Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings, and Mysteries - 173. The College Students That Cracked A 34 Year Old Cold Case

Episode Date: April 23, 2026

In September 1991, a young mother in Arlington, Texas, Cynthia Gonzalez, left for a late-night appointment and never came home. Her car was found 40 miles away, and the investigation that followed would consume a legendary detective's entire career through serial killer suspects, failed polygraphs, and confessions that went nowhere. Thirty-four years later, a college classroom full of students at the University of Texas at Arlington ,who weren't even born when she was killed, would find what everyone else missed. TW: Mention of SASubscribe on⁠ Patreon⁠ to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society and enjoy ad-free listening, monthly bonus content, merch discounts and more. Members of our High Council on Patreon also have access to our weekly after-show, Footnotes, where I share my case file with our producer, Matt. You can also enjoy many of these same perks, including ad-free listening and bonus content when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Follow on⁠ Tik Tok⁠ and⁠ Instagram⁠ for a daily dose of horror.  To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by symbiotica. Let me tell you real quick about a problem that I've been having lately, and that is that my friends and family have taken all of my symbiotica supplements. I keep them in a cabinet in my house, and every time people come over, they leave with a handful, as if they are Halloween candy. And I get it. Finding clean, trustworthy, and effective supplements these days is hard. Too many brands hide behind fillers, mystery additives, and fake natural flavors, but not

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So don't cross your fingers and hope for the best. Download the app and get groceries just how you like with Instacart. Welcome back to Heart Starts Pounding. I'm your host, Kailen Moore. Today I have a really interesting episode for all of you guys. It turns out that while I was taking public speaking in college, some people were actually solving cold cases. I didn't realize that was an option and I didn't realize that was an option.

I'm very jealous. In my Forensics 101 class, my freshman year, we just watched old episodes of CSI because I think my professor might have actually been pretending to be a retired cop. And that is a true story. I want to share with you what one college class was able to figure out when they looked at a 34-year-old cold case. I'm going to tell you what they saw that the police didn't and how sometimes fresh eyes on a case can change everything. Okay, fellow sleuthers, let's get into it. On September 16th, 1991, a six-year-old girl named Jessica Gonzalez watched as her mom put on her pizza delivery uniform and prepared to go to work that night. Jessica lived with her mom Cynthia and her dad, Donald, in Arlington, Texas, about halfway between

Dallas and Fort Worth. And Jessica was used to her mom working a lot. She was an incredibly hard worker and she was starting her own business on top of all that. She was putting in a lot of hours to make sure that her daughter had a better life than she had. But there was something about her leaving that night that just didn't sit right with Jessica. She was getting a bad feeling. She asked her mom to stay in. Don't go to work. Stay here. But Cynthia wasn't the type to skip out when she had committed to doing something.

She told her that it would be all right and she would see her tomorrow. And then she took off. That would be the last confirmed sighting of Cynthia Gonzalez while she was alive. By noon, the following day, Donald reported his wife missing after she never made it home. And the first call he got back from police didn't seem that promising. Her car, a 1984 Pontiac Fierro, was found in Johnson County, about 40 miles away. It was parked and locked. Police ended up calling a towing company to bring the car back to Arlington,

and this felt strange to Cynthia's family because shouldn't they be looking at it for evidence of what happened to her? Her car, turning up 40 miles away without her in it, felt sinister. Cynthia's friends and family started panicking after this discovery, and they came together to mobilize a search effort. They posted missing person signs all around the neighborhood, searching for any clues that she may have left behind. One of her friends even reached out to a psychic to try and locate her. Back home, Cynthia's mother Linda Grandi was trying to pick through what her daughter had left behind.

She sat in the apartment dining room that Cynthia used as an office, going through papers to find anything that might help. Cynthia was a good girl, a business owner. All of her friends and coworkers said that she was magnetic and hard work. a joy to be around. She was voted high school queen at Carter Riverside High School near Fort Worth in 1983. She was a member of future Homemakers of America and she volunteered at church. But Linda knew that there was a secret other life that Cynthia had,

one that was going to make this investigation difficult. See, Cynthia had dropped out of high school four months before graduation in order to get married. Her husband, Donald Gonzalez, was 24 years old at the time. Cynthia was just 17. At age 19, she had a daughter, Jessica Don Gonzalez. She doted on Jessica, but other aspects of her life started to fray. Sometime in the early 90s, she entered Narcotics Anonymous to help manage a drug problem, and she separated from her husband Donald.

