MOTHER’S DAILY EFFORT FAILS TO FIND MISSING DAUGHTER
By Mike Stuckey (Lodi News Sentinel, January 29, 1981)
“On Wednesday, Norma Skelton made the drive from Galt to Lodi to buy a birthday cake for her daughter Gail. “She would have been 27 years old or she is 27 years old today,” Mrs. Skelton said during a brief visit to the News-Sentinel.
Mrs. Skelton does not know what to believe because she has not seen her daughter for more than three months. Gail Skelton vanished on September 26 from a party at Herman and Helen’s Marina on Empire Tract, some 14 miles southwest of Lodi at the western end of Eight Mile Road. Substantial clues to 5 foot 2 inch, 115 pound woman’s whereabouts have yet to be found.
Sheriff’s detectives have scoured the area from which the young woman disappeared and they have talked to numerous potential witnesses. They have found no trace of the woman or the 1978 blue two-door Toyota she owned when she turned up missing.
“We don’t know,” says sheriff’s detective commander Dave Derksen. “We have no idea” what happened to Gail Skelton.
The closest that detective have come to a break in the case developed recently. With the help of a hypnotist, detectives produced a composite drawing of a man who may be connected in some way to the disappearance of Gail Skelton.
“We’ve got a composite drawing of the last person to have seen her,” Derksen says. He pauses. “Supposedly,” he is careful to add.
The information for the composite drawing came from an employee at the marina. The employee, a young woman who came to work as Miss Skelton was supposed to be leaving, told investigators that she subject of the drawing was a patron at the bar.
“They said they saw him around there earlier,” Derksen said. While detectives had been aware of this information for some time, “we got a better detailed composite of him by using a hypnotist.”
But the composite drawing—of a white man, 25-30 years old, with dark hair, over 6 feet tall and thin build – hasn’t been much help to detectives who are working the case, Derksen said. “We can’t identify him.”
The mystery of the case is heightened by the fact that Miss Skelton’s fiancée, 30 year old Pat Malone, disappeared June 19 from a boat on the Delta. Malone’s body was recovered from the water near where his boat had been discovered, 11 miles west of Lodi, after an eight day search.
Malone had a high level of alcohol in his system at the time of his death, according to the coroner’s report, and authorities theorize that his drowning was an accident. ****
There is no reason to connect the cases, investigators say, but they admit that the two incidents are surrounded by “a lot of strangeness,” in the words of Detective Nancy Sumers.
Perhaps the most tireless investigator in the case has been Mrs. Skelton herself. Mrs. Skelton has spent days searching the Delta by boat and by car since her daughter disappeared. She has looked over the roads and levees in the area. She has taped bamboo poles together and poked them into the water near the bridge from King Island to Empire Tract. Mrs. Skelton and detectives believe that Gail’s car may have gone out of control and plunged into the water somewhere.
Mrs. Skelton also has spent a great deal of time talking to her daughter’s friends, business associates, anybody who may be able to produce a new lead. She has done some of her own looking into the new facet of the case, that the man in the composite drawing may have had something to do with Gail’s disappearance.
“This guy came into the marina and was sitting at the bar harassing her or wanting her to go places and she refused,” Mrs. Skelton says. She claims that the hypnotist’s entry into the case has brought out another detail. The young woman interviewed by the hypnotist reported that Gail, “had a few drinks but she was not sloppy drunk as had earlier been reported,” says Mrs. Skelton.
With new details in hand, Mrs. Skelton says, “I’ve been running the rivers and I’ve called everybody and showed everybody this (composite) picture. Nobody seems to know him. Nobody wants to talk,” She adds with frustration.
Stress on the Skelton family – Gail’s mother, her father, her two brothers and a sister—has increased with every week that the young woman’s fate remains uncertain, Mrs. Skelton says.
Gail “was getting over” Malone’s death when she vanished, according to Mrs. Skelton, and the family does not believe the woman disappeared of her own accord. She had some problems to work out, Mrs. Skelton says, but “no more than normal or anybody else….nothing pressing financially.”
“She didn’t have to answer to anybody. She didn’t have half the problems married people have…this is all wrong for her to go off and not let anybody know.”
Gail’s passion was the Delta. She and Malone, who lived together on a houseboat, “were on that water all the time,” Mrs. Skelton recalls.
Malone and Gail, ardent foes of the Peripheral Canal, were involved in the development of a project known as “Irish Isles,” in the Stockton Deep Water Channel, described by Mrs. Skelton as a tourist attraction of sorts.
Malone’s pride in his Irish heritage became a part of the couple’s wedding plans--- they were to be married on St. Patrick’s Day of this year. “Their future was really going to be fantastic,” says Mrs. Skelton.
But now the future for Mrs. Skelton has become a series of uncertain days. Although she is troubled by heart problems, she continues to keep in touch with sheriff’s detectives, newspapers, almost anyone who might help her find Gail.
“I want my daughter,” she says. “I want to know what’s happened to her even if she’s in the bottom of the river.”
Persons who believe they may have information on the young woman’s whereabouts should call sheriff’s detectives in Stockton at 944-2141. “---------------
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