Slain Boy’s Mother, Stepfather Try to Carry On Under Cloud of Suspicion

MISSION VIEJO — The steep slope leading down to Oso Creek has changed dramatically in the five months since 2-year-old Cecil “C.T.” Turner’s body was discovered. Work crews have cleared away the brush that cloaked the shore and rains have washed away the yellow police tape that marked the spot where the toddler was found.

“Everything has changed,” Edith Marie Wu said last week, revisiting the site where her son was found nude and smothered to death. “But this is the spot where someone put my baby.”

It has been 166 days since a search party from the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station spotted the small body beneath leaves and debris about a quarter-mile from his home.

Publicly, Orange County sheriff’s officials say they have no suspects in the crime. But Wu knows that suspicions live on in the minds of investigators and her neighbors. She and her husband, Feilong Wu, stand accused, but not charged, she says.

The couple say detectives openly accused Feilong of the slaying during marathon interrogations in the days after the toddler’s body was found.

“They even had me brainwashed for a while,” Edith Wu said. “They questioned him for 16 hours. Then they told me he did it. I asked to be alone with him and I asked, just once, straight out, ‘Did you do it? I need to know.’ And he said no, so that was the end of that.”

Feilong Wu concedes that he failed a portion of a polygraph test, but the recent immigrant from China says the questions he missed were vague or misleading, especially to someone who learned English as a second language. His wife admits that she has a “checkered past,” with a felony conviction for bad checks and other minor brushes with the law in Texas, but she hotly disputes suggestions that she had any role in her son’s death.

Along the curving residential streets that surround Oso Viejo Community Park, where the boy’s body was found, the Wus are minor celebrities. Edith Wu says people point or whisper when they see her shopping or handing out fliers seeking clues in the killing.

“They think I killed my baby. That’s what they say,” she said.

Indeed, the mind-set of residents seems to vary only between likely and certain on the topic of the Wus’ guilt. “I’m pretty sure they did it, at least one of them,” said a neighbor who was among the volunteers who searched for the toddler. “But, God, if they didn’t . . . if their boy was killed and then all this, well, that’s a horrible thing to think about.”

Parents are often among the first suspects police look at when a child is mysteriously killed, and the public’s suspicions increase if an investigation drags on and no other suspects are identified, experts say. In Colorado, for example, the December sexual assault and murder of JonBenet Ramsey, a 6-year-old beauty pageant queen, has focused a spotlight of suspicion on her parents.

In the Wus’ case, instead of shunning the spotlight, they have sought media attention, criticizing investigators for not directing their efforts to tracking down a stranger who some witnesses reported seeing in the area the day C.T. was killed. Hiring a private investigator and staging a series of news conferences, the couple have offered a variety of theories and witnesses to bolster their claim of innocence.

Donald R. Long, a Newport Beach private investigator, confers with the Wus almost every day, sharing new witness accounts about a mysterious black car seen in the area, a “semi-psychic” who may be linked to the killer and a possible plot to sell C.T. in Mexico. The leads may seem far-fetched, he says, but he calls them no more bizarre than suspecting either Edith or Feilong Wu.

“I’m 100% on them,” Long said, admitting that he did have some initial qualms about accepting the case. “I can understand the reasons the [sheriff’s detectives] looked at them. If I came onto this case today, you bet I’d be looking at Feilong. You have to look at the parents. But now, after knowing them, and hearing our witnesses, there’s no way.”

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Feilong Wu’s angular face seems hard, even harsh, on television and in news photographs, but in person his features present a quiet, polite man with a warm smile. He searches for the English words to express himself, and he admits he is often confused by his adopted country and its ways.

“This has been very hard, very painful,” he said, standing near a thick wooden cross that marks the ridge above the spot where his stepson was found. “I came here to work, to study, to raise a family.”

When asked about his relationship with C.T., he said, “He was like my own.”

Feilong Wu came to the United States in 1993 to compete for Olympic gold. A champion diver in his native China, he coached at the universities of Illinois and Texas. In Austin, he also taught a judo class and found his future wife among his students.

The two married in April of last year, and a few weeks later Feilong headed west to accept a post with the renowned Mission Viejo Nadadores diving team. Edith Wu followed in July, and the two got by on donations from dive team members while waiting for Feilong’s work papers.

The move to California gave Edith Wu a chance for a fresh start. The Virginia native had tough times in Texas, pleading guilty to felony check fraud and getting “arrested a lot,” according to Sgt. Terry Dees of the Williamson County Sheriff’s Department.

Instead of a better life, the Wus’ move to California led to tragedy. A month after Edith Wu arrived in Orange County with C.T. and her daughter, 4-year-old Bryttnie (now living with her grandparents in Texas), Edith frantically called police to report her son missing. Edith said she was sleeping and Feilong was out jogging when her daughter awakened her to say C.T. was not in his crib. The front door was ajar, she said.

A massive search was launched that August morning, with sheriff’s deputies and neighbors combing the Villa Marguerite apartment complex and the area around an adjacent ravine.

“My husband was searching in the water” in the ravine, Edith Wu told The Times that day. “He feels like because he went jogging it was his fault.”

