Mother Finds Girl’s Body

Zoila Bustamante cried Monday as she fingered her 11-year-old daughter Wendy’s favorite Barbie doll.

Only hours earlier, the woman had found the bound body of her daughter wrapped in a bed sheet inside a boarded-up guest house, only a few hundred feet from the family’s Compton home.

Wendy had been missing since Saturday evening, apparently abducted as she walked to a neighbor’s house.

Compton police said they were looking for a suspect Monday evening in connection with Wendy’s death, but they provided no further details.

A cause of death had not been established pending an autopsy, nor was it known if Wendy had been sexually assaulted, Sgt. Ramon Allen said.

“She was an honest girl, an honest girl,” the Spanish-speaking Bustamante said through an interpreter. “She liked to buy new clothes for her dolls. She was a very happy little girl.”

The family--Wendy, her parents and three younger brothers--came to the United States from Honduras six years ago, settling in Compton only in the last few months.

A photograph of Wendy lay on the floor, where her mother had dropped it. Taken last Halloween, it showed a thin girl with long, straight, dark brown hair wearing a robot costume.

Wendy had been the subject of an intensive search, according to Allen, which began Saturday night shortly after the mother reported the girl missing.

When asked if the abandoned house in the 1000 block of East Golden Avenue had been checked previously, Allen replied: “Let me put it this way, that block was thoroughly searched.”

Bustamante, a small, fragile-looking woman of 31, said she had renewed her own search at sunrise Monday. As she walked, a neighbor told her about the dilapidated guest house on the next block, she said.

She went there and, peering through the boards, saw Wendy’s body. She said she ran home and called police.

Diane Graham, who lives in a house on the same lot where the body was found, said her family had been gone for most of the Easter weekend.

Her neighbors said they do not remember seeing anyone around the guest house.

Bustamante said the last time she saw her daughter, she had walked outside after being told she could not go with a friend’s family to a neighborhood pizza restaurant.