The College Students That Cracked A 34 Year Old Cold Case
In September 1991, a young mother in Arlington, Texas, Cynthia Gonzalez, left for a late-night appointment and never came home. Her car was found 40 miles away, and the investigation that followed would consume a legendary detective's entire career through serial killer suspects, failed polygraphs, and confessions that went nowhere.
Thirty-four years later, a college classroom full of students at the University of Texas at Arlington ,who weren't even born when she was killed, would find what everyone else missed.
If you have any information on the case of Cynthia Gonzalez, you can contact Detective Stafford with the Arlington Police Department at 817-459-5739
TW: Mention of SA
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SOURCES
https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/crime/article315139263.html
https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/crime/article313493697.html (from December - Warrant description)
Impact x Nightline "Never See You Again" on Hulu/Disney+
“True Crime with Tamron Hall” (Tamron Hall ep 76 - accessed via Hulu/Disney+)
Inside Edition - Jacey Concannon & Prof Eddings featured
Fort Worth Star Telegram (9/26, 1991)
Newspaper about the discovery of her body:
Stripper’s Mom fears the worst - September 20th, 2 days before body found
https://www.newspapers.com/image/642669873/?match=1&terms=Linda%20gandy
https://www.newspapers.com/image/642669880/?terms=Linda%20gandy
Jan 5, 1992 - The Victims (includes bio of Cynthia)
Mar 7, 1993 - Police seek help solving homicides
Oct 1, 1995 - Mother continues search for her daughter’s killer
Sept 08, 2025 - Arlington PD, UTA Partner on Innovative Cold Case Program
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/dfw/name/jim-ford-obituary?id=11017416
https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/name/jim-ford-obituary?pid=166165130
Another Homicide he solved in Cold Case form
Police Press Statement RE: Linda Donahew cold case being solved
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/118867998/linda_sue-donahew
Newspaper report on Amber case
1991 - Police Officer of the Year
Man who dated suspect, victim in 34-year-old Arlington cold case speaks out
Student Newspaper about the case
The only source that names all the students - four of them are named in the documentary
Fort Worth Star Telegram - Arlington cold case murder suspect made detailed confessions to friends: warrant
https://www.uta.edu/news/news-releases/2025/10/08/uta-students-chase-hot-leads-in-cold-cases
https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/arlington-texas-cold-case-murder-cynthia-gonzales/
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/uta-students-arlington-detectives-cold-case/3945848/
UTA Students help solve a 34-year old Arlington cold case
Texas College Students HelpedSolve a 34-Year-Old Cold Case Murder: Cops
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-nov-18-mn-44169-story.html
https://www.alcatrazeast.com/crime-library/serial-killers/the-broomstick-killer/
https://lylareese.medium.com/the-carwash-abduction-that-shook-austin-4ed972dfcb08
What Happened to Me? Exploring the Mary Theresa Simpson Cold Caseby Christina Fanelli. Published 9/25/2025.
White Buttons Found Near Scene as Police Search Combs Hill. Star-Gazette. Fri, March 20, 1964
https://www.newspapers.com/article/star-gazette-murder-took-place-near-site/191276078/
https://dnasolves.com/articles/elmira-police-department-fbi-1964-mary-theresa-simpson
https://www.timesunion.com/education/article/russell-sage-college-students-help-solve-21346879.php
https://www.newsweek.com/murder-12-year-old-girl-solved-61-years-later-dna-test-11519424
300 Quized - but No Answers - to Mary Theresa’s Killing (Star-Gazette)
S-G Offers $5,000for Girl’s Killer
https://www.news10.com/video/russel-sage-college-helped-solve-1964-cold-case/11510828/
https://www.sage.edu/academics/schools/arts-sciences/criminal-investigation-resource-center/
https://www.wamc.org/news/2026-02-23/russell-sage-college-students-help-solve-a-1964-homicide
TRANSCRIPT
On September 16th, 1991, a six year old girl named Jessica Gonzalez watched as her mom put on her pizza delivery uniform and prepared to go to work that night.
