The Deck - Mary Kathleen Rodriguez (5 of Spades, Texas)

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

Our card this week is Mary Kathleen Rodriguez, the 5 of Spades from Texas. For more than three decades, the question of who killed 26-year-old Mary Kathleen Rodriguez has hung over the town of West Odessa, Texas. Known as Kathleen to those who loved her, the live-in nanny was found brutally beaten to death inside the home of the couple she worked for. Although the case has changed hands from one detective to another, the original facts of the case remain the same. There was no sign of forced entry, meaning Kathleen almost certainly knew whoever came to the door that night. And the one person who could have been on the other side of that door is still at large. If you lived in or near the 1000 block of Clendenen Avenue in West Odessa, Texas, in December of 1990 and have information regarding the death of Mary Kathleen Rodriguez, please reach out to the Criminal Investigation Identification Department of the Ector County Sheriff’s Office at 432-335-3050. You can also submit a tip anonymously to Odessa Crime Stoppers at 432-333-TIPS (8477) or at https://www.333tips.org/.   View source material and photos for this episode at: thedeckpodcast.com/mary-kathleen-rodriguez Let us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media. Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuck Twitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuck Facebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllc To support Season of Justice and learn more, please visit seasonofjustice.org. The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers.  Instagram: @ashleyflowers TikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkie Twitter: @Ash_Flowers Facebook: /AshleyFlowers.AF Text Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Our card this week is Mary Kathleen Rodriguez, the Five of Spades from Texas. For more than three decades, the question of who killed the 26-year-old, known to everyone who loved her as Kathleen, has hung over the Ector County Sheriff's Office in West Odessa, Texas. Kathleen was beaten to death, inside the rental house where she worked as a live-in nanny for a married couple and their two kids. The original detective on the case took one look at the scene, and knew two things. One, this had not been a robbery. And two, whoever did this had done it in rage. But a few big questions still hangover Kathleen's case three and a half decades later. With no sign of forced entry, how did the killer get in the house? Was the married couple home when the murder

occurred or were they two hours away? And most troubling of all, what role did the same couple play in a death that happened just three months earlier. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck. It was the week between Christmas and New Year's back in 1990. A quiet time in Odessa, Texas, an oil and gas city on the flat West Texas desert. Christmas lights were probably still hanging in and around the home where 26-year-old Mary Kathleen Rodriguez lived with the family she nannied for.

a rental house on the 1,000 block of Clandonan Avenue, on the working-class west side of town. That house was fairly quiet when Mary's boyfriend, Billy Vincent, drove by on the Sunday after Christmas. The only sound from the other side of the door when he knocked were the family's dogs. Billy hadn't heard from his girlfriend for a couple of days at that point, and not being able to reach her by phone and now in person gave him an uneasy feeling. So he did something that he wouldn't normally do. He reached out to the couple that she nannied for, Edda and Eddie Bryant. He reached Edda by phone in Sweetwater, Texas a couple of hours away. She'd been visiting her mother in the hospital,

and their two little girls were with them. But Kathleen wasn't. Sensing Billy's concern, the Bryant's told him there was a window in the back of the house that they didn't lock and they gave him permission to climb through so that he could see if Kathleen was inside. The unfortunate reality is that she was. Here is then-Lieutenant Carl Rogers. On the evening of December 30th,

the Ector County Sheriff's Office got a phone call from a third party indicating that a deceased person had been found in a residence out in West Odessa. To everyone who loved her, Mary Kathleen Rodriguez was just Kathleen. Kathleen had grown up just over 300 miles north of Odessa, in a small panhandle city called Pampa. Her mother, Mary Ellen Rodriguez,

passed away in January of 2025. But a couple of years before, she sat down for what would be her only recorded interview about her daughter. The conversation was with a podcast called Behind the Line, run by Odessa Crime Stoppers, and hosted by Susan Rogers, an investigator Ryan Kelly.

