(HAYWARD, Calif., A-P) California authorities say they have charged a convicted killer with the 1988 kidnapping and slaying of a 9-year-old girl, whose mother now lives in southwest Iowa. Michaela Joy Garecht disappeared from a market in the San Francisco Bay Area after riding her scooter there with a friend. Her body has never been found. Police say they only recently were able to match a partial palm print at the scene to David Misch, who’s in prison for killing a woman. Misch was charged Monday with murder and kidnapping. He’s scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday.

Michaela Garecht, 9, went missing from outside a Hayward shop in 1988.

Michaela’s mother, who is undergoing treatment for breast cancer, issued a statement to the media in California, Monday. It reads:

“Over the years, I often wondered whether I really wanted to know the truth of what happened to Michaela,” she wrote. “I wondered if I would be able to take it. When I received news of the kidnapper having been identified, I asked the hard questions of Detective Purnell, of what method this man used to kill his victims, and received answers, and they were not easy.

“When I had doubted whether I would want to know, it always came back to, if Michaela could experience it, I could hear it. Because it’s not about me. It’s never been about me, about my feelings. It is and always has been about Michaela. What I have been through is nothing. What I feel is not important. It is only about Michaela.”