The girl matched no description on an active missing persons case anywhere in Los Angeles County or in national crime databases. An artist’s rendering of the victim’s face put on the TV news and in the papers brought no calls from a loved one or an acquaintance. Sketches faxed to five hundred police agencies across the southwest and to the State Judicial Police in Mexico drew no responses. The victim remained unclaimed and unidentified, her body reposing in the refrigerator at the coroner’s office while Sheehan and I worked the case.

It was tough. Most cases start with the victim. Who that person was and where she lived become the center of the wheel, the grounding point. Everything comes from the center. But we didn’t have that and we didn’t have the true crime scene. We had nothing and we were going nowhere fast.

All that changed with Teresa Corazon. She was the deputy coroner assigned to the case officially known as Jane Doe #90-91. While preparing the body for an autopsy she came across the lead that would take us first to McCaleb and then to Seguin.

Corazon found that the victim’s body had apparently been washed with an industrial-strength cleaner before being discarded on the hillside. It was an attempt by the killer to destroy trace evidence. This in itself, however, was both a clue and trace evidence. The cleaning agent could help lead to the killer’s identity or help tie him to the crime.

However, it was another discovery made by Corazon that turned the case for us. While photographing the body the deputy coroner noticed an impression in the skin on the rear left hip. Postmortem lividity indicated the blood in the body had settled on the left half, meaning the body had been lying on its left side in the time between the stilling of the heart and the dropping of the body down the hillside off Mulholland. The evidence indicated that during the time that the blood settled, the body had been lying on top of the object that left the impression on the hip.