Sheila Franks and Danielle Bertolini
This last week, family of the two women joined with Detective Brian Taylor of the Fortuna Police Department. Taylor, who went to high school with the victim, has been the investigator on the Danielle Bertolini case since she originally went missing in 2014 from the Swain’s Flat area of Bridgeville. Like Fortuna Police, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office has also kept Sheila Frank’s case open after she was determined to have gone missing within days of Bertolini.
In 2015, former Fortuna Police Department Chief William Dobberstein
told Dateline investigators that “we have identified a person of interest in both cases and it’s the same man.” Over nine years have passed with few developments in either of the cases, which law enforcement consider potentially related.
While law enforcement have found partial remains of each woman over the course of several years, the evidence needed to tie either suspicious death to an assailant has proven elusive over time.
Seeking to reinvigorate the search for clues and witness information that could bring to light further details about the last known actions of Danielle Bertolini or of Sheila Frank – who they were with, where they may have been going, and what either of them may have been doing in the days prior to their deaths, the family of the two women came to Humboldt County and met with journalists.
