The Unsolved Disappearance of Karla Rodriguez

Episode #27 Karla Rodriguez

Karla Rodriguez who her family called “Karlita” was like any other 7-year-old little girl living here in the Las Vegas Valley in the late 1990s. Her parents moved here to give their kids a better life and to pursue more opportunities.

Karla disappeared on the evening of Wednesday, October 20th, 1999 and hasn't been seen since, but her family has never given up hope that she's out there somewhere, that she had the opportunity to grow up somehow.

[Shaun] 

Hi and welcome to Sins and Survivors, a Las Vegas true crime podcast, where we focus on cases that deal with domestic violence, as well as unsolved cases and missing persons. I’m your host, Shaun, and with me as always, is the one and only John.

[John] 

I am the only John in the room.

[Shaun] 

As we said before, this case involves a typical little girl, living life in the 1990s. Karla Rodriguez was born in Michoacan, Mexico to her parents Elia Zapeda and Ramon Rodriguez on September 29th, 1992. She was the youngest of 4 girls, the oldest being Rosy Rodriguez, who was about 8 years older than her.

Karla was an active and outdoorsy adventurous and fun kid. She had her share of health problems including an appendectomy, and being prone to urinary tract infections, but none of that slowed her down.

She loved hanging out with her friends, riding her bike, and exploring the area where the family lived, just a few short blocks from the Stratosphere. 

[John]

On that fateful day - October 20th, 1999, Karla’s mom Elia walked her halfway to John S Park Elementary School at 931 Franklin Ave around 7 am.  That school is still there today with the same name, it's just a quick walk from the family’s home.

After school, she was out in the neighborhood as she often was, playing with friends around the 700 block of Bonita Avenue, northeast of the intersection of St Louis and Sixth Avenue. Around 7 pm which was after dark that late in October in Las Vegas, she went over to a particularly good friend and playmate’s house, rang the bell, and asked if she could come out and play.

His parents told her it was too late and that Karla should go home. 

She played in their front yard on their swing set for about 15 minutes, they said, and then left. 

Another friend claimed to have given her money to go to the store, but that one is hard to verify, and there was no security footage at any store near there that she might have gone to.

Unfortunately, that is where the trail ends. There are no confirmed sightings of Karla after that. It was as if she just vanished.

[Shaun] 

Karla’s mom and dad both worked and unfortunately worked opposite shifts. Ramon came home after his shift, and of course Karla wasn't there. He knew she’d often be out playing with friends, or even staying over at a friend’s house so he wasn't extremely worried. 

Karla’s mom didn't get home until 3 am from her work, and Ramon didn't mention to her that Karla wasn't home. In the months and years that followed, police and armchair sleuths have made a lot of this fact, occasionally with a pretty victim-blaming tone. The fact is though that it wasn't that unusual, and speaking as the oldest of 4 girls, it’s not unusual to ask the older siblings to keep an eye on the younger ones.

The next morning, when Elia woke up and found Karla not at home, she WAS pretty concerned. She headed over to John S Park Elementary and talked to the principal, and it was that principal who first called the police. That's another thing that people make a lot of, phrasing it like “her parents didn't call the police” but of course, they did start looking right away, and the police were called that next morning. 

To their credit, the police set up a command center at the school right away. They started searching the area and located her bike near that neighbor’s home. 

[John ] 

The police recognized when the call came in that they had already lost a lot of precious time to find Karla. Officers repeatedly said to news outlets that the first 6-12 hours after a child’s disappearance is the most critical time to begin a search because if they have been abducted in a car, 12 hours later, there’s no knowing where they might be. They could be 400 miles away in any direction. 

Amber Alerts are dependent on quickly informing the public and getting as many people looking in the community as possible before an abducted child is too far away.

The AMBER Alert system began in 1996 when Dallas-Fort Worth broadcasters and local police developed an early warning system for abducted children. The system was inspired by the story of Amber Hagerman, who was abducted in Arlington, Texas in 1996. 

