They are playing with faces of the dead and a handful of killers.

Sylvia Elaine Mangos' innocent face peers up from the eight of spades, the oldest unsolved murder in the new pack of cold case playing cards being sold in local jails.

The 8-year-old girl was kidnapped March 27, 1988, from the Yucca Valley swap meet. Her body was found eight days later in the Johnson Valley desert.

The San Bernardino County sheriff's Cold Case Team hopes inmates will come forward with information on some of the cases laid out in the 52-card deck and help bring closure to families who have waited too long for answers.

"These guys generally know things about crimes that have occurred and we hope it will motivate them to come forward," said Sgt. Frank Montanez, who selected which cases to put on the cards. "These guys play cards all the time, day in and day out. That's a lot of people seeing these cards, these cases."

The department has ordered 5,000 decks of cards. All have the phone number for WeTip, the anonymous crime hotline, printed on them in bold red letters.

They will be available to nearly 6,000 inmates at the county's four jails in Rancho Cucamonga, San Bernardino, Devore and Adelanto.

Several law enforcement agencies across the nation have tried this in recent years and all have had varying levels of success.

San Diego County Crime Stoppers rolled out 10,000 decks of cold case playing cards about a year ago.

San Diego Police Officer Jim Johnson, who works with Crime Stoppers, said no slayings featured in the deck have been solved but there is a "hidden benefit" because inmates often have information on other crimes.

"We knew these were cold cases because they're difficult to solve," he said. "However, we're going to get our name and number out there and teach a good pool of informants how to report to us anonymously and earn cash as a reward for their tips."

The playing cards released by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in 2007 bore more obvious fruit. Within three months of handing out card decks to 93,000 inmates in 129 facilities, tips led to two homicide arrests.

State agencies paired up again last year and ensured that the cards were seen by another 65,000 inmates in 67 jails. Florida State Department of Corrections officials also doled them out to 141,000 offenders on probation.

"It's creative, it's proactive and it's putting the faces and some of the information about some of the state's toughest cases in the hands of people who potentially know something or associate with people that do," said department spokeswoman Heather Smith. "It's a broad reach. They're incarcerated and a lot of times they're talking to one another."

One inmate even mailed a letter with information about a cold case to the Florida state attorney general, including the playing card that prompted him to come forward. Another donated his reward money to charity.

The idea for cold case playing cards was taken from the U.S. military's "Iraq's Most Wanted" playing cards issued to troops in 2003.

The owner of Florida-based Effective Playing Cards & Publications, which provides the cold case decks, said they have become quite the phenomenon and he is working on playing cards for California prisons.

The most important part though, said Dan Turner, is knowing that the victims' loved ones can find closure or at least know that the victims have not been forgotten.

"It gives the renewed hope that somebody's doing something. I have to keep a box of kleenex next to my phone," Turner said. "You always hear that you don't want to rat on anybody. But the inmates have given tremendous support."

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