Michele Pulsifer,3 Missing 3/17/69 Huntington Beach, CA

Vital Statistics at Time of Disappearance Missing Since: July 1969 from Huntington Beach, California Classification: Endangered Missing Date of Birth: March 17, 1966 Age: 3 years old Height and Weight: 3'2 - 3'5, 40 - 45 pounds Distinguishing Characteristics: Blonde hair, blue or brown eyes. Details of Disappearance Michelle was last seen sometime during July 1969 in her hometown of Huntington Beach, California. She resided with her mother, Donna J. Pulsifer (often referred to in media accounts by her later married name, Donna Prentice); her mother's boyfriend, James Michael Kent (often referred to as Michael Kent); her older brother, Richard Pulsifer Jr., and Kent's young son by a previous relationship. Photographs of Donna and Kent are posted below this case summary. Richard Jr. was six years old at the time of his sister's disappearance. He remembers that Michelle tried to hide in his room and seemed frightened, then Donna went in and took her away and he never saw her again. Richard Jr. says he was often abused physically by Kent and that Kent hit Donna as well. Richard Jr. also recalls that the day after he last saw Michelle, he went into the family's garage and saw a large cardboard box covered with blankets. The box had not been there the last time he was in the garage. Donna found Richard Jr. in the garage and told him to get out of there and stay out. She told him the box contained a motorcycle seat. A few days after Michelle vanished, Donna, Kent, and the two boys packed all their belongings and moved to Illinois with their dog. Donna and Kent told the children that there was not enough room in the car for Michelle so they were leaving her behind. Richard Jr. later said he had been forbidden to ever mention Michelle's name while he was growing up, and his mother and stepfather ignored him whenever he asked what had happened to her. Kent reportedly told his own biological son that he would only discuss Michelle's fate when he was on his deathbed. Michelle and Richard Jr.'s father, Richard Pulsifer Sr., was divorced from Donna. A photograph of him is posted below this case summary. He visited his children every other weekend but was not notified when they moved. He called the police and attempted to file missing persons reports, but since Donna had full legal custody of Michelle and her brother, no action was taken to find the children. Custody laws at the time often granted a mother complete rights to her children, to the exclusion of the father. Richard Sr. eventually found out that Donna and Kent were living with Richard Jr. in Illinois and that Michelle was not with them. Donna promised Richard Sr. that she would permit Michelle to contact him after the child graduated from high school, but Richard Sr. never heard from his daughter again. Donna called Richard Sr. a few weeks later and said Michelle was with relatives, but she refused to say exactly which relatives or where they were. Richard Sr. had to pay child support to Donna, but only for their son. In 1980, a judge ordered that Richard Sr.'s payments be withheld until Donna disclosed Michelle's whereabouts, but Donna never told anyone where the child was. Donna married Kent and lived with him for ten years after they moved to Illinois, but eventually divorced him and moved to Wisconsin in 1979; she still lives there. Kent stayed in Illinois. Donna never filed a missing person's report for Michelle, so her disappearance was not investigated by police for over thirty years. Michelle's paternal aunt hired a private detective in 2001 to find Michelle. The investigator interviewed Donna, who said she had given Michelle over to the care of Kent's mother but had not tried to find her or get her back after Kent's mother died of breast cancer in 1972. Donna stated that she did not contact Michelle again because Kent had become abusive and she was afraid of him. The private detective passed on his casefile to police after he was unable to find any record of Michelle following July 4, 1969, and law enforcement began their own investigation at that time. In August 2004, Donna and Kent were arrested and charged with murdering Michelle. The murder charge is punishable by 25 years to life in prison. Police investigated Michelle's disappearance but could not find a single public record of her after 1969; they concluded that her mother and Kent had murdered her and then moved away quickly so no one would notice her disappearance. Kent and Donna told people in Illinois that they had left the child with relatives in California, but family and friends in California did not have her and had no idea she was missing. People who knew Kent's mother says she never cared for Michelle, and since in 1969 she was already ill with the cancer that would later kill her, it seems unlikely that she would have agreed to care for the child. Kent cooperated with authorities and confessed to burying Michelle's body in a shallow grave in a remote gorge. Kent claimed that he and Donna found Michelle lying dead in her bedroom with no signs of injury and he helped Donna dispose of the remains. He stated that they never discussed the child's death afterwards but he assumed Donna had killed her. Donna maintains her innocence and her lawyer has stated that if Michelle is in fact dead, Kent probably killed her; he had an extensive criminal record, a violent temper, and a history of violence towards women and children. Richard Jr. later remembered that Kent always became very angry whenever Michelle soiled herself, and he once made her sleep in a cardboard box in the garage because of this. Both suspects pleaded not guilty to the murder charges. Kent agreed to waive his right against self-incrimination and give testimony against Donna before her trial, as he was suffering from diabetes, internal bleeding, and severe liver and kidney problems, and was dying. He died in February 2005; authorities never got his testimony, as he was became too ill to speak. Prosecutors are hoping to be able to use his previous videotaped statements in court anyway. Michelle's remains have not been found. The canyon she was allegedly buried in has regular floods and unless her body was buried deeply, it may have been washed away by the water or eaten by animals. Foul play is strongly suspected in her case due to the circumstances involved.

