Clarissa Castro (King of Hearts, California)
2023-11-29 00:24:51
For years, some law enforcement agencies have replaced the faces of traditional playing card decks with images of missing and murdered people and distributed those cards in prisons hoping inmates would come forward with information needed to crack these cold cases wide open. Now, audiochuck is dealing you in. Each week, we will be working with investigators and family members to bring you the details of some of the coldest cases from around the country in hopes that someone listening can finally bring these victims the justice they deserve.
Our card this week is Claressia Castro, The King of Hearts from California. One fall day in 1991, 14-year-old Claressia vanished into thin air after a night of hanging out with friends. Years later, the mystery of where she disappeared to would be solved, but that discovery would unlock a whole new world of unknowns. I'm Ashley Flowers and this is the deck.
December 8, 1991, was a bit of a gloomy day in southern California. the Sunday afternoon clouds hinted that rainfall was imminent. But that didn't stop a 14-year-old boy, who we'll call Joey, from walking a nature trail in part of Chula Vista, known as the Otay River Bottom. Now, it wasn't exactly known for being the best part of town, but that, too, didn't deter Joey from making the most of his weekend. What did stop him was what he would find on the side of the trail, under some trash bags caught in barbed wire.
It was what appeared to be a human leg. Joey wasn't sticking around to find out what the leg might be connected to. He booked it home, looking like he'd seen a ghost, and told his stepfather, between heavy breaths, what he'd found. Joey's stepdad needed to see this for himself, so he grabbed his cousin and had Joey lead them all back to the scene. Here's Chula Vista Police Sergeant Tony Molina describing what the three of them saw.
Each of them separately get within a few feet of what appeared to be a body, and they take a closer look. And so Stepdad, it looks closer, he sees. Yep, it's definitely a leg that looks like charred or mummified skin on the leg. But most of the body, like going up from about the knees up. The flesh is mostly gone, it's bones, and then the top part is covered by blue garbage bags.
But there's holes in the garbage bags where there's long, dark hair coming out. They realize this is definitely a body, so they call the Chula Vista Police Department.
Once police got there, they got busy and fast, wanting to beat the rain. There wasn't much evidence to collect, aside from the body itself. It was clear that the deceased individual had been there a while, given that the remains were partially skeletonized. And because of that, they couldn't even make a guess regarding cause of death, but they did know that this was a homicide. Because, along with the fact that this person had been wrapped in trash bags. Investigators would also come to learn that this person's hands had been bound with some kind of commercial type tape.
Now, it appeared that the victim was likely a woman, given the long hair and outfit, which was a black lace bra, a dark colored tank top and a large gray sweatshirt. But she didn't have any form of ID on her, so added to the list of mysteries they needed to solve was her identity.
They started the autopsy the next day, and the medical examiner was able to even provide some updates to the detectives over the next few days. Including narrowing down an age range, they narrowed it down to a 14 to 16 year old Hispanic female. They estimated she was 5'4 to 5'5 with brown hair.
Still, no cause of death or ID. But at least now, investigators were equipped with a description that they could compare against anyone missing in Chula Vista.
There was only one missing female at the time out of Chula Vista that was anywhere close to this, but she was a woman in her 30s. That's where everyone kept asking, including reporters at the time, Is this that girl? And from the department they were saying it doesn't seem to match up. It's possible at this point, we're checking into it, but it doesn't seem to match.
That became a prevailing issue. Nothing was seeming to match, even with the Jane Doe's description published in local newspapers. No one was coming forward saying, Hey, I haven't seen my daughter or sister or friend in a while, not even an I know someone who matches that description.
It was complete radio silence. Now, it's not clear what steps police immediately took, like whether or not they entered their DOE into databases. But I have to assume they did. Because even though this was the early 90s, NCIC was connected to all 50 states by then. Also, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children was around, which would have been another database to easily check their doe against. But whether they did their due diligence or not, the identity of Chula Vista Jane Doe remained unknown.
And over the coming months, the case sat cold, which didn't sit well with any of the detectives at Chula Vista PD. So they started trying some different routes to revamp the case. Like they had a clay reconstruction made of the Jane Doe's face. And after that didn't turn up any leads, they took more drastic steps, steps that took a detective all the way north of the border.
He went up to Ottawa, Canada, with this evidence. So the bag and the tape, because there was some new way of taking prints then, and apparently they were the closest place doing it. So they agreed to have him come up and he was there for three days. They process it over three days, he was there every day of it.
And, unfortunately, no prints were developed.
