Hey, everyone, welcome back to Crime Weekly News.

I'm Derek Lavasar.

And I'm Stephanie Harlow.

Happy holidays to everybody.

We're coming to you after Christmas and after the new year when you're seeing this. And before the new year, we were talking about our live and we were having this conversation. And unfortunately, during that live, some of you let us know that Melody Buzzard had been located.

And this was something that we had talked about before.

So we're going to give you a little bit of a rundown and then we're going to talk about where we are now.

So we're going to be revisiting this episode that we covered recently, which was the disappearance of 9-year-old Melody Buzzard from Lompoc, California.

At the time, Melody was considered missing, and investigators were focusing on her mother,

Ashley Buzzard, whose behavior during this multi-state road trip raised a lot of red flags.

Surveillance showed both of them wearing disguises, the rental car appeared to have switched plates, and

Ashley returned home alone with no explanation as to where her daughter was.

Unfortunately, as I just mentioned, there has now been a tragic development.

Authorities have confirmed that Melody's body has been located, and her mother, Ashley,

has been arrested in charge with Melody's murder.

She has entered a plea of not guilty, which is pretty common.

Yeah, like that's the least surprising thing.

Yeah, exactly.

Not shocking at all.

So today we're going to be going through what investigators discovered, how they were able to locate Melody and what we know so far about the

charges moving forward.

Okay.

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