AR AR - Carmeletta Green, 12, Little Rock, 10 Sept 1982

"We couldn’t figure out how it could not be her."

The small, sun-bleached skull sat half-covered in leaves. A fist-sized chunk of bone was missing from the left side.

On August 19, 1991, two cable workers surveying land off Archwood Park Road for future expansion stumbled upon the skeletal remains of what turned out to be a little girl.

Click to expand...

Large caseloads. No media coverage. No system for investigators to share information on unidentified remains.

For almost two decades, the bones of a 12-year-old girl lay dark in a storage room in Arkansas. They were the only known set of unidentified child remains in the entire state.

The case mystified reporters Amy Upshaw and C. S. Murphy of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. They spent most of 2009 interviewing dozens of people, poring through old court and police documents, and pressing city and state police to take a second look at a long-dormant case.

Investigative pressure from the two journalists led officials to redo a fresh set of crime lab tests. On December 1, 2009, police were finally able to tell the brokenhearted mother of a child taken from her bed in 1982 that her baby had been found. The little girl's name was Carmeletta Green.

Losing 'Letta: A six-part series in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
http://www.arkansasonline.com/letta/

This reminds me of the story of the girl who disappeared in Australia-Eloise something.