Donald seemingly expected that they would get back together, but it seems like Cynthia really started moving on with her life. life after this. And this is when she started a business to provide for her daughter. She didn't want to be a homemaker anymore. She wanted to go out and work again. Her day job was as an exotic dancer at a club called Playmates. But on the side, she ran her own company called Beauty and the Beast. Essentially, it was an adult entertainment company. She and a number of other dancers provided these things called stripograms, which, as far as I could tell, it was something like a candy gram but with a stripper instead of a box of chocolate.

And they also provided other more wholesome services like party clowns for kids' birthdays, though the strobograms were definitely the most popular service. But because of her line of work, Cynthia worked with very discreet customers, ones that were good at using fake names and restricted phone numbers. And she was actually on her way

to see one of those clients the night she disappeared. Cynthia wasn't supposed to work the night of September 16th, 1991. She was with her daughter her that night when she found out that one of her employees couldn't make an appointment for a stripogram. And another client came forward and said that Cynthia had told her this client lived on Grand Ave near the University of Texas Arlington. That night, she dressed up as a pizza delivery worker and headed out to meet this client. Now back at her apartment, as her mom sat at the table combing through Cynthia's things to find any clue about who this client was, Cynthia's phone kept ringing.

It was her employees, checking in about their schedules and upcoming parties that they booked. With every phone call, Linda answered and told them that Cynthia was missing. On September 20th, Linda spoke to a reporter from the Fort Worth Star Telegram, expressing her frustration at how the police were treating this investigation. She said that the handling of her daughter's car had been completely careless. And not one detective had come to Cynthia's office to collect any potential evidence. She said that if Cynthia had been in a less unsavory line of work, the police would have taken her disappearance more seriously. If the news had referred to her as a mother rather than a stripper, they wouldn't write her off as a victim of her profession.

And honestly, what she was saying was completely true. People in Cynthia's line of work go missing at an alarming rate. And it actually seemed to be more common in the time period and in the area around Cynthia's murder. For instance, in 1989, a woman named Sarah Fia Parker from Bell County, Texas, vanished before turning up dead not far from where she worked. Now, Linda probably didn't know about this case. It was over 100 miles south of her. She did know the reality of what her daughter did for a living.

Linda planned to offer a $2,000 reward for any information that could lead to her finding her daughter. And at the time of her interview with the press, she had already printed out a number of flyers, ready to spread them around town herself. We don't know, though, if she ever got around to posting those reward flyers because there was a big break in the case just two days later. It was Sunday, September 22, 1991 in Johnson County, Texas. A pleasantly warm evening.

It was the very last day of summer. At around 7 p.m., a woman was walking along a narrow dirt path by County Road 313 when all of a sudden she caught something out of the corner of her eyes. a glimpse of what looked like human flesh by the creek. Her confusion quickly turned to horror when she realized what she was looking at. It was the body of a woman. The smell made her think that the woman had been there

for at least a couple of days. She ran to the nearest phone and called the police and the first man on the scene was County Sheriff Eddie Boggs. Though he couldn't identify the woman at the scene, he could pretty much guess how she had died. she wore no clothes and he could see at least four bullet holes in her chest. Through fingerprinting, police were able to confirm that this indeed was Cynthia. Now, it was already a rough year for Arlington Police.

Cynthia Gonzalez was the 23rd murder that year, an all-time record for the city. But Cynthia's murder would stick with them in a way that those other 22 did not. Without her clothes or a murder weapon at the scene, there was very little evidence. to go on. The fact that it took almost a week to find her body put the police at a severe disadvantage. All of the questions they had circled back to the location and the state of her body. Whoever had killed Cynthia really did not want her to be found. This episode is brought to you by Rula. Finding a therapist can be really hard. Weightless can be so long. The whole process can feel

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After you sign up, you'll be asked how you heard about them, and please support our show and let them know that we sent you. That's Rula-R-U-L-A dot com slash H-S-P-O-D. You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget. This episode is brought to you by Kindred Bravely. As a new mom, I have tried a lot of nursing and pumping bras. a lot. And I can tell that the difference between one that kind of works and one that actually works is really massive when you have to do this multiple times a day. Kindred Bravely makes intimates an apparel for maternity, postpartum, and breastfeeding, as well as baby essentials,

