The next day, Sunday, Lau and Baltimore Detective Daniel T. Nicholson IV had positively identified the body, helped by co-workers and a photograph showing her wearing the gold eagle charm, and had arrested Cruz and charged him with murder. Police said he confessed to strangling Adorno, and the next day officers at the Baltimore City Detention Center found him dead in his jail cell of an apparent suicide.
"I'm glad we have answers for the family," said Lau, who spent 20 years as an officer and homicide detective in Baltimore County before joining the force in Howard five years ago. "Unfortunately, we didn't have any good news."
The victim grew up in a rural hamlet in the southwestern Mexican state of Tabasco. She had two boys and three girls between the ages of 9 and 16, fathered by a man who left to seek work in 2001 but never returned. Adorno worked as a cook, but it didn't pay enough to feed her family, which includes her mother and her invalid father.
In 2002, Adorno crossed the border and made her way to Maryland, where she found work in Howard County at the Red Robin and Eggspectations restaurants. She sent money home to her mother, Josefa Adorno Cazango, who said in a telephone interview in Spanish that her daughter "left to help get ahead. She supported her children. She never abandoned them."
Cazango, 52, said Adorno had not seen her children since she left Mexico seven years ago, but had saved money and had planned to visit this year. She never made it home. Cazango said her daughter mentioned Cruz only once, saying she had met a friend.
When she learned he was suspected of killing her daughter and then apparently had taken his own life, Cazango said, "His conscience must have taken him." The mother said she sells tamales to get by, and of her grandchildren, "Sometimes they eat, sometimes they don't."
Adorno's body remains at the state Medical Examiner's Office in Baltimore. Police told me her two employers reissued paychecks that Adorno didn't collect and are raising money to fly her body back to Mexico for burial.
Lau had suspected Cruz from the day the Red Robin manager reported her missing on Jan. 29, 2008, after she had failed to show up for a week. She had been last seen outside the Red Robin the night of Jan. 22 and co-workers reported seeing Cruz in the parking lot that night watching her leave.
Lau immediately focused on Cruz.
