[TENSE MUSIC]
[BALL CLATTERS]
Christie and I, we were young, we were happy,
we were enjoying our lives.
I never really thought anything like this would
have happened to Christie.
Your best friend is missing?
How could she be missing?
[TENSE MUSIC]
We were just gamblers at the casino,
having a good time with other people.
The last we know is we see her walking out of Thunder Valley
Casino at 1:13 in the morning on October 5, with a man
by the name of Mario Garcia.
And then she was never seen nor heard from again.
Do you remember the first time that you
saw the video of Christie walking out with him?
I absolutely remember that.
She moved away.
She moved away from him.
Look at that.
Yeah, I still remember her arm going
like this, saying, get off me.
Now surveillance cameras have captured her leaving the casino
with an older man.
Her family is understandably frantic, and her parents,
Pat and Debbie Boyd--
Debbie and Pat have been beacons of hope in this situation.
They have endured the unimaginable, of not knowing
where your daughter is.
Debbie turned that pain into passion.
[DRAMATIC MUSIC]
I want my daughter back and I want her back now.
I may be 5-foot-1 and blonde, but they've just
met a barracuda, and the fight's on.
I'm just going to ask you straight out,
did you kill Christie Wilson?
No.
I had nothing to do with her disappearance.
All rise.
I think he thought he was going to beat
the case the entire time.
He figured no body, less evidence.
I can walk away from this.
He never thought he was going to be convicted.
Guilty of a violation--
Yes!
And when he was convicted and went to prison,
he still had a piece of information,
and everyone wanted it, and he knew it.
[SOMBER MUSIC]
Was she in an ocean?
[WAVES CRASHING]
Was she in a ditch?
For 15 years, I never went to bed without wondering,
where is she?
Where did Mario Garcia put her?
And we have some campgrounds here.
You'll have campgrounds on the other side, too.
What happened to her, Mario?
How could she simply disappear after she was with you?
I don't have answers for that.
It really hurts our feet.
[HELICOPTER WHIRRING]
How long have you been looking for Christie Wilson?
Since October of 2005, we pretty much
have been continuing to look for her.
Even after they knew she wasn't coming back alive,
they kept looking.
Even after Mr. Garcia was convicted, they kept looking.
It was important to finally close
the case and work on remembering Christie
for the beautiful person she was, and not a case.
We needed to take the mystery out
of this for Debbie and her family.
We wanted to find her to show Mario, you're not going to win.
You're not winning this, and we're
going to find her and bring her home to the family.
[THEME MUSIC]
[TENSE MUSIC]
[SOMBER MUSIC]
Christie and I were definitely soul sisters, for sure.
We grew up together in school and just loved pretty much
doing everything together.
Tiffany DeVries says her best friend, Christie Wilson,
just had a knack for making her laugh.
[CHATTER]
I picture her in our front room just dancing and laughing
and having so much fun.
I could be having the worst day, and she would always
be there for me.
We always knew that no matter what,
we were there for each other.
But Tiffany was not with Christie in the early morning
hours of October 5, 2005.
That's when a surveillance camera in a California casino
captured Christie walking into a parking lot
with a man she met that night.
That was really scary, because we didn't know where she was
or if she could be alive.
Christie was then only 27 years old.
Her mother, Debbie Boyd, can hardly
believe how much time has passed.
You know, I try not to think of it too much,
because it actually takes me to a very sad place.
Since the moment Christie vanished,
Debbie vowed not to rest until she
knew what Christie's killer had done with her body.
I'm her mother forever.
And I was not going to give up.
Please help us.
48 Hours has been covering the Christie Wilson
case since 2006.
Christie and Mario come out here.
It began like so many of these stories
do, with a concerned boyfriend telling authorities
that his girlfriend had gone missing.
I loved her.
And I know she loved me, and we cared about each other
very much.
On the evening of October 4, 2005,
Christie's boyfriend Danny Burlando
says she went to the Thunder Valley Casino
to play blackjack.
Did it surprise you to hear she had been at a casino
that night?
