and this is "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
- I started thinking maybe somebody took her.
- You knew something was wrong right away?
- She wouldn't ever not answer her phone.
- It was maddening. It was crazy.
- When the officer tried to speak with the boyfriend,
he was very confrontational.
- Did you contact this ex-husband of hers?
- Yes. There was a domestic violence charge
where her husband had been arrested.
- So your mom's not around.
- I was old enough to realize
something serious was going on.
- The last person Rita was seen with
was a suspect in a sex assault.
- I was trying to leave, and he kept, like,
pushing me down.
- Did he tell you what he was going to do to you?
- He said he was gonna kill me.
- There were just too many similarities
to really discount.
I knew something horrible had happened.
- Come on. Where the heck are you?
♪♪
- Hello, and welcome to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
Single mother Rita Gutierrez-Garcia
worked two jobs to build a better life for her children.
But after a night out with relatives,
she vanished.
Her family was desperate for answers,
but the investigation stalled.
Then, a breakthrough.
Could a woman who almost met the same fate
hold the secret behind Rita's disappearance.
Here's Keith Morrison with "Finding Rita."
♪♪
- It was a Saturday evening in March, 2018.
It was St. Patrick's Day.
And the downtown bars in Longmont, Colorado were noisy,
crowded, cheerful.
So, did anyone pay attention to the man
who moved about among them,
or wonder what he was thinking as he befriended strangers
at the bar, female strangers.
Well...
why would they?
This was a place to relax, to be happy.
Which is exactly what Rita Gutierra-Garcia needed,
to get out, forget her troubles,
to get a fresh start,
and wash that man right out of her hair.
Just that very day, Rita had broken up
with her longtime boyfriend.
- She was just like, "I'm gonna go out and have fun."
You know, "I don't even want to think about anything else."
- This is Diane, Rita's mom.
What did they plan to do?
- Well, it was St. Patrick's Day,
so they were just gonna go out and celebrate.
- Though, not too much. She was a single mom,
had three boys waiting at home.
- She was like, "I'm not gonna have a lot to drink.
"I'm just gonna go out and have fun."
- Don't worry, she said, she'd be with family.
And she'd be home early.
Her middle son, Roman.
- It was like any other night.
I mean, we're used to her being gone at nights
because she used to work nights.
- When his mom wasn't home, said Roman,
his older brother would be in charge.
This night was no different.
- She'd gotten ready and said goodbye to all of us,
and we said bye back, and she walked out the door.
- Her half brother picked her up
and they drove downtown to the pub district in Longmont.
It wasn't very big, most places within
a couple blocks of each other.
Throughout the evening, Rita kept in social media touch
with her two sisters, Jessica and Nicole.
- We knew that she was out. - She was out.
- She was posting stories on her Snapchat
throughout the night.
- At home, her boys went to bed
expecting to see their mom in the morning.
But when they woke up, Rita wasn't there.
This is her youngest son Reyes who was nine at the time.
- I remember me and Roman were trying to call her.
And she wouldn't pick up. I was scared.
Just being scared and worried.
- Right around then, Rita's mom Diane showed up
to take them to church,
and encountered worried boys and no Rita.
- I thought, well, maybe-- maybe she decided
to reconcile with David.
- That is, Rita's ex boyfriend, David Brehm,
the one she'd just broken up with.
Or maybe she just had too much to drink that night
and stayed over with family.
Anyway, they were sure she'd be home soon
because later that Sunday was a big family event,
a baby shower for Rita's sister Nicole.
She'd never miss that.
But she did.
- So that's why we're like, "Where's Rita?
"Why isn't Rita here?"
- Would she not show up for something of yours?
- No, she wouldn't just do that.
- All afternoon, into the evening,
Diane and her daughters kept calling,
no pick up, no call backs.
Just a deafening silence.
What happened in here?
Did you feel it? - Panic and fear.
- Right at the beginning?
'Cause you knew something was wrong right away.
- We knew, yeah.
- She didn't not-- ever not answer her phone,
or at least text you and let you know
that she's okay or she's somewhere,
so for her to not have her phone on, um,
wasn't Rita.
- What were those next few days like for you two?
- Horrible.
Definitely got worse.
- Your mind just automatically goes to the worst places
and the worst things you can think of.
So it was never like a-- "Oh, it's gonna be okay.
"Rita's gonna come home."
It was never a-- like an easy feeling.
It was always, like, and eerie feeling
of, like, just discomfort.
♪♪
- Monday morning arrived, but not Rita.
Diane tried to maintain a sense of normalcy,
drove her grandkids to school.
She didn't say much to them,
didn't want to alarm them.
- Our grandma, I feel like, tried to protect us.
They just didn't want to, like, scare us
or tell us something that we wouldn't be able to handle.
- After dropping off the kids at school,
Diane drove to David's mom's house.
That is, the ex-boyfriend's mother.
- And I said, "I don't know where Rita's at.
"She's not answering her phone.
"Is she with David?"
So she called him and he said, "No.
"She's not with me. Why would she be with me?
"She's probably, you know.
"She's probably off with some other guy."
- Some other guy. - Yeah.
- Full panic now.
- I was like, you know, "Come on.
"Where the heck are you?"
"And why aren't you returning my calls?"
And then the boys got out of school,
and one of her sons had a recital.
And then she didn't show up for that.
- First the baby shower, now the recital.
Very worried now, Diane called the local hospitals.
She wasn't there.
Could you bring yourself to think
that she'd been harmed somehow?
- Yeah, so I thought maybe somebody kidnapped my daughter.
- So Diane made the call she'd been dreading,
to the Longmont Police.
- The police were like, "Sometimes people just,
"you know, they just go off."
And I'm like, "Rita doesn't ever just go off this long
"without telling me," you know?
Um, especially with her kids.
- That was enough.
They assigned the case to detective Cody Clark.
- There were some things that weren't quite adding up,
some things that didn't really make sense.
- Oh, he had no idea.
Making sense of things would consume
the next four years of his life,
and span two states and two countries,
and at the center of it all, two women.
♪
♪♪
- It was like some alien creature
had snatched her.
Two days and no Rita anywhere.
So, detective Cody Clark went about looking methodically.
- We were just getting that first little bit
of information and we were trying to figure out,
what are some of the places that she could have gone to?
Who might she have reached out to?
And just trying to kind of piece together
those last few hours that we absolutely knew where she was.
- But to know what happened, Detective Clark
first had to know Rita, her customs and habits,
past and present, any little detail
that might put him on the path to finding her.
- So I initially start looking up
for some background information on Rita,
trying to learn who she was,
and figure out if there was anything
that I needed to be aware of.
- Was she the sort of person
who would want to disappear or not?
- Exactly, right.
Did she have a pattern of doing those things, yeah.
So that was a-- a huge part of it.
[indistinct chatter]
- And Detective Clark spoke with Rita's family,
who had a lot to tell him about the woman they loved.
Rita Gutierrez-Garcia was smart and kind,
and happy, someone who embraced life
and those around her.
- She was funny.
She had this little, you know-- she'd do this
when she was joking with you or just being a little silly.
She loved fashion.
