More than a decade has passed, but hardly a day goes by that Oceanside police Det. Sheila Potkonjak doesn't think about the 7-year-old girl whose photograph is tacked to the bulletin board in her office.
The Easter picture of Leticia Hernandez, holding a baby chick in her hands, is a constant reminder of the biggest case of the detective's career, an abduction and murder that remains unsolved.
"It never goes away," Potkonjak said. "You wonder what we could do differently or could have done differently to solve such cases."
Her questions are all the more painful now, days after Samantha Runnion was kidnapped from in front of her Orange County home and later killed. The Runnion investigation--like the high-profile case nine years ago of Polly Klaas in Petaluma--ended with a relatively quick arrest.
But many other cases of children abducted and murdered are not resolved. The television cameras and news helicopters clear out and detectives move on to other cases. Families--and the community--are left to go on without knowing who is responsible for the crime, and whether the killer lives among them.
The number of child abduction-murders by strangers is small; California police agencies have reported just 13 such crimes, aside from the Runnion case, since 1991 that involve victims 12 and younger. Half of those cases remain unsolved--including that of a Beaumont boy whose face still haunts a billboard five years after his death and that of a Chula Vista girl who was snatched in 1991 when answering a nighttime knock on her home's front door.
The posters are still plastered in windows of businesses on Beaumont's main street. They show a photo of smiling, fresh-faced Anthony Martinez, 10. Next to it is a drawing of an anonymous, mustached man 25 to 35 years old, wearing a dark baseball cap.
This is the man who kidnapped Anthony on April 4, 1997, and killed him--a man who has never been found.
Beaumont is a desert town of 12,000 people, known for its cherry festival and antique stores that pull people off the highway on their way to Palm Springs.
The town is small enough that nearly everyone has some emotional tie to the murder. Parents know their kids played Little League with Anthony or went to the same school or they see his parents downtown. Maybe they were among the hundreds who took part in the search, from the time he was kidnapped at knifepoint until that day two weeks later when his body was found buried under rocks near Indio.
