Missing teens phone home

Parents' worst fears allayed

When Edie Beyer's phone rang late Monday night, she heard the voice that had been missing for nearly five days. It was her 15year-old daughter, Alexis Anne Beyer, and the teen said she wanted to come home.

Beyer said Alexis' call led police to a home in Carson, nearly 40 miles from the teens' apartment complex in Calabasas, where authorities found Alexis and Alexandra Nicole DiMarco, 13.

When the girls disappeared from their neighboring Malibu Canyon apartments on Feb. 15, everyone feared the worse.

"I'm just so happy they're back . . . and safe," Beyer said. "I can't wait to hold her."

Officials from the Lost Hills Sheriff's Station said the teens were returned to their parents after being interviewed and examined by a doctor.

Clues left behind by the girls seem to paint a picture of a hastily planned runaway and possible abduction by an Internet predator.

An investigation into the girls' disappearance continues, police said.

"My concern is they could have been lured," Alexandra's mother, Kimberly Bradfield, said in an interview before the missing girls were located. "I believe they could have been picked up by someone with a car who is older that they met off the Internet."

Bradfield said Alexandra, an eighth-grader at Medea Creek Middle School, was being watched by her grandmother and used the excuse that she was taking out the trash in order to leave the apartment. Knowing that Alexandra was grounded and was not allowed to go outside, the grandmother followed the teen to the apartment complex garbage bin, but lost sight of her just a few minutes later.

Neither girl reportedly had money, credit cards or cellphone.

Beyer said she, too, is baffled by the girls' decision to suddenly disappear, and said it's more than a simple case of two runaway teens.

Beyer said Alexis, who is home schooled, had left a hastily written note that read: "Mommy, I love you very much. Goodbye forever."

Beyer said she had a hard time convincing the authorities her daughter's disappearance was a runaway case turned abduction.

"Even in the safest city in the United States, girls are missing and disappearing," Beyer said. "We can't write them all off as runaways."

According to Bradfield, the girls had logged onto one of their personal profile accounts on the popular Internet site MySpace.com, where they might have met someone who encouraged them to run away.

"My fear is they (were) lured by some older man on the Internet, or an older woman, who has taken them in, and I don't know if they (were) being held against their will or. . .being taken care of," Bradfield said.

Bradfield and Beyer said they knew their daughters had accounts on the website, but neither mother knew the extent to which the girls were logging on.

"Alexandra posed herself as an 18-year-old woman with a false picture on (MySpace.com)," Bradfield said.

Bradfield said she changed the passwords on her home computers to keep Alexandra off the Internet after she received phone calls from older men asking for her 13-yearold daughter.

Similarly, Beyer had removed their home computer to keep Alexis away from the site, but the mothers said the girls logged on to the site from friends' computers and accessed two entirely false personas that neither parent knew about.

Website under scrutiny

MySpace.com, a popular Internet site where guests post their online profiles, has come under fire recently by police and other youth watchdog groups because of its growing reputation as a website targeted by Internet pedophiles. Some say the site also offers a place for teens to post sexually explicit pictures.

The site contains more than 56 million registered users and this year was ranked as the eighth most popular website by comScore Media Metrix, the Chicago-based company that tracks Internet sites.

To register for the site, users need to be only 14.

Deborah Brady, senior case manager with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said MySpace.com has become an issue.

Brady said the parents need to know that their children are using the site, and she encourages anybody on the site not to post their picture or offer personal information such as a home address, a phone number or a full name.

"I think a lot of us, both adults and teens, don't realize how clever these guys can be," Brady said. "You have to be really careful about the information you share about yourself."

Ironically, Brady said she uses the site to help track lost teens because their profiles include Internet logs, better known as blogs, which are essentially online diaries. Teens often will write about their intention to run away and whom they plan to meet up with once they do.

"I don't think it's a bad thing," Brady said, "but I think kids need to be educated about using that form of communication to protect themselves. . . Especially kids under 16 who don't have a sense of the big bad world out there yet."