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Inmate Note Nets Bones

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The Associated Press

Published: February 1, 2009

COLUMBIA, S.C. - Monica Caison figured it was worth a shot, so she wrote a letter, one paragraph, to the man on death row for kidnapping and killing Alice Donovan during a two-week, 2,300-mile crime spree.

"You say you want to do the right thing," wrote Caison, the founder of a group that searches for missing people. "I'm here and I'm listening."

She received Chadrick Fulks' reply two months later: a map, color photos of the area where he says he left Donovan's body six years ago, and instructions to look where searchers had not ventured.

Donovan's daughter Angie Gilchrist was skeptical. This wasn't the first time Fulks and co-defendant Brandon Basham had sent people on fruitless searches for their victims' bodies.

Just ask investigators who spent Thanksgiving 2002 looking through another patch of woods for Donovan and found nothing. Or the family of Samantha Burns, the 19-year-old Marshall University student who disappeared a week before Donovan from a Huntington, W.Va., mall not far from her home.

Caison, founder of Community United Effort - Center for Missing Persons, thought this time would be different. She had written to Fulks on federal death row in Terre Haute, Ind., after one of Donovan's daughters approached her at a fundraiser marking the sixth anniversary of her mother's disappearance. She was carrying a letter the convicted killer had written to a local newspaper saying he'd help find the body.

Donovan, a 44-year-old mother of two, last was seen pulling into a Wal-Mart parking lot in Conway, just north of Myrtle Beach, in November 2002.

Her kidnapping - captured on a security camera - and killing were Fulks and Basham's last major crimes during a two-week spree that started when they broke out of a jail in Madisonville, Ky.

When Fulks' response to her letter arrived two weeks ago, Caison didn't even stop at home before driving 75 miles from Wilmington, N.C., and organizing a search.

"I knew he was steering us the right direction," Caison said this week as the search wrapped up. "His instructions were very specific. He told me, 'You have to push forward. You have to go deeper. Go into the thicket, no one wants to search there.'"

On Jan. 18, after about seven hours of searching, dozens of volunteers and four dogs found bones in thick brush and thorns about 150 feet from a dirt road on the North Carolina line.

DNA tests are under way.

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