THE KIDNAPPING AND MURDER OF SANDRA CANTU

so today's video is going to be another solved true crime case today we're going to be talking about the case of sandra cantu i'd never heard of this case before one of my channel members suggested it to me i feel like that's becoming a theme these days but i think this is a pretty big case over in america specifically california so let's just get into it but before we do i just want to thank our sponsor for making this video possible magellan tv magellan tv is my absolute favorite documentary streaming service they have over 3 000 documentaries on a range of different topics from space nature earth history science and of course true crime one of the biggest reasons why i love magellan tv so much is because their true crime documentaries specifically are on so many cases that i've never even heard of like they do cover some of the big cases like charles manson but there's so many smaller cases from a bunch of different countries that you know i wouldn't have known of if i didn't have 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description that's how you get this amazing deal don't miss out thanks again to michelin tv for sponsoring this video and now before we get into it i just want to give my usual disclaimer that i mean absolutely no disrespect to anyone that i talk about in this video this video is for educational purposes and everything that i'm about to say is just information that i have found on the internet and i'm compiling into one video just a couple of content warnings before we get into this one this case is about a child and i know a lot of you guys can't watch the ones about children so there's that there's also themes of suicide and potential self-harm triggers in this video we don't actually talk about self-harm specifically but there is language that can be potentially triggering around that subject there is also themes of sexual assault in this case as well so if any of that is something that you don't want to hear about right now feel free to click out of this video i'm sure i can see you again sometime with a different case that might be a bit more suitable for you but with all that being said let's just get into the video so sandra renee cantu was an eight-year-old girl born on march 8 2001 she was the youngest of four children to parents maria and daniel sandra's parents got divorced when she was very young so her whole life she was practically just raised by her mother and her grandparents actually lived with them as well they lived in a mobile home park in a place called tracy in california and you know this was this was quite a big family and they all lived in one mobile home but you know they made it work they were very happy they were a very close family and you know no complaints from the cantu family sandra was a very outgoing little girl she was always smiling always wanting to do and try new things she was a very adventurous spirit she found it really easy to make friends because of this outgoing energy that she kind of put out into the world so she had a big group of friends she was friends with everyone on the mobile home park children adults literally anyone she would strike up a conversation with anyone make friends with anyone she was just a very positive light she was always smiling she was very confident she was just very bright she was one of those kids that just lit up a room when they walked in some of the things that sandra loved included gardening with her mother and her grandparents she always used to help out with the cooking as well she really liked that and she loved colouring in her colouring books she loved singing dancing jumping around you know just being a kid she was very active she was very loud she was just a very bright kid on march 27 2009 it was a friday sandra had just finished school and she decided on her way home that she wanted to go and get some friends and play outside she didn't want to just go home for the evening so she arrived back at the trailer park she ditched her bags at home and then she went straight back out to go and find some of her friends to play with the way that they would do it was that they would literally just if one of the kids wanted to play out they would literally just go and knock on every single person's door and see if anyone wanted to join them and sandra did this pretty much every single day so her mother had no issue with it even as it started getting dark outside that evening sandra did this every single day she always used to come home for a dinner her mum trusted her she always taught her children if they were gonna go and play out they weren't allowed to leave the trailer park because you know they trusted everyone in the trailer park they were all neighbours they knew everyone around 7 pm that night sandra's mother maria had finished cooking dinner and she wanted sandra home to eat as a family so she started calling round all of sandra's friend's parents to see if sandra was at anyone's house she called literally everyone on that trailer park pretty much and none of them actually had sandra over at their house in fact none of them had seen sandra for a good few hours she left her house when she came and ditched her bags after school she left at about 4 p.m so that was when she would have knocked on everyone's door everyone saw her at that point but now it was about 7 p.m and none of them had seen her for that whole three hour gap but maria wasn't too worried you know if sandra couldn't find friends to play with she was gonna play it by herself so maria went outside and started calling for sandra maybe she was just you know playing in a corner somewhere or hiding behind something she trusted sandra to be in the trailer park like i said you know her parents had very strict rules for the kids to not leave the trailer pack when they were playing outside so maria started doing laps of this trailer park and she just couldn't find sandra anywhere she was shouting her name and sandra wasn't responding she carried on looking around for another 20 30 minutes and she's getting progressively more and more worried as she's looking around and realizing that sandra's not there and so eventually she decides to go back home and report this to the police report her daughter sandra as missing so police came round to the house and they were speaking with her parents they got a detailed description of her what she was wearing that day she was wearing a pink hello kitty t-shirt some black leggings and while half of the officers were speaking with sandra's family the other half of the officers had a walk around the trailer park and they were asking knocking on everyone's doors if they'd seen sandra but again absolutely no look no one had seen or heard from sandra as police were speaking with her family they learned that sandra's grandfather had actually installed a cctv camera on the front of their house just