After 41-Year Search, Detective Tells Paul Wulff: 'I Found Your Mom'
8/10/2021 9:21:00 AM | Football
By Adam Rittenberg and Kyle Bonegura
ESPN.com
WOODLAND, Calif. -- Nearly six years after his mother vanished, Paul Wulff sat across from the man his family strongly believed had murdered her.
It was March 1985, and Paul, then 18, had been summoned to a meeting that possibly represented his family's final hope for justice. His mother's body had never been found. Despite plenty of circumstantial evidence, police needed a confession to firm up their case. They believed Paul, a high school senior and the youngest of four children, had the best chance of procuring one.
A glass window separated Paul from the man in custody, arrested days earlier by the Yolo County Sheriff's Office on a murder indictment. He wore a jail-issued orange jumpsuit. Paul wore a wire.
"I didn't know what the heck I was doing, other than just asking questions and hoping he would just spill his guts," Paul recalled recently.
His direct questions -- Could you tell us where she is? Can you help us with some information? -- were met with silence. The man on the other side kept his eyes locked on the floor, shaking his head, offering nothing.
"There's nothing to compare that to," Paul said. "Here you are on one side and you're questioning your father ... about what he's done to your mother."
Paul had been only 12 when Dolores Wulff disappeared from their family home in Woodland, about 20 miles west of Sacramento. He had largely been protected from his family's suspicions about his father, Carl. Although Paul was occasionally thrust into the discord between his father and his family -- from choosing whom to live with to filing a civil suit against Carl on the family's behalf -- his attempt to gain a confession from Carl was his most involved effort yet. And it failed.
"I got up, frustrated, and walked away, thinking, 'He's never going to say,'" the Cal Poly running game coordinator and offensive line coach said. "And that was the feeling: He's going to go to his grave never saying anything."
To read the rest of the story by Kyle Bonegura and Adam Rittenberg on ESPN.com, click here.
Photo of Paul Wulff courtesy of Carolyn Fong | Carolyn Fong Photography for ESPN
