Vanished: The Search

is Deborah Roberts here with another weekly episode of our latest series from 2020 and ABC Audio, Vanished, What Happened to Vanessa.

Remember, you can get new episodes early if you follow Vanished, What Happened to Vanessa on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast app. Now, here's the episode.

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The day Vanessa Guillain goes missing, she has plans with a fellow soldier, one of her closest friends on the base, Tay Hightower. The plan was to go hiking whenever she got off work.

That morning, Vanessa is supposed to locate and tag four broken weapons. It's easy work that should have taken only a few hours.

And she suspected it was going to be a half day, so she would probably get off at around lunchtime.

It's April 22nd, 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic. They haven't been able to hang out as often, so they're looking forward to spending time together, getting outside.

At 8 a.m., Vanessa sends Tay a screenshot of the day's weather report. It looked like it was going to rain that afternoon.
It takes Tay a couple of hours to respond.

I sent a message saying it's not raining anymore. That was the last thing I sent her that afternoon.
By 5 p.m., Tay realizes Vanessa never responded to his text.

She also never messaged him to to say she was done with work.

Tay goes to her room to see if she's there, but he only sees her roommate who tells him she hasn't seen Vanessa since she left for work that morning.

I said, could you call her? And she tried to call her and I went straight to voicemail. She called her like, I think three times and I went straight to voicemail.

He walks out to the parking lot and notices Vanessa's Jeep is still there. So she has to be somewhere on the base.

Another soldier who Vanessa was working with that morning says he hasn't seen her since 10.15 a.m.

and that she left behind her ID card, keys, and debit card and never came back for them.

Tay is starting to feel uneasy, so he checks with CJ Landy, another one of Vanessa's close friends in their unit. He just asked me if I heard from Vanessa at all that day, and I was like, no.

And then he was like, well, I'm looking for her right now because we don't know where she is. CJ and Tay retrace Vanessa's steps.

Maybe she was getting some work done at the motor pool, the garage where they fix up military vehicles. But she's not there.

She could be running at the track to blow off some steam. Not there either.

They search up and down the main road on base where she likes to run.

No sign of Vanessa.

They also go to the two arms rooms where Vanessa was working that morning. These are highly secured areas where the military stores weapons, ammunition, and security-sensitive equipment.

Both rooms are locked. Sotay and CJ bang on every door in case Vanessa somehow fell asleep or passed out inside.

No answer.

Meanwhile, about 200 miles away in Houston, Vanessa's older sister, Myra Guillen, is getting anxious. She and her family haven't heard from Vanessa all day.

So we start getting worried. That whole day, I was just not myself.
I was very clumsy and everything at work, so I felt that something was wrong.

So around 8 p.m., Myra decides to call the base to see if Vanessa's okay.

Maybe she was off doing some type of special training that she didn't tell her about.

That's when they told me that they hadn't seen her since about lunchtime that day.

And I'm sitting there like, it's already been more than six hours. Why haven't you done anything? Oh, we've been looking for her.
I'm like, looking where?

Here in the barracks. I'm like, and nobody knows where she is.
Nobody knows if they sent her off somewhere. And that's when he tells me, oh, we did send her for a report, but she never made it back.

And I'm like, and you're so calm about this.

Myra is in disbelief. Her sister's missing.
And the Army has no idea where she might be.

Myra says she fired questions at the staff sergeant on the phone. Where was she last seen? Are people looking for her? What's happening right now?

But she feels like she's talking to a wall.

So I told him, well, I'm going to make my way down there.

And he did tell me, the first sergeant is supposed to give you a call, so be on the lookout. I'll wait for the call.
I never got a call.

So I just grafted my purse and decided to head out.

Vanessa's fiancé, Juan Cruz, her sister Yovana, and a friend go with her. It's only supposed to be a three-hour trip, but the weather is brutal.

They drive against heavy rain and fog so thick that they could hardly see the road ahead.