Shoes, clothes, her hair.
Just always doing something with her hair.
- How is she as a mom?
- I think she was a fun mom.
She was a good mom.
She liked taking her boys out to dinner and movies,
and she loved to cook and bake.
There was always something going on,
but she didn't like the disappointing part,
So she would say, "I'm gonna tell--"
- You have to do that. - Yeah.
"I'm gonna tell your grandma."
Then I would be the one to kinda, like, you know,
get on them a little bit.
So I'd say, "You can't always be the fun mom."
[laughing]
♪♪
- Rita was the eldest of Diane's three daughters,
big sister to Nicole and Jessica.
- She had a really great sense of humor.
She was always making us laugh.
We used to call ourselves the Silly Sisters.
Or Sissaroos. [laughing]
She was quite the character. She was very thoughtful.
Sweet person, nurturing.
- She has a huge part of my heart.
- Rita married early, had her kids early.
But by her 30s she was divorced
and raising the boys on her own,
sometimes working two jobs, often at night.
- So she had to cram a lot into her life.
So I'd say she was a very productive
and complex woman.
- With plans, big plans.
- She was gonna be a paralegal.
And she was already job searching,
so she was very excited about that.
She was like, "I just want to have a better life
"for my kids," and she's like, "I know I can do this."
And I said, "You're damn right you can."
- She even got her very own first car.
- She was so proud.
I, myself, was like, "Oh, you could have got something
"more economical." [laughing]
But she's like, "Just be proud of me."
And I said, "I am." - What'd she buy?
- Uh, she got a 2005 Mercedes.
[exhales] - Yeah.
- So would she leave all that and just take off?
- Didn't make any sense right off the bat,
but it wasn't anything that pointed to us
thinking that there was any foul play
or anything nefarious going on either.
- Never assume, said Detective Clark.
Still, there was an urgent task,
and that was to take a closer look at the men
in Rita's life.
- We try to look for the people who are most likely
to have been involved, which would be former partners,
boyfriends, husbands, things like that.
- Sure. - People who knew them
and would have a reason why.
- And there was one person who stood out to Clark.
David Brehm.
Diane told the cops about Rita's on again,
off again boyfriend.
- It sounded pretty tumultuous,
that when things were good they were really good,
and when they were bad, they were pretty bad.
And yet, for whatever reason, they would break up
and then they'd get back together,
and break up, and get back together.
- And even though David himself
told Diane Rita was not with him,
Longmont PD had to check him out.
Of course they did.
So they called him.
- When the officer tried to speak with the boyfriend,
he was very confrontational and didn't wanna provide
a lot of information.
- David told the officer that his last contact with Rita
was by email on St. Patrick's Day,
the night she disappeared.
But when asked if he would forward the email,
David refused.
- And that kinda keyed, um, some concerns for him,
that, you know, maybe there was something else
that we needed to look at here.
- Wow, that's a red flag right in front of you there.
- Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
- So no more phone calls.
Now they went to see David in person.
- And this time...
this time was a whole lot different.
♪
♪♪
- It was when the police got involved,
that's when the cold reality hit Rita's sisters.
- When we were being interviewed
by the police department,
that was when it was the realest and the scariest.
Like, I was just bawling, crying, sobbing, begging.
Find her for us.
- Ex-boyfriend David did not sob or beg
when the police first spoke to him on the phone.
He seemed angry, defensive.
So detectives drove out to nearby boulder
where David lived, and this time,
they recorded the conversation.
And David, without being prompted,
offered this about his breakup with Rita.
David admitted there were issues.
He told the detectives that a couple of weeks prior,
he got into a pretty bad argument.
That, said David, was the last time he saw Rita.
And then, two weeks later, on St. Patrick's Day,
David sent Rita an email.
"Please talk to me."
And before Rita went out that evening, she replied...
- When we found out that she had sent him this email,
basically, telling him that, you know,
she didn't want to be around him anymore,
and to enjoy the rest of your life without me,
that obviously points us in that direction
of trying to figure out whether he was involved.
- So they tried to pin down where David had been
and what he had been doing that St. Patrick's Day.
David let the detectives take a look around his apartment.
Nothing stood out.
He also agreed to give them his DNA.
But David's behavior, though cooperative-ish,
was still unusual.
- He was very much focused on telling us
how to conduct the investigation
rather than telling us what exactly he'd been doing.
When a person behaves that way,
it doesn't make you wanna say,
"Okay, nevermind. I don't want to talk to you."
- Exactly.
It continued to kinda stir up a lot
of those feelings of unease.
- Detective Clark tried to explain to David
how the process worked.
- My job was to gather information
and figure out whether or not he had any involvement,
and the sooner that I could determine
that he wasn't involved like he claimed,
then the sooner I could start focusing my efforts elsewhere.
- So was David trying to hide something?
Or was he genuinely upset?
- He agreed to come to the police department
and-and do a polygraph examination
in order to kind of alleviate some of my concerns.
- David showed up at the police station
without a lawyer.
And even before the CBI agent got started...
David fell apart.
He answered every question.
But could not hold back the tears.
After two hours and five tests,
the results were in,
summarized in just one word.
Inconclusive.
- The examiner told me that ultimately the results
were inconclusive just due to the fact
of how emotional he was. - Yeah.
- He said, "I don't think this is your guy."
- By now, detectives had also spoken to David's mom
and confirmed his alibi for the night Rita went missing.
- We were able to pretty conclusively confirm
that he had been at his mom's house all evening,
and that he didn't know what Rita's plans were,
and that nobody else had seen him that evening.
- So how to explain David's emotional,
defiant demeanor.
- There was all kinds of misinformation
going around town about what had happened,
and it was making him more upset
about what was going on.
- Why would that make him more upset?
- There was allegations that he was involved,
which, I guess, was just making it even harder for him
to kind of focus on-- on helping the investigation.
- Perhaps, but when we sat down with David,
he told us that was the least of his concerns.
- I knew that I had no involvement with it,
so why concern myself with that.
To concern myself with what people may
or may not think, that's the last thing
I could care about.
- No, he said his mission was simply finding Rita.
- And if not finding her, finding out what--
who knows what and how to find out
what happened or where she is.
But that's where 100% of my attention was dedicated.
- As it was for Detective Clark,
who, by now, had learned about another man in Rita's life.
- There was a domestic violence charge
where her husband had been arrested.
Obviously, that's a huge piece of information.
- That is, if he could only find him.
♪
♪♪
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
I'm Craig Melvin.
When Rita Gutierrez-Garcia went missing,
detectives focused on her ex-boyfriend,
David Brehm.
The couple had just broken up,
but David had an alibi.
Now, investigators were digging deeper into Rita's past,
and they found something she kept hidden,
a secret that would send this case in a new direction.
Back to Keith Morrison with "Finding Rita."
- They found it buried in an old crime report.
It practically leapt out at Detective Cody Clark,
something in Rita's past he could not ignore.
She was a battered wife,
beaten and bruised repeatedly by the father of her three boys,
her ex-husband.
The guy's name was Gutierrez.
Royce Gutierrez.
For years, Rita had kept the abuse secret
from her own mother, Diane.
