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 Amber Hope McDonald desperately wanted to get to Reno in March 1984 to see a boyfriend.
The 15-year-old ran away from her Hayward home on March 2 and was hitchhiking on Interstate 80. She never got through Placer County. She was murdered and her body dumped off a steep embankment on the north side of Magra Road in the Gold Run area.
The girl carried no identification, and it took investigators time to determine who she was. There were no reports of missing Placer County teenagers at the time, although there are many runaways reported regularly throughout the state. But investigators say most of the teenagers return home after a few days or weeks away from their residence.
Placer County detectives located a possible suspect in the homicide, a man already in custody, but he was never charged with McDonald’s death. The case remains unsolved.
Amber Hope McDonald
The young girl was last seen alive about 11 a.m. on the day she took off from her Hayward home. She was given a ride to Vacaville by a motorist. Nothing was known about her whereabouts until four days later when a retired San Leandro couple having a roadside picnic along Magra Road discovered her body. Detectives said she had been strangled and had been dead from 24 to 36 hours.
The victim was found sprawled down a 20-foot embankment. She was fully clothed, except without shoes. Her left wrist had a ligature mark, and there was a ligature around her neck. There was no indication she had been sexually assaulted.
A Brownsville, Yuba County, man, who was serving a 25-to-life sentence for raping a 15-year-old girl in Yuba County in 1994, was a serious person of interest in the McDonald case along with several other rapes and unsolved disappearances and murders in Northern California dating back to 1974. But detectives said, however, he could not be connected to the young girl’s murder.
Placer County Detective Bill Summers said the McDonald case remains open. He can be reached at 530-889-7843. His fax number is 530-886-3825.
Unsolved murders in Placer County, no matter how long ago they occurred, remain active in law enforcement case files. There are a number of vicious murders still being investigated since there is no statute of limitation for a homicide. These cold case files remain open and detectives continue to look for clues and information that could lead to solving the crimes. In the coming months, some of those brutal, unsolved slayings, and the progress in bringing the murderer or murderers to justice, will be covered in the Sentinel.
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