of Rebecca in the top corner. It turned out that the Daily News archives had held the same shot as the yearbook. A headline above the photo said A MOTHER’S LONG VIGIL.
The bedroom photograph was credited to Emerson Ward, the photographer apparently using her given name. Below it was a caption that read: “Muriel Verloren sits in her daughter’s bedroom. The room, like Mrs. Verloren’s grief, has been untouched by time.”
Beneath the photo and above the body of the story was what a reporter had once told Bosch was a deck headline-a fuller description of the story. It read: “HAUNTED: Muriel Verloren has waited 17 years to learn who took her daughter’s life. In a renewed effort the LAPD may be close to finding out.”
Bosch thought the deck was perfect. If and when Mackey saw it, he would feel the cold finger of fear poke him in the chest. Bosch anxiously read the story.
By McKenzie Ward, Staff Writer
Seventeen years ago this summer, a young and beautiful high-school girl named Rebecca Verloren was stolen away from her Chatsworth home and brutally murdered on Oat Mountain. The case was never solved, leaving in its wake a splintered family, haunted police officers and a community with no sense of closure from the crime.
But in a measure of hope for the victim’s mother, the Los Angeles Police Department has launched a new investigation of the case that may see results and closure for Muriel Verloren. This time out the detectives have something they didn’t in 1988: the killer’s DNA.
The LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit began the intense refocus on the Verloren case after one of the original detectives-now a Valley area commander-urged that it be reopened two years ago when the squad was formed to investigate cold cases.
“As soon as I heard we were going to start looking at cold cases I was on the phone to them,” Cmdr. Arturo Garcia said yesterday from his office in the Valley Bureau command center. “This was the case that always stuck with me. That beautiful young girl taken from her home like that. No murder in our society is acceptable, but this one hurt more than most. It haunted me all these years.”
So, too, Muriel Verloren. Rebecca’s mother has continued to live in the house on Red Mesa Way from which her 16-year-old daughter was taken. Rebecca’s bedroom remains unaltered from the night she was carried out a back door, never to return.
“I don’t want to change anything,” the tearful mother said yesterday while smoothing the spread on her daughter’s bed. “It’s my way of remaining close to her. I will never change this room and I will never leave this house.”
Det. Harry Bosch, who is assigned to the renewed investigation, told the News that there are several promising leads in the case now. The greatest aid in the case has been the technological advances made since 1988. Blood that did not belong to Rebecca Verloren was actually found inside the murder weapon. Bosch explained that the pistol’s hammer “bit” the shooter on the hand, taking a sample of blood and tissue. In 1988 it could only be analyzed, typed and preserved. Now it can be directly matched to a suspect. The challenge is finding that suspect.
“The case was thoroughly investigated previously,” Bosch said. “Hundreds of people were questioned and hundreds of leads were followed. We are backtracking on all of that but our real hope lies in the DNA. It will be the case breaker, I think.”
The detective explained that while the victim was not sexually assaulted, there were elements to the crime of a psychosexual nature. Ten years ago the state Department of Justice started a database containing DNA samples from every person convicted of a sexually related crime. The DNA from the Verloren case is in the process of being compared to those samples. Bosch believes it is likely that Rebecca Verloren’s killing was not an isolated crime.
“I think it is unlikely that this killer only committed this one crime and then led a law-abiding existence. The nature of this offense indicates to us that this person likely committed other crimes. If he was ever caught and his DNA put into a data bank, then it’s only a matter of time before we identify him.”
Rebecca was carried from her home in the dead of night on July 5, 1988. For three days police and community members searched for her. A woman riding a horse on Oat Mountain found the body secreted by a fallen tree.