- I found out that, uh--
later on that he was being abusive.
- She didn't want you to know at first.
- She didn't-- she didn't want me to know.
And they got separated a couple times,
and she, you know, would go back,
and then, um, finally one day I just said,
"When you are completely ready to walk away,
"you will know."
- And Rita did know,
after one terrifying night when Royce held her down
on the bed and covered her mouth and nose
so she couldn't breathe.
And then he yelled and he beat her,
and when he finally let up, she sneaked a text to her mom,
"Help."
Diane called 911.
You've rescued her from a situation in a way,
or at least she has-- she's rescued herself,
but you were there watching. - She rescued herself.
But I helped her, yeah.
- Royce was arrested and was convicted
for assaulting Rita.
She filed for divorce.
And then there was trouble again
when Royce violated Rita's protection order.
And he was deported to Mexico.
So, an angry ex-husband with unfinished business?
- It was somebody that I wanted to look into
and learn more about. - I mean,
that's the obvious suspect in many cases.
- Absolutely.
Absolutely.
- Was it possible that Royce secretly returned to Longmont?
- Maybe something, you know, happened between them
and he wanted to do something else to her.
- Clark tracked down his Mexican phone number
and called him and asked him about Rita.
- He explained that he very rarely ever spoke with Rita.
Um, they had a decent relationship as parents,
um, but that the majority of their conversations
were focused on the boys.
- So where was he when Rita vanished?
Well, he certainly wasn't in Longmont, Colorado.
No way.
- I was able to confirm, uh, through
Department of Homeland Security that he had not been
in the country for years at that point,
and there was no record of him coming back
over the border into the United States.
- Dead end.
So Diane and Rita's sisters,
worried, upset, frustrated,
had a press conference.
NBC affiliate KUSA was there.
- Rita's my soulmate.
She's my older sister.
And I've never had to go a day without her
in my entire life.
- Rita...
You're my oldest.
Um, and you are Jessica's soulmate.
[sobbing] Nicole walked away
because she was really hurting,
and, um, we just want you to come home.
- Rita... - The boys need you.
And, um, please, if anybody,
Rita, or anyone out there, anyone seeing this,
please contact the Longmont Police Department.
- And she told them all just what it was like
to be her in that awful time.
- I just wanna scream inside.
She's my daughter, and...
I just need her back home. Um...
- Watching it all on a livestream
were Rita's boys.
- When they actually went on the news
for the first time, that's when, like,
the worry of it all set in.
- It hit you with a wallop at that point.
- Yeah.
Because we didn't know they were gonna do that.
And then, "Hey, they're on the news right now."
And that's for me when I get, oh, hey, this is for real.
This is happening.
- Suddenly, Rita's case was big news in Colorado.
- The search for a missing mother in Longmont.
- 34-year-old Rita Gutierrez-Garcia.
- Rita Gutierrez-Garcia left a Longmont bar
on St. Patrick's Day-- - ...just how worried
and devastated her family really is.
- She's been missing since March 18th.
- The search for answers is still going strong.
- Rita's story was so prevalent in the media
and out in the community, that-that everybody wanted
to know what had happened and were willing to help.
- Volunteers quickly mobilized and fanned out
across Boulder County to post fliers
and look for Rita anywhere they could think of.
One of those searching was David Brehm.
- I don't want anybody to understand the pain,
what it feels like to be searching
for your loved one.
It's a horrible circumstance to have to go through.
- With, in his case, suffocating guilt,
David told us.
Guilt for starting that awful argument,
the one that finally drove her away
just before St. Patrick's Day.
- If I didn't drink that beer that day,
she might still be here.
That day could have been the catalyst
to whatever happened,
but if it would have went differently,
we wouldn't be sitting here today.
- Nothing to do now but keep searching,
and very early on, Detective Clark encountered--
uh, was it a clue or just a coincidence?
Something like this had happened before
to another young woman who met a man
in the very same bar district.
- The immediacy of finding that out,
um, kinda made my heart skip a beat.
- Who was this woman?
And what happened to her?
- He had, um, begun, uh, strangling me.
♪
♪♪
- Detective Clark was stymied.
It seemed the whole town was looking for Rita.
But neither the search nor his investigation
had produced any real leads,
except there was this one clue.
In fact, it walked right over to find him.
A colleague thought Clark should know about
another active case about a woman named Kaylene,
KK to her friends,
and the hair-raising story of what happened to her
after a night at one of the very same bars
where Rita went before she disappeared.
It was four months earlier on Thanksgiving night, 2017.
Here is KK to tell the story.
- It was a good time just to get out
and listen to music with my friends.
- A casual meet-up for a group of 20-somethings
to let loose a bit after family dinner.
- You didn't want it to end.
- So that's why we ended up going to the afterparty.
- She and some of her friends kept the party going
at a house nearby, and then...
Was it the booze or something in it?
She began to feel unwell.
- Confused, nauseous, intoxicated.
I just wanted to go home.
- She'd arranged beforehand to call a friend for a ride.
But her phone was dead.
- So I plugged my phone in, trying to get it to charge,
and then that's where everything went to, like, a blur.
- She went outside to get some air,
and a guy followed her,
a guy she'd met earlier at the bar.
Now he'd unplugged her phone before it could charge
and handed to her, along with her purse,
told her something bad was happening inside.
They had to leave right away.
- He picked me up and just started walking
with me, arm around my waist and was, like,
carrying me because I could hardly walk or stand.
I was starting to get scared.
Um, but I didn't know what to do.
- The guy brought her to this house.
- It was really cold outside. It was, like, dead winter.
And I went inside, and-and that's kinda where
everything flipped.
- He told her she could plug in her phone
at the top of a flight of stairs.
It turned out to be a bedroom.
- He just started pushing me,
throwing me on the bed.
It's like your mind is going,
"What can I do to get out of the situation,"
but it's like, my body can't do that.
- Do you recall what happened after that?
- He had, um, begun, uh, strangling in me,
and then kinda, like, slapped me awake,
and then do it again, and...
- You can't breathe.
- No, you can't even swallow.
You can't breathe. You can't make sound.
And it just goes black.
- Again and again, she struggled,
tried to breathe, blacked out.
- I was fully clothed when he had started,
and I wasn't when I woke back up at some point.
- Did he tell you what he was gonna do to you?
- He said he was gonna kill me.
And he just laughed in my face.
You know, you go from, like, panic to fight mode,
to, um-- sorry.
- It's a hard thing to remember.
- But you go to where you're thinking in your head
about people that you love.
And you're never gonna see them again.
I think my last thought was I just wanted
to tell my mom I love her
and that I was sorry that I was such a brat.
- Then, finally, he turned away for a moment.
- And I just started running,
you know, screaming for help
and banging on the walls.
- She ran down the stairs,
and with her attacker chasing her,
she made it to the front door.
It was locked.
And that's when she saw in the living room
a man, a woman, and kids.
- I was like, "I won't call the cops."
Um, "I just wanna go home.
"Please let me go home."
- At that, she said her attacker backed off.
And living room man, the one with the woman
and the kids, told her he'd drive her home,
gave her a shirt to partially cover her nakedness.
