Crime Library: Criminal Minds and Methods

Sandra Cantu

New Details Revealed

Initially, many people figured that she must be covering for someone. The Melissa they knew couldn't possibly be this evil. But then, new details were revealed that chilled the residents of Tracy to the bone. They knew that the crime had been gruesome enough for a judge to order the autopsy sealed. But then, the residents learned a bit more. On May 22, Huckaby was brought into court to face additional charges that were completely separate from the Cantu case. She was charged with poisoning a man, and a seven-year old girl (two separate counts), as well as child endangerment.

Rose Pisam
Rose Pisam

On separate occasions, Huckaby had allegedly drugged two different people: one an older man, and a seven-year-old whom Melissa had been babysitting. The mother reported the incident, which took place in January, to police, and told ABC News that police hadn't taken her case very seriously. The hospital had told the mother, who wanted to remain unidentified, that her daughter had muscle relaxants in her system.

Stranger evidence still turned up on Huckaby's computer. In April it was revealed by CBS that Huckaby had performed Internet searches on a case that turned out be eerily similar to Cantu's: that of Rose Pisam, a four-year-old girl who had been murdered in Israel by her grandfather with whom she lived. After being missing for several months, Pisam's body was discovered stuffed in a suitcase. Was it possible that the grandfather had committed the crime and had framed Melissa? Or, maybe it was the other way around? Had she tried, for some reason, to frame her own grandfather?

Sympathy for Huckaby was dwindling; it was also revealed that she was a person of interest in an arson case in 2007, in which two fires had been set in a La Palma, Calif., house in which she had lived. Coupled with the poisoning allegations, Melissa Huckaby was slowing turning from an angel to a devil.

 

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