Criminology - The Fort Worth Trio

Episode Date: October 18, 2020

1974 was a tragic year for the city of Fort Worth, Texas. We detailed the disappearance and murder of Carla Walker in our last episode. Later that year, three young females, Rachel Trlica, Renee Wilson, and Julie Moseley went missing after a shopping trip. Join Mike and Morf as they discuss the disappearance of these three girls that the media dubbed as "The Fort Worth Trio." There are a number of bizarre aspects to this case including a letter mailed to Tommy Trlica, Rachel's husband, that was purportedly from Rachel. The letter made it seem as though the three girls had left for a trip. You can help support the show at patreon.com/criminology An Emash Digital Production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Go to ThriveCosmetics.com slash shine 26 for an exclusive offer of 20% off your first order. That's Thrive Cosmetics, C-A-U-S-M-E-M-T-I-S-C-S dot com slash Shine 26. If you love chilling mysteries, unsolved cases, and a touch of mom-style humor, Moms and Mysteries is the podcast you've been searching for. Hey guys, I'm Mandy. And I'm Melissa. Join us every Tuesday for Moms and Mysteries, your gateway to gripping, well-research, crime stories. Each week, we deep dive into a variety of mind-boggling cases as we shed light on

everything from heist to whodunit. We're your go-to podcast for Mysteries with a Motherly Touch. Subscribe now to Moms and Mysteries wherever you get your podcast. Criminology is a true crime podcast that may contain discussion about violent or disturbing topics. Listener discretion is advised. Hello everyone and welcome to episode 131 of the criminology podcast. I'm Mike Ferguson. And this is Mike Morford. Mr. Mike Morford, how are you doing? I'm doing good. I'm living the dream and I'm recording another episode with you and trying to stay positive about everything in life. How about you?

I love it, man. We are living the dream. I mean, we're battling everything that everybody else is, but we're still living the dream. We got to be positive. I like that positivity. Yeah, it doesn't pay to be negative. No, it really doesn't. And speaking of things that are positive, we continue to see some great pay. Patreon support. Let's give some shoutouts. We had Jessica Lute, Stacey Maxwell, Bonnie Mohan, Stephanie Wakeham, Bebes, Jennifer Vaughn jumped out at our highest level, Kyra Inn, Miracle Ridge Goats, and B. Haley. So that's some great support. We really appreciate it. Yeah, we've got some of the best supportive listeners out there, I think, out of any podcast. So thank you for that. Anyone that's considering supporting the show can do so by going to patreon.com slash criminology.

And don't forget about Stitcher Premium. You can find all of our episodes older than six months there. And they have a free 30-day trial. So you really have nothing to lose. All right, Morf. Let's jump right in in our last episode of criminology. We talked about the brutal February 1974, abduction, rape and murder of 17-year-old Carla Walker.

and how that crime shocked her Fort Worth community, 1974 turned out to be a very rough year for Fort Worth. But four years in, the city once again found itself at the center of a bizarre mystery. On December 23rd, 1974, three young girls vanished without a trace from a Fort Worth, Texas shopping center. Despite a massive search and investigation,

spanning nearly five decades, the girls have never been found. The missing Fort Worth girls are Mary Rachel Arnold, Lisa Renee Wilson, and Julianne Mosley. The girls are known collectively as the Fort Worth Trio or the Fort Worth Three. Mary Rachel Arnold was born in November 15, 1957. She went by her middle name of Rachel. She has her brother Rusty and his sister, Deborah. In the spring of 1974, Rachel, a Southwest high school student who was just 16, married Tommy Trellisa. While many were surprised by the young couple's marriage, they appeared to be very happy together.

Lisa Renee Wilson was born on August 29, 1960. Like Rachel, Lisa also went by her middle name of Renee. Rachel and Renee had been good friends for years. Their families had often camped and fished together. Julie Ann Mosley, the youngest of the three girls, was born on April 5, 1965, to Ray Ann Mosley. She was an average fourth grade student at B.H. Carroll Elementary School. A teacher described her as a sort of child who seemed to take everything in stride. Julie knew Renee Wilson because Renee was dating Julie's older brother, Terry, at the time.

