Frustrating Case of Slain Girl ‘Going Nowhere’ : Crime: Sources say investigators have been unable to tie their No. 1 suspect to the death of Leticia Hernandez.

Law enforcement officials have been unable to conclusively tie their prime suspect to the death of Leticia Hernandez, the 7-year-old Oceanside girl whose disappearance 2 1/2 years ago launched a nationwide search, and the investigation is “going nowhere,” sources said.

DNA tests recently returned from an FBI laboratory in Washington did not link the suspect--a convicted child molester and alien smuggler who lived just down the street from the girl--to the crime, sources said. “The results came back, and they were very bad,” one source said.

The negative test results marked the latest turn in an investigation beset by disappointment and delay. Emotionally charged from the beginning, the case has been slowed by misfocused police work and by lengthy legal wrangling, which has made it intensely frustrating for authorities, who believe they finally have targeted the right man but can’t prove it.

With no breaks in sight, officials said, prospects are dim that the case will ever be brought to court. “It’s just going nowhere,” said one source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, like others familiar with the case. “Just nowhere.”

Three sources close to the case confirmed the details of the investigation. All three and several others connected to the probe demanded to remain unnamed because the investigation is continuing.

Leticia’s disappearance Dec. 16, 1989, as she played outside her family’s Bush Street apartment sparked a massive nationwide hunt. Police received thousands of leads and at least 18 reports of sightings from California to Florida.

The kidnaping received extensive television exposure, with segments on “Crime Stoppers,” “Unsolved Mysteries” and “America’s Most Wanted.”

It also brought an outpouring of sympathy from the community. Benefits were held, raising at least $10,000 in reward money. An Oceanside police officer wrote a song to help raise funds.

After Leticia’s disappearance, witnesses told police they had seen the 4-foot, 60-pound girl taken away in a vehicle.

One of her alleged captors was described as a white man in his mid-30s or early 40s, about 6 feet tall, 230 to 250 pounds, with blond, shoulder-length hair that was thinning on top. He reportedly had a tattoo of a cross with printing on it on the back of his hand.

Another captor was described as a slender white woman, about 30, 5-foot-6 to 5-foot-11, with blond hair and a light complexion. A third suspect was said to be a white woman with a deep tan, in her late 40s or early 50s, heavy-set, with dark brown hair with gray streaks.

The descriptions were released by police after Leticia allegedly was sighted at highway rest stops, gas stations and road stands between Buckman Springs east of San Diego and High Springs, Fla.

Between February and May, 1990, Leticia reportedly was seen in 10 towns in northern Florida. The last purported sighting, in High Springs, was May 22, 1990, police said.

After that, there were no more sightings.

On March 6, 1991, a property caretaker discovered Leticia’s skull near a rural county road long favored by alien smugglers, in a sparsely populated area between the Pala Indian Reservation and the Riverside County line. Nearby, officers found the pair of red shorts she had been wearing when she was abducted.

The two sites were about 20 miles from her home.

At first, Oceanside police said Leticia might have been dead for three months to a year. But then the San Diego County medical examiner’s office said Leticia most likely had been dead 12 to 15 months, meaning she may have been killed soon after her abduction and that all 18 reported sightings may have been bogus.

From the start, detective work on the case, headed by the Oceanside Police Department, was based on an assumption that Leticia was still alive, sources said.

In part, that assumption was based on a natural human desire to hope for the best, sources said. But it delayed detectives, who should have been fearing the worst and focusing more directly on friends, family and neighbors of Leticia, the law enforcement sources said.

The assumption that the girl was still alive was also based on the intense publicity the case generated. The raft of TV stories and the slew of newspaper headlines caused detectives to “fixate on a conclusion which may have been inaccurate,” that Leticia could be found alive, a source said.

“This was the paramount news story across the country,” the source said. “A hot property. Think about the pressure to solve this thing.

“What this publicity caused is it caused people to be unable to step back and take a look at their own work,” the source said. “It was not solid” police work.

Complicating the investigation was a familiar law enforcement concern: the strong rivalries between police agencies purportedly cooperating on a case.

When reports came streaming in that Leticia had been taken across the state line, the FBI jumped into the case, since it investigates kidnapings that cross state lines. “Much to the dismay of the (Oceanside Police) Department,” a source said.

Both agencies vied to solve the case. Friction, though not overbearing, added to the pressure, the source said.

