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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — 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 per son 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 aban doned 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,” and the case’s ups and downs took an emotional toll. Dudek’s wife asked him to stop discussing the case over Christmas. But the investigators’ persist ence paid off. Last week, DNA results gave their victim a name: Yesenia Becerra Nungaray. Interviews with her mother allowed detectives a glimpse in to her life: the doe-eyed teenager had an adventurous streak but was close to her family. She left her small, quiet town in Mexico We had this beautiful child, and no one was coming forth to claim her. Scott Dudek detective 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 detectives were called when the restaurant’s employ ees found a body wrapped in plastic and folded into a green duffel bag on May 1, 2003. She had been dead for days — likely asphyxiated with a rag sound lodged in her throat. At 5 feet 1 and 110 pounds, she seemed young, somewhere be tween 12 and 18. Investigators got to work. “We felt this was a good kid,” Dudek said. “We were doing everything we could.” They rounded up specialists, who donated their time to exam ine her bones and her teeth. They had her DNA tested. They reached out to the com munity and neighboring police departments, looking into their missing person reports, eventu ally checking almost 300 miss ing girl cases nationwide. No one had reported her miss ing. But the community rallied around her, and the girl without a name was buried under a marker reading “Unknown Child of God” in a funeral paid for by nearly 100 people. Dozens attended the ceremony, though probably none of them knew her. Dudek got a read in February 2004 while reading an article that mentioned the hundreds of unsolved disappearances of young women along the border with Mexico. He and other investigators traveled to El Paso, Texas, and met with mothers yearning for news of their missing daugh ters. They took eight DNA sam ples from cases that seemed re lated and waited weeks for the results.
Newspaper Details
Lodi News Sentinel
Lodi, California, US
Tue, Dec 26, 2006
Page 2
Full Page
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Scott D.
USA 01 Jun 2026
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