She grew up here in Tampa. She was in my first born, and she went to Lamar school, and she was a very, very sensitive child. And she'd like to be around kids. And as she got older, she liked to cook. She could make the best biscuits you ever ate. And she liked to make French fries and just regular teenager.

Kathleen started nannying around the time she turned 18. She'd worked with two families before meeting the Bryant's. First, she started babysitting for them. And then she moved in. It turns out they may have been the last people to see Kathleen alive. When we were able to finally make contact with Eddie and Edna Bryant, who were out of town on that particular night and came back the following day, Eddie Bryant made the comment that when he arrived back at the house,

that the way things were in the house looked very much like it had looked prior to them leaving two to three days earlier. Today, Carl Rogers is the director of the Ector County Medical Examiner's Office. But when the call came into the sheriff's office, he was working for the criminal investigation division. He's been a Texas peace officer for 50 years. That Sunday night in 1990, Rogers was paged out to the scene a couple of hours after Billy Vincent alerted authorities. What he walked into was an older house in significant disarray, dirty dishes everywhere, clutter on every surface. None of these were clues, though,

because Eddie Bryant said that's just how they left things. But Rogers says one room in the house didn't fit that pattern. The middle bedroom where Kathleen was found. In the middle bedroom, there was some appearance in that bedroom that there may have been some type of disturbance in the room. A small end table was turned over. There were items thrown around on the floor, clothing items and that sort of thing. There was an electric iron that was on the floor there alongside the bed as well.

There was a door that led from that room into another bedroom, and that door was off the hinges. Kathleen herself was laying face down on the bed, her feet hanging off the end, still fully clothed in a green top and green pants that Rogers would later learn was her favorite outfit. On the floor by the bed, in addition to the iron and the overturned end table, there was also a half-full sprite bottle, the significance of which would only become clear later. There was no evidence of a sexual assault, but there were obvious head injuries and a large pool of blood on the mattress around Kathleen's head and some smeared blood that investigators believed had come from the family's dogs

moving through the room before deputies arrived. Kathleen's body was sent to love. for an autopsy the next morning. The forensic pathologist who performed it, a man named Dr. Ralph Erdman, issued his official finding about a week later. Cause of death, blunt forced trauma to the head. Manner of death.

Homicide. Dr. Erdman had concluded that Kathleen had been struck more than once with a blunt object, the size of something like a four-by-four piece of lumber, or a baseball bat. Dr. Erdman described the primary injury as being an upward blow with a blunt object, an upward blow with a blunt object. He specifically pointed out damage to the chin and the broken nose.

He also noted damage to the upper and the lower left cheek areas and the lower lip. Erdman believed Kathleen had been standing at or near the foot of the bed when she was hit multiple times with some kind of blunt object. The blows caused her to fall onto the mattress where she died. And based on the blood spatter, he told Lieutenant Rogers something that haunts him. He felt that she could have lived based on the evidence, spatter on the sheets where she was apparently still breathing while she was down. He had estimated that she could have lived as long as up to 12 hours.

There was no four by four, no big. baseball bat, no weapon of the kind Erdman had described. But there was that electric iron at the foot of the bed, and it had blood on it. When Rogers took it to Erdman later and asked whether the injuries could be

consistent with a blow from that, Erdman told him, yes, it was definitely a possibility. Now, there was no sign of forced entry anywhere in the house. Whoever had been in that bedroom with Kathleen, Rogers was sure, was someone

that she had known or someone she had let in. And strangely, though her purse had what looked like blood on it, the $52 in cash that had been partially pulled out was still left inside. I never felt that robbery was the primary motive for this. I felt like there was a level of rage that occurred here that probably stemmed over something else. So the big question is, who hated Kathleen enough to do something like this to her?

The obvious person investigators started with was her boyfriend and the person who discovered her body, Billy Vincent. The two had been seeing each other about two or three times a week for the previous nine months or so. Like a lot of people in that part of West Texas, Billy worked in oil field services. By every account from the people closest to her, Kathleen and Billy were infatuated with each other.

