1) 11-year-old Rachel Ziselman disappeared in 1977 while running an errand for her mother in Pacific Palisades, California. She was last seen carrying groceries a block from her home but never returned. 2) Extensive searches by police and volunteers over the following weeks turned up no clues as to her whereabouts. 3) Nearly four decades later, two men investigate her disappearance and spark the newspaper to reexamine its archives and coverage of the story and mystery around what happened to Rachel.

1. Palisadian-PostServing the Community Since 1928
Page 1 $1.50Thursday, April 9, 2015 ◆ Pacific Palisades, California
Still Searching: Rachel Ziselman
Missing From Palisades Since 1977
By JACQUELINE PRIMO
Reporter
Part I in a Series
The sun was high and the ground
was hot beneath her feet as Rachel Han-
na Ziselman, 11, left her home on the
1000 block of Monument Street in Pa-
cific Palisades and headed for Hughes
Market on an errand for her mother,
Rosemarie.
It was a lazy Monday afternoon, the
final day of a three-day holiday weekend
- Labor Day, Sept. 5, 1977.
Rachel and her siblings Sam, 14,
and Sarah, 7, had returned roughly 20
minutes earlier from their father’s apart-
ment in Santa Monica where they had
spent the afternoon swimming in the
complex’s pool.
Rachel, who at the time was 4’8”,
weighing 65 pounds with waist-length
blonde hair and blue eyes, was last seen
carrying a bag of groceries a block from
her home.
She has never been seen since.
38 YEARS LATER:
THE POST IN REVIEW
In January, 2015, Palisadian Alek-
sandar Pavlović, 23, who is studying
psychology at California State Universi-
ty-Northridge, approached the Palisadi-
an-Post with a request for access to the
newspaper’s archives. He said he had
been looking into the Ziselman case and
was hoping to find relevant articles.
Pavlovic said he first heard about the
Ziselman case when fellow Ralphs (for-
merly Hughes Market) co-worker Rick
Brissen brought up the subject.
Palisadian Brissen had said he re-
membered Rachel from childhood.
“[Rachel] was a happy girl from
what I remember and totally enjoyed life
and laughed all the time when she was
around us. She was outgoing. My sisters
went swimming with her and she played
at our house often,” Brissen said.
“I was fascinated when I learned
Rachel’s disappearance took place down
the street from my own house. Growing
up in the Palisades, I never felt unsafe.
I always believed this town had a qui-
et and peaceful history—and knowing I
was wrong changed my perspective sud-
denly,” Pavlović told the Post.
“What was just a simple curiosity
now turned into something much deeper
when I attempted to analyze the crime
scene—my own hometown—and come
up with my own conclusions as to what
may have happened,” Pavlović said.
The Post joined Pavlović and Bris-
sen in their inves-
tigation and also
began independent-
ly researching Ra-
chel’s disappear-
ance.
Hours of
searching by Post
staffers turned up
six articles in the
Post archives. Pav-
lović also pointed
the Post to a poten-
tial treasure trove
of articles in local
and national pub-
lications that men-
tioned Rachel.
After spending
hours conducting online searches, the
Post ultimately downloaded about 30
articles relevant to Rachel’s disappear-
ance.
The first media mentions found were
in the Sept. 7, 1977 issues of The Bakers-
field Californian, Press-Telegram (Long
Beach), Redlands Daily and the Valley
News (Van Nuys). Others followed in
The Daily Independent (Corona), The
Press-Courier (Oxnard), Star-News
(Pasadena).
The first article in the Post regarding
Rachel’s disappearance was published
on Sept. 8, 1977—three days after she
went missing.
Remarkably, it wasn’t the top story
of the week. It appeared on page 3 below
a story titled “Council receives Occiden-
tal application,” which detailed Occi-
dental Petroleum Corporation’s request
for the establishment of three urbanized
oil drilling districts in Pacific Palisades.
The “Police continue search for
Rachel Ziselman” article that week said
that the day after Rachel disappeared,
a command post was established at the
Palisades Recreation Center where
Rachel’s father John A. Ziselman, an
actor who went by the name John Zee,
stood watch. Her mother Rosemarie,
meanwhile, was holding her breath at
home. They both held out hope their
daughter would return.
Rachel, who had recently completed
sixth grade at Pacific Palisades School
(now Palisades Elementary School),
was set to begin at Paul Revere Middle
School that fall. The 11-year-old was last
seen wearing a checkered pink, blue and
yellow swimsuit with a white t-shirt, ac-
cording to witness testimonies.