Julie and Terry lived across the street from Renee's grandmother, where Renee stayed when her mother, Judy Wilson, worked at the drag. cleaners. All three girls resided in Fort Worth, Texas. Shortly before noon on Monday, December 23rd, 1974, 17-year-old Rachel and 14-year-old Renee decided to do some Christmas shopping. Nine-year-old Julie asked if she could go shopping with the older girls because she didn't want to be home alone. They said yes, but had to get permission from her mother. Julie called her mother Rayanne Mosley, and asked for permission. At first, Rayan said no, because her daughter didn't have any money, but Julianne started begging and whining on the phone, and Rayan eventually gave in.

Rayan told Julie to be home by 6 p.m. But the older girls wanted to be back by 4 p.m. Because Renee had a Christmas party to attend that night with Terry Mosley, who had given her a promise ring that morning. The three girls first headed to the Army Navy store number six. at 601 Westbury, where René needed to pick up two pairs of blue jeans on Layway. While at the store, she changed into a pair of jeans. Afterward, the trio headed to the Seminary South Shopping Center,

which is now the Grand Plaza, at 4200 South Freeway in Fort Worth. When the girls didn't show up at home by 6 p.m., their family members began to get nervous. Renee's father, Richard, along with a couple neighbors, hopped in the car, and headed for the mall searching for the trio, while other family members stayed by the phone. When they got there, they anxiously began driving around the parking lot. Before long, they found Rachel Trellisa's Oldsmobile 98, parked in the Sears upper-level parking lot.

The group got out of the car and looked around, but there was no sign of the girls. The car was locked up, and the keys were gone. As they peered into the back seat, they saw some of the stuff the girls had purchased resting on the back seat. At this point, fear that the girls might have had a flat tire or mechanical issue faded away. And the thought that something else more serious may have happened came to Richard. The group decided to call home to tell the other waiting family members that the car had been found,

but that the girls were missing. Rachel's mother, Fran Langston, and her brother, Rusty Arnold, raced to the shopping center as soon as they got the call. They went inside and visited every store, searching for the store. searching for the girls, they asked the mall manager to announce over the intercom system to see if the girls were there. But there was no sign of them. When they couldn't find the girls, the families called the Fort Worth Police Department, but they didn't arrive at the shopping center until 11 p.m. While they waited for police to arrive, the family stayed at the mall

next to Rachel's Osmobile armed with shotguns, guarding it, so nothing would happen to. it and protecting any potential crime scene. When police finally got to the mall, they surveyed the scene and the car, and pretty quickly they deemed the girls as runaways. But their parents were adamant that they were not the type of girls that would take off. The families pointed out that the trio didn't have that much money on them, and they didn't take any personal belongings. The next day on Christmas Eve, Rachel's husband, Tommy Trellisa, received a letter in the

mailbox. It was addressed to Thomas A. Treleisa. The name Rachel was written in the upper left corner of the envelope. The letter read, I know I'm going to catch it, but we had to get away. We're going to Houston. See you in about a week. The car is in Sears upper lot. Love Rachel. Tommy had some concerns with this letter, and he really wasn't sure if it was from his young wife. Rachel always called her husband Tommy not Thomas. It also appeared that Rachel's name was misspelled. The L was written as a lowercase E. But then it had been written over again to form the correct L.

Tommy handed this letter over to authorities. The letter was written on a sheet of paper. Wider than the envelope size, the stamp, which was a 10-cent stamp, had been canceled the morning of December 24. The postmark did not contain a city, only a blurred zip code 76083. However, the number three looked to either be backwards or an unfinished eight. Investigators believed that the zip code was meant to be 76038, which would have come from

Eliasville near Throckmorton, Texas, or 76088, which would have been posted in Weatherford. Later, over the 1970s and 1980s, FBI handwriting experts in Washington, D.C. would examine the letter several times, but the results always returned inconclusively. They could never prove that Rachel wrote the letter. Tommy Trellisa and Rachel's family never believed that Rachel wrote the letter. So more if I think it's a good point here just to talk about this letter a little bit. You know, obviously we said the family didn't think that Rachel wrote the letter. FBI and handwriting experts weren't sure. Their results came back in conclusive. So the big question is, did Rachel really write this letter or did someone else, presumably

someone who had something to do with the disappearance of the girls write it to throw police off. Because I guess for me, and I know it's the 1970s, there's no cell phones. There's still pay phones. I mean, you know, you can get to a phone to make a call. You know, it seems so strange to all of a sudden. I mean, literally, all of a sudden decide that we're going to Houston. so I'll just write you a letter instead of either telling you beforehand or picking up the phone, finding a phone and telling you right then and there.

