Anatomy of Murder - The Call (Rita Gutierrez-Garcia)

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

A single mom goes missing after a night out with friends. A momentary call placed to 911 proved to be the first key, that would eventually help unlock what happened.View source material and photos for this episode at: anatomyofmurder.com/the-call/ Can’t get enough AoM? Find us on social media!Instagram: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc

The victim, you know, suffered some of the most horrendous injuries I'd ever seen. Her phone called 911 and immediately hung up after that. To me, that was one of the things that I felt was important to cracking this case. What led up to those moments of her phone calling 911. And then just everything started to fall in place after that. You know, all of the dominoes are just starting to really kind of fall. I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff. I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction.

And this is Anatomy of Murder. Wide open spaces, big mountains, and even bigger skies. That's why most people fall in love with Colorado, including me during my college days at CU Boulder. And it's also why so many people decide to stay. The city of Longmont, Colorado, located north of Denver at the base of the Rocky Mountains, is a postcard-perfect community that boasts over 300 days of sunshine a year. And if there was ever a place to put down roots, it is here. It's in Boulder County. So we're about 30 minutes east of Boulder and about 30

minutes south of Fort Collins. It's a unique place in that it's a very stable community. We don't have a lot of a transient population that moves in and out of here a lot. Most of the people who have been here have been here for a long time. That's the voice of Cody Clark, a detective at the Longmont Police Department. A Colorado native, Cody grew up knowing that he wanted to be a police officer. Swap out the squad car for a horse and a 10-gallon hat, and Cody could have been one of those old-fashioned sheriffs right out of a classic Western. My godfather has been a police officer as long as I've been alive.

I got my interest in law enforcement from him. We actually ended up going to the same police academy. It was kind of neat to be able to sort of follow in his footsteps, going to the same place. And then I ended up becoming a police officer back in 2009. Worked for a couple different police departments here in the state since 2017. I've just been working in detectives as a persons crimes detective. And like any detective worth his salt, Cody spends a lot of time talking with people in his community, getting to know them, their interests, their concerns, and ultimately earning their trust. Not only does it help him better serve, it's also helped him develop

a certain knack for sensing when something's not quite right. Call it that spidey sense for the truth, for lies, and for danger. The more you do the job, the more you start to kind of get a feel for people and kind of a sense of the type of people that they are and how to engage with them and how to navigate a case based on how they interact with you. And it's that experience and awareness that was put into full service when in March of 2018, a call came in to report that a local woman named Rita Gutierrez-Garcia had gone missing. When I got the call about Rita being missing, I started to review some more of the reports

and start to dive a little bit deeper into some of her history. I really realized that this wasn't just somebody who hadn't checked in after a weekend of partying. This was a lot different. Rita was a 34-year-old single mother of three who had lived in Longmont nearly her entire life. She was one of those incredible people that could care for her own family, run her own cleaning business, put herself through school, and still find time to plan her sister's baby shower. Just a loving, vibrant young woman with big dreams and big responsibilities. But as many of you single moms know, those goals require maintaining a certain balance, which is why Rita had decided to spend St. Patrick's Day at a local bar with some friends and cousins, dancing and blowing off a little steam. She told her family that she was only going out for a few hours,

and she even made her point to mention that she was taking her house keys so she wouldn't wake everyone up when she came home. But when her mother Diane arrived in the morning to take Rita and the boys to her sister's baby shower, Rita was nowhere to be found. Her purse and keys were missing. Her bed was still made, and it was clear she hadn't come home the night before. Calls and texts went unanswered, and when she still wasn't home by the end of the day, her mom began to get that sinking feeling that something was very wrong. One of her sons had a band recital at school and Rita missed that. And that was the real big one for Diane to kind of realize that this was a major problem.

