UPDATE: Christopher Michael McAmis Recieves 15 Years To Life In Prison For the 2001 Murder Of Lynsie Ekelund

FULLERTON, Calif. – The mother of a Southern California woman who vanished almost 10 years ago said Saturday a bracelet found on recently unearthed remains belonged to her daughter.

Nancy Ekelund of Fullerton told The Associated Press that she had met with a coroner's investigator and instantly recognized the gold-link bracelet she had given as a present to her daughter Lynsie Ekelund, a 20-year old Fullerton College student who disappeared in 2001.

"I gave it to her when she was 10 years old," Ekelund said. "I still wear the exact same bracelet."

Authorities believe the remains uncovered this week are those of Lynsie Ekelund. Nancy Ekelund said coroner's officials were expected to formally confirm the identity of the body next week.

Christopher McAmis is suspected of strangling her and burying her in a canyon 50 miles north of Los Angeles in Santa Clarita, where he directed investigators to look, Los Angeles County sheriff's officials said.

McAmis said he used a tractor to dig a 4-foot grave in the canyon where he had done construction work, officials said.

Lynsie Ekelund vanished after going to San Diego with McAmis and two fellow Fullerton College students on Feb. 17, 2001, authorities said.

McAmis had been considered a person of interest in Ekelund's disappearance but was not arrested until last week. The 31-year-old Fullerton construction worker was charged with murder and remained jailed without bail.

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November 05, 2010|By Sam Allen, Nicole Santa Cruz and Christopher Goffard, Los Angeles Times

After nearly a decade of steadfast denials, three interrogations and two inconclusive polygraph tests, the man who last saw 20-year-old Lynsie Ekelund alive led detectives to a tree-dotted Santa Clarita hillside last week and indicated where to start digging. He had done a construction job there, police said, and it was where he had buried her.

Tearing into the hillside with a backhoe Wednesday, investigators unearthed a blue sneaker. They got on their knees and continued searching with small shovels and handheld buckets. Under several feet of dirt, they found bones.
Christopher McAmis, 31, an unemployed construction worker with a young family, had long maintained that he dropped the Fullerton College student off near her suburban northern Orange County home on the morning of Feb. 17, 2001, after she joined him on a trip to San Diego.

But Ekelund, a hazel-eyed journalism student who lived with her mother in Placentia and was partially paralyzed from a childhood car accident, was not seen again. With her disabilities, family members thought it unlikely that she would run away and be able to survive on her own. She didn't drive, and had little money with her.

Though searches of his house and car yielded no hard evidence, investigators were convinced that McAmis, of Fullerton, was involved in her disappearance.

"For many years we were often in a place of 'Yes, you did,' 'No, I didn't,' 'Yes, you did,' 'No, I didn't,' " Placentia Police Det. Corinne Loomis said.

Last Wednesday, detectives confronted McAmis with fresh evidence, including enhanced footage from ATM cameras that contradicted his statement that he had driven up Rose Drive in Placentia and gone home after dropping her off, police said.

"The statements that he made were laid against the information we had and it didn't match up," Loomis said, adding that detectives confronted him "in a way that made him realize he had nowhere to go."

As Loomis watched the interrogation through a window, she said the man who had always maintained his innocence uttered a sentence that stunned her: "I might as well tell you."

In a confession that Loomis described as "unemotional" and "matter-of-fact," McAmis said he attempted to rape Ekelund at his Whittier apartment and strangled her in the struggle, then drove her body more than 50 miles to a Santa Clarita construction site where he had worked with his father and dug the grave with a backhoe, police said.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — A man has been charged with killing a 20-year-old friend after trying to rape her in his Los Angeles apartment nearly a decade ago.

The district attorney's office said Friday that 31-year-old Christopher McAmis is being held on $1 million bail in the death of Lynsie Ekelund in February 2001.

Prosecutors say after an evening out with her and two friends, McAmis dropped off the other women at their homes and took Ekelund to his apartment where he tried to rape her.

Prosecutors say he killed her and disposed of her body. Her mother reported her missing.

Police investigated to no avail.

In 2008, the Orange County district attorney's office reopened the case. McAmis was arrested Wednesday at his Fullerton home.
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McAmis has an arraignment date set for November 30.

A former Whittier resident made his first court appearance in the 2001 killing of a Fullerton College student.
Christopher McAmis, 31, was scheduled for an arraignment Tuesday at Whittier Superior Court, but it was continued to Jan. 20, 2011.

The District Attorney's Office earlier charged McAmis with one count of murder with the special circumstance allegation that he killed 20-year-old Lynsie Leigh Ekelund of Placentia while trying to rape her at his Whittier apartment on Feb. 17, 2001.