For a few years, that's all. It was treading water, trying to keep up with technological advances, but ultimately getting nowhere. That is, until June of 1994, two and a half years after the discovery of their Jane Doe. That's when a detective at Chula Vista PD got a call from a county sheriff's deputy, who dropped an absolute bombshell. Out of nowhere, he says, Hey, I might know who your Jane Doe is.
We have this missing girl, 14-year-old Claressia Castro, who's been missing since 91. And the description seems to match up now. Just to pause for a second, because you might be wondering if this girl has been missing since 91. Why is this deputy now just calling in 94? Well, Sergeant Molina says, it's not as random as it seems, apparently. California's Missing and Unidentified Persons Section, a.k.a. MUPS regularly reaches out to agencies with missing and unidentified cases and gives them kind of like a polite nudge. Which is what had happened here. MUPS had reached out to the sheriff's office and asked them where they were with Claressia's still-open missing persons case.
And thank God for that nudge. Because Chula Vista detectives agreed this seemed like a promising lead, so they quickly started looking into it. Got Claressia's dental records and, lo and behold, it was her. The Chula Vista Jane Doe was Claressia Castro. Authorities got in contact with Claressia's family and started interviews right away.
I mean, they had two and a half years of catch-up to do. One of the first family members they spoke with was Claressia's oldest sister, Celestina Ramirez, who was 16 when Claressia went missing. And was actually the one who filed the missing person report with the sheriff's office. Celestina painted a picture for investigators of the kind of environment that she and her four siblings were raised in. She said their mother struggled with substance use and was barely home, leaving her to care for her younger siblings.
Prior to Claressia's disappearance, Celestina had grown tired of the chaos and moved out to live with a friend, leaving Claressia as the motherly figure around the house. Naturally, Celestina often worried about her younger sister, but she told police that that feeling of worry was stronger than ever. On October 23, 1991..
Here's Celestina recalling that day.
That day I felt weird, like I was drawn to her. I just didn't know, you know, what was going on. So I went and visited her that morning, and, you know, I visited her and she was fine. And I just was like, Hmm, OK.
Seeing Claressia fine just that once wasn't enough to ease Celestina's nerves. So later on in the day, she returned to the house and things weren't as calm as they were the first visit.
At that time, she had like some kind of party or something going on and there was a whole bunch of people in the house. And I did see her, she looked fine, she didn't look like out of the ordinary.
I even went into the house just to see, you know, what's going on, but the feeling I had like there was something wrong, something going on, you know.
Celestina couldn't stay long because at 16 she had her own party to get to. But even after leaving, she still couldn't shake the feeling that something was amiss. She didn't like that. Her sister was at the house with dozens of people, especially with the rest of her younger siblings there.
My ex at the time noticed that I wasn't comfortable. So he and his brother-in-law went to the house to make sure to get all those people out of the house. And he said that she's fine, everything's good, she's there, you know?
So I got a little bit relieved. But then, after the party had ended, I still felt like I still had to go and check on her again. So after that, it was, you know, it was late, we stopped by again.
Celestina told police that everything seemed calm and fine, lights off, no noise, but that still wasn't good enough for her, and she noticed Claricia had her window open.
I had to go and wake her up through the window to come and open the door, and so she did that. She came out, she was saying, what's going on? and nothing.
I just wanted to check and see if you're OK. I just didn't feel comfortable with all those people in your house, so I just wanted to see if you were OK. You know, and safe. Or, you know, it's just I didn't tell her how I felt, why I kept on going back to her, so we left it at that because I seen that she was OK.
She came out, she looked fine, after that she went back into the house and I left.
Celestina thought that was the end of it, that somehow her intuition was just malfunctioning or something, but it turns out it wasn't malfunctioning at all. She just wouldn't know it until the following morning when she had an unexpected guest show up at her doorstep.
My mom comes to my house and tells me, Where did I hide her? Where did I put her at? I'm like, What are you talking about? It was your sister, she's not home.
I go, well, what do you mean? She's not home? Yeah, she left your siblings there by themselves, and I go. She was fine when I seen her last night, but no, I don't have her anywhere.
I'm not hiding her. So then my mom left.
It took days before she found out the truth.
One of her best friends got in contact with me and told me that my sister was missing. I go, What do you mean? she's missing? She goes, Yeah, we're out here looking for her. I thought, OK, maybe my sister stepped out, or she maybe had enough.
And she left for a little bit and come back. My mom never got back in contact with me, so she never let me know that she never made it back. And tell her friends, her best friend told me.
