Gloria Densham has been waiting for more than 40 years but she finally gets to pay tribute to her daughter on Friday in a somber funeral at Oakdale Memorial Park in Glendora.
Her daughter Cynthia May Hernandez, 18, had just graduated from Charter Oak High School and was going to see "The Omen" on Aug. 26, 1976 when she was kidnapped and strangled.
Her skull was found by a dog in a San Bernardino mountain community months after she disappeared. Part of her rib cage was found after that during an unrelated investigation nearby.
Technology wouldn't catch up until many years later when detectives connected the skull, the ribs, her family and, ultimately, a suspect through DNA.
The remains were released to the family and now Densham is planning to inter them in a cremation wall so "the sunrise will be at her head and the sunset at her back."
Densham cries to this day when talking about her daughter, a powder puff football player and aspiring cosmetician, whose life was cut way too short.
"I'm sad," said Densham, fighting to keep her composure. "I'd like to have seen what she would've done with her life."
Glendora police detectives Matt Fenner and Marty Amaro, now retired, plan on attending the funeral. Fenner said it will be a tough day, but he hopes it will bring closure for Densham.
"Most of all she wanted to have a Christian burial for her daughter," Fenner said.
The brown-haired, brown eyed Hernandez was last seen leaving her home to see "The Omen" at the Fox Twin Theaters in Covina. Family members filed a missing persons report after finding her car in the theater parking lot.
A stranger picked her up and strangled her, Densham said, before burying her body in a shallow grave in the San Bernardino mountains.
The break in the case wouldn't come for two decades. Even though her skull was found in the mountains months after she went missing, it couldn't be identified and DNA technology didn't exist then.
Detectives reopened the case in 2012 and got a DNA hit in 2014.
Larry James Allred, now 62, pleaded guilty to murder last month and was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after seven years, the maximum allowed under California law in 1976, the year the crime was committed, prosecutors said.
"For forty years we had a victim without justice, a family without answers and a killer amongst us," San Bernardino County Deputy District Attorney Denise Yoakum, who prosecuted the case, said in a news release when Allred was sentenced. "Cindy's family didn't know whether she was alive or dead. This is exactly why the Cold Case team never gives up."
The remains were released to the family after Allred was convicted.
Densham breaks down when talking about her daughter. She had a good sense of humor. She loved to sing. She was an alto in the Charter Oak High School a cappella choir.
She was athletic. She played volleyball and football. She has a brother, who lives in Antioch and a sister, who never left the Glendora home where Cynthia grew up in case she were ever to return.
"She was a child of God," Densham said. "She loved her lord and her family unconditionally. Home was the best place for her to be."
