Mikelle Biggs

Written on 8:47 PM by Admin

The hot pursuit to find the person who kidnapped 11-year-old Mikelle Biggs ended long ago. Now it's a waiting game for the Mesa police detectives assigned to the case, which today marks its 10th year of remaining unsolved with no trace of the girl or her remains.

Detectives Domenick Kaufman, who has been the primary detective for about six years, and Jerry Gissel, who has been on the case from the beginning, still chase the occasional lead, but now are left to wait for either technological advances in forensics or the assailant's heart to soften.

"Hopefully, the individual who did this will realize the nightmare that they're putting this family through," Gissel said. "I know this person has got to be aching to get this information out. I know, like I'm sure he knows, that he needs to clear up this before he leaves this life because it's not going to be very good for him afterwards."

When the Lindbergh Elementary School sixth-grader vanished from the street just outside her home, Mesa police heaped resources into finding her for months and the case drew national attention.

Police have followed more than 10,000 leads, rappeled down mine shafts in search of her, hypnotized witnesses, consulted with the FBI, who conducted polygraph and voice stress tests and developed a profile of the perpetrator.

At first, "Missing" fliers with her school photo saturated Mesa's high visibility areas such as doors of convenience stores, light poles at major intersections and on car windows.

And over the years, Kaufman has chased the intermittent leads, which usually are third- or fourth-hand information from either jailbirds or ex-cons.

But even those tips have slowed to a trickle, Kaufman said.

Watching enticing leads turn into dead-ends has been frustrating, but the disappointment has subsided, he said.

"There are those cases you're going to solve in a shorter period of time," Kaufman said. "This is not one of those cases. This is one that is going to take a great deal of time and everyone involved in that knows that now and has accepted that fact."

Mikelle was an artist who aspired to be a Disney animator.

Her father, Darien Biggs, described her then as "a flower child born too late."

It was a little before 6 p.m. on Jan. 2, 1999, when Mikelle heard the bells of an ice cream truck and asked her mom, Tracy Biggs, for money.

Mikelle and her younger sister, Kimber, then 9, went to the corner of El Moro and Toltec to wait for the ice cream truck, Gissel said.

Kimber got cold and went back to their home four doors away on El Moro to get a jacket.

A neighbor driving by saw Mikelle standing alone on the corner under the street lamp with her sister's bicycle.

Police still have the pink and purple bicycle, which has "Wild Style" etched on the chain guard and white tires. It is now wrapped in clear plastic and leaning against a wall in an evidence vault with other bikes.

Tracy Biggs sent Kimber back outside to fetch her sister.

"When Kimber returns, Mikelle is no longer there. The bike is a little bit closer to the house but it's laying on its side with the wheel still spinning," Gissel said.

Kimber picked up the bike and went home, but her mother almost immediately began searching for Mikelle, calling friends and neighbors and then police.

Investigators later re-enacted Kimber's steps with her to determine how long she was gone from Mikelle.

"We're talking about 90 seconds or so," Gissel said.

Police dogs picked up her scent but lost it within a few feet, leading investigators to believe she was placed into a vehicle and driven away, Gissel said.

Gissel said every ice cream vendor and ice cream truck owner in the area was cleared and no one other than Mikelle reported hearing the bells.

Investigators found the two quarters her mother gave her, though.

"They were obviously thrown to get away from who her attacker was," Gissel said.

Certain that Mikelle is dead, the Biggs family buried a white casket on Jan. 2, 2004, and said goodbye.

Darien Biggs said then that he believed he knew who the killer was.

He declined to comment for this story.

Kaufman and Gissel said they haven't focused on any single person, but they have a short list of "people that possibly could have done this."

And they also keep tabs of the whereabouts of everyone on the list.

"We don't want to prematurely judge or rush to judgment on something until we have everything necessary to go forward with the prosecution. We get one shot at this to get this case right so I would rather sit back and wait for everything to fall into place," Kaufman said.

He's also confident that if the assailant's conscience doesn't get the best of him, then advances in forensic technology, which happen exponentially, will help to break the case open.

Gissel said he doesn't want to wait for the technology.

"I want this person to come forward and get this thing off their chest," he said, "and allow this nightmare to stop for the Biggs family."

Editor’s note, May 16: A “20-20” TV special on May 15 has boosted interest in this Tribune story, which first ran in January of this year.