It's like everything was stopping me from getting there, and I just felt more and more frustration. And

on my way there, I was just crying because I couldn't understand.

I didn't want to think the worst, but

a lot of panic.

As Myra races to the base, Tay and CJ are still looking for their friend. But when Vanessa never returns to the barracks that evening, several people start to alert military officials.

What first started as a rag-tag search party led by Tay and CJ would eventually engulf the U.S. military.

From ABC Audio in 2020, this is Vanished. What happened to Vanessa?

I'm John Quiñones.

This is episode 2, The Search.

It's 3 a.m., April 23rd, about 16 hours since anyone has seen Vanessa. Myra and her group finally make it to Fort Hood.

She calls the staff sergeant she spoke to on the phone earlier, letting him know they've arrived. But he's asleep.
He asks Myra to come back in the morning.

With no choice but to leave, Myra and her group book a hotel that night, anxiously waiting to finally speak to someone who can tell them where her sister was. They get back to Fort Hood at 8 a.m.

There's a group of Army service members waiting for them when they arrive. The first sergeant and staff sergeant are present, along with a handful of other men.

But there's one person in the lineup who stands out to Myra.

I tried to look at him and he would avoid looking at me and I just felt like there was something wrong with him.

Myra doesn't know it, but the soldier trying to avoid her stare is one of the last people to have seen her sister. His name is Aaron Robinson, an Army specialist.

He's a combat engineer on base, someone who helps design and carry out battlefield strategies. He's one rank higher than Vanessa.

Robinson was supposed to unlock the second arms room where Vanessa worked the morning she went missing.

Tay said he and CJ confronted Robinson when they learned that he was one of the last people to see her.

And I called him and I asked,

has he seen her? And he said, he hasn't seen her. And then I asked when he was working with her earlier, did she say where she was going? And he said, nothing.
He doesn't know anything.

He told me that he didn't talk to her while he was in there.

In the end, Robinson doesn't give them much to go on. He seems to know as little as everyone else.

But when Myra and her group are escorted to the military police station and are waiting to speak with more officials, Robinson's behavior strikes her as, well, strange.

I'm there sitting down waiting and

he just starts laughing.

He looks at me and he just starts laughing and I get really upset. I'm like, there's nothing funny about this.
Like my sister is missing and this guy is laughing for no reason at all.

And I just start asking myself, who is this guy? Like, how can I find out what's going on?

And he didn't say a single word. He would just laugh.
And so I decided to step out because I was getting really upset to the point where I was going to ask him, you know, what's your problem?

There's nothing funny, but I just stepped out.

That encounter with Robinson leaves Myra with a bad feeling. But she shakes it off.
After all, she's there to find her sister.

But instead of giving giving her information, Army officials are asking Myra what she knows.

First sergeant speaks.

He starts questioning me. Oh, has there been any contact? I'm like, obviously not.
I'm here. So like, do you guys know anything? You should know more than what I would ever know.

Like, you manage them. Nothing much said because I had so many questions, but no answers.

Myra spends the entire day at the military police station, ushered from interview to interview, talking to investigators, telling them the same thing every time. Vanessa wouldn't just disappear.

She wouldn't be so unresponsive. This wasn't normal.
And most importantly, Army officials needed to find her.

But when it came to any questions Myra and her group had about Vanessa's disappearance, they said they were given vague responses.

CJ is also at the police station, and he sees how defeated Myra feels. She was very upset because not a lot of people were trying to tell her what was going on because I'd be the same way.

Like, my sister is under y'all care and y'all not telling me what I need to know and where she is. So, what's going on? And she's not getting answers, so I would be pretty frustrated as well.

It's now been more than 24 hours since anyone has seen Vanessa. Vanessa's unit and military police were deployed to look for her.

The evening when Vanessa never returned to her barracks, the Army says they searched late into the night and resumed as soon as daylight broke the next morning.

