Vanished: Why?

This 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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On the evening of June 30th, 2020, just hours after authorities recover Vanessa Guillen's remains, specialist Aaron Robinson is being held in a conference room on Fort Hood.

Remember, Robinson isn't under arrest.

Authorities tell him he's being confined for breaking COVID-19 quarantine protocol.

Elsewhere, investigators are interviewing Robinson's girlfriend, Cecily Aguilar, and what investigators say Cecily tells them is quite incriminating for her boyfriend.

Around 10 p.m., there in that conference room on Fort Hood, Robinson is pacing back and forth, sometimes leaning against the conference room door.

A soldier tells him to sit down.

Robinson complies, if only for a moment.

Because a minute or so later, Robinson rushes out of that conference room.

Then Major General...

Donna Martin.

The guard gives chase, but he gets in a vehicle and he flees and he leaves Fort Hood.

Robinson vanishes into the dark Killeen night.

With Robinson on the run, investigators turn back to his girlfriend, Cecily.

Remember, earlier that evening, authorities say Cecily had told them something big, that Robinson had confided in her, that he killed Vanessa.

And Cecily told investigators she helped hide the remains.

Cecily had also agreed to call Robinson and let investigators listen in on their conversation.

She now tells authorities that she thinks Robinson is going to their apartment to get a gun.

With that in mind, investigators move to monitor the apartment, and Cecily continues talking to Robinson.

Here's Steve Campion, then a reporter at the ABC News-owned station in Houston, KTRK.

Aguilar is trying to help investigators locate him.

He's somewhere in Killeen, Texas, and Aguilar at that point is trying to pinpoint his location, trying to meet with him so investigators can move in and arrest him.

Authorities begin pinging Robinson's cell phone.

They know that he fled the base by car.

But as authorities listen to Cecily's calls with Robinson, It sounds to them like he's walking, not driving.

And indeed, the car he was suspected of driving is found abandoned in Killeen.

Meanwhile, Robinson is asking Cecily where she is.

Of course, the truth is she's with law enforcement in an interrogation room, but she tells Robinson that she's walking to the base to turn herself in.

Investigators actually have her go outside and send a selfie to Robinson as proof.

Remember, by this time, Robinson knows that human remains have been found near the Leon River.

It's all over the local news.

According to investigators, he tells Cecily,

baby, they found pieces.

Eventually, Robinson tells Cecily he will turn himself in too,

if she meets with him first.

He asks her to come to a gas station near the base.

Authorities coordinate for officers to be waiting nearby, but that gas station meeting never happens.

According to a police report, sometime after midnight, police spot a figure, a male on foot in shorts and a hoodie.

A cell phone in his left hand illuminates his face.

Around 12.33 a.m., an officer approaches him.

He draws his gun and tells him to get on the ground.

Instead, the man stops walking and reaches into his pockets.

According to the police report, the officer orders him to show his hands.

When the man pulls his right hand out, he's holding a black pistol and he raises it toward the officer.

The officer yells, gun, and takes cover.

The man points the pistol at the officer and then at his own head.

A single shot rings out and specialist Aaron Robinson falls slowly to the ground.

Soon, authorities descend on the area.

They cordon off that stretch of road, now aglow with squad cars, red and blue lights.

Yellow police tape is strung five lanes wide.

A small crowd of onlookers forms, and a bystander films some video.

In it, you see a white body bag on a stretcher being loaded into a white minivan.

Earlier that day, Vanessa's remains had been found.

They were found near where authorities determined Aaron Robinson's cell phone pinged the night she disappeared.

Vanessa's remains discovered where Robinson apparently was.

It was damning evidence.

Later, some critics would say there was enough evidence to place Robinson under arrest there in that conference room on Fort Hood.

But that didn't happen.

And now, Aaron Robinson is dead.

Potentially so close to accountability, the man authorities suspected of murdering Vanessa Guillen

is lost forever.

Just hours earlier, Myra Guillen learned that her sister's remains had been found.

It was a moment Myra described as when everything came to an end.

And now...

Shortly after, I go to bed and my phone starts ringing again at about three in the morning.

Investigators are calling her again.

It's CAD,

and

they just

blast at me.

We have two suspects.

One of them is dead, and one of them is alive, and it's a civilian.

And I'm like, what do you mean one of them is dead?

And they told me he committed suicide.

It's a major mistake on the part of the Army in not arresting him or confining him.

That's Chris Swecker, the former FBI agent who led that independent review of Fort Hood's command climate.

The review committee's publicly available report does not analyze the decision to not arrest Robinson.

But for Swecker, who spent 24 years working in the FBI and who retired as the assistant director of the Bureau's Criminal Investigation Division, the Army's inaction was perplexing.

