VOLUNTEERS KEY IN MISSING-PERSON CASES.

Byline: Kermit Pattison Daily News Staff Writer

As the newspapers and airwaves buzzed with reports of the discovery of the remains of Sherri Renee Dally by volunteer searchers, Richard Stevens felt a eerie sense of deja vu.

For the Thousand Oaks veterinarian, the kidnapping and murder of the Ventura woman struck close to home. In a similar search by volunteers three years before, Stevens stumbled upon the remains of murdered Westlake Village nurse Kellie O'Sullivan.

``The similarities,'' he said, ``are pretty haunting.''

In many respects, the two cases are strikingly similar. A young, devoted mother disappears without a trace in broad daylight.

Day after day, authorities and volunteers beat the bushes and scour roadsides looking for clues. Finally, volunteers find the badly decomposed body hidden off a remote road.

The two high-profile cases illustrate how volunteer searchers are becoming an important part of missing-person cases in Ventura County. Volunteer teams also have come together to look for missing children and a former rock musician who disappeared last year.

Dally's remains were found June 1 in a barranca north of Ventura by a volunteer search party. The 35-year-old mother of two children had been missing since she was a apparently abducted outside a Target store in Ventura May 6.

``They provided a terrific service to us,'' Ventura police Lt. Carl Handy said of the search teams. ``The family can now bring closure to this case instead of not knowing.''

Authorities said the volunteers can search vast expanses of territory far beyond what investigators can cover with their limited numbers. They also help free up investigators to track down leads in the criminal investigation.

``We don't have the resources,'' Handy said. ``The majority of our department has been working on this case from an investigative point of view.''

And in many cases, the act of searching can be cathartic for the volunteers themselves. Instead of sitting at home worrying, friends and concerned people can lend a hand.

``We had to do something,'' said Gary Aanerud of Oxnard, a friend of Dally's who organized the search. ``We couldn't sit around and expect answers and expect this whole case to be solved.''

About 70 people joined the search for Dally over three days, scouring the Ventura River, the Santa Clara River and the Ojai Valley.

Finally, Aanerud said, a few searchers on their way home after searching the Ojai Valley as an afterthought drove up Canada Larga Road north of Ventura. Alerted by foul odors, they found Dally's body in a weed-choked ravine.

But such searchers have not always found the missing person. Last year, friends searched for Philip ``Taylor'' Kramer, a former bassist for the band Iron Butterfly, who disappeared on a trip to Los Angeles International Airport. He remains missing.

In the search for O'Sullivan in September 1993, Stevens said he volunteered because he knew her fiance and had been following media coverage about the disappearance.

He and his office assistant, Patricia Beers, retraced the path the kidnapper might have taken to dump her body in the Santa Monica Mountains.

On their second stop, he recalled, Beers smelled a foul odor and Stevens crawled into the brush and saw O'Sullivan's remains still clad in her white nursing uniform. Mark Scott Thornton was later convicted for the kidnapping and murder and sentenced to death.

``It's disturbing,'' Stevens said of the discovery. ``But at least you can provide a little bit of closure for the people involved. None of us have to keep wondering where she is.''