you know in case anything ever happened in case they ever got robbed or the house got vandalized or anything they would have that camera he volunteered over this footage to the police and they watched it back and they see sandra coming home she dropped her bags off at home and then they see her back out on the street again this was around 4 p.m when they knew that she was just walking around the trailer park knocking on friends doors and things and she didn't seem stressed she didn't seem like anything was off she was skipping she looked happy and that was the last time she was seen on the cctv footage she wasn't seen again from that point so they knew she hadn't even tried to come home this footage didn't give them much it gave them kind of probably a better idea of what she was wearing that day i suppose but other than that there was nothing so the police continued to speak with the cantu family to try and get an idea of sandra's life and potential suspects or anything and that was when they found out that her parents were separated and actually at this point in time they were going through the divorce and the custody of the children you know the settlement and everything and it is a relatively common thing to see in children's kidnapping disappearance cases that often the person that does it is actually the other parent that doesn't have custody of that child they go and literally take the child in order to spend time with them or you know maybe use the child as a weapon so that was police's initial theory however sandra's mother maria just didn't think that was the case i mean she knew her ex-husband better than anyone i suppose and she said that just wasn't him he wouldn't do anything like that he hadn't been in sandra's life for a few years at this point and you know maria just didn't see a reason for him to do that it wasn't like they were actively fighting or it just wasn't the guy he was basically regardless police decided to look into this theory they tracked down sandra's father they spoke with him and very quickly ruled him out as a suspect i don't think he was even in tracy at the time that sandra went missing so now they were back to square one once again with absolutely no leads no suspect absolutely nothing and by now a considerable amount of time had gone by it was rolling into the next morning it was almost 24 hours since sandra cantu was last seen and police recognized the urgency in this case as well with missing children the chances of finding that child alive after they've been missing for just three hours is cut down to seventy percent just three hours sandra cantu's family didn't even realize she was missing until three hours in so at that point their chances of finding her alive were already diminishing by the minute after 12 hours of the child being missing those chances are halved and then after 24 hours the chances are dwindling and dwindling almost down to like 10 they had a 10 chance at this point of finding sandra cantu alive but police were willing to do whatever they possibly could so they called in the fbi they brought in sniffer dogs police were going around on horses they were helicopters in the sky they started blocking off roads questioning literally every car that came in a certain radius of the trailer park her family at home were printing out missing persons posters giving them out everywhere putting them on lampposts and everything there were hundreds if not thousands of just regular people volunteering to come and help find sandra people that had no idea who she was people that had never heard of her before this everyone in pretty much the whole of california was so affected by this case that they just wanted to find somewhere to help out people went all over tracy and the neighboring cities just giving out these posters knocking on doors every single door that they could asking anyone if they'd seen or heard anything but really nothing was coming up it was like this girl had literally just vanished into thin air an initial reward was set for two thousand dollars for the safe return of sandra cantu and i think as this case was gaining traction it was on the news it was on every single media outlet and more people were hearing about it they all wanted to help out companies businesses people with a lot of money these people kept reaching out and this reward just kept building and building a building until eventually i think they had like a 30 000 reward out there on day two of the investigation police got a rather minor tip from someone that lived on the trailer park they said that the reason they hadn't reported this before now was because they thought it was kind of insignificant but the more they'd kind of dwelled over it in their mind they thought actually maybe it was worth mentioning to police just in case it was linked one of the neighbors that lived only a couple of doors down from sandra cantu had a suitcase out on their driveway on the day that sandra went missing and around 4 p.m that suitcase went missing it was stolen and this woman at first she thought well the police have bigger things to be dealing with than my missing suitcase but the more she thought about it the more she thought maybe that's not just a coincidence maybe it was linked maybe the same person that stole sandra stole the suitcase for whatever reason police kept it in mind they added it to the case file but obviously it wasn't really gonna help them too much at this point in time there were a few very short-lived suspects in this case just people that police had looked into after speaking to sandra's family her friends her neighbours people that were you know a little bit dodgy you know they had a reason to suspect them maybe the first of which was an ice cream man that was seen in that neighborhood by the trailer park on the day that sandra went missing now this ice cream man was rather unfamiliar the locals didn't really recognize him he wasn't there often and on that day he was actually seen speaking to a bunch of kids i mean that is what ice cream men do but i don't know the way that the neighbors explained this to police it was a little bit dodgy they got kind of a weird feeling from this ice cream man they didn't really like him so they just mentioned it to police that this guy's not normally in the area and then the day that he is a young girl goes missing maybe look into him there were no direct links to sandra here it's not like he was seen speaking to her or anything like that police did look into it but they quickly ruled him out there was another guy that lived on the trailer park a kind of older gentleman that sandra's own family told police to look into her because he was a known paedophile and he actually had a history of trying things with sandra cantu herself there was this one incident at the community swimming pool where sandra had been talking to this man as she did she was a very very friendly