Self-employed milk-man Karsten Heim-burger doesn't usually pay attention to the news. So when a friend asked him last week if he wanted to join volunteers searching for "the missing van Dam girl," his response was, "Who is that?" That would make Heim-burger unique among his fellow Californians―and most Americans, for that matter―who for the past month have been obsessed with the fate of a 7-year-old Girl Scout kidnapped in the middle of the night from her pink-and-purple bedroom in an upscale San Diego suburb. As fate would have it, the man who says he "knew absolutely nothing about the case" would be the one to put an end to the agonizing mystery of Danielle van Dam's whereabouts. Heim-burger and a dozen other volunteers had spent the better part of last Wednesday combing through a trash-strewn lot off a two-lane road southeast of the van Dam home when he spotted a small, badly decomposed body lying next to a clutch of oak trees. "It sort of stunned me to see it. It looked like someone had carried it over there and placed it down, rather than thrown it from a car," Heimburger, 32, told NEWSWEEK. The body was adorned with the plastic necklace and one of the Mickey Mouse earrings Danielle had been wearing on the night she was abducted, but was otherwise so unrecognizable that it took medical examiners another 24 hours to positively identify it.
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