She lived with her mom cynthia and dad, Donald, in Arlington, Texas, about halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth. And Jessica was used to her mom working a lot, she was an incredibly hard worker and starting her own business on top of that, she wasputting in a LOT of hours to make sure her daughter had a better life than she had, but there was something about her leaving that night that didn’t sit right with Jessica. She had a bad feeling.
She asked her mom to stay in. Don’t go to work tonight, stay here. But Cynthia wasn’t the type to skip out when she had committed to doing something. So she told her that it’d be ok, she’d see her tomorrow, and she took off.
That would be the last confirmed sighting of Cynthia Gonzalez while she was alive.
At noon the following day, Donald reported his wife missing after she never made it home. And the first call he got back from police didn’t seem promising.
her car – a 1984 Pontiac Fiero – was found in Johnson County, about 40 miles away. It was parked and locked.
police called a tow company to bring the car back to Arlington. This felt strange to Cynthia’s family because shouldn’t they be looking at it for evidence of what happened to her? Her car turning up 40 miles away without her in it felt sinister.
Cynthia’s friends and family started panicking after the discovery, and came together to mobilize a search effort. They posted missing persons signs all around the neighborhood, searching for any clues she might have left behind. One of herfriends even reached out to a psychic to try and locate her.
Back home, Cynthia’s mother Linda Gandy was trying to pick through what her daughter left behind. She sat in the apartment dining room that Cynthia used as an office, going through papers to find anything that might help. Cynthia was a good girl, a business owner, all of her friends and coworkers said she was magnetic and hard working. A joy to be around.
she was voted ‘High School Queen’ at Carter Riverside High School near Fort Worth in 1983.She was a member of Future Homemakers of America, and volunteered at Church.
But Linda also knew that there was a secret, other life to Cynthia. One that was going to make this investigation difficult….
See, Cynthia had dropped out of high school four months before graduation in order to get married. Her husband, Donald Gonzalez, was 24 years old at the time. Cynthia was just 17.
At age 19, she had a daughter, Jessica Dawn Gonzalez. She doted on Jessica, but other aspects of her life started to fray.
Sometime in the early 90s, she entered Narcotics Anonymous to help manage a drug problem, and she separated from her husband Donald. Donald seemingly expected for them to get back together. Cynthia, for her part, started moving on with her life.
She started a business to provide for her daughter. She didn’t want to just be a homemaker anymore. Her day job was as an exotic dancer at a club called Playmates. But on the side, she ran her own company called Beauty and the Beast. Essentially, it was an adult entertainment company. She and a number of other dancers provided “strip-o-grams”, which as far as I can tell is something like a candy gram but with a stripper instead of a box of chocolates.
They also apparently provided more wholesome services like party clowns for kids' birthdays
But because of her line of work, Cynthia worked with VERY discreet customers. Ones that were good at using fake names and restricted numbers. And she was on her way to see one the night she disappeared
Cynthia wasn’t supposed to work the night of September 16th, 1991. She was with her daughter that night when she found out that one of her employees couldn’t make an appointment for a Strip-O-Gram. The client lived on Grand Ave, near the University of Texas, Arlington, Cynthia told another employee.
That night, she dressed up as a pizza delivery worker, and headed out into the night.
As her mom sat at the table, combing through Cynthia’s things to find any clue about who this client was, Cynthia’s phone kept ringing. It was her employees checking in about their schedules or upcoming parties they’d booked. With every phone call, Linda answered and told them that Cynthia was missing.
On September 20th, Linda spoke to a reporter from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, expressing her frustration at how the police were treating the investigation. She said that the handling of her daughter’s car had been careless, and not one detective had come to Cynthia’s office to collect potential evidence.
She said that if Cynthia had been in a less unsavory line of work, the police would take her disappearance more seriously. If the news had called her a mother rather than a stripper, they wouldn’t write heroff as a victim of her profession. And… it’s hard not to agree with what she’s saying here.
Disappearing sex workers were – and are – unfortunately and disturbingly common. But it seemed to be more common in the time period and area around Cynthia’s murder. In 1989, a woman named Sarafia Parker from Bell County, TX vanished before turning up dead not far from where she worked. Linda probably didn’t know about this – it was over 100 miles south of her – but she knew the reality of what her daughter did for a living.
