It all came flooding back to Jaime Johnson in December 2019, when her brother asked her about the death of her best friend 31 years earlier.
Sara Kay Keesling was 12 years old when she was last seen walking home from a friend’s house near her home in Riverside on Oct. 2, 1988. About two weeks later, a hiker discovered her badly decomposed body behind a hillside water tower, partially buried beneath a pile of trash, north of the 60 Freeway in Rubidoux.
When Daniel Johnson spotted the Atkinson water reservoir during a hike with family members over the Thanksgiving holiday in 2019, he immediately thought about Sara.
“I always remember her when I see the water tower on that hill,” Daniel Johnson said in a Dec. 2, 2019, text to his sister. He subsequently dug up a few old newspaper clippings about Sara’s death on microfiche from the local library, and texted them to his sister.
For Jaime Johnson, 49, it was as if an old scab had been ripped open, triggering a torrent of painful emotions she thought had long abated.
“Her death shattered and forever changed me. I carried the grief and shock for a long time. It has been the most enduring grief of my life,” said Johnson, who now lives in San Diego.
Medical examiners were unable to determine a cause of death because of the condition of Sara’s remains. They concluded she had been dead eight to 10 days by the time her body was found, and her left hand and foot were missing because of animal activity, according to the autopsy and coroner’s investigation report.
Investigators with the Riverside County Regional Cold Case Homicide Team, a multiagency task force, believe Sara was the victim of a homicide. But no arrests have been made in her death, to the chagrin of childhood friends who have been pushing to keep her case alive.
Troubled childhood
By all accounts, Sara Keesling endured a tumultuous family life in a broken home.
Her parents had divorced and were engaged in a custody battle over Sara and her two siblings, Lisa and Jimmy. Family and friends were aware that Sara wanted to avoid visitation with her father, Paul Edward Keesling Jr., who was always referred to as “Ed.”
“She was trying to survive an awful childhood,” Jaime Johnson said. “She had to rely on her wits at way too young an age. She had to grow up way too fast.”
Sara had just begun the seventh grade at Sierra Middle School in Riverside when she died. In interviews with The Press Enterprise at the time, teachers at Jefferson Elementary School, where Sara had previously attended, described her as a mature and gifted student who loved to read, but also as an underachiever whose efforts ran “hot and cold.”
“She’d either give 150% or zero,” one teacher told The Press Enterprise. He said he could never figure out what was bothering Sara or why she started failing to show up for class. “She was running away from something,” he said.
Another of her teachers at Jefferson said she believed she could reach Sara, until the last quarter of her sixth-grade year, when the teacher said, “It all fell apart.”
It was during that period when Sara was often running away from home, typically staying with friends but keeping her whereabouts secret.
Childhood friend Lisa Gomez, now 51, recalls receiving a call from Sara shortly before she died.
“When she would leave a place she would call me, but she wouldn’t tell me where she was specifically. She would do this so I could tell her mom and Lisa she was OK,” said Gomez, who now lives in Homeland. “She wouldn’t tell me where she was because she didn’t want anyone she was staying with to get in trouble.”
Last weekend alive
Shawndi Lawton, a friend of Sara’s who went by the last name Ward at the time, said Sara secretly stayed at her home the weekend before her disappearance because she didn’t want to stay with her father.
Sara showed up at her house on Thursday, Sept. 29, and the two hung out there all weekend and didn’t go anywhere, Lawton said. They ordered pizza and sandwiches from D’Ceasaro Pizza, watched MTV, and played dress-up — trying on different outfits, teasing their hair with Aqua Net hairspray and experimenting with makeup.
Sara, according to Lawton, loved heavy metal music, especially singer-guitarist Lita Ford. So Sara decided to dress up like Ford, donning a black dress, black sleeveless top, black lace stockings and a black bra. To top it off, she borrowed a pair of Lawton’s black boots.
Sara stayed with Lawton until Sunday, Oct. 2.
“I walked her halfway home and never saw her again,” said Lawton, 50, of Banning. She last saw Sara near the corner of El Cajon Drive and Wayman Street, and believed she was headed to her home on Holbrook Way, less than half a mile away.
Sara never made it home. When her body was found 11 days later, she was wearing the same black outfit she had on when she left Lawton’s home.
Mom ‘searched all over town’
Sara’s mother, Lori Jo Dickinson, reported her missing to the Riverside Police Department the day her daughter first hid out at Lawton’s home. The report was shared with the National Crime Information Center’s missing and unidentified persons database.
“I searched all over town and outside of town. I drove all over the place looking for her. I talked to people. Nobody had seen her,” Dickinson said in a telephone interview.
Dickinson, who was working as a registered nurse at the VA Loma Linda at the time, noted in her police report that Sara was supposed to be with her father that weekend, and that she had run away in the past to avoid such visits because “she doesn’t like her father.”
In her interview, Dickinson said, “Sara was supposed to go to Ed’s house that weekend, and she apparently didn’t make it.”
Grisly discovery
Sara was unidentified when her body was found face down in an area known as an illegal dump site, according to coroner’s report. She was partially covered with building insulation, a broken wooden table and green garbage bags filled with rotting food.
A length of knotted cord was found resting on Sara’s back, just below her neck. Tire tracks found at the scene were measured and photographed by the Sheriff’s Department, according to the coroner’s report.
A cause and manner of death could not be determined due to the condition of her body, and toxicology results could not accurately confirm whether she had any alcohol or drugs in her system.
