Another missing indigenous girl…another call for justice. This is the tragic abduction of Anthonette Cayedito.
I don’t like writing about horrible things happening to children. But I think highlighting their cases are crucial to maybe getting them solved. Anthonette Cayedito is one example of a missing child case that bothers me, since it has been cold since 1986. There is some chance that Anthonette is still alive, though, based on things that happened after her abduction.
Anthonette Cayedito disappeared from her bedroom in Gallup in 1986. She has been sighted over the years but is now thought to be deceased due to the amount of time elapsed.
Anthonette was a sweet and well-behaved girl, called “mature beyond her years.” Her birthday was on Christmas. She had long black hair, brown eyes, and a beautiful smile that showed her crooked teeth and the light glowing within her. At the time of her disappearance, she lived in a tiny house on Arnold Circle in Gallup, NM, with her mom Penny and her two little sisters, Wendy and Senida. Her father, Larry Estrada, did not live in the home.
Let’s dive into her case.
April 6, 1986
On April 5, Anthonette spent the evening with her baby sisters and a babysitter while her mother met with friends at the Talk of the Town Bar in Gallup. Her mother came home around midnight, paid the sitter, and sent the sitter on her merry way. She stayed up until 3 am talking to Anthonette before going to bed. She and Anthonette shared a bed, and Anthonette evidently went to sleep with her.
In the morning, around 7 am, Penny started to wake the girls up for church service. She realized that Anthonette was not there. Some say that she thought Anthonette was outside helping neighbors look for a lost dog.
By 8 am, she started to look for Anthonette. At 11 am, she went to the police. But the police told her to come back after 8 hours to file a missing persons report, thus losing precious time on locating the girl.
Anthonette’s little sister Senida claimed that a man knocked on their door at 3 in the morning while their mom was asleep. She also remembers someone coming back a second time to knock and hearing both a male and female voice say, “It’s your aunt and uncle. Let us in, we’re cold.” Anthonette went to see who it was, and was then abducted.
A neighbor also came forward to say she saw a brown van at the house and a man approaching the front door, but she didn’t think it was that strange, given people came and went from Penny’s apartment all hours of the day and night. It is not clear when the neighbor saw this van and if was at the same time that Senida claims the man knocked on the door and took Anthonette. Penny denied knowing anyone with a brown van.
Uncle Joe
A little over a year later, Wendy, who was only five at the time of Anthonette’s disappearance, reiterated what Senida said. But she claimed the man identified himself as “Uncle Joe.” She had kept this to herself for over a year, out of fear of upsetting her mother apparently. Many people think this was a false memory or even that Wendy was trained to say that.
The police did look into Wendy’s claims. The girls actually did have an uncle Joe. He was formerly married to their mother’s sister. Apparently, police vetted him and he had a rock solid alibi. I wish I knew what that alibi is and just how rock solid it is.
If Wendy’s memory is true, then someone else named Joe kidnapped Anthonette Cayedito. People on the reservation tend to call each other aunt, uncle, sister, and brother, regardless of how they’re actually related. Uncle Joe may have been a friend of the family, not an actual uncle. It is also possible that the abductor knew the family, knew they had an uncle Joe, and used the name to gain Anthonette’s trust so she would open the door. After all, Anthonette was not trusting with strangers, according to Penny, and she would not have opened both the screen door and outer door to a stranger at 3 in the morning unless she knew them.
On Reddit, there is a theory circulating that Uncle Joe was actually someone that Anthonette’s mother dated or even someone she brought back to the house from the bar that night. Uncle Joe then kidnapped Anthonette, with or without her mother’s knowledge. When you’re inebriated, you’re not using your best judgment. It is possible that the mother did bring someone home with her, someone she may not have known well. It is also possible something bad happened between this mystery man and her daughter after she went to bed. Some theorize that maybe she didn’t go to sleep at 3 am, but instead left the house again, which gave this “Uncle Joe” guy a chance to circle back and abduct Anthonette.
Theories about Teresa Penny Cayedito
Some believe that Anthonette’s mother did not actually come home at midnight and did not actually have a babysitter. Given her lifestyle and penchant for alcohol and drugs, this seems plausible. Wikipedia describes how intelligent and hardworking Anthonette was, taking care of her younger siblings. All I could think about while reading that, is how children who seem mature beyond their years usually are that way because they have to be; they don’t have any capable, safe adults in the house so they become adults themselves far too early. Anthonette may have been so mature because she was forced to raise herself and her sister. Her father, Larry, bragged about how she was “nine going on fifteen” and “making tortillas at six” according to the Gallup paper.