But, and this is a big but, their relationship had one complication. Billy was married. Though based on what Kathleen was telling her friends, that was about to change. This is Kathleen sharing the information with her friends who shared it with us. He had told his wife that their relationship was over. They were no longer sleeping in the same bed. Those friends told investigators that Kathleen had been telling him not to leave, especially not around Christmas and not in a way that would blow up his family.

She liked the relationship the way it was. From a distance, that is the kind of friction a homicide investigator pays attention to. A cheating husband, a woman caught in the middle, the wife at home who might or might not have known what was happening. Well, she definitely knew about it after because Rogers interviewed her and Billy. Even gave Billy a polygraph. But he passed with her. without a problem. Our producer attempted to reach out to Billy, but was unsuccessful. Despite the complicated nature of their relationship, Rogers didn't talk to a single person in

Kathleen's life who had ever seen Billy raise a hand or even his voice to Kathleen. So Rogers shifted his focus to the other couple who was a dominant presence in her life and the people who may have been the last to see Kathleen alive. Edda and Eddie Bryant. From what Lieutenant Rogers remembers, Eddie, too, worked at an oil field company on the north end of Odessa, and Edda did bookkeeping out of the house.

But money seemed to be tight. And Rogers believes that the family was behind on rent. The Bryant's were renting that house. They had been there, according to their information, and what I remember, about two, two and a half months. There was also some indication that we had talked to the owner at the house at one point, and they told us that they were in the process of trying to remove the Bryants from the house.

Kathleen took care of the Bryant's two young daughters in that house, both under age nine. The exact nature of the arrangement between Kathleen and the Bryans isn't fully nailed down, but Lieutenant Rogers never found any evidence that the Bryants were paying Kathleen. It seemed to him that they more or less had an arrangement that gave Kathleen a place to live, and in exchange, when the Bryant's needed her to babysit, she did. And she made her own money working part-time at cactus foods, this grocery store where she earned about $135 a week. Kathleen didn't drive, and so anywhere she needed to go, she relied on Edda to take her. The Bryant's gave Rogers a timeline of their movements from when they left Odessa a couple of days after Christmas to the day that Kathleen was found.

They had left on Friday afternoon for Sweetwater. Edda had stayed in Sweetwater with her sister at the hospital where her mother was admitted, while Eddie had gone on with a friend down to Kingsland a few more hours away to hunt. They told Rogers that they had not heard Kathleen was dead until Sunday night when they got a phone call. Not from Billy, but from Kathleen's closest friend, Bambi Marker. Edda was the first to know. She then called Eddie down in Kingsland, who drove back overnight, reaching Sweetwater either late Sunday night or first thing Monday morning.

From there, they drove back to Odessa together. Rogers ran every piece of that alibi down. He checked with the motel where the Bryant stayed at Friday night, with the hospital, with Edda's sister, with the friend in Kingsland. And he couldn't find a single witness on either end to suggest that one of them had slipped back to Odessa during the weekend. But there were two parts of their account that did stand out to him. Lieutenant Carl Rogers remembers that both Eddie and Edda Bryant were cooperative when he spoke to them about the murder of their live-in nanny. But the way that they shared information stood out.

They gave us the information that they gave us regarding their whereabouts and when they had left and what their time frame had been and that sort of thing. It was very matter of fact, not necessarily indifferent, but just matter of fact. And though nearly every part of their story checked out and matched up, there was one part that didn't. The couple's stories about the last hour they spent at the house with Kathleen before the drive to Sweetwater, those didn't match. Eddie told Rogers that the last time he saw Kathleen, she was lying on the bed in the middle bedroom, alive and well.