And I go, Oh my god, you guys are looking for her. Yeah, she's missing.
Celestina said she didn't know what to do other than call the police and try to file a missing person report. But they told her she couldn't do that since she was a minor, leaving Celestina feeling helpless.
I knew there was something wrong, but I couldn't figure it out. And, you know, even after the fact, no one was listening, no one did anything.
Celestina said it wasn't until the following January, three months later, that she was finally able to file a report alongside her grandmother. But even with that official report filed, Claricia was labeled an endangered runaway. But that didn't feel right because she had never run away before. And she wouldn't have willingly abandoned her younger siblings, especially when their mom wasn't home. But none of that mattered to investigators.
Celestina's concerns were largely ignored at the time. No one outside of Claricia's family was truly concerned for her safety until now. Two and a half years later, now that police had physical proof, something terrible did indeed happen to her. After talking with Celestina, investigators sat down with Claricia's younger sister, who was only six years old when Claricia went missing. Here is Police Sergeant Molina again.
She couldn't remember a whole lot, so that very first time that they interviewed her, she said that she remembered that night before Claricia went missing. So again, presumably the night when all these kids are over, because she didn't remember all the people there. She does remember at some point, her sister walking out in front of the house and getting in a fight with two girls. She remembered her sister coming back in, crying, but otherwise, OK.
And that was kind of the extent of her statement that first time around.
In talking with Claricia's loved ones, police learned that she was going through some very trying times. Just prior to her disappearance. Her family had just moved from the Spring Valley neighborhood to the Lomita neighborhood, a few miles away across the freeway. But it was enough distance that they'd crossed the boundaries between two gangs.
And what we know about Claricia now, based on statements from family members and friends, is she was involved in a female gang at the time. In that region, it sounds like there may have been a little bit of conflict in that area.
Rumor also had it that Claricia was affiliated with not just her gang, but another one through this guy.
At least a couple of her friends said that she was not necessarily dating, but, in their words, fooling around with a gang member. Boy out of her original neighborhood area, where she lived in Spring Valley before.
We've been asked to call this guy Charlie.
The thing about Charlie is he also has a girlfriend. So that was, of course, something that detectives started looking at at that time. You know, is it possibly a love triangle, something like that?
Now, when we spoke with Sergeant Molina, he didn't know if investigators at the time interviewed Charlie, even after we spoke with Molina. He was having trouble finding any record of that in the case file, which doesn't mean it didn't happen. Documents in cases this old get lost or misplaced all the time. Molina's pretty sure Charlie was spoken to at some point in the investigation, but he's just not sure when or even what detectives learned. I do know, though, that they tracked down and talked to many of the 30-some kids who had attended the party at Claricia's place the night that she went missing.
They were trying to see if anyone there had seen or knew something, but it didn't really get them anywhere.
They spoke with a number of them, including one that was in prison at the time. It was kind of a typical again, thinking of the gang culture, right? You don't talk, even if you don't really know anything. It's still going to be vague. You don't want to be seen talking with the police or interacting in that way.
After weeks into the investigation, all police really had was a lot of background information and a total lack of cooperation from those who might have mattered most.
I think it was pretty early on that we could tell. This is not likely to be a stranger abduction type thing, and very likely to be related to her gang affiliation. Whether it's a fight that she had or just something going on there.
Things quickly slowed down, and eventually the investigation came to a screeching halt. To Celestina. It felt like they weren't pursuing the case as intensely as others because they viewed it as gang related.
I was upset about that. Because regardless of her past or what she was in at that time, she's still a person and she does belong to somebody. It's time to move forward and realize that, you know, she's a person, she was a human being, you know? So, yeah, I was really frustrated.
Her frustrations only grew as hope dwindled, but it's amazing how quickly that spark of hope can be rekindled for Celestina. It happened in 2003, when retired Sergeant Robert Conrad, better known as Bob around Chula Vista Police headquarters, returned to the department to assist with cold case homicides. That's when he dusted off Claricia's case file and got to work.
So when Bob came back, he interviewed the older sister again, and much of it stayed the same. She kind of reiterated the relationship with her mom at the time, that there was a lot of reasons that she was not communicating with her mom about it. And he firmed up the timeline with her as far as when she reported her sister missing.
Bob did also speak with the mom. And so mom, you know, admitted at the time she was dealing with her own issues there at the house. And so she didn't remember a lot about the circumstances with her daughter going missing at the time. As far as specifics, she said that the day prior to Claricia going missing, she was in and out of the house all day.
