Dead Fetus, Missing Mom Baffle Police

FRESNO, Calif. - Last week, a pregnant Margarita Flores and her husband got a call from a woman identifying herself as a charity worker and promising free baby furniture and a year's supply of diapers.

The caller arrived at the Flores home as arranged, and Flores went off with her, supposedly to a warehouse to collect the gifts. The trip was supposed to take 20 minutes.

Flores never came back.

Since then, the case has unfolded with one macabre twist after another: a dead fetus, a missing body, a witness found hanged in a shack.

Police are baffled by the case, and the only person who may shed light on the mystery is in jail, accused of kidnapping Flores. She is refusing to cooperate.

Meanwhile, Flores' distraught husband, Heliodoro Cruz, holds out hope for his wife's safe return.

The mystery began Sept. 14 when a woman knocked at the couple's door at about 1:30 p.m., following up on phone calls about gifts for the Flores family. The trip to get the gifts wasn't expected to take long. In fact, Flores left behind her purse.

When Flores, who was eight months' pregnant with her sixth child, hadn't returned by 3 p.m., Cruz called friends, the family minister and police.

While police have given no motive for the apparent kidnapping, some of Flores' relatives and friends believe she was taken for her unborn child, a girl she had already named Doraelia.

So far, police have pieced together this much:

Hours after the 40-year-old Flores left home, she was seen arguing with Josefina Sonia Saldana, 40, outside a fast-food restaurant in Chowchilla, more than 30 miles away. It wasn't known whether Saldana was the woman Flores left her home with earlier.

The next morning - with Flores missing - Saldana showed up at Valley Children's Hospital with a dead fetus. She told officials there she had delivered the dead child in a car.

That same day, farm worker Serafin Rodarte, who rents a shack on Saldana's property, supposedly spotted the corpse of an adult. The body was partly wrapped in carpet, with the bottom half of the torso visible, he told police.

But he didn't tell police of his discovery until he was questioned on Sept. 17. By then, the body was gone.

Now, Rodarte is gone, too. He was found hanged inside his one-room cottage on Tuesday, leaving apparent suicide notes.

Investigators and Flores' family were hoping the notes would shed light on the case, but they only declared his innocence and contained farewells to his family.

Saldana, meanwhile, was arrested Friday and accused of kidnapping. Prosecutors are trying to force her to submit to tests to determine whether she was ever pregnant, and if so, whether the dead fetus was hers.

In her first court appearance, Saldana yesterday pleaded not guilty to kidnapping, and her public defender agreed to let her undergo medical testing.

The link between Saldana and Flores is unclear. Police believe the connection may be at the University Medical Center in Fresno, where Saldana worked as a Spanish-English interpreter and Flores, who suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure and uterine cancer, was a patient.