On the evening of Nov. 15, 1998, 18-year-old Melinda Brown said goodbye to her parents around 7 p.m. and headed out to a house party in Simi Valley, Calif.
Later that night, around 10:30 p.m., police arrived and shut down the gathering after neighbors complained about the noise. Brown and a group of friends then moved on to a nearby apartment complex close to where the original party had been.
“It was a smaller gathering,” Ventura County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Craig Hennes says. “They continued to party for a few more hours there.”
Brown never came home. When she also failed to show up for her shift at In-N-Out Burger two days later, on Nov. 17, her family reported her missing.
Ten days after that, her remains were discovered near a shallow grave a few hundred yards off a popular dirt road in the Hungry Valley area of Los Padres National Forest, near Gorman.
“There was a lot of animal activity,” Hennes recalls. “It looked like some of the wildlife had unearthed her and dragged her out of the shallow grave.”
She had been shot in the back.
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Brown’s final movements have troubled Ventura County detectives for nearly three decades.
Witnesses later claimed that after the second party, Brown was dropped off around 1 a.m. at a liquor store about half a mile from her home. But investigators doubt that account.
“What we can gather is that the liquor store was closed,” says Hennes, who questions whether she was ever actually dropped off there.
“We don’t have any witnesses that actually placed her at that liquor store,” adds Kathryn Torres, a senior deputy with the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office.
Where Brown was killed also remains a mystery.
“All indications are that she was murdered and then transported and left in Gorman, but we don’t know that,” Hennes says. “We don’t know where the homicide scene is.”
There is likewise no clear evidence that Brown — who lived with her parents and sister in a quiet Simi Valley neighborhood — was abducted.
“We’re suspicious of the people that last saw her,” Hennes explains. “And that’s where the original investigation ran into a lot of roadblocks. There was not a lot of information or cooperation at that time with that friend group.”
Now, detectives are turning to advances in forensic science for answers.
“When the crime scene was being processed, a lot of DNA samples were taken,” Torres says. “And we are now beginning to submit those again for updated processing. We have trace evidence we’re still processing that we are optimistic will lead us to a suspect DNA profile.”
As for who might have killed the teen, investigators believe the answer lies close to home.
“Right now, we believe it was somebody that knew her,” Hennes says. “We don’t believe it was a drifter or some random person that just happened to come into town. We believe that Melinda knew the person that killed her, and we’re trying to prove that right now.”
Detectives hope that with the passage of time, someone who stayed silent before may finally be ready to talk.
“People didn’t want to talk back then,” Hennes says. “But maybe, we’re hoping, now 30 years forward, people have lived their life, and they have children of their own that maybe they would feel now is the time to come forward and say something.”
Anyone with information about the case of Melinda Brown is asked to contact Ventura County Sheriff’s Major Crimes Unit at (805) 383-8739 or email coldcase@ventura.org.
If you wish to remain anonymous, contact Ventura County Crime Stoppers at (800) 222-8477 or visit www.venturacountycrimestoppers.org to submit a tip via text or email.