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your first order. Make sure you use our link so they know we sent you. Exclusions apply. the body of Cynthia was found, there was no doubt that this was a murder case. The missing person's team who had handled, or mishandled, Cynthia's disappearance, handed the case over to Arlington's homicide team. The detectives had their work cut out for them. The gun that killed Cynthia was not at the crime scene, and very little of the evidence that was collected from the crime scene was useful. Plus, the body had decomposed for several days in a creek bed. The man assigned to lead this was one of Arlington's most reliable detectives, Jim Ford. Ford had been working for Arlington police for almost 15 years at that point,

starting as a patrol officer and then working his way up through narcotics before his promotion to homicide. Once he got his teeth in a case, he never let it go. His determination and dedication also made him uncommonly good at interviewing suspects. He was this slow-talking Texan, and his persistence would often exhaust perpetrators into confessing. And it was this combination of methodical patience and determination that led many of his colleagues to compare him to the TV detective Colombo. It was this common joke around the office that he could get a confession out of the Pope if he tried. Five years after Cynthia's murder, actually, Detective Ford would become a national figure leading the Amber Hagerman investigation.

And if that name sounds familiar, it's because it's the case they named the Amber Alert after. The case was a huge deal and Jim Ford was the only one. that they trusted to lead it. But no matter how good a detective he was, he had never dealt with a case like this one. In his first press appearance, he noted that this case was going to be exceptionally difficult to solve due to the amount of time that had passed

between Cynthia's murder and her body appearing. He also said that the amount of evidence that had disappeared during that time was substantial. But this was not an admission of defeat. Ford was very determined to see this case through. So first, he said, out to build a list of people that Cynthia knew, which would include every client who had met her through Beauty and the Beast, at least the ones that they could find and identify. But first,

before he did any of that, Ford had someone even higher on his suspect list that he wanted to check in with. On Selmo, Sanchez Ortiz was 32 years old in 1991, the same age as Cynthia Gonzalez's husband Donald. He had also been dating Cynthia since January. The two had met at playmates, and they lived together for six months before her death. Ortiz, who went by the nickname Rocky, was well aware that Cynthia was missing. When Ford called him with some questions, he must have feared the worst. Ford asked what color nail polish Cynthia had been wearing, and Rocky answered, saying that she had been wearing hot pink nail polish. And he knew that because he had painted her nails for her. Hearing the answer, Ford admitted that, yes, they had found her body,

and they needed Rocky to come in immediately. Rocky's interview was held the day after Cynthia's body had been found, September 23rd. And pretty much right away, Ford was able to clear him. He had an alibi and none of the evidence matched. The two had, according to everyone they knew, been crazy about each other. The one time they had fought, which was in July of that year, Cynthia had been beside herself wondering what she would do if he didn't come back to her. And once Rocky was cleared, Ford was able to move on to Cynthia's clientele.

which was not a small list. Beauty and the Beast was a relatively new business, but it had been thriving in the weeks leading up to her death. Ford wound up interviewing hundreds of people in Cynthia's life, including her family and friends, and as many clients as he could find. And all of these people were cleared as well. Now, I don't know if Ford was able to find the exact client

that Cynthia was meeting that night, but I get the sense that he wasn't able to figure out who it was, Like I said, these clients tended to be very discreet, or there is a chance, too, that he was found but was cleared. On December 15th, Ford was named Arlington's police officer of the year, but his diligence and effort was not getting him any closer to finding out who killed Cynthia. And Arlington was far from the only city in Texas struggling with unsolved crimes against women. See, Cynthia's death was just one of a growing trend in Texas that year. I already mentioned the tragic 1989 death of Serafia Parker, the young woman who was killed in Bell County. By 1991, it was still unsolved, and she was not the only one.

