RAMONA PRICE - 7 yo (1961) - Santa Barbara CA

The search for Ramona Price began nearly 50 years ago, but only now do police feel they may be getting close.
The 7-year-old girl vanished on Sept. 2, 1961. Santa Barbara authorities
disclosed this week that she may have encountered Mack Ray Edwards, a
serial killer who worked in the area and confessed to killing six
Southern California children.
On Wednesday, four specially trained dogs found what police are calling "an area of interest" near a bridge spanning U.S. 101 in Goleta.
"It's about as strong a reaction as we could have expected to receive," said Lt. Donald Paul McCaffrey, a police spokesman.
Ramona lived on the outskirts of Santa Barbara, several miles down the 101 from the Winchester Canyon Road bridge.
Edwards was a heavy-equipment operator who helped build the bridge,
which opened just a few weeks after Ramona went missing. He sometimes
bunked with a friend in a mobile home on a ridge top within view of the
construction site.
The bridge is soon to be torn down, replaced by a new one nearby — which
makes this a particularly good time to search, police said.
"When he was in San Quentin [State Prison], he told other inmates he had
victims no one would ever find," said Santa Barbara Police Chief Cam
Sanchez. "He said no one would ever tear up the freeways."
Sanchez spoke to reporters as the dogs and their handlers methodically
paced the bare dirt at the bridge's base and scrambled through brush on
its embankments. The Australian shepherd, chocolate Lab, border collie
and golden retriever worked independently — and all four alerted in the
same area.
"We're hoping and praying that some great things come out of this," said Sanchez, a former Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective. "Everyone deserves some kind of closure, whatever that might mean to them."
Sanchez said police would have to further analyze the canine team's
findings before deciding whether to excavate at the site — a process
that could take weeks. A similar effort to find another of Edwards'
presumed victims failed in 2008 after crews conducted digs near the 23
Freeway in Ventura County.
The four dogs and their handlers were from the Canine Specialized Search
Team, a volunteer group affiliated with the Santa Clara County
Sheriff's Office.
Finding remains half a century old is not an impossible task, said Lynne
Englebert, one of the group's directors. She said the dogs have located
buried remains around the world, including some at an archaeological
site in Czechoslovakia that probably were more than 1,500 years old.
Recently, the dogs located some 300 unmarked burial sites in the old
eastern Sierra mining town of Bodie near the California-Nevada border.
Ramona disappeared as her parents were packing up for a move to another home in the Santa Barbara area.
A witness saw her talking to a man who had stopped his 1950s-vintage Plymouth on the road where she was walking. Ramona got in the car. She was never seen again.
Edwards had a 1950s Plymouth, Sanchez said. A sketch made at the time
was "pretty darn close" to Edwards' 1970 booking photo at the Los
Angeles County jail. He turned himself in — and confessed to six murders
— after an aborted kidnapping of three young sisters in the San
Fernando Valley.
Edwards bragged about committing as many as 20 murders but is not known
to have mentioned any in Santa Barbara. In 1972, before investigators
could check out his claims, he hanged himself with a TV cord in his San
Quentin cell.
Santa Barbara police did not focus on him until about four years ago,
when Weston DeWalt, a Pasadena writer, alerted them to his research. It
was DeWalt who discovered Edwards' work on the bridge.
Ramona's parents are dead, but an older sister survives. Police would
not release her name. But Sanchez said the 60-year-old woman remains
devastated by the loss of her sister.
On Wednesday, a few Santa Barbara residents gathered at the bridge to
watch the dogs work. They talked about the search for Ramona in 1961, a
massive community effort that involved Boy Scouts, military helicopters
and police officers from all over the region.
Shirley Robles, 76, lived in a house just behind the one to which Ramona was about to move.
Robles, whose two children were young at the time, remembered police
searching her home, hoping that Ramona might simply be playing
hide-and-seek.
"It was a very frightening time," she said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ramona-price-20110616,0,2323605.story