And this was very unlike her to miss anything for any of her boys. Her three boys were the focus of her life. And she had never gone more than a few hours without speaking to them. Rita's sudden silence was deafening, and by Monday morning, Rita's mother knew it was time to call police. To go several days without checking in was extremely out of character. According to Rita's friends, Rita had joined them at the Breaker's Bar and Grill in downtown Longmont, where Rita had seemed to be in good spirits,

laughing and having fun with friends until last call at 2.30 a.m. But according to those friends, Rita had turned down a ride home, telling them she already arranged a ride with someone else. Last time her friends and cousins saw her, Rita was talking on the phone in the parking lot behind the bar. Even though there was nothing that immediately pointed to foul play, Cody knew that Rita's disappearance raised red flags. He opened a missing persons investigation and told her family that he would do everything he could to try and find her. It's just tough to sit with them and try to give them reassurance that I'm going to do my job the best that I can, but again, not make any false promises to them that I'm going to bring her home safe or we're going to find her and it's all going to be okay

because I don't know what's going to happen. Cody began his search for Rita through the usual channels, hospitals, hotels, even the local morgue where she didn't turn up. Then he turned to more modern methods. One of the things that we started to do is start pulling bank records to see if she's spending money on her debit card anywhere, looking for phone transactions, if she's making calls or sending texts or things like that. And we just weren't coming up with a lot. In fact, it appeared that Rita hadn't spent any money since Saturday night, the last time she'd been seen. Nor was there a record of any texts, emails, or activity on her social media.

It was then that Cody knew it was time to take a deeper dive into Rita's personal life. Often, we call it victimology. For someone to just drop off the radar of this completely, it was reasonable to assume that her life or her safety could be in imminent danger. And understanding her personal relationships was critical in identifying any potential threats. And right away, there was one person who stood out. Rita's on-again, off-again boyfriend, David. According to Rita's family, the couple had a history of getting into some pretty intense arguments, and their last big blow-up just happened to be on the day she disappeared.

There was some accusations about potential domestic violence between Rita and David in the past, and that that may have led to several breakups that they had, including the most recent one, the day she went missing. That sets us on high alert to try and pin down his whereabouts. You know, Scott, we hear this all the time, right? We all know that it's those in the closest circles that are first questions. But just hearing about when this last problem between them had happened, that's definitely going to put you on an even higher alert. Yeah, those factors can easily determine your approach, how and when you decide to talk to the boyfriend. I mean, can you get more information about the circumstances of her disappearance before you reveal it to someone like the boyfriend who would be your normal person of interest in any case like this.

You know, someone that she has a personal relationship with. And so, of course, having a bad boyfriend does not always make for a good suspect. But when police called David and started to ask him questions about Rita, they were pretty shocked at just how uncooperative he was. And that did raise eyebrows at the Longmont PD. When we first talked with David, he was extremely confrontational and very angry at us even speaking with him about Rita. He really set off a lot of red flags for us

by not wanting to answer questions and being very accusatory towards us. And it appeared like he was trying to shift the blame back on us, which obviously caused us a huge amount of concern. So David claimed his last contact with Rita was by email on St. Patrick's Day, the night she went missing. When the officer asked him to forward that email, he refused. And his behavior was erratic, to say the least. He was very back and forth. You know, one minute he would be telling me that he just wanted to find Rita and that's all he cared about. He loved her and just wanted to make sure he was okay. But then he would become confrontational and agitated that I wasn't doing enough and that I In response to his pleas to get back together, Rita had responded that her heart was tired and that she wished he would find someone new and move on with his life.

Within hours of Rita's final brush off, she had disappeared. To prove he had something to do with it, detectives would need a lot more. But in Coda's experience, some people have been killed for a lot less. On the early morning of March 18th, 2018, Rita Gutierrez Garcia vanished without a trace from a bar parking lot in Longmont, Colorado. In the subsequent investigation for the missing mother, detectives had learned that Rita had written a Dear John email to her ex-boyfriend David. When questioned by Cody, David's behavior was confrontational and erratic, but he still insisted that he had nothing to do with Rita's disappearance.