Diana Simone, a radio station employee, came up with the idea of having local radio stations alert the public when a child abduction occurs in their community so they can send in tips to law enforcement. 

In 2003, President George W. Bush signed the PROTECT Act into law, which provided the emergency preparedness and response tools necessary to create a national AMBER Alert program. In 2002, the system became nationally focused after the first White House Conference on Missing, Exploited, and Runaway Children. 

The AMBER Alert system has spread to countries throughout the world and is responsible for the rescue of over 900 children. As of 2022, Texas has the most AMBER Alerts, with 17% of all AMBER Alerts issued in the U.S. coming from Texas.

Unfortunately, as far as we can tell, since AMBER Alerts were so new, we can't confirm there was one issued for Karla.

Police started by searching her neighborhood. They went door to door, asking neighbors for information, if they had seen Karla, if they had seen anything or anyone suspicious in the neighborhood, and so on.

They concentrated on the area bordered by St. Louis, Sahara, Industrial, and Spencer Street. 

Police also used bloodhounds named Blossom and Barney to try to track Karla’s scent. They led police to a nearby apartment complex, but “no items of evidence or value” were found there. Although they did find some fairly sketchy, but apparently unrelated individuals.

According to the FBI, the dogs hit on a particular nearby apartment, and even a bathroom within the apartment where they found human blood.  The bathroom had been recently disinfected, while the rest of the house was in disarray. 

Unfortunately there wasnt enough blood to build a DNA profile given the technology of the day, and there were no further hits on Karla’s scent in the individual’s vehicles.

Although the FBI believes the two individual were sex offenders as far as we know a case against them was never pursued.

The police wanted to make sure they talked to every person they could. They set up a roadblock to stop passing motorists. They went back through neighborhoods several times, just in case someone had been away on vacation or hadn’t yet heard the news she was missing. 

Strangely though, years later, a neighbor mentioned to the news media that through all of the intensive searching, they were completely unaware of Karla being missing. 

That sort of reminds me of how we talked in the Shauna Tiaffay bonus episode that Shauna lived two doors down from me, but I was never interviewed about her murder.

[Shaun]

We have talked about this before, and many journalists, advocates, and ethical true crime content creators have pointed this out in the past. It is sadly not uncommon for criminal justice agencies or the media to focus on victims of crime that fit certain demographics. There was speculation in Karla’s case that perhaps if Karla had been a white child, maybe she would have gotten more attention. But, I don’t think we have any evidence here at all that Las Vegas Metro Police or the Las Vegas Review Journal or the Las Vegas Sun were ignoring Karla or not covering her case enough. 

The evidence we have here seems to indicate the opposite. 

More than 100 officers and volunteers searched for a week, repeatedly going through the neighborhoods with flyers. Hundreds of flyers were distributed. Police searched abandoned cars, abandoned lots, and empty hotel and motel rooms. They used their mounted police unit to search in ditches and washes for any trace of Karla. 

Detectives tried many avenues to raise awareness about her disappearance. Her face was printed on Sedona drinking water bottles and flyers were mailed out with her photo, those “have you seen me?” mailers I’m sure many of us are familiar with. 

On the Saturday night after she disappeared, Karla’s disappearance was featured on America’s Most Wanted, and her story was even covered by The Montel Williams show. During the September 2000 Southwest Series Nascar event, at the Las Vegas speedway, Darryl Lamoure from Phoenix drove his “Driving for the Missing” entry, featuring Karla’s photo.  Her face was also on the hood of Joe Nemechek's stock car at a race at California Speedway in 2000.

We went through the Review-Journal archives and we clipped at least a dozen articles about Karla, including many times where a teaser about the state of her case appeared on the front page or on the front page of the Nevada section, directing readers to an article with updates. 

