Karla Carolina Rodriguez was born on September 29, 1992. Her nickname was Karlita. She was born in Michoacán, Mexico. Her mother is Elia Zepeda and her father is Ramon Rodriguez. Karla was the youngest of four daughters.
When Karla was around 12 months old, the family moved to Las Vegas, Nevada. The family lived near the Stratosphere. Karla was said to have been adventurous, she loved riding her bike and being outside.
Karla was quite a sickly child. By the time she was seven, she had undergone an appendectomy. She also suffered from recurring kidney and urinary tract infections. Her teeth were in poor condition and she had visible cavities – this is all information from the FBI.
She was on the small side for a girl her age, about 3-foot-6 and 50 pounds/22kgs.
The average height for a 7-year-old girl is around 47.7 inches (121.1 cm) – Karla was around 91cm so she was very tiny. This seems exceptionally small but that is her height as per multiple sources – Charley Project and the FBI.
The day that Karla disappeared was Wednesday October 20, 1999. There are differing stories about what happened that day. The majority of reports seem to indicate that Karla was on a break from school, but she was still attending an English class to help her improve her vocabulary since Spanish was her primary language.
Karla’s mother said that she walked Karla two blocks towards her school. It is then implied that Karla would have walked the additional five blocks to school by herself.
Karla never made it to her class that day. The FBI said a witness later came forward saying they saw Karla walking towards school, alone and crying.
According to the FBI, it is unknown where Karla went that day as she did not go to her class. During the late afternoon, she went to the home of a female friend.
Before 7pm that night, the friend walked Karla to another house. This is a bit confusing but Karla told Friend One that this was her home, when in fact her real house was around the corner. A male friend of Karla’s lived in this house.
She rang the doorbell. When her friend looked at the clock and saw that it was 7pm and getting dark, he told Karla that his parents would not let him go outside and play.
This info about what Karla possibly did next is from the FBI:
‘She may have stayed outside for about another 15 minutes on the swing they had outside their house. She may have also gone to her house where another friend said that he gave her $2 to go buy candy. The police went and pulled video from the store where the friend said that Karla planned to go for the candy, but they could not find her there.
Karla’s parents worked opposite shifts which partly explains why nobody realized for so long that she was missing. Her father Ramon arrived home later that night – her mother was working the night shift. When Karla was not there, he spoke to a neighbor who had seen her earlier that day. After confirming that Karla had been seen in the neighborhood, Ramon assumed his daughter had stayed at a friend’s place and he went to bed.
Karla was still not home the following morning. Her mother Elia had now finished work. Elia called the school to see if Karla had arrived for her classes. When the principal realized that Karla had not turned up, police were called.
A command post was set up at the school.
Karla’s bike was found abandoned near the neighbor’s home.
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department arrived to investigate. The FBI also became involved in the case. Karla’s disappearance was also featured on ‘America’s Most Wanted.’
The FBI traveled to Mexico to conduct interviews and they also investigated areas around the border.
According to the ‘Luminol Podcast’, both of Karla’s parents took polygraphs and they passed.
According to the FBI, there are two main theories about what may have happened to Karla.
Theory one includes the possible involvement of two brothers. The FBI have labelled them as Mark and Randy on their website about Karla.
As part of the investigation into the disappearance, the police used two bloodhounds named Barney and Blossom to track Karla’s scent. The dogs started off in two different places, and both of them tracked the child’s scent to the home of Mark and Randy.
Randy was a Navy veteran who had been discharged under unfavorable circumstances. Both he and Mark had no stable employment.
At the time that Karla disappeared, Randy had been working as a casino dealer from 6pm to 2am. Mark had been working at a local store from 10am to 7pm, each day of the week except for Tuesdays.
The men were known to use drugs recreationally. This is info direct from the FBI:
‘They frequented trafficking victims forced to do prostitution. Mark was also known to tell sexually explicit “jokes” about little girls.’
Police went to the apartment where the men lived and they consented to searches of their home and vehicles.
When the scent dogs entered the apartment, they both hit on the bathroom area. One of the dogs jumped into the bathtub and grabbed a sponge in its mouth.
Authorities said the bathroom appeared to have been recently cleaned and disinfected. This was unusual as the rest of the apartment was described as ‘filthy.’
On the side of the toilet near the bathtub, blood spatter was found. It was tested and was found to be human. However, there was not enough of a sample to acquire any DNA from.
Police found a drink container in the kitchen sink, which they believed indicated that one of the men had been to a convenience store recently. Mark would have left his job at around 7/7.15pm on the night that Karla disappeared. This would have been around the time that Karla left her friend’s house to purchase the candy. Mark was said to have been able to speak Spanish. The theory is that he intercepted Karla and spoke to her, convincing her to walk along the street close to his apartment. One of Karla’s neighbors was a known drug dealer. It is believed that Mark possibly purchased drugs from that person and had seen Karla in the past.
