CrimeWatch

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS 5 / AP / BCN) ― A 14-year-old girl and her boyfriend were arrested in the Bay Area on Wednesday as suspects in the murder of the girl's mother, who was found stabbed to death in her Northern California home, authorities said.

Tylar Witt and Steven Colver, 19, were taken into custody by San Bruno police without incident at a strip mall, said San Mateo County Sheriff's Lt. Ray Lunny.
 
They had been wanted since Monday, when authorities found Joanne Witt, 47, dead in her El Dorado Hills home. Co-workers had reported Witt had failed to show up for work since Thursday.

El Dorado Hills, where the median home price in April was $422,500, according to DataQuick, is about 30 miles outside Sacramento and about 115 miles northeast of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Investigators do not yet have a theory on which person allegedly committed the murder, or if both participated.

El Dorado County Chief Assistant District Attorney Bill Clark said the pair were being held on arrest warrants alleging murder, but no formal charges had yet been filed.

Prosecutors didn't expect to get a formal investigative report until Friday, he said, the same day Colver was likely to have his first court appearance. Tylar would likely have a juvenile detention hearing Thursday, he said.

Clark was not aware if the two had retained attorneys.

Authorities believed the daughter's relationship with Colver may have led to the murder.

"The only motive that we're working is the relationship between Tylar and Steven,'' El Dorado County Sheriff's Sgt. Jim Byers said, implying the mother disapproved of them dating.

The coroner had not yet issued a cause of death, but El Dorado Sheriff's Capt. Craig Therkildsen said it was a "traumatic death and it was caused by, we believe, a kitchen knife type of instrument."

At a Wednesday afternoon news conference, he said the sheriff's department was taking "a huge sigh of relief" now that the pair had been arrested.

Therkildsen said he could not comment on a report that Joanne Witt had recently filed a complaint with police against Colver for an alleged sexual relationship he had with her daughter.

Authorities had been called to the Witts' home before. Tylar Witt was booked into juvenile hall May 18 for assaulting her mother at the residence, according to a police report.

Meantime, Sgt. Byers said San Francisco police recovered a car on Tuesday that they believe the teens abandoned in the 500 block of O'Farrell Street in the city's Tenderloin neighborhood.

The vehicle was illegally parked and "would have been towed like any other car would have been towed,'' Byers said. 

Police also searched a hotel room, believed to be the Holiday Inn on Van Ness Avenue, where they think the couple stayed Friday night, but Byers said, "I have been directed not to discuss what was discovered in the room.''

A hotel concierge, who knew the teens' description and was also familiar with the case, said they were at the hotel but she was not allowed to talk about it.

Police were questioning people in the neighborhood and at surrounding businesses on Wednesday morning.

In postings to a Facebook page believed to be Colver's, in which he goes by the nickname 'Boston,' friends had urged Colver to turn himself in.

"You've got to quit running. We're all worried about you here," one friend wrote. "Please, Boston, you once told me that you would never be capable of such a thing. Prove me right. Prove yourself right. For me?"

Anyone with information on the case was asked by authorities to call the El Dorado County Sheriff's Office at (530) 621-6600.

(© CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. The Associated Press and Bay City News contributed to this report.)