The next afternoon, a Marine searching a slope above the creek made a grisly discovery: C.T., naked and face down, his arms at his torso and his face turned to the side.

There was no evidence that the child had been sexually assaulted, according to Lt. Ron Wilkerson, a sheriff’s spokesman. The body also showed no trauma--such as bruises or cuts--and almost a month passed before the cause of death was determined to be suffocation.

The posture of investigators changed in the hours before the body was found. Instead of huddling with the Wus, or allowing them to continue helping with the search, the couple were hustled off to sheriff’s headquarters in Santa Ana.

Feilong Wu was given a lie detector test. He said he missed one question about whether he was “responsible” for C.T.’s death, and a second about knowing the body’s location if he were the killer.

“Those questions, how do you answer those? I don’t know,” he said.

Wilkerson said neither he nor the department’s homicide detectives could comment on the questioning of the Wus or other witnesses. The confidential investigation is “open and active,” he said, and it could harm the case to comment on particulars.

Edith Wu said investigators theorized that her husband smothered C.T. in his crib and spirited the body away from the apartment while she slept.

“Anything that doesn’t fit their view, they don’t want to hear,” she said. “They’re like little children covering their ears. ‘I don’t want to hear that!’ It’s ridiculous. They ignore the facts.”

The leads uncovered by the Wus and their private detective include a witness who says she saw C.T. alive--an hour after he was reported missing--at a nearby Sav-On drugstore in the arms of a young, nervous man.

The Mission Viejo woman, Kristen (she asked that her last name not be revealed to protect her family), said the man carrying the sobbing child cut her off as he dashed into the drugstore demanding directions to a bathroom.

Kristen said she and her daughter noted the two because the child was clad only in a diaper, and the man had no diaper bag or other supplies a parent would usually carry. She said the boy was about 25 pounds, had brownish hair in a step haircut and a gap between his front teeth--a near exact description of C.T. Turner.

Kristen described the man carrying the child as a white male in his late teens or early 20s, with medium-length, brown hair, wearing a white T-shirt and dark, baggy shorts.

The next morning, Kristen saw news accounts of C.T.’s body being found and instantly realized that the photo in the newspaper was of the boy she had seen a day earlier. She called police and gave her statement to a deputy a short time later.

Nine days later--on the day C.T. was buried in Texas--detectives returned to Kristen’s home to take her statement again. This time, she said, her information was not welcome.

“They told me there was no way it was [C.T.], that he couldn’t have been there,” Kristen said. “They said the evidence was going toward the parents and they would be making an arrest. They made me feel like a nobody. I wondered if I was crazy. But I know. I’m 99%, 100% sure. It was him.”

Weeks later, Kristen saw Edith Wu in another news report, this time asking for witnesses to step forward. Some of her friends told her not to get involved, or speak up on behalf of someone who was probably guilty, but Kristen called Edith Wu anyway. “I tried to put myself in her spot,” Kristen said.

Another witness, Cori Powers, stepped forward to say that she had helped with the first day’s search and that her West Highland terrier came within feet of the spot where C.T. was found, but kept walking. The dog has a “keen sense of smell and curiosity,” and weeks later, when the pet returned to the area, darted to the spot where the body was found, she said.

To Long, the former Los Angeles police homicide detective turned private investigator, Kristen is a “five-star witness,” and her story, along with Powers’ account, suggests that C.T. was kidnapped and somehow dumped in the ravine after the first day’s search. He said snippets of other witness accounts also support the idea that a resident snatched the boy, secreted him--perhaps in a car trunk where he asphyxiated--and then panicked when the child died.

Wilkerson said he was skeptical that detectives dismissed Kristen’s accounts or shared information about a pending arrest. He said her information was contradicted by evidence showing C.T. was already dead by 10 a.m. on the day of his disappearance. But he declined to elaborate, citing the confidentiality of ongoing investigations. He added that security cameras in the drugstore were malfunctioning Aug. 12, so there is no way to verify the sighting.

Wilkerson also declined to comment on the theories offered by Long.

“There are any number of scenarios that could be drawn as potential ways this crime occurred,” Wilkerson said. “I don’t want to put any credence into speculative theories. We want to deal with the facts and go from there.”

The Wus say tensions are running high with the detectives assigned to find their child’s killer, and they speak of shouting matches and insults being exchanged. Indeed, several department sources said the investigators are frustrated by the family’s charge that they have shirked their duties to track every lead.

Edith Wu said “it’s gotten personal” for the investigators in their quest to show Feilong Wu is indeed guilty. She also said she will continue her efforts to chase down new leads and witnesses, by tending to the Web site (https://www.ccmsinc.com/ct) created for her son and handing out fliers door to door. The only thing that will stop her, she says, is poverty.

The couple have been evicted in recent weeks, had their car repossessed and found it hard to get job interviews.

“When people find out who I am, all of a sudden, ‘The position is filled,’ ” Edith Wu said. “I just wish I could move on. Get a job, grieve in private, know what happened, and just move on. But I can’t. No one can.”