Gallup is a small city on the Navajo Nation. It is quite impoverished and the generational trauma of Native American persecution has led to a significant substance abuse problem in the area. There were rumors that Anthonette’s mom liked to party, do drugs, and drink, and some even say she was a sex worker. Does this automatically mean she was a bad mother? Of course not. But it does raise the chances that she did not have had the money to pay for a babysitter and she may not have come home that night when she said she did. I have never seen any evidence anywhere that the police found the babysitter she supposedly hired and confirmed that part of the story. So if there was no babysitter, and maybe she didn’t come home at midnight exactly, then it is possible that Anthonette was abducted at any point during the night with no adults there to protect her.
The Gallup law enforcement (who bungled this case initially by waiting over a day to even look for Anthonette) claim that they think Penny knows more than she let on. They think this because Penny evidently failed a polygraph (we all know how accurate those are). This echoes the sentiments of a medicine woman that Penny had perform a handfasting ceremony in an attempt to locate and communicate with Anthonette’s soul. They both think she had something to do with it, as do many true crime junkies.
Given her involvement in the drug world, people think that Penny sold Anthonette to settle a drug debt. They believe she then coached Senida and Wendy to tell lies to the cops about what really happened that night. For some reason, Penny picked their uncle Joe as a target and tried to frame him.
While the mother’s involvement is a horrific theory, I suppose there is nothing to totally discount it. However, just from personally knowing alcoholics and from partying in Gallup myself, my own theory is that Anthonette’s mother had nothing to do with the disappearance. She failed a polygraph because she lied to cops about having a babysitter and being home with her daughters after midnight; she was scared of being charged with neglect and losing custody of Senida and Wendy. Like many mothers with substance abuse issues, she probably was not very responsible. She was probably out all night, leaving Anthonette alone to watch her two younger sisters, and she came home around 7 am to find Anthonette gone. She concocted the story about the sitter and church in the morning in an effort to make herself seem like a better mother. She didn’t sell Anthonette, though.
Since neighbors report that random people came and went from the house all hours of the day and night, and since people say that Penny had drug issues, it is also possible that Penny had some unsavory types around Anthonette. Some of these people may have been sex offenders who liked hurting young girls or some of them might have had human trafficking ties. Penny could have exposed Anthonette to someone who later kidnapped her. This is why Anthonette seemed to know the person and opened both the outer door and the latched screen door to him.
Nevertheless, blaming the mother seems unnecessary, farfetched, and cruel without any concrete evidence. This is especially so when you consider how the mother died of liver failure at 46. It would appear that guilt over what happened to her daughter never left her and she drank herself to death. All I can say is that there was no true evidence showing the mother sold her daughter. In fact, there is no concrete evidence about much of anything.
Wesley Daniels
For a year, people searched for Anthonette. A man named Wesley Daniels was implicated by neighborhood children whom he had taken on a picnic on April 6, so he was arrested, but apparently nothing came of that. Despite phone tips that pushed searches to Albuquerque and Grants and rewards of up to $1000 for information leading to the girl’s safe return, nothing came of any of it.
Slowly 1986 turned into 1987 and the family celebrated a second Christmas without Anthonette, using her picture as the angel on their tree. The Christmas of 1987, she would have turned eleven. But she was nowhere to be found. There were no solid leads. Wesley Daniels’ arrest gave the family some hope – but that was soon taken away.
In later years, Wendy Montoya talked about the traumatic effect Anthonette’s disappearance had on the family. She said things became “dark and dysfunctional.” Evidently Penny did not sober up.
The family still wants to know what happened to Anthonette, even with the years of nothing piling up. There have been a few developments in the case that made the family have some hope that Anthonette was still out there somewhere, just waiting to come home, but none of them have been solid enough to definitively determine what became of Anthonette after April 6, 1986.
The Phone Call
A year of silence and agony passed. And then there was the spooky phone call from a frantic little girl to the Gallup police station sometime in 1987 (the exact date varies by different accounts). The girl on the phone said she was Anthonette Cayedito, she was in Albuquerque, and she needed help. Then an angry female voice said, “Who said you could use the phone?” The girl screamed and the call ended. You can hear the recording here:
Now, what the hell? There’s a lot to unpack here. The first is that the mother identified the voice as Anthonette’s. But could that have been wishful thinking? Or, worse, was the mother behind the call?
People think it’s odd that the call was to Gallup and not 911. However, 911 was only invented in 1957 and was not used everywhere in the US or Canada until after the mid-80s. Since Anthonette was abducted in 1986, it could be she was taught her local police station and not 911 growing up. It could also be that she knew Gallup would be the surest way to connect to her family. She may have seen one of her missing person posters too and gotten the number from it.
