“She was very quiet and very careful,” Borges said. “She’s not the type of girl based on what her family said that’s going to have a car pull up and someone say, ‘Hey, can you come help me find my dog? Or ‘Here’s some candy and get in a car.’ Something happened swiftly.”
Anne’s body was found on the Fort Ord Army base near a shooting range two days later. Army investigators looking into a tip about a possible marijuana grow discovered her remains in a wooded area just off the road, about one mile from her elementary school.
She had been suffocated and sexually assaulted.
Her case eventually went cold, but now, 40 years later, the Seaside Police Department are working with the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office Cold Case Task Force with the hope of solving it.
“Whoever is responsible for this is an absolute monster,” says Borges. “Most monsters don’t change their ways. What keeps me up at night is knowing that there are other potential victims out there. Every second that goes by there is someone else out there that can be a potential victim.”
Borges says that since they reopened the case they have sent any available evidence to labs for potential DNA testing.
“There is quite a bit of evidence and we have been working with a variety of different DNA vendors,” he says.
Authorities are also hoping that renewed attention on the case will bring in new leads.
“We really do need the public’s help because somebody saw something,” says Borges. “We know for a fact, somebody had to have seen something that didn’t look right, and all it takes is one person to read an article, see a news clipping, see her picture and say, ‘oh my goodness, I remember this.'”
Borges says that Anne’s family fled Vietnam and “were refugees on a boat, somewhere out at sea when the U.S. Navy intercepted them and brought them to the United States.”
They moved to Seaside where Anne was born two years later.
“She was a five-year-old little girl in this country to start her life, to make her family proud and to just live the American dream and that in and of itself is just heartbreaking,” he says. “This family fled from Vietnam. They fled from war. The United States of America was paradise for the family. So never in their wildest dreams did they think coming here and being in this cute little town, even though it was rough back then, would result in losing their little angel.”