Today I bring to you the heartbreaking case of Teresa Reyes.
Teresa, better known as Terry, was just 17 when she left her parents’ apartment to go party with some “gangster types with shaved heads” on July 1, 1998. Though she had run away from home before, she always stayed in touch with her mother, who is also named Teresa Reyes. She would always be gone for a few days, then she would always come home.
This time, however, she did not return home for 15 years. Her sun-bleached skull was finally returned to her family in a black urn thronged by red roses in 2009.
On the surface, Terry was a fun-loving, wild teenager with gorgeous curly hair, a tongue stud, a navel ring, and a rose with “Teresa” tattooed on her calf. But underneath her winning smile, Terry had a chemical imbalance that led to violent mood swings and impulsive decisions. After running through four psychiatrists she hated, she found one she liked, who diagnosed her with bipolar and ADHD and prescribed her medication she had to take 3 times a day. Her parents moved from Las Cruces to Albuquerque for better psychiatric care and educational opportunities for Terry. Terry was often teased at school for her slow learning, but she was smart despite her academic struggles.
Despite taking her medication three times a day, Terry still had a lot of troublesome symptoms. She was incredibly impulsive and known to run away for days at a time. After she slashed her arm three times with a knife during a fight with her mother, she was sent to Desert Hills Center for Youth and Families, a psychiatric hospital for youth. From there, she broke out the window and disappeared for a few days with a roommate. There are two other police reports of her running away, as well, and her mother reports it happened fairly often.
Terry had many boyfriends. Some were boys her age that she brought home to meet her parents, before breaking up with them after a week or two. But others she never brought home. Her mother only had vague knowledge of these shadowy older male figures in Terry’s life.
Nevertheless, Terry was a sweet person who loved her family and always let her mother know where she was. She never meant to worry anybody – she just made poor decisions. She liked to have a good time but she also meant no harm. She and her mother shared the same name, and they were very close.
On July 1, 1998, Terry went out with her cousin, Tyffani Sedillo, to visit some friends in the North Valley. Though Sedillo was a year younger, she was more mature than Terry and strived to keep Terry out of trouble. At a gas station payphone at 1130 Candelaria NW, the two girls were approached by four or five men in a cream-colored van without lettering. According to Sedillo in a 2000 statement, the men appeared to be gangster types with baggy pants and shaved heads. She said, “One guy was skinny, one guy was fat and two were OK looking.”
The skinny one took a particular interest in Terry. He invited the girls to meet them at a house party behind the Philips 66 on Fourth Street and Montano Road Northwest. Terry wanted to go but her cousin said no, having an iffy feeling about the men. One of the guys then gave Terry his number. Terry borrowed her cousin’s lipliner and scrawled the number 505-837-8208 down on a napkin. She told the guys she would call later to come hang out. As the men drove away, she told Sedillo “I’m going to that party.”
Sedillo dropped Terry off at 11:00 pm. Terry nonchalantly told her parents about her day as she readied a plate of French fries and a soda. She made no mention of the gangsters in the cream-colored van. Then she said good night sweetly and carried her snack to her room, where she turned on her TV. Her mom locked the front door and turned into bed, having no idea that this was the last time she would ever see her daughter.
Reyes was woken later in the night to the eerie sound of her daughter’s bedroom door banging open and shut in a breeze from an open window. She investigated and found that her daughter was not in her bedroom, but her lights and TV and radio were on, and her fries and soda were untouched. There was also her purse, makeup, medications, and everything she normally took with her when she left the house. The only thing missing was her well-worn sandals – and Terry herself. Reyes was dismayed to find that her daughter was not in the bathroom or anywhere else in the apartment, and the front door was unlocked.
Reyes said to herself, “She’ll call soon” and went back to bed with an ache of worry in her stomach. Though Terry had run away like this before, it still unsettled her mother every time.
A day passed and Terry never called, which was unusual for her. Her mother finally reported Terry missing and the police told her that they wouldn’t file a report for 72 hours. So she waited the 72 hours, made the report, and was told by a Detective Darin Mallon that they would not investigate until 6 months had elapsed due to their conviction that Terry was just a runaway. In fact, a police officer did not even show up at the Reyes apartment to talk to them about Terry until September 1998, months after she had gone missing.
With Terry’s troubling history, Reyes tried to believe her daughter would turn up. But in her gut, she knew something was wrong. Terry always called because she was so attached to her mother.