They searched through every barrack, outbuilding, and motor pool on the base.

When it was clear Vanessa wasn't in Fort Hood, they scoured the nearby town of Killeen, searching trails, driving up and down roads in the surrounding area.

They checked to see if she was in any of the local hospitals or jails.

No Vanessa.

On Friday, April 24th, Ford Hood officially changes Vanessa's status to AWOL, absent without leave.

Given the suspicious circumstances surrounding Vanessa's disappearance, the case is turned over to the Army's Criminal Investigation Division, or CID.

The CID is the Army's law enforcement agency in charge of investigating more serious felony-level crimes and violations of military law, things like fraud, drug trafficking, homicides.

They recruited the help of local and federal law enforcement agencies. There's the FBI involved.
We also have the Texas Rangers involved. We have the Bell County Sheriffs involved.

That's then Major General Donna Martin. She's retired now, but she became the commanding general of CID, the Criminal Investigation Division, the summer after Vanessa disappeared.

And everyone is working collaboratively using their resources to help us get to

the bottom of this.

Meanwhile, military investigators are interviewing people on base, including specialist Aaron Robinson.

Remember, he was one of the last people to see Vanessa, and he was also one of the last people she texted. She sent him a message saying she was on her way to his arms room.

Robinson tells military investigators what he told Vanessa's friend, Tay Hightower, the night she disappeared, that Vanessa came to his armory room, completed her task, and then left.

And Major General Martin said he provided an alibi.

He tells us that he went home and he was home for the entire evening until he received a text from his squad leader or sergeant who said, hey, this mandatory training is coming due and you guys need to knock out this training.

And so he tells us that he went back to the unit to log into a computer to start and complete that online training. His girlfriend confirms his alibi.

But as the investigation continues, officials are about to get new information that sends them in a totally different direction.

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Early in the investigation, three soldiers come forward saying they thought they saw Vanessa the afternoon she went missing.

We have three soldiers who are standing by a tree and they are just talking and smoking and these three soldiers they said they saw Vanessa and they gave us a time that would have indicated she left Specialist Robinson's arms room.

1.30 p.m.

This is key to building the timeline of Vanessa's final moments. The soldiers say Vanessa came out of the building looking upset and she appeared to be walking toward the barracks parking lot.

This tip becomes their main focus, her last known whereabouts. It also means Specialist Robinson wasn't the last one to see her before she went missing.

That Friday, April 24th, CID goes public with their investigation, announcing they're looking for a missing soldier.

In the days after Vanessa's disappearance, they post a $15,000 reward for any new information regarding her whereabouts, pointing out that she was last seen in the parking lot of her squadron headquarters.

And so we did a lot of investigation out into the parking lot to see maybe if she had been abducted from the parking lot.

Remarkably, There aren't any cameras in the area that could have caught Vanessa leaving the building or walking around.

There are no cameras that our investigation turned up, so we did not see any cameras, and so we didn't have any cameras to review.

Major General Martin said the base had other security measures in place.

At the time of Vanessa's disappearance, there was an alarm system, and to access any of the arms rooms, soldiers had to enter a specific PIN number unique to them, so the Army can keep track of who opened and locked every room.

But with no surveillance footage to review, investigators are missing a key tool. They have to rely on the memory of their eyewitnesses.

Officers spend a great deal of time and resources searching the area. They try to follow the path Vanessa could have taken, retracing her possible steps.

We brought in search dogs to see if they could catch a scent, but we didn't find anything there.

When nothing substantial comes out of their search, investigators decide to re-interview the three soldiers who said they saw Vanessa in the parking lot that day.

It turns out these soldiers don't really know her. Investigators realize they gave conflicting descriptions of what Vanessa was wearing.
The soldiers aren't even completely sure what she looked like.

And they later realize that they saw Vanessa in the morning, not the early afternoon. So that tip ends up being a bust and a waste of valuable time.

