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	Disbelief As Teacher Melissa Huckaby Is Charged with Child Rape and Murder The Times (United Kingdom) April 24, 2009 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6164779.ece The community of Tracy, a quiet town where San Francisco's suburbs meet the farm belt in central California, is riven by disgust and disbelief. Not just because eight-year-old Sandra Cantu was brutally sexually assaulted and murdered there, but because Melissa Huckaby, 28, a local Sunday school teacher, has been charged with the crime. The alleged killer, the granddaughter of the local minister, is herself a mother - her five-year-old girl Madison was a playmate of Sandra's. They lived just five doors down. Yesterday Mrs Huckaby was appearing in court. She has been formally accused of murder with the added special circumstances of rape with a foreign object, lewd or lascivious conduct with a child under 14 and murder in the course of a kidnapping. For that, she faces the death penalty, should the prosecution ask for it as Sandra's parents want them to. Mrs Huckaby has yet to enter a plea. Murder and sex-crime researchers say they cannot recall a case quite like it. Tracy police Sgt. Tony Sheneman said dozens of callers a day have insisted that Huckaby could not have acted alone, that no mother would rape another's child, that the scenario was too improbable to be true. "After this case, I'll never say never again," Sgt Sheneman said, adding that police remain confident that Huckaby acted alone. Sandra disappeared on March 27. A video, taken from a camera put up by Sandra's family for security, shows the girl near her home in the Orchard Estates Mobile Home Park about 4pm that Friday. She walks happily toward her home then skips away. Her mother, who thought she was at a friend's house, reported her missing four hours later. For four days, fearful parents kept their children indoors and police followed up more than 1,000 tip-offs. The mound of flowers and cuddly toys at the entrance to the mobile home park grew into a mountain.Hundreds of volunteers and law enforcement officials turned out to search for her as a shocked community rallied round. Sandra's picture was posted over half of California. Then on April 6 a suitcase containing her body was found in a filthy irrigation pond by dairy farmworkers. Huckaby was arrested late on April 10 after she drove herself to the police station. It appeared she had slipped up - she told a local newspaper reporter that the suitcase was hers but had been stolen from her driveway - a story which conflicted with what she had earlier told police. It later emerged that Mrs Huckaby had been admitted to hospital shortly after the suitcase was discovered. It was reported that she had tried to kill herself by swallowing razorblades. Sources say that in five hours of questioning at the police station, Mrs Huckaby admitted involvement of some kind in Sandra's disappearance - and by the next morning she had been charged with offences for which US criminal historians have struggled to find a precedent. Police have not released details of how or where Sandra was killed and they have admitted they do not have a motive. But only 5 per cent of paedophiles in the United States are female and this case does not appear to follow usual patterns. Women represent only 1 per cent of all adult arrests for forcible rape and 6 per cent of all adult arrests for other sex offenses, according to a Department of Justice report. When they do commit sex crimes, women often are acting as accomplices to men, and their victims tend to be teenagers, said David Finkelhor, director of the University of New Hampshire Crimes against Children Research Center. "It's very, very rare for women to molest children, and when they molest children it's very unusual for them to molest a child of this age," Mr Finkelhor said. "It's unusual for women to kill children who are not their own." Friends have come forward to say that while Mrs Huckaby suffered from depression for a long time, she was sensible and fiercely devoted to her daughter.
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