He eventually even allowed investigators to take a DNA sample to search his apartment as well, even administer a lie detector test, which, if I'm being honest, is pretty convincing that he had really nothing to hide. Another pair of detectives went and spoke with David and his mom and were able to get a pretty solid alibi from him. There was no way that he could have left his home that night and that he didn't even know where Rita was going to go because we ended up learning that Rita's plans were pretty spontaneous. So for him to have known where to look for her and then find her would have been difficult in and of itself, but we didn't have anybody who

even saw him that night. On top of the fact that his mom is vouching for him, you know, it just kind of petered out very quickly that more than likely he wasn't involved in anything. So with David's whereabouts accounted for, Cody turned his attention next to another man in Rita's life, her ex-husband. And what he uncovered is not for the faint of heart. A warning to our listeners, the following includes descriptions of physical abuse that might be disturbing for some people, especially survivors of domestic assault. During Rita's marriage to the father of her three children,

Rita had been repeatedly and mercilessly victimized by beatings at the hand of her then-husband. Beatings that in some instances endangered her life. In one instance, her ex-husband had actually held her down on the bed and covered her mouth and nose so she couldn't breathe. Luckily, Rita managed to escape long enough to text her mother to call 911. Her ex-husband was later arrested and convicted of assault, and while he was in prison, Rita had filed for divorce and retained a protective order against him. Being convicted of domestic violence against Rita, that obviously sets off a red flag that we want to kind of look a little bit further into and determine whether

or not he might be responsible for something that happened. It's not an unreasonable suspicion, especially considering that the ex had actually violated that protection order as soon as he was released from prison. So where was he on St. Patrick's Day 2018? It turns out that following his most recent arrest, his permanent residency card had been revoked and the ex-husband had been deported to Mexico. This was a major concern and that she was at high risk, potentially being the victim of foul play. So Anastasia, clearly the first thing you have to be checking is, has he come back to the U.S.? If he did cross the border back into the U.S., one of the first places I would try to determine is, is there any evidence, surveillance video? Because, you know, the border has such high security. Ultimately, is there video of him coming back?

And obviously, too, people also cross borders not the way they should, being not through border control. So, again, all of these things were a possibility. But ultimately, Cody was able to actually track her ex down by phone. And during that call, the ex was adamant that he hadn't seen Rita in years and that he only spoke to her on the phone when he was in touch with his sons. But given his violent criminal history, Cody wasn't going to just take his word for it. He enlisted the help of the Department of Homeland Security to help verify his alibi. We were able to confirm that he had never reentered the country.

Another potential suspect eliminated. Another dead end in the search for Rita. Fearing that they were running out of time, her family decided to enlist the public in hope that Rita would be found and returned home. They wanted to hold a press conference in front of the PD because it was just so out of the ordinary for her. And they wanted to bring attention to the fact that this was not like her at all. And the community really latched onto it. Just the fact of a single mother of three kids and two of them, I mean, at the time they were extremely young. I, you know, that just really struck a chord with so many people in the community that something was not right here. And that appeal to the tight-knit community paid off.

Dozens of tips began pouring into the police department from people that had seen Rita on the night she disappeared. One witness in particular reported seeing Rita talking to a local, a man by the name of Juan Figueroa, who according to police records was a suspect in a sexual assault case that occurred just a few months before Rita had gone missing. The victim, you know, suffered some of the most horrendous injuries I'd ever seen, and definitely worst injuries that our other detectives, the DAs, and even the doctors who examined her from a surviving victim. Despite being identified as her attacker,

Figueroa had somehow managed to evade police. Everything that we were learning about Juan kind of painted him as this drifter, as somebody who had grown up in Longmont, but never really laid down roots anywhere. He would live with family for a little bit, and then he'd move out, you know, with a roommate, and he'd live there for a year, and then he was gone. But apparently Figueroa would surface long enough to harass local women at bars,

including the one where Rita had last been seen, the Breakers Bar and Grill. And you know, Scott, I'm the first one always to say innocent until proven guilty. But this definitely is a maybe and someone you want to look at more closely when you learn things like this. Yeah, the first step really is to find out where he is. Someone who's been sort of a ghost in the past, here today, gone tomorrow. Those types are really difficult to track down. So you want to confirm what the tips are telling you. Most importantly, you know, we do have a specific date, St. Paddy's Day. So ultimately what you want to do is figure out, did he have access?