Six months passed with no word and no sign of Terry. Reyes often called the police to try to get them to investigate her case more seriously; they did not appear to do so and they insisted Terry was a runaway, selling her body on Central. Reyes called the mayor’s office and the FBI, but again, that led nowhere. Reyes felt the police did not take the missing person report seriously and there was scarcely any follow-up. Detective Mallon from the Crimes Against Children Unit did begin to peruse Terry’s case after six months, as did James Torres in Homicide, but they did not communicate and did not even know they were both working the case. They did not communicate well with Reyes, leaving her frantic to get answers.
Reyes decided that she needed to take matters into her own hands. She distributed flyers and posters all over town. She drove around Albuquerque, looking for her daughter in the sex workers and drug addicts lingering along Central Ave. She also set up a tipline at her apartment, though she did not add an answering machine to it. Many tips poured in from the missing persons posters, though it appears only one caught the interest of the police.
That particular tip was traced to the Econo Lodge, to a man named Richard. Richard claimed that he saw Terry in the room of a drug dealer named Oscar. Apparently Oscar was a shady character who was hard to find and who allegedly drove a white Nissan Maxima. Richard provided the pager number of a sex worker named Monica, who had apparently also been in the room. When questioned, Monica said she had seen a girl who looked like the one on the missing posters in Oscar’s room – and that girl went by Terry. Monica said that Terry was with Oscar of her own accord and did dates for him (street slang for prostituting). Since by that point Terry was 18, she was free to do what she wished, so Detective Mallon decided to let the whole thing go.
Detective Mallon reported what he had learned to Reyes and typed up a 3-page report with his conclusion that Terry had left home of her own volition. Shortly after that, he was transferred to another department, and his report went missing. Torres also retired and his investigation apparently hit a dead-end as well. Everything they had separately found appeared to whirl into the abyss.
A letter from Teresa Reyes (the mother) wound up on the DA’s desk. The DA found the case alarming, so she sent it to the Gang Unit for further investigation. When Rudolph Checkley from the Gang Unit got the case, he looked into it but could not find any leads. Without Mallon’s report, his investigation was severely hampered. Who knows what he could have found out with that report in hand? He likely knew exactly who Oscar was, as the Gang Unit and Vice tend to have a pretty good thumb on local underworld characters, but he didn’t even know he needed to be looking into Oscar.
Finally…Some Headway
In June 2000, due to the lack of police activity on the case for the past 2 years, Reyes hired the services of Pat Caristo. Caristo is a PI with an agency that offers pro bono services to needy families.
Caristo accomplished more in a short time than the police ever day. She started by interviewingTyffani Sedillo, who had never been interviewed by police. Sedillo gave a statement about the guys who had hit on Terry and the cream-colored van.
Caristo then went to the area that the guys had said the party was at. There she found a cream-colored van and she took a picture of the license plate. From there, she got the name of the owner. She turned everything she discovered over to the police but there was no follow-up.
One day, Reyes’s granddaughter was playing with a teddy bear in a clown outfit, which was one of Terry’s favorite toys. Reyes noticed a rip in the doll so she went to sew it up. That’s when she found a napkin stuffed into the hole. She unfurled the crumpled napkin and there was a number scrawled on it in lipliner. “Aha!” she thought, realizing this was the number that Sedillo had talked about.
Caristo advised Reyes to put the napkin in an envelope with the time, date, and location of where she had found it. Caristo then contacted police and they advised her to hold onto it until an officer could come get it. No officer came to get the napkin. At some point, Caristo called the number on the napkin, learning that it was an unlisted cell phone that had been disconnected.
Reyes wrote a letter to the police chief begging them to take her daughter’s case more seriously and come get the napkin, but there was no reply. Then she wrote the same letter to the Police Oversight Commission. Someone apparently got it, because Reyes reported that an officer came to get the napkin after that. But, after that, there was just no word and no progress. Police never bothered to fill Reyes in on the fact that they didn’t have sufficient evidence to subpoena cell phone records and find out who had formerly owned the number.
As the years passed, Reyes grew more and more convinced that her daughter was dead. When she appealed to Real Crimes to help her get information out about her daughter’s case, she said she knew her daughter was probably dead, but she still held out hope. She did everything in her power to get answers, as did her other children and her husband. She even contacted four different psychics and, though she felt dubious about their visions, they all unanimously told her that Terry was dead. One of these psychics was the rather famous Cynthia Hess, who envisioned that Terry had died by accident or drug overdose and was strewn on a mesa in the desert. Unfortunately, her vision was at least partially right.
The Gruesome Discovery
In December 14, 2004, a rancher discovered a skull in the sand at the bottom of an arroyo near mile Marker 41.5, northeast of US 550 and near Tribal Road 279, in the Jemez Pueblo. The arroyo was off a gated dirt road with limited access.