Eddie said that he and both of his daughters went out to the car first and Edda was the last one in the house with Kathleen. for a minute or more before Edda finally came out and they drove off. Now, Edda's version was pretty similar, except she says that when Eddie went out to the car, he only took one of their daughters, and the other she kept inside with her. It's a flag.

I mean, it's concerning. Edda never denied that she came out of the house after the others. Her denial was that she was in the house alone with Kathleen. Just to clear this up, Rogers asked Eddie and Eda to take a polygraph. The polygraph operator in the case of Eddie Bryant said that he was unable to pass Eddie on the polygraph. And then in regard to the polygraph on Eta Bryant, he stated that she had just straight up failed the polygraph. Rogers was getting a bunch of red flags when it came to this couple.

What he did not have yet was a motive. But that picture began to come together as Rogers spent the next few weeks interviewing Kathleen's closest friends. Through Bambi, investigators learned that Eddie had a temper when he drank. And around Christmas Day, he was drinking a lot. On Christmas Eve, six days before Kathleen would be found dead, Kathleen tried to take a bottle of whiskey away from Eddie at the house. And what she later told Bambi was that Eddie, tore up the house, and he and Edda had gotten into what Bambi described to investigators

as a big disturbance over it. But our reporters never found a record of the police being called that night. Kathleen left and spent Christmas Day and the day after at Bambi's house, where she ended up getting sick. Bambi noticed thin red streaks running down each of Kathleen's cheeks that day, about a quarter inch wide. When Kathleen laid down to sleep, she was breathing so heavily Bambi got worried about her. She was finally well enough to go back to the Bryant's house on the 26th. But Eddie wasn't the only problem. In the weeks before Kathleen was killed, Edda had allegedly been taking things that didn't belong to her. Bambi told investigators that Kathleen had been complaining that Edda was stealing her money, both out of her wallet and

from places she had hidden it. Kathleen had started handing money from her paychecks over to her boyfriend Billy to hold in a separate account where Edda couldn't reach it. By the time Kathleen was killed, Billy was holding $152 for her. She was saving up to leave. Mary Kathleen had told the boyfriend and had told a couple of her close friends that she wanted to get out of that living arrangement and wanted to get out into a place of her own again. She had had enough of feeling like she was being used.

And that was the way the friends put it to us. She said that she felt like she was being used for both her money and for her babysitting abilities. According to a police report, Billy stated that he had given Kathleen a necklace for Christmas. A day or two later, Edda asked to borrow it for a party. Kathleen refused because she was afraid that if she let it out of her hand, she would never see it again.

And then there was the phone bill. The Bryant's house. had one landline in it, and for whatever reason, it was in Kathleen's name. The Ector County Sheriff's Office still has the actual bill in the case file. Southwestern Bell, statement dated November 11, 1990, mailed to Kathleen Rodriguez, with a previous balance of $623 already passed due, and a new total of $713.11. And Lieutenant Rogers says Kathleen was telling people about, out that bill in the weeks leading up to her death.

She had told her friends that apparently she was upset with Edda, because Edda had, according to Kathleen, had run up the long-distance phone bill on that phone to about $700. And that she needed for Edda to pay that money to be able to take care of the phone bill. Rogers says Kathleen told her friends that she had a plan to get her money back.

Edda was waiting on a lawsuit settlement check that was expected to arrive at the end of the week on Friday, December 28th, the same day that the Bryant's left for Sweetwater. The settlement was connected to one of several civil suits Eda had filed at the time. Kathleen's friends had been telling her, the day that check lands is the day you confront her. And from what Kathleen had told a couple of her closest friends, she had more than a phone bill to put on the table. The accusation back at that time from the Friends was that Mary Kathleen had said that she was in possession of hot checks or hot check notices related to Eta. And that she was going to use that as leverage, apparently, and tell Eta that, you know, either I need you to either pay the phone bill or I'm going to show these hot check notices or hot checks to Eddie. In Texas in 1990, writing a hot check, a check that bounces, was a misdemeanor offense, and a pattern of them meant misdemeanor charges and fines.