This blow forces investigators to regroup. As officials continue to move forward with their investigation, Myra and her family feel like they're being kept in the dark.
The meetings were useless.

There was no new information. We gave them literally every single thing that they asked for.
There wasn't a thing that we said no to, whether it was phone records or everything, literally everything.

Even our stuff at this point.

We gave them everything.

The Army says they remain communicative with the Guiennes, but this is an open investigation. So Fort Hood said they couldn't share too much information.

That left the family feeling incredibly frustrated. They felt they had the right to know how close or how far investigators were from finding Vanessa.
You refused

to answer any questions about the investigation

because for mostly everything that I would ask, oh, it's an ongoing investigation. We can't answer your questions.
You know, I can certainly sympathize with not having all the information you want.

Again, Major General Martin. But we want to make sure that, number one, we have due process.
And so we have to balance information sharing with due process.

We have to maintain the integrity of the investigation. The family feels like they're being stonewalled by Army investigators.
They believe if they want to find Vanessa, they need to take action.

The Guienne start putting up posters of Vanessa around the base. At the top of each poster, the word missing in big bright red letters.

And right below it are two pictures of Vanessa, one in her army fatigues, the other of her in civilian clothing, smiling. They list her physical features, height, 5'3.

Hair color, dark brown. Tattoos.
Cross with flower on left arm. Myra also creates a social media post about Vanessa's disappearance.

It's a picture of Vanessa in a bright yellow sundress with palm trees in the background, her hair pulled back in a bun. She has a soft smile.
Her face has that golden glow from the sunset.

Myra puts a caption over the photo that reads: I promise I'm gonna find you, even if it's the last thing I do.

I posted it, and

sure enough, it went viral.

One of the people who sees Myra's post about Vanessa was local television reporter Olivia Leveda. She covers what's happening around Killeen, the small Texas town neighboring Fort Hood.

Some of her reporting centers around Fort Hood and the local military operations.

With the pandemic forcing everyone inside, the internet became essential to finding out what stories were out there in Killeen.

Scrolling through social media, I see a tweet about a missing soldier. Her name is Private Vanessa Kean.

And I just thought it was really strange that she went missing April 22nd. I saw that tweet April 24th.

And I was just thinking, why haven't I heard about this?

Why haven't we been on alert that there is a missing soldier? She notices how much attention Myra's tweet and other social media posts about Vanessa's disappearance are getting.

The number of reposts and likes keep growing. Olivia could tell Vanessa's story is hitting a nerve.
And that's when we knew that this was something that we had to look into.

Her story, her family talking about that the fact that she was missing. Something told me this was

bigger than what it it seemed. That night, Olivia reports the story on the evening news in Killeen.

Private first-class Vanessa Guillen was last seen on Wednesday, and her loved ones say they need everyone's help to find her.

Local news outlets start reaching out to the Guillenns for interviews. The family's getting media coverage all across the state of Texas.

Their social media posts are attracting more engagement, and their search starts to gain a following.

So, with their newfound attention, on May 1st, a little more than a week since anyone had heard from Vanessa, the family organizes a protest right outside Fort Hood's gates, pressuring the military to do more to find Vanessa.

Again, reporter Olivia Leveda. The first protest, they had a pretty good turnout, a few dozen people, I would say.
But as the time dragged on,

Vanessa's still missing, that's when people started to take this personal.

The lack of answers, the time dragging on, and that's when more people started showing up to the protests. Central Texas news station, KCEN, live streams one of the protests online.

We need answers! Where is Vanessa? We need answers! Where is Vanessa? I went to one protest.

There were hundreds of people there to support Vanessa's family and to beg for these answers that they felt like they weren't getting.

Vanessa's story is getting more and more attention. Volunteers are out there looking for her every day.
And the Guillennes keep leading demonstrations outside of Fort Hood every Friday.

The family stations themselves by the base's entrance. Supporters hold colorful signs and banners demanding Vanessa be found.

