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	Wiretaps Used in Huckaby Case By Scott Smith Stockton Record July 14, 2009 http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090714/A_NEWS/907140320 Officers set up wiretaps in their investigation of 8-year-old Sandra Cantu's death, according to a required-by-law notification letter the San Joaquin County District Attorney's Office sent to The Record informing the newspaper that its calls were among those monitored. Connie Lawless, the grandmother of Melissa Huckaby, who is accused of killing Sandra, said she and about five people she knows received a similar letter. Lawless said it was unnerving to learn that her calls may have been recorded. "Anything that comes to us from, like the DA's office, it automatically is upsetting," Lawless said. "We never know what shoe's going to drop." She said the monitoring worried her, because members of the congregation her husband leads could have had their confidential conversations recorded. Lane Lawless is pastor of Clover Road Baptist Church in Tracy. Several church members confirmed that they also got the letter about wiretapping, she said. "We have learned through this that at any moment any one of us can be swept up in this," Connie Lawless said. "It could be you, me or anyone." She added that investigators resorted to the phone taps because they are "really scraping the bottom of the barrel for evidence" against her granddaughter. Lawless said she has yet to hear of any solid evidence in the case against Huckaby. The investigation ultimately led to the arrest of Huckaby, a 28-year-old neighbor of the slain girl. Huckaby now stands accused of kidnapping, rape and murder charges that could result in a death sentence. In the letter to The Record, Chief Deputy District Attorney Ron Freitas wrote that on April 8, San Joaquin County Superior Court Judge Richard Vlavianos signed an order allowing investigators to monitor phone numbers. Sandra vanished on March 27 from the Orchard Estates Mobile Home Park. Farm workers found her body April 6, stuffed in a suitcase thrown into a dairy's waste pond two miles north of Tracy. Tracy police arrested Huckaby on April 10. Telephone calls were tapped from April 8 to April 13, according to the letter. The letter lists two phone numbers that investigators monitored. One was Melissa Huckaby's cell phone, and the second was the Tracy home of her grandparents. Huckaby lived with the Lawlesses. It is unclear from the letter if the judge's order included additional telephone numbers. "All communications ... from April 8, 2009, to April 13, 2009, from phones registered in your name, and/or by you, were intercepted and monitored," Freitas wrote in the undated letter prosecutors sent to The Record. A Record reporter reached Huckaby on her cell phone early on the day she went in for questioning with the Tracy Police Department. She was arrested that night. Huckaby that day declined to comment and hung up on the reporter, who also made calls to the Lawless home. An attachment to the prosecutor's letter says that the law requires police to give notice when they have monitored calls. It adds that San Joaquin County Superior Court Judge Linda Lofthus' gag order prevents Freitas from commenting. Electronic monitoring, a tactic local law enforcement seldom uses, is a common tool for FBI agents, who assisted in the Tracy case, said Jeff Hislop, a retired lieutenant in the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Office who now teaches criminal justice at San Joaquin Delta College. Wiretapping laws are as old as telephones, yet the laws have evolved to meet the changing technology, which now includes cell phones, beepers and e-mail, he said. Today, before a judge can approve wiretaps, Hislop said investigators have to show they've exhausted all other sources, demonstrate probable cause and show that their target will provide evidence. They also are forbidden from recording unrelated calls, he said. Local police use this tool less often than the FBI, because officers typically have community sources and contacts from which to obtain information before the need arises to seek a judge's permission for setting up a wiretap, Hislop said. "It can happen anywhere," he said. "My gut feeling is that because the FBI was so deeply involved, that's where it probably came from." Contact reporter Scott Smith at (209) 546-8296 or ssmith@recordnet.com
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