You know, it didn't.
Because recently, she had been telling me
she'd been playing some blackjack.
Back in 2005, Tiffany DeVries was a young newlywed.
She's thought about why Christie left the casino that night
with a stranger, and she has a theory.
But sometimes I think, well, what if, you know,
someone put something in her drink?
Debbie was aware her daughter had begun gambling,
partly because she was between jobs and low on money.
Her boyfriend Danny felt Christie was gambling too much.
What's the last time you actually talked to her?
At 10:28 PM, Tuesday, October 4.
We had a 55-second conversation.
This is the actual casino video of Christie taking that call.
I told her to come home.
And she was like, OK, I'm finishing up.
I'll be home soon.
But when Danny awoke, there was no sign of Christie.
He began leaving dozens of desperate messages
on Christie's cell phone.
A quarter after 10:00 on Wednesday.
It's now been 24 hours since I talked to you last,
and I'm worried sick about you.
Please call me.
If you're OK, call me.
If you're not OK, call me.
Let me know what's going on.
Danny filed a missing persons report.
Investigator Don Murchison interviewed Burlando back
in 2005, and says Danny was very cooperative.
Anything that I wanted from him when I was at that residence,
he allowed me to have.
Murchison says investigators soon found their prime suspect
when that casino video surfaced.
They were able to track down a 53-year-old man named
Mario Garcia by his player's casino card.
Sheriff's deputies arrested and held him on a weapons charge.
Christie Wilson came and sat on my left,
between me and another individual.
In 2006, Mario Garcia told 48 Hours what he says
happened in the hours before Christie disappeared.
We were at that table for a period of time,
until that table got hot.
She asked me, hey, you want to go with me to another table?
And I said, sure.
Their night of gambling ended just past 1:00 AM, Wednesday,
October 5.
Garcia claimed that he and Christie walked to his car
and then went their separate ways.
And he suggested that Christie may have
met someone in the parking lot.
But wouldn't that be seen on camera?
Well, they don't see that she got in my car, do they?
[TENSE MUSIC]
They don't see where she went, correct?
Some 3 minutes and 41 seconds later,
Garcia's car reappears on the cameras,
and it looks as though he's the only one inside.
She hasn't called any family, any friends.
All the way up here.
Investigations Commander George Malim
helped coordinate a massive search for Christie
through the rugged and varied terrain of Placer County.
We utilized search and rescue people and their vehicles,
and they drove every road that they could, every driveway,
looked in every culvert, and still nothing was found.
Among the searchers was Christie's heartbroken older
sister, Stacie.
You want to hear details, but you don't.
It's just, I get this image in my head of, god,
what she must have been going through, and--
[SNIFFLES]
The physical searches turned up nothing.
But then investigators began looking
into Mario Garcia's past, and what they found was chilling.
You don't cross Mario.
You don't cross him, especially if you're a woman
and you're alone.
You don't cross him.
[OMINOUS MUSIC]
[CHIPS CLATTERING]
[STATIC]
[TENSE MUSIC]
Even though Mario Garcia was the last person seen
with Christie Wilson, to some he appeared
an unlikely murder suspect.
He was a project manager for a local hospital,
married with two teenage boys.
I am, and I have been, happily married.
Your husband is your destiny.
And with him, I have that feeling.
I just have that connection.
Garcia's wife Jean defended him.
He is a family man.
If he is not working, we will take the kids for sports.
And his son Kris, then 19, said he's a great dad.
He was always there for us.
He'd always come home, make sure we all sit at the table.
We're just a good family.
The family lived in a house on five beautiful acres in Auburn,
California--
gold country.
With Mario, I always feel good about him.
But investigators were not about to take Jean's word for it.
Four days after Christie disappeared,
they went to Garcia's home to question him
and ran a criminal background check.
And that's how they found Wendy Ward,
a woman from Garcia's past.
When I first met him, I found him
to be very intelligent, very articulate, very warm.
Wendy Ward met Garcia in 1978 near Oakland, when she was 26
and he was 27, and they began dating.