From my experience,

there was enough probable cause at that point to arrest him.

So that's an area that,

again,

you have to scratch your head if you're an experienced investigator and wonder why.

Because you wonder, isn't the discovery of Vanessa's body in that place where his phone pinged enough for probable cause?

Yeah, at that point,

It's a little bit baffling.

Back in 2021, Army officials told us that investigators' judgment at the time was that there was not probable cause to arrest Robinson and that they were working to gather more information helpful to the case.

An internal Army report acknowledged that the Army personnel could have done more to prevent Specialist Robinson from fleeing.

Quote, CID failed to clearly communicate that Specialist Robinson was a soldier of heightened interest rather than just another soldier for a follow-up interview, unquote.

This month, when ABC News asked CID to respond to criticism it should have arrested Robinson, an Army spokesperson told us, quote, Army CID has undertaken significant reforms and improvements to its investigative processes based on the findings of the Fort Hood Independent Review Committee, unquote.

That's the committee led by Chris Swecker.

Aaron Robinson's death makes it much harder to solve the mystery at the center of this story.

The mystery of why?

Why was Vanessa murdered?

But the investigation continues, and authorities pursue that question.

Why?

And out of their investigation and out of the backgrounds of Aaron Robinson and his girlfriend Cecily Aguilar, there emerge clues, clues as to how such a heinous crime could have come to pass.

The investigative efforts all culminate with Cecily Aguilar's day in court, and with the shocking new evidence prosecutors hope will help put her away for decades.

From ABC Audio and 2020, this is Vanished: What happened to Vanessa?

I'm John Quinones.

This is episode 5.

Why?

In the hours after Cecily Aguilar told investigators that Aaron Robinson had killed Vanessa Guillen, authorities returned to the arms room where Robinson had encountered Vanessa on that morning in April.

They used a chemical that glows blue when it reacts to traces of blood.

And sure enough, there it was, the telltale glow.

Bloodstains were found elsewhere in the arms room.

Authorities swabbed some blood and sent it off to an FBI lab for testing.

And indeed, a DNA test later found an extremely high likelihood.

that the blood was Vanessa's.

It was yet more evidence linking linking Aaron Robinson to Vanessa's death.

But now, of course, Robinson is gone, unable to explain what happened and why.

So to try to understand the crime, we started trying to understand Robinson, who he was and where he came from.

It was hard to learn much about him.

We know that he grew up in Calumet City, Illinois, just south of the south side of Chicago.

He played football there at Thornton Fractional North High School.

In 2018, he was deployed to Iraq for about seven months.

Vanessa's friends, CJ Landy and Tay Hightower, they say they didn't know Robinson well.

Kind of a loner, I guess.

A loner trying to get friends.

Yeah, yeah, that kind of person.

Almost like an oddball trying to fit in, or listen.

If fitting in was his goal, it probably didn't help that he was was going out with Cecily Aguilar, the estranged wife of another soldier, Keon Aguilar.

Fellow soldiers told us they knew about this romantic entanglement.

We learned something else about Robinson.

During the investigation into Vanessa's disappearance, there emerged signs that Robinson may have been struggling with his mental health.

After investigators interviewed Robinson, they described leaving him alone in a room and witnessing him pacing back and forth, talking to himself and laughing.

Separately, Cecily Aguilar told investigators that sometimes Robinson would go into moods in which he would not be his normal self.

She also told them that Robinson had made statements in the past about suicide.

And investigators say that Cecily told them something else, something that might explain why Robinson did what he did.

Here's then Major General Donna Martin.

Cecily Aguilar did tell us that Specialist Robinson told her that he did what he did.

He killed Vanessa because she saw a picture on his cell phone of her and he feared that she would go to the chain of command and get him in trouble for having an affair.

Specifically, Cecily said that Robinson told her that Vanessa saw a photo of Cecily on the lock screen of Robinson's phone.

Adultery is, in fact, illegal in the military.

A conviction can result in dishonorable discharge.

But Army officials also told us that in most cases, the odds of getting court-martialed for adultery are, quote,

extremely minimal.

Also, Vanessa was not not in a position to reveal Robinson's secret.

That secret was already out.

Other soldiers told us they knew Robinson was dating another soldier's wife, a soldier serving with them at Fort Hood, Keon Aguilar.

So silencing Vanessa was not going to solve that problem.

Members of the Guillen family wondered about another possible motive.

Here's Myra.

Maybe Robinson was doing something he wasn't supposed to.

Or maybe he did try to sexually abuse her.

And she didn't give in to his advance and he ended up going to the farthest extent to try to get rid of her.

Ever since Vanessa went missing, her family wondered, was her disappearance somehow related to the sexual harassment she had told her mother about?

