Sins & Survivors: A Las Vegas True Crime Podcast - The Unsolved Disappearance of Karla Rodriguez

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

Karla was just seven years old when she vanished from her Las Vegas neighborhood on October 20, 1999. Despite exhaustive searches, potential suspects, and age-progressed images, her whereabouts remain unknown, leaving her family searching for answers. Karla Rodriguez, whom her family called “Karlita” was like any other 7-year-old little girl living here in the Las Vegas Valley in the late 1990s. Her parents moved here to give their kids a better life and to pursue more opportunities.Karla disappeared on the evening of Wednesday, October 20th, 1999, and hasn't been seen since, but her family has never given up hope that she's out there somewhere, that she had the opportunity to grow up somehow.Police drew strong connections to serial killer Curtis Dean Anderson who was known to be in Las Vegas around that time.http://sinspod.co/episode27sourcesDomestic Violence Resourceshttp://sinspod.co/resourcesClick here to become a member of our Patreon!https://sinspod.co/patreonVisit and join our Patreon now and access our ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content & schwag!Apple Podcast Subscriptionshttps://sinspod.co/appleWe're now offering premium membership benefits on Apple Podcast Subscriptions! On your mobile deviceLet us know what you think about the episodehttps://www.buzzsprout.com/twilio/text_messages/2248640/open_sms Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/sins-survivors-a-las-vegas-true-crime-podcast--6173686/support.

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Get the truth about debt. To listen ad-free, visit Zinspod.co slash subscribe. Starting at $2.99 a month, you'll also get access to our exclusive bonus content episodes when you join through Patreon or Apple subscriptions. Thanks for supporting the show. Carla Rodriguez, who her family called Carlita, was like any other seven-year-old little girl living here in the Las Vegas Valley in the late 1990s. Her parents moved here to give their kids a better life and to pursue more opportunities. Carla disappeared on the evening of Wednesday, October 20, 1999, and hasn't been seen since.

But her family has never given up hope that she's out there somewhere, that she had the opportunity to grow up somehow. Hi, and welcome to Sins and Survivors, a Las Vegas true crime podcast where we focus on cases that deal with domestic violence, as well as unsolved cases and missing persons. I'm your host, Sean, and with me, as always, is the one and only John. I am the only John in the room. As we said before, this case involves a typical little girl living life in the 1990s. Carla Rodriguez was born in Michoacan, Mexico to her parents, Elia Zepeda and Ramon Rodriguez on September 29th, 1992. She was the youngest of four girls, the oldest being Rosie Rodriguez, who was about eight years older than

her. Carla was an active and outdoorsy, adventurous and fun kid. She had her share of health problems, including an appendectomy and being prone to kidney and urinary tract infections, but none of that slowed her down. She loved hanging out with her friends, riding her bike, and exploring the area where the family lived just a few short blocks from the stratosphere. On that fateful day, October 20th, 1999, Carla's mom, Elia, walked her halfway to John S. Park Elementary School at 931 Franklin Ave. around 7 a.m. That school is still there today with the same name, and it's just a quick walk from the family's home. After school, she was out in the neighborhood, as she often was, playing with friends around the 700 block of Bonita Avenue, northeast of the intersection of St. Louis and 6th Avenue. Around 7 p.m., which was after dark that late in October in Las Vegas, she went over to a particularly good friend and playmate's house, rang the bell, and asked if she could come out and play.

Her parents told her that it was too late and Carla should just go home. She played in their front yard on the swing set for about 15 minutes, they said, and then left. Another friend claimed to have given her money to go to the store, but that one's hard to verify, and there was no security footage of any store near there that she might have gone to. Unfortunately, this is where the trail ends. There are no confirmed sightings of Carla after that. It was as if she had just vanished. Carla's mom and dad both worked, and unfortunately, they worked opposite shifts. Ramon came home after his shift, and of course, Carla wasn't there. He knew she'd often be out playing with friends or even staying over at a friend's house, so he wasn't extremely worried. Carla's mom didn't get home until 3 a.m. from her work,