I would say a very supportive person.
It felt like he cared a lot.
But Wendy says he also had a temper,
and he reached a boiling point after she
ended the relationship.
He grabbed her one night and drove off with her in his van.
He was holding my neck, or he was holding my head.
And he says, if you do anything, you do anything,
I will take your head and I will smash it.
I think he said to me, take off your clothes, or something
like that.
And I said, no.
I just was clawing, scratching, whatever I could do.
Then he started to choke me.
I couldn't breathe.
Did you think you were going to die?
I did.
I really did.
She says he raped her, and then took her back to his apartment.
He pulled a gun out of his cabinet,
and he held it to my head.
And he pulled the trigger.
He says, well, it wasn't loaded this time.
But basically, I can come and get you any time I want.
Wendy says he raped her again, and then he
casually made himself a sandwich,
ate it, and drove her home.
I'm surprised that I actually am alive.
I'm very lucky.
Wendy immediately went to the hospital and police arrested
Garcia, but the court case stalled for two years
before prosecutors offered him a deal.
I figured it's better than nothing, and let's do this,
and then let's move on.
Garcia agreed to plead guilty to one count of assault
with a deadly weapon, and was sentenced
to 18 months probation.
Believe it or not, Garcia says he's
the one who was railroaded.
She made allegations that were not true.
There was a gun involved, wasn't there?
There was no gun involved.
You pled guilty to assault with a deadly weapon,
and there was no gun involved?
You just offered to plead guilty?
I possessed guns.
But there was no--
we had a stormy relationship.
When you say stormy relationship, did you hit her?
No, I did not.
Wendy never forgot about Garcia, but she moved on.
Until October 2005, not long after Christie
went missing, when she was tracked down
by Detective Murchison.
And when you heard that Christie Wilson disappeared,
and the last person to see her alive
was Mario Garcia, what was your reaction?
I felt sick to my stomach.
Wendy told Murchison what happened with Garcia,
and she said there was something else about Garcia
they needed to know.
I felt after my own incident with him,
that he could very easily do this again with someone else.
It wasn't long before something terrible involving
Mario Garcia happened again.
My younger sister and I were pals.
We were friends.
She was a lot of fun to be around.
She was very outgoing.
Tom Davis's sister Lynette dated Mario Garcia after Wendy
in 1979.
It too was a volatile relationship,
and Garcia was upset with Lynette
because she ended a pregnancy with his child.
But the couple still celebrated Christmas
with Lynette's mother.
After dinner, the three of them got into Lynette's car.
The streets were dry, weather was clear.
Retired officer John Cave was the chief accident investigator
for the Oakland Police Department.
That Christmas night, he got a call
that a car had plunged into the water near the Oakland airport.
The witnesses said the car pulled over
to the right shoulder.
They drove by.
The car accelerated.
[ENGINE ROARS]
And there was a ledge into the pier and the car
shot off that ledge, out into the water.
And that's where it sunk.
[SOMBER MUSIC]
[WATER BURBLING]
Garcia was the only survivor.
I panic.
And eventually I took my seat belt,
and I opened one of the windows.
All this rush of water came into the car.
I got out, and everybody else, I presume, got out.
He told police Lynette was driving,
but they couldn't confirm who was behind the wheel.
If in fact Mario Garcia was the driver,
and he intended to kill Lynette and her mother, I mean,
it's not a very efficient way to get rid of somebody, is it?
It worked, didn't it?
And if he was the driver, he got away with it.
Cave wanted to question Garcia further,
but Garcia got a lawyer the next day.
Why, if it was just a simple accident,
would you not talk to the police,
and would you hire a criminal lawyer?
It's the thing to do.
It's the legal right of every citizen of the United States,
and my attorney advised me not to talk to them.
[GEESE HONKING]
After the accident, a heartbroken Tom
reached out to an old friend from his hometown.
Incredibly, it was Wendy Ward.
As they talked, she asked how his sister was doing.
