A seven-year-old girl walking her dog with friends in her Santa Ana neighborhood answered questions from a man she'd never met.
The other children ran off with the dog and the man, Hernan Castro, lured her inside his house, molested her and put money in her underwear while telling her not to tell anyone about the incident.
Six years earlier, Castro lured another girl, 9, inside his garage, fondled her and stuck his tongue in her mouth.
On a separate date, he drove the same girl to a grocery store, fondled her and asked her to play with his genitals.
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Eventually parents contacted police and the Orange County District Attorney's office won multiple convictions stemming from all three incidents at a 2011 jury trial.
Castro appealed, claiming in part that his kidnapping conviction wasn't deserved.
On July 31, the California Court of Appeal based in Santa Ana upheld the kidnapping charges because Castro used happy talk about the girl's dog to lure her inside in execution of his plan to commit lewd acts.
Upshot: Castro, 69, will continue to serve his 30 years to life sentence inside the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.
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