When police searched Mark’s vehicle, it was described as a van with boarded up windows. The van has Mississippi license plates that were registered to an ex of Mark’s. The FBI contacted the ex and she said that she was surprised the van was still in her name.
One of Mark’s shirts was found inside the van, and it contained bodily fluid stains. The dogs did not detect Karla’s scent on the upholstery in the vehicle.
Police were never able to confirm that Karla had been in the apartment or the van, so neither Mark or Randy were ever convicted in relation to this case. They eventually concluded, with FBI assistance, that Mark was a situational child sex offender.
Mark died in September 2002 of drug-related causes, and Randy also died in 2005 of similar causes.
The second theory put forward by the FBI includes the serial killer Curtis Dean Anderson.
This is info about his crimes from the FBI website –
Anderson was convicted and sentenced to over 300 years in prison for the 1999 kidnapping and murder of 7-year-old Xiana Fairchild in Vallejo, California, and other crimes. He was captured after one of his kidnap victims was able to escape. Anderson was interviewed by FBI agents in November of 2007, and confessed to murdering eight victims in the United States, including Fairchild and 7-year-old Amber Swartz-Garcia of Pinole, California. Anderson also confessed to two murders in Mexico, but did not provide any information on those victims.
Around May 1999, Curtis had been released from prison in California. He had been serving time there for kidnapping a woman in California and taking her across state lines to Oregon. By that point, he had sexually assaulted and killed seven females. Most of his victims around this time were in their late teens/early adult years.
In September 1999, one month before Karla disappeared, Curtis was involved in a motorcycle accident and he was significantly injured. One of his defense attorneys would later say that because of his injuries, Curtis switched from having a preference for victims who were older, to younger, prepubescent females because they were easier to overpower.
A receipt was found in 2000 in Curtis’ vehicle which was a white or beige Oldsmobile Firenza. He was said to have been living in the vehicle in 1999. The receipt showed that he was in Las Vegas on October 20, 1999, the day that Karla vanished. The receipt was from a cigarette store that was 1.1 miles away from Karla’s home. He had been at the store at 1.41pm that day.
Despite apparently being in Las Vegas on October 20, Curtis was confirmed to have attended doctor appointments in San Jose, California on October 19 and October 22. San Jose is around a 7.5-8 hour drive from Las Vegas. It is unknown why he was in Las Vegas on October 20.
One media outlet looked at the days that Curtis killed his victims and found that he always did it on a Thursday. We know that Karla disappeared on a Wednesday evening.
Curtis died in prison in December 2007 – he hanged himself in his cell. Before his death, he referenced a map of Nevada where he had placed five ‘X’ marks across the state. He said that these were places where he had buried tapes of him and his victims. Two additional maps found in his cell after he died provided more precise directions for two of the five sites.
The FBI went to the locations to search. In March 2019, authorities attempted to use ground penetrating radar but due to the amount of debris at the site, the effectiveness of that tool was reduced.
The FBI went back to the site in 2020 and 2021 to search again. Nothing was found in relation to Karla’s case.
2019 marked 20 years since Karla disappeared.
“We miss you, Karla,” her sister Rosy, now 35, said. “Please someone who has any clue — please let us know, contact the police.’
“We’re still going to be here,” she said. “We’re not going to give up until we find somebody or someone who has seen her.”
“We believe in our heart that she’s still out there somewhere, and we don’t lose that hope,” she said.
Ramon, Karla’s dad, also spoke to the media as he held her favorite doll. He told the Review-Journal in Spanish that he and the girl’s mother now understand the dangers of leaving children unattended. The family still lives in Las Vegas.
Retired Metro Deputy Chief Al Salinas told the Review-Journal in 2019 that, in his opinion, Karla was “a victim waiting to happen.”
“Dad didn’t call us. Mom didn’t call us. It was the principal of the school that called us. Those kind of situations really give me concern,” Salinas said, later adding that he thought Karla “fell through the cracks.”
Officials said in 2019 that no substantial leads have come to light in about 10 years. Supervisory Special Agent Elena Iatarola, with the Las Vegas FBI office, said there is now a $5,000 reward available for anyone with information that leads to a resolution of the case.
Karla was last seen wearing a blue jacket, a blue-and-white striped shirt and red pants. Her fingernails were painted green. She was 3 feet, 6 inches tall and weighed about 50 pounds, according to the Polly Klaas Foundation, which also has assisted with the case.
Police said Karla had a medical scar on her abdomen, a small mole above her right eyebrow and spoke limited English.
SOURCE LIST:
https://luminolpod.com/blog/f/the-disappearance-of-karla-rodriguez
https://www.sinsandsurvivors.com/blog/the-unsolved-disappearance-of-karla-rodriguez
https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/kidnap/karla-rodriguez
https://www.fbi.gov/news/podcasts/inside-the-fbi-podcast-what-happened-to-karla-rodriguez
https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/seeking-info/curtis-dean-anderson