In October, two women vanished near Waco, Brenda Thompson on October 10th, and Regina Deanne Moore five days later. On December 27th, Colleen Reed was kidnapped from a car wash near Austin, Texas. Not all of these women were sex workers, but all of them, besides Thompson, were. were in their 20s, and all of these cases, like Cynthia's, started to go cold. With no obviously guilty clientele, a cleared husband, and a cleared boyfriend, it didn't seem like there were many leads for Ford to chase. That is, until spring of 1992, with a call to a tip line coming from Kansas City, Missouri. The man on the phone had been watching the TV show America's most wanted, and he noticed that one of the criminals featured on the show bore an eerie resemblance to

one of his co-workers. Now, the man on the show had a different name than his coworker, and he was wanted for the murder of multiple women in Texas, but he had such a strong resemblance that a couple more co-workers said the same thing. They decided that they were just going to call the tip line anyways, and after a quick background check, police descended on this man named Richard Fowler, and they arrested him for possession of an illegal firearm and controlled substances. And this tipster had been correct. His coworker was the same guy that was featured on TV. Fowler, of course, was not his real name.

He was the recently paroled serial killer, Kenneth Allen McDuff. And yes, you did hear that right. Recently paroled serial killer. McDuff had been a burglar and a serial sexual abuser in the early 1960s. He went in and out of prison a few times before August 6, 1966, the day of what would become known as the broomstick murders. That night, he and an accomplice had killed three teenagers, two boys and a girl. They shot the boys and sexually assaulted the girl before strangling her using a broken broomstick. After the killing, McDuff's accomplice went to the police and turned himself in for a reduced sentence.

McDuff was sentenced to death and scheduled to go to the election. chair. Now, for most murderers, especially in Texas, that would be the end of the line. But it wasn't for McDuff. In 1972, in the Supreme Court case, Furman v. Georgia, use of the electric chair for executions was deemed unconstitutional. Many men who had been waiting to go to the chair found themselves suddenly facing life sentences instead, and one of these men was Kenneth McDuff. Between 1972 and 1989, McDuff regularly applied for parole. He hired a lawyer to compile evidence and testimony that placed the blame for the broomstick murders onto his accomplice. And I cannot stress enough how much the specific circumstances of 1980s, Texas, contributed to McDuff's

release. Texas prisons were very overcrowded at the time, and they were basically looking for reasons to release inmates to make their operations sustainable. And McDuff had plenty of money to bribe parole board members. In 1989, after 17 years, of parole applications. McDuff was released back out into the world, and he immediately started killing women again, up until his 1992 arrest. By the time his coworker had made that call,

he had killed at least five and maybe as many as seven women. He'd been seen in the company of three women whose bodies hadn't been found, Brenda Thompson, Colleen Reed, and Regina Moore. With McDuff behind bars again, Texas authorities could connect many cases that had seemed like isolated events. McDuff had evaded detection

because his crimes had been spread across multiple counties, meaning that police hadn't been able to share information with each other. In 1993, he was sentenced to death for the second time. In his final years, he refused to cooperate with the police, but he loved to boast to other criminals about what he had done.

In 1998, a police informant got close enough to McDuff to learn the location of Thompson, and Reed's bodies. He ultimately gave up the location of Moore's body in exchange for dental work. And for Detective Ford, maybe this was his chance.

Maybe this notorious killer of sex workers was the missing key to solving Cynthia's murder. McDuff never said anything to anyone about Cynthia Gonzalez. And then on November 17, 1998, his sentence was carried out. In the years since his first stint on death row, Texas prisons had switched from the electric chair to lethal injection.

And whatever he knew or didn't know about her death, he took it with him to his grave. This was obviously devastating for Detective Ford. Like I said, Ford was not someone who let things go, especially cases like Cynthia's. Throughout the 1990s, he pursued every possible lead, clearing hundreds of persons of interest. Cynthia seemed to fit McDuff's victim profile. She was in her mid-20s, female, sex worker, And the timeline placed her right in the middle of his abduction spree. The problem was Ford found no evidence that connected McDuff to Cynthia Gonzalez.

Every other victim had at least one eyewitness who saw the two of them together. But nobody saw McDuff with Cynthia. There were no fingerprints or DNA evidence connecting the two. And Cynthia was shot, unlike all of his other victims who had been strangled or beaten to death. This was a very frustrating dead end. it was also impossible to prove that he didn't do it. At this time, Cynthia's family had been struggling to move on from the tragedy. Linda Gandy, Cynthia's mother, was living in Fort Worth, Texas by 1995, the four-year

anniversary of her daughter's death. She was considering turning to mediums to see if it would help them find any closure for her family. And at the time, Arlington Police Department said that they had two potential suspects in mind for the murder, but there wasn't enough information to issue an arrest warrant yet. Cynthia's daughter, Jessica, had to grow up without a mother. Throughout her childhood, she found herself yearning for a relationship with her mother like her friends had. She had a small box of Cynthia's belongings at home, including a bottle of her perfume,

and every so often she would open it up like a time capsule to remind herself what her mother smelled like. And Cynthia's former husband, Donald Gonzalez, drops out of our research around this point. We know that he is still alive, but he's declined most of the same. invites for media appearances over the years, referring to keep his emotions and anything he knows to himself. The case did receive fresh wind in November of 2004. Arlington Police Department was always a smaller operation, so they couldn't afford to have a cold case team of their own.