The check notices in Edda's name, according to Kathleen's friends, were exactly the kind of paperwork Eda did not want Eddie to see. Kathleen was reportedly going to tell her, pay the phone bill, or these go to your husband. But the day before that was supposed to happen, Thursday, December 27, Kathleen was still sick. That day, Edda drove her around for hours. First to the emergency room, where Rogers confirmed the visit with the ER doctor who diagnosed Kathleen with an ear infection and wrote two prescriptions.

Then she took her to cactus foods to pick up her paycheck, then to a liquor store next door to cash it, and then to a pharmacy to fill the prescriptions and then home. Sometime that afternoon, sick and in bed, Kathleen handed Eddie $5 and asked him to go grab her something. something that is the smallest clue that might unlock this whole case. A sprite. That is the Sprite bottle, still partially full, that Rogers would find on the floor of the middle bedroom three days later. And that day, that entire day to the ER to pick up her check, Kathleen was wearing her favorite green outfit.

It's interesting that when her body is found, Late afternoon on Sunday, three days later, that is the same clothing that Mary Kathleen was wearing on Thursday. When investigators asked the Bryant's what they had last seen Kathleen in, the Bryant said, a black warm-up suit or maybe a purple shirt. But no one outside that house has been identified as having any contact with Kathleen after Thursday afternoon. And she was in a green outfit when she died.

The second interesting thing involved the medication she picked up on Thursday. On Sunday, when we found those medication bottles in the residence, there was only one pill that was missing from each bottle. It appeared that she had only taken one dose of the medication since Thursday. We talked to the Bryants about that, about if they had any explanation, she had been sick for that period of time, sick enough that she went to a doctor, and nobody had any explanation as to why she might not have taken her medication over those couple of days. And then there was the iron police had found on the floor. In our interviews with the Bryant's later on, one of the Bryants told us that that was normally

kept in a hallway closet, and the other Bryant told us that it normally stayed in a different cabinet elsewhere in the house. But they both contended that. that that's where the iron would have always been kept had it not been out to be used. We were also told by Edda Bryant that she had just used that iron to iron a shirt on Thursday night before they were to leave for Sweetwater on Friday. And she said that she did not have an ironing board, and so when she ironed clothes, she ironed them on the floor. Neither Bryant could explain how or why that iron with blood on it was on the floor at the foot of the bed by the time deputies walked into the middle bedroom on Sunday night. At this stage of his investigation, Lieutenant Rogers had a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing to the Bryant's, but no smoking gun per se.

That is until he learned something about the Bryant's history that made this muddy case feel crystal clear. The couple had been connected to another death, just three months prior. Three months before Kathleen was beaten to death inside Edda and Eddie Bryant's house, the Bryans had been standing in the front yard of another house a few miles away in broad daylight at the center of a deadly fight that multiple eyewitnesses had watched. It started with the Bryant's daughter and another little girl having a bicycle collision in their neighborhood. Both girls ran home crying. Eddie and Etta got in the car and drove over to confront the girl's father, a man named Paul Shaw.

They found him at his father-in-law, Paul Ryeburn's house, and they got into it. The fist fight ensues between Eddie Bryant and Paul Shaw and Etta Bryant. And Paul Ribern is with a heart condition. He gets involved in it apparently trying to break it up. Somewhere during the course of this, according to the witnesses, he is attacked by Eddie and Edda Bryant there in the front yard. And the witnesses, multiple witnesses, said that Eddie had picked up a two before out of the front yard and had beaten Mr. Bryant with that two before.

And that at some point in this exchange, Edda Bryant had got her hands on the two before and that she also used the two before to beat Paul Wright. Mr. Ryburn was subsequently taken to the emergency room where he ultimately passed away that night. Paul Ryburn's autopsy was performed in Lubbock by Dr. Ralph Erdman. And despite the front yard fight, Erdman ruled that Paul Ryburn's death was due to natural causes. There was a lot of feeling on some people's part that if I was man with an existing heart condition, I might die of a heart attack as well. if I've got two people half my age beating me with the two before. But nonetheless, that was the ruling.

