ONE
Case Closed
Many times over the last four years, I had imagined walking through the doors of the San Diego Sheriff’s Office to close the case file on my mother’s murder investigation. I pictured it like a movie—me, the smart, resourceful, golden child/crime solver, returning triumphantly to headquarters to hand investigators the key shred of evidence needed to convict Mom’s killer. Having a vision of this ending kept me sane.
Wracked with guilt and driven by my desire to make my mother proud, one last time, I became obsessed with finding her killer, and nothing would keep me from pursuing that goal. “If you can see it, you can achieve it,” Mom would often remind me as a child, encouraging me to envision being the high school homecoming queen or SMU graduate, with the promise that my unconscious brain would magically lead me to success and the coveted crown. But in this case, the answer I had so desperately searched for and so carefully envisioned about my mother’s murder, and what I actually found, were two shockingly different things.
The sergeant in charge of Homicide at SDSO called to deliver the long awaited news, personally. Mom’s murderer had finally been identified and apprehended, he proudly informed me, adding, that corroborating DNA evidence was indisputable, and several reliable witnesses placed the suspect in Baja at the time of Mom’s death. Under the intense questioning of our devoted cold-case detective, the killer had cracked and confessed to brutally murdering my mom.
When pressed for specific details of his crime, with the hint of leniency if he told the truth, the killer coldly and casually offered that he beat Mom as she struggled to fight him off. Infuriated by the vicious things she screamed, and enraged further by the deep scratches she made on his face and neck with her long nails, he said he reached back with a tightly clenched fist, and coldcocked her above the right eye, sending her to the ground. Pouncing on her, he placed his trembling hands on her throat, and squeezed the life out of her, then left the bruised, half clothed body in the middle of a remote desert wash, and walked away.
This was the scene I had envisioned, repeatedly, for years, but it was not what actually happened. The identity of Mom’s murderer was not magically served up to
