Police spent days digging through a wooded lot in Pleasantville, New Jersey, after receiving information that a missing toddler might be buried there. The February 2009 search revived an investigation that had gone unanswered for more than two decades. For Bonita Karen Sanders’s family, it also brought the possibility that the little girl they’d hoped to see again had died.
Bonita was just three days shy of her second birthday when she disappeared from the Virginia Court Apartments in Atlantic City, Atlantic County, on September 14, 1986. Her mother claimed the toddler vanished while sitting in a stroller outside their home. However, investigators would eventually question that account and begin examining whether Bonita had been killed.
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