Without a homicide ruling in Paul Reiburn's death, the DA's office wouldn't prosecute either Eddie or Eta for their actions. Three months later, when Kathleen Rodriguez was killed inside that same couple's house, her autopsy was performed by the same Dr. Ralph Erdman. Important note here. Erdman's ruling on Kathleen was not in terms. dispute. Kathleen had clearly been killed by blunt force trauma to the head, and Erdman correctly ruled her death a homicide. But even though Rogers had lots of circumstantial evidence, the single pill,

the sprite, the phone bill, the green outfit, and contradictory statements, in his mind, it was all still a theory because he had no witnesses, a polygraph he knew wouldn't be admissible, and suspects with an alibi, kind of. The ME concluded that Kathleen, had died at least 24 hours before she was found on that Sunday night, so sometimes Saturday. The Bryans were definitely not home then. But remember, Lieutenant Rogers told us that she might have lived for up to 12 hours after she was attacked. That means she could have been attacked on Friday afternoon, right around the time that the Bryant's left for Sweetwater. And then she could have died Saturday morning. But there are a lot of butts and mites and coulds and coulds,

in those sentences. So Rogers didn't take the case to the prosecutor, and no charges were ever filed. The only charges that did get filed over the ensuing years were against the ME, Dr. Ralph Erdman himself. He was charged with seven felonies for falsifying autopsies across three Texas counties. Erdman's name was suddenly a liability

in any case that he had touched. And Rogers saw this as his chance. He still didn't have enough to walk into a courtroom for Kathleen's death. But Paul Reiburn's? He had eyewitnesses to the beating, including Paul Reibern's wife and his teenage grandson. And now an Erdman ruling that no one had to take it face value. If a new medical examiner could re-examine Ryburn's autopsy and call it a homicide, Rogers thought that they could put Edda and Eddie Bryant in front of a jury.

And this would be in certain. of Kathleen's investigation too. A conviction might be the thing that could finally demonstrate a pattern of violence by the Bryant's. In 1993, Rogers took the Ryburn file to Ector County's new medical examiner, Dr. Sparks Vizi, and the new ME was willing to reinvestigate. We exhumed Mr. Ryburn's body from the grave, re-autopsied the body, and their conclusion at the end of the autopsy, the second autopsy,

was that Mr. Ryburn had died as the result of a heart attack brought on by the assault. And Dr. Visi changed the manner of death ruling in the case at that time to homicide. Upon the change in the status of the case and it now being considered a homicide, the sheriff's office obtained murder warrants. for both Eta and Eddie Bryant.

And this is in 1993. This is three years after the death of Mary Kathleen Rodriguez. So the murder warrants were obtained in 93. We executed those warrants when Eddie and Eda were located returning to Odessa from a family funeral down in that area. We located them returning to Odessa on the area. the interstate and they were subsequently arrested and brought back to Odessa.

Eddie was tried first, and a Texas jury, even with multiple eyewitnesses, and a body exhumed and re-autopsied, brought disappointment. The case ultimately went to the jury and the jury returned a guilty verdict, guilty, on one of the lesser included charges. and that charge was assault causing bodily injury, which at the time was a Class A misdemeanor charge, six months probation. And at that point in time,

the district attorney's office decided, with the result of that trial being a conviction on a class A misdemeanor, as opposed to a felony murder charge, that they were not going to pursue the murder charge on Edda Bryant, and as a result of that, the charges on Eta were dropped. And prosecutors in Kathleen's case decided not to move forward with charges. I think Mary Kathleen's case was never prosecuted because we just didn't have the evidence that was necessary, probably to even get a warrant. You know, there were no witnesses that we

ever found to her case. Anything that we found evidence-wide, that tied to that case, that evidence tied to anybody, it tied to someone that already lived in the house, and there was a reason there for that evidence to maybe be in that house. What your evidence indicates to you or what you feel that you know about a case is not always the same as what you can go into a courtroom and prove. Our reporting team reached out to Eta and Eddie Bryant for comments.

