The views and opinions expressed in Cold and
Missing are exclusively those of the hosts. All
parties mentioned are considered innocent until
proven guilty in a court of law. Cold and Missing
also contains adult themes and languages. Listener
discretion is advised. I'm your host, Ali McLaughlin
-Sulkowski. And I'm your co -host, Eli Sulkowski.
And this is Cold and Missing, where we cover
cold cases and missing person cases. Hello, everyone,
and welcome back to Cold and Missing. I'm your
host, Ali, and it will just be me coming to
you this week. Eli is a little busy with some
other projects, but he will be back with us again
next week. But I wanted to go ahead and bring
you this week's case. I didn't want to take a
week off because if you'll remember last week,
we talked about the missing person case of Karen
Grajeda. And towards the end of the timeline,
I mentioned that there is a cold case that goes
kind of hand in hand with Karen's case. So that's
the cold case that we're going to be talking
about today for episode 125. So just as a bit
of a content warning at the top, this case does
involve a young person and there are mentions
of sexual assault. Today, we are talking about
the cold case of Esther Lizette Galaz. and this
takes place in December of 1994 in Tucson, Arizona.
But first, a little bit about Esther. Esther
goes mostly by her middle name of Lizette, but
her siblings call her Junior since she is named
after her mother, Esther. I'll just refer to
her as Lizette throughout the podcast, so if
I mention Esther, I'm talking about her mother.
Lizette is six years old in 1994. She and her
family, that included four other siblings, had
recently moved to the Bella Verda apartment complex
a few weeks before the timeline starts. She lived
there with her siblings, two brothers and two
sisters, and her mother, Esther, and her mother's
boyfriend, Martin Lopez. While Esther and Martin
were not married, he acted like a stepfather
to Lizette. Lizette is a rambunctious little
girl. Her aunt says, quote, She likes to sing
and dance. There was one song she liked to sing
in Spanish a lot. It's called Tengo Celos. She
likes to sing and move her body around to the
music. She was a loving child. She was always
friendly and she loved her siblings and peers
her own age. She liked school a lot. End quote.
Lizette is a popular student at Prince Elementary
School. One of her teachers described her as,
quote, she had a strong little spirit. She had
the greatest smile in the world. She was also
so concerned about everyone in the class, including
me. If someone would fall down, she would go
over to them, bring them to me, and want to take
care of them and get them a drink of water. If
I needed help in class, she was there. End quote.
At this time in 1994, Lizette is three and a
half feet tall, has long brown hair, and brown
eyes. And now, a timeline of events. On Monday,
December 19th, 1994, Lizette had a normal day
at school. When she got home from school, she
immediately heads outside to play with kids in
the apartment complex. She stops by the Lessard's
apartment around 4 p .m. to ask if their son
could come out and play, but the little boy wasn't
home, so Lizette hung around for a minute eating
cookies before heading back outside to find someone
to play with. While at the neighbor's apartment,
her mother's boyfriend Martin walks by. He gives
her a quick kiss and keeps walking towards the
family's apartment. Lizette eventually finds
her friend Amber to play with. They spent the
afternoon playing school and laughing on the
swings. As it began to get darker outside, she
waved goodbye to her friend and headed home.
Amber says that when she said goodbye to Lizette,
She saw her run towards a blonde woman near the
convenience store next to the apartments. The
convenience store is going to come up a lot in
this timeline, so I just want to take a quick
second to talk about it. The location of the
convenience store is right next to the apartments.
It is very, very close. They practically share
a parking lot, and if your apartment was on the
side closest to the convenience store, It's likely
your apartment would be closer to the convenience
store than other apartments in the complex, just
to paint a picture a little bit. Lizette eventually
did wander inside her apartment right around
6 p .m. She immediately asked her mom if she
could go back outside to play. Esther says no.
It was getting dark and the temperature was starting
to fall. Esther then put her 11 -year -old son
in charge. She needed to run to the convenience
store to make a quick phone call on the payphone.
Esther takes one of Lizette's younger sisters
with her to the store. After a few minutes, Lizette
announced to her brother that she wanted to go
with her mother and left the apartment. Again,
the store is very, very close to the apartment
complex, so it would not have been strange for
Lizette to run after her mom. Only around five
to ten minutes pass by before Esther returns
back to the apartment. Lizette's not there. When
Esther asks her son where Lizette is, he says
that she wanted to go to the store with her.