Months passed, and then Leticia’s skull and her shorts were found, in an area with few houses, about 2 miles south of the Riverside County line and east of S16, a two-lane road that runs through a rugged canyon. The lonely road has long been used by alien smugglers as a bypass to the U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint a few miles to the west on Interstate 15.

“The skull is bare,” a source said, meaning a long time had passed since death. “What this tells you is that these reports (of sightings) were probably in error, as they often are.”

Federal investigators, however, remained on the case, saying they still had authority to investigate even though the skull was found within miles of Oceanside.

Under a technicality of federal law, anyone missing for 24 hours and believed kidnaped is presumed to have traveled across state lines, giving federal authorities the power to pursue the case.

Investigators knew, however, that a convicted child molester and alien smuggler lived down the street from the girl. Aroused initially by his record, investigators were distracted by the reputed out-of-state sightings.

Last year, a federal grand jury turned its focus toward the neighbor. But his role in the case remained fuzzy.

The suspect, who sources said did not testify before the grand jury, was convicted of alien smuggling in 1984. He pleaded guilty to a sole felony count of molesting his 9-year-old niece in 1988. Recently, he moved to Hemet.

It was known that the suspect, who was served with a subpoena identifying him as the target of the grand jury probe, had not left California during the search for Leticia, sources said.

It was also known that the suspect--a dark-skinned Latino, 5-foot-6 and 154 pounds--obviously bore no resemblance to a huge, blond white man or two white women, the witness descriptions of Leticia’s alleged captors, sources said.

So investigators tried to reconcile what they now knew for a fact--that her remains had been found close to home--with the reports of the cross-country trips that had been repeated so many times they had come to seem like fact, sources said.

Rather than pursue the straightforward theory that the suspect had killed Leticia near home shortly after molesting and abducting her, sources said, investigators surmised he had molested her, kidnaped her, then turned her over to fellow alien smugglers--to white friends, who took her on a road trip to Florida.

“It was ridiculous,” a source said. “Here are the two scenarios: She’s alive, they take her to Florida, where she either dies or is killed. They bring her back to a spot 22 miles from her home, where they dump the body and discard the identical clothes she was wearing on the day she disappeared.

“Or, they go to Florida, only to bring her back out here to kill her. Neither one makes sense. There are not 12 folks on any jury in this great country that you’re going to convince with that story,” the law enforcement source said.

While police clung to that theory, the source said, the suspect’s lawyer blocked a federal search warrant to obtain DNA evidence from him, meaning blood, hair and saliva samples.

The warrant raised a novel issue in federal court: whether it is legal to obtain DNA evidence if no criminal case exists, on the basis of a mere grand jury investigation.

Two federal judges reviewed the case, offering different views. The suspect’s attorney, San Diego lawyer Judy Clarke, took the issue to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the San Francisco-based federal appeals court that serves California. There it languished, for half a year, without a hearing, sources said.

Last November, frustrated with the delay, federal prosecutors bowed out of the case. “We reached a point where we thought it would be better to send the case to the state, and we did so,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Larry Burns. He declined to comment further on the case.

The search warrant that was so disputed under federal law is a settled point in state court, where local police regularly use the warrants to collect samples. The suspect promptly submitted samples, said Dick Lewis, coordinator of the Metropolitan Homicide Task Force, which served the warrant. Lewis also declined further comment.

In March, the samples were sent to the FBI lab. Ron Orrantia, an FBI spokesman in San Diego, also declined to comment on the case. But a source said test results came back a few weeks ago. “To say the least, it was not positive at all,” the source said.

The tests do tie the suspect to various sites that have been searched in the case, another law enforcement source said. But the tests do not put the girl at those places, the source said.

“The DNA didn’t flunk as far as he (the suspect) was concerned,” the source said. “This DNA did not exclude him by any manner or means. It simply did not connect him to the victim.”

The next step in the case, sources said, is uncertain. During the federal grand jury probe, the suspect took a lie detector test about an alibi he offered as to his whereabouts when Leticia disappeared.

The suspect claimed he was out of town. But he “flunked so badly they ought to sue him for damage to the (lie detector) machine,” a source said.

“Strong circumstantial evidence” puts the suspect in Leticia’s neighborhood when she disappeared, including witness statements and items collected during the investigation, a source said.

Police believe the suspect, with a record of child molesting, had the motive to seize the girl. The killing, police speculate, probably happened in panic or anger that could have been triggered by any number of circumstances.

But detectives find themselves unable to take the case any further.

“It’s not that we think he’s innocent,” a source said. “But he’s not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Added another source: “It’s a shame. A darn shame. I don’t know where we go from here.”