Eddie replied that everything is in the past and said to leave it there and not to contact him again. Our efforts to reach Eda, both by phone and mail, as of this recording, have not been successful. Records show that the couple was divorced at 1996 and Rogers believes that they've since moved to separate towns. The hot checks caught up with Eta. In 1992, she was convicted of theft by check of $200 or more, but less than $750 or more. but less than $750, which is a misdemeanor. She was sentenced to a year of probation, and Eddie's drinking ultimately landed him a DWI and jail time.

In 1997, he pleaded guilty to driving while intoxicated for the second time, a misdemeanor, and was sentenced to 120 days in a local jail. His driver's license was suspended for a year. Rogers left the sheriff's office in 2000. To his knowledge, and from our own research, no charges have ever been filed against anyone in Mary Kathleen Rodriguez's case, and no grand jury has ever even been convened. Kathleen's sister-in-law, Amy Rodriguez,

has been married to Kathleen's younger brother, Ben, since 2004. Amy never met Kathleen, but when she and Ben had a daughter, they decided to carry Kathleen's name forward. Amy says that Ben was nearly 12 when Kathleen was killed, and nobody told him the truth of what happened until he, was an adult. Even now, he still can't talk about her for long without it bringing up strong emotions. He just said it was like losing her twice. Amy says what hung over the rest of Mary Ellen's life was not just losing her daughter, Kathleen, but the way that the investigation

seemed to come to a close. I think Mary Ellen felt like they just dropped it. They couldn't figure it out so it was just the end of it there wasn't going to be a resolution so I think just trying to come to terms with the fact that there wasn't going to be a resolution was hard homicide investigators was always one that got away and this is sort of mine that that got away regardless of what I think regardless of what I think I know I never got it to a point that I felt like that there was enough, never felt like we had what we needed to be able to qualify to obtain an arrest warrant in the case, much less be able to take it to trial. Rogers has another theory, this time of what would crack a case this old.

Fresh eyes in this program may be what provides that for this. I'm only one investigator. My team back in 1990, we were only one team. At this point in time, new investigators, new eyes on a case. I'm a firm believer in that. If there were people back in 1990 that knew more than what they were willing to share with us in 1990, they're 35 years older today. And, you know, later in life, a little more wisdom maybe. maybe somebody is willing to share something today

that they didn't feel comfortable with or didn't feel right about or whatever their circumstance from not sharing it 35 years ago. Somebody knows something about the death of Mary Kathleen Rodriguez in 1990. And frankly, it's time to do the right thing and tell somebody that can do something with it.

For Amy Rodriguez, for Kathleen's brother Ben, for the family that lost Mary, Ellen last year who are still waiting for answers, they continue to wait for that someone to do the right thing. I would like to see an harassed Anna understand a confession. I don't know that I'll ever get it, but if we know who did it, they need to pay. When we asked Amy what she would say to whoever did this if they were out there listening,

she answered without hesitation. She was loved, and it wasn't fair to have her life ripped away from her. She had a full life ahead of her. She wanted to get married. She wanted to have kids. And that was stolen from her. They stole it from her. If you lived in or near the 1,000 block of Clinton Avenue in West Odessa, Texas,

in December of 1990 and have information regarding the death of Mary Kathleen Rodriguez. Or if you have ever heard anyone talk about what happened in that house, please get in touch. with the Criminal Investigation Identification Department of the Ector County Sheriff's Office at 432-335-3050. You can also submit a tip anonymously to Odessa Crime Stoppers at 432-333-tips. That's 432-333-8477. The deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit the deckpodcast.com. I think Chuck would approve.