I said, yeah, she was killed in a car accident, involved
with this guy named Mario Garcia.
Mario Garcia?
It goes beyond disbelief.
She says, I used to date him.
I was involved with him.
I have rape charges against him.
No charges were ever filed against Garcia for Lynette
and her mother's deaths, but Debbie Boyd
had heard all she needed to about Mario Garcia.
You're not fooling anybody, and especially not me.
And I will continue to pursue you and pursue you and pursue
you.
[OMINOUS MUSIC]
[TENSE MUSIC]
[RADIO CHATTER]
After three weeks of searching, Placer County authorities
made a tough decision to charge Mario Garcia
with Christie's murder, even though they
hadn't found her body.
Her mother Debbie Boyd worried there wasn't enough evidence.
The thought of him getting off on this case,
once again, scares the living daylights out of me
for every woman.
It was a large case to put together.
Garen Horst, the Placer County deputy district attorney
at the time, had the unenviable task
of prosecuting the county's first no-body murder
trial in September 2006.
So what do you believe happened to Christie Wilson?
She went out of the casino with the defendant.
At some point in the vehicle at the casino,
he incapacitated her.
He was probably putting her in the back seat
so that when he drove away, nobody would see.
As far as what he did afterwards,
that's anybody's guess.
Was she in your car?
No, she never was inside my car.
At some point in time, she says that she left her cell phone
in the casino, and we embrace.
And that was the end of the conversation.
Investigators did later find Christie's phone in the casino,
but there's no footage of her returning to get it,
and no footage of Christie getting into Mario's car.
But Horst says the evidence proves that Christie
was inside the vehicle.
One of Christie's pulled hairs was found in that trunk.
[CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKING]
Crime scene investigators also found tiny drops of her blood
on the back seat and the door.
Why is it that the DNA on the door,
claimed to be of Christie Wilson,
was the only thing that was found?
Why is it that the DNA from my sons, my wife, and other people
that were in the car were not found?
By your own admission, you cleaned the car.
I cleaned everybody else's DNA except Christie Wilson?
That's the only thing they found.
So how did it get there?
What's your reaction when the defense insinuates
that was planted?
It greatly angers me.
They couldn't defend what was there,
so they had to say it was planted.
The prosecution says the evidence
that incriminates Garcia is as plain as the scratches
on his face and his body, left by Christie as she
fought for her life.
Did you get the scratches from Christie Wilson?
No, absolutely not.
But the morning after that trip to the casino,
several of Garcia's co-workers say
they saw scratches on Garcia's face,
and he visited the eye doctor.
Those are injuries that I receive through poison oak
and falling from a tree.
Yet Robert Royer, an emergency room doctor
who sat at the same table as Garcia at the casino,
told investigators he could clearly
see Garcia's face that night.
How far is Mario Garcia from you?
2 feet?
Less than a meter.
Did he seem to have any injuries on his face?
I didn't see any injuries, no.
And I'm reasonably good at making
those kind of observations, because that's
what I do for a living.
Why wouldn't the emergency room doctor see those?
I cannot answer what he saw or didn't see.
And no one can answer why Christie
left the casino with Garcia.
Those who knew her have wondered if he
had put something in her drink, and the prosecutor
presents evidence to support that theory.
A week after Christie disappeared,
Garcia searched online for information
about how authorities test for date rape drugs.
But when Garcia takes the stand, he
insists he's done nothing wrong.
I wanted to tell the court that I
am very sorry that Christie Wilson is missing,
but I don't know where she's at.
The jury doesn't get to hear about Garcia's violent past,
even though he comes face to face with a reminder.
[CRYING]
To show her support, Wendy Ward travels to Sacramento
to meet Debbie and Christie's family for the first time.
I couldn't stop hugging her.
I just wanted to hold her and hug her, and all the family.
[MURMURING]
They're just going through so much.
Wendy heads to court with the Boyds
for closing arguments, where Garcia's lawyer suggests
that no one even knows if Christie is dead.
Are you saying that Christie Wilson may still be alive?
