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The Murder of Cindy Hernandez
It was 40 years before her family got the justice they deserved.
Cynthia May Hernandez, known to everyone in the Glendora community in which she lived as ‘Cindy’, was 18 and had just graduated high school in the summer of 1976.
She was a keen athlete and a talented singer with a steady boyfriend and a wide circle of friends. However, after she went out alone one evening to catch a movie, she was never seen again.
It would be 40 years before her grieving mother finally found out what happened that fateful night — and it would partly be the brave testimony of two rape survivors that helped bring her killer to justice.
Vanished without a trace
On August 26th 1976, Cindy Hernandez was hoping to go and see the popular horror movie The Omen at the Fox Twin Theaters in Covina. Her friends had already seen it and her boyfriend of more than a year was down with the flu, so she decided to go it alone.
She drove to the theater in her 1963 Chevrolet station wagon, with her family bidding her goodnight — it was a late showing — and assuming they’d see her the next day. When her mother Gloria Densham got up early next morning, though, she discovered Cindy’s room empty and her bed unslept-in.