Linda planned to offer a $2,000 reward for any information that could lead to her finding her daughter. At the time of her interview with the press, she’d printed out a number of flyers, ready to spread them around town.
We don’t know if she ever got around to posting these reward flyers, because there was a big break in the case just two days later
It was Sunday, September 22, 1991, in Johnson County, Texas. A pleasantly warm evening, it was the very last day of Summer.
At around 7PM, a woman was walking along a narrow dirt path by County Road 313. When all of a sudden, she caught something out of the corner of her eye. A glimpse of what looked like human flesh by the creek. Her confusion quickly turned to horror when she realized what she was looking at.
It was the body of a woman.
The smell made her think that the woman had been there for at least a few days. She ran to the nearest phone and called the police and The first man on the scene was County Sheriff Eddy Boggs.
Though he couldn’t identify the woman at the scene, he could pretty much guess how she had died. She wore no clothes, and he could see at least four bullet holes in her chest.
Through fingerprinting, police were able to confirm that this was Cynthia.
Now, It was already a rough year for Arlington police – Cynthia Gonzalez was the 23rd murder that year, an all-time record for the city. But Cynthia’s murder would stick with them in a way those other 22 did not.
Without her clothes or murder weapon, there was little evidence to go on. The fact that it took almost a week to find her body put the police at a severe disadvantage.
All their questions circled back to the location and state of the body. whoever killed Cynthia really didn’t want her found.
Once the body of Cynthia was found, there was no doubt that this was a murder case. The missing persons team who had handled – or mishandled – Cynthia’s disappearance handed the case over to Arlington’s homicide team.
The detectives had their work cut out for them. The gun that killed Cynthia wasn’t at the crime scene, very little of the evidence at the crime scene was useful, and the body had decomposed for several days in a creek bed.
The man assigned to lead this case was one of Arlington’s most reliable detectives: Jim Ford. Ford had been working for Arlington PD for almost 15 years, starting as a patrol officer, then working his way up through narcotics before his promotion to homicide. Once he got his teeth into a case, he never let go. His determination and dedication also made him uncommonly good at interviewing suspects. A slow talking Texan, his persistence would often exhaust perpetrators into confessing.
This combination of methodical patience and determination led to many of his colleagues comparing him to the TV detective “Columbo”. It was a common joke around the office that he could get a confession out of the pope if he tried.
Five years after Cynthia’s murder, actually, Detective Ford would become a national figure leading the Amber Hagerman investigation. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because that’s the case that they named the AMBER alert after. The case was a huge deal, and Jim Ford was the only one they’d trust to lead it.
But no matter how good a detective he was, he had never dealt with a case like this. In his first press appearance, he noted that this case was going to be exceptionally difficult to solve, due to the amount of time that passed between Cynthia’s murder and her body appearing. The amount of evidence that had disappeared during that time was substantial. But this was not an admission of defeat. Ford was determined to see this case through.
First, he set out to build a list of people Cynthia knew, which would include every client who had met her through Beauty & the Beast. At least, the ones he could identify. But first… Ford had someone even higher on the suspect list.
Anselmo Sanchez Ortiz was 32 years old in 1991, the same age as Cynthia Gonzalez’s husband Donald. He had also been dating Cynthia since January. The two had met in Playmates, and lived together for six months before her death.
Ortiz, who went by the nickname “Rocky”, was well aware that Cynthia had been missing. When Ford called him with some questions, he must have feared the worst. Ford asked what color nail polish Cynthia had been wearing. Rocky answered, saying that she’d been wearing hot pink nail polish – which he’d painted on for her.
Hearing the answer, Ford admitted that they found her, and they needed Rocky to come in.
Rocky’s interview was held the day after Cynthia’s body had been found, September 23rd. And pretty much right away Ford was able to clear him– he had an alibi and none of the evidence matched. The two had, according to everyone they knew, been crazy about each other. The one time they fought, in July of that year, Cynthia had been beside herself wondering what she’d do if he didn’t come back.
