Her throat had been cut and her body stuffed into a plastic garbage bag hidden in Golden Gate Park.

She was two years old and her name was Tanita Marie Donner. Two eleven-year-old girls from Lincoln Junior High found her during a science class field trip.

“She looked like a little naked doll,” Natalie Jackson, one of the girls, told a San Francisco TV station.

That was a year ago. The nightmares were now less frequent for the schoolgirls. For most San Franciscans, Tanita’s murder was fading from memory, although her face still stared from bus shelters, store windows, and bumper stickers, an image as familiar to the Bay Area as the Golden Gate or the Transamerica Pyramid. For a time, it embodied San Francisco’s anguish. A blurred, grainy blow-up of a color snapshot, Tanita timidly showing her tiny milk-white teeth as Mommy coaxed a smile. Two pink butterfly barrettes held back her brown hair. She was wearing a cotton dress with lace trim, and crushing her white teddy bear to her chest. Her dark eyes shining like falling stars.

REWARD screamed in bold, black letters above her head. Below were details of when and where Tanita was last seen alive. Twenty-five thousand dollars was offered for information leading to an arrest in her murder. No takers.

Tanita Marie Donner’s killer was still out there.

As the train worked its way through the transbay tunnel of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, three-year-old Daniel Raphael Becker remained transfixed by a poster of Tanita Marie Donner.

“Who’s that, Dad?” he asked his father.

“Don’t point, Danny. She’s just a little girl. Now please sit still. We’ll be home soon.”

Nathan Becker settled back in his seat, opened the business section of Saturday’s San Francisco Star, hoping to finish a story he began at home that morning before he and Danny left for the game. Nathan was a systems engineer who commuted by CalTrain to Mountain View. The article was about his firm which was on the brink of a revolutionary breakthrough. The game was a yawner, the A’s were embarrassing the Yankees. Danny was bored, so they left the Coliseum after the fifth. Just as well, because now they had to go all the way to Daly City to pick up some artist’s brushes for his wife, Maggie. Nathan had promised. It was a long ride, and he wished he hadn’t let Danny talk him into taking BART. He got his fill of trains during the week. They’d cab it home from the shop.

The day had started like a typical summer Saturday for Nathan and Danny, with one of their weekend-buddy excursions.

“Want to go to Oakland and see the A’s game today, Dan?” Nathan was making scrambled eggs while Maggie slept upstairs.

“Can we do the wave, Dad?”

“You betcha.”

Danny laughed.