However, a new initiative started that year, spearheaded by Jim Ford and fellow detective John Bell. Funded by a new grant, they would be their own cold case unit, working on unsolved crimes in between their active investigations. And after his experience with Cynthia Gonzalez and Amber Hagerman, Ford was determined to use modern technology to bring closure to older cases. And over the years, he had a lot of success doing this. In 2005, he arrested a man in connection with the 1991 murder of an infant. The suspect had been in plain sight, but they just didn't have the evidence at the time to secure an arrest.

In 2006, Ford identified the murderer of Linda Donahue, who had been strangled to death in 1987. the killer was already behind bars for a different crime. And Jessica Gonzalez, now Jessica Roberts, remembered that Ford was so dedicated to his cold cases that he would come and visit her at work with any follow-out questions he had. Arlington's Colombo remained very dedicated. But in 2010, he decided to retire from Arlington Police Department

to work as a criminal investigator for the district attorney's office. He had suffered from congenital heart problems since he was a teenager. And maybe he hoped that retired. hiring from the daily grind of police work would give him more time to work on long-term investigations. People were depending on him, not just his family,

but all of the victims and their families who never saw justice. But then, tragically, on July 31st, 2013, Jim Ford passed away of heart failure. He was just 58 years old, and he worked on his cases right up until the very end. He never solved Cynthia's murder, in spite of his stellar record.

with the cold case unit. And without Ford to keep working on it, the Gonzalez case would go on to just gather dust and storage. Most of the reporting I read from this time just assumed that she was one of Kenneth McDuff's victims. The timeline matched up and it was better than no answer at all, at least to them. It would be over a decade before anyone gave it a second thought. Going into the 2020s, the Cynthia Gonzalez case remained unsolved. The Arlington Police Department only had six homicide detectives for the whole city, and all of them were also responsible for clearing cold cases in their free time. It was, to put it lightly, not an ideal setup. Two things had happened in 2024 that brought this case back to life again, though. First, Cynthia's daughter,

Jessica Roberts, called the Arlington police to ask if there had been any updates about her mother's death. There weren't, but after the call, the case file was handed to a detective in his early 30s named Anthony Stafford. He hadn't even been born in 1991 when Cynthia was killed. And later in 2024, a woman named Patricia Eddings reached out to Arlington PD. She was a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, who taught several courses on forensic science and criminology.

A former forensic analyst herself, Eddings regularly invited Arlington police officers to give lectures to her students. And at the end of one of these lectures, the presenting officer said something that gave her an idea. He talked about how understaffed their cold case department was, how nobody really had enough time to give these cases the attention that they needed. And Edding spoke to this officer afterwards, where she pitched him an idea. What if she taught an advanced course on cold case investigation?

She would gather a class of her best and brightest and allow them to go through the cases that the detectives just didn't have time for. Both the university and the Arlington Police Department were really enthusiastic about this project. and the first of these new courses kicked off in the fall of 2025. Eddings carefully selected this class, ultimately assembling a room of 15 students, most of whom were interested in pursuing careers in criminal justice. The 15 students would be divided into three groups of five,

each with a single case that they would investigate. The five students assigned to Cynthia's case were J.C. Con Cannon, Preston Schroeder, Jenna Lewis, Natalia Montoya, and Samantha Underwood. They were given a flash drive with all of Jim Ford's files on it and told to get to work. I can only imagine how daunting this was. In interviews, the students said that the flash drive had digital copies of up to 600 pieces of evidence on it, which had all been digitized by Detective Stafford. This included crime scene reports, forensic records, and hundreds and hundreds of pages of interviews with suspects.

