LAKEPORT, Calif. – Ten years after a Kelseyville woman was murdered in her downtown Lakeport business, the case remains one of the county’s most well-known, and troubling, cold cases.

Barbara LaForge was 43 years old when she was murdered on Tuesday, October 8, 2002.

On the morning of her murder, LaForge had been alone – save for her small dog, Carmen – in her Wildwood Frame Shop, which shared space with Inspirations Gallery at 165 N. Main St.

It’s believed she was shot sometime between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m., not long after she had arrived that morning. Clues at the scene led police to believe her morning routine upon entering the shop – including taking her dog off the leash – had been interrupted by her killer.

She was found by a customer and a neighboring business owner a few hours later after she hadn’t opened the shop.

She had been wounded four times at close range with a .22-caliber weapon, and was struck through the heart. The weapon has never been found, despite a search for it in Clear Lake and along the Hopland Grade.

Since then, the case – Lakeport’s only unsolved homicide – has taken police and the people who knew and loved LaForge on a journey filled with strange twists.

Her cremains, along with some of her remaining possessions, were found by police in early 2008 in a mini storage locker that went up for auction after police said her husband, Dan Hamblin, abandoned it.

Police have retested evidence and brought in outside experts. There have been two Lakeport chiefs of police and two district attorneys since the murder, and the Lakeport City Council even devoted additional funds to hiring a part-time detective to work the case.

Hamblin and his girlfriend, Linda Mafrice, remain the top persons of interest in the case, according to Lakeport Police Chief Brad Rasmussen.

As police continue to work the case, there have been the continuing questions of family, friends and community members, baffled by the likable businesswoman’s murder.

“She was absolutely the last person that this ever should have happened to,” said her niece, Stasha Wratislaw of Lakeport.

“She was the best kind of human being,” said Wratislaw.

Gail Salituri, who owned Inspirations Gallery and was close friends with LaForge, said the past decade has brought few answers – and no justice – for her friend.

“Today, 10 years later, I still feel the residual pain of her tragic death,” said Salituri, who is troubled that the case hasn’t yet been solved.

Rasmussen said his agency is still dedicating time and effort to bring the case to a close, which includes an arrest.

“As far as we’re concerned, we still want to solve it and bring it to a conclusion,” he said.

He’s getting help with that goal from District Attorney Don Anderson, who took office in January 2011 and has a keen interest in seeing LaForge’s murder solved.

“The case is not over,” Anderson said.

He added, “Between Lakeport Police and our office, we do have a game plan, and we’re following through with it.”

Also still in place is a $50,000 reward for information leading to an arrest or conviction in the case, offered by the Governor’s Office.

A decade of questions

Wratislaw was just an eighth grader when her aunt was shot to death.

“My aunt and I were inseparable,” Wratislaw remembered, adding that LaForge was like a mother to her.

Wratislaw’s mother, Leilani Prueitt, and LaForge were sisters. Prueitt had issues with drugs and alcohol.

“My mom was in a bad place,” said Wratislaw. “I really rebelled against that.”

Wratislaw said she practically lived with LaForge. She found out just weeks after her aunt’s death that LaForge was exploring the possibility of taking legal guardianship of the girl.

The weekend before the shooting, the young teen and LaForge had traveled to Sacramento to a dog show, something they often did on weekends.

“She was really getting into the dog shows after she got Carmen,” Wratislaw said of the small purebred whippet that LaForge owned.

LaForge had told her niece after they got back that she would see her that Tuesday. That turned out to be the day LaForge died.

A customer and a next-door business owner found LaForge shot inside her frame shop at around 11 a.m. Oct. 8, 2002. She hadn’t opened the shop, the front door remained locked and the customer could see LaForge’s dog, Carmen, cowering in one of the shop’s front windows, her leash still on her collar.

She was transported by Lakeport Fire paramedics to Sutter Lakeside Hospital, where she was pronounced dead that afternoon.

Then-Lakeport Police Chief Tom Engstrom – now a Lakeport City Council member – received assistance from the California Department of Justice in processing the crime scene, which officials have admitted was contaminated due to the comings and goings of emergency responders.

Engstrom told Lake County News in a 2007 interview that the crime scene testing and processing ended up yielding no significant evidence – not even a fingerprint – on which to base a criminal case.

“I was so comfortable with getting the state crime lab people up here, I just couldn’t believe we didn’t get anything out of that,” Engstrom said at the time.

After the murder, Wratislaw said she dropped out of the eighth grade and missed a year of school.

“It’s something you would never, ever in a million years imagine,” she said of the murder.

Wratislaw said she didn’t talk about the murder for years afterward.

“I was seriously formed by these events,” she said.

Persons of interest

Since the case’s first days, Lakeport Police investigators have received little or no cooperation from Hamblin or Mafrice, who were romantically involved before LaForge’s murder.

The day after LaForge’s murder, the Lake County District Attorney’s Office filed 90 charges against Mafrice, most of them for forgery as well as for grand theft, for stealing more than $100,000 from the Royale Shores Homeowners Association. Two months earlier, Mafrice had been charged with defrauding an elderly neighbor of thousands of dollars.