“She simply vanished—because
there is no shred of evidence,” one police
officer was quoted as saying in the Post
article, adding she was last seen by the
Bay Theatre carrying a bag of groceries
around 3 p.m. (Norris Hardware now
stands where the Bay Theatre once did.)
Hughes market personnel remem-
bered Rachel bought bread, hot dogs and
cold drinks.
“During the late night hours Tues-
day, the girl’s father stood vigil at the
command post. Lights at the family home
on Monument Street
burned all night as
the girl’s mother
and the family’s two
other children also
awaited word,” the
article said.
On Tuesday,
Sept. 6, 15 LAPD
officers, two heli-
copters and a blood-
hound with its han-
dler from the Sierra
Madre Search and
Rescue Team can-
vassed the area. Of-
ficers conducted a
door-to-door search
in the Ziselman’s
neighborhood, and that night around 30
search and rescue volunteers combed the
remote areas of the Santa Monica Moun-
tains. County lifeguards joined in the
effort by searching Will Rogers State
Beach.
By the time night fell, Rachel had
been missing for more than 24 hours.
“The bloodhound, a blind, five-year-
old named Belle Starr, took off into Po-
trero Canyon, but no clues were found,”
the Post article said.
A follow-up article by Post Associ-
ate Editor A. Thomas Homer called “Po-
lice continue investigation of missing
girl” was published on Sept. 15, 1977,
10 days after Rachel disappeared. It said
that more than 1,600 man hours had
been spent looking for the girl, including
volunteers who searched the mountains,
canyons and beach areas.
Lieutenant George Tawes of West
LAPD headed the investigative team.
“Search and rescue teams from Si-
erra Madre, Altadena, Santa Monica,
Malibu and Pasadena worked through
two nights during the search. A 32-mem-
ber group of the California Community
Alert Patrol also assisted in the search,”
the Sept. 15 article states.
The search, while seemingly exten-
sive with all-hands-on-deck, including
the Boy Scouts, turned up no clues as to
Rachel’s whereabouts and no sign of a
struggle.
In fact, the search turned up nothing
at all.
“It’s almost like she vanished off the
face of the earth,” one policeman said in
the article.
As of a Sept. 22, 1977 article, police
were listing the case as a missing child.
After nearly three weeks, police
conducted a search of Big Tujunga Can-
yon as a “longshot.” The remains of an
8-year-old Venice boy had been found
there in May of the same year, according
to a Sept. 25, 1977 article in the Post.
The article ran with the headline
“Missing Girl: Search avails nothing.”
Come October, when Rachel had
been missing for a month, local busi-
ness owners started a reward fund for
any information pertaining to the where-
Palisadian-Post, Sept. 8, 1977
(Continued on page 2)
Pacific Palisades School sixth grade class, 1976. Rachel
Ziselman far right in the red skirt.
Photo courtesy of Thomas Nelson
Rosemarie Ziselman sits with an officer at her kitchen
table in the days following her daughter’s disappearance.
Palisadian-Post Archives, published Sept. 8, 1977

2. abouts of the girl, whose 12th birthday
had passed by the time the Post ran a
follow-up article on Oct. 6.
Palisades Letter Shop, which had
been a local staple on Via de la Paz since
Phyllis Genovese opened it with a $50
typewriter in 1947, printed some 5,000
pledge sheets featuring Rachel’s pic-
ture at no cost. They were distributed
throughout the business center by Pa-
cific Palisades Chamber of Commerce
president Jim Stout. Pledges were
logged by volunteers at Southern Cal-
ifornia Savings and Loan of the Pali-
sades, where Rosemarie was employed.
By publication of the October 13
Post issue, more than $3,000 had been
pledged for the Rachel Ziselman Fund.
“It’s very heartwarming,” Rose-
marie was quoted as saying, regarding
a large envelope of pledges sent from
children and teachers at Pacific Pali-
sades School.
AN ERRAND GONE AWRY
“As [Rachel] passed by me in the
living room, she inquired if I want-
ed something. I asked her to get me a
bag of potato chips. I also, briefly, gave
some consideration to accompanying
her to the supermarket. That I decided
against it, and chose to nap instead, I am
confident is easily among the five largest
mistakes I have made to date,” said Ra-
chel’s brother Sam Ziselman, now 52,
in a March 24, 2015 interview with the
Post.
