Overview:
Piecing together scant evidence while asking for the public's help cracked the case, Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown says. But a motive in the slaying remains a mystery.
As any detective can tell you, piecing together a case sometimes comes down to the little things. That was true in the investigation of missing 9-year-old Melodee Buzzard.
Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown announced Tuesday that Melodee’s body had been found and that her mother, Ashlee Buzzard, had been arrested on suspicion of murder.
The 40-year-old Lompoc woman was jailed without bail after officers took her into custody. Brown said she has remained uncooperative, just as she had been during more than two months of searching for her daughter.
It was a little thing — a couple out snapping photos — that led to the break in the case, the sheriff said.
The pair noticed a badly decomposed body amid the desert vistas outside Caineville in central Utah, Brown said. The couple called the Wayne County, Utah, Sheriff’s Office on Dec. 6 to report their finding.
Deputies there notified Santa Barbara authorities a couple of days later.
DNA testing established that the body was Melodee’s. The girl had been shot to death in the head, the sheriff said. Expended shell casings were found at the scene.
The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives matched the shell casings found in Utah to a spent bullet cartridge found in Ashlee Buzzard’s Vandenberg Village home. Yet another round, this one unfired, was recovered from a white 2024 Chevrolet Malibu that Buzzard had rented in early October, Brown said.
Even with that evidence, some elements of the case remain unresolved. No weapon has yet been recovered. And no motive for the slaying has been established, authorities said.
Brown said his office would not expound on the horrific nature of the girl’s killing.
“This level of criminal activity is particularly shocking given the calculated, cold-blooded and criminally sophisticated premedication and heartlessness that went into planning it and the ruthlessness that went into actually committing the crime,” Brown said at a late-afternoon news conference Tuesday.
He clicked through the timeline of the case. It showed how Ashlee Buzzard became the prime suspect in Melodee’s disappearance.
The investigation began Oct. 14 when a school administrator noted that Melodee hadn’t been coming to school.
Deputies went to the Buzzard home.
Ashlee Buzzard could provide no explanation about her daughter’s whereabouts, prompting a search of her home a day later.
Suspicions were further aroused when details emerged about an extended car trip the mother and daughter had taken a week earlier. Video recorded at a car rental office showed both Buzzard and Melodee entering the office wearing wigs. Those images were released to the public Oct. 22 in hopes that someone would come forward with information that might help locate Melodee.
Detectives traced the rental car’s route. Leaving California, it traveled through Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska and Kansas.
Along the way, Buzzard’s activities raised suspicions.
At one point, she switched license plates on the rented Chevy Malibu, officials said. She went from California plate 9MNG101 to New York plate HCG9677. And she would back the car into gas stations, which Brown said was an apparent attempt to avoid being identified through security cameras.
Tracking her movements was painstaking, authorities said. The FBI called in help from seven field offices across the West. Multiple police departments and sheriff’s offices helped as well.
Detectives were able to create a map they shared with the public. It showed Buzzard traveled through central Utah. Ultimately, that location is where Melodee’s body was found.
“All of us who have been involved in this case have been deeply affected by it,” Brown said. “We were hoping against hope that she would be safely found. This outcome is deeply tragic.”