Honolulu Star-Bulletin from Honolulu, Hawaii • 4

I A4 Honolulu, November 18, 1990 The Sunday Star-Bulletin Advertiser- Dianies Her disappearance changed lives forever i was missme was her FROM PAGE ONE by this case. -A i The story begins and ends at the Rosalie Woodson Dance Academy, where for 32 years mothers have been bringing their daughters so the little girls could learn to be ballerinas. Rosalie Woodson said she had all five of the Suzuki girls as students Karen, Susan, twins Pam and Pat, and the youngest, Diane. "All rf tham woro liVo HancrVitora ting into," Gibo said. 'All these searches, we covered the area.

Some sites we went oyer four or five times." They turned up nothing. But Gibo never thought about 'giving up. This was for his neighbors, his friends. "We talk about ohana. They're our neighbors and you're supporting them.

It's something natural, you're doing this to help them. They needed our help and we had enough caring people supporting us, which made our work much easier," said Gibo, who retired from city government as purchasing administrator in 1986. "I found out the island of Oahu very much has the ohana spirit, a very caring community. The support I got from the community manpower, donated services and equipment, contributions it's amazing." There has never been an outpouring of community concern like that demonstrated for Diane Suzuki. Gibo knows why.

1 "Diane relates to almost all our fam I me daughters I wish I had," Wood i Is son said in an interview, Friday. "They were all outstanding dancers. keys. Her car was found in the parking lot, with the back door unlocked and some ly-chee still in the car. At 5 p.m..

the Suzukis notified police that Diane was missing. The dance instructor, reflecting on the past five years, said, "It was very hard, very difficult. The pressure and intensity of the whole situation was very overwhelming. But you just go on and hang on to hope she's all right and coming back and you'll see her again. Only that got me through those first few years.

But it was very hard. "She always made you feel you were someone special, not just like a little kid," the dance teacher said. "She was just so giving. She always listened to me." Peter and Sadie Gibo are the close friends and next-door neighbors of Masaharu and Yuri Suzuki, Diane's tn ilies. She was Diane possessed the most talent," Woodson said.

Diane took ballet, tap and jazz classes. She danced in the "Swan Lake" production featuring Japanese prima ballerina Yoko Morishita and in local "Nutcracker" productions. She assisted Woodson and taught her own classes for four or five years. In July 1985, Woodson's acad- like the ail-American gal. Verv active in school.

She had i V. ii ill' i-t irtinnnm'-'Tlittmiliiiifriiirii good grades, articipated in a ot of extra-curricular activities, Earticipated in er church and Advertiser tile photo Woodson The building that houses the Rosalie Woodson Dance Studio in Aiea. the YBA (Young Buddhists Association). She was a UH danc er. She got into emy had just presented its annual dance production.

To celebrate, Woodson was treating her teachers to a weekend at the Turtle Bay Hilton on the North Shore. Woodson and others left the studio about lunchtime on Saturday, July 6. "We were waiting for them at the Turtle Bay when we got that call." The news that Diane disappeared after teaching at the studio caused nervous parents to pull their children from Woodson's classes, and her business suffered. Over five years, she worked to build her classes back up, only to be parents. Peter Gibo said they had watched Diane grow from a toddler into a "young lady with a lot of potential." On that Saturday, Peter Gibo was golfing when Diane was first noticed missing.

When he returned home, he joined a small group of family and friends who searched the dance academy building about 6 p.m. At 2 a.m. Sunday, Peter Gibo and a dozen others asked the building owner to open all the offices in the building so they could check once again. They looked for two hours. Gibo himself searched the second-floor studio and looked in the back, "where the police are now focusing their investigation," and went into the bathroom.

Nothing unusual was apparent, he said Friday. For the next year, Gibo was the leader of search parties that scoured valleys and mountains and shoreline up and down Oahu and back again. More than 1,000 volunteers turned out the first big search, and others kept going out nearly every weekend. "We had a complete topographical map of Oahu and marked each area and sent the team out. We studied the terrain to see what we were get- i Diane to finish in the second-floor studio at 3 p.m.

so they could ride together to the Turtle Bay. (She is not named here because she is a witness in the case.) "I was in the back room near the stereo and watching her teach, and then I went downstairs about 5 minutes to 3," she said in an interview in 1985. In an interview Friday, the dance instructor, who still teaches at the dance academy, recalled that she went to the academy's ground-level office to pick up a few things, talked about 10 minutes to a friend who phoned from the Mainland, and went back to the second-floor studio to meet Diane. "By the time I went upstairs (about her class had already been let out," she said. She sensed something was wrong right away "I knew she wouldn't just run off and not tell me." By 4 p.m., the academy secretary was calling the Suzuki home to check if Diane might have arrived there and told the family Diane was missing.