For six weeks, they methodically went through all of this evidence, printing out documents, and going over them with a fine-tooth comb. It was clear that Jim Ford had been very thorough in this investigation, but they hoped that somewhere they would find something that he missed. And miraculously, they did. This episode is brought to you by Aura Frames. So this is my first ever Mother's Day as a mom myself, and I've been thinking a lot about how fast everything has been changing.

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Jojuba, three sticks, five minutes, and you'll look like you're just having a really good skin day. If you're ready to raise your beauty standard, OG's got you covered. Go to OG.com slash HSP and use code HSP for 15% off. That's OGE.com slash HSP and enter code HSP to get 15% off. This episode is brought to you by Alma. A year from today, who do you want to be? more patient, maybe less reactive. I always think about these things around the new year, and I know I want to work on managing my anxiety personally. Well, you deserve to feel like the future version of yourself,

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easier. The year from today isn't that far away. Get started now at helloalma.com slash heartstarts. That's helloalma.com slash h-e-a-R-T-S-T-A-R-T-A-R-T-S. That's H-E-L-L-L-M-A-M-A-S-H-Hartstarts. Throughout all the pages of interviews and follow-up reports, there was one name that kept coming up again and again and again, someone who had never been investigated as a suspect. The whole time, investigators were looking into the men in Cynthia's life, and they hadn't given a second thought about the women. But deep within the case files, this one name kept popping up, Janie Perkins, but at the time she had been known as Janie Hatley. When Cynthia was murdered, Janie was 29 years old. She had been dating Rocky Ortiz when Rocky met Cynthia in January of 1991, approximately eight months before the murder.

Now, this is where the story gets a little messy. Rocky claims that he broke up with Janie and then he started dating Cynthia a few weeks later. This is a little bit of speculation, but there was probably more overlap than that. According to official documents, Rocky broke up with Janie three weeks before Cynthia's murder. In a newspaper report from 1991, Vera Woodring, Cynthia's building manager, claimed that Rocky and Cynthia had been living together for six months before her murder. In that same article, Rocky is quoted as saying that he and Cynthia knew each other

for two months before they started dating, which means that they began dating probably around March and lived together until September. If Rocky was telling the truth in 1991 and the police's timeline for his relationship with Janie is correct, that means that he was seeing both women for at least five months. I don't know how much the women knew about this, but it's clear that they knew of each other, and it's clear that Janie resented Cynthia for Rocky's affections. Jim Ford brought Janie in for questioning in late 1991,

and she claimed that she had nothing to do with the murder. But her alibi was incredibly weak. She said that she was off work and that she was just home alone. No one could verify this, though, obviously. To make things even more suspicious, She took a polygraph test later, which raised some doubts about her involvement. Now, polygraph tests are not admissible in court, and they have their own issues. We have gone over this before on this podcast.

But it is interesting to note here that there were two questions on the test that she failed. And those questions were, do you know who shot Cynthia? And did you shoot Cynthia? A week later, Ford brought her back in for another lie detector test with a different method. she failed again, and in a follow-up interview, she tried to explain herself. She claimed that she hated Cynthia and she was glad that she was dead.

She even said that she thought about killing Cynthia before due to her rivalry with her over Rocky. Her exact words were that she loved Rocky and she would do anything for him. But still, she denied that it was her who killed Cynthia. By this point, the students must have been wondering why she wasn't investigated more seriously after this, but it does get worse.

In February of 1993, a little over a year after Cynthia's death, one of Janie's friends was arrested in Grand Prairie on an unrelated charge. That man, Robert William Hardy, provided a sworn statement that Janie had bragged to him about killing Cynthia. And that should have been enough to get a warrant for an additional investigation, right? Well, still, Arlington PD didn't arrest Janie. I don't know what was going through Jim Ford's head at the time, but the call was coming in right as Kenneth McDuff was getting his third death sentence.

So maybe the serial killer story did seem more likely to him. It's also possible that he just didn't think that this was the sort of crime of passion that a woman would commit. After all, Cynthia was on her way to meet a male client, and so it did seem like she was being lured by a man when the crime was committed. Whatever the case, the weight of evidence seemed too obvious to the students going through these files. Hardy wasn't the only man that she had confessed to either. The last time she saw Rocky, she told him that she killed his girlfriend. Even though she later backed off of this story saying that she was just trying to piss him off,

he reported the incident to the police, and nothing came of it. Six weeks into the semester, the students had done enough work on their cases that they could make contact with the detectives again. They gathered a list of questions for Arlington PD, and the top of their list was, why didn't you look further into Janie Perkins? They sent these questions in, and they didn't hear anything back. I mean, after all, this was a college assignment.

