Last phone call steered search

A Maple Valley woman who was trapped for more than seven days in a wrecked vehicle without food or water is angry with her husband for not finding her, but it may have been one of his calls to her cellphone that led authorities to her.

Tom Rider, 39, repeatedly called his wife's cellphone after she disappeared Sept. 20, but by early last week her phone calls went to voice mail, an indication that the battery had died. But a King County sheriff's spokesman said Monday the last call that Tanya Rider received before the battery ran out helped deputies find her.

On Thursday, deputies received permission to review Tanya Rider's recent phone records. When they found that the last call to her phone, before its battery died, was routed through a cellphone tower at 15734 203rd Ave. S.E. in Renton, deputies had her cellular service provider use a technology called "pinging" to search a five-mile area around the tower. By 2:15 p.m. they found the injured woman trapped in her mangled sport-utility vehicle.

Verizon tracked the phone by ping triangulation — using three cell towers to figure out where the device was. Cellphones emit pings constantly, and these signals identify which company has cell towers closest to the location of a particular cellphone.

Tanya Rider, 33, was found Thursday strapped upside down in her crumpled SUV in a ravine. She has been upgraded to satisfactory condition, and is no longer in intensive care.

Tom Rider said Monday he had spoken with his wife and that she is angry with him for not rescuing her.

"She seems to blame me for not finding her fast enough," he said. "She remembers being trapped, clawing at the seat belt and not being able to get it off. That's tearing me up inside. I was hoping she wouldn't remember anything."

A Sheriff's Office spokesman said he didn't know who placed the phone call used to find her location, but Tom Rider said he tried her cellphone over and over.

Tom Rider has been critical of the Sheriff's Office's response to his wife's disappearance, saying days went by before they took him seriously. But on Monday, he said he was satisfied with Sheriff Sue Rahr's responses to him.

In response to his criticism, the Sheriff's Office on Monday released a timeline of the department's response to Tanya Rider's disappearance and suggested that confusion over who had access to her bank account delayed them from launching a search.

Tanya Rider was last seen between 9 and 9:30 a.m. Sept. 20 when she finished her shift at a Bellevue Fred Meyer store. Tom Rider first called 911 to report she was missing at 7:44 a.m. Sept. 22. He said that he didn't notice she was missing until someone from Fred Meyer called their home Saturday. He said they each work two jobs with varying hours, and it wasn't uncommon for them not to see each other.

The Sheriff's Office said investigators initially thought Tanya Rider was the only person who could use her USAA bank account because her husband said he couldn't access it.

Because there had been activity in the account after she was reported missing, detectives believed Tanya Rider was alive and well. It wasn't until Wednesday — six days after she was last seen — that authorities learned from Tom Rider that he had access to the account and was responsible for the transactions.

Tom Rider claims he never told deputies that he couldn't access the account.

Rahr categorized it as a "misunderstanding."

Upon realizing that Tom Rider was responsible for the bank activity, deputies pushed for a search warrant so they could access the missing woman's cellphone records, sheriff's spokesman John Urquhart said.

"We had talked to Verizon Monday morning, but they said you have to have a search warrant or a court order," Urquhart said. "It took us until Thursday morning to get enough probable cause for a search warrant."

Rider apparently drove about 20 feet down a steep ravine overgrown with blackberry bushes and heavy brush Sept. 20.

Tom Rider asked 911 dispatchers on Sept. 22 whether his wife might have been involved in a traffic accident, according to the timeline released by the Sheriff's Office.

When the Sheriff's Office didn't have a crash report involving Tanya Rider, the dispatcher transferred the call to the State Patrol. The State Patrol also didn't have any reports of crashes involving Tanya Rider.

Tom Rider called the 911 center twice more that day, according to the timeline.

Tom Rider called the 911 center again the following morning. Unlike the previous day, when the dispatcher declined to take a missing-persons report, a report was taken. Authorities say Tanya Rider didn't qualify, at first, as a missing person because she was young, healthy and didn't appear to be the victim of foul play.

The detective assigned to missing persons contacted Tom Rider about the case Sept. 24.

The investigator started looking into the couple's finances that day, Urquhart said.

Tanya Rider told her husband that she remembers calling 911 during the ordeal, but the Sheriff's Office said there is no record of her calling for help.

"She may have pressed 911, but it may have been after her phone died," said Tom Rider.

Jennifer Sullivan: 206-464-8294 or jensullivan@seattletimes.com