child she would talk to anyone and everyone and this older man was seen brushing the hair from sandra's face and kissing her on the lips an old man kissing a child on the lips and this was some time ago as well sandra was eight at the time of this case and i think this happened when she was like six so police looked into this man they called him into the station for an interview where they actually confronted him with the fact that they knew this and he confessed to it and he said well you know it's just it's just harmless affection police had to explain to this man that no that is not harmless that is sexual assault against a minor and that was when the man confessed to the police that he had this attraction to children specifically girls around the age of nine or ten sandra cantu eight years old his exact victim type the fact that he just openly admitted this to police i actually couldn't believe it when i heard it i mean that is the biggest red flag anyone could potentially get in a true crime case however this man did have a credible alibi police were still keeping an eye on him but they decided to kind of focus on other things for the time being because it's all about checked out i mean they should definitely be keeping an eye on that guy for the rest of his life because freak now a few days later in the investigation police received another tip and this time it seemed as though it was the end of the road this tip diminished everyone's hopes of finding sandra cantu alive a man that worked at the local dump had called the police when he found a pink hello kitty t-shirt just thrown in the trash normally he wouldn't think too much about this people throw old clothes away all the time but because sandra cantu's case was so public on the media and they talked about this outfit that she was last seen in the pink hello kitty t-shirt the black leggings he thought that this could be linked to the missing little girl he'd been hearing about so police came down they collected this t-shirt took it back to the station as evidence and they informed sandra cantu's family of what they'd found and they were they were devastated police asked them to come down to the police station to identify this t-shirt and you know from that point on maybe they would start looking at the investigation differently so the family came down they took one look at this t-shirt and they realized it actually wasn't sandra's it was actually slightly different to the one that sandra's mother remembered sandra wearing that day and it was the wrong size as well so in that moment all of their hopes came flooding back this wasn't sandra's t-shirt maybe she was still out there somewhere but at this stage in the case police were once again running out of leads and so they decided to go back and look at the case and see if there's anything that they could look into a little bit further and that was when they remembered the cctv footage those were the last steps of sandra cantus that they were able to look at and analyze so they got that cctv footage back up and they watched it frame by frame to see if they could see anything and that was when they noticed that sandra's movements weren't quite as straightforward as they originally thought so in the beginning of this clip it's quite clear that sandra is on her way home she's literally walking in a diagonal line in the direction of her house but then about halfway there her head turns and she changes direction she starts walking down the street elsewhere so police saw this and they thought well what made her change her mind from going straight home to going down the street you know had something caught her attention had someone called her over it seemed as though she was actually looking in the direction of one of her best friend's homes and this kind of made sense maybe she thought oh i forgot to go and knock on her door i'm going to go and see if she wants to play out but the thing that stood out to police was the fact that she wasn't intending on even going there she was intending on going home so something in that last second caught her attention and made her change her mind another few days went by in this case and you know like i said people's hopes were diminishing literally by the hour by now the chances of finding sandra cantu alive were so low that you know people they didn't want to admit it but they kind of knew that they were fighting a losing battle with this search and in one last attempt to rally up the community keep spirits high keep everyone motivated to find sandra they decided to have a candlelit vigil and everyone attended this vigil there was sandra's family her friends neighbors from the trailer park people that barely even knew sandra that just wanted to feel closer to the investigation and closer to her family and show their support everyone turned up as well as the police and the fbi partly because a lot of those officers that were working on this case said that they felt so connected to it a lot of them said that they felt as though they were looking for their own child but also because they knew that if anyone had done something to sandra the possibility that they would show up at this vigil was quite high whether that was to seem less suspicious to seem like they were on the family side or if that was just to revel in the sadness that they'd caused you know revel in what they'd done a lot of even serial killers and people like that they will show up at the crime scene or show up at search teams and things because they like to see the effect of what they've done so investigators came along and everyone sang songs they lit candles they shared memories of sandra people are crying people are laughing people are remembering different amazing things about this wonderful little girl and then all of a sudden this was interrupted when a woman runs straight through the middle of the vigil straight up to investigators screaming this woman is hysterical she's wailing she's crying she's screaming i found something i found something she runs over to investigators she grabs them she leads them over to this thing that she found the whole time absolutely incoherent she is wailing she runs over to where the mailboxes are kept on this trailer park and when she gets over there she slumps on the ground right next to this letter she's saying it's there it's there it's there so police bent down they looked at this letter and they read it it said cantu locked in stolen suitcase thrown in water on vachetti road and whitehall road and this letter was signed witness so this letter was immediately bagged up and taken back to the station as evidence where they got in all kind of experts to look at this paper experts handwriting experts just general criminologists and everyone that looked at this letter immediately found it very very odd there were quite a few things that were just off about it for a start many of the words were misspelled