LOS ANGELES -- The county coroner's office Friday said a 17-year-old girl who may have been a kidnap victim of slain fugitive Christopher Wilder died from asphyxiation because her face had been forced into the dirt.
The body of Michelle Lynn Korfman was found May 11 in the Angeles National Forest.
She disappeared April 1, after a beauty pageant at a Las Vegas, Nev., shopping center.
'Studies using a scanning electron microscope on throat tissues of Michelle Lynn Korfman have revealed that the 17-year-old died as the result of asphyxia caused by aspiration of foreign matter (soil) into her larnyx and trachea,' coroner's spoksman Bill Gold said.
The Boulder City, Nev., girl was believed to be among 11 young women and girls kidnaped by Wilder during an 8,000-mile crime odyssey before he was shot to death in a struggle with New Hampshire state troopers April 13.
Excluding Miss Korfman, four of the victims were found dead, three escaped alive and three remain missing.
The girl's body was positively identified June 15 through dental charts but the coroner had not then established the cause of death.
