she was 21 years old. she had been contacted the year prior here in anaheim on beach boulevard. beach boulevard? suddenly detective trapp s case took on a whole new complexion. if you want to buy drugs, beach boulevard is where you come. if you are looking for a girl, beach boulevard is where you come. a lot of them came from good, stable families that just happened to run into the wrong guy who somehow got them into the job. i mean these pimps are really good about breaking down the women and getting control over them. reporter: making them a prime target for predators. a lot of predators will start with prostitutes because they think that people won t miss them. somebody does. yes, somebody does. somebody did. reporter: like jeray s mother who, records revealed, lived in a tiny town in oklahoma.
that tattoo on jeray s neck? this is jodi. and even before the detective got the words out i felt it that she was gone. reporter: her daughter had been so happy, so charming, outgoing. but then, said jodi, a boyfriend convinced jeray that could please him, she d have to turn tricks. this is jeray. he just honked trying to get her attention. a selshe was caught on camerk in 2012. but jeray left the boyfriend, turned her life around, so jodu thought. but then that awful phone call from detective trapp. i was screaming, like screaming. reporter: the detective made a promise to that mother. it didn t matter what choices jeray may have made. she, the detective, would work this case as hard as any she ever had.
reporter: unusual? maybe. that a detective should lean on her profound catholic faith to help solve crimes. but julissa trapp does. cases don t always get solved in 48 hours, you know. reporter: surprise, surprise. they take time, and they take work. reporter: and that little rosary helps you? it does. reporter: if she could solve this case, she d give that rosary to the dead woman s family. but first she had to figure out who she was. from just one identifying mark on her neck, a tattoo, jodi. was that her name? reaching now, detective trapp pulled up the anaheim police department s database of tattoos. yes, they have won. descriptions of tattoos collected from anyone they encounter. and what do you know. there was a match. but her name was not jodi. it was jeray.
we literally went from each little motel to each little motel showing her picture and having the clerk run her name to see if she had stayed there. reporter: and eventually she found the room where jeray had been staying, in which were $700 in cash, a mascara, lipstick, contact lens solution, but nothing whatever to lead her to a suspect. not here anyway. from the disposal company, she got a list of the dumpsters those garbage trucks had serviced that morning, and then she and other officers went dumpster diving. hundreds of dumpsters. what would you be looking for? they were all given pictures of what the trash looked like around her. if it looked similar, take pictures of what s inside. reporter: no luck. a waste of time. then back on the conveyor belt, an odd thing turned up in the trash collected near jeray s body. we got a print hit. you re talking about a fingerprint here? a fingerprint, yes.
reporter: it was on a caulking tube, and it matched someone, a window installer who worked for a company called hardy windows. he tells us, we never throw trash out at customers homes. we always bring it back to hardy windows. reporter: where they found one dumpster no one had checked. the trash company, inadvertent, had left it off the list they gave the police. detective trapp looked inside. that same blue plastic wrapping, and it was almost like i was looking at the same trash i had seen on the conveyor belt. bingo. if not for that lucky fingerprint, they d have missed it. what was that like? it was a combination of frustration but, okay, all right. we re moving somewhere. reporter: so jeray was dumped here sometime before the morning of march 14th, miles and miles from the spot where, according to cell phone records, she