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 .