Do we know if she's dead?
All rise.
The jury concluded--
Would you please hand the verdicts to the bailiff,
please?
--that it did know.
"We, the jury in the above entitled action,
find the defendant, Mario Flavio Garcia,
guilty of a violation--"
Yes!
[TRIUMPHANT MUSIC]
Absolutely, justice has been served.
It's about time.
Now, if he's any kind of a man, he'll
tell us where he disposed of my daughter.
[AMBIENT MUSIC]
At Garcia's sentencing in January 2007,
the Boyds still held out hope that Garcia
would disclose where he left Christie's body in exchange
for a lesser sentence.
I suppose that at this hearing I'm
supposed to ask for mercy, for forgiveness,
and to show remorse.
However, I will not do such thing.
I did not kill Christie Wilson.
I am innocent.
[TENSE MUSIC]
Garcia's sentence, 25 years to life,
is doubled because of his assault on Wendy.
When other charges were added, his total sentence
became 59 years to life.
At this point, I don't ever expect
that he'll disclose what he did with Christie.
The truth is out there.
And Mario told me that we have to found Christie,
and that's the only hope he has.
Jean Garcia did not know that her own family
would play a key role in the search for Christie.
What do you think happened the night
Christie Wilson disappeared?
See the timeline of her disappearance on Facebook
at 48 Hours.
[GENTLE MUSIC]
Mario Garcia's murder conviction in 2006
was hardly the end of the case for Christie's mother.
Garcia was sent to prison and the years dragged by,
but he refused to say what he did with her body.
It's been the mystery at the center of this case,
and it has gnawed at Deb's soul.
Debbie is forever changed.
Mario Garcia changed that.
He changed me.
The loss of her daughter was crushing,
but Debbie knew she couldn't allow
Garcia to control her life.
We made a commitment that he is not going to take our marriage.
He's not going to take the marriages of our children.
He's not going to disrupt our jobs.
We are not giving him any more.
That was not easy, as Garcia filed one appeal after another.
You can't move forward completely
when you have all these appeals.
You know, it's like you move forward five steps,
and then you're back in it again.
Pat Boyd, Christie's stepfather and a former San Jose
detective, knew the stakes were high.
Because it's not like we had a tremendous amount of evidence.
A small amount of evidence being lost,
the case would have been lost.
The concern is always there for the appeals.
But it was not a distraction that it took us away
from our tasks and our mission to try to find Christie.
Nuno Tavares, an investigator for the Placer County District
Attorney's Office, and fellow investigator Don Murchison
had been on the case from the beginning, and never let go.
Why is it so important to the two of you to bring her home?
Because the family needed her.
They needed a place where they could go
and to spend time with her.
We wanted to give Debbie and her family back control.
Up until this point he controlled
the location of Christie's remains,
and that didn't sit well with me.
They are incredibly dedicated.
They are very experienced.
Their balance between tough cop and teddy bear
is the appropriate balance.
Placer County District Attorney Morgan Gire
gave Nuno and Murch, as Debbie calls them, the green light
to keep looking for Christie.
And they ran with it, going to extraordinary lengths
to find her, no matter how dirty the job.
We actually pumped an entire septic tank out.
We pumped out the entire 2,000 gallons of sewage
and went through it by hand.
That is determination.
First of all, good morning and thank you.
All those searches over all those years turned up nothing.
But the investigation entered a new phase in 2017,
when Tony Lopez, an anchor for the CBS station in Sacramento,
conducted an interview with Debbie.
She directed some carefully chosen words to Garcia.
I now view him as a lost soul, and that I often wonder--
I want him to know that I often wonder how he ever became
the man that he did.
If Mario were to pass away with me
not having had the opportunity to sit and just talk to him,
I know I would forever regret it.
Debbie says Garcia spotted that interview
and began writing letters to her and Placer County officials.
Garcia apologized for what Debbie had gone through,
but did not accept responsibility
for Christie's murder.
I wanted Christie back so bad that I thought, you know what?