Her timeline when she spoke to Bob was that she left the house at 10 p.
M.
Got home at 2 a.
M. And in her words, when she got home, there was a blanket on the floor by the couch and Clarissa was gone. She said that the six-year-old girl came out to her at the time and said that she saw Clarissa leave in a small white car.
Her mom told investigators that after that she tried to report Clarissa missing, but was told that she was just a runaway. But Sergeant Molina said that's never been confirmed on their end, whether that call happened or not. She went on to say that she later heard talk on the street that a Spring Valley girl had been killed. Reinterviewing everyone wasn't the only thing on Bob's to-do list.
He also wanted to take advantage of all the latest developments in forensic science. And the latest and greatest innovation at the time was forensic. VMD, which is vacuum metal deposition, a technique to lift fingerprints off of difficult surfaces like fabric. Police tried this method on the trash bags and tape recovered from the crime scene, but unfortunately, nothing came of it. And so, just like in the 90s, the case once again went cold. But it wouldn't stay that way for quite as long this time.
Because in 2006, their local Fox station aired a story about Clarissa's case. And just like that, the community's interest was reignited. And so was Bob's. He once again jumped into reinterviewing people to see if anyone's story had changed, and wouldn't, you know it, someone's did?
None other than the youngest sister, who again was six years old at the time of her sister's disappearance. But she was now a young adult, and she had more to add to her eyewitness testimony. Now, as a refresher, here's what she had to say the first time detectives spoke with her when she was still a child.
She said that she remembered that night before Clarissa went missing. She does remember at some point her sister walking out in front of the house and getting in a fight with two girls. She remembered her sister coming back in, crying, but otherwise okay this time, she says. She recalled she had a bloody nose after that fight with the girls. And that she went and grabbed some knives. Put them on the table and said, Don't answer the door, if it knocks, I'll get it.
Who those girls were, she didn't know.
She said that she believes it was sometime around 10.
She does not know for sure, she just remembered her and her younger siblings were in bed. She remembered hearing a car honk and looking out and seeing two guys that came up that drove up in a black or dark car. And that Clarissa walked out there and got into the back seat.
And she left, and that it appeared voluntary. That was her recollection this time around. it doesn't make sense with any of the timeline, but that was her recollection this time.
What did make sense with everything else police knew, though, was that Clarissa was scared and seemingly knew something was going to happen now. Unfortunately, the sister's updated statement did little to jumpstart the investigation and sadly, things stalled again. But Bob didn't give up.
In 2008, he got Clarissa put on a deck of cold case cards being distributed to prisons, and in 2010 he got her put on an updated edition of that deck. But still, crickets. By the time 2015 rolled around, Bob was ready to drum up something, anything in the case. So he went back through everything to see if there was anyone to revisit. Anything that could be sent off for DNA testing.
And sure enough. As he read the case file over again, this time he homed in on a detail about fingernails that had been taken from Clarissa during the autopsy. Holding his breath, Bob reached out to the medical examiner's office to see if they still had those fingernails and could they send them off for testing.
The medical Examiner's office said that during a facility move that those were unfortunately contaminated and so they were no longer of evidentiary use. Those were gone.
Police felt they'd exhausted all leads, but that's the thing about police work. New ideas, new paths forward can hit you out of nowhere. Even during our interview with Sergeant Molina, he said he wondered what Clarissa's fingernails were contaminated with. Like, could there still be some usable DNA on them that could at least point them in the direction of their killer?
Molina didn't know, but he seemed set on figuring that out, honestly. The most hopeful path forward for this case right now is this episode. Chula Vista, detectives and Celestina alike are hopeful that it'll fall to the right person's ears, and maybe that person is you.
Were you at Clarissa's party on October 23, 1991?
Did you witness something? anything? maybe someone confessed something to you later? Even if you think it's information police already have? Please come forward again, or come forward for the very first time. You could be holding the missing piece to this more than 30-year-old puzzle.
If anybody did know anything, I just want them to come up and confess, or come up and give information if they know any information. Because of the fact that, for one, she's a human being, another, she was 14, and she's also a sister and a daughter to somebody. So we can be at ease.
If you know anything about the murder of 14-year-old Clarissa Castro in 1991, please call the Chula Vista Police Department at 619-691-5151.
The deck will be off next week, but I'll return the following week with a brand new episode.
The Deck is an audiochuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast..com. So what do you think, Chuck, do you approve?
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