- And we had been driving, and we stopped
at a stoplight or a stop sign,
and I got out.
- You just jumped out of the car.
- Yeah, I just got out and ran,
and I ran to my mom's house.
- Four blocks in the winter cold,
barefoot, all but naked, and she fell on the floor
at her mother's feet.
- A Longmont police officer drove Kaylene to the hospital
where Detective Sandy Jones met Kaylene.
- It was the worst I'd ever seen.
Her eyes had hemorrhaged and she had marks
on the back of her neck.
Um, she had bruises on her arms and her legs.
- The nurses took photos
and collected the evidence of rape.
- This was a horrible, horrible crime,
and I wanted to find him.
- So first she found the host of that afterparty KK attended.
And, what are the chances?
The house just happened to have a security camera,
which captured the moment handed KK her purse,
and her phone, and her charger
as she sat outside.
And then, here they are walking away.
The party host didn't know the guy,
so asked around, got a name.
Juan Figueroa, a name Detective Jones recognized.
- I knew that he was one of our cadets.
- Juan had once been enrolled in the explorer program
at Longmont PD.
He wanted to be a police officer.
- He did a ride-along with me when I was in the traffic unit.
- Chris Merkle, with the Longmont PD then.
- I remembered him, um, hanging out with me
being very talkative, and being, um, very gung-ho.
- But then Juan stole a police department taser,
and they caught him, and he was out.
And now he was a person of interest
in a sexual assault case.
- And we were going to family members
and talking with his friends and trying to find out
where he was or where he lived.
- No luck.
But then a break, a huge one.
A woman called Longmont PD.
It was Juan's housemate.
She gave police the address.
So Jones got a search warrant,
went to the house, and collected what evidence she could.
But what you really needed was a DNA sample
to compare with results of that rape kit.
The trouble was, Juan seemed to have gone underground.
Oh, he just wasn't around at all.
- No, I couldn't find him.
But what was around town, spread, apparently, by Juan,
was a poisonous story about Kaylene.
The story completely at odds with what she experienced.
What was his story?
- That I was drunk, and I wanted to hook up
and, um, I got upset because my ex-boyfriend
was going to find out, and so I cried rape.
- It was like she'd been attacked all over again.
She'd been injured, humiliated,
now desperately frightened.
And her attacker was still out there somewhere.
- I understand the police had to make a case
to arrest him.
They had to get evidence.
So then it made people be like, you're a liar,
or else he'd be in jail.
He would have been charged.
- She felt like everybody was judging her.
And she hid away. She tried to end it all.
What did you do?
- Um, I ate a bottle of pills, and I cut my wrists.
- She just felt like she was underground,
five feet underground,
um, and that there was no coming out of it.
- Kaylene's sister, Jasmine.
- It was hard.
It was like we were living a nightmare.
And it just broke my heart that she'd been hurt.
And what-- in our town that we call home.
And now, in March 2018, Detective Clark
and Detective Jones compared notes.
- So here's Kaylene.
- One woman brutally raped, the other missing.
Both had been at the same cluster of bars
just months apart.
Could they be related?
Security cameras captured Rita on Saint Patrick's Day,
talking with someone.
Was it Juan Figueroa?
♪
♪♪
- Where is she?
She's never gone for this long.
- Days had gone by,
and Rita had still not made it home to her boys.
But Roman, Rita's middle child,
held on to hope, or tried to.
- I tried to stay as positive as I could
and just think, like I never wanted to say the phrase,
what if she doesn't come home?
Because then I feel like that'd be me giving up.
- Detective Sandy Jones,
investigating the assault on Kaylene,
was worried that the same thing,
or worse, might have happened to Rita.
- What on Earth happened to her?
And if he had anything to do with this?
It was very scary.
Very, very scary.
- Well, in fact, according to reader's companions,
just before she vanished, a guy did try to hit on Rita.
- They specifically mentioned that there was a person
who had walked up to Rita
and tried striking up a conversation with her.
And they just kind of told him to leave
and to leave her alone.
- Rita's cousin said the guy introduced himself
as Juan,
Juan Figueroa.
And he did go away, but later,
said the cousin, sometime after 2:00 AM,
there he was again, outside in the parking lot
where Rita was waiting for her ride home.
Juan Figueroa. Did you know that name?
- I didn't.
He was not somebody that I was really familiar with.
- Until, of course, Clark spoke to Jones.
- He had been convicted of a few different, uh,
minor thefts and had been in jail numerous times.
- So you're looking for a guy who has shown a propensity
for making bad decisions?
- Yeah.
- Even so, there was no evidence that he was responsible
for Rita's disappearance.
Just because he was the last person
seen in the parking lot
doesn't mean that he was involved.
- No, but maybe, they figured,
maybe they could see him,
or even see him approaching Rita in the bar
or in the parking lot the night she vanished.
- Up and down the streets and alleys of downtown Longmont
were dozens of privately owned security cameras.
- We did a canvass of, I want to say,
ten or fifteen blocks of the downtown area
of every business, every, you know,
resident that had cameras in that area.
- How many hours of footage did you have?
- Oh, dozens.
One business may have several cameras
with different angles.
You know, over this, you know, several hour time period
that we had to look at.
- It was chaotic at first.
Like tearing apart the haystack inch by inch,
looking for some grainy image that might be Juan or Rita.
And then finally, just a glimpse.
But it was her.
It was Rita entering a bar in downtown Longmont
at 1:08 AM with her cousin and her cousin's boyfriend.
- It kinda helped start to fill in some of those pieces.
You know, because we knew
that they were at the bar that evening.
But what does that look like?
What were they doing?
Who else were they talking to?
Was there a fight?
There were so many questions that we had.
- Like, for example, could they prove Juan Figueroa
was at the bar that night?
Did Rita's cousin have the right name
the right person?
And yes, Juan was there.
Cameras captured him entering the bar
about 20 minutes after Rita.
And then minutes later, here he was again,
talking to someone off screen.
And pay close attention.
The person he's talking to briefly comes into frame.
It's Rita.
- And so now we want to know who else saw that conversation.
what was that conversation about.
Again, it just-- it opened up so many doors
because it finally started to focus us
a little bit more on what we needed to figure out.
And then, 1:52 AM, Rita walked out of the bar.
- That same person was seen waving at her,
trying to get her attention,
but she ignored him when she left the bar.
- A minute later, Juan made his way toward the same exit.
And eventually Rita ended up in the parking lot,
where the cousin said she saw Juan Figueroa.
Had he followed her there?
Trouble was, there was no video from that parking lot.
So what happened?
Did Juan assault her there? Did he take her somewhere?
Or had Rita, like KK, escaped?
Now, two detectives working two separate cases
were looking for the same man.
And once again, he was in the wind.
- We were trying to track him down,
but it always felt like we were a step behind.
- Oh, no, not just steps behind,
but miles across states and beyond the border.
Well, back home, they discovered a last,
perhaps desperate, call made from Rita's phone.
It was to 911.
♪
♪♪
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
I'm Craig Melvin.