in a very obvious way now i don't mean you know just general bad spelling i mean like the word on was spelt with two ends who who actually does think that honor is spelt with two ends it was very clearly deliberate and there were so many misspellings in this whole letter and it's just 12 words long investigators just looked at it and thought there is absolutely no way that any human being can make this many spelling mistakes in 12 words handwriting experts that looked at it also thought that the handwriting looked like it was faked like the person that wrote it was trying to hide their real handwriting but no matter what the circumstances the situation with this letter was it was terrifying to the police real or fake it was making some very very bold claims about this poor child it said that sandra cantu was dead and it was leading police to where they could potentially find her body that was locked in a suitcase so the next morning a team of divers or multiple teams of divers were sent out all over that particular area that this letter talked about this was around two miles from the trailer park where sandra cantu lived and all these diving teams went in every single body of water in that general area the only issue with a few of these bodies of water was that they were actually sewage dumps from local farms so it was a lot thicker than water let's just put it that way so it was going to be really hard for divers to actually well you know dive in it it was going to be hard for them to dig up enough of this like sewage water this thick sludge to be able to look deep in this in this body of water especially if whatever they were looking for this suitcase supposedly if it had been in there a while it would have sunk through all of this and the weight on top of it of this sewage would have been so heavy that it was practically impossible for them to be able to search the whole thing effectively teams tried their best but they knew it was going to be one hell of a job it was going to take a very long time so in the meantime police back at the station were working on trying to track down the origin of this very suspicious letter so this book with the woman that actually found this letter on the night of the candlelit vigil her name was melissa huckabee she was one of the neighbors she literally lived like two lots down from sandra cantu she had a daughter that was just a few years younger than sandra her daughter was five years old and sandra and her daughter used to play out a lot together so she felt really connected to this case she knew sandra quite well and she told police that her disappearance had really quite affected her and her family melissa worked at the local church she was a sunday school teacher and her father was actually a pastor at this church and so ever since sandra went missing they'd done a lot to kind of remember her they'd prayed for her things like that she told police that when she got this letter she was specifically alarmed that it mentioned the stolen suitcase because melissa huckabee was actually the person that reported her suitcase as being stolen from her drive on the same day that sandra went missing she said she just had a feeling that she knew it was worth reporting to police at the time you know she wasn't going to do it at first but the more she thought about it the more she thought it was just too much of a coincidence and the suitcase was actually quite big it was big enough to fit a child in now as police were speaking to melissa huckabee they were immediately quite suspicious about how much of this investigation seemed to center around this woman that really had nothing to do with it it was her luggage that was stolen it was her that received the letter and in this letter they even wrote the words stolen suitcase you know why would if this was a genuine letter from sandra's killer why would they need to specify that the suitcase was stolen there were just so many weird things about it like why would the killer want to communicate with melissa huckabee of all people like why would they send the letter to her was it because they knew it was her suitcase surely they would send it to sandra cantu's family everything just seemed to be happening to melissa huckabee who had no real connection to sandra cantu and police thought it was all quite convenient they didn't necessarily suspect her as the killer but they did suspect her of being a big attention seeker at this point they were doubting the authenticity of the letter you know did it actually have anything to do with this case or was this just something that melissa huckabee had concocted just to involve herself and just to get some attention police just thought it was all a bit odd so they continued to question her they just kind of wanted to find out more about this woman and her relationship with sandra so they asked her what she was doing on the day that sandra cantu went missing around the time of like four o'clock and she said that she was actually at the church where she works as a sunday school teacher and she was redecorating her classroom so police asked her if there was anything that she could give them to verify this alibi you know confirm it if she'd made any calls or texts or anything while she was there and she said actually she did make a phone call while she was there to someone at the trailer park to report her suitcases missing so police looked at her mobile phone history and she did she made this phone call from the church around 4 p.m kind of time so maybe she wasn't there but police weren't fully satisfied with that i mean sandra cantu was last seen on the cctv footage around 4pm but that doesn't necessarily mean that was when she went missing i mean she could have just been playing alone outside in the trailer park until like five o'clock six o'clock and then she might have been kidnapped or whatever no one knows the specific time that she went missing she was just last seen at four o'clock and then by seven she wasn't there so police were still kind of interested in melissa huckabee as maybe not a potential suspect but a potential person of interest so they asked her if they could seize her car and search it and she said yes police weren't looking for anything in particular it's not like they were expecting to find something specific like a weapon or blood or anything they were just you know they were just looking and they did actually find something in her glove box there was a little blue sticky note with some scribbles on it and these scribbles they looked like more than just scribbles it seemed as though it was three words that had been written out and then scribbled over so much that you couldn't really see what was underneath so this little sticky note was sent off again to handwriting experts who kind of put it under a microscope they messed with it they changed the contrast levels i don't know what they do but these