Little Girl Lost

LITTLE GIRL LOST is the true story of a vicious murder in the heart of California’s Gold Country...a murder committed by two teenage girls, one of whom wrote in her diary: “Today Cindy and I ran away and killed an old lady. It was lots of fun.” 

But beneath this account of one terrible, senseless killing lies the heart of the book: a riveting and tragic study of how the oppressive forces of child abuse and family violence robbed two young girls of their childhoods, their innocence, and ultimately, their humanity.  

Little Girl Lost was first published in April of 1992, nine years after the brutal murder of 85-year-old Anna Brackett in her quiet condominium on the outskirts of Auburn, California.  Six months later the book went into a second printing, and in December of 1997 it entered a third printing. More than 400,000 copies have been sold worldwide.

While the book is unfortunately now out of print, you can still find used (and even occasional new) copies for sale by third parties in many online bookstores such as Amazon.com and Paperback Swap.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

 

What's Happened Since Then?

Many have asked what's happened to the two young girls since Little Girl Lost was published.

Cindy Collier spent a total of nine years at the California Youth Authority facility in Ventura. After obtaining her junior college degree, she went on to study law at the institution under the tutelage of attorneys from Pepperdine University School of Law.  She was paroled on August 20, 1992. Since then, she has had no further encounters with the law. She has four children and lives in northern California.

On June 1, 1991, Shirley Wolf was transferred to the Central California Women’s Facility near Chowchilla, in the heart of the spreading Central Valley.  One of three thousand inmates at the mammoth prison, Shirley made sporadic attempts over the ensuing years to recreate herself, including finally completing her high school education and turning to God. Yet her life remained fraught with the kind of chaos, bitterness, and anger that typified her history.

Through it all, she remained profoundly alone. Since 1988, despite repeated attempts to contact her family by mail, she received nothing but silence. But in the summer of 1992, Shirley tracked down her parents’ last known telephone number in the Pacific Northwest town to which Louis Wolf had fled with his family seven years earlier...and for the first time in four years she spoke with her father. 

From their conversations over the next few weeks, she learned that her mother walked out some months before, leaving her three sons behind with Lou. When every question about her favorite brother L.J.  was met with either evasiveness or silence from her father and the other two boys, Shirley suspected the worst. Subsequent research, however, has turned up no record of his death, disappearance, or imprisonment.

Less than two months after that first reunion call to her father, Louis Wolf inexplicably stopped accepting any further telephone calls from his daughter. Once again, Shirley found herself estranged and abandoned.

Finally, on June 30, 1995—12 years and 16 days after the slaying of Anna Brackett—Shirley Katherine Wolf was freed from prison.

Since then, she has been arrested numerous times for crimes ranging from assault to prostitution.  Now in her mid-forties, she has spent nearly a third of her life locked behind prison walls.