I recognize that vehicle.
Etta's explanation was different.
She could not identify a source.
She was the source.
And according to her, she did not understand how she knew.
Still, she decided she had a civic responsibility to tell someone.
She left work.
Then she went to the LAPD's Foothill Division.
Detective Lee Ryan
This is one place where later internet versions often simplify what happened.
Some retellings say Etta walked into the police station, announced that she had psychic powers and was laughed out of the building.
The documented story is more interesting.
Detective Lee Ryan spoke with her.
Ryan listened.
He brought her into an area containing large maps.
He asked her to identify where she believed the canyon might be.
Etta pointed toward the Lopez Canyon area.
Ryan even photographed Etta pointing at the map.
His later explanation was practical.
If the information turned out to be meaningful, there would be a record of exactly what she had identified.
And if Etta herself turned out to be involved, police would have documented that too.
Ryan later recalled arranging for Etta to return at 7 a.m. the following morning.
The plan was to use an LAPD helicopter to search the area she had indicated.
Whatever other officers may later have thought about psychic claims, Ryan did not simply throw the information away.
But Etta Couldn't Wait
Etta left the station.
She now faced another problem.
The search was scheduled for the following morning.
But she could not stop thinking about what she had seen.
What if Melanie was still alive?
What if police waited too long?
What if Etta had been right?
She went home.
She collected two of her children and a visiting niece.
Then she drove toward Lopez Canyon herself.
This decision would change her life.
Lopez Canyon
Lopez Canyon sits above the Lake View Terrace area on the northern side of Los Angeles.
In 1980, parts of the area were remote and rugged.
Canyon roads curved through dry hillsides and brush.
There were stretches where a person could leave the roadway and disappear from easy view.
Etta drove slowly.
Her family watched the landscape.
They searched for approximately thirty minutes.
Then her young daughter noticed something from the road.
Etta stopped.
They investigated.
The white object from the landscape was not a piece of trash.
It was associated with a person.
Etta saw the nurse's shoes.
The group quickly understood what they had discovered.
Melanie Uribe was there.
The frightened family hurried away.
Etta later joked darkly in court that she may have nearly run over her own children trying to get back to the van.
They flagged down authorities and led police to the location.
The search for Melanie was over.
The murder investigation was beginning.
The Body
Contemporary UPI reporting from December 18 confirmed that Melanie's body had been found in Lopez Canyon the previous evening.
Authorities preserved the site overnight before removing the body in daylight so evidence would not be unnecessarily disturbed.
The injuries established that this had been a violent homicide.
The later appellate record described repeated blunt-force trauma to Melanie's head.
Evidence also established that she had been sexually assaulted before she was killed.
Police now had a crime scene.
But immediately they also had something that did not fit.
Etta.
How Could a Stranger Know?
Imagine the situation from the detective's perspective.
Melanie has disappeared.
Her truck has been burned.
The public knows police are searching.
Then a woman officers do not know walks into the station.
She points toward a remote canyon.
Before the scheduled police search takes place, she drives there herself.
She finds the victim.
Not in a crowded park.
Not beside a major highway.
In a remote canyon.
And the woman insists:
I saw it in a vision.
Police are trained to distrust extraordinary coincidences.
They began looking for an ordinary explanation.
Maybe Etta knew the victim.
Maybe she knew the killers.
Maybe someone had told her.
Maybe she had heard neighborhood gossip.
Maybe she had participated somehow.
Maybe the psychic story was simply a cover for information she could not explain without incriminating herself.
Those possibilities were not irrational investigative questions.
The problem was what happened next.
Ten Hours
Etta was taken in for questioning.
Hours passed.
Detectives repeatedly tried to determine where her information came from.
She gave the same essential answer.
She had seen the location mentally.
She did not know Melanie.
She had never met her.
She did not know who killed her.
According to testimony years later, investigators eventually administered a polygraph.
The examiner believed some answers indicated deception.
Police reports suggested she might have learned the location through neighborhood gossip.
The psychic explanation remained unacceptable to them.
Early on December 18, detectives arrested Etta Smith on suspicion of murder.
She had come voluntarily to police.
Now she was in jail.
The Arrest
Etta later described the experience as devastating.
Her attorney said she underwent a strip search.
He alleged that she was initially left barefoot and went approximately twenty-four hours without food or drink.
She would later compare being held in jail to being treated like a caged animal.
Most frightening of all, she knew almost nothing about what was happening outside.
Police suspected her of involvement in a brutal homicide.
She knew she had not killed Melanie.
But she could not provide an explanation investigators considered believable for the single fact that mattered most.
How did she find the body?
The truth, if Etta's account is accepted, sounded less believable than almost any lie she could have invented.
Police Already Had Another Important Witness
Years later, Etta's attorneys would emphasize a fact that became central to her false-arrest lawsuit.
When police arrested her, investigators already knew a witness had seen men forcing themselves into Melanie's truck.
Paul Wood had described figures near the intersection.
He had heard Melanie scream.
The crime did not look like a lone female stranger had secretly abducted Melanie without witnesses.
Etta's attorney would later argue that even if police completely rejected the psychic explanation, there still was not enough evidence to justify arresting her for murder.
A California judge eventually agreed.
Meanwhile, the Real Story Was Spreading Through Pacoima
The investigation did not break because of psychic information.
It broke because one of the people involved could not keep quiet.
According to contemporary police accounts, one of the participants began bragging about the crime in his neighborhood.
People heard about it.
At first, they were frightened.