21 year old mother found in garbage dumpster behind a florist On a humid Tuesday in late August 1999, Jubilee “Maile” Lum, a 21-year-old Asian / Pacific Islander woman from Honolulu, was trying to leave a chaotic past behind her. She had grown up on Oahu, one of six children in a close, often noisy household, and as a teenager had drifted into a rougher crowd, spending long nights in Honolulu's Chinatown district and flirting with the dangers of the street. In the year before her death, her family believed they were finally seeing a change.
She had started taking adult education classes at the beginning of 1999, was living back at home in Kalihi, and was engaged to her longtime boyfriend, Ambrocio Lazaro, whom she had known for more than a decade. They were planning to marry on her twenty-second birthday that November, and by August she was four months pregnant, described by her relatives as loving, kind, and deeply devoted to her family. 
The weekend before her death, Ambrocio was discharged from the hospital after being treated for heart problems. From the moment he was released on Sunday, August 22, he tried to find Maile, but it is unclear whether they ever managed to reconnect. On Monday, August 23, 1999, she was seen downtown on Hotel Street in Chinatown during the morning hours, moving through an area she knew well from her years on the street. Witnesses later told police that she got into a white or light-colored Ford Econoline van in that neighborhood, a late-1980s to 1990 model with swing-out doors and windows on the passenger side. Investigators came to believe this van was critical to the case, likely the last vehicle she entered before she disappeared, and they would spend years asking the public to help them identify it. 
The next day, Tuesday, August 24, life at Beretania Florist on South Beretania Street began like any other workday. The family-run shop had been an institution in Honolulu for decades, and that late morning employees stepped outside periodically to check the trash cans and dumpster behind the building. Around 11:30 a.m., an employee looked over the area and saw nothing unusual. When the same worker returned about an hour later, sometime around 12:30 p.m., a large, round garbage bag had appeared on the ground in front of the dumpster in the shared parking lot at 1299 South Beretania Street. The bag was so heavy that it took three florist employees to lift it into the trash bin. One of them, curious about its weight and shape, punctured the layers of plastic with her florist's knife and thought she saw a dark strand of hair; when she noticed blood on the blade, she stopped and called the police. Officers arrived and opened the bag to find Maile's nude body wrapped in several layers of heavy-duty trash bags. There were no obvious gunshot or stab wounds—authorities later said her body was “intact”—and the medical examiner determined she had likely been dead less than a day and had died from suffocation; detectives told her mother that she had been strangled. It was also confirmed that she had been approximately four months pregnant when she was killed. 
Police identified her through fingerprints on Wednesday, August 25, and informed her family, who then had to deliver the news to Ambrocio. In interviews with local newspapers, her mother, Melva, said the entire family was in shock, and her younger sister remembered Maile as more of a mother figure than a sibling. Detectives canvassed the area around the florist, knocking on doors in the apartments above the shop and speaking with people who worked nearby. No one reported seeing a body being dumped, even though the lot was busy and the discovery was made in broad daylight. One employee from a neighboring business, Total Fitness USA, did come forward to say she had seen a purple or turquoise Dodge Dakota pickup truck entering the parking lot around noon, during the narrow window when the trash bag could have been left there. She could not say whether anyone dumped anything from the truck, and no one was able to provide a license plate or description of the driver, but the sighting became another thread investigators would return to again and again. Maile was laid to rest on September 11, 1999, while the police continued to ask the public for help, appealing to anyone who might have seen her in Chinatown on August 23 or any vehicles moving in and out of the florist's parking lot between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. the next day. 
Within weeks, detectives began exploring whether Maile's death might be connected to another grim discovery from earlier that month. On August 10, 1999, the badly decomposed body of 24-year-old Michelle Anne Bensinger had been found in a field; the state of her remains made it impossible to determine a precise cause of death, and her case was classified not as a homicide but as a “suspicious unattended death.” Both women were found nude and were close in age, and a jailhouse informant later wrote to police claiming that Maile and Michelle worked for the same escort service, called Petite Pleasures, with Michelle allegedly running the operation and Maile answering phones. That alleged connection suggested to some investigators that both women might have moved in overlapping circles that involved sex work and a dangerous clientele. Still, police never formally confirmed that the two cases were linked. One homicide lieutenant publicly said that they could not say whether they were connected or not, and a detective working Maile's case later stated that he saw no direct evidence tying the deaths together beyond the likelihood that the women knew each other. 
A year later, attention shifted briefly to another string of violent crimes on the islands. In September 2000, the FBI arrived on Kaua‘i to assist with a series of attacks on middle-aged white women there—cases involving beating, sexual assault, and stabbing, with two victims dead, one survivor, and a fourth woman missing but fitting the same pattern. Homicide investigators in Honolulu wondered whether the same unknown predator could be responsible not only for those assaults but also for the deaths of Maile and Michelle, hoping that if the cases could be linked, they might gain access to federal profiling and faster forensic testing. An FBI profiling team reviewed the information, and at one point there was a prime suspect in the Kaua‘i attacks. That man was re-arrested on a parole violation while a DNA comparison was conducted, and the attacks on Kaua‘i stopped after he went back to prison. However, the tests were inconclusive, charges were never brought against anyone in the Kaua‘i cases, and no connection was established between those attacks and Maile's murder. 
By 2006, nearly seven years had passed with no arrest, and the Honolulu Police Department publicly renewed its push for answers. Detectives held a press conference and again highlighted the two vehicles that had haunted the case from the beginning: the white or light-colored late-1980s or 1990 Ford Econoline van seen in Chinatown when Maile was last known to be alive, and the purple or turquoise pickup truck observed in the florist's parking lot around the time her body must have been left there. Investigators emphasized that whoever killed her had managed to move a heavy bag containing a body into that busy lot in the middle of the day without drawing attention, and they pleaded for anyone who might remember either vehicle to come forward, even after so much time. In the same period, Maile's sister recalled going with their mother to the morgue in 1999 and seeing bruises on Maile's body, saying later that it did not look like a peaceful death and that it appeared she had suffered. 
Despite those renewed efforts, Maile's case remains an open, unsolved homicide. The driver of the van that picked her up in Chinatown has never been identified, and the person behind the wheel of the purple or turquoise pickup truck seen behind the florist has never been publicly named. Police have explored possible links to other suspicious deaths and a separate series of attacks, but none of those lines of inquiry have resulted in a definitive suspect or any criminal charges. No one has ever been arrested or formally identified as a suspect in the murder of Jubilee “Maile” Lum, and her family is still left with memories of a young woman who had begun to pull herself away from the dangers of the street and was looking forward to a wedding and the birth of a child when her life was violently taken on August 24, 1999. 
