The multi-state hunt for Melodee Buzzard, a missing 9-year-old California girl, came to a close when her remains were discovered in a rural area of southern Utah, authorities announced Tuesday.
Members of the sheriff’s office and the FBI arrested Ashlee Buzzard, Melodee’s mother, Tuesday morning on a charge of first-degree murder, Santa Barbara County Sheriff-Coroner Bill Brown said.
Authorities say she deliberately tried to hide her steps, such as backing a rental car into gas stations in an attempt to avoid detection by their surveillance cameras.
At trial, the mother will face several “special allegations” because of the brutality of the alleged crime, including the use of a 9mm gun and acts of exceptional “cruelty, viciousness, or callousness,” according to a criminal complaint filed Wednesday.
The body was discovered by a couple who were taking photos in a remote part of Wayne County, Utah, Brown said. Wayne County authorities say the body was near a road with pieces of evidence nearby.
The remains couldn’t be immediately identified, he said, but “it was apparent that the decedent was a female who had died from gunshot wounds to the head.”
But DNA analysis found it was a familial DNA match to Melodee’s mother, he added.
It took less than 24 hours for a Utah crime lab to connect the body to Melodee’s disappearance, Wayne County Sheriff Micah Gulley said.
Prosecutors will ask a jury to consider that Melodee was “particularly vulnerable” and Buzzard “took advantage of a position of trust” to carry out the killing, according to the complaint.
“We have recovered a significant amount of evidence that clearly indicates that this heinous crime was committed by Ashlee Buzzard, Melodee’s mother, and the very person upon who she relied upon and trusted the most in this world,” Brown said at a news conference.
Investigators do not have the murder weapon and have not established a motive, adding Buzzard is “uncooperative,” authorities said Tuesday.
Buzzard will appear in court Friday, according to the complaint. CNN is attempting to determine whether Buzzard has an attorney.
Melodee’s paternal grandmother, Lilly Denes, told CNN affiliates KEYT and KSBY earlier Tuesday the sheriff’s office informed her Melodee’s body had been discovered.
“It’s really sad for us, especially that tomorrow is Christmas Eve and, you know, I have the rest of the grandkids coming home,” Denes told KEYT Tuesday.
She said she was the first person notified by police that her “baby was gone.”
“She’s over there with her dad now,” Denes said. Melodee’s father, who is Denes’ son, died in a motorcycle crash when Melodee was an infant.
CNN has reached out to Denes for comment.
Brown went through a timeline Tuesday that explained what led investigators to Melodee’s body.
Melodee was last seen October 9
Buzzard went on a road trip with her 9-year-old daughter on October 7, when surveillance footage captured the girl at a local car rental agency dressed in what seemed to be a disguise, authorities said.
Melodee was wearing a hoodie pulled over her head and “what appears to be a wig that is darker and straighter than her natural hair,” the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office previously said. “Investigators believe the wig may have been used to alter her appearance.”
The rental car traveled through Nebraska, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and Kansas before returning home to Lompoc, about 55 miles northwest of Santa Barbara, authorities said.
At some point along the trip, Buzzard switched the license plates on the vehicle she had rented to a New York plate, Brown said Tuesday.
“Investigators have confirmed that Ashlee was seen returning to her Lompoc residence on October 10, driving the same rental vehicle she departed with on October 7 – but Melodee was not in the car,” the sheriff’s office previously said.
The young girl was last seen on video surveillance with her mother on the Colorado side of the Colorado-Utah border on October 9, according to Brown.
Detectives, Brown said, now believe Melodee was killed shortly after that stop.
Melodee was reported missing days later, on October 14 – not by a family member, but by a school administrator concerned about her long absence.
The next day, October 15, detectives served a search warrant at Buzzard’s home, according to a release from the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office.
On October 30, sheriff’s detectives, along with the FBI Evidence Response Team, served follow-up search warrants at Buzzard’s home as well as for a storage locker and car she had recently rented, investigators said.
An expended cartridge case was recovered during the search of the home, Brown said, and during the search of the rental car a live round of similar ammunition was located, Brown said.
On December 17, the ATF found that cartridge cases from the Utah crime scene linked to a single cartridge case found at the Buzzard residence, authorities said.
“Cold-blooded and criminally sophisticated premeditation and heartlessness … went into planning” the crime, Brown said.