[John]

Police contacted every family member or relative and even traveled to Mexico to interview family still living there, on the chance that they had any additional information that might be helpful (but of course, they knew she wasn't living there)

On October 28, 1999, an anonymous Las Vegas resident came forward and offered a reward of $25,000 for information to help find Karla. The donor had seen Karla’s story on the news and wanted to help. The wording of the reward was for “information leading to the arrest and conviction.” 

Although that wording sounded to the press and the community that the police had determined Karla must be dead, the police repeatedly said that they hadn’t given up hope that Karla was still alive. 

Throughout the investigation, police followed up on numerous tips. An apartment manager found a backpack in an empty apartment that was initially thought to be Karla’s, but it wasn't. A girl was seen at a picnic on Mount Charleston who looked a lot like Karla but wasn’t. 

In December 1999, police went to a small motel at the opposite end of the strip from Karla’s neighborhood, in hopes of talking to someone who allegedly had information about her disappearance, but nothing turned up. They even traveled to New Mexico to investigate a sighting and found that while the girl looked a lot like Karla, sadly it wasn’t her. 

On October 25, 1999, an 11-year-old girl living in Las Vegas reported that a man in a mid-1980s Cadillac had enticed her into his car and had molested her. At the time of Karla’s disappearance, police were distributing his sketch and publicizing the description of his car, as a possible lead. 

The police said this man was just one of the “hundreds of possibilities” they were considering. 

According to reporting in the Las Vegas Sun from May of 2000, detectives had filled 30 binders which took up two 3-foot-long shelves in their office with information, tips, and interviews. They interviewed dozens of people, including sex offenders who were known to live in Karla’s neighborhood, but nothing came of those interviews.

No one who was tested failed a polygraph test, including both of her parents who were eliminated early on as suspects.

[Shaun]

However, there were two people who the police believed may have been responsible for Karla’s abduction. 

On October 14, 1999, less than a week before Karla disappeared, a man named Kyle Bell escaped from a prison transport. Bell was convicted of murdering 11-year-old Jeanna North, a girl from Fargo, North Dakota. Jeanna left her home in June 1993 to go rollerblading with friends, when Bell abducted and murdered her. 

He was being transferred, along with other prisoners, to a supermax prison in Oregon. When the bus stopped for gas in Santa Rosa, New Mexico on October 14, Bell escaped. He had hidden a key in the sole of his shoe that was missed during his strip search. He removed his handcuffs and leg irons and climbed out of the ventilation hatch onto the roof of the bus. He lay down on the roof of the bus until the bus started to pull away, and then he slid off and ran. 

The prison transport company failed to notice he was missing for 9 hours. 

When Karla went missing, he was at large. And, as he was a convicted child molester and murderer, and Jeanne was out rollerblading with friends when she was kidnapped, so naturally the police believed that Bell could have come to Las Vegas and he could have seen Karla out riding her bike and abducted her. 

Kyle Bell was finally recaptured in Dallas on January 9, 2000. He had made it all the way there and even rented an apartment with a fake ID. When he was featured on a segment on America's most wanted, one of the employees for the apartment complex called in the tip, and even collected a $50,000 reward for turning him in.

Police were not able to tie Bell’s movements to Las Vegas, and he was never conclusively tied to Karla’s disappearance.  

[John]

One suspect who does seem a lot more likely to be responsible is serial killer Curtis Dean Anderson. 

Anderson was a serial predator and murderer. He was sent to San Quentin in 1992 for kidnapping a friend’s wife at gunpoint and forcing her to drive him to Oregon. He was released from San Quentin in May 1999.

On August 12, 2000, he kidnapped an 8-year-old girl, Midsi Sanchez from Vallejo, California who was walking home from school alone. He held her captive for 2 days, but she was able to escape when he left her alone in his car. 

He was arrested and eventually confessed to multiple murders, including the kidnapping and murder of 7-year-old Xiana Fairchild, also from Vallejo, California. Xiana was abducted in December of 1999. Just like Midsi, she was walking to school when he kidnapped her. Her remains were later discovered near San Jose, California, 60 miles from where she lived, in the Santa Cruz mountains.