Surveillance footage placed Juan Figueroa
with Kaylene the night she was attacked
and Rita Gutierrez-Garcia right before she vanished.
Now, detectives wanted to find Juan.
But they also needed proof he was involved
in Rita's disappearance,
and they were about to get chilling new details
about the night she went missing.
Here again is Keith Morrison with "Finding Rita."
- Spring, 2018.
- I felt like I failed her.
I couldn't do anything for my daughter.
- Diane Romero was broken.
No sign of her daughter, Rita, since St. Patrick's Day.
Feeling helpless, she placed every shred of hope she had
in Detective Cody Clark and the Longmont PD.
- They told us that they were going to take care of us.
They were going to help us.
- For me, it was about giving the family that answer
of where Rita was,
that they deserve that closure
of knowing what happened to her.
- To do that, investigators dug into
the bar's security camera video
where they saw Rita heading out the door.
And the guy watching her leave was Juan Figueroa,
the suspect in Kaylene's rape case.
But there was no video to show what happened
after she left the bar.
Except, Detective Clark got her phone records,
and there she was, eerily.
Not actually her, of course, but her phone.
He could see where it went,
middle of the night.
The phone put her near this parking lot
just behind the bars around 2:30 in the morning,
after which it slowly moved.
- So she ends up walking a few blocks to the north
and then her phone is stationary.
It's not moving.
It's not going anywhere for about 20 minutes or so.
And when we went back and reviewed
some of the other footage that we had found,
we found a vehicle that went into the same area
where her phone was stationary.
- What was the vehicle?
- It was a white pickup truck,
and it had orange construction marker lights
across the top, which is pretty distinct.
But one of those specific lights was actually out.
So it made it even more distinctive on the video.
- At 3:03 a.m., Rita's phone traveled again.
- But it's not moving like somebody walking.
It's moving so quickly, like somebody's driving.
- It's in a car. - Right.
- And right at that same time, 3:03 a.m.,
there was the truck, again.
- Her phone pings again in that area
and that same vehicle travels right through that area
at that exact time.
- A minute later, another security camera
caught the same truck.
And it wasn't just any truck.
Detective Jones confirmed it.
That was the truck Juan was driving
when she worked on Kaylene's case.
- It just continued to kind of push us in the direction
that he knew a lot more than-than we initially thought,
that he wasn't just the last person seen with her
before she left, but that he may have been
the last person with her period.
- And there was more Detective Clark gleaned
from Rita's cell phone records.
- At about 3:07 in the morning,
her phone dialed 911.
When the operator answered, there was nobody there.
It had already hung up.
- Dispatch called the number back twice.
[phone ringing]
But there was no answer.
They tried to trace the call
but couldn't pinpoint its location.
A 911 call for help and then nothing,
just an awful, deathly silence.
- My heart sank, and that's when I knew
that this wasn't just a missing person,
that something horrible had happened.
- And so he called her family into the police station
and sat them down and delivered the news.
Rita wasn't coming home.
- It was awful.
It was horrible to...
tear away that hope from them
that they had been holding on to,
and telling them to now prepare
for the absolute worst thing imaginable.
- But the family?
- I didn't want to accept that.
I still had some hope and some faith.
that she was still going to come back.
- And maybe it was hope, or simply denial,
but Rita's family was not about to give up.
In fact, they were just getting started.
They began meeting at this park not far from Rita's house,
holding vigils, strategizing about searches,
distributing fliers.
That's when Diane noticed something
that gave her a little comfort.
- There was this tree, and it was small,
and it was in March, you know,
so things aren't quite blooming.
It was kind of bare and it looked lonely.
So we started decorating this tree for Rita.
Then we just kind of made it our tree.
- But though the searching continued,
a harsh reality hovered like a cloud.
It was surely a body they were looking for.
- There was a part of me that wanted to find her,
more than anything.
And in the back of my mind like.
But can you deal with it if you find her, Diane?
You know, what are you going to do?
- Why was it so important to you to find her,
find her remains?
- Because she's our sister and we want her home.
- When you have a loved one pass away,
you lay them to rest.
You cremate them, you bury them.
We didn't get that.
- Imagine the task.
Find her, find her body
somewhere around Longmont, Colorado.
The trouble was, she could be anywhere.
Five miles away, fifty miles away.
Could be that way, or that way.
Or in the mountains behind me.
Back that way.
The task was virtually impossible.
Of course, we had to try,
and they certainly did, but not just for Rita.
Detectives Clark and Jones knew the key to finding Rita
and solving KK's case was finding Juan Figueroa.
By now, they had an arrest warrant for him,
for assaulting KK.
A virtually Colorado-wide search was on for him
and that truck of his.
- We started back talking the same thing
we had done before.
We went to his sister's house,
the two sisters that live in Longmont.
We went to his mom's house and I spoke to his mom,
and she had no idea where-where he was.
- They also contacted law enforcement agencies
around the country and told them
to be on the lookout for a white pickup truck.
What do you know?
Within a few days, they got a call.
Juan's truck had been spotted.
Not in Colorado, but a thousand miles away.
- When we learned that, it was like,
did he get away? Is this it?
Is this where the story ends?
♪
♪♪
- It was infuriating.
The man suspected of raping one woman
and possibly murdering a second was like a ghost.
And Rita was still missing.
And KK, Kaylene, was living in fear.
Where was Juan Figueroa?
- It was a lot of anxiety.
I wouldn't go grocery shopping.
I wouldn't go to the store for anything.
- You're always looking around you
to see if he's there? - Yeah.
I didn't know where he was.
- If he'd done it twice, he could do it again.
- Right. At any moment. - Yeah.
- And so trying to track him down became a priority.
- And then, investigators got word
the Department of Homeland Security
had a video they might want to see.
A white vehicle with plates matching Figueroa's truck--
and surely that was him inside it--
had just crossed into Mexico,
1,000 miles from Longmont.
- When we learned that he had gone into Mexico,
it was really deflating to kind of feel like,
did he get away? Is this it?
Is this where the story ends?
- Maybe not quite.
Detectives discovered he'd gotten himself a new phone,
and they were able to get the number.
They traced it to the town of Piedras Negras,
just across the Texas border.
- So we're kind of watching that
as we're trying to figure out what exactly he's doing,
where he's going, all of those things.
And for the most part,
that phone was super stationary.
- Somewhere here in Piedras Negras,
Figueroa was lying low, apparently being careful.
But if he got a whiff police were getting close,
then surely he'd flee again.
So how to catch him?
- Somehow they had to figure out a way
to get him to emerge from wherever he was.
And they had an idea.
- While he was in Mexico, Juan was actually talking
with several people, and was asking them for money.
- Well, if he's short of money, that might be a hook.
- Which is exactly what we did.
See, he wanted money by wire transfer.
So that was the first thing we knew.
If he's getting money that way,
then we can figure out pretty darn close
where he's at.
- A female friend of Juan's, once reluctant,
agreed to cooperate.
Call it an attempted sting.
First this, from the friend.
Hours later, Juan...
The next day, Juan again...
Figueroa told his friend to wire the money
to Piedras Negras.
So the cops gave her the money to use
and she sent it and Figueroa picked it up.