Yeah, I think whenever there's a letter like this, you have to sort of, or police have to consider, is this something that's helpful? Is this a red herring? Is this something we should exhaust all efforts to determine the origins of it? this letter was mailed the morning after they disappeared. So it seems like before most people would know the girls are missing, that this letter was mailed. So that would seem to rule out any kind of hoax, someone that just wanted to cause confusion. And then that makes you wonder, is it really from Rachel or could it be from someone that did harm to the girls?

And if so, in that situation, why would they even need to misdirect the things? family or the police, if they don't know them if they're strangers and they did something to the girls, inserting themselves by writing this letter would only provide clues possibly that might help catch them. So if the person that did something to them sent it, it wouldn't seem to their cause very much. I think if somebody wrote this who was part of the disappearance, they did so to throw police off by saying, you know, hey, we're okay. We just went to Houston. don't worry about us. We'll be back in a week. I think to your point, Morph, why do that if you're a stranger? And I understand that. But maybe you're not a stranger. And maybe you need to buy some time

or maybe you need that misdirection to just kind of throw a little bit of a wrench into the works. Yeah, maybe just to add that little bit of uncertainty for the family and for the police to send them in wrong direction maybe. After Tommy Trellisa handed the letter over to police, he was asked to examine the car to see if anything was out of place or missing. He reported to police that some items were missing from the glove compartment of the Oldsmobile. The missing items were $350 bonds purchased by him and his first wife and a copy of a will from his parents, both of whom had died of natural causes within a year of one another. At this point, authorities had no evidence that the girls had met with foul play, but they searched for any potential witnesses that may have

seen the girls on the day they vanished. Several witnesses reported seeing the girls in the mall that day. A few remembered Renee's sweet honesty t-shirt. One store clerk told police that a woman had come in on December 23rd the day the girls vanished and told him that she saw some men shove three girls into a pickup truck. police tried to track down this woman who had reported this, but they never found her. The days following the trio's disappearance slowly crept by. The girls' families hoped the girls would return in a week, as the letter suggested. Meanwhile, a friend of the family of one of the girls started a reward fund at a local bank, asking for information that would quickly lead to the girl's whereabouts.

Renee's mother released a letter to her daughter and the other girls that said, we do not believe you have voluntarily run away. But if you have, we beg you to come home immediately or telephone so that someone can come after you. We are 100% behind you, and there is nothing that we will not do for you. The letter also contained a plea to anyone holding the girls to release them. A week passed. The deadline in the letter sent to Tommy Trellisa came and went without a word from the girls. police were now open to the idea that they were investigating a potential abduction

versus three girls who had run away. They also believed it was possible that Rachel did write the letter to her husband, but someone had forced her to do it. On New Year's Eve, a man found women's garments in a field near a stream where he hunted, this was about six miles west of Justin, Texas, near, Texas 157. Since news of the missing girls had spread like wildfire, the hunter immediately thought the clothing might be related to their case,

and he called police. Police collected the clothing, and they showed the garments to the families, who confirmed that they did not belong to any of the missing girls. Homicide detective, lieutenant Oliver Ball, released a statement saying there was no evidence, linking the garments to the missing girls. It was a letdown for police and the girls' families

because they thought they had a potential lead, and it turned out not to be. Shortly after this lead fell through, a man who claimed to be an acquaintance of one of the girls told Rachel Trellise's father, Raymond Arnold, that he had seen the trio at the mall the day they vanished. The man said he had spoken to the girls in the department stores record department

at the Southwest Shopping Center. The man telephoned Raymond at 1 a.m. on New Year's Day, 1975. He said he spoke to Rachel at the mall and that she responded. He noticed Renee and another person who appeared to be with the girls. But details about this information are sketchy, and it appears that nothing came from this man's tip. In a desperate attempt to find the girls, and feeling as though police were not doing everything in their power to find them,

the families turned to a psychic known only as J. Joseph. Jay Joseph claimed to have described Julianne Mosley's red tennis shoes. This information had not been released in media reports. He also sensed something was wrong with Rachel's note and said the girls had traveled toward Great Vine, Texas, Oklahoma, or Illinois. The psychic's claims unfortunately didn't result in the girls being found. Just after the psychic made his claims, a friend of Renee's father received a telephone call at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, January 8th, 1975, from a girl who said she was a friend of Renée's. The girl revealed that Renee and the other girls would arrive on the 7.25 p.m. Greyhound bus from Houston.

