The Stockton Record posted a story this morning outlining the custody battle between Sandra Cantu murder suspect Melissa Huckaby and her ex-husband, Johnny Huckaby.

Huckaby, who is due back in court Friday for further arraignment, has a 5-year-old daughter who was a playmate of Sandra’s, the 8-year-old from Tracy who was kidnapped March 27 and found dead 10 days later.

Huckaby, 28, was living with her grandparents and daughter in a Tracy mobile home park. She is charged with raping and killing the little girl, who lived nearby.

On April 16, less than a week after Tracy police arrested his ex-wife in connection with Sandra’s death, Johnny Huckaby asked a court in Orange County to give him custody of their daughter.

Melissa and Johnny Huckaby were married when she was pregnant. They moved to Southern California and divorced soon after, with Melissa getting full custody and Johnny at one point living in the Kansas City, Kan., area, where Melissa filed court papers earlier this year seeking unpaid child support from him.

Their daughter has been living with Melissa Huckaby’s parents, Judy and Brian Lawless, in the Southern California town of Cypress, according to court filings.

The Rev. Lane Lawless and his wife Connie Lawless, grandparents of murder suspect Melissa Huckaby, gave interviews to KSBW TV8, a Monterey area station, about the Sandra Cantu case, when they were attending a church conference in Salinas last month. To read our story about the Lawless family and how the case has affected them and their church, click here.

At 10 a.m. Thursday, Scott Webb, director of the Sund/Carrington Foundation, will present a reward check to Jose Luis Franco for finding the suitcase that contained the body of Sandra Cantu.

On April 6 Franco found a large black suitcase floating in a dairy farm pond near Whitehall Road. He thought it was suspicious, as it hadn’t been there two weeks ago when the pond was last drained, so police were called in at about 10 a.m.

After a day-long investigation, that had media helicopters hovering over the farm site to film shots of the suitcase, it was transported by San Joaquin County coroner’s officals and opened at their facilities.

Tracy kidnapping victim Cantu, 8, had been missing since March 27. She was last seen alive just two miles away from the pond, at the Orchard Estates Mobile Home park.

The suitcase would prove to a key piece of evidence in leading to the arrest of 28-year-old Melissa Huckaby, who told a local newspaper just a few days after Sandra’s body was found that she had a similar suitcase stolen from her driveway the day Sandra was reported missing.

Huckaby was arrested on murder, kidnapping and rape charges on April 10.

According a press release issued by Tracy police, the check will be handed over in a presentation expected to last about 30 minutes.

Although it was initially reported that the workers who found the body were refusing to accept a reward, last week police said about $20,000 would be given to an anonymous recipient — much to the chagrin of Los Angeles psychic Dana Pedlow, who claims she gave police key tips about the case.

Apparently, as Franco ended up giving media interviews, he’s no longer anonymous. According to one TV report, he planned to use the money to help his children attend college.

It’s always strange to be a member of the media when a story you’re covering becomes big in the national news, as has been the case in Tracy ever since an abused boy in chains was discovered in December.

When you see a town in your midst reduced to a four-minute TV feature, complete with the sober voice of a broadcaster lamenting the loss of innocence, it gives one new perspective on how easy it is for the truth of a place to get lost in the spin.

A piece aired by Nightline last night, titled “American Gothic,” was the latest, following a long string including Nancy Grace segments, Dr. Phil and even a feature in People magazine.

The Nightline piece wasn’t bad (although I could have lived without 10 shots of the good old downtown water tower), but the title was a little much for a town of 82,000 that’s become a major residential hub for commuters working in the Bay Area.

Alluding to the classic 1930 Grant Wood painting of a stoic buttoned-up white Iowa farm couple really doesn’t have much to do with a Central Valley community where the population as of 2007 was about 30 percent Hispanic or Latino, with a long history of Portugese immigrants in the mix.

Whatever you believe about psychics, Dani Pedlow’s initial thoughts about the Sandra Cantu case certainly seemed to have a tinge of truth, assuming this e-mail exchange she posted on her website this morning is true.

The posting is in response to our story about her beef with the Tracy police department.

Police and psychics working together to solve crimes isn’t anything new, but in the case of the Sandra Cantu murder case, this time it seems to be more a situation of Police vs. The Psychic.

The Los Angeles-based Pedlow, whose claim to fame is she predicted on live radio how a Poughkeepsie, N.Y., serial killer would be found, is upset because she swears she sent some tips to the Tracy police that identified where Sandra’s body would be found and is entitled to some of the reward money.

(Incidentally, Bay Area residents, Pedlow says she did undergraduate work in psychology and minored in criminology at Cal Poly and was offered a scholarship to U.C. Berkeley, but she instead went to New York to work on the radio.)

Here’s a few tidbits from her website biography: Read the rest of this entry »

The Sandra Cantu murder investigation and its related threads have led media and FBI investigators all over the West Coast and up into the rural Northwest, where small towns like Clarkston, Wash., and nearby Lewiston, Idaho, are hearing about the Tracy girl’s story.

Late last week reporter Josh Richman managed to reach the Rev. Oliver Bittleston, pastor of the Clarkston First Church of God from 1982 to 1994, at his Clarkston home to ask him about the FBI’s visit to the church. Agents went there in connection with their investigation into murder suspect Melissa Huckaby and her family, including the Rev. Lane Lawless, whose Clover Road Baptist church in Tracy was searched as part of the Cantu investigation. Lawless was ordained in Washington state in the 1970s.

Bittleston said he’d just returned from a Clarkston grocery store, where he’d bumped into the church’s current pastor, the Rev. Bill Creutzberg, who was familiar with the FBI probe and subsequent media calls.

“I have absolutely no idea, I wish that I knew something,” Bittleston said. “The only thing we can do is if there’s any interrogation or investigation that involves the church up here, we’ll have to do it in the presence of our lawyers.”

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It looks like all interested members of the media who wanted to attend the Melissa Huckaby arraignment in Stockton today got a spot.

In addition to the nine seats pre-assigned on Wednesday by San Joaquin County Superior Court officials, 17 spots were given out by lottery at 11 a.m. this morning. There were 17 applications for those spots.

However, it’s likely that some members of the media didn’t bother making the trek to Stockton, thinking that they would be shut out. The court has also banned all cameras from the proceedings. A media attorney said that courts have pretty full discretion over how to allot access to the media in high-profile cases.

Huckaby, charged with kidnapping, raping and killing 8-year-old Sandra Cantu, is due to appear at 1 p.m. this afternoon.

To read all about this case, visit our archive of stories.

A Washington-based NBC affiliate TV station is reporting that FBI agents have visited a church in Clarkston to find out information about murder suspect Melissa Cantu’s grandfather, Clifford Lane Lawless.

To read the full story, visit KHQ in Clarkston.

A church along the Washington-Idaho border has been the focus of an FBI seach in connection with the slaying of Sandra Cantu and arrest of Melissa Huckaby, a TV station is reporting.

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A three-person panel representing the San Joaquin County Superior Court decided Wednesday to allow just nine members of Bay Area news organizations to have a guaranteed seat in the courtroom when suspect Melissa Huckaby returns for further arraignment early Friday afternoon in the Sandra Cantu murder case.

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