The skull was sun-bleached and missing its mandible. Several of the teeth had been fractured down the roots, possibly premortem; others had been lost postmortem, leaving only one. Tribal police did a grid canvas of the general area and found a few chips of what may have been a leg bone, but no other remains. The remains had probably been scattered by wild animals and lost to the elements. They may have been buried or dumped in a different location and slowly scattered in farther and farther circles by wildlife and weather, hampering their recovery.
The skull was determined to belong to a white or Hispanic female, estimated age 20-35, dead for several years. A facial reconstruction was created that looked nothing like Terry, and the skull was sent to Quantico, where only a partial DNA profile was gleaned in 2006. The mother uploaded DNA to CODIS in 2007, but the partial profile was not sufficient for a match.
No tips came forward, even after The Albuquerque Tribune ran an article asking for details about the skull. In October 2011, a nuclear DNA profile was obtained, but it didn’t match to anybody in CODIS. But in April 2013, Diane Reyes and Benny Reyes, Terry’s siblings, decided to upload their DNA to CODIS and they had a match within three months.
Jane Doe 2004-05689 was Teresa Reyes.
For nine years, the Reyes family did not know about the skull and they continued to search for Terry. I cannot imagine their anguish at learning they had searched for their lost loved one for so long, while her skull sat in a box in a drawer in the OMI, labeled “Jane Doe 2004-05689.”
Terry was finally found. She – or, rather, her skull – was cremated and returned to her family in a black urn thronged by red roses. For a long time, Reyes had understood her daughter was probably dead, but this was a final death to all hope. Her family went out to the place where her skull had been found and tied ribbons to a tree. Though they search the sandy hills themselves for traces of their beloved Terry, they were just as unsuccessful as the police.
Terry’s death was presumed a homicide. It is now under the investigation of Ida Lopez, a name that might be familiar to you if you follow the West Mesa Bone Collector case. Lopez long thought that Terry might be one of the women found in the mass grave on the West Mesa; her actual resting place came as a surprise. Now there is little hope of solving her death. There are just so few leads, due to the fact that so much time has elapsed with complete inaction by the police. Her cause of death is not even clear, at least publicly. Her skull bore no obvious traces of trauma that could explain her cause of death.
The police had disregarded Reyes’s pleas to take the case seriously; they just assumed that Terry was a runaway selling her body on Central. Meanwhile, Reyes knew something was wrong because a mother knows. And at some point between when Terry left her parents’ apartment in 1998 and 2004, Terry died. Someone who is between 17 and 21 does not just die – something bad happened to her.
Theories
Despite various leads, the only evidence that truly exists is the phone number and the cousin’s account of the men who approached the girls. And that evidence is not being properly investigated. The tip by Richard and Monica is also evidence, but it may not be reliable. Was that really Terry in the motel room with Oscar, and how did she get there? What happened between when she went into her room on July 1, 1998, and when she was found dead in 2004? When did she die and how? How long did she live after running away on the night of July 1, and why wasn’t she able to call home, as she always did?
Did Terry even make it to that party? It is worth investigating those guys and finding out what kind of connections they have. Maybe they were involved in trafficking women and they had ties to Oscar. The party may have been an attempt to kidnap and traffic Terry.
Or the party could be a red herring. Maybe the party was innocent enough – just some guys who thought Terry was cute – but something went awry afterward. Someone got to Terry as she left. Or the party was the first place that Terry tried hard drugs. With her bipolar disorder, she may have had a psychotic episode and lost memory of her identity, which is why she never called home. She became involved with Oscar, who gradually assumed control over her to the point she couldn’t call home even when she recalled who she was, and she was forced into a life of prostitution and drug use. Eventually the drugs or an angry client or Oscar got to her.
Alternatively, a new drug habit may have inspired her to leave home for good. Her previous runaway attempts had been trial runs. She meant to call eventually, but as she got deeper and deeper into Albuquerque’s underworld, her sense of shame kept her from doing so. Then she fell in with Oscar and he controlled her to the point she was not allowed to call home.
It could be that Terry never even made it to the party. Someone may have abducted her or tempted her to slip away beforehand. Given Terry’s association with other “shadowy older male figures” that she hid from her mother, it could be she had another connection, another male in her life, who did something bad to her that night. Or maybe she thought a man wanted to date her, when really he was trafficking her, and before she knew it, he had led her into a dark lifestyle that ultimately contributed to her death. The guys at the party may have never even seen her after they met her at the payphone.
Nevertheless, since those guys and the phone number are the most solid lead available, they need to be investigated. Yet they have not been. Why is that? Is there a police cover-up going on to protect whoever Oscar is, or is it just an example of true departmental negligence? With the license plate number to the cream-colored van, Pat Caristo basically handed the police the name of at least one of the men who is probably involved.