Once Rocky was cleared, Ford was able to move on to Cynthia’s clientele, which wasn’t a small list. Beauty and the Beast was a relatively new business, but it had been thriving in the weeks leading up to her death. Ford wound up interviewing hundreds of people in Cynthia’s life, including her family friends, and as many clients as they could find. And all of these people were cleared as well.
Now, I don’t know if Ford was able to find the exact Client that Cynthia was meeting that night. But I get the sense that he wasn’t able to figure out who it was. Like I said, these clients tend to be very discreet.
On December 15th, he was named Arlington’s “police officer of the year.” But his diligence and effort was not getting him any closer to finding out who killed Cynthia. Arlington was far from the only city in Texas struggling with unsolved crimes against women. See, Cynthia’s death was just one of a growing trend in Texas that year.
I already mentioned the tragic 1989 death of Sarafia Parker, the young woman who was killed in Bell County. By 1991, it was still unsolved, and she was not the only one. In October, two women vanished near Waco. Brenda Thompson on October 10th and Regina DeAnne Moore 5 days later.
On December 27th, Colleen Reed was kidnapped from a car wash near Austin, Texas.
Not all of these women were sex workers, but all of them besides Thompson were in their 20ss.
And all of these cases, like Cynthia’s, started to go cold. With no obviously guilty clientele, a cleared husband AND a cleared boyfriend, it didn’t seem like there were many leads for Ford to chase.
That is, until Spring of 1992, with a call to a tip line… in Kansas City, Missouri
The man on the phone had been watching the TV show America’s Most Wanted, and he noticed that one of the criminals featured on the show bore an eerie resemblance to one of his co-workers. Now, the man had a different name than his coworker and was wanted for the murder of multiple women in Texas. But he had such a strong resemblance that a couple more coworkers said the same thing. They decided to call the tip line anyways, and after a quick background check, police descended on the man, named Richard Fowler and arrested him for possession of an illegal firearm and controlled substances.
The tipster had been correct: his co-worker was the same guy featured on TV. Fowler, of course, was not his real name. He was the recently paroled serial killer Kenneth Allen McDuff.
Yes, you heard that right. “Recently paroled serial killer”.
McDuff had been a burglar and a serial sexual abuser in the early 1960s. He went in and out of prison a few times before August 6th, 1966. The day of what would become known as the “Broomstick Murders”. That night, he and an accomplice had killed three teenagers — two boys and a girl. They shot the boys and sexually assaulted the girl, before strangling her using a broken broomstick.
After the killing, McDuff’s accomplice went to the police and turned himself in for a reduced sentence. McDuff was sentenced to death, and scheduled to go to the electric chair.
For most murderers, that’d be the end of the line.
But it wasn’t for McDuff. In 1972, in the Supreme Court case Furman v. Georgia, use of the electric chair for executions was deemed unconstitutional. Many men who had been waiting to go to the chair found themselves suddenly facing life sentences instead. One of these men was Kenneth McDuff. Between 1972 and 1989, McDuff regularly applied for parole, hiring a lawyer to compile evidence and testimony that placed the blame for the broomstick murders onto his accomplice.
I cannot stress enough how much the specific circumstances of 1980s Texas contributed to McDuff’s release. Texas prisons were overcrowded, desperately needing to release inmates to make their operations sustainable, and McDuff had plenty of money to bribe parole board members. In 1989, after about 17 years of parole applications, McDuff was released back out into the world.
He immediately started killing again, until his 1992 arrest.
By the time his co-worker called this in, he’d killed at least five, maybe as many as seven women. He’d been seen in the company of three women whose bodies hadn’t been found: Brenda Thompson, Colleen Reed, and Regenia Moore.
With McDuff behind bars again, Texas authorities could connect many cases that had seemed like isolated events. McDuff had evaded detection because his crimes had been spread across multiple counties, meaning that police hadn’t been able to meaningfully coordinate.
In 1993, he was sentenced to death for the second time.
In his final years, he refused to cooperate with police… but he loved to boast to other criminals about what he did. In 1998, a police informant got close enough to McDuff to learn the location of Thompson and Reed’s bodies. He ultimately gave up the location of Moore’s body in exchange for dental work.