Was he somewhere that he could have been involved in her disappearance? That would be the first, most important step. And also, did he even know her? When Figueroa's photo was shown to Rita's cousins who were with her that night at the breakers, they were able to confirm seeing him talking to their cousin and giving her an uncomfortable amount of attention. Shani specifically remembered Juan putting his name out there several times and making a big deal about who he was and the kind of person that he was in the community that everybody knew who he was. Rita was not very interested and kind of brushed him off and didn't want anything to do with him. But according to Rita's cousin, Figueroa was persistent, following her outside into the parking lot.

When Rita went to leave that evening with her cousin, she ended up going back to this little tiny parking lot behind a bar here in the downtown part of Longmont. But that was one of the things that kind of stood out to this cousin was, well, isn't that weird that this guy made such a big deal about who he was and wanted us to know what his name was? And then all of a sudden he shows back up later trying to talk to Rita again. So Figueroa was not only a wanted suspect in one recent sexual assault, he was now one of the last people to be seen with Rita before she disappeared. And given that history, police had good reason to suspect that Rita's safety was in danger. That fear was confirmed when they finally were able to get a look at her phone records. It turns out that Rita had made one phone call

after leaving the bar, and that call was to the Longmont police. Her phone called 911 and immediately hung up after that. And to me, that just kind of seals it in my mind that she's not just not answering her phone, but that something happened to her. The search for 34-year-old Rita Gutierrez-Garcia had just taken a very dark turn. Phone records show that at 3.07 a.m. on March 18th, the mother of three had called 911, but the call was disconnected just seconds later. As soon as we got her phone records back and we realized that she had called 911 and the phone hung up, to me, that was when I knew, you know, my gut really sank and this was a major concern and that she was at high risk of potentially being the victim of foul play.

Cody and his team were now tasked with trying to piece together Rita's last known movements, from the moment she was spotted talking to Juan Figueroa to the instant that that 911 call abruptly ended. To me, that was one of the things that I felt was important to cracking this case of figuring out who had done this to her and what led up to those moments of her phone calling 911, why that happened and what were the circumstances. First, they set to confirm Rita's cousin's recollection that Rita had indeed been in contact with Juan Figueroa.

We were able to get security footage from the bar that Rita and Juan first met at. And we had really good video of Rita walking into the bar with her cousin and her cousin's boyfriend, hanging out inside for a little bit, and then Juan walking in. I want to say it was like 30, 40 minutes after that. And then Rita is just barely off camera, but you can see them interacting and talking. Police also knew from Rita's cousin that she had been seen in the parking lot talking to Figueroa just after 2 a.m., but unfortunately there was no security footage outside the bar, meaning there was no evidence that would suggest she had left with him. However, they were able to use cell phone data to track her movements.

Pings from nearby towers showed that Rita likely moved at a walking pace a few blocks from the bar before stopping again for approximately 20 minutes. Armed with that information, police raced to scout video footage from a street camera from that street corner, and incredibly, that footage captured a distinctive white pickup truck coming to a stop in the exact location where Rita's phone stopped moving. That vehicle was interesting because it's got these orange marker lights across the top that you see on construction vehicles. One of those specific marker lights was out and we were able to identify that that truck belonged to Juan Figueroa. Four minutes after Figueroa's truck drove into frame, Rita had called 911 for help.

