Missing for months, then murdered

Kids playing in the woods behind the Belmont Park apartment complex in Woodlawn had made a grisly discovery.

A body, they'd told their parents.

The adults didn't believe them.

It wasn't until one woman went to look for herself that police were called.

"I didn't want to believe it was a body," said Laurie Harkam, the woman who called police, to a WMAR-2 News reporter covering the story at the time.

Sarah Jane Forrester was just 13 years old.

The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner ruled her death a homicide by traumatic injury.

Forrester had been reported missing from the group home where she lived in Catonsville in late February.

She'd last been seen alive around April 28, 1999, near Edgewater Village in Harford County.

Police recovered her body on May 12, 1999.

Courtesy: Baltimore County Police Department
(Background Photo: WMAR-2 News Archive)

She was laid to rest near her father's parents' home in Salem, WV, and near her father's grave. He passed just three years before she did.

If you have any information, which could help police you can call the homicide unit at 410-877-3943 or you can call Metro Crime Stoppers at 1-866-7LOCKUP.