and Ramon didn't mention to her that Carla wasn't at home. In the months and years that followed, police and armchair sleuths have made a lot of this fact, occasionally with a pretty victim-blaming tone. The fact is, though, that it wasn't that unusual. And speaking as the oldest of four girls, it's not unusual to ask the older siblings to help keep an eye on the younger ones. It was the next morning when Elia woke up and found Carla not at home, and she was pretty concerned. She headed over to John S. Park Elementary and talked to the principal, and it was that principal who first called the police. That's another thing that people make a lot of, phrasing it like her parents didn't call the police. But of course, they did start looking right away, and the police were called that

next morning. To their credit, Metro set up a command center at the school right away. They started searching the area and located her bike near that neighbor's home. The police recognized when the call came in that they had already lost a lot of precious time trying to find Carla. Officers repeatedly said to the news outlets that the first 6-12 hours after a child's disappearance is the most critical time to begin a search, because if they've been abducted in a car, 12 hours later, there's no knowing where they might be. They could be 400 miles away in any direction. Amber Alerts are dependent on quickly informing the public and getting as many people looking in the community as possible before an abducted child is too far away. The Amber Alert system

began in 1996 when Dallas-Fort Worth broadcasters and local police developed an early warning system for abducted children. The system was inspired by the story of Amber Hagerman, who was abducted in Arlington, Texas in 1996. Diana Simone, a radio station employee, came up with the idea of having local radio stations alert the public when a child abduction occurs in the community so they can send in tips to law enforcement. In 2003, President George W. Bush signed the PROTECT Act into law, which provided the emergency preparedness and response tools necessary to create a national Amber Alert program. In 2002, the system became nationally focused after the first White House conference on missing, exploited, and runaway children. The Amber Alert system has spread to countries throughout the world and is responsible for the rescue of over 900 children. As of 2022, Texas has the most Amber Alerts, with 17% of all Amber Alerts issued in the U.S.

coming from Texas. Unfortunately, as far as we can tell, since Amber Alerts were so new, we can't even confirm there was one issued for Carla. Police started searching her neighborhood. They went door to door, asking neighbors for information, if they had seen Carla, if they had seen anything or anyone suspicious in the neighborhood, and so on. They concentrated on the area bordered by St. Louis, Sahara, Industrial, and Spencer Streets. Police also used bloodhounds named Blossom and Barney to try to track Carla's scent. They led police to a nearby apartment complex, but no items or evidence of value were found there, although they did find some fairly sketchy, but apparently unrelated individuals. According to the FBI, the dogs hit on a particular apartment, and even a bathroom within the apartment, where they found human blood. The bathroom had been recently disinfected while

the rest of the house was in complete disarray. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough blood to build a DNA profile given the technology of the day, and there were no further hits on Carla's scent on those individuals' vehicles. Although the FBI believes the two individuals were sex offenders, as far as we know, a case against them was never pursued. The police wanted to make sure they talked to every person they could. They set up roadblocks to stop passing motorists. They went back through neighborhoods several times, just in case someone had been away on vacation or hadn't yet heard the news that Carla was missing. Strangely though, years later, a neighbor mentioned to the news media that through all of this intensive searching, they were completely unaware of Carla being

missing. That sort of reminds me how we talked in the Shauna TFA bonus episode that Shauna lived two doors down from me, but I was never interviewed about her murder. We have talked about this before, and many journalists, advocates, and ethical true crime content creators have pointed this out in the past. It is sadly not uncommon for criminal justice agencies or the media to focus on crime victims that fit certain demographics. There was speculation in Carla's case that perhaps if Carla had been a white child, maybe she would have gotten more attention. But I don't think we have evidence here at all that Las Vegas Metro Police or the Las Vegas Review Journal or the Las Vegas Sun were ignoring Carla or not covering her case enough. The evidence we have

here seems to indicate the opposite. More than 100 officers and volunteers searched for a week, repeatedly going through the neighborhoods with flyers. Hundreds of flyers were distributed. Police searched abandoned cars, abandoned lots, empty hotel and motel rooms. They used their mounted police unit to search in ditches and washes for any trace of Carla. Detectives tried many avenues to raise awareness about her disappearance. Her face was printed on Sedona drinking water bottles, and flyers were mailed out with her photo, those have-you-seen-me mailers I'm sure many of us are familiar with. On the Saturday night after she disappeared, Carla's disappearance was even featured on America's Most Wanted, and her story was covered by the Montel Williams show. During the September 2000 Southwest Series NASCAR event at the Las Vegas Speedway, Daryl L'Amour from Phoenix drove his Driving for the Missing entry featuring Carla's photo.

