Stalked - By Allison Brennan Page 0,15
was stymied by the missing girl’s own parents, who had a wild party the night she went missing, later identified by this paper as a “swingers’ party” where married couples swap sex partners for an evening of drugs, drinking, and sex. Because of the delay in obtaining a guest list, incomplete statements by both Mr. and Mrs. McMahon, and the two-day storm that destroyed physical evidence, the investigation was delayed.
No one has been arrested for the crime, but sources close to the investigation indicate a search warrant has been issued for one of the McMahons’ guests who has been in police custody for two days.
The Newark office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working in close conjunction with the Newark Police Department, devoted all available agents to interview witnesses, process evidence, and search for Rachel. Media Information Officer Special Agent Dominic Theissen stated, “We are deeply saddened at the discovery of Rachel McMahon’s body late this afternoon. An autopsy and thorough investigation will be completed to ensure that justice will be swift.”
The McMahons were unavailable for comment.
The FBI confirmed that there is no connection between Rachel McMahon’s disappearance and that of Camille Todd, a twelve-year-old girl who went missing from Newark the previous week.
On the surface, the case appeared straightforward—an eleven-year-old girl had been kidnapped from her bedroom late on a Saturday night. The time of her disappearance was a bit sketchy. No one had seen her between 10:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m. Her brother told police they’d been playing games in their playroom until 10:00 p.m. when she went to her room to call her best friend. He fell asleep and woke up at 3:00 a.m. The house was quiet, he went to her room, and she wasn’t in her bed. Her friend told police, and phone records confirmed, that they’d spoken for nearly an hour, hanging up at 11:03 p.m. Rachel wanted to go over to her friend’s house that night, but the mother had forbidden it. For the first day of the investigation, local police falsely believed that Rachel had either run away or left to visit her friend. The search focused on the four blocks between the McMahon home and the Miller home.
Because of the age of the missing girl, the FBI was called more as a formality in case there was foul play. In his personal notes, Tony had written:
The local PD covered their ass by calling us, but they didn’t seriously consider her disappearance a kidnapping until they interviewed the neighbors and learned about the party the night before.
An attached newspaper article printed the day before Rachel’s body was found illustrated that this wasn’t a typical neighborhood get-together.
A neighbor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he was at the McMahons’ party Saturday night.
“We’re swingers. It’s all safe; we have rules; nothing bad has ever happened.” The neighbor, who is also married, said he’d never seen the McMahon children at the parties and assumed they were staying with relatives. “We’re consenting adults.”
The closing of one of the earlier articles, before Rachel’s body was found, seemed important to Lucy, so she wrote it down in her notebook.
Search parties have been looking for eleven-year-old Rachel for the past twenty-four hours. Notably missing from the search is her father, Aaron McMahon, who has been interviewed by both local police and the FBI regarding his daughter’s kidnapping.
What made that interesting was that the next day the newspaper reported that the mother, Pilar McMahon, was a person of interest. Both McMahons had lied to police about the nature of the party on Saturday night and whether any of their guests knew the children were home. Other inconsistencies in the McMahons’ statements had been highlighted by Tony in his own notes. He wrote:
Their daughter is missing yet they both lied about the orgy. Neither admitted, until confronted with evidence and witness statements, that they hosted a sex party for ten invited guests, but a total of fifteen people had access to the home that evening. Originally, Mr. McMahon said that it was a neighborhood BBQ, stating as much to both responding officers, the local media, and in his initial statement to the FBI. Mrs. McMahon said she thought her daughter was trying to get back at her because of an earlier argument, but the longer Rachel was missing, the more distraught she became.
The press had gone after the parents after it was leaked that they were swingers. A new article penned by Rosemary Weber appeared every morning, each one