Diane's bag was intact with her purse, shoes and jazz slippers. All that were out here practically every single day. They've searched and searched and searched," she said. Just this past September, she finished remodeling the dance studio's bathroom, which had been examined by investigators five years ago. She put in new tile on the floor and walls and repainted; on Wednesday, police "started tearing up the bathroom." "That's why I'm so angry.

I've finally gotten over the hurt, and it starts all over again. Now the wound is opened." When she heard the police were now calling the case a murder, "it was like somebody put a knife through my heart," Woodson said. "The logistics of it doesn't make sense. But if they know something that will bring this to a head, I'm all for it" A young dance instructor who had just finished teaching her own dance class at the Rosalie Woodson Dance Academy was the first to realize Diane was missing. The dance teacher, who was 15 in 1985, was waiting that Saturday for UMlCb.

tjll nan Hiao looking forward to a summer study in modern dance. So she had a lot of potential and a lot of things going for her, and she was a beautiful, caring person. You doq't mind to have her as your That is why her disappearance left such a big void in so many people's lives. "My personal feeling is not anger, but the sadness that it took someone so beautiful. Never gave a chance," Gibo said.

Detectives in the Honolulu Police Department continue working on the case and say they have a "viable They hope to bring charges when the investigation is completed. On Friday, Homicide Lt. Gary Dias said what many had thought, but didn't want to believe, about what happened to Diane Suzuki on July 6, 1985: "We believe she was murdered in the dance studio." hit with a new wave of parental anxiety because of last week's search. "Parents are calling the police department and asking if it's safe to come to the studio, and the police are saying it's probably the safest place on the island," Woodson said. "Teachers make sure students go out to meet their parents and don't wait alone.

Parents are instructed to pick up their children on time. Parents are waiting in their cars in the parking lot." Woodson described the disruption in her life, in 1985 and again last week. "For the first six weeks, detectives Isle inimrfer inniysteirieg still. i unsolved A dozen cases of killings, missing persons are 7 If- '1 I I v. 1 ft 4 By Chris Neil and Mark Matsunaga Advertiser Staff Writers Diane Suzuki's disappearance is one of more than a dozen baffling and disturbing cases of missing or murdered people that remain unsolved in Hawaii police files.

The victims men, women and children include: Roiti Dias, an 8-year-old girl abducted while walking to school in Halawa on May 27, 1980. Her body was found later that day, throat slashed, miles away in a culvert near Waimea Beach Park on the North Shore. Police released descriptions of a man and a woman they sought in the case, but no one was arrested. I John L. Klein, 28, and his wife Michelle, 25, visitors from Encino, who were slain in March 1981 while hiking on Kauai.

The couple's car was found near the base of a Li Dias Wailua trail. An intensive search turned up their bodies off the trail. Each had been shot several times with a pistol. The case attracted exten-' sive news coverage, both here and on the Mainland, but, despite the assistance of the FBI, the case was never solved. Richard Blevins, 30, and Scott Hardie, 28, both of Kaneohe, both Vietnam veterans, who went hiking in cen- walking his dog spotted her body at the bottom of a roadside embankment on Tantalus.

Investigators searched the home and car of a police sergeant in connection with the case, but no arrests were made and the case was never solved. Catherine Schaible, 64, the "Tree Lady" of Hale-iwa, who was found fatally injured near the monkey pod tree where she lived in September 1983. Police believed she may have been deliberately hit by a car. Kimberley M. Green-how, 36, of Sunset Beach, was last seen alive leaving the Hawaii Yacht Club, on April 3, 1984.

Apparently suffocated, her body was found along Ku-nia Road the next morning. Her car was found a few miles away in the Village Park subdivision. A man had been seen speaking to her at her car, but no one was ever arrested. Jiezhao Li, 12, disappeared Feb. 11, 1988.

The fourth-grader left her family's Nuuanu duplex to sell chili tickets for a class trip to the Big Island. The 4-foot-ll, 70-pound girl was last seen between 4:45 p.m. and 5 p.m. at the 7-Eleven store at Nuuanu and South Kuakini Street. Posters begging for information on Jiezhao's whereabouts now yellow in the sun in Chinatown, Robin Bayliss, 26, was found unconscious at the Wai-pahu warehouse where she worked as the secretary and office manager on Aug.

23, 1988. She had been raped and stabbed repeatedly. Bayliss had been raised in Canada and moved to Hawaii only a few months before her death. Her family is still offering a $50,000 reward. Frank Thomas Ramos, 28, of Waialua, who was last seen the night of Feb.