This girl gave her name, but none of Renee's other friends recognized the name. Renee's mother was unable to find the caller's name in the high school student directory. The Wollons notified that Trilissa and Mosley families about the call, and together, they all waited for the girls at the bus station. But when the bus arrived, the trio wasn't on it. It was another disappointment for the girls' loved ones. But these families were not giving up on the girls. All three families worked together and distributed 500 posters and 50,000 flyers throughout Texas pleading for help from the public and locating the three. missing girls, the signs and flyers contain the words, reward $2,000 plus. In large letters,

above pictures of the girls, they plastered them in bars, gas stations, grocery stores, and pool halls. Local residents, friends, and neighbors also helped with their efforts. The tragic loss of Carla Walker was still on Fort Worth residents' minds, and they wanted to do whatever they could to keep from having the same outcome that occurred in Carlos' case. In early February, 1975, Rayanne Mosley received a telephone call. The call occurred at 11 a.m. On February 6th, when Rayan answered the phone, no one responded at first despite Rayan saying hello several times. Rayan was just about to hang up when she heard a low moan and a girl say, Mama. Rayan asked, who is this? And the girl will repeat.

the word, Mama. Ray Ann asked the caller if this was Julie Mosley, and the girl replied, yes. She asked the caller where she was, but the girl said she didn't know, and started to tell her something before the phone called abruptly ended. Ray Ann said the girl sounded drugged or sick, and that she wasn't speaking normally. She was positive that the caller was her daughter, but the girl never called again. Police had been working to ID or isolate the caller in these incidents and they apprehended a young girl who made fake phone calls to all three of the trio's families. She was a 14-year-old from North Richland Hills, Texas. When police learned her number and identity, after a trace was placed on the Wilson's telephone, the young girl was taken into custody.

She admitted to making three fake phone calls to the Wilson's, but denied making the phone call to Ray Ann Mosley, posing as Julie, and the police ultimately believed her. Well, many of the leads investigators were working on were fizzling out. Fort Worth Police were continuing to dig. They investigated a report of a black male driving a gold-colored car who pulled into a service station at 2001, West Ulyss Boulevard and Ullis, Texas, about 2 a.m. on Saturday, February 8th. The man had three young white girls in the back seat with him. This man asked the attendant if he could purchase beer, and he left when the employee said it was after hours. As the man drove away, one of the three girls dropped a flyer out of a car window.

It was one of the 50,000 missing flyers of the group. In the suburbs of D.C., a woman fails to show up for work and is found brutally murdered. I wonder which emergency. We just walked in the door, and there's blood in the foyer. For the next two decades, the case remained unsolved, until new technology. allowed investigators to do but had once been impossible. A new series from ABC Audio in 2020.

Blood and water. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. ...rolls that the families had put up in different businesses across the area. On address was written on the flyer. 1714, A9, R.M. Boulevard. RM stood for Randall Mill Road in Arlington. The police search department complexes along that road.

for a car matching the man's vehicle, but they found nothing. They said there was also no such address as 1714 Randall Mill Road. Today, there is a restaurant at that exact location. The Shaw Festival presents the most beloved musical of all time. My Fair Lady. This is the story of Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney Flower Girl who, Professor Henry Higgins bets, he can turn into a lady. Don't miss, My Fair Lady, a wonderfully lavish and lovelry production.

This year at the Shaw. For best seats at best prices, go to Shawfest.com. In the spring of 1975, the Trio's families hired a private detective named John Swain after police failed to find their children. In April of that year, Swain received information from an unnamed source. that the three girls had been killed and their bodies hidden beneath a bridge somewhere near Port Lavaca, roughly 340 miles south of Fort Worth near the Gulf of Mexico. Police search the area there but found nothing. Closer to Fort Worth on Sunday, April 13, 1975.