experts found that it was three words that were scribbled out and these three words were bushetti road whitehall road and water coincidentally three of the words that the suspected killer had written on a letter for melissa huckabee to find bit weird so police now decided to arrange a search of melissa huckabee's home because now she was seeming more and more suspicious by the minute and in her home under the nightstand next to her bed they found a notebook so she'd gone out of her way to hide this notebook under her dresser they pulled it out and they noticed that the paper was the exact same as the letter that was written and sent to melissa huckabee and as they were looking through this notepad they actually found that one of the pages had been teared out but that's not all we're not stopping there on the next page after the one that had been teared out there was some indents in the page you know how when you write really hard on a page and it kind of dents the page underneath and on a closer look at this page with the dinsen they found that these indents lined up with a few of the words that were written on the letter that was sent to melissa huckabee so this pretty much completely confirmed that melissa huckabee wrote that letter herself sent that letter to herself but why police couldn't decide what conclusion to draw from this was melissa genuinely the killer and was she actually writing this letter leading police to the body of the girl that she just killed but making it that she found her own letter i don't know it all just seemed a bit or was it all just for attention and this was the reason that police believed the most because she really made a scene of it at the candlelit vigil i mean she was wailing she was crying she was screaming she was like pushing people out of the way it was so dramatic they thought that maybe she was just doing this for attention she just wanted to make this about her she just i don't know melissa huckabee did have a history of mental illness and i just want to clarify right here that i'm not saying that you know people with mental illness seek attention but a lot of people that knew her claimed that she did just do dramatic things quite a lot for no reason i mean probably just for the attention of it and as much as police were confident that this probably was just for attention you can't be so short so they decided to carry on looking into it carry on questioning her and when they called her in for another interview before they even got chance to ask their first question melissa huckabee told them that she actually had a couple of suspects for them that they should probably look into she gave them the name of another older gentleman that lived in the trailer park who had a history of sexually assaulting the young girls that lived there and he actually was known to drug them sometimes as well i don't know how that's a multiple time thing i mean surely if he did it once he should be in prison for that but apparently he did it a couple of times melissa said that she'd actually seen this man speaking with sandra on a few different occasions so she just handed his name over to police just in case they wanted to look into that but she wasn't done there she wasn't done giving them suspect names she mentioned another two people that lived on this trailer park this time it was a father and son jeweler but the son was like an adult so there were two fully grown men and she told police that she believed that both of these men were paedophiles and they had pictures of children on their phones potentially even pictures of sandra cantu so police decided to look into all three of these men the first one that they looked into the guy with a history of drugging children they cleared him pretty much straight away they looked into the father and son jeweler and they seized their phones and on there they did actually find a lot of pictures of children including sandra cantu these pictures were suggestive in nature they weren't straight up like child porn but you know they were pictures of sandra cantu sitting on one of the men's laps which to her in that moment she wouldn't have seen anything wrong with it completely innocent to a child but those men knew what they were doing they knew they shouldn't have had a stranger's child sitting on their knee i mean they took that picture for a reason so all of these men that were considered potential suspects all three of those that we just talked about plus the guy that kissed sandra once in the pool all of them were given polygraph tests lie detector tests the guy that kissed sandra at the pool one time actually passed his test so police didn't think he had anything to do with it but the guy that drugged a child in the past he actually failed his but he did have a pretty concrete alibi so police kind of let that one go a little bit the father and son jeweler also took these tests and both of them failed so what was going on here how did three of these men failed these lie detector tests about knowing where sandra cantu was did these people know more than they were letting on to police had they worked together i just want to interject here and say that polygraph tests in my opinion and a lot of other people's opinions they're absolute crap they're not accurate they're not a specific science like they're inadmissible in court because they're just not reliable i don't even know why they're still used i mean they're probably just used to give a good idea of whether someone's lying but they're so easy to fake and they're so easy to manipulate so that if you are lying it makes you pass or if you're not lying it makes you fail you know they're just they're rubbish they're proper rubbish whether you personally believe lie detector tests or not that's your own call to make but i thought i would mention just in case anyone was on the fence that they're a load of crap so police were now thinking based on the results of these lie detector tests that maybe all of these people were linked in somewhere maybe they all did something here as a group maybe melissa huckabee was involved because how else would she know that they all knew something you know why else would she give up their names but before police could even look into that as a theory they received a phone call and this was the phone call that they never wanted to receive 11 days into sandra cantu's disappearance on april 6 2009 police received a phone call from a worker at a local irrigation pond they were draining this pond as they often did when one of them found a suitcase in the water so police rushed straight to the scene and there they found this black suitcase both of the zips were tied together by a little white string they didn't open it at the scene just in case this was what they thought it was they didn't want to affect any kind of forensic evidence that might be in there so instead the whole suitcase was lifted into a