And for Detective Ford, maybe this was his chance. Maybe this notorious killer of sex workers was the missing key to solving Cynthias’ murder. But McDuff never said anything about Cynthia Gonzalez.
And then, On November 17th, 1998, his sentence was carried out. In the years since his first stint on death row, Texas prisons had switched from the electric chair to lethal injection.
Whatever he knew or didn’t know about her death, he took it with him to his grave.s
This was obviously devastating to Detective Ford. Like I said before, Ford was not someone who let things go, especially a case like hers. Throughout the 1990s, he pursued every possible lead, clearing hundreds of persons of interest. Cynthia seemed to fit McDuff’s victim profile: Mid-20s, female, sex worker… the timeline placed her right in the middle of the abduction spree…
The problem was, Ford found no evidence connecting McDuff to Cynthia Gonzalez. Every other victim had at least one eyewitness who saw the two of them together. But nobody saw McDuff with Cynthia. No fingerprints or DNA evidence connected the two, and Cynthia was shot, unlike all the other victims, who had been strangled or beaten to death.
It was a frustrating dead end, because it is just as impossible to prove that he didn’t do it.
All this time, Cynthia’s family had been struggling to move on from the tragedy. Linda Gandy, Cynthia’s mother, was living in Fort Worth Texas by 1995, the four year anniversary of her daughter’s death. She was considering turning to mediums to see if it’d help them find closure for her family.
At the time, Arlington PD said that they had two potential suspects in mind for the murder, but there wasn’t enough information to issue an arrest warrant yet.
Cynthia’s daughter Jessica had to grow up without a mother. Throughout her childhood, she found herself yearning for a relationship with her mother like her friends had. She kept a small box of Cynthia’s belongings at home, including a bottle of perfume. Every so often, she could open up this time capsule and remind herself what her mother smelled like.
And Cynthia’s former husband Donald Gonzalez drops out of our research at around this point. We know he’s still alive, but he declined most invites for media appearances over the years, preferring to keep his emotions to himself.
The case received fresh wind in November of 2004. Arlington PD was always a smaller operation, so they could not afford to have a cold case team of their own. However, a new initiative started that year, spearheaded by Jim Ford and fellow detective John Bell. Funded by a new grant, they would be their own cold case unit – working on unsolved crimes in between their active investigations.
After his experience with Cynthia Gonzalez and Amber Hagerman, Ford was determined to use modern technology to bring closure to their older cases.
And over the years, Ford had a lot of success.
In 2005, he arrested a man in connection with the 1991 murder of an infant. The suspect had been in plain sight, but hadn’t had the evidence at the time to secure an arrest. In 2006, Ford identified the murderer of Linda Donahew, who had been strangled to death in 1987. The killer was already behind bars for a different crime.
Jessica Gonzalez – now Jessica Roberts – remembered that Ford was so dedicated to his cold cases that he would come and visit her at work with follow up questions.
Arlington’s Columbo remained dedicated to his cold cases. But in 2010, he decided to retire from Arlington PD to work as a criminal investigator for the District Attorney’s office. He’d suffered from congenital heart problems since he was a teenager, and maybe he hoped that retiring from the daily grind of police work would give him more time to work on long-term investigations.
People were depending on him – not just his family, but all the victims who never saw justice.
On July 31st, 2013, Jim Ford passed away of heart failure. He was just 58 years old and He worked on his cases right up until the very end.
He never solved Cynthia’s murder, in spite of his stellar record with the cold case unit. And Without Ford to keep working on it, the Gonzalez case would just gather dust in storage.
Most reporting I read from this time - even some of the pieces I read while researching for this article - just assumed that she was one of Kenneth McDuff’s victims. The timeline matched up and it was better than no answer at all.
It would be over a decade before anyone gave it a second thought.
Going into the 2020s, the Cynthia Gonzalez case remained unsolved. The Arlington police department only had six homicide detectives for the whole city, and all of them were also responsible for clearing cold cases in their free time. It was, to put it mildly, not an ideal setup.
Two things happened in 2024 that brought the case back to life again.
First, Cynthia’s daughter Jessica Roberts called the Arlington Police to ask if there had been any update about her mother’s death. There wasn’t , but after the call The case file was handed to a detective in his early 30s named Anthony Stafford. He hadn’t even been born in 1991 when Cynthia was killed.