Maybe they weren't going to take anything the student said that seriously, after all. Maybe it was more about the exercise of going through a case that mattered. Well, behind the scenes, Detective Stafford found the student's work very compelling, compelling enough that he could take it to the district attorney's office. And not long after, a representative of Arlington PD, came into Professor Edding's classroom. There, he made an announcement. That morning, a warrant was served

for the arrest of Janie Perkins. U.S. Marshals were currently waiting outside of her house in Azel, Texas, to take her into custody. The entire class erupted in applause. And while I've only seen a short clip of this moment in a documentary, you can just feel the sense of relief and joy in that room. The students had done it.

They had cracked a 34-year-old cold case. In early November 2025, Janie was 63 years old, and now she was charged with capital murder. She was taken into custody in Tarrant County and ultimately released on a $150,000 bond. Arlington police called Jessica Roberts into the station to give her the news that they had made an arrest, and she was overjoyed. The documentary series Nightline plays an audio recording of them giving her the news, and it is very moving to hear. This woman had been living in limbo for 34 years, and her relief is really palpable. That same Nightline episode recorded Jessica meeting with the students who helped solve her mother's murder. After decades of silence, these kids, none of whom had been born when Cynthia was murdered,

brought some closure to Cynthia's surviving family and loved ones. The case was expected to go forward this March, the same month that we were writing this episode in, and to us it really seemed like a done deal. Ortiz was going to be the star witness for the prosecution, which was going to be handled by the DA's office. Both the police and the students speculated that Janie may have had a male accomplice, but after this break, it felt like the case was about to crack wide open. Everyone involved was so hopeful, including Arlington PD. And on March 5th, Detective Stafford was honored by Arlington as officer of the year, partly thanks to his work on this exact case. And then, well,

Cold keys are really tough to prove, especially without thorough physical evidence. I wish I could tell you that I'm ending this episode on a hopeful note and was able to tell you that justice was served right as I was putting the finishing touches on this draft, but that is not what happened. Researcher Rob and I were following this case really closely when we were writing this episode, and on Friday, March 20th, Rob emailed me the news. A Terrant County, grand jury had declined to charge Janie Perkins with the murder of Cynthia Gonzalez. We were both devastated, to say the least. The evidence that the students gathered, the failed polygraphs, the interviews with Janie, none of that was enough. And for as crushing as it was for me and Rob,

it must have been so much more crushing to everyone who had put so much work into making sure that Cynthia was not forgotten. We're so waiting with bated breath to see if they're able to gather more evidence that can change the grand jury's mind. But in the meantime, that's it. Janie Perkins remains an innocent woman and everyone involved in Cynthia. Cynthia Gonzalez's case also faces the hardest task of all, going back to their lives. Jessica Roberts has three kids of her own now, and she's been really open about how her mother's death robbed her of a model on how to be a mother herself. And in many ways, that's been the hardest part about this story, reading the stories of people who have had to just go on,

letting the emotional scars of Cynthia's death scab over, but never really heal. Everyone involved in this case, especially this time around, cared so deeply about their work, especially the UTA students who brought this case back to life after a decade in storage. And in the end, maybe the greatest gift we can give, Cynthia, is ensuring that she's not forgotten. And maybe that will keep this case alive enough to continue going through it and finding evidence that will eventually lead to someone's arrest. Hopefully, one day, this case will be officially marked as solved. And unfortunately, that's all I have for you this week. I'm going to continue to follow this case really closely, and hopefully one day we'll have an update that I can share with you all. I will be back here next week

with another episode for everyone. Now I turned it over to you. What do you think about this case? Do you think that there was enough there to charge Janie with Cynthia's murder? Or are we going to have to keep looking? Is there maybe someone else hidden in the case files? Is there someone else that seems guilty in this whole entire investigation? Let me know wherever you listen to this podcast. And I will be back next week with another episode. for you all. And until then, stay curious. Heart size pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Heart size pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Our associate producer is Juno Hobbs. Additional research and writing by Rob Teamstra.

Sound design and mix by Red Room Creative. Special thanks to Travis Dunlop, Grayson Jurnigan, the team at WME. Have a heart pounding story or a case request. Check out heartsardspounding.com.