We'll dig into this more in our next episode.

But in 2021, an internal Army investigation found no credible evidence that Robinson sexually harassed Vanessa.

Back in 2020, then-Army Under Secretary James McPherson raised another possibility.

We don't know what the motive was with regard to Specialist Robinson killing Vanessa.

We may never know.

He may have taken that motive with him to his grave.

With Aaron Robinson gone, authorities are left with just one person to hold accountable: Robinson's girlfriend, Cecily Aguilar.

How did she end up here?

And can prosecutors succeed in bringing her

to justice?

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It was hard to find people to talk to about Cecily Aguilar.

ABC News reached out to her and didn't hear back.

What we have been able to piece together is that Cecily had lived a life that was, well, at times, rootless and quite difficult.

She grew up in Michigan.

According to court testimony, she was given up by her birth mother, and around the time she was a toddler, she was adopted.

When Cecily was 14, Child Protective Services removed her from her adoptive parents' home.

After that, Cecily spent time living in foster care and, at other times, was homeless.

It was during these difficult years that Cecily met Aaron Clough.

We heard from her in a previous episode.

A lot of what we know about Cecily comes from Aaron.

She remembers Cecily in high school, how she stood out in class.

Tattoos, and she always had crazy colored hair.

Indeed, years later, when Cecily has a mugshot taken, it's her hair that stands out.

It's dyed bright orange.

Her hair almost perfectly matches her outfit, what looks to be like prison-issued attire with that infamous orange hue.

But back back in high school, behind the dye and the tattoos, Aaron says that Cecily

was struggling.

Foster care for Cecily

was rough.

She said that she always stuck to herself.

She was quiet.

I'm pretty sure she had mentioned a couple of times where she just wanted to run away.

She hated it.

At other times, when Cecily was homeless, Aaron says Cecily would often sleep in a local park.

Around this time, Erin Clough had a job at McDonald's, and she says she encouraged Cecily to apply.

She did, and that is where Cecily met Keon Aguilar.

You might remember how the story goes from there.

Cecily and Keon married and moved to Texas, to Fort Hood.

They took on a new roommate, Keon's fellow soldier, Aaron Robinson.

And later, with the marriage on the rocks, Cecily moved out, and Robinson came with her.

Erin Clough says she thinks her friend Cecily

felt stuck.

I think she was scared.

She was so far away from home.

She didn't have the money to come home.

She didn't have a home to come back to.

You know, she didn't have anybody.

She didn't have anything but herself.

And I'm guessing at that point in time, this Aaron guy.

So she called me at eight o'clock in the morning june 26th um she video chatted me and i missed it and then she tried phone calling me and i missed it and i told her i couldn't talk to her right now and then i'd call her in a little bit and she said okay and then i never ended up calling her

soon after remains are found near the leon river aaron clough hears the news her friend cecily is in custody for allegedly helping to hide a body.

It's just so crazy.

I wish I could just talk to her one-on-one with nobody else and ask her, Cicely, what happened?

Like, what happened?

What, why did you do this?

Did you do what you really did?

And if you did, why?

As for why or how, Cecily could have done this.

I think Cicely could have been manipulated by Aaron 100%.

You know, especially in that time in her life.

And she was alone.

She felt alone.

So I think in her state of mind, in the situations that she was in,

Aaron could have definitely manipulated her.

But Aaron Clough is very clear.

If Cicely did do the things that they are saying she did, then she deserves what she will get from it.

Cecily Aguilar would eventually be indicted on 11 federal charges, all connected with allegedly covering up Vanessa's murder.

In November 2022, Cecily took a plea deal.

She pled guilty to one count of accessory to murder after the fact and to three counts stemming from false statements she made to investigators.

With a guilty plea in hand, federal prosecutors moved on to their next task, putting Cecily Aguilar away for as long as possible.

Cecily's fate would come down to one day in a Texas courtroom and to some new evidence that shocked the courtroom.

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August 2023.

More than three years have passed since Vanessa's remains were found.

Three years of motions and legal wrangling that kept putting this day off.

But finally, it's time for Cecily Aguilar to be sentenced.

Steve Campion made the two and a half hour drive from Houston to Waco.

Back in 2020, Steve had covered this story as a local TV reporter.

Three years later, he was no longer working in journalism, but this case had stuck with him.

And after the Guillen family invited him to come for the hearing, he took the day off work to be there.

At the courthouse, Steve witnesses a reunion of sorts.

There was a lot of familiar faces.

Texas EquiSearch, the team that searched for Vanessa on the ground, their founder was there.

Tim Miller, the family was there.

Different people who were involved in the investigation were there.

