Persistent detective work leads to girl's identity

SAN FRANCISCO — From the moment the girl's body was found stuffed in a duffel bag nearly four years ago, her image haunted detective Scott Dudek — her feminine pajama pants, the single ankle sock decorated with snowflakes, the butterfly clip in her hair.

Yet so much was missing — she had no identification, and no one had filed a missing person report.

"We had this beautiful child, and no one was coming forth to claim her," Dudek said. "But you knew instantaneously this was someone's little girl."

The FBI's crime database lists about 6,000 unidentified victims nationally. Some of them have gone unclaimed for decades. But something about the girl abandoned among the weeds behind a Castro Valley diner struck a cord with Dudek and his team at the Alameda County Sheriff's Department.

For the next three years and eight months, the detectives spent long days and thousands of dollars tracking her identity. The teen known as "Jane Doe" became "their girl."

DNA breakthrough

The investigators' persistence paid off. Last week, DNA results gave their victim a name: Yesenia Becerra Nungaray.

Interviews with her mother allowed detectives a glimpse into her life: The doe-eyed teenager had an adventurous streak but was close to her family. She left her small, quiet town in Mexico for the United States on March 14, 2003 — her 16th birthday.

In calls home, she begged her mother to join her, saying even her worst days in the United States were better than her greatest days at home, Dudek said. Yet six weeks after she left, she was dead.

The restaurant's employees found the body on May 1, 2003. She had been dead for days — likely asphyxiated with a rag found lodged in her throat. At 5-foot-1 and 110 pounds, she was young, somewhere between 12 and 18 years old.

Investigators rounded up specialists, who donated their time to examine her bones and teeth. They had her DNA tested.

Eventually, they checked almost 300 missing girl cases nationwide. No one had reported her missing. The girl was buried under a marker reading "Unknown Child of God" in a funeral paid for by nearly 100 people.

Dudek and other investigators traveled to El Paso, Texas, in 2004 and met with mothers of missing daughters. They took eight DNA samples. .None matched.

In June, the county offered a $50,000 reward for relevant information, adding to the $5,000 reward from the Carole Sund/ Carrington Memorial Reward Foundation. One of the new leads was a hit.

An undocumented immigrant, Miguel Angel Nunez Castaneda, had apparently lived in Hayward with the victim. He is not a suspect, but a "person of interest" and is being sought by police. Detectives suspected the girl, like Nunez, might be from Yahualica, a town of 35,000 in the Mexican state of Jalisco.

They made the trip south. For three days, they spread the word to residents.

One of their fliers landed in the hands of Maria Del Carmen, a mother of three whose middle child, her only daughter, had gone to the United States.

Mother is devastated

The detectives visited Del Carmen and talked to her into the night, looking through pictures and sharing their story, Dudek said.

They learned enough to believe they'd hit on the right family. But they needed a DNA test to confirm their hunch.

Last week, they got their answer. The girl's mother was devastated.

Now they're gearing up for the next step: finding her killer.