Dead Hispanic girl unclaimed in Las Vegas

Ken Ritter:

Mourned by a community but unclaimed by a family, a dead little girl remained unidentified while police planned to reach further into Mexico and Central America in hopes of learning her name and finding her killer.

"This makes no sense at all, that we haven't gotten one person to come forward to identify this girl or her parents," said Las Vegas police Lt. Lewis Roberts, who heads a task force of about 40 detectives trying to identify "Jane Cordova Doe." Her morgue name refers to the apartment complex where she was found Jan. 12.

A $44,000 reward was posted Thursday by several businesses and at least one anonymous donor in a city where money can usually buy just about anything.

Even rolling billboards of the type that typically advertise lingerie-wearing female escorts have been showing the computer-composite image of the little girl with soft brown eyes around neighborhoods and the Las Vegas Strip.

"We're breaking some new ground with this case," said Gerald Nance, a veteran investigator with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in Alexandria, Va.

Authorities say the child was perhaps 3 or 4 years old. Her death was a homicide, the Clark County coroner said, due to internal injuries from blunt trauma to her torso.

She had been cared-for in life, authorities said, before she was laid out neatly in a boxy metal trash bin. She was wearing a blue sleeveless shirt, light purple nylon pants and a clean white fleece jacket decorated with fuzzy pink hearts.

Police think the girl's family might have been illegal immigrants from outside the Las Vegas area. But Roberts said none of the dozens of tips generated after an account of the case aired Saturday on the television show "America's Most Wanted" panned out.

"We've been to California. We've checked addresses in Mexico. We're getting calls from other parts of the nation," he said. "Nothing that's really taking us anywhere.

Investigators have been sent out to revisit the apartment complex, knock on neighborhood doors again and distribute leaflets at schools again.

"I know this is getting old," he said. "But maybe someone we didn't get the first time saw something or heard something. Maybe there's someone in Central or South America who doesn't have a television."

The most likely reason why her family has not claimed the girl's body is that they were the ones who killed her.