“A couple hours later, my moth-
er awoke me and seemed terribly con-
cerned, almost panicky. She related that
Rachel had been gone for an extended
period of time and that she’d made a few
phone calls to her friends, but no one had
seen her. She asked me to check sever-
al locations. I don’t remember them all,
but I specifically recall walking over to,
Missing Girl:
Rachel Ziselman
Palisadian-Post, Sept. 22, 1977
Palisadian-Post, Sept. 8, 1977
Palisadian-Post, Sept. 15, 1977
Palisadian-Post, Sept. 29, 1977
Palisadian-Post, Oct. 6, 1977
Palisadian-Post, Oct. 13, 1977
PALISADIAN-POST CLIPPINGS
and around, Palisades Park,” he added.
“That’s how the disappearance start-
ed,” Sam said, adding that his moth-
er grew “increasingly frantic as time
passed.”
Sam said his mother initially told
the police Rachel was 12 – after all, her
birthday was just a few weeks away on
Sept. 30. However, because LAPD had
a policy at the time that prevented them
from searching for persons 12 or older
until a certain period of time had lapsed,
police were at first hesitant to respond.
Rosemarie quickly corrected her error
and told them Rachel was actually 11,
but Sam said “it took some effort to get
them [LAPD] to drag themselves out to
our house promptly.”
Palisadian Brissen, who has been
looking into Rachel’s disappearance with
Pavlović, said, “On the day [Rachel]
went missing my mother was called on
the phone that evening by Rachel’s moth-
er who asked, ‘Where is my daughter?’”
“I remember thinking somebody
must have lost a pet,” said Palisadian
Petrie Robie in a March 2015 interview
with the Post. Robie said she remembers
hearing Rachel’s name being called out
that night over and over.
“It was so ominous to hear the next
day a child had gone missing,” Robie
said.
As the hours
passed and night
fell on day one,
Rachel’s family
was at a loss.
“I specifically
recall waking up
the next morning
and being stunned
to learn that Ra-
chel was not back.
The cops were
there, everyone
was searching, and
I had just assumed
when I awoke the
next day my sister
was going to have
been located,” Sam told the Post.
“We all felt like we were living in
Mayberry at the time,” said Thomas
Nelson who was in Rachel’s sixth-grade
class. He told the Post in March 2015 that
he remembers the disappearance distinc-
tively and that the news was shocking to
Palisades families.
“This was kind of the fruition of pa-
rental nightmares,” Nelson added.
CONFLICTING REPORTS
The first 1977 Post articles regard-
ing the disappearance say Rachel was
last seen wearing a checkered pink, blue
and yellow swimsuit with white T-shirt
over it.
An Oct. 6 article, however, writes
that one of Rosemarie’s friends came to
the home in search of an article of Ra-
chel’s clothing to present to a psychic.
The woman reportedly found the bikini
bottom in the Ziselman home, and the ar-
ticle goes on to say the bikini top was on
Rachel’s bed.
Sam’s account of the story may offer
some insight and clarity into the matter.
“A couple days later [after Rachel
disappeared], we discovered the biki-
ni on the dresser in her bedroom,” Sam
said in an interview with the Post. “In re-
sponse, the LAPD gave lie detector tests
to every member of
my family except
Sarah (who was sev-
en years old at the
time). I remember it
quite well, because,
as you can imagine,
undergoing a poly-
graph test was ter-
ribly interesting to a
14-year-old kid.”
Sam added,
“After much spec-
ulation, we con-
cluded that Rachel
must have changed
clothes before leav-
ing on her errand.”
QUESTIONS UNANSWERED
What happened to 11-year-old Ra-
chel Ziselman on Labor Day 1977? Who
were the witnesses who reportedly last
saw her in front of the Bay Theatre?
How could she have disappeared within
a block of her home and vanish without
a trace?
Did she go willingly with somebody
she knew or did she run away? Was
she lured or dragged into a car and kid-
napped? These were and continue to be
some popular theories.
“Time continues to pass, and for the
family and friends of the missing girl,
the long waiting continues,” said a Sept.
15, 1977 Post article.
Little did anybody know the family
would still be waiting for answers nearly
four decades later.
Read Part Two of the series in an
upcoming issue of the Post for a look at
life in the Ziselman family after Rachel
disappeared and an examination of some
theories as to what happened to her.
If you have any information or sto-
ries pertaining to Rachel’s disappear-
ance or any memories of Rachel you
would like to share, please email My-
Post@palipost.com.
(Continued from page 1)
Rachel Ziselman in one of
the widely circulated photos
following her disappearance.
Photo courtesy of Sam Ziselman
Police man the command post at the Palisades Recreation
Center the day after Rachel went missing.
Palisadian-Post Archives, published Sept. 8, 1977
Police conduct a door-to-door search in Rachel’s
neighborhood. Palisadian-Post Archives, published Sept. 8, 1977