"It was a very busy day. We were working on several cases, and then I heard about this suspicious suitcase that had been discovered in a ravine near the Paul Masson Mountain Winery," she said.

When officers from the West Valley Substation of the sheriff's department opened the suitcase, they made a gruesome discovery. "We found the headless torso of a woman inside," Ludcke said. Her hands had been chopped off.

The coroner determined that the victim was African American. But the sheriff's department could not establish anything more beyond that, not even the identity of the person because of the absence of fingerprints or dental records.

The incident happened in 1993.

A little later, Ludcke was transferred out of the West Valley Substation.

With little to go on, the case was soon declared closed by the sheriff's department. One by one, most of the deputies who had discovered the suitcase retired from the department.

The headless torso incident in Saratoga became just another unsolved and forgotten case.

That was until Sgt. Pedro Contreras, a "cold-case" investigator in the sheriff's department, got an inquiry from the California Department of Justice in 2004.

"They were inquiring about a serial killer in Southern California," Contreras said.

The sergeant gave them some detail about the 1993 incident. The officials, in turn, gave Contreras a list of five or six people who had been reported missing in the area at that time.

He immediately started digging into the case again.

Contreras has a reputation for tenacity and hard work. "He is extremely diligent," Ludcke said.

"I started eliminating the people on that list one by one," Contreras said. But there was one person he could not eliminate. Her name was Stephanie Jensen.

"She had some family in Utah. An ex-husband lives in Georgia," he said.

Jensen's family members gave Contreras more information about the victim. "Her adoptive mother told us about a visible scar Stephanie had on her legs," he said.

A few months later, a crime laboratory confirmed that the headless torso was that of Stephanie Jensen.

She was a 31-year-old youth counselor who had been living in San Francisco at the time of her disappearance. Contreras soon found that she had been living with a boyfriend named Kirk C. Bennett.

"I looked at certain facts of the case. I was curious as to why Bennett had not reported her missing," Contreras said.

Bennett was traced to Middleton, Idaho, a small town of about 3,000 in the southwestern part of the state.

"I attempted to speak to him in January but he declined to be interviewed," Contreras said.

The more he investigated the case, the more he was convinced that Bennett was involved in Jensen's death.

By June of this year Contreras was convinced that he had enough evidence to arrest Bennett.

"Sheriff Laurie Smith allowed me to travel. I interviewed a lot of people," he said.

On June 13, Bennett was arrested by Santa Clara County Sheriff's Deputies in Middleton. A few weeks later, on July 1, Bennett was transported to the main jail in Santa Clara County.

"Bennett has refused to speak to investigators," Contreras said. "Jensen's half-brother is elated that we have made an arrest in the case."