I also think it’s weird that every post I have read about this case said a man was in the background saying gruffly, “Who said you could use the phone?” I thought it clearly sounded like a woman. I do not hear a man’s voice there.
The girl screams as there seems to be a scuffle over the phone, and then the line goes dead. Some people think the scream sounds phony. I think it sounds real.
Police attempted to trace the call with no luck. If the call came from a house, why couldn’t they have traced it? That just seems so weird.
Carson City, Nevada Sighting
There was also the account of a waitress, who claimed she saw Anthonette with a couple at her restaurant in Carson City, NV. The word she used to describe the couple was “unkempt.” The girl kept knocking silverware off the table and looking at the waitress. When the waitress picked the silverware up, the girl grabbed her hand. The waitress brushed it off (what a weird thing to brush off) until the couple left and she began bussing their table. On a napkin under the girl’s plate, the girl had scrawled, “Help me – call police.” The waitress called the cops but they were never able to track down the trio.
Now it could be that this waitress was making things up, or else she saw another kidnap victim, desperate for help. But there is no evidence that the girl she saw was actually Anthonette. Apparently the girl resembled Anthonette and was even the age range Anthonette would have been in, but again, there is just no evidence of who she actually was. I worry that if she really was in Carson City, she may have been a victim of human trafficking.
Louisa Estrada: Another Family Abduction
Even more weirdly, Anthonette’s cousin, Louisa Estrada, disappeared from Gallup on September 5, 1989. Her story actually has a happy ending though – she was found alive in Juarez in October, 1989. Louisa was 25, intellectually disabled to the point she could not care for herself, and family to Larry Estrada, Anthonette’s dad. She went for an evening walk and vanished on September 5. However, for days after she went missing, she was seen around Gallup in the company of an unidentified man.
Louisa was believed to have the maturity of a five-year-old and could not live on her own. She had a cleft palate and serious speech deficit that made her hard to understand. Not long before she went missing, she had started to try to live the normal life of a 25-year-old by going out at night to bars. It is possible her disappearance was willing, as she attempted to enjoy freedom she was not allowed by her family.
She was eventually found alive in Juarez, presumably the victim of human trafficking, though I can find very little information on her case. The most I found on it was a short paragraph on Wikipedia and a few mentions of it on Reddit and Websleuths and a newspaper article about her disappearance; I was not able to uncover a newspaper article or actual website dedicated to when she was found.
Could there be a link between these two? Was Anthonette’s family somehow involved in trafficking, or did they have a family member or acquaintance who was responsible for abducting and selling indigenous women? I would love to talk to Louisa and find out how she ended up in Juarez. The Internet yields very little information on that. However, it is also possible the two cases are unrelated. It could be it is just some sick coincidence, two tragedies afflicting the same family.
Melody Harris, aka Apache Junction Jane Doe
I thought that Apache Junction Jane Doe is a possible match for Anthonette Cayedito, but I just found out she was finally identified as Melody Harrison. That is fantastic news!
Apache Junction Jane Doe Melody Harrison was found in Apache Junction, AZ, off of Highway 60 and Idaho Road on August 6, 1992. She was predominantly Native American and estimated to be about sixteen to eighteen. She had protruding front teeth. In her pocket, she had a sketch of a penny; in another pocket, a transit token from Phoenix saying “Valid for one student fare.” She was clad in denim cutoff shorts, and wore a yellow ring with a nugget design and a Team Gear shirt with soccer balls on it.
From this evidence, it was surmised she was from Phoenix, and that is where fifteen-year-old Melody Harrison was from. Harrison’s decomposed remains were found in an area where transients often congregated. Nobody knows how she got there. It was a good 40 miles from her home.
She had been dead about three to five weeks prior to her discovery and her remains were mummified, making her cause of death impossible to determine, though there were no obvious signs of trauma on her skeleton. That points to something like strangulation, suffocation, drowning, or poisoning as the cause of death.
Whatever happened to this beautiful young Native girl seems to have been lost in the sands of the Arizona desert forever.
Melody Harrison was reported missing from Phoenix in June 1992. Yet when large billboards showing her shirt went up around Phoenix, she still was not identified for over 30 years.
Conclusion
All these years later, Anthonette Cayedito has not been seen or heard from. It is probable that she is dead. That, or she was brainwashed and traumatized over the years to avoid reaching out to family. I would love to see this case solved before I die. It is one of the many that is near and dear to my heart.
Sources
https://dnadoeproject.org/case/apache-junction-jane-doe/
Locke, Patrice (3 October 1989). “Search Continues for Gallup Woman”. The Albuquerque Journal.
Locke, Patricia (October 8, 1989). “Missing Mentally Retarded Woman Found In Juarez”. Albuquerque Journal.