$50,000 Reward in Murder Case Excites, Baffles Investigators : Crime: Governor OKs the maximum amount in the little publicized death of a 14-year-old Lancaster girl found in the desert.

Sgts. Frank Salerno and Jackie Franco of the sheriff’s homicide bureau, whose work is a daily lesson in the different values people place on human life, got good news Tuesday.

In response to their request, Gov. George Deukmejian offered a $50,000 reward for information in the case of Angela Migliore, a 14-year-old Lancaster girl found strangled in the desert last month.

But why Deukmejian offered such a large reward in such a comparatively little-known case remained unclear. Other than the formal proclamation terming the crime “a senseless murder,” his office offered no explanation.

The Migliore case, which Salerno and Franco have pursued doggedly with little progress, accounts for the 10th such reward that the governor has offered since he signed a law in May, 1989, increasing state rewards from a maximum of $10,000 to $50,000.

The case has received less widespread attention than previous crimes regarded as worthy of the maximum reward, including the Glendale and Santa Barbara arson fires, the rape-murder of a Wilmington woman abducted from a drive-in, and the drive-by shooting death in South Los Angeles of a sheriff’s Explorer Scout.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block requested Deukmejian to offer the reward, at the prompting of the two detectives.

The governor offers two or three rewards a year based on requests from law enforcement agencies, spokeswoman Susan Trowbridge said. But she would not say how many requests are received or what criteria are used to select from among hundreds of violent crimes.

The governor makes little comment on the cases he chooses, she said. “The reward speaks for itself.”

Sheriff’s officials could not come up with a figure on the number of cases in which Block has sought rewards from the state this year.

Now the Migliore reward totals $60,000, with $5,000 offers each from the city of Lancaster and Los Angeles County.

Capt. Gary Vance of the Antelope Valley sheriff’s station tried to put into words what makes the Migliore case special. He said homicide investigators don’t see a lot of killings like hers--no drugs, no gangs, no leads and a dead child.

“I suppose it’s one of those cases where you’ve got a totally innocent victim, the kind that shocks the conscience,” he said.