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Jenny Read's sculptures are stored in a small, dark and weather-stained shed built nearly 30 years ago in the backyard of her Chevy Chase childhood home. The shed receives occasional visits, as if it were her gravestone.

A more public symbol of her talents stands in the middle of Bethesda's Elm Street Park a few blocks away: a large bronze sculpture of a delicately posed girl holding aloft a hoop, installed at the park in 1981.

A spirit of the 1960s who was still coming to grips with her femininity and artistic talents, Jenny Read moved to San Francisco in 1970 after being accepted at the city's Art Institute.

But her effort to establish herself was cut short May 18, 1976, when Jenny Read, at 29, was raped and murdered. A butcher knife was found in her chest.

No arrest was made in her murder. The investigation was revived briefly in the 1980s, but suspicions that a demonic cult was responsible for the murder led to nothing.

"It was like having this scream inside of me locked up," said her younger sister Rebecca Medrano, 60, who now lives in Washington, D.C. and is executive director of the GALA Hispanic Theatre.

But justice may have come Aug. 3, when James Lee Mayfield, 63, was arrested in San Francisco and charged with her murder.

By all accounts, Read's childhood on Elm Street in the 1950s was idyllic and in a way represented that more innocent time. Front doors lingered open, and children scampered in and out of the Read's backyard where a swimming pool was open to all.

Their neighbor, Kathleen Williams, who shared the pool and the backyard with the Read family, still lives next to Dallas Read, 97, Jenny Read's stepmother, who has dementia.

Williams has a miniature version of Jenny Read's Elm Street Park sculpture, called "Girl with Hoop," that Jenny Read made as a child. While other children focused on playing, Jenny Read always had a pencil or crayon. She observed, sketched and wondered.

"She was enchanting. She was dreamy," Williams recalled, saying that Jenny Read's auburn hair and freckles stand out in her memory.

Williams' daughter, Pamela Roddy, said the households "were like an extended family." She babysat for Jenny Read and Medrano before they went to Rosemary Elementary School, now Chevy Chase Elementary School.

"I remember her as very artistic, very ethereal," Roddy said.

When the sisters were young, Jenny Read built and illustrated a miniature scroll of "Stuart Little" for an art project at Rosemary Elementary on Medrano's behalf.

Drawn by the reputation of the San Francisco Art Institute, Read moved to the city in 1970 and took waitressing jobs to support herself. She began to hone her skill and reputation as a sculptor, working in wood and bronze. A filmmaker for the University of California Art Museum featured her in a documentary. A sculpture of a female figure being crucified that she gave to the Christ Episcopal Church in Sausalito now stands over her ashes.

Medrano said Read tended to sculpt women either in "ecstasy or pain," with the latter usually bearing heavy loads on their backs.

Her free spirit, although sometimes troubled, never dissipated. Pamela Axelson, a roommate and close friend who saw Read a few hours before her death, recalled one night as they returned from an art class Read pointed the car north toward Eureka, instead of home. It turned into a five-day excursion.

"She just decided that I was someone that she wanted to know, and she set about making things happen," Axelson recalled.

In addition to her artwork, she left behind a great deal of written correspondence. In her journal and letters to her parents and friends, she struggled with living alone, of getting by on a meager salary while musing on aesthetic fulfillment, and with a yearning for love and motherhood but shyness with men.

"As sculpture has taught me, it is great power to create and execute a dream — frustrating and impossible though it may seem sometimes," Jenny Read wrote to her parents Dec. 13, 1971.

In a journal entry Jan. 21, 1974, she wrote: "I am so enjoying these days in an eddy, drifting gently in the same spot, relishing detail in the foliage, not wanting to rejoin the main current just because every moment of the free coasting is so clear and fully present."

"She was the kind of person who was going to make it, I think, that way, because that's all she wanted to do," said her brother Nash, referring to her career as an artist.

But some of her writing reflected her troubles as an introverted, anxious young woman. "Very barren days — mail empty, room the same, no place or time to work, too many unbegun ideas, too many unwritten dreams, too many unaccountable moments — neither productively independent nor admittedly dependent," Read wrote in her journal on March 11, 1974.

And just a few days before she was murdered, Read sensed dangerous tremors. She wrote that the building she lived in was "haunted." "I am in a perishable place," she wrote in her diary in early May 1976. Axelson remembered that Read's studio apartment was "like a goldfish bowl" because the interior was highly visible to anyone on the street.

The murder cut a swath across her family. Nash Read stopped carving and painting, but his sister's presence never left him. Medrano recalled her own adventurous days in New York and wondered why she hadn't suffered her sister's fate. She dreamed of catching her murderer.

And her father, Nick Read, who felt that perhaps he could have paid for her to live in a safer neighborhood, hired private detectives to investigate the murder. But this effort also stalled. He died without ever recovering from his daughter's death.

Exhibitions of Jenny Read's work in the following years took place around the country, including Washington, D.C. and Montgomery, Ala. Her alma mater, Antioch College in Ohio, opened a student art gallery dedicated to her. In 1982, her family published seven years of Read's letters and diary entries in a collection called "Jenny Read: In Pursuit of Art and Life." A biographical play was performed in Chicago that Medrano attended.

Then in the spring, Medrano and Nash Read received a call from an investigator with the San Francisco Police Department who told them that police were developing a suspect through DNA evidence. Mayfield, 63, of San Francisco was arrested Aug. 3 and charged with burglary and Read's rape as well as her murder. His attorney, Mark Jacobs, a public defender in San Francisco, could not be reached for comment.

Mayfield is not eligible for the death penalty, but the district attorney's office is seeking life in prison, said Braden Woods, an assistant district attorney with the San Francisco District Attorney's office.

The case was revived with the help of a cold case unit that began a few years ago as a joint operation of the San Francisco District Attorney's office, city police and the police crime lab, Woods said. The new unit has solved cold cases going back as far as 1968.

"It's obviously very satisfying, but it's also very sad," Woods said. "It's also difficult to call family and tell them, look, we have solved the case, but it still doesn't bring your loved one back."

Brother and sister had similar reactions to the news of Mayfield's arrest.

"I thought, are you kidding me? Is this television?" Nash Read recalled.

"Things like this, I used to think they only used to happen in movies," Medrano said.

Axelson, who remains in San Francisco, visits Read's ashes from time to time. Medrano said it is her goal to communicate the news to her stepmother, Dallas Read, who turns 97 today.

Medrano has another mission. Jenny Read's pieces, which have stayed in the shed her brother built for them since 1981, are beginning to disintegrate due to water damage and time. An arm has fallen off one wooden sculpture, and other pieces could be in jeopardy. With Mayfield's arrest, Medrano has decided to take Jenny Read's sculptures out of the storage shed, and put on an exhibition of her sister's pieces.

"They've been locked up too long there," she said.