Which gave the detectives a better idea, at least,
of where he was, but getting an exact address,
arresting him in a foreign car,
extraditing him back.
Not so easy.
And then, totally unexpected,
they got lucky.
- We end up getting a call from a former employer of Juan's.
- Who told them he'd fired Figueroa for stealing.
So now he was more than happy to help catch him,
and he had an idea of his own.
- He told them that he had a job for him.
The job wasn't real.
It was made up, and he told Juan
that he was going to pay him
some exorbitant amount of money.
- The catch was that this premo job
was in Colorado.
It's like you've got voluntary deputies
working for you. [laughing]
- Yeah.
It was-- it was definitely a community effort.
- And Figueroa, apparently desperate for the money,
took the bait.
Remember, detectives had been monitoring his phone.
One day without warning, it started to move,
- And all of a sudden, it jumps over the border.
He was driving back.
The border crossing was in a little place
called Eagle Pass, Texas,
where a Customs and Border Protection officer,
just following procedure,
asked him what he had been doing in Mexico.
- He explained that he was at a funeral for his grandmother,
and the agent told him he was sorry to hear that.
Uh, when did she pass away?
And he couldn't answer that question.
- Oh... - And then he asked,
"Well, where was she buried?"
And he couldn't answer that question either.
And all of a sudden he started to sweat.
That kind of clued them in pretty quickly
that something was amiss.
The officer looked up Figueroa's name,
and that's when he saw it.
An arrest warrant for Kaylene's case,
wanted for sexual assault in Colorado.
A sergeant from the local sheriff's office
went to meet him,
but when he told Figueroa what the warrant was for,
Juan didn't seem too worried.
He was cuffed and taken into custody.
- Chris Merkle, the very detective
who'd met Juan Figueroa as a young police cadet,
went to Texas to pick him up,
and drove all the way back to Colorado,
19 hours on the road,
during which Juan talked almost nonstop,
his chatter picked up by the detective's recorder.
- Knowing that the person next to you,
on the warrant with Kaylene,
you know, raped and almost killed her,
and then knowing that we are pretty much sure
that he was involved in Rita's disappearance
and probably did something very similar
made for a really long ride.
- They towed Figueroa's truck back to Colorado, too.
- We knew that there was potential evidence
in that truck.
And so that was a big thing.
We really wanted that truck.
- Kaylene heard about the arrest, of course.
What were your thoughts right at that moment?
- It was mixed.
It was happiness, but also like,
okay, here we go.
- Relief, yes, and dread about having to face that man
in the courtroom.
And Rita's family thought now surely they'd find her,
or at least find out what happened.
- I personally thought maybe he'll just speak up right away.
You know, he'll say where Rita's at.
He'll say what happened.
- If only.
What they really wanted was it be some kind of answer,
any answer.
And they were about to get it.
That tied the knot. - That did.
♪
♪♪
- Four months after Kaylene was assaulted,
Juan Figueroa was sitting in a Boulder County jail
on rape and attempted murder charges.
But detectives were far from done.
They were still trying to build the case against him
for Rita's disappearance.
One thing was painfully clear,
what started out as a missing person's case
was now a homicide investigation.
Is it possible for anybody to understand what it's like
if your daughter is missing, presumed dead,
that police are investigating it as a murder,
and you don't know what happened to her?
- You don't know what's going to feel like
until it actually happens.
And I had people who I know who said,
"I know what it feels like."
You know, "I lost my child," and I'm like,
"You got to bury your child.
"I don't know where my child is."
- In desperation, Rita's ex-boyfriend, David,
even reached out to us back in 2018
to spotlight Rita's case
for Dateline's Missing in America series.
- Find information to lead to an arrest,
to her body.
Anything that would help bring justice
or bring her home.
That was my mission, every day.
- But over time, the hope of finding Rita,
or at least finding out what happened to her,
was slowly slipping away.
- Just searching, endless searching
to come to know fruition.
And no, it was-- it was a very difficult time.
- There was one thing, though.
Investigators have been bothered by it
ever since they seized Figueroa's pickup truck.
- A lot of people had told us that
that truck is a dump all the time.
- But now? Messy, yes, but clear to investigators
it had been scrubbed down many times over.
- Juan had done a very good job
of trying to clean that truck up.
- Still, if he cleaned it, maybe he missed something.
So they tore it apart, swabbed every surface,
and that's when they noticed, very faint,
a mark on the passenger seat.
- A stained area where it almost looked like somebody
had tried to clean that.
- They swabbed it anyway, sent it off to the DNA lab.
But...
- It came back as a mixture of numerous people.
So basically there were several different DNA profiles there,
and we couldn't figure out which one belonged to who,
essentially. - Had to be frustrating.
- Oh, it was incredibly frustrating.
- At dead end, they just couldn't tie Juan Figueroa
to Rita's disappearance.
But then the lab sent back another set of test results
from Kaylene's case.
They compared a sample of Juan's DNA to her rape kit,
and it was a perfect match.
- They were able to confirm that his DNA was on Kaylene.
- That tied the knot. - That did.
- They set a trial date, 2019,
and Kaylene would be the star witness.
But the thought of having to testify
about the worst day of her life
in front of the man on trial for raping her,
and the people who said she lied about it?
She wasn't sure she could do it.
- I was like, I'm tired of people thinking, like,
I'm-I'm trash, and I'm this skank
or something, and I just want it to go away.
- And even though the trial was still months away...
- I was getting messages after messages daily.
- Facebook messages,
calls and texts from numbers she didn't recognize.
What did they say, these messages?
- That they were going to, like, hurt my family and stuff,
and make sure they know, like, that I'm a liar
and I'm a slut and just very hateful,
hateful things.
- It got so bad, said Kaylene, that she fled Longmont
and secretly moved to the town of Greeley,
35 miles away, to lay low and try, at least,
to leave the past behind her.
A trial was months away, was quick for the law,
but torture for Kaylene.
And Diane, still searching for Rita...
When they went ahead with KK's case,
sort of full speed ahead, were you feeling like
they were abandoning Rita at all?
- No, no.
We knew that it was going to help Rita's case.
She's only gonna make it stronger for us.
- Christmas came,
the first Christmas without Rita.
For boys without their mother,
there was really nothing to celebrate.
So Detective Cody Clark decided to help.
- Thinking about her kids not having a mom
around for Christmas, uh,
hit a nerve with me.
I brought her boys Christmas presents.
I had really come to care about them as a family.
- When you think about her, is there anything in particular
that you miss?
- Her. - Just her.
- On Rita's birthday, they went to the little park
to decorate the tree that seemed to stand for her.
- I don't have her here to nurture and to--
to hold, but I'll just, like, touch the leaves,
you know, and the branches and just talk to Rita.
- She's there. - I just feel she's there.
Yeah.
- And through all the grief,
it was Diane who kept them all going.
- She's like the log of the tree,
and we're all the branches.
- My grandma encouraged us to just never give up.
Pray as hard as you can.
She will be found.
No matter what she will be found.
- But when and how?
It would take a miracle to find her
somewhere out here.