Left: Richard Sr., circa 2004; Center: Donna, circa 2004; Right: Kent circa 2004 Investigating Agency If you have any information concerning this case, please contact: Orange County District Attorney's Office 714-245-8408 OR Orange County Sheriff's Department 714-425-1900 Updated 6 times since October 12, 2004. Last updated December 2, 2005; details of disappearance updated. Charley Project

Missing Orange County girl was murdered in 1969, DA says 5:49 p.m. August 30, 2004 SANTA ANA – Thirty-five years after Michelle Pulsifer vanished, authorities Monday said they know what happened to the 3-year-old. She was killed by her mother and the woman's then-boyfriend, who moved halfway across the country to cover up the crime, Orange County authorities alleged. "We've concluded that Michelle never left that home in Huntington Beach alive," District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said at a news conference. The girl's body has not been found. The former boyfriend, 62-year-old James Michael Kent of Lakemoor, Ill., was arrested in Illinois last week and was being held in the Orange County jail on $1 million bail. Michelle's mother, Donna J. Prentice, 57, of Genoa, Wisc., was arrested in that state and California authorities are seeking her extradition. The pair could face 25 years to life in prison if convicted of murder. Investigators say the couple deny killing the girl and insist she was left with a relative in California. Kent, a truck driver, was scheduled to be arraigned on Sept. 10. The public defender's office said an attorney has not been assigned to the case. It was not known whether Prentice had hired a lawyer. Her extradition hearing was scheduled for Sept. 22. Michelle's brother, Richard Pulsifer Jr., said he is relieved at the arrests. "A lot of questions, hopefully, will be answered and it will all be resolved," Pulsifer, 41, of Vista, said in an interview. "In the past, we've always hit dead ends." Pulsifer was 6 when he last saw his sister. "The very last conversation I had with her was when she came into my room and asked my to hide her," he told The Associated Press. He hid her under the bed covers but their mother came and got the girl. Pulsifer said he never saw his sister again. Within days of that July 1969 incident, the family moved to Illinois. There was one other child in the house, Kent's 6-year-old son from a previous relationship. "They told the children there was not enough room in the car for Michelle. Instead, Michelle would stay with relatives in California," Rackauckas said. "No missing person report was filed and no one talked about Michelle again." "There's absolutely no record of Michelle Pulsifer after 4th of July, 1969," he said. Michelle's brother said he has had little contact with his mother over the years but never got solid answers whenever he asked about his sister. He hasn't spoken to Kent in years. The girl's biological father, Richard Pulsifer Sr., lost custody of his two children in an uncontested divorce. Pulsifer, who now lives in Las Vegas, said he tried without success to locate his daughter. He asked the county's social service agency to investigate but was told it couldn't without a court order, Deputy District Attorney Larry Yellin said. In 2001, Michelle's aunt, Ann Friedman of Coronado, hired a private attorney who determined there was no sign of the girl's existence after the couple's move: No school records, work history, marriage license or death certificate. The investigator turned his files over to the district attorney's office. The office's cold-case investigators spent a year gathering evidence before making the arrests. Sign On San Diego

