“The FBI is the most sophisticated law enforcement agency in the world, pursuing the most dangerous criminals in California.”
“When we see Sandra Cantu skipping across the trailer park going toward her house and something catches her attention.”
“The bureau mobilizes.”
“We had sexual deviants living in the trailer park, you just had other weirdos living in the trailer park.”
“What are the odds of Sandra still being alive?”
“I’ll let them know you came by, okay? All right.”
“All right. There’s only 100 people that live here, so it’s a very close-knit community. All the residents here knew each other and pretty much trusted each other.”
“Hi Kathleen, this is Maria. Have you seen Sandra?”
“No one has seen Sandra for hours.”
“Okay.”
“Tracy, please… uh… well, I have a missing daughter.”
“Okay. How old is she?”
“She’s eight.”
“When’s the last time you saw her?”
“Oh, it was about three. She told me she was going over to this one girl to play and she hasn’t been home, and I went looking all over there.”
“Sandra had the little Hello Kitty pink t-shirt on. Uh, it looked like black leggings. This was the last that we knew she was in the mobile home park, so that was pretty important for us. It really helped us lock down that time frame.”
“It’s the worst thing imaginable. You have this horrible feeling in your gut that something’s terribly wrong and you don’t know what it is.”
“It’s just heart-wrenching. And it you know, we have a job to do, we have to move forward through it, but I think there’s that human side of all of us that we think in the back of our mind, is this going to be that time where it’s bad?”
“What are the odds of Sandra still being alive?”
“Statistically speaking, 97% of the children who are abducted at this point in time have been murdered. But it is our job to focus both the FBI and the Tracy Police Department on that 3%, because there’s a chance that she is alive.”
“So how was your day?”
“Good.”
“She talked with everybody. She always asked if she can help with the yard or, um, help cooking. She liked to cook.”
“Sandra was very friendly, um, she had a way to just capture your heart and she had a beautiful smile. She was always smiling.”
“Sandra was in just about every trailer and she knew just about everybody, so it made our job a little bit more difficult because every trailer was now in play for us to investigate.”
“I want to ask…”
“That gentleman had brushed Sandra’s hair off of her face and kissed her on the lips in the pool.”
“He told us that he had sexual fantasies about young girls, that his fantasies focused on girls between the ages of 9 and 10.”
“Oh hey, what do we have here?”
“Hi. Can I have a chocolate bar?”
“Sure can.”
“Aren’t you just a little kid?”
“Excuse me?”
“What did we tell you about being in the park?”
“Sandra was a very friendly girl, but we thought these individuals might have taken advantage of her friendly personality, you know, to use to their benefit.”
“I found something! I found something! It says Cantu!”
“It’s over there.”
“Cantu is in stolen luggage and water at Pachetti and White Hall. Sign: Witness.”
“And what’s so interesting about this note is it almost looks like there are deliberate misspellings. I mean, a very simple word, ‘on,’ is misspelled.”
“I… I… here’s the note. I was… I was just walking by and I saw it here on the grass and I…”
“Is she in there?”
“The one thing you noticed was the weight of the suitcase, um, there was definitely something inside the suitcase. As we start to carry the body bag out, all of a sudden you could smell the smell of death.”
“It’s devastating, you know. We lived up to this moment that she’s still alive. We got to find her, she’s still alive, we can find her, we can find her. And then at this point, we can’t.”
“It’s so hard when you see something that’s happened to a young child. There’s no easy way to tell somebody that your child is dead.”
“When they came to tell us that they found Sandra, the most primal screams that you can imagine and wailing and disbelief and just not wanting it to be true. I mean, she was a beautiful baby. She was my beautiful little girl.”
“Now we had a killer to find.”
“I… I… here’s the note. I was… I was just walking by and I saw it here on the grass and I…”
“Hey Maria, yeah. I was wondering if your daughter could come over and play with mine.”
“Hey, get over there right now. Drive as fast as you can to get there, and right before you get there shut your lights down and get in there and then just walk up like everything’s cool and knock on the door and make sure we don’t got another little kid in there.”
“Hey, um, do you have any idea what we’re need to talk to you about?”
“I think probably the Tinsley case. That’s the only one I can think of.”
“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.”
“Between 5:30 and 5:40, two people saw your car stopped on White Hall Road. They saw you come from out of the bushes on White Hall Road and someone asked you, ‘What… was I okay?’ and I said I was going to the bathroom.”
“Mhm.”
“What were you doing, Melissa?”
“It was an accident. I told you, it was an accident.”
“What was actually happening?”
“What did she look like?”
“She looked pale. And then I killed her, huh?”
“I thought that she was dead and I panicked.”
“So what happened?”
“I tried to wake her up and she wouldn’t wake up.”
“She was dead and I killed her.”
“I didn’t want anybody to think that I had killed her and I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Sandra, come on over here with me. Come here. Come on. You want to help me decorate the church?”
“Sure, okay. Come on, let’s get in.”
“Almost got it ready. Thanks. There you go. Go ahead, drink it all up.”
“When I came back it wasn’t there anymore.”
“Hey, how you doing?”
“I don’t know why I did it.”
“She knows why she did this and she just won’t tell anybody.”
“I don’t care to know, because it’s a sick individual that would do something like this to a child.”
“But I still cannot understand why I did what I did.”
“She created the emergency and she was going to be the one to solve the emergency and she would be the hero. She would get all this attention, she’d be the star and she’d be on these TV shows and Oprah would come and talk to her.”
“Our team is still going to hurt over the death of Sandra. You know, you take somebody in the community that you think is a good person or respected and they turn out to be like Melissa Huckaby.”
“Yeah, it’s just it’s hard. It’s hard because could be anybody. Who’s the next Melissa Huckaby?”
