CA CA - Kari Lenander, 15, Brentwood, 25 July 1980

Detective Marcia is haunted by one cold case in particular – the 1980 murder of Kari Lenander, a teenager from the affluent suburb of Brentwood who never returned home after a night out in Hollywood...

“With retirement looming, it’s becoming more emotional because I realise it’s not about the cases I’ve solved – it’s about the ones I didn’t solve,” Detective Marcia shares.

Click to expand...

Kari Lenander was murdered in July 1980, the summer before her junior year at PaliHi. The Brentwood resident’s body was found at 4:30 a.m. on July 26 in a street gutter in south Los Angeles. She would have turned 16 on August 4.

The night before, Lenander and best friend Toni Garfield, also a PaliHi junior, had hitchhiked a ride at the corner of Wilshire and Barrington. The man who picked them up, a male Caucasian known only as Ken from Canada, gave the girls a ride first to the Hollywood area, where they stopped to use the bathroom. Lenander and Garfield had been drinking prior to hitching a ride, and when Garfield started to feel dizzy in the bathroom, she told Lenander she had to go home. Ken drove the girls back to Brentwood and dropped Garfield off at her house. It was the last Garfield saw of her friend. The events that followed, leading up to Lenander’s murder, remain unknown...

While the DNA evidence found on Lenander’s dress the night of the murder has not been matched, Marcia said, ‘Lenander’s death appears to be a sexual assault/murder, [and these] have a high potential to be committed by a repeat offender, so the individual could be identified with DNA.’

Click to expand...