A Bay Area girl vanished on her way home. Now, a new search for answers. – SFGATE

A Bay Area girl vanished on her way home. Now, a new search for answers.  SFGATE

On a November afternoon in 1987, 13-year-old Michele Rose Matteucci was making her way home from school in Daly City. She was a bright eighth grader, a talented musician and dancer. She never made it home. Nearly 39 years later, Michele’s homicide remains unsolved. A police artist’s sketch of a mysterious man, conflicting eyewitness accounts and hundreds of tips have failed to identify her killer. Now, a new $50,000 reward announced by California Gov. Gavin Newsom has renewed hopes that someone might finally come forward with information about what happened that afternoon. Investigators spent weeks trying to establish what happened in the final few hundred yards of Michele’s journey home.

Michele disappeared on Tuesday, Nov. 10, 1987, in the Serramonte neighborhood of Daly City, a landscape of closely packed postwar tract homes, built in long, narrow rows along the hillsides south of San Francisco. She was returning from Alta Loma Junior High School to her family’s home on Wakefield Avenue. At around 3:15 p.m., Michele got off a SamTrans bus with several classmates at the corner of Morton Drive and Callan Boulevard, just minutes from home. One of the girls later told police that Michele started walking up Morton Drive toward her house but then unexpectedly turned around and headed back down Callan Boulevard. The classmate said Michele would ordinarily