Her face was also on the hood of Joe Nemechek's stock car at a race at California Speedway in 2000. We went through the Review Journal archives and we clipped at least a dozen articles about Carla, including many times where there was a teaser about the state of her case on the front page or on the front page of the Nevada section, directing readers to an article with updates. Police contacted every family member or relative and even traveled to Mexico to interview families still living there on the chance they had any additional information that might be helpful. Of course, they knew she wasn't living there. On October 28, 1999, an anonymous Las Vegas resident came forward and offered a reward of $25,000 for information to help find Carla. The donor had seen Carla's story on the news and wanted to help. The wording of the reward was for information leading to the arrest

and conviction. Although that wording sounded to the press and the community like the police had determined Carla must be dead, the police repeatedly said that they hadn't given up hope that Carla was still alive. Throughout the investigation, police followed up on numerous tips. An apartment manager found a backpack in an empty apartment that was initially thought to be Carla's, but it wasn't. A girl seen at a picnic on Mount Charleston who looked a lot like Carla, but wasn't. In December of 1999, police went to a small motel at the opposite end of the strip from Carla's neighborhood in the hopes of talking to someone who allegedly had information about her disappearance, but nothing turned up. They even traveled to New Mexico to investigate an alleged sighting and

found that while the girl looked like Carla, sadly it was not her. On October 25th, 1999, an 11-year-old girl living in Las Vegas reported that a man in a mid-1980s Cadillac had enticed her into his car and had molested her. At the time of Carla's disappearance, police were distributing his sketch and publicizing the description of his car as a possible lead. The police said this man was just one of hundreds of possibilities they were considering. According to reporting in the Las Vegas Sun from May of 2000, detectives had filled more than 30 binders which took up two three-foot-long shelves in their offices with information, tips, and interviews. They interviewed dozens of people, including local sex offenders who were known to live in Carla's neighborhood, but nothing came of these interviews.

No one who was tested failed a polygraph test, including both of her parents who were eliminated very early on as suspects. However, there were two people who police believed may have been responsible for Carla's possible abduction and her disappearance. On October 14th, 1999, less than a week before Carla disappeared, a man named Kyle Bell escaped from a prison transport. Bell was convicted of murdering 11-year-old Jeannie North, a girl from Fargo, North Dakota. Jeannie left her home in June of 1993 to go rollerblading with friends when Bell abducted and murdered her. He was being transferred

along with other prisoners to a Supermax prison in Oregon. When the bus stopped for gas in Santa Rosa, New Mexico on October 14th, Bell escaped. He had hidden a key in the sole of his shoe that was missed during his strip search. He removed his handcuffs and leg irons and climbed out of the ventilation hatch onto the roof of the bus. He laid down onuffs and leg irons and climbed out of the ventilation hatch onto the roof of the bus. He laid down on the roof of the bus until the bus started to pull away, and then he slid off and ran. The prison transport company failed to even notice he was missing for nine hours. When Carla went missing, Kyle Bell was at large. And as he was a convicted child molester and a murderer, and Jeannie had been out rollerblading with friends when she was kidnapped, naturally the police believed that Bell could have come to Las Vegas and he could have seen Carla out riding her bike and abducted her.

Kyle Bell was finally recaptured in Dallas, Texas on January 9th, 2000. He had made it all the way there and even rented an apartment with a fake ID. When he was featured on a segment of America's Most Wanted, one of the employees for the apartment complex called in the tip and ended up collecting that $50,000 reward for turning him in. Police were not ever able to tie Bell's movements to Las Vegas, and he was never conclusively tied to Carla's disappearance. One suspect who does seem a lot more likely to have been potentially responsible is serial killer Curtis Dean Anderson. Anderson was a serial predator and murderer. He was sent to San Quentin in 1992 for kidnapping a friend's wife at gunpoint and forcing her to drive him

to Oregon. He was released from San Quentin in May of 1999. On August 12, 2000, he kidnapped an eight-year-old girl, Midsy Sanchez from Vallejo, California, who was walking home from school alone. He held her captive for two days, but she was able to escape when he left her alone in his car. He was arrested and eventually confessed to multiple murders, including the kidnapping murder of seven-year-old Gianna Fairchild, also from Vallejo, California. Gianna was abducted in December of 1999. Just like Mitzi, she was walking home from school when he kidnapped her. Her remains were later discovered near San Jose, California, 60 miles from where she lived, in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He ultimately pleaded guilty to her murder and was sentenced to