And then later in 2024, a woman named Patricia Eddings reached out to Arlington PD. She was a Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, who taught several courses on forensic science and criminology. A former forensic analyst, Eddings regularly invited Arlington Police officers to give lectures to her students.
At the end of one of these lectures, the presenting officer said something that gave her an idea.
He talked about how understaffed their cold case department was, how nobody had enough time to give these cases the attention that they needed.
Eddings spoke to the officer afterward, where she pitched an idea. What if she taught an advanced course on cold case investigation? She’d gather a class of her best and brightest, and allow them to go through the cases that detectives didn’t have time for.
Both the University and Arlington PD were enthusiastic about the project, and the first of these new courses kicked off in the fall of 2025.
Eddings carefully selected her class, ultimately assembling a room of 15 students, most of whom were interested in pursuing careers in criminal justice.
The 15 students would be divided into 3 groups of 5, each with a single case to investigate.
The five students assigned to Cynthia’s case were Jacey Concannon, Preston Schroeder, Jenna Lewis, Natalia Montoya and Samantha Underwood. They were given a flash drive with all of Jim Ford’s files on it, and told to get to work.
I can only imagine how daunting this was — in interviews, the students say that the flash drive had digital copies of up to 600 pieces of evidence, which had been digitized by Detective Stafford. This included crime scene reports, forensic records, and hundreds of pages of interviews with suspects.
For six weeks, they methodically went through all of this evidence, printing out documents and going over them with a fine-tooth comb. It was clear that Jim Ford had been incredibly thorough, but they hoped that somewhere they’d find something that he missed.
And miraculously, they did.
Throughout all the pages of interviews and follow up reports, there was a name that kept coming up again and again. Someone who had never been investigated as a suspect.
The whole time they’d been investigating the men in Cynthia’s life… and they hadn’t given a second thought to the women.
But deep within the casefiles the same name kept popping up. Janie Perkins, but at the time she’d been known as Janie Hatley.
At the time of Cynthia’s death, Janie was 29 years old. She’d been dating Rocky Ortiz When Rocky met Cynthia in January of 1991. Approximately eight months before the murder. Now this is where the story gets messy — Rocky claims that he broke up with Janie, then started dating Cynthia a few weeks later.
This is a bit of speculation, but I think that there was more overlap than that. According to official documents, Rocky broke up with Janie three weeks before Cynthia’s murder. But in a newspaper report from 1991, Vera Woodring, Cynthia’s building manager, claimed that Rocky and Cynthia had been living together for six months before her murder. In that same article, Rocky is quoted as saying that he and Cynthia knew each other for two months before they started dating. Which means they started dating around March, and lived together until September.
If Rocky was telling the truth in 1991, and the police’s timeline for his relationship with Janie was correct, that means he was seeing both women for at least five months. I don’t know how much the women knew about this, but it’s clear they knew each other… and it’s clear that Janie resented Cynthia for Rocky’s affections.
Jim Ford brought Janie in for questioning in late 1991, and she claimed that she had nothing to do with the murder. But Her alibi was pretty weak — she said she was off work and home alone. No one could verify this, obviously.
To make things even more suspicious, she took a polygraph test later, which raised doubt about her involvement. Polygraph tests are not admissible in court and have their own issues, but it’s interesting to note here that She failed the polygraph on two questions:
“Did you know who shot [Cynthia]?” And “Did you shoot [Cynthia]?”
A week later, Ford brought her back in for another lie detector test with a different method. She failed again, and in a follow up interview, she tried to explain herself. She claimed that she hated Cynthia, and is glad that she was dead. She’d thought about killing the victim before, due to their rivalry over Rocky.
Her exact words were that she loved Rocky and would do anything for him.
But she still denied committing the murder.
By this point, the students must have been wondering why she wasn’t investigated more seriously after this, but it gets worse. In February of 1993, a year and a quarter after Cynthia’s death, one of Janie’s friends was arrested in Grand Prairie on an unrelated charge. The man, Robert William Hardee, provided a sworn statement that Janie had bragged to him about killing Cynthia.
