Nearly three decades after her death, a murder victim whose partially decomposed body turned up in a brushy ravine in eastern San Diego County has been identified.

DNA testing has confirmed that the remains discovered in an open area off the 1300 block of Avocado Avenue in El Cajon on Aug. 13, 1998, were those of 30-year-old Alicia Ledezma Sanchez, according to police. Investigators believe the mother of three had been dead for as long as six weeks.

Sanchez’s death has been classified as a homicide, though no cause-of-death ruling in the case has been made public.

The initial investigation into the woman’s death led to no arrests, and attempts to identify her were fruitless.

In 2003, cold-case homicide detectives with the El Cajon Police Department revived the investigation, sending Sanchez’s skull to a forensic artist who used it to create a sculpture approximating her facial features as they were in life. Photographs of the rendering were released to the public, but no viable leads resulted.

Five years later, a DNA sample was obtained from the decedent’s remains and a genetic profile was developed, but the effort led to no matches, according to police.

Then, over a two-year period beginning in 2023, members of an ECPD volunteer cold-case unit worked with several laboratories to conduct genetic genealogy and advanced DNA-analysis techniques that can reveal decedents’ characteristics and potential family members.

For investigators, it is at least a potential lead and at best a break in the 26 year old case. NBC 7’s Dave Summers tells us how investigators have a new face to put to this mystery.

For over a year, retired police officers Fran Deck and Kevin Trotter have been starting at the computer-generated composite photo asking the same question that El Cajon detectives have wondered for nearly 30 years: what is her name?

“I have always just wanted to give her a name, find out who she was,” Deck said.

The volunteer detectives enlisted the help of investigative genetic genealogist Carol Rolnick, who works for a company called Parabon.

“There are some great technics that are used to narrow down what part of the world that individual is from and what their make-up, their genetic make-up is. It’s called biogeographic ancestry,” Rolnick said.

Rolnick compared the victim’s DNA with that DNA found on public databases to come up with potential relatives. She narrowed it to nine people.

“In this case it was a very big family from a single small town in Michoacan, Mexico,” Rolnick said.

Trotter and Deck sent letters, including a link to NBC 7’s original story that aired in May of 2024, to all nine potential family members. That information was shared in a private family Facebook group. In that group was Sanchez’s niece.

Three months ago, the El Cajon Police Department posted an update on the investigation on its social media pages in another bid to find out who the victim was. The cold-case unit was then contacted by a potential family member who believed she knew the victim’s identity, and a genetic test with DNA obtained from Sanchez’s son confirmed a familial match, finally revealing her identity.

“Now we know who she is. We know who her family is. We can find out who her associates were,” Trotter said.

Finding her name after all these years makes finding the suspect now seem possible.

“This is the first major break that we have gotten on the case,” said Sgt. Steve Breakall of the El Cajon Police Major Crimes Unit.

Breakall says volunteers are working on more than a dozen cases. This is the oldest and only case among those to achieve such an important development.

“I thought of it as a pie in the sky thing, and then when I saw the kind of work Fran and Kevin were doing, I had no doubt they would get to it,” Breakall said.

Breakall says the investigation is in its infancy. They are asking family and friends to help them put together Sanchez’s history.

She was born in Tijuana and often traveled back and forth to San Diego. What she was doing, who she was with and why she was killed in El Cajon are questions with no easy answers.

“The odds are against us,” Trotter said. “It will be difficult, but this was difficult, and we got this far, and I am not giving up hope.”

Anyone with information about Sanchez or the circumstances surrounding her death is asked to call the ECPD Investigation Division at 619-579-3320 or email the volunteer cold-case team atcoldcaseunit@elcajon.gov