And this is one of these moments, Anastasia, when you have this type of evidence, surveillance evidence, cell phone evidence, it's best to recreate that scene to see how the timing would be. And could she actually have gone into that truck and driven away? But, you know, when you're thinking about it, again, this is all hypothesis based on the evidence that they're gathering. You know that there's only a four-minute window, right? From when you know where his truck is, you know where she is calling police four minutes later. But again, it's those circumstantial pieces that they're not there yet, but it certainly seems that that's exactly where they're heading.

And the question really would be is this, is there still any reason to doubt that Figaro is now the prime suspect in Rita's disappearance? The answer should really be no. There's no reason to doubt he's involved. We'd never been able to find it because he would work odd jobs, cash under the table, so we weren't able to find any kind of steady employment for him and we'd never find a place that he was consistently going. Whether he was staying with family or friends or just couch surfing, we just had a heck of a time trying to find him. So that was probably the biggest hurdle that we had in our investigation

with trying to track him down. Cody tried to enlist the help of Figueroa's family, which, believe it or not, is not as uncommon as you might think, at least in certain cases, when you're trying to apprehend a suspect, going to the family of the suspect. But unfortunately, in this case, it backfired. They alerted him that the police were looking for him. And within an hour, he was already on his way out of the state.

We start putting out, you know, these alerts all over the country to try and see if we can find, you know, is his license plate being picked up on license plate readers anywhere? We're not finding anything. A few days later, Cody realized that there was one place he hadn't checked. On a whim, we decided to reach out to ICE. And sure enough, we had just missed him by about an hour that he had crossed the border into Mexico, which made no sense because, again, he was born in the U.S., raised in Longmont almost his entire life, doesn't even speak Spanish. So he doesn't have family down there. What is he doing? Outwardly, everything suggested that he was on the run.

The bigger question then was, did he have Rita with him? Once we get video of him going into Mexico, sure enough, same truck, same light that doesn't work. And then sure enough, we get a picture of him as well driving that truck. And based on the angle of that video, you can actually see about 90% of the inside of the truck as well. It's a single cab, you know, not very big. And we were able to see inside of it, see that there's nothing in there. And then there's nothing in the bed of the truck either. Scott, all that really tells us that she isn't with him then. But I don't know that it necessarily confirms that she is gone in the sense of something nefarious having happened just based on this

alone. Unfortunately, without Figueroa, Cody knew it might be impossible to ever find out what happened to Rita. And now that he fled to a country that Cody has no jurisdiction, those chances were shrinking by the day. Finding a criminal in another country and extraditing them isn't as easy as they make it look on TV. There's a lot of red tape. And so I'm just a local cop

who doesn't deal with that stuff. So it was very foreign to me. And there are very specific international rules before you can detain a suspect on foreign soil. And that basically is talking about extradition, which starting with, of course, you have to have that solid case or probable cause for making an arrest. It also gets into the applicable governing laws and potential punishment if convicted. I had my suspicions that Rita was dead by this point, but he didn't have any proof. Now, fortunately, the other detective had enough to get a warrant for him for the sexual assault and attempted murder of the other victim.

But the question was, were the authorities in Mexico going to extradite based on that? And how were we going to navigate that? So instead of trying to apprehend him in Mexico, they focused on getting Figueroa to come to them. And in that effort, they caught a huge break. We also ended up getting some unsolicited help from somebody else who had a personal vendetta against Juan, for lack of a better term, and wanted him to get arrested. The man with the grudge was a former boss of Figueroa's who suspected Figueroa was stealing from him. He told Cody he had a way to contact his former employee and he knew exactly how to get him to come back to the U.S. So he came up with this fake job offer telling Juan, yeah, I've got this job

that's pay you all this money and I'll even buy your truck and I just need you to come back to the States and I'll pay you all this money. And Juan tells him, well, you know, I've got this warrant and it's going to be a problem. And the guy says, oh, don't worry about it. Just come back over. I'll pay your bond. Everything will be fine. The suspect in the disappearance of Rita Gutierrez Garcia had been hiding out in Mexico, but there seemed to be one thing that would lure him back to his home country, money. The minute he crossed into the border from Mexico into the United States, Figueroa was taken into custody. They run him and find that he's got this warrant. Once he gets arrested for the warrant, he's taken to a local county, Maverick