John Swam, 100 volunteers and law enforcement officials searched beneath bridges along Texas 35 south of Fort Worth for six hours. They used boats and crisscrossed Hog Bayou, which was 40 feet deep in places. They found several clothing items, but none of the clothing belonged to the girls. The tired searchers failed to find the three missing girls. But of course, this was a huge undertaking. I mean, this was a task morph that was basically the equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack. A couple of weeks later, human bones were found in Bexar County, Texas, at the edge of a lake. Police said the remains might be parts of five young women, but they acknowledged at the time that some of them could be animal bones. But after a final examination,

the remains were determined to be the remains of two young women, neither of which were part of the Fort Worth Trio. In August 1975, John Swain discovered that a 28-year-old, old man was making a string of obscene phone calls in the Fort Worth area. This man's name had come up several times in Swain's investigation of the disappearances. He did a background check on this guy and found out that he worked for a store in South Fort Worth. And it turned out that Rachel had applied for a job there just before her disappearance. Police arrested the man at 2.30 p.m. on August 12th,000. 1975 at a Texas Christian University area shopping center after a 15-year-old girl,

Per Swames's instructions, agreed to meet the suspect. This teenager and her 18-year-old sister had been receiving obscene phone calls from the man for two years. The man who was not publicly named used his position to obtain the names and phone numbers of young women who had applied for jobs or who were listed as references on job applications, Swame established that at least six women who had applied at the man's store had been receiving lewd phone calls regularly. Swame said the man had once lived in Rachel Trellisa's parents' neighborhood, but moved

away shortly before she married Tommy and left home. The man also drove a car that fit the description of one scene parked near the Trilissa residence the day the three girls disappeared. But in the end, nothing ever came from this suspect related to the disappearance of the three girls. About a year later, in April 1976, Rachel Trellisa's husband, Tommy, filed for divorce. on the grounds of abandonment. Rachel's family was completely understanding of Tommy's decision to file for divorce. On April 18, 1976, an oil field worker found skeletal remains of three persons outside of Alford, Texas, in Brazoria County, P.I. John Swam arranged to have the bones compared

to the Fort Worth trios through X-rays and dental records of the girls in Jolera. lie, the Harris County Medical Examiner announced the remains were not the three missing Fort Worth girls. Instead, they were a teenage white male and two white females between the ages of nine and 13. And from my understanding, they've never been identified. As the five-year anniversary of the trio's disappearance approached, family members of the girls began to wonder if they would ever be found. But they had comforted. knowing that private investigator John Swain wouldn't give up on the search for them. At 2.30 p.m. on Friday, October 19, 1979, police were called the Swame's east side apartment

at 2120, Hanley Drive. After his sister and brother-in-law tried unsuccessfully to reach him by phone, the police found Swain dead on the living room floor in his apartment. His death was ruled a suicide from a drug overdose. John had made arrangements that upon his death, all of his files on the missing girls would be destroyed. This was a devastating blow to the trio's families. In March 1981, more skeletal remains, including two vertebrae, a tailbone, and 17 human teeth were found in Brazoria County about six miles outside Alvin, south of Houston, in the same area where the remains in 1976 were found. Fort Worth detectives traveled there once again to see if there was a connection to the missing girls in early April.

They learned that the bones did not belong to the three girls, but belonged to 14-year-old Georgia Greer and 12-year-old Brooks Bracewell, two victims of the Texas Killingfield's murders, which we covered a while back on criminology. Later in 1981, a man told Fort Worth detectives that he had been in the mall parking lot the day the trio disappeared. He said he saw a man force a teenage girl into a light blue van on the day the girl has vanished. He saw a younger female run from the van, only to be caught by a second man.

This witness went over to help, but one of the men told him not to interfere and said, quote, this is between me and my wife. This same witness visited Fran Langston, Rachel's mother, and told her the same story. The witness pointed to Rachel's picture in Fran's home and said, that's the girl I saw that day. There was no doubt that the man's account raised questions, but there were no answers, and this tip led nowhere. It's unclear if investigators questioned Tommy Trellisa

regarding this tip, considering he was Rachel's husband at the time. Almost two decades went by with little happening in the investigation. The fate of the three girls was a huge mystery to law enforcement officials. in November 1999, 25 years after the trio vanished, Rachel Trellisa's brother, Rusty Arnold, located a private investigator named Dan James, who set up a $25,000 reward using his own money. When Dan James and Rusty Arnold linked up

and went over all of the available reports and information, it seems as though they both came to believe eyewitness account, that Rachel, Trilisa, and Renee Wilson were seen alive at stores and a gas station in the days following their disappearance. In all of these unconfirmed sightings, it was always Rachel and Renee together without Julie. Based on their findings, they also believe that Renee and Julie were deceased by 1999, but that Rachel is still alive. According to Dan James, several credible witnesses reported seeing Rachel in the Fort Worth area around Christmastime, as recently as 1998. But Dan and Rusty also believe that an unidentified person or persons maintain efforts to help

