Calif. man charged in murder of Montessori heiress
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A California man was charged on Thursday with killing 15-year-old Hanna Montessori, the great-great granddaughter of the educational pioneer, Maria Montessori.
Maria Montessori founded her first school in Rome in the early 1900s and developed a method of education emphasizing independence for children that is now used in thousands of schools around the world.
The arrest of Johnathan Tran, 20, comes nearly two years after the murder of Hanna, discovered bleeding from the head in a quiet southern California neighborhood on January 19, 2004, four months after running away from a Georgia group home.
She died on the way to a hospital and her body lay in the morgue as "Jane Doe," unidentified for three months before family members spotted her photograph on a Web site.
Prosecutors say Hanna, who vanished from a Marietta, Georgia, group home in September of 2003, had been working as a prostitute and was seen getting into Tran's pick-up truck in Santa Ana about 7 p.m. on the night of her death.
A few minutes later, prosecutors say, a witness heard a loud "thump" as a truck drove by and saw Montessori lying in the street with severe head injuries.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-12-08T224601Z_01_KNE881900_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-MONTESSORI.xml
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