The Girl Next Door

This story was last broadcast on June 14, 2008.

Like any good homicide detective, Sgt. Scott Dudek can sometimes get a little obsessed with his cases. But as correspondent Harold Dow reports, the 2003 murder of an unidentified young girl troubled him more than any other.

A 22-year veteran of the Alameda County Sheriff's Office in northern California, Dudek has solved his share of gruesome crimes. But murders are rare in the suburban community of Castro Valley.

So what he saw the night of May 1, 2003 was especially shocking, even to a seasoned detective: the body of a young girl, murdered, stuffed into a trash bag, and discarded behind a restaurant.

Dudek says the girl had been dead for about ten days. And the way she died - with a rag in her throat - suggests someone may have wanted to silence her.

Usually, Dudek says, investigators know within the first 24 to 48 hours the identity of an unidentified murder victim, as missing persons' reports are reviewed or parents contact the authorities.

But sadly, no one seemed to be looking for this victim. Because her body was so badly decomposed, a local artist did the best she could to give her a face. They also gave her a name: "Jane Doe." Police had to rely on her autopsy for other clues.

"We had ten perfect prints that we got off of both her hands, which is a rarity," Dudek explains.

Investigators guessed she was in her early teens. She was in good health, with perfect teeth. This Jane had all the appearances of a typical teenage girl-next-door, from her painted nails to her choice of clothing.

Dudek released a sketch, hopeful it was good enough for someone to recognize this girl once it was splashed all over the local media and posted on Web sites dedicated to finding missing children. "With this sketch being released we probably had 150 possible clues or sightings of people that thought they knew who our Castro Valley Jane Doe was," he says.

One clue seemed so promising, that Dudek and his partner, Ed Chicoine, followed it all the way down to the Texas-Mexican border, where they collected DNA samples from several mothers of missing teenage girls, including a girl whose picture bore a remarkable resemblance to Jane.

But none of those leads panned out. There would be many more dead ends, but Dudek remained determined, even though his frustration was mounting.

Then, investigators got another clue that seemed almost too good to be true from a possible witness: "We thought it was a huge break. We got an anonymous letter in the mail," Dudek says.

The writer claimed to have seen someone get "something from the trunk" of a car and dump it into the very same bushes where the body was found.

Dudek says police asked the person to come forward, offering to keep him anonymous. This potential witness admitted in the letter that he was reluctant to come forward because he himself had been in that parking lot "waiting for a married girlfriend."

As weeks turned to months, the letter writer never came forward and no one claimed this young girl.

But her case touched the people of Castro Valley, and an unlikely hero emerged: Dave Woolworth, a landscaper. He had no way of knowing that what he was about to do would one day help solve this mystery.

"From day one she touched me, and to this day she still does," says Woolworth, who was best known around town for his signature tie-dyed T-shirts. "When I read the story, I started crying. And I looked at my wife and I told her, 'No one will come and claim her. It was eating at me.'"

Once the forensic investigation was completed, Jane was destined for cremation. But that was unacceptable to Woolworth, himself a father who had once been estranged from his own daughter.

Woolworth decided to take the lead in raising donations from the community, and so four months after her body was abandoned in a parking lot, Castro Valley's adopted daughter was given a funeral befitting a dignitary.

As several more months went by, this child was still nameless, and her killer faceless. The leads had slowed to a trickle.

So Sgt. Dudek made the agonizing decision to exhume the young girl's body and search again for the clues that could close this case.

His team of forensic experts, led by anthropologist Allison Galloway, will examine Jane Doe's bones for clues that could provide a better estimate of her age.

"The bones all suggest she's pretty much finished growing; I think she's probably much more, say like 14 to 17 range," Galloway remarks.

In another attempt to pinpoint Jane's age, Dudek turned to Dr. Duane Spencer, a dentist and forensic specialist. Dr. Spencer compares Jane's x-rays to some of his teenage patients, and comes to the conclusion that the victim was 14 to 17 years old.

Dudek feels the most important key to unlocking this mystery is to get a better picture of what Jane looked like alive, and for that he calls in forensic artist Gloria Nusse, who will make a sculpture of Jane based on her bone structure.

Nusse and Dr. Galloway study Jane's skull for clues to the girl's facial features. It's part science, part guesswork. Asked how she can reconstruct a person's face just based on a skull, Nusse tells Dow, "Well the information is in the bone. It tells me that the width of the cheekbones is this; it tells me that you know, the slope of the forehead is this. Every skull is absolutely unique but the landmarks are the same."

But Nusse also needs a sense of Jane's ethnic background to create a sculpture that will hopefully resemble the dead girl closely enough for someone out there to recognize her.

"Most of the features we're seeing are European. But there are some features that suggest that she might have some either Asian or Native American background," Galloway notes.

The first step is to make a mold of the skull, so Jane's body can be returned to the cemetery in the morning. Nusse will work all night long to make it.

She'll then bring the mold to her studio, where she'll work on it for weeks to bring Jane to life.