14, 1989, while riding his bicycle at Sunset Beach. Another North Shore resident, Joseph Earl "Bully" Furtado, 30, disappeared on a trip to the Big Island on April 4, and a search there turned up neither him nor his car. The disappearances were linked in court to the conviction of a North Shore cocaine dealer. Serial murders: On Jan. 15, 1986, the almost nude body of Leilehua High School student Regina Sakamoto was found floating off the Keehi Lagoon shoreline near the Honolulu Airport reef runway.

She had been raped and strangled. The circumstances reminded homicide detectives of another case, that of Vicki Gail Purdy, a 25-year-old Mililani woman whose body had been found in the same lagoon some 7V4 months earlier. She too had been raped and strangled. Investigators initially tended to dismiss the similarities as coincidence. Purdy was last seen in Waikiki the night before her body was found; Sakamoto was last seen in Waipahu after having missed a bus to school.

Then, on Feb. 1, 1986, three youths crabbing along a drainage canal in Mapunapuna stumbled on a bundle wrapped in blue plastic sheeting floating near the shore. They discovered the decomposing body of 21-year-old Denise Hughes, the wife of a Pearl Harbor sailor. Her hands were tied behind her back. She had been strangled.

Maj. Chester Hughes, then head of the HPD Criminal Investigation Division, announced on Feb. 5 that he had formed a task force to investigate the similarities among the three murders. In April 1986, a road crew found another woman's body below an H-l freeway overpass in Waipahu. Again, the woman's hands were tied behind her back.

She was identified as Louise Medeiros, 25, of Waipahu. She had apparently been abducted as she waited for a bus from the airport. She was three months pregnant. Finally, on May 3, the nud body of Linda Pesce, 36, was found off a dirt road at Sanii Island. Her hands were tied bef hind her back, dirt had been hastily scattered over her body and a concrete block had been placed over her back.

She had been reported a week earlier and polic had found her abandoned car on the shoulder of the H- freeway viaduct near the air port. There was speculation thf) unsolved murders of at least two other women were the handiwork of the serial killen Mayumi Gaugh, 21, disappeared Nov. 27, 1985. Her remains were found a year later in Kaif lua. And the body of HelerJ Correa, a 21-year-old mentally, disabled woman, was discov? ered in 1984 in a water-fille irrigation ditch in a Kunia cana field.

1 Although police arrested anq questioned a suspect in the fiv serial killings, he was nevei) charged and was later released) All the cases remain unsolved despite a $25,000 reward for inj formation leading to the arrest and indictment of the killer. Several cases are under re view by the Honolulu Police, Department's "unresolved ho micide team," formed by HomH cide Lt. Gary Dias in April with detectives Stephen Dung! and Clifford Rubio. The team so far has been as-j signed eight cases, Dias said He wouldn't disclose the case currently under review for fearj of jeopardizing the investiga-j tions. The detectives' work differ? from that of homicide detec- tives, who are calied to murder, scenes.

The unresolved team! re-evaluates evidence, reviews and possibly reinterviews wit nesses, and decides what new technology can be applied to1 old cases as in the disap-j pearance of Diane Suzuki. GETTING IT STRAIGHT Ramos tral Oahu on Aug. 29, 1981, and were never seen again. Their truck was found stripped near Kaena Point. Hardie's hat was found near Kipapa Stream above Mililani.

Searchers discovered thousands of marijuana plants, giving rise to speculation that the two men were murdered by growers protecting their crop. Their bodies were never found. Lisa Au, a 19-year-old Kailua hairdresser who disappeared on a rainy Thursday night in January 1982 while driving to Kailua. Her boyfriend found her car the next morning, alongside the Kailua-bound lanes of Kalanianaole Highway, mauka of Maunawili Road near the Kailua Drive-in Theatre. There were no signs of a struggle.

Au's purse, wallet, a dollar bill and some change were found on the seat of her car, as were her car keys. Her driver's license and car registration were missing. Police speculated Au may have been stopped by someone she believed was a policeman and then forced into the abductor's car. Fears intensified when police disclosed they had received reports of a man dressed as a police officer who had been stopping cars with lone female drivers. For 10 days, friends, family, volunteers and police searched for Au.

Then, on Feb. 1, a man We at The Advertiser want to correct any errors we publish. If you have a complaint about news coverage, please call the City Desk (525-8090) or write to Managing EditorNews Anne Harpham, The Advertiser, P.O. Box 3110, Honolulu, HI 96802. Sunday Star-Bulletin Advertiser 1990 by Honolulu MvwtlMf.

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