The “ruthlessness” that went into committing it, he added, was shocking.
“It’s unbelievable just to know that a mother could do this to their child,” Melodee’s aunt Lizabeth Meza said to CNN affiliate KSBY.
How a backroad discovery led to the arrest of Melodee Buzzard’s mother in the child’s ‘calculated’ killing
As the December sun set over central Utah’s sandstone peaks, a couple ventured down a nondescript dirt road to snap photos against the backdrop of a red rock vista. Instead, they stumbled across a grisly discovery among smattered shrubs and parched soil: the decomposed remains of a little girl.
When sheriff’s deputies arrived in the sparsely populated stretch of Caineville, it was clear they would be investigating a homicide. The unidentifiable girl had died from gunshot wounds to her head, authorities later said.
Unbeknownst to investigators at the time, they had before them the remains of 9-year-old California girl Melodee Buzzard, whose confounding disappearance during a road trip with her mother had mobilized a vast network of local, state and federal investigators who searched for two months across eight states. An image of her cheeky smile and cascade of ringlet curls had been projected across the nation by media, law enforcement and the concerned public.
Ultimately, it would take two more weeks before they determined all signs pointed to a suspect whom Melodee “trusted the most in this world,” Santa Barbara County Sheriff-Coroner Bill Brown said.
Melodee’s mother, Ashlee Buzzard, was arrested Tuesday and charged with first-degree murder in her daughter’s killing, which a criminal complaint said was carried out with exceptional “cruelty” and “viciousness.”
Murmurs rose in a courtroom Friday as Buzzard pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors said they would not seek the death penalty if she is convicted, but would instead ask for life in prison without parole.
Investigators said they were stymied by “deliberate efforts” to hide the truth – clumsy disguises, swapped license plates and suspicious driving – and an uncooperative mother who could never provide a reasonable explanation for Melodee’s whereabouts. CNN has reached out to Buzzard’s attorney for comment.
Here’s how investigators say they finally pieced together DNA, ballistics and a multi-state web of leads to connect Melodee’s mother to her killing.
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A home without Melodee
The universe where Melodee lived with her mother was small. It revolved around a single-story home that looked like any other in their Lompoc, California, neighborhood, where the streets bore whimsical names like “Stardust Road,” “Pluto Avenue” and “Solar Way.”
Many of Melodee’s extended relatives had not seen her for years. They had largely lost contact with the mother after Melodee’s father died in a motorcycle accident when she was a baby, her aunt, Lizabeth Meza, told NewsNation.
It was not her family that reported her missing in October, but a concerned school administrator.
On October 14, Melodee’s school asked the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office to do a welfare check on the child due to her “prolonged absence,” according to a timeline from investigators.
School employees had not seen Melodee since August, when Buzzard enrolled her in a study program that would allow her to attend school remotely, according to the sheriff’s office and Lompoc Unified School District. This school sighting helped detectives narrow their search early in the investigation, when the previous sighting of Melodee was sometime last year.
Officers arrived at the Buzzard family home on October 14 but only found Ashlee Buzzard, who had “no verifiable explanation for Melodee’s whereabouts,” the sheriff’s office said.
When they searched the home, Melodee was nowhere to be found.
Unraveling a winding multi-state road trip
The next day, investigators executed a search warrant on the Buzzard home and uncovered information that would dramatically narrow their search window.
Buzzard had recently rented a car at a local rental agency, where surveillance cameras captured Buzzard and Melodee disguised in wigs, the sheriff’s office said. Images released to the public show Buzzard in thick golden curls and Melodee with a hoodie pulled over thick bangs.
As they drove, Buzzard swapped the car license plate, put on a new wig, and backed the car into gas stations in an apparent attempt to avoid surveillance cameras, Brown alleged, citing evidence gathered by investigators, including surveillance footage.
Melodee was last seen on video with Ashlee on October 9 near the Colorado and Utah state line. Detectives now believe Melodee was killed shortly after this sighting, the sheriff said.
Buzzard returned to their Lompoc home the next day without Melodee, the sheriff’s office said.
FBI agents and sheriff’s deputies executed another search warrant on October 30 at Buzzard’s home, a storage unit she had rented and the rental vehicle, the sheriff said.