Placentia police said McAmis, who now lives in Fullerton, confessed to the killing after he was arrested Oct. 29.

He led police to the 29000 block of Bouquet Canyon Road in Santa Clarita, where skeletal remains later identified as Ekelund's were found. Detectives said he worked at a construction site there in 2001.
McAmis' wife, Kim, was in the courtroom on Tuesday. Also present was Ekelund's mother, Nancy.

The two women later met outside the courtroom and talked briefly. Nancy Ekelund also hugged Kim McAmis and a couple other people from McAmis' group.

Kimberly Keith thought what would make Kim McAmis feel better was to meet her friend Nancy Ekelund, so she approached the younger woman.

"I'm sure it helped the wife because she probably thought Nancy hates her," Keith said.

"That's not Nancy. ... She was nothing but love to her. To know Nancy is to know Lynsie.

Kim McAmis told Nancy Ekelund she's in shock and had no idea, according to Keith. She also mentioned she has a little girl.
"Nancy said, 'So do I, so you understand.'"

Ed Winter, spokesman for the Los Angeles County Department of the Coroner, said the cause of death for Lynsie Ekelund is still under investigation. He said she was identified using dental records.

It was a missing person case for years. McAmis was the last person who saw the young woman.

Authorities said McAmis picked up Lynsie Ekelund and two other female friends on Feb. 16, 2001, then drove to a nightclub in San Diego.

On Feb. 17, he dropped off the two girls at their homes, then allegedly drove to Whittier with Lynsie Ekelund, where he allegedly killed her.

Once McAmis admitted killing Ekelund in Whittier, the case was handed over to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office.

Keith met Lynsie Ekelund when she worked at Friends Christian School in Yorba Linda. Lynsie Ekelund was then in 7th grade.

"She was paralyzed in an accident. That girl was a protector of everybody who got picked (on)," Keith said. She described Lynsie Ekelund as "absolute sunshine."

Keith said a memorial service for Lynsie Ekelund will be held Dec. 18 at Placentia Presbyterian Church.

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Keith met Lynsie Ekelund when she worked at Friends Christian School in Yorba Linda. Lynsie Ekelund was then in 7th grade.

"She was paralyzed in an accident. That girl was a protector of everybody who got picked (on)," Keith said. She described Lynsie Ekelund as "absolute sunshine."

I'm not clear on who was paralyzed...Was it Lynsie or Kimberly Keith? Anybody know? It must be Kimberly...Surely he didn't try to rape a paralyzed girl...

It was Lynsie.

But Ekelund, a hazel-eyed journalism student who lived with her mother in Placentia and was partially paralyzed from a childhood car accident, was not seen again.

Thanks, BJ...I don't know how I missed that when reading earlier...It just makes this crime even more horrendous!

May 3 2012

On April 5, 2002, Chris McAmis sat in a cramped interview room at the Placentia police station. Facing the baby-faced, 23-year-old Whittier resident with spiky, jelled hair was Detective David Douglas, who had a few questions about the disappearance of 20-year-old Fullerton College student Lynsie Ekelund. McAmis told the detective that after a trip to San Diego with Ekelund and others, he'd dropped the victim off near her suburban Placentia home in the early-morning hours of Feb. 17, 2001.

Douglas wasn't buying his story. "Did you bury her somewhere?" he asked in a soft voice.

"No," McAmis responded, maintaining eye contact with the detective.

"If she was dead, do you think you would tell me?" Douglas asked.

Chris nodded his head.

"Why would you do that?"

"Because it's the right thing to do."

But McAmis didn't do the right thing until eight years later, when in 2010, he finally confessed to strangling Ekelund and led investigators to her bones. Throughout those years, because Ekelund was technically a missing person, police declined to divulge many details about the case, and little was known about McAmis, other than that he was the last person known to have seen the young woman. But with the 32-year-old killer now set to begin a sentence of 15 years to life in state prison, Placentia detectives granted the Weekly access to tapes of McAmis' interrogation and confession.

"People said he had a very dark side and he was troubled," says Detective Bryce Angel, who was present during the confession. "He had some family issues in the past where he may have been, at the very least, emotionally abused."

Before befriending Ekelund in 2000, McAmis had dated Heather Rockwell, who sought a restraining order against him after he destroyed several toys she had given him, and then spread them across her lawn. After one woman he dated dumped him for another man, a miffed McAmis set up email accounts under various aliases to harass her. "I didn't have any friends that could back me up and say, 'You shouldn't have done that, Chris,'" McAmis told police.