A neighbor of Mafrice’s at Royale Shores told Lake County News in a 2010 interview that Mafrice had purchased Hamblin a motorcycle before her arrest.

On the day of LaForge’s funeral, Mafrice had been seen at the Kelseyville home LaForge and Hamblin shared, packing LaForge’s belongings into black garbage bags. Mafrice moved in with Hamblin a short time later.

In the spring of 2008, Lakeport Police purchased the contents of a storage locker in Kelseyville that police said had been abandoned by Hamblin.

When they opened it, they found many of LaForge’s possessions. They also found LaForge’s cremated remains.

Later that year, police returned the cremains to LaForge’s adopted family in Florida. The Jones family, who had taken in LaForge during her youth, held a ceremony in which they scattered the remains – accompanied by a wreath – in Goodby’s Creek in Jacksonville.

Also in 2008, Det. Lou Riccardi and Det. Destry Henderson were assigned to the LaForge case. The men reinterviewed people, handed out fliers and worked on having evidence retested.

One person who they interviewed for the first time was Wratislaw.

“I was never questioned initially,” she said. Despite the fact that she and LaForge were so close, “No one ever talked to me.”

That was, until Riccardi and Henderson pulled her from work for an interview. She said during the interview they assured her the case was their No. 1 priority.

In December 2010, years after she had been required to make full restitution in the Royale Shores case yet had failed to do so, Mafrice was sentenced to state prison by Judge Andrew Blum, as Lake County News has reported.

Blum sentenced Mafrice to completing her restitution payments and to serving four years and eight months in state prison. She was only expected to serve about two years due to credits. Rasmussen could not say if she had been released from prison yet.

“She’s still a person of interest in the case,” said Rasmussen. “That hasn’t changed.”

He added that Hamblin also is a person of interest in his wife’s murder.

“At this point, there are no other suspects that are still currently being investigated,” Rasmussen said.

Wratislaw said she doesn’t believe Hamblin killed her aunt. “I don’t necessarily think he was involved. I don’t believe that.”

She said she still sees and calls him occasionally and considers him “my only tie” to LaForge.

Wratislaw said she’s never been able to bring herself to ask Hamblin about why he hasn’t worked with police on the case, but believes she will someday.

Continuing efforts on the investigation

Rasmussen, a sergeant with Lakeport Police at the time of the murder, has since been appointed chief. Engstrom retired in 2005 and was succeeded by Kevin Burke, who left in 2010 to take the chief of police position in Healdsburg. Each of the chiefs has worked to keep the case active.

“We’re going to just keep working everything we can until there’s nothing else that can be done,” said Rasmussen.

He said there are still things that can be done on the case to generate more information and evidence.

“That’s why we’re working with the DA’s Office to have them look at it and see what might be needed,” Rasmussen said.

Anderson, who had met LaForge a few times but didn’t know her well, acknowledged that he and his staff have been working closely with the Lakeport Police Department on the LaForge murder. He said it’s the only cold case they’re actively investigating.

Both Anderson and Rasmussen said reevaluating and retesting evidence is part of their current efforts. Rasmussen said he couldn’t divulge the precise details of what items are being retested.

There have been a lot of new improvements and methods in DNA and forensic analysis that Anderson believes could help the case move forward, and so his office will ask the California Department of Justice to retest important evidence.

“We’re going to be trying everything we can to come up with more information,” Anderson said.

He added, “We haven’t given up, and we’re still going at it strong.”

Rasmussen recognized that community interest in the case continues to run high.

“The community still has an interest in seeing the case come to a conclusion,” he said. “It’s still something that’s on peoples’ minds, even after all this time.”

Remembering Barbara

Earlier this year, after having run her gallery and the frame shop together since LaForge’s death, Salituri closed the doors of the shop where the murder had occurred.

“By having kept the business open for nine and a half years after the fact, I endured a barrage of criticism, questions, speculations, theories and outright untruths,” Salituri said.

“I had enough, and knew it was beyond time to move on,” she said.

Salituri recalled, “When I closed those doors, I looked into the empty windows, took a moment to say goodbye once again to Barbara and remembered Carmen, the eyewitness to the crime who cowered in that exact window years prior.”

She said she’s still shaking her head in utter disbelief that the crime has not been solved, and she’s moved on.

“Today, I say hope is sometimes a paralyzing factor in an unsolved murder and Karma has no deadline. Yet hope and good detective work is all we have,” Salituri said.

Wratislaw became emotional as she remembered her aunt, who she called “the most amazing person.” She said LaForge had a great sense of humor, was loving and very faithful to her beliefs as a Jehovah’s Witness.

“I don’t know anybody that didn’t like her,” she said.

Wratislaw, who in the past decade has married and now has a small child of her own, said there’s a void in her heart and soul that will never be filled.

As for the investigation, for there to be a resolution she believes that it’s going to take someone’s conscience finally breaking and, in turn, causing them to come forward.

But Wratislaw can’t be certain that conscience will lead to a solution, pointing out that, whether it’s one or 20 people who were involved, they’ve been able to live with committing the murder for a decade.

“At this point, I’m just assured that someday there will be justice, in this life or the next,” she said.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .