The murder of Shaquita Bell has a number of tragic story lines. There is her disappearance 12 years ago. A mother of three working as a bakery clerk at a Giant supermarket, Bell vanished in 1996. There was no body and no witnesses, yet every June near the date of Shaquita’s disappearance, her mother, Jackie Winborne, came to police headquarters and pleaded to heat up the cold case.

When Cathy Lanier became police chief, she took the Bell case to heart. “If we recover Shaquita,” she said on cable TV last month, “it’ll be the best day in 18 years of law enforcement for me.”