Vanessa Richardson

They turned to face Dorothea, who wore a look of shock and horror.

However, Detective Cabrera wasn't immediately suspicious.

He'd seen dead bodies before, and he could tell these remains had been here much longer than Bert had been missing.

Cabrera knew something terrible had happened here, but he still didn't think Dorothea was guilty of anything.

So he told his team to pack up and made plans to return the next day with a full forensic team.

This allowed him to obtain a full search warrant of the property in the meantime.

When they returned the next day, Dorothea welcomed them onto her property again, but instead of lingering in the backyard, she went upstairs to her bedroom.

As she watched them from her window, reality started to dawn on her.

They were going to find the bodies, some of which may still be recognizable.

She had to get out of there.

Dorothea stuffed $4,000 in cash into her purse and walked out to the garden.

She asked Detective Cabrera if she was under arrest, and he reassured her she wasn't.

Then she asked him if she could go to a nearby hotel to grab a cup of coffee to calm her nerves.

Cabrera offered to drive her himself.

When he dropped her off, he told her to call him when she was ready to be picked up.

Dorothea thanked him, and as soon as he drove away, she booked it to the airport.

She bought a ticket to Los Angeles, but she knew that detectives would discover this, so instead of getting on the plane, Dorothea took a bus to LA instead.

No one had any idea she was on the run, and over the course of the next several hours, investigators dug up seven more bodies in her backyard.

One of the bodies, which belonged to a woman, was wearing a wristwatch that was still ticking.

Unlike a lot of the other remains, the detectives realized that she hadn't been dead for very long.