Cooley had just lain down to go to sleep at 7:30 a.m. on Oct. 11, 1952, when a hunter from the town burst into his house and shouted he had found the Youngs' missing car. The 27-year-old was a highway patrol officer, but the sheriff wasn't around, so he sped out to the scene.

Nothing could have prepared Cooley for what he saw, and nothing has changed the emotion he felt the moment he lifted the trunk lid. On one hand, Sondra had a chance to live — if he could get her to the doctor fast enough. On the other hand, everyone else was gone.

He cradled the 3-year-old in his arms and rushed to the doctor's office in Chester. When the doctor said he couldn't help him, he had to backtrack to Westwood.

Sondra's mother, Christal, arrived at the hospital not knowing if Sondra would make it through the night. She kept herself busy at the hospital by mending the children's clothes, until she realized the children were dead and the mending wasn't needed.

"Believe me, when I learned that this wonderful kingdom of ours had broken and crumbled at my feet, it took all the faith within my grasp to withstand the terrible shock," Christal wrote in an essay for the Sacramento Bee as she dealt with her tragedy and tried to explain the power of her faith. "I had to dig deep into all of my past understanding and faith to understand why? Why? Why? Couldn't he have heard their prayers and protected them? Then as I looked down on Sondra in the clean, white hospital bed and knew she would live I knew there was a God. That he did hear and answer prayers."

Sondra was in hiding for about six weeks because police worried the killers, Jack Santo and Emmett Perkins, would try again to kill her. That winter Christal picked up her daughter and son and moved to Provo. She was 39.

Christal struggled with the pain of missing Guard and the girls even after she remarried in 1954 and had another daughter, but she forgave the murderers, who ultimately died in the gas chamber at San Quentin.

"To be bitter, how can I be bitter when so much has been given?" Christal wrote in the Sacramento Bee essay. "It all can be summed up in the words of Shakespeare, who had a way of saying things, 'And they, sweet love remembered, doth such wealth bring. I would scorn to change my place with kings.' "

Sondra often thought about officer Cooley, the man she called "Mr. Kool-aid" over the years, but her desire to see him again didn't become a possibility until an unexpected letter arrived at her brother Wayne's office one day.

It was from John Guess, a Grammy-award winner who worked in Nashville and was related to Cooley. Guess had heard the story from his Uncle Jeff and had begun work on a screenplay. He decided that to get the story right he needed to find Sondra, but he didn't know where she was or what she was doing.