In December 1988, after “conducting every test we can,” authorities said they may never know how Sara died, The Press Enterprise reported at the time.
Body identified
At the time her body was found, homicide investigators did not make the connection to the missing person report filed by Dickinson two weeks earlier, even though Sara’s mother was living just seven miles from the Atkinson reservoir.
Dickinson said she learned of the dead girl in the newspaper after the Sheriff’s Department posted an announcement asking for the public’s help in identifying the “teen-age” girl, who was believed to be 15 to 18 years old.
During a visit to the sheriff’s station, Dickinson said she provided investigators with information about Sara, including the name of her dentist. Detectives subsequently visited her home to personally deliver the tragic news: the dental records confirmed the dead girl was, in fact, Sara.
“I just fell over. It was so awful,” Dickinson said. She said she told investigators who she suspected killed her daughter, but they told her they didn’t have any evidence.
In the ensuing months, Dickinson said she would frequently call investigators to check on the status of the investigation, but the response was always the same.
“They said they’d call me if they got any information, but they never called,” she said.
The case ran cold, then languished for decades.
Investigation renewed
When her brother rekindled interest in Sara’s death, Jaime Johnson decided to reach out to Sara’s older sister, Lisa Keesling, after more than 30 years. Johnson wrote her a letter after her brother found her address online.
“I am not writing a book, I have no social media presence, and my only motivation for reaching out is to try to find out what really happened to my friend so many years ago,” Johnson said in the letter dated Dec. 5, 2019.
A week later, Keesling responded via email.
“I think about Sara all the time, and I’ve spent my whole life grieving for her,” Keesling said. “Basically, I don’t really know the truth about what happened, but there were many people who had theories.”
The two women then decided to reach out to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, requesting that it dust off Sara’s case file and reinvestigate her death in the hope that some new piece of evidence would emerge to reveal how she died, and at whose hands.
After three years of persistent pressure from Johnson and Keesling, two investigators from the Riverside County Regional Cold Case Homicide Team, which operates out of the District’s Attorney’s Office, were finally assigned in the summer of 2023 to conduct a follow-up investigation into Sara’s death.
Investigators Greg Fuller and Phil Villalobos conducted several interviews across the country, traveling as far as New York to interview Sara’s father. They sent forensic evidence to labs for reexamination. In the end, however, the two were no closer to solving the case, finding no new evidence that would warrant criminal charges against anyone.
After two years investigating Sara’s case, the two detectives both retired in 2025.
Foul play
Despite the lack of forensic evidence, investigators have declared Sara’s death a homicide.
“Just to be located where she was found, we cannot rule out foul play, but there weren’t any leads out there at the time,” said Amy Contreras, a Riverside County sheriff’s investigator and member of the cold case team.
Lisa Keesling and Johnson said they remained in regular contact with Villalobos and Fuller throughout their investigation and after they retired.
“They said this clearly was a homicide, and they suspected the water reservoir was a secondary location, and that her body had been brought there from where she was killed and dumped there,” Lisa Keesling said.
Fuller and Villalobos, who now work as private investigators, declined to comment for this story. James Campos, commander of the Regional Cold Case Homicide Team, also declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigation.
In a Dec. 15, 2025, email to Johnson, Billy Hester, supervising investigator for the Regional Cold Case Homicide Team, assured Johnson that investigators would continue to follow up on “viable leads and actual witnesses.”
“This case is not closed as we consider it a homicide,” Hester said in his email.
Moving on
Lisa Keesling said her father moved out of the Palm Avenue home the family had once shared soon after Sara’s memorial service at Trinity Lutheran Church. She, her brother, Jimmy, and her mother never saw him again. Jimmy died of a heroin overdose in 2004 at the age of 26, she said, and his cremains were buried in the same plot as Sara’s at Evergreen Memorial Park in Riverside.
Ed Keesling, who worked as a security guard when he was in Southern California but now lives in New York, could not be reached for comment.
Although they didn’t know each other while Sara was alive, Johnson and Lawton became acquainted online, when Johnson posted information about Sara on social media and the crowdsourcing website Find a Grave.
The two recently met in Riverside, visiting the site of the Atkinson reservoir that is now fenced off where Lennar Homes is building about 200 homes as part of its Emerald Ridge development. Johnson and Atkinson also visited Sara’s grave, sharing stories about their long-departed friend.
Over lunch at nearby Butch’s Grinders, a mainstay deli in the city for more than 40 years, a ladybug landed on a wisp of Johnson’s hair as she sorted through a manila folder full of documents about Sara’s case. It triggered a fond memory of Sara.
“We would look for ladybugs at school. We would wander around the school grounds and on the playground, looking for grasshoppers and ladybugs,” Johnson said.
Johnson and Keesling believe that, from the beginning, Sara’s death wasn’t a priority for homicide investigators due to the lack of physical evidence, her undetermined cause of death, and her background as a runaway. Had investigators pressed harder in 1988, they believe, perhaps the case could have been solved.
And while it remains unknown if Sara’s killer will ever be identified and brought to justice, Johnson hopes that by bringing her story into the public arena again after 38 years, it will hopefully shake something loose.
“We’ve barked up every tree for the last six years,” Johnson said. “And now we are reaching out to anyone we can think of who might help bring attention to Sara’s unsolved death. I just want anyone to come forward who might know something.”
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