County in Texas, comes to pick him up from Border Patrol, and that deputy goes into the cell to talk with him. What you're about to hear is actual audio of Juan Figueroa speaking with that deputy about why he was in custody. I mean, my lawyer, I talked to my lawyer yesterday. He's the one who makes me determine myself. What did they say it was for? My lawyer said it was for a sex assault. So it weren't that it just got signed by the judge either Friday or yesterday. I don't know when it got signed. It's from Colorado, you know, so we have very little info.

So am I going to get extra credit? Yeah. The deputy then told him a detective from Colorado would be picking him up shortly. But before the deputy left, Figueroa asked him an odd question. Scott, I mean, of course, I'm already disgusted by the fact that the thing that he says is that he seems excited that the only thing he was wanted for is sexual assault. But then the question is, well, what does that mean about the case having to do with Rita? Well, I think visually getting to see that and hear him ask that question, I mean, that would be great evidence if and when he gets to trial, right? People would actually see him being

celebratory, the fact that he's not being charged with murder as he expected. But it's an important part of his state of mind. Maybe he thought that they were unaware that he was connected to Rita's case. And again, just to put it out there, right? If someone hears, whether they committed or not, that they're being put under arrest for a serious crime, specifically something like sexual assault, you expect that person to be concerned or horrified, angry, whatever it is, but not be elated or somewhat happy. So I do think what you just said, Scott, is important. Like that picture could be worth a thousand words. And while alone, it doesn't mean so much, but taken together with what it is they're actually looking for,

murder, well, a sexual assault could get him out before the potential sentence for murder, which could be the rest of his life. So I kind of get it right there. And I think you're right. It's a little piece, but it might be something that's important later. And so then Figueroa sits down with the detectives and he agrees to speak with them in Texas while in custody. And he says that he's confident that the sexual assault charges against him would be dropped. But the detective that was with him took him by surprise and asked him about the whereabouts of Rita. He immediately shut down the interview and said he wanted an attorney. So I never even got a chance to talk to him. But he did have a chance to shine a spotlight on another crucial player in this mystery, Figueroa's truck. Once we got down there, we had detectives go and,

you know, search the vehicle, go through the truck, but without disturbing any of that potential DNA evidence, just to see if there was anything immediately apparent that we needed to be aware of and the one thing that really stuck out was that the truck was very clean according to everybody else he was living out of this vehicle so it just kind of became a moving dumpster for lack of a better term there's garbage and pools and all these things in there then all of a sudden when he goes to Mexico, the entire truck has been cleaned out and it's almost spotless. Almost spotless. On the passenger side window, investigators did find a long brown hair that looked like it could have matched Rita's. Now, unfortunately, when we ran through testing on that, it was too degraded due to the heat being exposed to that window.

It was too degraded for a DNA analysis, but it led us to believe that we were definitely looking in the right place and that she was in the truck at one point. A more thorough search of the truck was just as disappointing. Technicians found a spot of biological material on the passenger side bench, but it had a mixture of several different DNA profiles. And even with all this circumstantial evidence, Cody knew that he would still need something more solid to charge Figueroa with this crime, a crime that was looking more and more like murder. How do we get enough to be able to take this case

from just a missing persons case to a no body homicide? Thankfully, they wouldn't have to worry about him escaping custody. A positive DNA match in the sexual assault case meant he would be confined to jail while he awaited trial. Whereas it turned out, Figueroa would give investigators a major assist in sealing his own fate. I get this random letter in the mail from this inmate and he says, hey, you don't know me, but I've got information about Rita's case and I really want to talk to you. And I know you don't have a reason to believe me because I'm in jail for lying and for stealing and doing all

these horrible things. But that woman's family deserves some closure. And to me, that just kind of stuck out. Cody agreed to hear what the inmate had to say so i go sit and talk with him i'm super skeptical at first because who knows what this guy wants right like what's going to be the quid pro quo here i ask him what is it that he's looking for and he flat out tells me that he doesn't want anything that he's almost done with a sentence on a drug charge so he doesn't have anything to gain and he doesn't know. He just doesn't like the guy. And he was talking about being involved in this murder and not being caught and about getting rid of the body.