body bag to be transported to a medical lab somewhere and as soon as the forensic team lifted this suitcase from the floor the first thing they noticed was the weight of it this wasn't just an empty suitcase that someone had thrown away there was something in here it was quite heavy and the smell that came from the suitcase as soon as they started moving in it was the unmistakable smell of decomposing human flesh so the suitcase was transported back to the medical examiner's lab and as soon as it was opened everyone's worst nightmare was confirmed this was the body of sandra cantu inside the suitcase she was still clothed she was curled up in the fetal position and the rate of decomposition was actually rather fast so she couldn't immediately be identified just from looking at her body she was actually identified through the clothes that she was wearing that day immediately from looking at sandra cantu's body there were no clear injuries so they didn't quite know her cause of death yet they were gonna have to wait until she went to autopsy there were no self-defense wounds on her arms no scratches no cuts no stab wounds no bread marks bruises cuts absolutely nothing so her body was taken for an autopsy and literally the only mark on this girl's whole body was a small scratch on the inside of her lip which they had no idea how she'd sustained that a toxicology report showed that sandra cantu had actually been drugged at the time of her death she was drugged with benzodiazepines she had quite a lot in her system actually and it's believed that she was probably fully sedated when she died the coroner concluded that sandra cantu's cause of death was asphyxiation from what they described to be a noose made from cloth although it's believed at this point when she was killed she was probably already knocked out from the drugs and this bit's really sad so just a warning if you want to skip forward like 30 seconds it was also found in her autopsy that she was sexually assaulted with a foreign object and they could tell this due to the angle at which her body was you know injured from this and so going back to the fact that sandra's body was actually found fully clothed when they found her inside the suitcase does that mean that her killer had sexually assaulted her and then redressed her what would the point of that be this is quite an unusual unexpected rare thing for a killer to do you know if they're gonna undress a victim in order to sexually assault them they'll usually just throw the clothes wherever they put the body or they'll burn the clothes or something it was quite unusual that they'd fully dressed her instead of just putting the clothes next to her in the suitcase so this led psychologist to believe that maybe her killer was someone that was close to sandra cantu or someone very remorseful maybe they felt immediate remorse and guilt and shame for what they'd done and they wanted to try to give sandra even a scrap of dignity before they did just ditched her body somewhere so as soon as this discovery was made all eyes turned to melissa huckabee because at this point we knew that she was the one that wrote the letter to herself and in that letter she said that the body would be found in the stolen suitcase in that exact place so how did she know that police just knew that she had to be involved in sandra's disappearance kidnapping death in some way in order to have known that so they went down to her trailer they were going to go and ask her for another interview but when they got there she wasn't home they asked around in the trailer park to see if anyone had seen melissa heard from her knew where she was and one of the neighbors told police that she was actually in the hospital melissa huckabee had attempted suicide by swallowing razor blades she survived and she was being treated for her injuries in hospital at this point so now police were even more suspicious yes melissa huckabee did have a history of mental illness suicidal tendencies but the timing of this was very very convenient the fact that she attempted suicide right at the time that they found sandra cantu's body police just thought it was very telling that perhaps she was guilty in this case the hospital didn't let them interview melissa huckabee for the time being obviously because her mental state she wasn't very good so they asked police to just hold off until she was released from hospital so for the time being they decided to look into other kind of aspects of this case they appealed for any witnesses that might have been around that pond that irrigation pond where sandra's body was found on the day that she went missing to see if anyone had seen anything if anyone had seen anyone leave this suitcase and there was one guy that came forward to the police and said that he'd actually seen something really weird he'd seen this car this suv parked on the side of the road by the pond with the passenger door just wide open it was just there this guy and his girlfriend were actually going out for a meal but they were quite concerned about this suv with the door open so they walked over to see what was going on and as they approached they saw a middle-aged woman with dark hair coming up from the ditch by the pond when they saw this woman they kind of asked what was going on they asked if she was okay and she was like oh yeah don't worry i just needed to use the bathroom so i just pulled over on the side of the road just went down there by the pond you know don't you worry this guy gave a full description of this suv that he'd seen parked up and it was an exact match to melissa huckabee's suv so now the evidence is just piling up and up and up about melissa huckabee and so police decide to go around the trailer park and ask the neighbors just about her in general they just wanted to know what kind of person she was they learned from the people that knew her best the people that literally lived next to her that she was an unsavory character in general and also a criminal but you know she had a lengthy criminal history of things like theft robbery scamming and there was even one incident of arson where she burnt down her own home there was nothing quite on the level of murder or kidnapping or anything like that but it was clear that she was kind of working her way up to more and more serious crimes they also found that she had acted rather weirdly towards the local children but she'd just never been reported for it for example there was one time that she took one of the local children from the trailer park to a playground without her parents permission like imagine that imagine some woman that lives down the street from you literally just taking your child for a few hours without even telling it but that's not even the worst of it when these parents finally got their child back she was slurring her words she was incoherent she couldn't really move they were really worried about her