keep Rachel hidden away. Dan and Rusty refused to elaborate on their theory or any evidence they might have that supports these claims. In January 2000, Rusty Arnold and Rachel Trellisa's older sister, Deborah, spoke to Mary Rogers of the Fort Worth, our telegram. Deborah was briefly engaged to Tommy Treleisa before he married Rachel. At the time of her sister's disappearance, Deborah was living with Rachel and Tommy. She had an argument with her then boyfriend and temporarily moved in with the couple. Both Deborah and Tommy maintained that there was

no turmoil between them and Deborah insisted the romance was long over. Deborah recalled that Rachel asked her to go shopping on December 23rd, 1974, but Deborah stayed in bed instead. Deborah was in the Treleisa home the next day when Tommy received the letter, allegedly written by Rachel. After the interview with Mary Rogers was published in the newspaper, the Arnold, Mosley, and Wilson family sent Deborah a letter, pleading for her to disclose any detail she might know concerning the missing girls' whereabouts. and asking her to fully cooperate with investigators.

The families believe she knew more about the disappearances than she let on. Rusty Arnold thought Deborah wrote the letter to Tommy, not Rachel. Deborah has denied having any knowledge of the disappearances, and she believes the girls might have been forced into sex trafficking. I don't think you can blame these families for having some suspicion that this woman might have more information and why they would want her to be fully transparent and share whatever she knows. Well, let's be honest, Mor, if it's a little strange, I think when a lot of people hear that,

okay, Deborah was engaged to Tommy. They apparently broke it off. And then Deborah's younger sister, Rachel, ended up marrying Tommy. Okay, does that happen from time to time? I'm sure it does. but then you add in the fact that at the time Rachel disappeared, Deborah was living with Rachel and Tommy after an argument with her boyfriend. So, you know, all of that just seems to be a little strange in my eyes. It would be awkward. Maybe that's a better word for it. awkward to have, you know, that trio living in the same house with the history that they all shared.

So from that standpoint, yeah, I agree with you. I can see where the family would look at Deborah and say, hey, please cooperate with investigators and have that feeling that maybe she knew more than what she had disclosed. In January 2001, police decided to take a fresh look at the case. And Fort Worth Police Chief Ralph Mendoza assigned homicide detect. Tim Betcher and Detective Ronald Piolo to the case. At a news conference two months later, detectives detailed new developments in the case

that included 20 new witnesses. Some of these witnesses saw the girls at the mall, the day they disappeared. The detectives hoped that these new developments combined with DNA evidence and more modern DNA technology could solve the case. But detectives didn't back in 2001, and they've never fully disclosed what DNA evidence they've had.

Detectives also said that the U.S. Postal Service determined that the letter sent to Tommy Trellisa, shortly after the girls disappeared, was mailed from Fort Worth, not Eliasville, as police initially believed. The detectives believed the girls left the mall with someone they knew and trusted. Betcher said, quote, we can say that they were at one point seen with one individual, but we believe there was more than one involved. The detectives had narrowed the number of suspects down to under five and believed that after the girls left them all, they encountered foul play. And according to Betcher, met up with some unfortunate circumstances.

In mid-April 2001, Scott Gordon from, KXAS NBC 5 Dallas Fort Worth reported that a witness named Bill Hutchins came forward and told Fort Worth police detectives that he saw Rachel, Renee, and Julie sitting in a pickup truck with a young male security guard from Seminary South Shopping Center at around 1130 p.m. On December 23rd, 1974, the day they went missing. He was quote, descent. saying, I saw three girls sitting in the front seat with him, a young girl next to him, a girl that was a little bit older sitting next to her, and then the older and largest girl against the passenger door. Bill said at that point, the girls appeared to be with him willingly. Bill said that he talked with all of the individuals in the truck. They were laughing. he said everybody seemed happy.

They exchanged a few comments, then Bill rolled up his window and drove up. When he saw news reports about the missing girls a couple of days later, he called the detective working on the case. Bill said in his interview, I talked to his secretary, gave her my name, what I had seen, everything like that, and let it go at that. And I never heard back from them. He said at the time he figured the case was solved. He didn't see anything else about it in the paper, so he let it slide.

Police did not follow up on his lead until April 2001. They found the security guard and questioned him, but he denied having anything to do with the girl's disappearance. This is a very interesting story, if true, but at the same time, this encounter supposedly took place at 1130 at night. at the shopping center, the same time that the trio's family members were there staking out the parking lot looking for the girls. It seems to me more of the way that we described it. I mean, some of these family members had shotguns. They were guarding, you know, the car.