That should have been enough to warrant additional investigation, right?
Still, Arlington PD didn’t arrest Janie. I don’t know what was going through Jim Ford’s head. Since the call came in right as Kenneth McDuff was getting his third death sentence, maybe the serial killer story seemed more likely to him. It’s also possible that he just didn’t think this was the sort of crime of passion that a woman like Janie would commit. Whatever the case, the weight of evidence seemed obvious to the students going through his files.
Hardee wasn’t the only man she’d confessed to, either. The last time she saw Rocky, she’d told him that she killed his girlfriend for leaving him. Even though she later backed off, saying she was just trying to piss him off, he reported the incident to the police. Nothing came of it.
Six weeks into the semester, the students had done enough work on their cases that they could make contact with the detective again. They’d gathered a list of questions for Arlington PD. The top of their list was “why didn’t you look further into Janie Perkins?”
They sent these questions in… then heard nothing.
I mean, afterall this was a college assignment. Maybe they weren’t going to take anything the students said seriously, afterall. Maybe it was more about the exercise of going through a case that mattered.
Well, behind the scenes, Detective Stafford found the students’ work compelling enough that he could take it to the District Attorney’s office.
Not long after, a representative of Arlington PD came into Professor Eddings classroom. There, he made the announcement: that morning, a warrant was served for the arrest of Janie Perkins. US Marshalls were currently waiting outside her house in Azle, Texas, to take her into custody.
The entire class applauded. And while I’ve only seen a short clip of this moment in a documentary, you can feel the sense of relief and joy in that room.
The students had done it. They’d cracked a 34-year-old cold case.
In early November, 2025, Janie was 63 years old, and now she was charged with Capital Murder. She was taken into custody in Tarrant County, and ultimately released on a $150,000 bond.
Arlington police called Jessica Roberts into the station to give her the news that they’d made an arrest. She was overjoyed. The Documentary series Nightline plays an audio recording of them giving her the news and it’s actually incredibly moving. This woman had been living in limbo for 34 years, and her relief is palpable.
That same Nightline episode recorded Jessica meeting with the students who helped solve her mother’s murder. After decades of silence, these kids — none of whom had been born when Cynthia was murdered — brought some closure to Cynthia’s surviving family and loved ones.
The case was expected to go forward this March, the same month we were writing this episode. To us it seemed like a done deal. Rocky Ortiz was going to be the star witness for the prosecution, which was going to be handled by the DA’s Office. Both the police and students speculated that Janie may have had a male accomplice, but after this break, it felt like the case was about to crack wide open. Everyone involved was hopeful, including Arlington PD. On March 5th, Detective Stafford was honored by Arlington as Officer of the Year, partly thanks to his work on this case.
And… well, cold cases are tough to prove, especially without thorough physical evidence. I wish I could tell you that I reached the end of this script on a hopeful note, and was able to tell you that justice was served right as I put the finishing touches on my draft. But that’s just not what happened.
Researcher Rob and I were following along with the case as we wrote this episode, and on Friday March 20th, Rob emailed me the news: A Tarrant County grand jury had declined to charge Janie Perkins with the murder of Cynthia Gonzalez. We were both….devastated to say the least
The evidence the students gathered — the failed polygraphs, the interviews with Janie — just wasn’t enough.
This must have been crushing to everyone who put all this work into making sure that Cynthia was not forgotten. We’re still waiting with baited breath to see if they’ll be able to gather more evidence that can change the grand jury’s mind, but in the meantime, that’s it. Janie Perkins remains an innocent woman, and everyone involved in the Cynthia Gonzalez case also faces the hardest task of all: Going back to their lives.
Jessica Roberts has three kids of her own, and she’s been open about how her mother’s death robbed her of a model for how to be a mother herself.
In many ways, that’s been the hardest part about this story, reading these stories about how people have had to just… go on, letting the emotional scars of Cynthia’s death scab over, but never really heal. Everyone involved in this case did incredible work, especially the UTA students who brought the case back to life after a decade in storage.
In the end, maybe the greatest gift we can give Cynthia is ensuring that she isn’t forgotten.