And it really upset him and it really disturbed him. And he just felt like this guy needed to be held accountable. He's talking about certain things in the investigation that we haven't made public. So clearly he knows this stuff from Juan. You know, Scott, of course you have to be skeptical, right? Because even when someone says that they don't want something, you know, is it maybe going to be for revenge or for some other reason? Because when you have anyone coming to you from jail, you have to look at them first,

just critically to the nth degree. I mean, clearly you have to look at them first, just critically to the nth degree. I mean, clearly you have to tilt your head a bit, but it's a conversation. And this person had access to your person of interest, the person you believe is responsible, not only for that violent sexual assault, but for Rita being missing. On the surface, cautious optimism is the best way I would say it. And here's something else, that that inmate wasn't the only one who came forward. Six other people reached out to Cody to report that they, too, had heard Figueroa confess to his crimes. Could not shut up. And every one of them said the same thing.

And it was wild because I was exactly with you. You know, like, oh, this is just another, you know, jailhouse informant who's just trying to shave off a few years on a sentence to get out of, you know, prison. But every single one of them, he's sick. He's messed up and he's proud of what he did. But knowing how a jury can be and should be skeptical of jailhouse informants, Cody decides to go one step further. And my favorite part of this story gets permission to put a wiretap inside Figaro's jail cell. When I heard this, I know what the excitement was, is what could this bring? What kind of direct evidence could Cody be onto here? And also, it's just really difficult to pull this off in a correctional facility,

one of the toughest places to do it at all. But, you know, Cody figured that even if the recording was ultimately inadmissible at trial for some reason, that the information could still prove invaluable, hopefully improving Rita's murder if that's where this case went. But he also thought about how important for the family if it just might lead to finding her remains. And you know, this really is a risky move as well. Let's talk about the other side of it.

I mean, you're not telling the inmate who's your informant that you're doing it because they may get nervous, they may make a mistake, or you can't fully trust them. What if they told Figueroa what's going on, that people are onto you? He could completely shut down. It is a risky move, but if it pays off, it pays off big. The story of what exactly happened was the thing that we couldn't find. What happens to her between the last time she's seen and when her phone dials 911 and not knowing that was making me insane. You know, there were plenty of times I would sit and try and think of hypothetically, maybe this happened or maybe this. And it just frustrated me because it wasn't anything but hypothetical.

So hearing from him firsthand and finally being able to piece things together from his perspective and maybe try and get into his head a little bit about what he did here or what he was thinking and what his concerns were maybe that might help answer some of those questions and maybe start pointing us in the right direction sure enough figueroa started talking revealing damning details about the night rita disappeared here is the actual audio captured on that wiretap. You know, I tried talking with her. She didn't want to talk to me. Cousin was there, tried to get me away from her. But I just wanted to see her.

She's so pretty. And then I met up with her afterwards. Then he started to kind of spin this ridiculous tale about how Rita left with some other guy. Juan claims that he goes to a party afterwards. And while he's at this party, he sees Rita again. Talks about how something had happened and that Rita ended up dead, but that he, Juan, had to bury her. Figueroa went on to admit that the next day he had destroyed potential evidence of his crimes. Now, let me just say, this is an incredible amount of ingenuity to be able to capture that damning evidence.

