Callers have inundated the phone lines of Tracy police, saying it can’t be. Veteran homicide and sex-crime researchers say they cannot recall a case quite like it. Even the investigators themselves looked at the evidence and initially said “no way.”
A woman was accused not only of killing someone else’s child, but of raping her.
Law enforcement officials and other experts say the allegations against Melissa Huckaby in the slaying of 8-year-old Sandra Cantu are remarkably rare over decades of U.S. police work.
Huckaby was charged Tuesday with murdering her daughter’s playmate, with the added special circumstances of rape with a foreign object, lewd or lascivious conduct with a child under 14 and murder in the course of a kidnapping. The 28-year-old divorced mother is due back in court Friday, when she is expected to enter a plea.
Sandra’s body was found on April 6 — 10 days after she went missing. It was stuffed in a suitcase that was pulled from an irrigation pond near Tracy, a small town where San Francisco’s suburbs meet California’s farm belt.
Tracy police Sgt. Tony Sheneman said dozens of callers a day have insisted that Huckaby could not have acted alone, that no mother would rape another’s child, that the scenario was too improbable to be true. The case is so striking that police initially shared the public’s reaction.
The investigators themselves, when first confronted with the evidence that pointed to Huckaby, were inclined to look for another suspect.
“When investigators were first looking at this they went ‘Huh, no way. … Who did she work with?’” Sheneman said. “We got that info and said ‘there’s no way, that doesn’t happen.’”
“After this case, I’ll never say never again,” Sheneman said, adding that police remain confident that Huckaby acted alone.
