When Long Beach real estate agent Bruce Koklich's wife failed to show up for work on a Monday morning in August, he reported her missing and offered a $100,000 reward for information on her whereabouts.
Detectives launched an extensive search but didn't find Jana Carpenter-Koklich. They did, however, discover drops of her blood in her abandoned car and in the bedroom she shared with her husband.
"In this case, it didn't take very long to make us start believing that foul play was involved," said Los Angeles County Sheriff's Lt. Ray Peavy.
Koklich was arrested in January on suspicion of his wife's murder, even though her body never turned up. He is now out on bail awaiting a preliminary hearing in the case.
Once considered rare and risky, murder trials in cases in which the bodies are missing are becoming increasingly common.
Since the first "no body" conviction in the nation based solely on circumstantial evidence in 1957, prosecutors have successfully tried defendants in a number of such cases where victims were believed to be dropped from airplanes, pushed into the ocean or buried next to freeways.
Prosecutors have been aided by advances in crime lab and DNA technology that can link a suspect to a crime scene without a body. They have also benefited from a change in attitude among some jurors, who no longer consider a body critical evidence in a murder case.
At least twice recently in Los Angeles County, defendants were convicted despite missing bodies.
In October 2000, a man was found guilty of kidnapping and murdering his half sister, the wife of Los Lobos guitarist Cesar Rosas.
Later that same month, the victim's bones were found buried in the Santa Clarita Valley after the killer told detectives where to look.
Last year, a Pomona woman and her live-in boyfriend were convicted of murder and child abuse in the death of the woman's 3-year-old daughter. The child's body was never found.
Prosecutors acknowledge that it is still a challenge to try a murder case without being able to show jurors photographs of the victim's body or without presenting a medical examiner's testimony about the autopsy.
First they must persuade a jury that a murder has occurred before they can go about proving who committed it.
"The success rate is mixed," said Robert Pugsley, a professor at Southwestern University School of Law.