A great example of going the great lengths that detectives go through to find the truth. Even though Cody didn't believe every part of what Figueroa was saying, it was confirmation for him that not only was Rita gone, but that he was involved in her murder. He was the one who was ultimately responsible. And now it was just a matter of how do we get him to tell us. And there was still a critical piece of evidence missing from this potential murder trial. And that was a body. But we all know that those cases can and do go to trial. Figueroa ended up going to trial and being convicted of the earlier sexual assault and attempted murder charges. And he was sentenced to 93 years in prison. But Cody still wasn't giving up on holding Figueroa responsible for Rita's murder. Four years after Rita disappeared, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation told Cody that they now had the ability to retest that stain that had been found in Figueroa's truck and separate

the multiple DNA profiles. And then when the results came back, it was confirmed that one of the profiles belonged to Rita Gutierrez-Garcia. There was now physical proof that she had been inside Figueroa's truck, and that was enough for a grand jury to indict him for Rita's kidnapping and murder. About two months before we're getting ready to go to trial, his defense attorney reaches out to us and says, hey, are you guys open to an offer? And the DA flat out told told her the only way that we will even consider an offer is if he gives us the body and the defense attorney said I think we can

make that happen it hit me like a ton of bricks not only does it concretely confirm what we already knew but there's gonna be something that we can give the family to finally have some closure and be able to heal and move on and that's all they ever wanted from the get-go. And that's all I ever wanted to give them. To be able to hear that and know that that was going to be the case was just everything. After both sides negotiated the terms of the deal, Juan Figueroa wrote a written confession. I immediately recognized his handwriting and he signed it saying, you know,

I, Juan Figueroa, killed Rita Gutierrez Garcia. And this is the approximate area where her body can be located and plotted out a latitude and longitude. The next morning, search teams went to try and recover Rita's body. Although Longmont is a very suburban community, it only takes about 10 or 15 minutes in any direction to get into some pretty remote and very agricultural parts of the state. The foothills of the mountains and some very remote trails and trails that one was very familiar with. They're very densely wooded. But as it turns out, Figueroa took as little care in disposing of Rita's remains as he did

with her life. And it didn't take too long after the search had begun. My phone rings, and it's one of the other district attorneys, and she says, hey, I need you to come over here. And I go running over, and about 25 feet off the side of the road, in a drainage ditch with some cattails, are bones sticking up out of the ground. The skeletal remains were positively identified as Rita Gutierrez-Garcia. That was just an unbelievably surreal moment.

All of this culmination of work just kind of coming together in the most random, unpredictable way. It was extremely overwhelming to finally be at the point where I could finally give her family those answers that they'd wanted for so long. I was finally going to be able to give them Rita back. Juan Figueroa ultimately pled guilty to second-degree murder and second-degree kidnapping. He was sentenced to 48 years to be served concurrently with his other conviction, a conviction he tried to appeal. It was about four or five months later, his appeals went through on the previous case and they were all denied and affirmed the sentence of 93 years. And you could tell that was a huge wind out of his sails when he realized that that wasn't going to be the case. He wasn't, you know, just going to walk out of jail like nothing happened. It's something else that Cody had told me that really stuck with me for hours after we spoke.

And it has to do with giving Rita's family closure and their ability to have peace and to move on. He remembers clearly standing in the middle of that cow farm where her remains had been found. What a completely empty feeling he had personally. But it was finally the realization that while her family had the unfortunate answers they feared, now for her family, she has come home. A final resting place to visit and perhaps a way for them to begin their healing. Cody Clark wouldn't give up. He got to know Rita through pieces of paper

as a missing person and then through her family as the clock and time continued to tick forward. Even as he began to build a case against her attacker, Figueroa, what Cody wanted most was to bring Rita back to her family. That became his goal, one that was achieved through perseverance, time, and as with many things, some luck. Rita, your family never gave up their search and would not rest until they had you back, be it alive or dead. The detective and the law enforcement team assisting him all helped achieve that goal. You are remembered,

you are mourned, and your legacy as a caring, kind person who loved her children will forever live on. Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder Anatomy of Murder is an Audiochuck original Produced and created by Weinberger Media and Frasetti Media Ashley Flowers is executive producer. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?