For months after a pregnant 20-year-old marine accused a colleague of rape, her family says, she continued to work alongside her attacker and endured harassment at Camp Lejeune.
In the weeks after she disappeared, they believe, the sheriff's department was slow to act.
As authorities recovered Maria Lauterbach's remains Saturday from a fire pit where they suspect Cpl. Cesar Armando Laurean burned and buried her body, her family asked why authorities didn't treat her case with greater urgency.
Naval investigators Saturday said the pair had been separated on the job, a rape case was progressing and Laurean was under a protective order to stay away from Lauterbach. And Onslow County Sheriff Ed Brown insisted his department acted as best they could on the facts available.
"As soon as it went suspicious, we contacted the media and asked for help,'' Brown said. "The case did not produce enough evidence, other than she was just missing.''
On Saturday, her burnt remains, and those of her unborn child, were excavated from Laurean's backyard.
"As well as I could see, the body was much charred,'' Brown said. "The fetus was in the abdominal area of that adult. ... That is tragic, and it's disgusting.''
Authorities have issued an arrest warrant on murder charges for Laurean, 21, of the Las Vegas area. They say he fled Jacksonville after leaving behind a note in which he admitted burying her body.
In his note, Laurean wrote Lauterbach cut her own throat in a suicide, but Brown doesn't believe it and challenged Laurean to come forward and defend his claims of innocence.
Authorities have described a violent confrontation inside Laurean's home that left blood spatters on the ceiling and a massive amount of blood on the wall.
County prosecutor Dewey Hudson said Laurean had been in contact with three lawyers, including Mark Raynor, who declined to comment Saturday.
Lauterbach disappeared sometime after Dec. 14, not long after she met military prosecutors to talk about her April allegation that Laurean raped her.
Her uncle, Pete Steiner, said that Lauterbach -- stung by the harassment that eventually forced her to move off base -- decided to drop the case the week before she disappeared.
Paul Chiccarelli, the special agent in charge of Naval Criminal Investigative Service at Camp Lejeune, told The Associated Press on Saturday that marine commanders decided in October to send the case to the military's version of a pretrial hearing. A military protective order had been automatically issued in May and renewed three times.
"Anytime there is a sexual assault allegation involved, that's a standard routine,'' he said.
Lauterbach and Laurean served in the same unit of the II Marine Expeditionary Force, and court documents indicate Lauterbach's mother told authorities Laurean had threatened her daughter's career.
Steiner said Saturday on ABC's "Good Morning America'' the marines didn't separate the two personnel clerks, but Chiccarelli said marine commanders assigned them to separate buildings May 12.
Neither Brown or Hudson would say Saturday if they would have treated the case differently had they known about the protective order, which they discovered Friday night.
Chiccarelli said sheriff's office investigators were told about the order on Monday.
But Chiccarelli again said investigators didn't consider Laurean a threat to Lauterbach, or later a flight risk, because they had indications the pair were on friendly terms. He declined to detail those indication Saturday.
Lauterbach's mother reported her daughter missing Dec. 19 -- five days after she last spoke with her. By that time, she had been placed on "unauthorized absence'' status by the Marine Corps.
