Remains Are Those Of Sisters, 9 And 11 -- Mother Reported Girls Missing In July 1996 From Seattle Motel

Late on a Saturday night in July 1996, Sammiejo White, 11, and her sister, Carmen Joy Cubias, 9, were said to have left the Crest Motel in Seattle's North End to get cigarettes for an older brother.

And then they vanished.

This week, the King County Medical Examiner's Office identified two sets of bones, found in a field on an abandoned farm in Bothell, as the girls' remains.

The cause of the deaths was said to be "homicidal violence," but investigators won't provide more detail.

Jerry Webster, chief investigator for the medical examiner, said he talked to the girls' mother, Margaret Bernice Delaney, for more than two hours yesterday.

In 1996, the two girls had been staying at the motel, at North 141st Street and Aurora Avenue North, with their mother. At the time, it was not known whether they ran away or were victims of foul play.

After the sisters' disappearance on July 6, 1996, Delaney told police that neither girl had talked about or shown interest in running off, but she called Carmen "independent." She said the family often traveled by bus and the girls knew how to use the bus system.

In an interview at the time, Delaney told The Seattle Times that she had arrived in Seattle from the Tri-Cities area in 1995 for the birth of her ninth child. She had moved into the Crest Motel the day before the girls vanished.

Neither girl had money, Delaney said, but they "know how to panhandle."

The mother said she walked the streets of downtown Seattle every night looking for the two girls. She was unable to receive public assistance, she said, because she had no permanent address and was paying for the one-bedroom motel room with donations from a local charity.

Police distributed fliers in North Seattle, and copies were sent to the Tri-Cities, Tukwila and other cities Delaney said she had visited.

Seattle police investigated the girls' disappearance as a missing-persons case. They questioned relatives and acquaintances and even gave Delaney and her elder son polygraph tests, which they passed.

On Wednesday, the Medical Examiner's Office said it had made "a highly probable" identification of the two sets of skeletal remains, but withheld the identities until the girls' family had been notified.

Yesterday, Webster said the girls probably died in July 1996, very soon after they disappeared.

The bones were found Feb. 10 by a transient living in an abandoned barn near Northeast 195th Street and 120th Avenue Northeast in the North Creek area. The man led a police officer to the remains, apparently unearthed when the area was excavated for development.

During a four-day search, investigators and volunteers from three counties found about 70 bones and bone fragments at the site.