and so they took her to the hospital and they found that she'd actually been drugged melissa huckabee had drugged their child giving them benzodiazepines the exact same drug that was found in sandra cantu's body when she was killed and as much as police wished that they could literally just get melissa huckabee then and there just based on that just based on the fact that she had a past of doing things like this to children they couldn't they needed more specific evidence to say that she literally killed sandra cantu so they got a search warrant for the church where melissa huckabee taught her sunday school class because if you remember her alibi for the day that sandra canty went missing was that she was at the church redecorating her classroom so police thought maybe we should check there and in there they found a few weird things so for example the blind in that room they had like a white string you know to pull to open the blinds and there'd actually been a chunk of it cut off and it was re-tied and immediately they remembered the suitcase that sandra's body was found in those zips were tied together with a little chunk of white string in the kitchen they also found a rolling pin with some kind of red smudge on the handle the handle was slightly bent and it had this red mark on it and immediately they were very concerned that this could be potentially sandra's blood so they bagged it up and they sent that away to be tested as evidence the results were going to take a few days to come back so in the meantime police were thinking what else could they really do and that was when one of them got the idea to wiretap melissa's phone like bug her phone so that they could hear any calls that she made she was in the hospital she was never gonna know that her phone was bugged so they did that they were hoping that at some point she might make some kind of call that would incriminate herself and it wasn't long until she made some kind of call that was of police's interest literally the day that she was released from hospital melissa huckabee went back home and she called sandra cantu's parents and she asked them if sandra's older sister wanted to come round to her house to play with her child because like i said melissa huckabee had a five-year-old daughter that was quite close with sandra so now as soon as police heard this they went could read this was an absolutely terrifying moment that potentially melissa was luring another child from that same family no less into her home and they were worried that she was gonna strike again at this point she didn't really have much to lose because she kind of knew that police were onto her so as soon as police heard this phone call they raced down to melissa huckabee's home they knocked on the door and when she answered they looked inside and there were no children there not her child not any of sandra's siblings luckily they'd got there in time so now this police officer had to come up with a reason to be there so that he didn't give away the fact that they'd actually bugged her phone and that was the reason that they were there so he came up with something on the spot he was like oh um i just need you to come down to the police station and give us a statement about this letter that you found the other day at the vigil so she was now in the station and police thought well we might as well just confront her with everything that we've got we've got so much evidence against this woman that like what can she really say at this point so they said to her look we know that you wrote this letter yourself we have the notepad we have the sticky note we found in your car and as expected melissa huckabee denied everything she denied ever writing this letter you know even knowing what that scribbled sticky note thing was but that wasn't all police had up their sleeve if you remember they had that witness tell them that they'd seen melissa huckabee at the pond that day they described her car exactly and so police said look we know you were at the pond on the day that sandra went missing and as soon as police said this melissa huckabee broke down in tears and finally they got a confession she was saying it was an accident it was an accident i didn't mean to kill her she just died and she was crying like she could barely get her words out so police just sat there in silence they just let her cry let her say all these things and waited until she composed herself and then finally started asking her to give them the story of everything that happened so melissa huckabee said that they'd been playing hide and seek that day her her own child and sandra cantu she said she had that suitcase just out on her drive when sandra decided to hide in it she decided to unzip the whole thing get herself inside of it and then somehow from the inside zip herself back up in it kind of impossible but anyway melissa said that at some point during this game of hide and seek she got distracted completely forgot that she was even playing completely forgot that sandra was hiding in the suitcase and she got ready to go to the church to go and decorate her sunday school classroom she picked up this suitcase with sandra still in it and put it in the boot of her car and drove to the church she said she did all her decorating she came back to the car literally hours later that same evening and then she saw the suitcase and it dawned on her that sandra cantu was still in that suitcase she had been the whole time so melissa opened up this suitcase and inside she found sandra cantu already dead she'd gone pale you know it was very clear that she was no longer breathing she said she tried to wake her up she tried cpr she tried literally everything but you know it was it was too late this child had suffocated inside this suitcase so melissa said she did the only thing that she could think to do because she panicked she was scared she was scared she was gonna you know get sent down for killing this child when she hadn't so she decided that she was just gonna zip the suitcase back up and go and discard the body she said she didn't want anyone to think that she'd killed her so she just tried to pretend it never happened so police are sat there in the police station listening to this story and in their head they're just thinking this is the biggest load of lies i've ever heard in my entire life i mean they literally had the autopsy report in front of them in notes that said she'd been sexually assaulted she'd been strangled to death i mean i can't even get into how impossible melissa huckabee's story was first of all like i said as i was telling it how did sandra zip herself in that suitcase it's just impossible it's not possible second of all why was melissa taking the suitcase to the church because she never mentioned that obviously there was nothing in the suitcase if sandra was supposedly in the suitcase so why did she need to take it to the church with