STOCKTON, Calif.—The evidence against her mounted, but Melissa Huckaby stuck to her story as police questioned her in April 2009: She had nothing to do with the abduction, rape and murder of an 8-year-old neighbor girl.
“She’s the type of person that thought she could always explain her way out of situations,” Tracy Police Det. Nate Cogburn told the grand jury that would charge Huckaby in Sandra Cantu’s death. “And that was clearly what she thought she was going to do in this case.”
More than 1,800 pages of grand jury transcripts and other documents were released Friday, shedding some light on the young Sunday school teacher who eventually pleaded guilty to kidnapping and murdering her daughter’s playmate. Huckaby, 29, has never revealed her motive and investigators have been at a loss to explain why she did it.
“There are so many unanswered questions that we will never know,” prosecutor Thomas Testa said.
What emerges from the documents is a portrait of a depressed woman with a troubled past and a penchant for cutting herself, her family said.
According to a probation report, she described her childhood as “kind of rough” and said she was raped by a police officer when she was 19. She said she was diagnosed as bipolar and suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome.
Dr. Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsy, testified that Sandra’s killer showed a “calm, calculating mind at work.”
The way the body of 8-year-old victim was placed in the suitcase after the killing showed the work was likely premeditated, Omalu said during the July 2009 hearings. He testified that Sandra suffered mightily before she died of suffocation and was undoubtedly sexually assaulted.
“This was not something heat of the moment,” Omalu said.
That calculating mind also on display the night of March 28, 2009, when Sandra was still missing and neighbors held a candlelight vigil in the mobile home community where Huckaby and Sandra lived.
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