Mother Just Wants Truth About Girl’s Murderer

Bertha Velasquez said she has been slowly coming to terms with her daughter’s murder of more than 10 months ago. The popular 16-year-old was found strangled and buried under a pile of pine needles near a flood control channel not far from here.

It’s the fact that her daughter’s murderer has never been caught that still keeps Velasquez awake at night.

“There’s hardly a moment that I don’t think about it,” she said with a burst of tears. “What this criminal did to my daughter, he could do to another person, and another, and another. Nobody’s daughter deserves to die in such a cruel and vile way.”

Despite dozens of initial leads, homicide detectives say they are no closer to solving Zuleima Valdez’s murder now than when her body was found March 19.

Zuleima’s death sparked an intense investigation by law enforcement agencies in Orange and Los Angeles counties. Although the case remains active, it has been at a virtual standstill for months, with no new leads.

“We have no suspect information at all,” Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Sgt. Lynda Edmonds said.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has been handling the investigation because Zuleima’s body was found near the Coyote Creek flood control channel in Lakewood, across the Orange County line.

The Cypress High School freshman was last seen about 9 p.m. March 18, when she told her mother that she was going to the beach with friends. But friends later told investigators that they had left for the beach two or three hours earlier and had not seen her.

Velasquez said she became worried when Zuleima had not returned home by 1 a.m. The next morning Velasquez and other residents of a mobile home park searched the area. Later that afternoon, two teen-agers riding bicycles near the channel found Zuleima’s fully clothed body.

Days later, investigators began looking into the possibility that Zuleima was slain by the same man who was a suspect in the strangulation of a Long Beach woman whose body was found dumped in Laguna Hills on March 21.

But that suspect, Steven Christopher Walters, 30, of Long Beach, shot himself to death when sheriff’s investigators arrived at his house to question him about the Laguna Hills homicide.

Orange County Sheriff’s Lt. Richard J. Olson said that the speculation about a link between the two strangulations was started “by the media” and that investigators had no evidence to support a tie.

Edmonds of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department said deputies investigating Zuleima’s murder said that they “looked into that lead but that it didn’t pan out.”

One reason the Walters lead faded, Edmonds said, is that the suspect died before he could be questioned.

But detectives said they do believe that Walters, who was a convicted child molester and car thief, killed Lori Calhoun, 41, the Long Beach woman whose body was found in Laguna Hills.

Like investigators, Velasquez has discounted the Walters connection.

“I think it was somebody she knew,” she said in Spanish, with her 31-year-old son, Bernard Velasquez, translating for her. “She always had such a big trust in people.”

Velasquez, who still lives at the Lincoln Center Mobile Home Park with her son, several blocks away from where Zuleima’s body was found, said she occasionally receives telephone calls from investigators, but they never report any progress.

“I wish that whoever knows who the killer is that they would denounce him to the police,” she said. “I know somebody knows what happened, and they’re hiding it. I hope someday I’ll know the truth.”