Or maybe Juan Figueroa would talk,
though it seemed unlikely. He had lawyered up.
No, Figueroa wasn't talking to the cops,
but he was talking.
Maybe too much.
♪
♪♪
- Welcome back. Detectives investigating
Rita Gutierrez-Garcia's disappearance were convinced
Juan Figueroa was involved.
They just needed more time to prove it.
But there was hard evidence linking him
to the assault on Kaylene.
Soon, Juan would face trial in that case,
and for investigators determined to find justice
for both young women, a conviction was crucial.
Back to Keith Morrison with "Finding Rita."
- While Juan Figueroa sat behind bars
awaiting trial for Kaylene's sex assault case.
He talked, talk nonstop,
just not to police.
Juan did his talking to his cellmates.
- I knew that he was telling them what was going on,
so it was just a matter of hearing it
from his own mouth.
And we eventually figured out how to
get that-hat bug in there.
- Meaning a hidden wire to record
whatever Figueroa was blabbing about.
The hope was he'd say something,
anything about Rita.
And sure enough, it took a while,
but here was-- well, it was something, anyway.
- He was trying to say that somebody else
had committed the murder, but that he was there
when it happened. - Oh, okay.
- Was-was what he was alluding to,
but that he had been the one who was responsible
for burying her body.
This cellmate was trying to kind of pry
a little bit more information out of him on his own,
and asked him where it was at.
- That statement, it kind of sent shivers down my spine
just because again, it clearly showed
that he was involved.
- Still, they wanted more,
said then prosecutor Michelle Sudano.
- We hadn't located her body.
We didn't have a crime scene or anything to go on.
And so, there was so much work that had
to go into building that case,
because not only were we proving
that Juan Figueroa was her murderer,
but we also had to prove that she had, in fact, been killed.
- This is really bothersome to me...
- And to prove murder, they had to buy time,
and the way to do it, they had decided,
was to a conviction in Kaylene's assault case.
That was the job of Sudano's co-counsel,
Katharina Booth.
- It's very high pressure.
We knew, it was extremely essential, obviously,
to keep them in custody, to be able to get a conviction.
- In March 2019,
over a year since the attack on Kaylene,
prosecutor Booth got her shot
when the trial opened at the Boulder County Courthouse.
What kind of person were you up against?
- Someone who, uh, craves the power and control
of abusing others, especially women.
- Prosecutor Booth laid it all out for the jury.
There was the rape kit, of course,
with the crucial DNA link to Juan Figueroa,
but also evidence of Kaylene's near-fatal injuries,
which were well documented and shown to the jury.
- This was clearly a rape and attempted murder.
- I can see some defense attorney
saying, "Well, you can say that if you want,
"but lots of people like rough sex
"and like to be choked when they're having sex.
"So how can you prove it was anything other than that?"
- You're right.
And, uh, those were some of the arguments that were made,
but there were a lot-- a lot of other evidence
that showed his guilt.
- For example, said prosecutor Booth,
video shot inside the party house
where Kaylene went after the bars.
Remember when Kaylene stepped outside
to get some fresh air at the after party?
She said she left her phone charging inside the house.
Well, here it is on the home security system,
plugged into the wall.
And then moments later,
Juan Figueroa comes into frame,
sits down with his arm oddly tucked away,
stands up and tosses the phone under the couch.
- That part stands out to me, to just really reflect
how premeditated this was,
making sure she didn't have a charged phone.
- The prosecution's key witness, of course,
was Kaylene herself,
who lived to tell the story,
and now steeled herself to face Juan Figueroa.
- It was a very emotional trial, and he was disgusting.
He laughed. He laughed-- - In the trial?
- Yeah, he-- it was a joke to him, the whole trial.
So he just laughed.
- When Kaylene took the stand,
the defense challenged every bit of her story
and focused on this video.
Kaylene, going up the stairs
to what turned out to be a bedroom,
willingly, said the defense.
- Nonsense, said the prosecutor.
- Yes, she walked up those stairs,
but he had, uh, contrived an entire story
to get her there, starting all the way back
at the party that they had been at
in order to get her away and lure her away
from the safety of others.
- And then, for more than a year, said Kaylene,
she'd been threatened,
had been accused of making it all up,
had been surrounded by doubts and whispers
and malicious gossip.
And now, after a ten day trial,
twelve strangers would judge.
Would they believe her?
- I was just scared, because I'm like,
that was very important to me for the fact
everybody said I was a liar.
- There she sat in court only a few feet away
from the man who nearly took her life,
and she waited,
waited for that jury to decide,
unaware of what was waiting for her outside.
♪
♪♪
- After a 11 and a half hours, the wait was finally over.
The jury had made their decision.
Kaylene's family and Rita's family
took their seats inside a crowded courtroom.
Kaylene herself, nerves as tight as they had ever been.
And the verdict was...
guilty.
- I just broke down.
- Because it was somebody recognizing you were right?
- Yeah.
- All along. - Mm-hmm.
- Those other people were wrong.
That finally was a moment of vindication
that you desperately needed. - Mm-hmm.
I just wanted everyone to hear it.
- Relieved, yes. But...
- It felt like a weight had been lifted.
But in the back of my head I knew it wasn't over.
And now we have to start Rita's.
- You felt that as a responsibility yourself?
I felt like I had a responsibility
to do what I could after that point to help.
And I'm like, you know, let's focus on Rita now.
Where is Rita?
- Maybe not so easy, because within hours,
Kaylene's life was in danger again.
She and friends and family had gathered
at a local restaurant to celebrate.
- Within the first five minutes I was there,
I had gotten a very gruesome, like, death threat
sent to me from a Facebook account
and saying really nasty stuff,
calling me, like, the B word, and saying,
"We're going to set your body on fire while you're alive."
- And there was more in that message.
What was that like, to get that?
- I shut down.
I completely shut down.
- Kaylene told the police,
but they couldn't track down the sender.
And Jasmine saw her sister unravel.
- I just remember saying, this is never going to end.
- The very next day, Kaylene left.
Left town, moved all the way to Kansas.
- That's what she needed to do in order
to keep herself safe.
- Meanwhile, back in Longmont,
Detective Cody Clark was still looking every day
for Rita.
- There was a lot of pressure from the community of,
you know, why hasn't Rita been found?
What are you doing to find her?
What are you doing to bring somebody to justice?
And, um... - Sure.
- I think there's an expectation that these, you know--
anybody who watches television,
these things get solved in 45 minutes.
[laughing]
And this is going on for months, and then years.
- Yeah.
You know, it just added to the anxiety
from the community, feeling like,
you know, the police had forgotten about this.
- They hadn't, of course,
but... time.
Every day, every month of days somehow made it feel worse.
- It's extremely difficult.
I mean, how do you prove somebody is dead
if you don't have a body?
- He was stuck.
Rita's family felt stuck, too.
- It's just stagnant there for such a long time.
- So you were sure it was him,
but you couldn't do anything.
- Yeah.
- Then, a very big surprise.
Remember that stain investigators found
on the passenger seat of Figueroa's pickup truck?
They extracted DNA back then,
but the best they could get was a jumble.
Several humans, but no way to ID any one of them.