A spent bullet casing was found inside the home, and a similar round of live ammunition was found in the car, the sheriff said. The expended casing was submitted to a national ballistic imaging database, called NIBIN, run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
As Buzzard remained uncooperative, officers surveilled the mother “around-the-clock,” while others spent weeks painstakingly following promising leads, the sheriff said.
The sheriff’s office continuously updated the public and asked for their help submitting tips, walking a thin line as they tried to share as much information as possible without compromising their efforts.
All the while, officers were “hoping against hope that she would be safely found,” Brown said.
A crucial backroad discovery
Despite the relentless search for Melodee, the discovery of her remains was an unlikely accident.
Her body was found in the rural community of Caineville, Utah, where a handful of homes are separated by long stretches of land and wrinkled stone outcroppings. And the couple who mistakenly found her had pulled off a state highway onto an easily missed dirt road.
Until the December 6 discovery, the case had appeared to stall and detectives lacked definitive evidence to charge Buzzard in her daughter’s disappearance. But the remains – later identified as Melodee – and items left at the scene provided key links to Buzzard, the sheriff said.
After the unidentified body was found, a lab in Utah analyzed items left at the scene, according to the sheriff in Wayne County.
“In less than 24 hours, the Crime Lab obtained confirmation that the Wayne County case was connected to the Santa Barbara case,” Sheriff Micah Gulley said in a statement.
Cartridge cases found at the scene were flagged in the NIBIN database as linked to the single cartridge that was found at Buzzard’s home, the sheriff said. Prosecutors later wrote that Buzzard allegedly killed Melodee using a 9mm gun.
It wasn’t until December 22 that an FBI Crime Lab was able to determine that the remains from Utah were a “familial DNA match” to Buzzard, and investigators got a warrant to arrest Buzzard on suspicion of murder.
“We have recovered a significant amount of evidence that clearly indicates that this heinous crime was committed by Ashlee Buzzard,” Brown announced after Buzzard’s Tuesday arrest.
Buzzard was formally charged on Christmas Eve and is being held without bail. In a criminal complaint, prosecutors accused her of “lying in wait” to kill Melodee as the child was “particularly vulnerable,” allegations the mother has denied.
Though investigators believe the killing was planned before they embarked on the road trip, they have still not located a weapon or been able to pinpoint a motive.
“Everybody’s asking themselves, ‘Why did she do this?’ … How can you do that to a baby?” Melodee’s paternal grandmother, Lilly Denes, told CNN affiliate KSBY.
Brown said Tuesday that the “ruthlessness” of the killing and the degree of alleged premeditation are difficult to understand.
“This level of criminal activity is particularly shocking given the calculated, cold-blooded and criminally sophisticated premeditation and heartlessness that went into planning it,” he said.
Mapping Buzzard’s movements across states required coordination from more than a dozen agencies, including FBI field offices in seven cities, FBI Special Agent in Charge Patrick Grandy said.
But as the case goes to trial, the FBI will continue to assist local law enforcement through lab analysis and by pursuing remaining leads. Grandy encouraged the public to keep reaching out with information that may help investigators.
The sheriff said the mother has remained uncooperative after her arrest, adding “there was no change in her attitude and her demeanor.”
During Buzzard’s arraignment on Friday, a judge granted a temporary restraining order that will prevent the sheriff’s office from discussing any details of the case that have not already been publicly released.
While the remains offered a breakthrough in the case, they also delivered a heartbreaking blow to the investigators who had dedicated months to recovering the lost child, Grandy said.
“We were all hoping to find Melodee alive, as you undoubtedly were as well,” Grandy said to reporters. Brown added that his agency has been “deeply affected” by the case.
Melodee’s paternal family was in court Friday, watching as Buzzard pleaded not guilty. Marvin Meza, Melodee’s uncle, told KSBY he doesn’t understand why prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty.
“What she did is despicable,” Meza said. “For what she did, (the punishment) should be a lot worse.”
Meza said, “I just want the public to understand (Melodee) was loved.”
The sheriff took a moment during Tuesday’s news conference to speak directly to Melodee’s family, who he said endured “unimaginable pain throughout this ordeal.”
“Their strength, their patience and their steadfast hope have been evident from the very beginning,” Brown said. “No family should ever have to experience this kind of loss, and our hearts are with them today and will be with them in the difficult days ahead.”
He later added, “May God bless the innocent soul of Melodee Elani Buzzard, who we will never, ever forget.”
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