Q: Was the murderer of two teenage girls named Melissa and Tina in 1984 ever caught and convicted? - Anonymous, Carmichael
A Placer County Superior Court jury acquitted a Carmichael man on Aug. 5, 1988, of the 1984 bludgeoning deaths in Sierra County of two North Highlands teenagers, the Bee reported.
No one else was ever prosecuted in the deaths of Tina Shrader and Melissa Mattingly, both 17, according to Bee reports.
The jury foreman said the "jury was just not convinced that the prosecution proved without a reasonable doubt" that the 34-year-old suspect was guilty.
The suspect was manager of the North Highlands doughnut shop where Mattingly worked.
The case based on circumstantial evidence was moved to an Auburn courtroom because of pretrial publicity in Sierra County, where the heavily decomposed bodies of Shrader and Mattingly were discovered July 4, 1984, by a fisherman near the Little Truckee River.
The suspect admitted on the witness stand that he took Shrader and Mattingly to the north shore of Lake Tahoe on Memorial Day weekend 1984 but testified the girls left that area in the company of an unidentified motorist who was driving a car with out-of-state license plates.
He denied having taken them to the secluded riverside spot north of Truckee where their nude bodies were found lying side by side. A pathologist testified the backs of the victims' skulls had been crushed by a blunt object.
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