Can a trio of local sleuths solve a 55-year-old Lynwood murder?

LYNWOOD, Calif. (KABC) -- Detectives will often say that the first 48 hours of a murder are critical to solving the crime, but three determined women are still plugging away at a mystery more than half a century after it happened.

The victim is Jan Marsh, a 14-year-old Lynwood High School freshman who was killed in November 1969. Her case still unsolved.

The women who are busy trying to crack the case are not your typical detectives.

Cheryl Sanchez Simmons, Rose Morales and Tina McKillip all grew up in Lynwood and were about the same age as Marsh when she was killed.

In 2019, when the women came across a social media about the murder, they became obsessed with finding out who killed her.

"Fourteen years old. She was just a baby," said Morales. "We wanted to get justice for Jan. She was a Lynwood girl."

Over the past five years, the women have interviewed detectives who worked the case, possible witnesses and have poured over countless police and medical examiner reports. They even pieced together a suspect map and collected more than 200 hours of Zoom interviews.

"We're going to just keep digging and digging and digging," said Sanchez Simmons. "We will never stop."

But the women say one thing holding them back is a lack of help from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, who they say will not give them access to Marsh's murder file.

"If the L.A. County sheriff's would let us take a look at Jan Marsh's murder book, which by the way we have seen, it's about this tall, but we couldn't look at it."

Since the sleuths locked onto the Marsh case, they've also started investigating two other Lynwood murder cases from around the same era. But it's Marsh's murder that still haunts them, especially since Marsh's mother passed away a few years ago.

"She died not knowing if anybody was going to work on it except the three of us who were dedicated to it, and that really bothers me," said McKillip.

As for the killer, the women have narrowed it down to a handful of suspects, only one of whom is still alive. Unfortunately, they say any physical evidence that may have contained the killer's DNA has been lost.

"Will we ever solve Jan's case?" posed Sanchez Simmons. "We're going to try really hard, but without the cooperation of law enforcement, it's very difficult."