Let's see how far this goes.
Deb had struggled with the idea that, you know, what do you
negotiate with a man who has been
convicted of the murder of your daughter, who
knows where she is?
But ultimately, Debbie changed her mind.
She could not bring herself to negotiate with Garcia.
I was sitting there thinking, what on Earth
are you doing, Debbie?
Get a grip.
This would be such a disgrace.
He will not use my daughter's body as a bargaining chip.
And we certainly weren't going to agree
to let him out in exchange for the location of her remains.
So really the only option was, find her.
Nuno and Murch reapproach Garcia's family.
Investigators knew Jean Garcia had divorced Mario
after his conviction.
She had reached a point where she no longer believed Garcia.
She said she was very convinced that Mario
had something to do with Christie's disappearance
and murder.
The investigators also reached out to Garcia's sons, Kris
and Andy, and walked them through the four days
in October 2005 after Christie went missing,
but before police began questioning Garcia.
What did they see?
How did their father behave?
We went through every day, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.
Then he got to Saturday, and that's
where the story got a little bit interesting.
Kris had an important soccer game.
He saw his dad working on a tractor, working frantically,
and had a crazed look in his eye as he was
working around the property.
And he told Kris, I'm not going.
And it was a very firm, I'm not going.
Kris found that out of character for Mario.
The investigators asked Kris to accompany them
back to his childhood home, which the family lost
in 2007, to pinpoint the spot where
he had seen his father working on the tractor.
He said, it was right next to our detached garage,
right along the road.
It was barely 100 yards from the Garcia house.
But if he had been digging in that very spot with a tractor
just days before deputies searched the property, why
hadn't anyone noticed?
It wasn't just a small area where he had landscaped.
There was landscaping all over the property.
You got to remember, he has time.
Mario has four or five days to really, really do this right.
Mario did an extremely good job of making the terrain
look like it just fit the area.
And Nuno and Murch also knew that cadaver dogs
had roamed the property back in 2005, and had found nothing.
Cadaver dogs are a tool like any other tool that we use.
Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.
A year passed, and in August 2020,
investigators decided they would take another look.
This time, they brought with them
a company that specialized in ground-penetrating radar,
or GPR.
Nearly the entire five acres were scanned,
and technicians pinpointed eight spots
where there were voids or pockets beneath the surface.
The first two holes produced nothing.
You've struck out twice.
We've been going for a long time.
Three is now my favorite hole.
It's my favorite hole, because that's where
Mario was working that day.
And how far did you go?
We started pulling back about 25 feet,
pulling just a couple of inches at a time.
Went about 18 feet wide, and out of the corner of my peripheral,
I see a bone popping up out of the ground.
[DRAMATIC MUSIC]
I was a little bit short of breath, I'll tell you that.
The blood was rushing.
And we stopped everything, we froze everything.
It was the moment of truth.
Had Nuno and Murch found Christie Wilson?
[TENSE MUSIC]
[SOMBER MUSIC]
Buried on what was once Mario Garcia's property,
Nuno and Murch had found what looked like a human bone,
but they needed confirmation.
So they called in archaeologist Cindy Arrington.
She immediately told them the bone was human,
but the detectives weren't convinced.
He's like, you're not close enough.
I said, oh, yes, I am.
[CHUCKLES] And he said, get closer.
So they had me get down in the trench to really double
check, triple check.
OK, yes, it's human.
Human, but was it Christie's?
More identification work needed to be done.
But finding any human bones on Garcia's property was big news,
and they immediately shared it with the sheriff and the DA.
They came to the conclusion that we
need to get this news to Debbie quickly.
And they knew how they needed to get it to her.
For years, Debbie and Wendy Ward have
helped the detectives teach a class
for homicide investigators.
And just two months earlier, someone in the class
asked Debbie a question no one had ever asked before.
Mrs. Boyd, if your daughter was ever recovered,
how would you want to be notified?
And I just said, please don't ever just call me on the phone.
Nuno and Murch flew to Scottsdale, Arizona.