How would they not have run into this pickup truck containing the three girls? So it seems like, and we haven't been to this park alone, we don't know how big it is, but it seems like in a quiet parking lot this late at night with a family there looking all over the place for their daughters, that they would have heard or seen something like this interaction. So I wonder if it's possible that somehow a time is off. Somebody got the night wrong or the time wrong. Again, we're looking at something that happened decades before the police came to re-interview this man about the incident that he witnessed. And I think it's important for police to do this kind of stuff because in these investigations that they're sort of re-igniting trying to go back and say, what did we miss 20, 30 years ago.

Sometimes people that potentially have information about cases somehow fall through the cracks. So it's always good to have fresh eyes going back and see what can be re-checked out. Yeah, but even more important to me is they have this information. not long after the girls disappeared. Just nobody followed up on it. Yeah, it seems like following up on that kind of tip back then would have been a lot easier than trying to do it decades later. Well, it's always going to be better, right?

You know, back to your point, would you rather talk to someone a potential witness the day after they saw something? Or would you like to interview them 30 years later when memories have faded. That's if the person is even still alive. You know, it's just no doubt. Everything is better when you can talk to people as quickly as possible.

Because if what they've got to say has some relevance to it, then that could be the difference between solving a case early and it becoming a cold case. In August 2018, Rusty Arnold, who was just 11 years old when his sister vanished, along with his group of volunteers raised almost $15,000 to pay divers to pull up three vehicles. These vehicles were sitting deep in the bottom of Benbrook Lake, about eight miles from the shopping center where the girls disappeared. The group had been working on a theory since 2014 that vehicles there may be connected to the trio's disappearance. The group conducted a practice dive on August 3rd at Berger's Lake in northwest Fort Worth. The actual dive took place on Saturday, September 22nd, 2018.

Four divers from North Texas Marine Recovery and Salvage used giant airbags to pull one of the vehicles, a 1960 Chevrolet Corvier, out of the lake. They attempted to bring a second car up, but abandoned it due to difficulties lifting it. Forensic experts spent several hours examining the Corvair but found no evidence of the girls on October 13th, 2018, divers pulled the second car out of Lake Benbrook.

That car, a 1976 Lincoln Continental, yielded no results as well. Rusty Arnold became a certified diver, and in July 2020, he participated in pulling the third car out of Lake Benbrook. The group had attempted and failed to pull the car up in September 2019. after years of being submerged in the lake, the metal was too fragile and it basically broke apart in their hands. So the team had to devise a new strategy. Instead of bringing the car up to the water surface, they would search the vehicle themselves underwater. But it was no simple task because as anybody who swims in, you know, a lot of lakes knows, lake water is different. than ocean water.

Divers call it black water because in a lot of lakes, visibility is very, very low. Some divers say it's like closing yourself inside a casket. It took Rusty and his team two hours on July 17, 2020, to locate the car using sonar. When they found it, they marked the spot with a buoy. Diver Wayne Spears dozed through the dark water and peeked inside the vehicle.

He removed the door from its head. tinges and scoured the car but found nothing. It was another blow to the missing girls' families. Rusty Arnold set up the website MissingTrio.com back in 2009 in an effort to obtain new tips and sharing information and updates about the case. Private investigator Dan James was one of the sponsors. The website is still up today. Rusty later set up a Facebook page called Missing Fort Worth Trio that currently has over 3,000 members. So there's a couple of things there for me more. Number one, Rusty.

I mean, you know, obviously this is a man who has never and will never give up on finding his sister. He went so far as to become a certified diver. But one of the thoughts I had was, you know, what evidence would you most likely find in a car? that, you know, has been submerged in water for so long, I think it would be pretty tough. I would think most things that were inside the car at the time had probably floated away, you know, papers had disintegrated by that point, just really tough to get any type of forensic evidence from a car that has been submerged in water.

