When I first got the case with people who were upset like, you know, why are you letting

this guy run a murder investigation?

And it's true.

I mean, I had at the time somebody said, how many murder investigations have you run?

I looked at them and said, this is my first one.

It was May 1997.

Ron Bamye was 31, a deputy DA and Ventura, California.

A sleepy seaside town, 60 miles north of Los Angeles.

He was green just starting out.

And that's when they dumped on his desk an old mystery, an unsolved case that had languished

for five years, the mystery of Katrina Montgomery.

It was one of those awful stories, a missing girl, a desperate family, cops who say they're

doing all they can.

Was she murdered?

She must have been, but how it happened was still a puzzle.

By the time Ron Bamye inherited the case in May 1997, the original investigation or

what there had been of it was clouded over by time and now almost nothing was clear.

There was no real good crime scene investigation done at the time.

There was some done, but nobody knew what they had.

Nobody knew if they had a homicide, a missing person.

They didn't know and nobody was talking.

For all the efforts of Katrina's family, for years, the case had simply died.

...