But almost three years later,
the Colorado Bureau of Investigation
called Detective Clark and...
- Told us about some new technology
that would be able to look at that stain,
and be able to tell us
not just that there were several people's DNA patterns,
but who they belong to.
- So they retested the stain
and sent Detective Clark the results.
When they sent back those results saying
that it was Rita's DNA in that stain...
I don't even know how to describe it.
Um, I was elated, you know, like...
- My goodness, yeah. - It was--
it was, like, that one final piece,
that physical piece of evidence.
She was in there. - She was in his truck.
- In the summer of 2021,
a grand jury indicted Juan Figueroa
for the murder and kidnapping of Rita Gutierrez-Garcia.
Wasn't an easy case, mind you.
Even with that precious bit of DNA.
Still, it was the best they were going to get.
So we had certainly not all the evidence
that we needed, but we were confident in the case.
Figueroa, already sentenced to 93 years
for assaulting KK, was confident, too,
told cellmates he thought he could beat the murder charge.
Rita's mother, Diane, meanwhile,
though glad he was going to face some kind of justice,
had about giving up hope of actually finding Rita.
- It was hurting me. It was frustrating me.
It was depressing,
to come home and not-- nothing.
- This was the stuff that she sent...
- And then prosecutors Booth and Sudano's trial prep
was interrupted.
- We were really close to trial.
We were within a couple of weeks
before the defense attorneys reached out to us
and said that-that maybe it was worth talking.
- Figueroa's attorneys wanted to make a deal.
- We said to them, you know,
before we ever entertain anything,
he has to give us Rita back.
- And they said...
yes.
- What did you think when you heard that?
- We didn't believe it.
We thought it was going to fall apart
at every possible moment. - Yeah.
- But, what actually happened?
Well, what a surprise.
♪
♪♪
- Juan Figueroa had a choice.
Take his chances in a murder trial
or bargain for a deal.
The price of getting such a deal?
Two things.
Figueroa would have to tell them what he did to Rita,
and he'd have to reveal where he dumped her body.
Would he do it?
Prosecutor Booth didn't know.
Detective Cody Clark didn't know.
- I wanna say it was, like, a day or two
of just sitting on pins and needles.
- And then an email arrived, and here it was.
Six words.
But there was something else in that email, too,
something kind of amazing.
Because who would think of keeping
a specific bit of information like this?
- It had GPS coordinates for us to locate Rita.
- Uh, we never expected. - It was more than you thought.
- Oh, it's more than we thought.
- As the sun rose the next morning,
the cops were there, the lawyers all were there.
Maybe he was lying, sitting back in his cell,
enjoying this.
Or maybe not. But this was it.
Their best and maybe last chance of finding Rita.
They stared out at that wide vista.
Even with coordinates, this wasn't going to be easy.
- I was really starting to get disappointed
because of the terrain,
and we were in super high cattails
and it was so thick and I remember I was like,
this is going to be like finding a needle in a haystack.
- They slogged around, ten minutes,
twenty minutes, forty minutes.
And then suddenly, a shout.
It was prosecutor Michele Sudano.
- And I saw what looked like a white piece of bone.
- There it was, what was left of a body,
no doubt human remains under a thicket of cattails.
- We were really lucky because a lot of the cattails
in this area weren't up to your chest,
which they were everywhere else.
- Eventually they got DNA confirmation.
Rita Gutierrez-Garcia was missing no longer.
- You found her? - We found her.
- Detective Clarke dreaded telling Rita's family.
I knew that it was going to be
one of the hardest conversations that I had with them,
because it was that finality
that she wasn't coming back home alive.
- He met Diane and Rita's sisters
at the police station.
- Everyone was there, you know, Rita's A-Team.
We all started crying.
We're just like, "What?"
You know, like, "Oh my God."
They did what they said they would do.
And, um...
I am so grateful that they gave me my daughter back.
Cody kept his promise.
- But remember, as part of his plea deal,
Juan agreed to tell investigators
and prosecutors exactly what happened to Rita.
- Uh, my truck was parked in the front...
- When we went into that interview,
we had not told his defense counsel or--
obviously then, nor did he know
that we had actually recovered Rita
at that point.
So some of the details he provided we could match
and know was consistent with what we had located
at the crime scene.
- For nearly four hours, Juan told his story
as investigators listened intently to see
if it rang true.
Juan claimed that after meeting Rita,
he offered her a ride home.
He said he panicked after punching her
and put her in his truck.
He started driving around, he said,
trying to figure out what to do next
when he noticed Rita's phone.
Remember that last call from her phone to 911?
It was Juan who made the call, not Rita.
Of course, investigators had to ask...
Did you ever believe that he was telling
the whole truth here?
- No, I think there's always been some suspicion
that more happened, just knowing what happened
with Kaylene.
That's not something that we could prove.
- They couldn't prove Juan sexually assaulted Rita.
But Detective Clark is convinced
that is exactly what happened
before he strangled her to death.
- With Juan's confession, there would be no trial,
and in June 2022...
- You understand what that charge--
- ...he was sentenced.
- Then how do you plead to added count four,
murder in the second degree?
- Guilty.
- The judge you gave him 48 years
on top of the 93 years he was serving for the rape
and attempted murder of Kaylene.
After the sentencing,
Rita's family spoke to the media.
- We have this victory, and we cannot wait
to be able to give Rita the peace and the rest
her body needs.
- At a memorial service, months later,
Rita's friends and family were finally able
to celebrate her life, and Diane invited
all the detectives and the prosecutors, too.
She called you the A-Team, right?
- They're the A-Team.
They really were fabulous.
We worked as a team. Team Rita.
- They asked Detective Clark to give the eulogy.
Not an easy thing to do.
- How do I write a eulogy for somebody
that I didn't know, that I had never met?
So I tried to just do the best that I could
to kind of memorialize what I knew about her
and how much of an impact she had had on me,
even though I'd never known her.
Over the last four years, I've learned about Rita
from dozens, if not hundreds of people.
What I saw was a brave woman, a strong mother.
Her sons lives are proof that a mother's love
is a powerful force to be reckoned with.
- And right there, listening to it all,
was Kaylene, the young woman
who will be forever connected to Rita.
I don't know that they ever would have solved her case
if it hadn't been for you.
- Everything played out.
It played out the way it did for a reason.
You know? - What was the reason?
- Like, so I could get him, and he was there,
and they could hold him, and, you know,
then they could find her, and they could get the truth.
- And Diane, she likes to visit the park
where Rita's tree still stands.
- It just blooms so beautifully.
It's green.
And the vines, they kind of, like, twine, you know,
and it just spirals up,
and it's just growing so much.
It's so beautiful.
- You light up when you talk about the tree.
- I love that tree because it just reminds me of--
of Rita.
- And she sits on the bench
that Cody Clarke helped raise money for
in Rita's memory.
There's a plaque on it,
"For the rest of our lives,
"we will search for moments full of you."
- I didn't get Rita back as a person
and as a body, but I got Rita back.
I won't let no one take that from me.
- That's all for this edition
of "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
I'm Craig Melvin. Thank you for watching.