STOCKTON, California: A woman kidnapped, raped and murdered an 8-year-old girl whose body was found in a suitcase dumped in a pond just a few miles from home, prosecutors alleged on Tuesday.

Melissa Huckaby, 28, was charged with murdering her daughter's playmate, Sandra Cantu, in a gruesome crime that has shocked and terrified residents of Tracy, a northern California city of about 78,000, 96 km east of San Francisco.

Huckaby, who volunteered as a Sunday school teacher at her grandfather's Clover Road Baptist Church in Tracy, appeared in a San Joaquin County courtroom for her arraignment in a red jumpsuit and shackles. She trembled and cried as a judge read the charge: one count of murder with the special circumstances of rape with a foreign object, lewd or lascivious conduct with a child under 14 and murder in the course of a kidnapping.