The body of missing Arizona girl Jhessye Shockley has yet to be found, but the police investigating her disappearance believe that the five-year-old was killed and her body dumped in a trash can across town.

"We're in what we believed to be the worst-case scenario from the beginning," Sergeant Brent Coombs of the Glendale, Arizona police department said at a news conference on Wednesday.

While the investigators didn't go as far as directly accusing Jhessye's mother, Jerice Hunter, of murdering her daughter, they pointed their fingers sharply in her direction by describing her as the "No. 1 focus."