It's impossible to drive through Fort Hood's gates without seeing a photo of Vanessa.

Local news outlets start referring to Vanessa's mother, Gloria, as Mama Guillen. It's a nickname she carries proudly.

Gloria tells me that when she was a little girl, she was taught that your child is the center of your life. You care for them.
You always fight for them.

Gloria says she's fighting to bring her daughter home alive.

Gloria says Vanessa has to be somewhere on the base. At every protest, she's demanding that Ford Hood keep searching for her daughter.

But she and the entire Guillen family feel military investigators are not moving fast enough or investigating the right people.

And Gloria has a strong feeling about who might have hurt. Vanessa.

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A full investigation into Vanessa's disappearance is underway, but her mother's heart is heavy.

Gloria feels like investigators are not doing enough with a key piece of information that she shared with them early in the search for her daughter. Myra explains.

My mom and Vanessa were always closer than any of us ever were. I'm closer to my dad actually.

And

when she went missing,

my mom was like, I have to talk to you. And I said, well, what's going on? And this was, you know, when the investigators and everything were coming into place.
So

that's when she tells me me and Vanessa talked one day. I had to push her into telling me what was wrong.

I was like, okay, we'll go ahead. And that's when she tells me that Vanessa confessed to her that she was being sexually harassed by one of her sergeants.

Myra had no idea this was happening to Vanessa before she disappeared. She remembers a conversation they had a few months prior to her disappearance.

They were texting, and out of nowhere, Vanessa said she was struggling, but she was reluctant to share any details.

She kind of wants to open up in regards to something

in the military,

but in the end she doesn't. She just tells me, eventually, hopefully, you'll understand.
And I couldn't really get her to open up.

It's like she wanted to tell me, like she wanted to scream it, but she would just tell me, never mind.

It broke Myra's heart to know that it took Vanessa's disappearance to finally understand her little sister's turmoil.

The family thinks this information could help investigators figure out what happened to Vanessa. So after she goes missing, they tell CID that Vanessa was being sexually harassed.

The Guillens are hoping it would finally lead to some answers. But all they get get is silence.
Myra doesn't think the base takes the harassment seriously. Gloria's also frustrated.

She feels like the military is dismissing her daughter's claim, her pain.

So, in early June, she decides to go public with a sexual harassment for the first time.

In an interview with Telemundo, Gloria says that Vanessa told her she'd been sexually harassed by a sergeant.

She was detailing this sexual harassment her daughter spoke about and complained about. Reporter Olivia Leveda again.

And after they actually came out, after Vanessa's family came out and said, not only is she missing, she was also being sexually harassed.

That's when it started trending online with the hashtag Iam Vanessa Guillen. And when I say trending, I mean even with celebrities.
The story reaches a whole new level of attention.

Movie star Salma Hayek posts a photo on her Instagram page. She's holding a picture of Vanessa on a sign that says, Bring back Vanessa, de vuelvanos a Vanessa.

Kim Kardashian and singers Gloria Stefan and Becky G

also share their support for Vanessa's safe return. Her disappearance starts to make national headlines.

More and more people are learning about Vanessa Guillen, her family's immigrant background, her love of sports, and her sense of duty.

But it's her experience serving as an active duty soldier while being a victim of sexual harassment that really strikes a chord and sparks a movement.

The hashtag I am Vanessa Guillen becomes a rallying cry for those who identify with Vanessa's story of sexual harassment in the military.

People are sharing their own stories online, posting things like, I felt so alone.

The people I told swept it under the rug.

They did nothing.

The system must change.

They talk about how their harassment complaints were often dismissed, or how fear of retaliation kept them from speaking up. And the protests grow bigger still.

From Houston to California to North Carolina, there are demonstrations all over the country. Justice for Vanessa! Justice for Vanessa!