It is not clear if Terry was murdered or died by drugs or some accident. The results of her autopsy have not been released. But I think her death seems eerily similar to the deaths of other women from Albuquerque in the early aughts. Similar enough that there may be a connection.
One weird coincidence I noticed is that a Cuban man named Omar was rumored to take prostitutes to the “mountains” and beat them and leave them for dead; other rumors claimed that dirty cops did this to sex workers. Could this Omar be the same guy, with his name slightly distorted as word rippled through the streets about him?
There is also local talk of a Cuban connection to the West Mesa Bone Collector murders. A Cuban gang is believed to be responsible for cocaine and crack widely available in Albuquerque, leading some to speculate that these Cuban gangsters had something to do with the rash of disappearances and deaths of drug-addicted sex workers in the early 2000s. Like the other victims of the West Mesa Bone Collector, it seems Terry may have become entangled with drugs and prostitution if the Richard/Monica tip is to be believed, and then she vanished and turned up dead in the same time period as the other West Mesa women and girls.
If Terry fell victim to the same predator as the other West Mesa Bone Collector victims, then it is possible that the Jemez area is the second gravesite that cops have been looking for all this time. Many sex workers went missing in Albuquerque in the same time period as the West Mesa victims, but they have never been found, dead or alive. They were not in the mass grave on the West Mesa. After all this time, it is believed that they are dead. Police have tried to find the gravesite that may house their bodies, but they have not been successful. (link) If Terry was found in the Jemez area, could this be the site for the other possible West Mesa Bone Collector victims, like Vanessa Reed and Leah Peebles? Remember that Terry’s remains were scattered by animals over a number of years, so it could be her actual burial or dump site was relatively far from where her skull was found, making it possible the gravesite was overlooked when cops canvassed the area.
I also think there may be a link between Teresa’s death and the West Mesa Bone Collector and the Memphis Mob. The Memphis Group, or Mob, is believed to be responsible for many sex worker murders in the 1980s. Who is to say they aren’t responsible for these murders? The Memphis Mob took root in Albuquerque with the distribution of Preludin and the sale of sex in the late 1970s, and they have not left. Was “Oscar” possibly a Memphis Group member?
Of course, this all hinges on the assumption that Richard and Monica were speaking the truth about Terry being with Oscar in his motel room. What if the girl they saw was not Terry Reyes, but just a lookalike with a similar name? Did Monica actually recall that the girl was named Terry, or did she get it from the missing persons flyer and remember incorrectly? Did the police put that name into her head, thus creating a false memory? Also, sex workers and drug addicts are notoriously reluctant to call the police, so it seems strange they called the tipline and spoke to police willingly. They both could easily have gotten killed over snitching on someone like Oscar, so why would they openly divulge so much information? Were they lying because they were after reward money or some other motive? It could be the Oscar lead is a total dead-end and Terry was never with Oscar, never selling her body on the street, never involved with the Albuquerque underworld.
An estimate of when Terry died would be helpful in ruling out theories. But it seems that the news have forgotten about her. And, it appears, the police have, too. Why haven’t they investigated the cell number? Surely with her skull found, they have enough evidence to subpoena phone companies for the records. Why haven’t they tracked down the owner of the cream-colored van, which may not even be in his possession after all these years, and find out if he saw Terry that night? Why haven’t they looked more into Oscar?
Tragically, it seems that Teresa has always been a low priority to APD. The APD is also bogged down in violent cases and drug cases. The year Terry disappeared, they had 682 missing juvenile reports. This makes it hard for them to dedicate time and resources to each individual case. Especially with 3 runaway reports on Terry’s record, her case got overlooked, allowing time to elapse and evidence to disappear. Hence, her case may never be solved.
I hope for the sake of her siblings and parents that her case is solved, though. Teresa had her whole life ahead of her and it is tragic that she fell victim to the evil lurking in Albuquerque’s streets. While it is a mystery what happened to her and who is responsible, her story is like so many other tragic stories of women and girls who cannot live freely because of evil male predators. It is also like the tales of so many girls and women in Albuquerque, who seem to have been seized by some sort of evil that still lurks there, unfound and possibly protected by the police.
http://realcrimes.com/Reyes/tribunestory.htm
https://www.koat.com/article/skull-identified-as-albuquerque-girl-years-later-1/5051233
http://realcrimes.com/Reyes/Teresa_Reyes.htm
https://www.doenetwork.org/cases/686ufnm.html
https://www.websleuths.com/forums/threads/nm-west-mesa-murders-2003-05.80639/page-16