During the investigation, Douglas interviewed a 21-year-old ex-girlfriend of McAmis, Ivy Kwan, who in front of the police maintained a seemingly naive demeanor and downplayed questions about her ex-boyfriend's temper. "Have you guys thought about other possibilities?" Kwan asked detectives when they told her they suspected McAmis of murdering Ekelund. "Maybe [Lynsie] got kidnapped after she was dropped off."

Later, detectives put Kwan and McAmis in the same room. "Listen, baby, they have no evidence whatsoever," she told him, seemingly unaware of the hidden camera. "The only thing they can do to take you to jail is manipulate you to say you did it."

For eight more years, McAmis continued to deny killing Ekelund. Then, Placentia police enlisted the help of Orange County district attorney investigator Larry Montgomery, a clever and meticulous cold-case investigator. On Oct. 27, 2010, Placentia police arrested McAmis at his Fullerton home and took him to the Fullerton police station, where Montgomery, a slender man with well-coifed white hair and a business suit, was waiting in an 8-foot-by-10-foot room.

Angel brought a handcuffed McAmis into the room. Now overweight, with thinning, gray-flecked hair, McAmis sat with slumped shoulders, occasionally uttering a loud grunt, as if to clear his throat. Montgomery took the suspect back to the night of Ekelund's disappearance. McAmis had previously told police that because he dropped Ekelund off two houses away from her home, someone else could have kidnapped her.

"You didn't walk her to her front door," Montgomery reasoned. "That could be true. Most guys would make damn sure she got home. But that could be you. [But] it's a red flag."

However, Montgomery told McAmis, investigators had looked at footage captured by a bank security-camera across the street from Ekelund's house, and what it saw—or failed to see—suggested McAmis was lying. "In fact, your truck did not go by that night," Montgomery said. "It wasn't there."

McAmis had insisted that, after dropping off Ekelund, he'd gone back to his house in Whittier and promptly fell asleep. But Montgomery produced damning evidence to the contrary: a credit-card transaction totaling $33.08 at a gas station in Santa Clarita—a good hour or so north of Orange County—on the day Ekelund disappeared. The card was in McAmis' name.

Investigators knew he operated heavy equipment for his father's construction company. In February 2001, the company had been working on a job at LARC Ranch, a sprawling rural facility for developmentally disabled adults, located in the rugged hills of Santa Clarita. Although McAmis' father had told investigators his son wasn't working that site, a foreman insisted McAmis had been working there throughout the month, except weekends.

"You're not up there working that day," said Montgomery. "You're up there for something the day she disappeared. That's a big red flag."

Suddenly, McAmis said he might need a lawyer.

"It's up to you," Montgomery responded.

At this point, Angel, who had been silently observing the interrogation, spoke up. "Nobody likes to be labeled the monster," he told McAmis. "In this case, that's the way it's pointing. Only you have the other side of the story. Nobody is going to be able to speak for you. That's why we're here now."

McAmis took a quick breath and, after a decade of lies, finally confessed to killing Ekelund. It all happened, he said, because she would have gotten in trouble had she gone home late. She insisted on spending the night at his Whittier apartment and sleeping in his bed. McAmis said he tried to kiss her, but she elbowed him in the chest.

Scorned, he went to the kitchen and began gulping vodka. He returned to his room, where Ekelund pretended to sleep. "I pulled her pants down and tried to put my penis inside her," he said. She grabbed the phone and threatened to call the police, he recalled, then slammed the receiver across his face.

"Being drunk, it enraged me," McAmis told police. "It set me on fire. I grabbed her, threw her onto my bed, got her into a headlock. I just thought she was going to pass out, and I ended up killing her."

Police believe McAmis may have kept Ekelund's corpse, which stiffened with rigor mortis, in his apartment for up to two days. Eventually, he wrapped her in a green blanket, carried her down the stairs of his second-floor unit and loaded her into the extended cab of his pickup. He told police he bumped her head as he hurriedly put her in the vehicle. At the Santa Clarita construction site, he dug her grave using a skip loader; then, after driving his truck into the meadow, he unloaded and dumped her body into the hole during his lunch break.

Until his arrest two years ago, McAmis occasionally granted interviews. In 2003, he met with documentary filmmakers about Ekelund's disappearance. Sitting on a couch next to ex-girlfriend Kwan, he maintained his innocence. The 40-minute segment never aired, but just before the sound cuts out, a cheerful Kwan came chillingly close to describing the actual murder.

"There's so many people abducted," she insisted. "You say they're missing. But they could be raped and buried in a mountain. How the hell could anyone find them?"

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At what was expected to be a preliminary hearing, the accused murderer of Fullerton College student Lynsie Ekelund pleaded guilty today. Christopher Michael McAmis, 32, will serve a sentence of 15 years to life for murdering 20-year-old Ekelund in 2001 at his Whittier apartment.

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what he did to her!