Vista man recalls events around 1969 tragedy Mom charged with murder in disappearance of sister, 3 By Adam Klawonn STAFF WRITER September 2, 2004 VISTA – Richard Pulsifer Jr. remembers the dream vividly. In it, he is a boy searching for his 3-year-old sister, Michelle. He stands over a square plot of earth and grass. He looks down. He finds her decaying body. Pulsifer said it was only a bad dream, but it was the first time he realized his little sister, missing for years, was probably dead. He was 6 when she vanished 35 years ago. The dream came at age 17, he says, shortly after he heard his mother utter the words "Michelle" and "death" in the next room. "Was the dream telling me what actually happened or confirming what I heard?" he asked in an interview this week at his Vista home. "I think deep down I knew she wasn't alive." Michelle's and Pulsifer's mother, Donna J. Prentice, and her former boyfriend, James Michael Kent, were arrested last week and charged with murder in connection with the tot's unexplained disappearance in July 1969. Kent, a 62-year-old truck driver with a criminal record, admitted last week on tape that he buried Michelle's body in Silverado Canyon in the Santa Ana Mountains, along the Riverside-Orange County border, an Illinois sheriff's detective told The Associated Press on Monday. "I thought that was pretty . . . ," Pulsifer said, his comment trailing off. "I don't know how to put it into words." Authorities believe that Prentice of Genoa, Wis., and Kent of Lakemoor, Ill., killed Michelle and then moved with Pulsifer and a stepbrother to Illinois to cover their tracks. They are being held in Vernon County, Wis., and Orange County, respectively, on $1 million bond and face court hearings later this month. Pulsifer, now 41, said he was 6 years old and asleep in his bed on a warm summer morning in Huntington Beach in July 1969 when Michelle walked into his room. She wanted to hide, he said, and started to climb up onto the twin bed with him. He had almost worked her under the covers, he said, when his mother walked in and took her away. "It was like, 'Come here, darling,' just like any mother would do," he recalled. "There was no anger or anything like that." That was the last time Pulsifer saw his sister. Just days later, he said, the family packed up and left California for Illinois. Pulsifer, whose mother and father had divorced, said Kent was a strict disciplinarian while he was growing up. He said he buried any talk about the beatings – along with questions about Michelle's whereabouts – because he never wanted to hurt his mother emotionally. After the family moved again, this time to Kenosha, Wis., his mother asked him if he wanted to know what happened to his sister. He was a freshman in high school at the time. "I asked, 'Where is she?' " he said. "She changed the subject. It pretty much wasn't brought up again." His father, Richard Pulsifer Sr., had been looking for his son for years and finally found him, he said, after his mother – then working as a cocktail waitress – applied for government aid and the agency contacted his father. Pulsifer said one of his last memories of living with his mother before going to live with his father was at age 17, when he awoke to hear her crying in another room of their two-bedroom apartment and talking to her husband, Noble Prentice. He said he caught the words "Michelle" and "death." At age 19 and living with his father, Pulsifer agreed to meet with a hypnotist his father hired to jog his memories about Michelle. He is unsure if it worked but said he was able to recall some memories without help, such as trying to hide Michelle and the dream. But it wasn't until 1987, when he was 24, that he phoned his mother and posed the question that had become an obsession for father and son: What happened to Michelle? "She said, 'I'm not telling you, Rich,' " he recalled. " 'It's been so long I don't want to open up old wounds.' " Later in the same conversation, she told him Michelle was alive and well and using the Pulsifer last name, he said. Unwilling to probe further, he backed off. Contact between mother and son became infrequent after that, he said. Prentice knew of her son's impending birth in November 1997 but never called Pulsifer and his wife, Lisa, to ask if it was a boy or girl, he said. Eventually, detectives pieced Michelle's case together with a little help from a private investigator hired by a family member, Ann Friedman, of Coronado. Amid the mystery of his sister's disappearance, Pulsifer lived a pretty normal life. He helped run American Karate School in San Marcos and other locations with his father, achieving a seventh-degree black belt, before he had an accident on the job in 1998. Now he is a circulation manager with the North County Times newspaper. He and his wife have three boys, ages 6 to 20, and live in a duplex near Vista Village. He gets off work around 7 a.m. to take his children to school. They drive a blue minivan and a white Ford station wagon. Pulsifer knows that his normal life is over, though, at least for a while, and that he may have to take the witness stand. "The whole thing is very strange," he said. "Right now, I'm on an emotional roller coaster." He spoke calmly, almost affably, with a chuckle about some childhood memories. But he said now he feels hate and sorrow, and wonders if after 35 years he can feel forgiveness. The family has been contacted by national media, including NBC's "The Today Show" and "Dateline." Pulsifer gave a box full of family photos, trinkets and pictures of Michelle to investigators. "It's scary, I tell you," he said. "I didn't think my part in this was that important." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Adam Klawonn: (760) 476-8245; adam.klawonn@uniontrib.com Sign On San Diego