Esther turns around and heads back outside to
look for Lizette since she hadn't run into her
at the store or coming back. When she didn't
immediately find her daughter, she asks for more
help in the search. When the whole family comes
up empty, Esther calls 911 around 8 p .m. to
report Lizette missing. Esther says, quote, my
son said she went out. We went looking for her,
and the neighbors went looking for her. After
two hours, I called the cops. End quote. Police
arrive and start searching the complex. They
start knocking on other unit doors, asking if
anyone had seen her. As hours continue to tick
on, police decide to alert the media to get Lizette's
picture out there around 10 .15 p .m. Initially,
police think that Lizette just wandered away
from the apartment. maybe running to catch up
with her mother or to play with kids in the complex.
However, Lizette had never wandered away from
home before. And as the minutes tick on and it
gets colder and colder, police worry about the
temperature and that something nefarious had
happened. While it had been in the mid -70s during
the day, it was dropping down to 40 degrees at
night. We do know that police locate two young
witnesses. The kids say that they saw a girl
matching Lizette's description talking to a man
in a light blue or gray small pickup truck. An
argument was happening between them. The man
seemed to force the little girl into the truck.
Police take this sighting seriously. The kids
were not together. They saw it from different
vantage points and described a similar event.
As it turns into Tuesday, December 20th, Police
believe that something more serious has happened.
They continue to look for Lizette through the
night. However, no sign of the little girl is
found. Captain Lyle Mann says, quote, it's like
she went up in smoke. We've not discounted anything.
We're very concerned foul play may be involved,
end quote. As the morning breaks, a full search
is launched. Helicopters and scent dogs are brought
in to help aid the searchers. Police are going
door to door through the apartment complex and
doing the same at six other apartment complexes
nearby. The search lasts all morning and into
the afternoon. Around 4 .15 p .m., a man who
wasn't with Lizette's search effort, he was just
out walking his dogs. He was walking them through
a vacant lot that was about half a mile away
from where Lizette lived. In the lot was a dry
desert wash, and when he was walking his dogs
through there, he found a discarded mattress.
When the man looked under the mattress, he made
a horrible discovery. The little body of Lizette
is found. The police block the area and begin
processing. Quickly, they change the case to
a homicide investigation. Police refuse to comment
on the state of her body at this time or a possible
cause of death. They want to wait for an autopsy
report. The next day, Wednesday, December 21st,
Lizette's autopsy is conducted. Police initially
refused to comment on the cause of death, but
eventually it's leaked and then confirmed by
police that Lizette had been sexually assaulted
and died from a result of blunt force trauma
to the head. The autopsy puts her time of death
somewhere between 8 p .m. Monday night. and noon
on Tuesday the next day. So she was last seen
around 6 p .m. on Monday and then found around
4 .15 on Tuesday. Police do bring her mother
and her mother's boyfriend downtown for questioning.
However, they're released after four hours, and
police will eventually clear the family of any
involvement in the crime. A friend of Lizette's
does come forward to say that Lizette was at
their house until 7 p .m. That would have been
about an hour after she was last seen. This sighting
is only mentioned once, and it's unclear if police
ever ruled this out. Pretty quickly, police make
a connection between Lizette's case and the sexual
assault of three young girls in 1993. We talked
about this a bit last week. Police make the connection
because the description of the assaulter in those
cases matches the description of the man who
was seen forcing the young girl into his truck.
A major difference, however, is that in the 1993
cases, all of the girls were let go after the
assault. On Monday, December 26th, the day after
Christmas and a week after she was last seen,
Lizette's memorial is held. The community donates
to cover the expenses of the funeral for the
family. And the next day, December 27th, she
is laid to rest. As the weeks pass by, police
say that they chase down hundreds of leads and
rule them out. By mid -January 1995, police say
that they have no suspects. The FBI agreed to
create a profile for the suspect, but that's
never released to the public. The case appears
to go cold quickly. The one -year anniversary
comes around in December of 1995, and police
have no new information to share on the case.
Police still say that the witnesses who saw the
man force the girl in the truck is their strongest
lead, but police do acknowledge that it could
have been a father and a daughter having an argument
and not related to Lizette at all. Police beg
the public that if anyone has any information,
to please come forward. In January of 1996, so
just over the one -year mark of Lizette's murder,
Karen Grejeda goes missing, who we covered in
our last episode. Both Karen and Lizette look
similar. They're both young Hispanic girls and
live on the south side of Tucson in apartment
complexes. In January of 1997, over two years
since Lizette's murder, and Rodolfo Ceteno Morales
is arrested for the sexual assaults in 1993.