A set of markers on the skull tell Nusse how thick the clay should be over different parts of the face to get an accurate and lifelike shape.

Five weeks after the exhumation, and after some 40 hours of work, Nusse is putting the final touches on the forensic reconstruction. "She definitely looks like she's kind of coming to life to me," Nusse says, looking at the sculpture.

Dudek is convinced he's one giant step closer to finding out Jane's real name, and the identity of her killer.

At a news conference, police unveil the sculpture, hoping it would generate new leads in the case. Dudek is also spreading the word to other police agencies, as well as offering a $55,000 reward.

Dudek doesn't know it yet, but "Jane" is very much on the mind of Ellen Leach of Gulfport, Miss., a stockroom clerk by day, and an armchair detective by night.

"It could be called an obsession of sorts," Leach explains. "I try to find missing persons to give their families some sense of closure. I have been to probably 50 Web sites."

Leach is one of thousands of amateur detectives who scour the Internet to help police solve cold cases, by matching photos of the missing to those victims who remain unidentified.

Late one night, the features of one little girl from southern California began to line up with Jane's. "We were very hopeful that it was going to be our little Jane Doe," Dudek recalls. "We requested dental records on this little girl."

But the girl's dental records do not match Jane's perfect teeth. It's another dead end - by now, one of hundreds.

"Probably that was one of the lowest times in this investigation because we just were hoping so much that that sculpture would give us that one piece of the clue that we needed to solve this mystery," Dudek remembers.

Gloria Nusse is even beginning to doubt her own work. "My greatest fear, of course, is maybe I didn't do it right. 'Did I do something wrong?'" she wonders. "Whoever did this to her was probably counting on nobody knowing who she was. And probably felt like she was nothing. Nobody means nothing. And nobody deserves to be murdered."

Detectives also kept an eye on Jane's grave to see who might visit her. One day there was an intriguing clue: they found a note and necklace on the headstone. "And the letter actually says 'God loves you, it's okay baby girl, Jim is paying for what he did to you,'" Dudek explains.

Dudek is hoping that DNA and fingerprint tests on those items will provide some answers, but that will take weeks, even months.

So once again the detective is manning the phones. "Sooner or later somebody's gonna make a connection and they'll pick up the phone and they'll call us and they'll do the right thing," he says.

That combination of police work and publicity finally paid off. In January 2006, 48 Hours Mystery reported on the case of Jane Doe. The calls started pouring in, and one of them would turn this case around.

"The emotion that day was, it can't be explained, it was just huge for us. It was just, I can't believe that maybe this could be what we've finally been looking for," Dudek recalls.

Someone who watched the program thought Jane looked like a young girl who was seen around Castro Valley with a man. "His name is Miguel Castaneda. And he worked in the restaurant where the body was dumped," Dudek explains.

Detectives had some questions for Castaneda. But when they went looking for him, he was gone.

Dudek and his team have received a tip that Jane and the man she was seen with may be from the same hometown in Mexico. So they're chasing their latest lead all the way across the border, trying to identify her.

The detectives head to Yahualica, a poor, working-class town near Guadalajara. Their plan: to show the sculpture, and a photo of Miguel Castaneda, to as many townspeople as possible.

For the next 48 hours, the detectives work day and night, walking hours on end to hand out some 4,000 flyers. The team hopes the reward, now up to $65,000, will attract some attention as well.

At first Dudek recruited some help, but pretty soon he didn't have to ask. The townspeople here, like those back in Castro Valley, had already taken this case to heart. "The word spread around town so quick we had people coming up to us, asking if they can hand out flyers," Dudek explains.

Dudek was most eager to reach the teenagers in town. He thought they were his best shot at tracking down Jane's family.

From one school to another, he repeated his story, and didn't spare them the grisly details of what happened to Jane. "We felt that they were old enough to put themselves in her place, what horrific things she went through in the last moments of her life," he says.

On his third day in Mexico, Dudek received a frantic message. It was a woman who had seen the flyer and feared that Jane was her missing daughter. The minute Dudek laid eyes on her, he had a feeling his search was over. "You have that moment where you go, 'Oh my God,' 'cause she has some of the identical features," he explains.

The woman showed detectives pictures of her daughter. "The sculpture that Gloria did and that picture, how much more close can you get? The cheek bones are perfect, her lips are perfect in that picture, she has gold hooped earrings," Dudek remarks.

And the woman said her daughter, like Jane, had perfect teeth.

The age and time frame fit, too. The woman's daughter left for California in March 2003, on her 16th birthday. She went to stay with Miguel Castaneda, who was a family friend. Within weeks her mother lost contact with her, about the same time the body was discovered behind the restaurant.

"It's like, 'Oh my God, I'm gonna have to tell this lady exactly what happened and what happened to her little baby,'" Dudek recalls. "Before I even started to say anything, she just started to scream and shakin' her head saying 'No, no, no.' It was brutal for me, there's no other way to describe it," he says.

A DNA sample from her mother would later confirm it: Jane's real name was Yesenia Nungaray.