Murals of Vanessa also start to pop up. Painted images of Vanessa wearing her Army fatigues appear on walls in public spaces, bus stops, hair salons, even food trucks.

It all spoke to a moment of reckoning that America found itself in the summer of 2020. Reporter Olivia Leveda.
There's so much going on while we're looking for Vanessa.

I mean, this is kind of around the time of George Floyd as well. Like, people are just not standing for certain things.

People took to the streets in major cities around the country after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer on May 25th, about a month after Vanessa went missing.

The national outrage forced the public to contend with how American institutions are held accountable. From local law enforcement to the U.S.
military.

I mean, it's crazy that all these things happen at once. And like of America being angry about what people see as injustices.
They saw George Floyd's death and they view that as wrong.

Breonna Taylor's death. And then you add Vanessa and they took it as unacceptable.
All the news surrounding Vanessa's case catches the attention of attorney Natalie Kawam in Tampa, Florida.

I saw it on the news

and I watched a little bit about her going missing on the the base. I saw that they were doing some protests.

Natalie's firm, Whistleblower Law, specializes in military medical malpractice, sexual harassment, and fraud.

Natalie had also been lobbying the Department of Defense and Capitol Hill for stronger rules around sexual misconduct in the military.

I'm familiar with Fort Hood because I have clients at Fort Hood that I represent.

So I connected with

the fact that the parents are immigrants and so are mine.

And I represent a lot of active military members and a lot of veterans. So I just really felt like that was something I could help this family with.

The Guyan family had been going head to head with this institution without someone to guide them through their case. And Myra knew they needed help.

I had a hard time finding a lawyer that would take the case.

Thankfully, I found Natalie. As soon as she came in, everything started speeding up.

They started seeing that I wasn't there to play anymore, that I needed answers, and I needed to find her, regardless of the situation.

Natalie is by the family's side at every meeting, media interview, and press conference. This should never have happened.

Women should not be afraid to come forth about sexual harassment. They should not fear reporting sexual harassment.
It's unacceptable. It's 2020.
What's happening?

The Guienne start to feel hopeful that they would find Vanessa, but also push for more accountability in the military.

As for the Army, All eyes were now on Fort Hood. Vanessa's disappearance is a national news story, and they are facing criticism for how they've handled the case thus far.

Once the sexual harassment allegation was made public, Fort Hood launches an official investigation into the Guillen family's claim on June 18th.

Vanessa had already been missing for almost two months.

During that time, military investigators are chasing down other leads and continuing to interview people on base. And those interviews reveal what could be a break in the case.

Two witnesses who say they saw specialist Aaron Robinson pulling a big black plastic storage box through the parking lot. It's a tough box, almost like a big hard-sided suitcase.

These witnesses say they saw Robinson with that tough box the day Vanessa went missing, and it looked really heavy. Major General Donna Martin.

They saw him take that tough box out of the basement of the building and put it inside of his car.

Now, moving a heavy box on a military base, that's not that unusual. For a soldier to be moving equipment, whether it's their personal equipment inside of these huge tough boxes.

We use them for deployments. We use them for various reasons.
But then, investigators find

something

else. We have some breaking news.
Fort Hood Criminal Investigation Division have found skeletal remains in a field in Colleen.

That's next time.

Vanished. What happened to Vanessa is a production of ABC Audio and 2020, hosted by me, John Quinones, produced by Sabrina Fang, Nancy Rosenbaum, Shane McKeon, and Nora Ritchie.

Fact-checking and production help from Audrey Most Tech and Annalisa Linder. Tracy Samuelson is our story editor.
Our supervising producer is Sasha Aslanian. Music and Mixing by Evan Viola.

Special thanks to Katie Dendos, Janice Johnston, Denise Martinez-Ramundo, Natalie Cardenas, Rachel Walker, Brian Mazurski, and Michelle Markulus.

Josh Cohan is our Director of Podcast Programming. Laura Mayer is our our executive producer.

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