Police begin looking at him to see if he could
be involved in Lizette's murder, since he does
match the description of the man seen forcing
a girl into his truck. In December of 1997, at
the three -year anniversary, through donations
in the community, Lizette's headstone is placed
at her grave. In April of 1998, nearly three
and a half years after the murder, Morales is
found guilty on five kidnapping charges and three
sexual assault charges. He is sentenced to 248
years in prison. He maintains that he did not
have anything to do with Lizette's murder. After
this, there's not a lot of updates on Lizette's
case. The next big update comes in 2023, so at
this point it's been over 30 years since Lizette's
murder. And it appears that the police have been
working quietly on her case in the background,
using advances in DNA technology to try to get
more information. Detective Miller gives the
following statement in 2023. And just as a heads
up, he calls Lizette Esther throughout this next
statement. Quote, in the initial investigation,
there were some child witnesses that described
a male talking to Esther near the convenience
store where her mom had gone and Esther was called
out by name and Esther went and got into the
truck. So a lot of media coverage on that. Further
advanced forensics have been completed and different,
more modern investigation techniques have been
used over the last five years to develop a potentially
another suspect. That doesn't match the description
that the children initially gave. They're small
kids. Their memories change. The descriptions
are different. And it's likely that the suspect
is not a Hispanic male, which was originally
thought to be. So we're broadening our suspect
search. Unfortunately, technology can't take
us all the way there. It's going to have to be
knocking on the doors, the old traditional type
of police work that may potentially lead us down
the road to identifying the suspect. We're hopeful.
These are still cases that people remember. They're
not solved, and it's our hope that by the time
we finish our careers here, that we can either
get a result and a resolution by identifying
a suspect, potentially prosecuting that suspect,
and giving some course of justice to the family.
End quote. Police don't release any further information
and there hasn't been any new updates or developments
in Lizette's case since then. So if you know
anything about the murder of Esther Lizette Galaz,
please call 888 -CRIME at 520 -882 -7463. So
that is the case of Esther Lizette Galaz. I found
this case when I found Karen's case last week.
As I've mentioned at the beginning of the podcast
and in last week's podcast, these two cases are
talked about by Tucson police together. They're
kind of grouped together. And while there's no
direct evidence to suggest that the crimes are
related, police are investigating them as if
they are. Looking at a map of Tucson, Karen...
And Lizette lived only about a 15 -minute drive
away from each other. So pretty close, all things
considered, on the same side of town. But in
learning about Lizette's case, I was really shocked
that I didn't know about them. I'm really shocked
I don't know about these cases, that they really
hadn't come to my attention before I started
digging into them myself. Just these two young
girls in very similar circumstances. I'm sure
if you listened to last week's episode, you picked
up on some of the similarities of the case. And
again, while they may be related, they may not
be related. There are definitely some like themes
that just stand out. Even down to like, you know,
them living in the apartment complex. Both the
girls running outside to play and kind of running
in and out of their apartment. Like we know.
In this case, Lizette is there at 6 p .m., asked
to go back outside. Her mom says no. And then
a few minutes later, Lizette is gone. You know,
she runs out the door, assumingly going towards
her mother in the convenience store, but that's
really the last we know. The last firm sighting
at this point is Lizette leaving the apartment.
This case has a lot of unanswered questions,
obviously. burns in my mind or that I keep coming
back to was the the sighting of Lizette at another
apartment around 7 p .m. Like I mentioned in
the timeline this is only mentioned once but
it's mentioned quickly following Lizette's disappearance
so this isn't coming you know years later or
anything like that this was coming I believe
the day after this person came forward and said,
you know, Lizette was at my apartment until 7.
I don't know if parents also saw Lizette there
or if it was just her friend. How old is the
friend? I don't have any of those details. And
I think those details would give us a lot of
information. But I am curious if just this has
been ruled out and it's just not part of the
narrative or if. Police do think that she might
have stopped by a friend's apartment just one
more time to try to keep playing. I would be
really curious to know if that went anywhere.