Four years after Yesenia's murder, detectives finally know her tragic story. And it might never have happened, without Gloria Nusse's sculpture.

"In this picture, Yesenia is 15 years old. And what's amazing is when you look at the side view with the hair pulled back over the ear, on how close they look," Dow points out, comparing a picture of Yesenia with the sculpture.

"I see a similarity in the shape of her jaw, I see a similarity in the shape of her nose? It is her," Nusse remarks.

But Nusse's success is bittersweet. "I am a mother, I have a daughter. Yesenia's mother must be so devastated to find out that her daughter is gone," she says.

On that tearful day in Mexico, Dudek made two promises to Yesenia's mother: to bring her daughter's body back home, and to hunt down the person who killed her. And he wants to start by finding Miguel Castaneda.

Yesenia's body was exhumed one last time to begin the long journey home. Once again, Yesenia is given a police escort. The detectives are taking her back to Mexico, where her mother, Maria, is waiting.

"It was a pretty sad day, you know. And you wanted to be strong for the family. Because we viewed ourselves as her relatives now," Dudek recalls.

Now there were two communities in mourning, on either side of the border. Castro Valley raised money again, for a funeral fit for a princess. And the townspeople of Yahualica showed Maria they shared her grief.

"During the funeral, through the procession, you walked all through the town where Yesenia grew up. What was that like for you?" Dow asks Dudek.

"I had never experienced anything like that. It was a proud experience. Everybody came out and said goodbye to her as we walked by. And I think not only did we bring closure to Maria and her family, I think we brought closure almost to the whole town," Dudek says.

For Maria, it was a devastating end to four years of trying to find out what had happened to her little girl. "For me, she was very special. She was happy and she liked flowers, stuffed animals. She used to get along well with people. When she left she told me that she wanted to keep studying and working because she was a very hard worker, from the time she was little, she was a hard worker," her mother explained with the help of a translator.

Maria knew her daughter's future was bleak in her poverty-stricken hometown. So she reluctantly let her go to California, because Miguel Castaneda promised to watch over her. And at first, things seemed to be going well.

"She told her mom her worst day in America was still better than any day, you know, that she had in Mexico," Dudek explains.

Then the phone calls home suddenly stopped. Castaneda told Maria that Yesenia had packed up and left. As the months went by, Maria knew something was very wrong.

"She knew her daughter was somewhere in the San Francisco Bay area," Dudek explains. "She did everything possible she could do to try to contact people, she didn't know who to call."

Now it's time for Sgt. Dudek to make good on his other promise to Maria: to catch the person who so brutally put an end to her daughter's dreams. "Our job's not done. Our job's not gonna be done until that person's locked up," he vows.

He's been tracing Yesenia's final movements. "When Yesenia left Mexico, she came to stay in a bungalow in Hayward, California. She was only here about three weeks with Castaneda," Dudek explains. "She got a job as a babysitter."

But the situation may have soured quickly. The detective has received a tip that Castaneda asked a friend to come to his bungalow to help move a large bag.

"He was told, 'Hey, I need some help moving a mattress.' When he started to pick it up he realized that it was most likely a body, not a mattress. And he decided that he wanted no part of it," Dudek explains.

Asked if he has been able to talk to that person, Dudek says, "Unfortunately because this is an active case I really can't divulge too much as far as that stuff goes."

But Dudek doesn't hesitate to say this: he's now convinced that Castaneda is the killer. "It's my belief that Yesenia felt that Castaneda was like an older brother; Castaneda wanted more of a relationship than that type. I think Yesenia turned down his advances and she was killed because of that," he says.

And Dudek is still hoping to hear from another possible witness: the mystery man in the parking lot who was waiting for his married girlfriend.

As for that necklace that was left on the grave in California, it did not contain any relevant DNA. But detectives still have enough of a case against Castaneda to get a warrant for his arrest.

But first they have to find their suspect. And that might not be easy, since he could be hiding in either country.

Back in the town of Yahualica, Yesenia's grieving mother is grateful to be able to bury her daughter close to home. "Please I am asking you to help me to thank them, because thanks to them, my daughter is here and I want to give them a hand," Maria says.

And she's also grateful to a man she may never meet, landscaper Dave Woolworth. "I just did what was right," he says. "She was a clean-cut 16-year-old girl that took pride in herself."

Without his efforts, Castro Valley's Jane Doe would have been cremated, her identity forever a secret.

Knowing she's home with her mother is also giving Woolworth some comfort at a difficult time. "I have cancer. My days are numbered," he explains. "I'm glad that I lived long enough to see it."

Woolworth still hopes to see Yesenia's killer put behind bars. And Dudek is determined to make that happen soon. "We're gonna move as fast as we can. We'll get our man, we'll make an arrest. We'll get him," he vows.

"This was about a bunch of people, not forgetting about a girl that was found, murdered behind a restaurant. Citizens, scientists, cops, clergy, everybody came together and look at the result," Dudek says. "Yesenia will be my little girl and everybody's little girl in this area forever."

There is still a $65,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of Yesenia's killer.

Produced By Clare Friedland