
He said the family is in the preliminary stages of starting a foundation to help underprivileged children do things such as attend cheerleading camp.
"They are trying not to be angry," Teske said. "Obviously, they want justice and the guy caught just like everyone else does. But I'll tell you what ... they are probably the strongest people I have ever met."
At a memorial service Tuesday night, more than 2,000 mourners filled pews lined with tissue boxes at Arvada's Faith Bible Chapel.
If the expectation was an evening of grief and pain, it dissipated with the first notes of Jessica's favorite song over the loudspeakers.
The chart-topping, frivolous pop song "Call Me Maybe" played as photographs of Jessica's life appeared on video screens, making clear this was a time to celebrate a young girl's bright, short life.
All the while, law enforcement officers both paid their respects and carefully watched the crowd. Gov. John Hickenlooper spoke. Nearly everyone was dressed in purple.
They listened to funny stories about the "girlie girl" who always brightened the room.
"She was an ordinary girl being raised by an ordinary family," said her great aunt Gay Moore. "I wish we could go back to having that ordinary family again."
The Rev. Rick Long of Grace Church in Arvada, which Jessica sometimes attended, said the girl who brought so much light into everyone's life would not want her death to cast a permanent gloom or leave a fearful world behind.
"Don't let anyone rob us of our hope," he said. "This child showed us that love conquers everything that is evil. ... Evil does not win. Jess wins."
Jeremy P. Meyer: 303-954-1367, jpmeyer@denverpost.com or twitter.com/jpmeyerdpost
Got a tip?
Anyone with information is asked to call the Westminster police tip line at 303-658-4336 or e-mail PDamberalert@cityofwestminster.us.
Copyright 2012 The Denver Post. All rights reserved.