her third of all when she was picking up the suitcase to put it in the car how did she not realize oh hell this is really heavy maybe there's a child in here fourth how do you get distracted in the middle of a game of hide and seek with your own child where was her child when she went to the sunday school classroom to go and decorate it you know if she knew where her child was how did she forget about sandra i don't know there's not even a single aspect of this whole story that's even slightly believable but none of that even mattered anymore because at this point in the case the results had come back from the forensic tests of that piece of string and the rolling pin that was found in the sunday school classroom that piece of string was confirmed to be the exact same string that was used to tie up the suitcase so obviously melissa had done that but not only that the rolling pin came back that red smudge on the rolling pin came back as a match to sandra cantu that was her blood it was concluded that this was more than likely the instrument that was used to sexually assault her even if melissa huckabee even tried to argue it sandra cantu had never been to that church before she'd never been to that sunday school before how on earth could her dna her blood of all types of dna i mean it wasn't even like it was sweat or hair or anything it was her blood how could her blood have ended up on that rolling pin so police finally arrested melissa huckabee and charged her with the murder of sandra cantu but they weren't even finished there police decided to go around and collect literally as much evidence as they possibly could to using the trial to try and make this a slam dunk case there was no debate about it so they decided to seize melissa huckabee's laptop and look at her search history and when they did they realized that this murder of sandra cantu was more than likely premeditated it seemed that she'd been researching how she was gonna kill sandra cantu or at least a child maybe she wasn't specifically thinking sandra maybe sandra was the unfortunate victim here but she was researching how to kill a child for a while she was looking especially into this one particular case of another young girl who was murdered by her grandfather and there were so many similarities to this case this young girl was put in a suitcase the guy then went and ditched her body in a pond it was literally almost identical to what melissa huckabee then went on to do so it was clear that she was getting all her ideas from this case reading about it over and over and over until eventually she managed to lure sandra cantu away from her home and carry it out on her so this is the story that was told in court you know based on crime scene evidence autopsy evidence things like that this is what they think happened they believe that sandra cantu obviously from that cctv footage we see her heading home that day and they think melissa huckabee called her over from her home and that was what turned sandra's head that's what distracted her and made her walk in that direction they think melissa persuaded sandra to come with her to the church to her sunday school classroom to help her decorate and of course sandra being up for anything being the friendly little girl that she was she wanted to go she wanted to help so she voluntarily got in melissa's car and drove to the church with her they say that when the two of them arrived at the church melissa made sandra a drink of juice that she laced with these benzodiazepines she gave this drink to sandra let her drink the whole thing and then waited until she was sedated to begin this attack on her they believed that sandra was fortunately sedated for the whole ordeal i mean if there's any even slight positive it's that she wasn't awake for this whole thing and they believed that she passed away that she was murdered by melissa huckabee around 5 5 30 p.m and then it was at 6 p.m that melissa closed up this suitcase once again re-clothed sandra closer in the suitcase and took it out to the pond around six and the saddest thing is that sandra cantu's mother actually phoned the police to report her daughter missing that evening at 7 30 p.m so when she made that call her daughter had already been dead for over two hours twenty-eight-year-old melissa huckabee was tried for kidnapping and first-degree murder to which she actually took a plea deal to avoid the death sentence so she pled guilty and for that she was given life in prison without the possibility of parole melissa huckabee has actually never admitted why she did this why she kidnapped sexually assaulted and murdered this poor innocent child a lot of people have different theories as to why she did this you know some people think it was her mental illness some people think it was literally just for the attention of it all she liked to be the center of attention so she wanted police interviews and she wanted to be the one to find the letter every time melissa is asked about this and asked why she did it she just cries she just cries and says i don't know why i did it you know she regrets it so much but for something so premeditated that you'd literally researched online it's hard to believe that anything that premeditated doesn't have a motive there's got to be a reason as to why she did it and melissa huckabee is the only person that knows that reason but that is all i have on this case thank you so so much for watching i really appreciate it thanks again to michelle and tv for sponsoring this video remember if you click the link down below in the description you will get 30 off of an annual membership that makes it only like 3.50 a month it's a no-brainer that's literally the price of a coffee and with that you also get a two-week free trial to start it all off so you know what you're waiting for link in description huge thank you to all of my channel members for helping me decide the cases that i cover especially my tier two members whose names are all on screen right now if you want to become a channel member you can just click the join button on a desktop or there'll be a link in the description of this video but yeah thank you so so much for watching if you enjoyed 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Channel: Eleanor Neale

Views: 1,585,748

Rating: 4.9420953 out of 5

Keywords: eleanor, neale, eleanor neale, eleanor neale true crime, eleanor neale makeup, mystery, unsolved, unsolved mystery, true crime, solved, documentary, killer, murder, serial killer, buzzfeed, buzzfeed unsolved, podcast, true crime podcast, bbc, itv, netflix, storytime, forensic files, 2020, crime watch daily, dateline, interview, news, creepypasta, horror, sandra cantu, sandra, cantu, kidnapped, kindapping, melissa, melissa huckaby, californa, maddie clifton, suitcase, abducted, abduction

Id: 6-mfuMMd2nU

Length: 55min 34sec (3334 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021