One thing that feels frustrating about this case
is that for so long, the suspect was described
as this Hispanic male. And a suspect sketch was
used that promoted this image of this man. scene
forcing a girl into his truck or arguing with
a girl. The story has changed a little bit over
the years. But again and again, that suspect
is named. And I think with good reason. Police
really did believe the two child witnesses. They
were at different points in the apartment and
saw the same thing. So for so long, there was
this very specific search of a Hispanic male.
But now, In 2023, police are saying the suspect
is likely not Hispanic. I think what police have
done, I don't know this for sure if this is exactly
the testing they've done, but to me it sounds
like they do have DNA and they were able to run
a phenotype DNA test. So this, from my understanding,
which is very limited, would be more of like,
you know, a 23andMe. where it can give you the
origins of your DNA. So I think that's what was
done here. We've seen this done in some other
cases we've covered. So I think that is what
would give police, you know, that they are not
looking for Hispanic male. You know, he doesn't
have the DNA for it. But, you know, they don't
have any specifics like weight, age, height,
you know, those like real specifics. So it really
feels like... There was a lot of time lost kind
of looking in the wrong direction, the complete
wrong direction. I assume if there is a DNA,
you know, profile that's been made, that it's
been entered into all the databases and there
hasn't been a hit, which is kind of surprising.
You would think that somebody who commits a crime
like this would reoffend somewhere down the line
and have their DNA taken. This is one of those
cases where it's like I wonder, you know, all
of the backlogs, just backlogs and backlogs and
backlogs of rape kits sitting in police departments.
If somewhere in those, you know, there's another
match and more information and another case.
I am hopeful in this case that since we do have
DNA that we will get some answers down the line.
Lizette's family still want to know what happened
to her. They want justice. They want answers.
They want to know who did this to their loved
one. And also, someone needs to answer for what
they did to Lizette. It's horrible what happened
to this little girl. And nobody should be able
to do that and not have to answer for why they
did that. So what I hope in this case, what I
want in this case for the family is that they
get the answers that they need and that they
want and that justice is served for Lizette.
Because whoever did this to her does not need
to be walking out free. The person who did this
is horrible, is horrible. So they do not need
to be out there. They do not need to be around
children. They do not need to be around people.
Lizette seems like such a wonderful, wonderful
child. And we, the world, lost out on having
Lizette and seeing her impact fully. You know,
just in the six years that she was here, she
made a huge impact on her family, her community,
her friends, her school. Every journey she would
have gone on, like all the impacts she could
have made in her life. And it's not fair that
the world was robbed of the opportunity to see
Lizette grow and shine. But again, if you know
anything about the murder of Lizette Galaz in
December of 1994 in Tucson, Arizona, please call
888 -CRIME at 520 -882 -7463. We will have pictures
of Lizette on our Instagram at coldandmissing.
You can follow us there and see the photos. Unfortunately,
there's not a lot of photos of her, but I was
able to dig up some really great ones of her.
So please look, please share, share her case.
your community, in your network. People really
need to know Lizette's name and hear her story.
And we need to get more buzz about her case.
I think that there is some momentum with police,
you know, reopening the investigation, working
on it quietly. But I think if we can get that
media attention, that momentum here, that it
will just continue to give resources to this
case. And working Lizette's case is ultimately
going to be working Karen's case as well. So,
you know, I just think that this is a great place
for police to put resources, to put time, to
put people, to try to bring closure to the family,
to the community. So please check out Lizette's
picture share it that's the whole goal here and
thank you to everyone who has rated and reviewed
us I've just seen so many positive reviews come
in and it's been so heartwarming and humbling
it's means so much to me that you would take
the time out of your day to leave a review to
let me know your thoughts to take the time to
appreciate the podcast we appreciate it so much
here at cold and missing so thank you so much
and if you haven't rated and reviewed us yet
please if you have the time today or this week
if you could we would appreciate it so much and
it helps other people find the cases here and
it'll help people find elizabeth's case so that's
advocacy work that's beautiful And if you or
someone you love is hard of hearing, you can
follow along with a transcript. The transcript
can be found at our website, www .coldandmissing
.com. It's the official transcript, so the spelling's
always correct there. I know in podcast players,
they've started to add transcripts that are auto
-generated, but the official one is on our website,
and it also has all of our old episodes on there.
So if you're looking for more or a specific case,
you can search there to see if we've covered
it or suggest the case. if you want us to cover
it. But that is all I have. Thank you so much
for listening to Cold and Missing. I'm your host,
Ali . Have a good week and stay safe, y 'all.