Family's 20-Year Fight: Keeping Justine Vanderschoot's Killers Behind Bars

On the morning of September 2, 2003, Lynnette Vanderschoot found her daughter's bedroom empty and her truck gone from the driveway. Justine, seventeen years old, had vanished without her purse, her money, her identification—nothing that suggested she had chosen to leave. What began as a desperate search would become a family's two-decade fight for a justice that keeps slipping through their fingers.

Justine was the spark in her household, the one who sewed her own clothes, who played cheerleader and soccer, who dreamed of a career in fashion and beauty. Her older sister Christine, only eighteen months her senior, had been her closest friend since childhood. "She was vibrant, charismatic, just life of the party," Christine would later say. The Vanderschoots organized their community. They hung pink ribbons—Justine's favorite color—around Auburn. They printed missing-person flyers and wore T-shirts with her photograph. For two and a half weeks, they searched.

The first real lead came when Justine's truck was found at a park and ride five miles from home. A man named Matt Scribner, riding his horse through the area days later, noticed something that had changed: a hole he'd seen before was now covered with debris. He didn't think much of it then. No one thinks like that. But on September 18, 2003, investigators excavating that spot found Justine's remains buried in hard clay dirt. The search was over. The real ordeal was just beginning.

Justine had been murdered by two young men who had once been welcome in her family's home. Danny Bezemer, her boyfriend, had been introduced to the Vanderschoots by his friend Brandon Fernandez years earlier. Danny had no stable family of his own—his parents were largely absent—and the Vanderschoots gave him what he craved: belonging. Don even got him a job at his auto dealership and gave him a key to the house. But Danny was controlling. He monitored Justine's phone calls and texts, dictated who she could see. When she met a Navy sailor during a spring break trip to Florida in April 2003 and came home excited about him, Danny became consumed with jealousy. He believed she was cheating. He wanted proof. In late August, a few days before Labor Day, Justine attended a party at the apartment Danny now shared with Brandon. She told a friend she was ready for a fresh start, ready to move on from both of them.

Danny and Brandon had reconnected after a year apart, driven partly by their shared resentment of Justine. Brandon had hated her, called her names, blamed her for coming between him and Danny. Together, they had darker preoccupations: they talked about killing people, about disposing of bodies. Brandon had created a website ranking levels of violence, filled with images of the dead and dying. On the night Justine disappeared, both men said they had been alone together in their apartment. Each was the other's alibi. But investigators found that Brandon had made two calls to Justine's phone that night. When the FBI separated them and played a recorded conversation in which Brandon begged his cousin to lie to police, Brandon broke. He admitted he knew where Justine was.

In his confession, Brandon described arriving at the park and ride around midnight with Danny and Justine. Danny wanted to talk to her alone. Brandon walked away, then heard the car horn and a scream. When he returned, Danny was still strangling her, his hands around her neck, a taser nearby. "I win, I win," Danny said, laughing, his eyes bulging. The song "The Game" was playing on repeat in Brandon's car—a song about a boyfriend murdering his unfaithful girlfriend. The lyrics included Justine's own voice, recorded without her knowledge, talking about other boys. After Danny killed her, he removed her clothing and placed her in a grave they had dug in advance. He poured a chemical over her body. Brandon said he was terrified Danny would kill him too, so he helped bury her and promised never to speak of it.

Danny and Brandon were arrested and charged with murder. In 2005, Danny pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and received 25 years to life. Brandon pleaded to second-degree murder and received 15 years to life. The Vanderschoots thought they could finally grieve. But California's evolving murder laws would transform their nightmare into something worse: a legal labyrinth with no exit. In 2018, the state changed its definition of murder to reduce culpability for those who didn't directly commit the killing. Brandon seized on this. In 2020, he filed a petition to have his conviction overturned, arguing he should be resentenced as an accessory after the fact rather than a murderer. A judge denied him. An appellate court reversed that decision. The case went back to trial. The Vanderschoots had to relive everything again.

In May 2024, more than twenty years after Justine's death, prosecutors had to prove once more that Brandon had planned and participated in her murder. Danny testified that he and Brandon were "two pillars" in the plot, that they had divided responsibilities: Danny would kill her, Brandon would handle the forensics. Brandon had purchased the chemicals. He had provided the tools, including a pickaxe from his parents' house. He had helped dig the grave over several days. After the murder, he shredded a receipt for new tires—consciousness of guilt, prosecutors called it. Brandon's defense attorney argued his client was merely a follower, terrified and manipulated by Danny, guilty only of covering up the crime, not committing it. He pointed out inconsistencies in Danny's testimony, suggesting Danny was lying to improve his own chances of parole. On August 1, 2024, the judge denied Brandon's motion and upheld his conviction. But on December 31, 2025, an appellate court reversed that ruling again. Another hearing is pending.

The Vanderschoots have been back to court seven times in the last seven years. They face two more parole hearings in the coming years. Christine, Don, and Lynnette have channeled their grief into advocacy. They sponsored Justine's Law, passed in California in 2023, which mandates teen dating violence prevention education in high schools statewide. They speak about the warning signs they missed—the jealousy, the control, the isolation. They want other families to recognize what they did not. In Justine's Garden, behind her childhood bedroom, they have planted a towering dogwood tree and surrounded it with mementos. Lynnette says she sees hummingbirds there and talks to her daughter through them. The family will not stop fighting. But the legal system, they say, has made it impossible to truly move forward, to truly grieve. Every new hearing, every new appeal, pulls them back into September 2003, back to the moment their daughter disappeared, back to the hole in the ground where she was found.