Ashlee Buzzard is accused of shooting her nine-year-old daughter Melodee in the head and abandoning her child’s body in rural Utah
In the last image that shows little Melodee Buzzard alive, the nine-year-old stood at her mother’s shoulder, a gray hoodie pulled tight over a black wig as she shared a tense smile with an agent at a car rental facility. It was October 7, 2025, and her mother Ashlee, was about to take her daughter on a deadly road trip in a rented white Chevrolet Malibu.
During the trip, investigators say, Ashlee swapped out her wig and switched her license plate as she traversed through Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, and Nebraska. Two days into the trip, Melodee and her mom were spotted near the Utah-Colorado border. On Oct. 9, investigators now say, Ashlee pulled over on a scrubby road in the unincorporated community of Caineville, Utah, a place set against the backdrop of a stunning red rock vista, and shot her daughter in the head.
Then Ashlee continued her multi-state road trip back to California without her daughter, likely returning to the Lompoc home, thinking she had gotten away with what investigators now call a calculated, cold-blooded murder.
Only, by then, Melodee’s teachers were buzzing. The curly-haired child who had spent much of her life being home-schooled hadn’t been to an independent study that had been mandated that summer, and no one could reach her mother. So on Oct. 14, officials with the Lompoc Unified School District reported her disappearance to the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Office, launching a tireless investigation into the missing child’s last days by detectives who “encountered deliberate efforts to prevent them from locating Melodee and uncovering the truth.” Stonewalling by the missing girl’s own mother.
Within hours of the school’s report, detectives executed a search warrant at Ashlee’s home on Oct. 15 and found evidence of the car rental. Detectives retraced the road trip with painstaking detail, learning that Ashlee Buzzard had taken a route home to California through Kansas, Colorado, Utah, Arizona and Nevada – without her daughter. On that day, Santa Barbara Sheriff Bill Brown said, Ashlee was more than uncooperative. Instead, she was combative and “provided no verifiable explanation for Melodee’s whereabouts.”
But, they continued searching, releasing images of Ashlee Buzzard and Melodee at the car rental facility and a detailed timeline of their travels.
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Brown said he and his detectives “hoped against hope that she would be found alive.”
Then, on Dec. 6, the call his detectives had been dreading came from colleagues in Utah. The Wayne County Sheriff’s Office had responded to a report of a decomposed body discovered off the roadway near the 3300 block of East State Route 24 in a remote area of Wayne County.
A child’s remains had been found by tourists who stumbled upon the heartless crime while taking a photo of a sunset. The victim had suffered “gunshot wounds to the head.”
On Dec. 22 – three days before Christmas – the remains were confirmed by an FBI lab to be Melodee’s. Sadly, the dead child’s DNA was a match to the familial profile of the woman who is now charged with killing her.
On Friday, Ashlee Buzzard pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder with additional charges of lying in wait and the intentional discharge of a firearm. At her arraignment, the Santa Barbara County District Attorney’s Office announced it would not seek the death penalty but would argue for a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. The 40-year-old accused killer’s public defender, Adrian Galvan, successfully argued for a gag order in the case.
Melodee was born into tragedy. Her father, Rubiell “Pinoy” Meza, was killed in a 2016 motorcycle accident when his daughter was just six months old. His family was in the courtroom on Friday to face the woman who is accused of snuffing out Melodee’s young life, wearing pink ribbons in her memory.
In 2021, when Ashlee was hospitalized in a mental health facility, social services contacted Meza’s mother, Lily Denes, to take in Melodee, which she did. But when Ashlee was released, she cut off contact with Denes, sparking a custody battle for Melodee that was still active when she was murdered, the slain girl’s grandmother says.
“Everybody’s asking themselves, ‘Why did she do this?’… How can you do that to a baby?” Denes asked after Ashlee’s arrest. While everyone still held out hope, she prayed directly to Melodee. “I know your dad is watching you from heaven.”
So are Brown’s investigators. “This investigation does not end here,” Brown said. “We remain committed to working closely with prosecutors to ensure justice is pursued with integrity, care, and compassion. Melodee deserved a far better life, and she will never be forgotten.”
Michele McPhee
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