A Cold Case in California Heats Up

Feb. 17, 2007 — -- It was 24 years ago that Carol Bella, a former high school cheerleader with two small children, was brutally stabbed to death in her , home.

The young mother and her 3-year-old son Bobby were each stabbed more than a dozen times. Her 2-year-old daughter Jennifer was spared because she was sleeping at her grandmother's house that night.

Today, Jennifer Bella is 26 years old and still looking for justice for the mother and brother she remembers only through pictures.

"There's still a bond," she says. "She's my mother. I think that she deserved the chance to have a family, to raise a family. … And my brother, he deserved to live his life. It just breaks my heart to know that they were taken away so young in such a manner that's just cruel."

Jennifer's partner in her quest to find the killer is the Corcoran Police Department. The murder of Carol Bella is the only unsolved case in the department's books.

Recently retired police Commander Randall Leach spent the last several years chasing leads on Bella's homicide.

"This case is a very, very serious crime," says Leach. "It's a double homicide, but more than that, it's the killing of a mother and her young son, in their own home -- a brutal stabbing."

The town of Corcoran has had just one murder in seven years, so Carol Bella's unsolved killing has left a deep scar not just with police and family, but with the entire community.

And now, almost a quarter-century after the killings, the cold trail is finally warming up. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Bella's killer.

And police, for the first time, have named a local man, Marcos Vallejo, as a person of interest in Bella's murder.

Police say Vallejo worked with Carol Bella and ended a personal relationship with her shortly before the murder. Police also say a car resembling his green Ford Pinto was seen near the murder scene on the night of the killing.