He ultimately pleaded guilty to her murder and was sentenced to 300 years in prison. 

Anderson also confessed to the abduction and murder of 7-year-old Amber Swartz-Garcia in June 1988 from Pinole, California. He kidnapped Amber while she was jumping rope in front of her house, forced her to drink alcohol, and drove her 13 hours to Tucson, Arizona, where he killed her, and buried her in Benson, Arizona. 

He also had other adult victims in both the United States and in Mexico. 

Given that the girls who Anderson horrifically murdered were all Latina, all around the same age, and the circumstances of their kidnappings were all so similar, the police and the FBI tried to link Anderson to Karla’s disappearance. 

[Shaun]

Vallejo police determined that Anderson was in Las Vegas in March 2000. He had even surrendered a Nevada driver’s license to authorities in California. According to reporting from October 2000, Vallejo police did not confirm to the Las Vegas Review-Journal the exact date that Anderson turned over that license. 

According to the FBI, police also found a receipt in Anderson’s car when he was arrested after Midsi’s kidnapping. The receipt was from October 20, 1999 – the day Karla disappeared – from 1:41 pm, from a cigarette store in Las Vegas, only 1.1 miles from Karla’s house.

Police have stated that Anderson was confirmed to be at doctor’s appointments in San Jose California the day before, October 19, and on October 22. San Jose is about an 8-hour car ride from Las Vegas. 

[John]

According to the Review-Journal, when Anderson was arrested in 2000, receipts -plural- were found in Anderson’s pockets that linked him to Las Vegas. The FBI has never definitively said that Anderson is responsible for Karla’s disappearance, but it seems clear he was back and forth to Las Vegas on occasion

When he died in Prison in 2007, maps of Nevada were found in his cell, marked with Xs and of course the FBI followed up on those marks. 

They went out into the desert to inspect the spots marked on the map. The FBI “Evidence Response Team” searched for Karla with ground penetrating radar twice, in 2020 and 2021, but Karla has not been found. 

As far back as January of 2000, police began trying to match Karla to any unidentified child remains that had been discovered across the country. They have repeatedly told the Review-Journal they were hoping Karla was alive and well but admitted that the likelihood of her being dead increased as each day went by. 

In 2002, police released an age-progressed sketch of Karla, the police reported that there have been several additional sightings of Karla over the years and that they always follow up on any leads that they receive. 

For the 20th anniversary of her disappearance, they have further age progressed her photo, showing how she would have looked in her 20s and finally, as she’d look at age 30.

[Shaun]

Despite the fact that they have had no answers for almost 25 years, Karla’s family never gave up on finding her. Karla’s parents never moved out of the home they lived in hoping that one day she’d come back. The family participated in a press conference in 2019 on the 20th anniversary of Karla’s disappearance, in which her dad was photographed holding her favorite doll.

In 2019, her parents donated DNA samples in the hope that there may someday be a match in the DNA database. We talked recently about the advances in forensic genealogy, which has been responsible for solving some remarkable cold cases. Unfortunately in this case, with Karla being missing, there’s nothing to compare. 

If her remains were found someday, of course, Othram would be the lab that could identify her.

We want to share this quote from Karla’s sister, Rosy - “It’s amazing how people can wait like this, and go on with their lives. It’s not easy, trust me. It’s not easy having a member of your family missing. It’s horrible, and nobody deserves this.”

When Karla was last seen, she was wearing a blue jacket, a blue-and-white striped shirt, and red pants. Her fingernails were painted green, and she primarily spoke Spanish. Karla has a medical scar on her abdomen from her appendectomy and a small mole above her right eyebrow. 

As with all the missing persons' cases we share, we’ll share the photos we have, and If you have any information about the location of Karla, you’re encouraged to reach out to the Las Vegas Metro Police Homicide Division at 702-828-3521. The FBI is currently offering a reward of $5000 for information leading to Karla’s location

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