Mother re-tried for 29-year-old OC murder Monday, November 10, 2008 By Eileen FrereSANTA ANA, Calif. (KABC) -- It's a mystery nearly four decades in the making. A 3-year-old girl disappears, never to be seen again. Now her mother is on trial for the girl's murder for the second time. That woman was first tried for the crime last year, but the jury failed to reach a verdict. Her former boyfriend confessed to burying the young girl back in 1969, before he died in 2005. The retrial began in Santa Ana Monday. The prosecutor alleges that the defendant, the mother, took part in four decades of deception. She allegedly lied to various relatives over the years when asked about the whereabouts of her daughter; those alleged lies ranged from Michelle, the missing daughter, being cared for by other relatives, to Michelle studying in Canada in high school and doing well. Investigators say there's no trace that Michelle existed after 1969. Donna Prentice, in court Monday, looked at the last-known photo taken of her daughter, Michelle Pulsifer, before the 3-year-old disappeared nearly 40 years ago. Prosecutors allege the 61-year-old and her boyfriend, Mike Kent, murdered the little girl around July 4, 1969. The defendant, from 1969 on, told a lot of lies," said prosecutor Larry Yellin. Prosecutors allege that days after her disappearance, the couple left Huntington Beach for Illinois. They packed up their two boys, their family pets, and allegedly told the children there wasn't enough room in the car for Michelle. She had been left with relatives in California. For years, the prosecutor alleges, Prentice lied to relatives who asked about Michelle. Michelle's brother will testify about the last time he saw her, in July 1969, when he was 6 years old. "The door opens and in comes his sister Michelle," said prosecutor Yellin. "And she's trying to climb up in his bed, and she's saying, 'Hide me, hide me.' And Richie says that his mother, the defendant, came in, took Michelle out of there." Michelle's father, Richard Pulsifer, eventually hired a private investigator. The Orange County District Attorney's Office then reviewed the case, filing charges against Kent and Prentice in 2004. While in jail, Kent called his son Jamie. "He told him that he buried Michelle's body -- he buried that little girl -- in Williams Canyon here in Orange County," said Yellin in court Monday. Kent died of natural causes before the first trial, which ended with a hung jury in 2007. "That statement -- 'I buried her in the canyon' -- did not come from her mouth," said defense attorney Ken Norelli. "Donna Prentice did not have anything to do with the disappearance of that child." The defense told jurors Prentice was a loving, nurturing mother under the control of an extremely abusive man, and paralyzed by fear. "This case will be all about whether or not she should have not gone and had the courage and the strength to find out where her daughter was, because she didn't," said Norelli. "And that does not make her a murderer of her child." Prentice faces a maximum of five years to life in prison if convicted, following sentencing guidelines that were in place in the 1960s when Michelle disappeared. http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/local/orange_county&id=6498775

Monday, November 10, 2008 Prosecutor: Mom lied for 39 years about daughter's vanishing Defense attorney portrays Donna Prentice, accused of girl's killing, as loving mom abused by violent boyfriend. By LARRY WELBORN The Orange County Register SANTA ANA – The mother of a chubby-faced 3-year-old girl who went missing in 1969 engaged in nearly "four decades of deception" about what happened to the toddler, and now she should be held responsible for the child's murder, an Orange County prosecutor told a jury here today. Donna Prentice suddenly moved with her new boyfriend to Illinois in July 1969 a few days after her daughter Michelle Pulsifer disappeared from a Huntington Beach home, Deputy District Attorney Larry Yellin told a jury in opening statements of Prentice's murder trial During the ensuing 38 years, Yellin contended, Prentice told a variety of lies about what happened to her daughter, including that she was being raised by her boyfriend's mother, was being raised by a family in Canada, and that she was doing well in school. But in reality, Yellin insisted, Prentice and her boyfriend, Michael Kent, murdered the girl for unknown reasons sometime around the 4th of July, 1969, and then they quickly moved to Illinois, along with their two young sons from separate earlier relationships, and a family dog and two cats. Little Michelle was not in the car on that trip, Yellin said, and has never been since. But defense attorney Ken Norelli claimed in his opening statement that Prentice was a "loving, caring and nurturing mother" who never caused any harm to her children. Kent, however, Norelli insisted, was "an extremely violent and dangerous man" who was abusive to every woman and child in his life. It was Kent, Norelli told the jury, who killed Michelle and then buried her body in remote Williams Canyon. Donna Prentice did not have anything to do with her daughter's disappearance, Norelli said. Norelli also told the jury that Prentice never knew what happened to daughter because she was threatened and manipulated by Kent, with whom she had an on-again, off-again relationship for several years after Michelle disappeared. She later kept silent about her daughter's whereabouts, or told different stories, Norelli contended, because she was suffering from battered woman syndrome at the hands of Kent and was "paralyzed by fear." Prentice and Kent were arrested and charged with Michelle Pulsifer's death in 2004 after a private investigator hired by the Pulsifer family found no evidence that the little girl ever existed after July 1969. Kent died in custody of liver failure in 2005 before he could be brought to trial. But before he died, he told Orange County district attorney's investigator that he had buried the little girl in Williams Canyon. Prentice, now 61, sat quietly at the counsel table with her gray hair tied back in a ponytail during the opening statements. She has remained in custody in lieu of $1 million bail since her arrest. Her first trial in 2007 ended with a hung jury, with a 10-2 vote for guilty of second-degree murder. Noble Prentice, her third husband, watched the opening statements from his seat in the courtroom gallery. Richard Pulsifer Sr., little Michelle's father, and Richard Pulsider Jr., her older brother, waited outside the courtroom, waiting to be called as witnesses. If convicted, Donna Prentice could be sentenced to five years to life in prison. The trial is expected to last about three weeks. Contact the writer: lwelborn@ocregister.com, or 714 834-3784 http://www.ocregister.com/articles/prentice-told-kent-2223793-norelli-michelle

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