It was nearly midnight when the Boyds' doorbell rang.
Debbie was asleep on the couch.
Pat answered the door.
He opened up the door, and he looked at us,
and he got a big smile on his face.
And he said, hi, guys, how's it going?
And then you could see him pause,
and you could see things starting to click,
the gears in his head.
And I got up, and I just was in a fog, and I looked at them.
And they said, Debbie, it's Murch, it's Nuno.
And I said, what are you doing here?
So that's when we told her that we
had found human remains on Mario's property
that we believed were Christie's, but we couldn't
confirm that.
[TENSE MUSIC]
I remember her that night saying,
is it OK to be happy or joyful?
She kept looking around going, is that OK?
We didn't know whether we should open a bottle of champagne,
what-- there was just a lot of hugs, some quietness, sometimes
just sitting there letting it sink in.
Debbie made plans to fly to California to tell her daughter
Stacie, and before she left for the airport the next morning,
Nuno and Murch heard that their team had found
nearly an entire skeleton.
And it was definite-- the bones were Christie's.
[OMINOUS MUSIC]
Detectives say they've found the remains of--
Last seen in 2005 in the parking lot--
Wilson's killer is already in custody,
serving more than 50 years for her murder.
It was the first--
[SOMBER MUSIC]
Days later, Debbie shared the news with the world,
and made sure to thank Nuno and Murch.
Today is a day that absolutely reflects some of the greatest
level of perseverance and police work
that a victim's family could ever ask for.
They brought two people home.
They brought my daughter home.
[MELANCHOLY MUSIC]
They brought my wife home.
You feel that you got Deb back?
Yep.
Tell me about that.
She can think of more than just, where is Christie?
Kris and Jean didn't want to speak publicly,
but they're grateful to have closure for Christie's family,
and their own.
Kris, Andy, Jean, they didn't ask
to have a dad and a husband who was a murderer, who
buried his victim on their property,
where they lived and played.
They didn't ask for that.
And then there were the other victims
of Mario Garcia who were hit hard by Christie's murder,
like Danny Burlando, her boyfriend at the time.
Didn't realize how much had really
been bottled up for 15 years.
I think I may have been judged, misjudged,
misunderstood through the process,
and that didn't really allow me to grieve and be
a victim in this whole thing.
Wendy Ward was also relieved.
She knows how lucky she is to have survived her own encounter
with Garcia, and has used art to help
transform the feelings that she's
held onto for all these years.
It helped shift those feelings into something positive.
What came up in me to create that
and to survive, and to say, no more.
Everyone involved takes pride that Christie
was found without making a deal with Garcia,
and the discovery lays to rest any doubts
about Garcia's guilt.
I mean, there's no greater proof.
The autopsy revealed that Christie's hand and nose
were broken, but it couldn't establish a cause of death.
Do you believe he strangled her?
I think that's very likely what occurred that day,
but we just don't know.
Those who loved Christie try to focus on the life she lived.
Her best friend Tiffany DeVries says
she's reminded of Christie by the little things she loved--
a song on the radio, or the way Christie danced.
For me, Christie has never been completely gone.
I've been carrying her spirit with me every day.
[WAVES CRASHING]
Debbie and Christie's father Dennis had Christie's remains
cremated.
In October 2020, to mark the anniversary of her death,
Debbie visited the pier in Capitola
where the family put a plaque many years ago.
This is a place that Christie just absolutely loved.
It was what she called her happy place.
Debbie says no longer having to wonder where
Christie is changes everything.
We can grieve the way that we should have been
able to grieve 15 years ago.
There's a peace about that.
I was so blessed to be her mom for 27 years,
and that I will carry with me forever.
[MELANCHOLY MUSIC]
[SOMBER MUSIC]
Listen to the My Life of Crime podcast with me, Erin Moriarty.
Known as the Doomsday Mom, her two children murdered.
Lori started referring to her children as zombies.
Inside the Lori Vallow Daybell trial.
How the jury found her guilty.
48 Hours, next on CBS.