300 years in prison. Anderson also confessed to the abduction and murder of seven-year-old Amber Schwartz-Garcia in June 1988 from Pinole, California. He kidnapped Amber while she was jumping rope in front of her house, forced her to drink alcohol, and drove her 13 hours to Tucson, where he killed her and buried her in Benson, Arizona. He also had other adult victims in both the United States and in Mexico. Given that the girls who Anderson horrifically murdered were all Latina and all around the same age, and the circumstances of their kidnappings were all so similar, the police and the FBI tried to link Anderson to Carla's disappearance. Vallejo police determined that Anderson was in Las Vegas in March of 2000. He had even surrendered a Nevada driver's license to authorities in California. According to reporting from October 2000, Vallejo police

did not confirm to the Las Vegas Review-Journal the exact date that Anderson turned over that license. According to the FBI, police also found a receipt in Anderson's car when he was arrested after Mitzi's kidnapping. The receipt was from October 20, 1999, the day Carla disappeared, from 1.41 p.m. from a cigarette store in Las Vegas, only 1.1 miles from Carla's house. Police have stated that Anderson was confirmed to be at doctor's appointments in San Jose, California the day before, October 19th, and on October 22nd. San Jose is about an eight-hour car ride from Las Vegas. According to the Review-Journal, when Anderson was arrested in 2000, receipts, plural, were found in Anderson's pockets that linked him to Las Vegas. The FBI has never definitively said

that Anderson is responsible for Carla's disappearance, but it seems clear that he was back and forth to and from Las Vegas on occasion. When he died in prison in 2007, maps of Nevada were found in his cell, marked with X's, and of course the FBI followed up on those. They went out into the desert to inspect the spots marked on the map. The FBI evidence response team searched for Carla with ground-penetrating radar twice in 2020 and again in 2021, but unfortunately Carla has not been located. As far back as January of 2000, police began trying to match Carla to any unidentified child remains that had been discovered across the country. They have repeatedly told the Review Journal that they were hoping Carla was alive, but admitted that the likelihood of her being dead increases as each day goes by. In 2002, police released an age-progressed sketch of Carla. The police reported

that there have been several additional sightings of Carla over the years, and that they always follow up on any leads that they receive. For the 20th anniversary of her disappearance, they have further age-progressed her photo, showing how she would have looked into her 20s, and finally, how she'd look at age 30. Despite the fact that they have had no answers for almost 25 years, Carla's family never gave up on finding her. Carla's parents never moved out of the home they lived in, hoping that one day, she'd come back. The family participated in a press conference in 2019 on the 20th anniversary of Carla's disappearance, in which her dad was photographed holding her favorite doll. In 2019, her parents donated DNA samples and hoped that there may someday be a match in the DNA

database. We talked recently about the advances in forensic genealogy, which has been responsible for solving some remarkable cold cases. Unfortunately, in this case, with Carla being missing, there's nothing to compare. If her remains were found someday, of course, Othram would be the lab that could identify her. We want to share this quote from Carla's sister, Rosie. It's amazing how people can wait like this and go on with their lives. It's not easy, When Carla was last seen, she was wearing a blue jacket, a blue and white striped shirt, and red pants. Her fingernails were painted green, and she primarily spoke Spanish. Carla has a medical scar on her abdomen from her appendectomy and a small mole above her right eyebrow. As with all the missing persons cases we share,

we'll share the photos we have, and if you have any information about the location of Carla, you're encouraged to reach out to the Las Vegas Metro Police Homicide Division at 702-828-3521. The FBI is currently offering a reward of $5,000 for information leading to Carla's location. Thanks for listening. And if you're enjoying the podcast, please leave us a review and consider joining our Patreon. We want to be able to keep bringing you these important stories and we'd appreciate the support. When you join Patreon, you'll get access to ad-free versions of all the episodes, along with our swing shift bonus content, where we go a bit more in depth after the episode and offer more theories on the cases. Thank you again, and always remember, what happens here, happens everywhere. Thanks for listening. Visit sinspod.co slash subscribe for exclusive bonus content and to

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