And maybe what they were hoping to find, it might have been tough, but finding their remains or skeletons in the car would have at least provided some answers. Well, yeah, I actually did not think about that. I mean, that's one thing that you would probably be able to find. So that, yeah, that's a great point. That's actually not something that entered my mind. I was thinking more about, I don't even know what I was thinking, some type of physical evidence that clothing, I think that stuff would be hard to find. Detectives have spent decades investigating the case to no avail. The girls' families have heard numerous stories of their children's fate, but nothing leading them to exactly what happened on that December

day. Both Renee Wilson's and Julie Mosley's mothers have passed away in recent years. Ray and Mosley died on July 30th, 2013. Her obituary read, somewhere over the rainbow. now you know the answer we are all trying to find. Rest in sweet peace, we love you. Judy Wilson died on July 19, 2005. Both Judy and Ray Ann were 73 years old at the time they passed away. So Morp, as we wrap up this case, it's a tough one. You know, we said it right up front.

1974 was an extremely rough year. in the Fort Worth, Texas area, you had the disappearance and murder of Carla Walker, and then you had the disappearance of the Fort Worth trio. And I'm sure there were many more disappearances than murders during that year. These are just the ones that we're focusing on. They're all heartbreaking. You know, and you and I touch on this on a lot of episodes. Behind every disappearance, behind every murder,

there are family members. There are loved ones, friends, acquaintances. Their lives are undoubtedly changed. The entire direction of some of these people's lives were changed after that day in December. Now, one thing you really have to feel for these families is just that endless questions about what happened. I think that sense of not knowing has to be very tough for the families. If it was a case of murder, they had their children's bodies, that would be awful, but they'd have some kind of peace and knowing what happens. I think they're left with a lot of unanswered questions. It seems like they did have a lot of assistance from police going down all kinds of rabbit holes and multiple private investigators trying to help and to not have any

results shows you just what kind of mind-boggling mystery this is. I mean, this was not a case that was not heavily investigated. Now, you know, some people have made the argument that not all leads were followed up on. You can definitely make that argument of, you know, Bill Hutchins who said, he called right away and said, hey, I've got some information. Nobody ever called him back. So if that's true, you can understand where the family would say, wow, man, are the police doing everything that they can do. I think, you know, what makes this case a little more mysterious than some, you've always got the mystery of what exactly happened in any unsolved case. But in this one, to me, it's the letter. Because if the letter was not written by Rachel, as I think most people

believe, then you have to think because it was written so quickly, it was written so quickly, it was pinned by the person that did these three harm. But why? You know, we kind of touched on it when we talked about the letter. What was the purpose? If it was simply to try to throw police off. Okay, I get that. You want to make the police believe that, you know, these individuals are still alive. They've simply gone to Houston. They'll be back in a week. All right. That might buy you a week. Why do you need that week? I think it's one of the questions to really take a look at. Is it simply because you want to make distance away from this area?

Are you from the area and you left? You know, now the other thing I would talk about Morp is in later years. As investigators were, you know, looking at the case again, they came out and said that they had a handful of suspects. Now, we don't know who those suspects are. They've never released the names. And as we said, we don't know the extent of the DNA evidence that police have. We also don't know exactly what makes police believe that these handful of people are suspects. But it's something, right? There's something that put these individuals on police radar, has kept them on police radar. But they've obviously never been able to put it all together to charge one of these individuals or more. Well, I think one thing that the investigators can take comfort in and as well as the girls' families is that just as we saw in the Walker case, after almost 50 years, there was an arrest recently. And that could provide answers.

So it's never too late to see an arrest made in this case as well. Yeah, I think that's one of the things that you and I have learned. You can never give up on these cases. I don't care how old they are because they're being solved 40, 50 plus years later. And obviously, you and I hope this one gets included in that list of finally solved. Thanks goes out to Debbie Buck at TruecrimeDiva.com for writing and research assistants in this episode. As always, if you love the show but haven't done so yet, go out, give us a five-star rating. Keep telling your true crime loving friends about the podcast.

That word of mouth goes a long way. If you want to find us on social media, we're on Twitter with the handle at Criminology Pod. You can also find us on Facebook by searching for Criminology Podcast or by joining our Facebook discussion group, criminology podcast discussion and fans. All right, Morp, that is it for our episode on the Fort Worth Trio. Tough case that I hope investigators get a break on soon. But as with a lot of these unsolved cases, it's something that we'll have to wait and see. But Morp and I will be back with all of you next Saturday night with a brand new episode of

criminology. So for Mike. And Morph. We'll talk to you next week. Take care, everyone. Can too heard you loud and clear with their new ultra-moister collection, powered by batana oil and Jamaican black caster oil. This new lineup collection is clinically proven to deliver non-stop moisture for up to five days.

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