And so it was like

three years later, wow, like all these different people who had been there during different parts of the story were all of a sudden assembled.

Everybody was just waiting to see what would happen.

There was a lot of anger, a lot of sadness, a lot of tears.

That's Myra Guillen.

That day,

there was a lot of mixed emotions.

It was a hot one in Waco with a high of 106 degrees.

Inside the courthouse, the mood was uneasy.

There was a lot of tension in the room, and then eventually the defendant, Cecily Aguilar, came in.

No cameras were allowed in court, but a courtroom sketch of Cecily shows her once again in prison-issued orange.

She's seated next to her lawyer, both facing forward.

Her hair is down and tucked behind her ears.

It appears to have returned to its natural color, the orange dye long since faded.

I remember her sitting at the table, and there wasn't a lot of like back and forth with the attorney.

There wasn't a lot of emotion.

Like, I've been in other courtrooms, like, where the defendant might have an outburst, but I don't remember a lot of emotion from Cecily Aguilar in that courtroom.

The question before the court that day was not Cecily's guilt.

She had already pled guilty.

This was her sentencing hearing.

The two sides, Cecily's lawyers and the government, were arguing how long Cecily should go to prison, and both presented evidence to support their positions.

Prosecutors argued that Cecily deserved the maximum possible sentence, 30 years.

Some of the evidence they presented were Cecily's own statements.

The interrogation videos with Cecily Aguilar, those were a window into a world that no one had seen.

Remember, in the weeks after Vanessa went missing, Cecily had changed her story multiple times.

Now, three years later, Cecily's statements to investigators were being scrutinized in her presence and in the presence of a federal judge with the power to lock her up for decades.

We were actually hearing from from her in the interrogation room, and she was deliberately misleading the authorities.

It was aggravating to watch because if she had known all of this all this time, she could have really prevented a lot of heartbreak had she just come forward and said what had happened.

But the footage of Cecily's interrogations was not the most striking evidence prosecutors presented.

What shocked those in attendance was other evidence.

evidence that it seems few people in that courtroom were aware of.

Prosecutors would cite this evidence as yet another reason to give Cecily the maximum sentence.

And just a warning, what prosecutors alleged is disturbing.

There was these really vile allegations that Robinson had

not just mutilated the body or

deconstructed the body, but that had done something really vile to the body.

According to the court transcript, authorities had discovered a, quote, auto-filled search term, something typed into Robinson's phone around 5 p.m.

on the day Vanessa was killed.

That search term, according to the court transcript, was necro.

In addition, a Texas Ranger testifies that he had interviewed someone who said she had spoken with Cecily Aguilar while she was in jail in July 2020.

The Ranger says, quote, she said that Ms.

Aguilar told her that Aaron Robinson had had sex with Vanessa Guillen's corpse.

In the courtroom, that was a moment where everybody was, you know, it was silence, right?

You could have heard a pin drop.

It was as if like it couldn't get worse.

And then you threw on that detail and you're like,

all right, that's the worst it possibly could get.

This is the most depraved, evil thing I've heard.

To me, it just doesn't fit in my head to see how

a person is capable of doing that to another human being.

It is just,

and I mean, it's like a horrific,

like a scene you would see at like a

horror film or something of that nature.

Like it was a shock to hear that.

The allegations are horrific.

But Cecily Aguilar's attorneys point out the defendant in this case isn't Aaron Robinson.

And they point out that Cecily did eventually cooperate with investigators.

She helped place those recorded phone calls to Robinson.

She also went to the Leon River site with investigators, talking through what she said she and Robinson did on the two nights in question.

And their arguments go further than that.

So her defense attorneys basically wanted to paint this picture of Cecily having a very troubled childhood, that she didn't have any caretakers, that she had to make it on her own.

And because of that, she was basically in a position where she could be manipulated by somebody that she cared deeply about.

And so the narrative from the defense attorney is essentially

Aaron Robinson made her do this.

She was so emotionally involved with Aaron that she would have done anything to make sure that the relationship stayed intact.

Prosecutors, of course, were ready for that argument.

The government said, you know, listen, a lot of people experience a lot of horrible things, but not everybody goes and dismembered bodies.

Not everybody goes and lies to police and then ultimately participates in this attempt to cover up a murder.

For me personally, it was lots of anger having Cecily in front of us and not being able to ask her questions directly.

For Myra, seeing Cecily Aguilar in person didn't soften her feelings.

It's about how silent she was after the fact.

I believe you're as guilty.

as a person that committed the crime if you keep quiet and she kept quiet for as long as she could.

it wasn't until law enforcement was involved that she decided to speak up

after almost five hours of testimony the court heard victim impact statements vanessa's sister spoke the family attorney natalie kawam spoke and over the course of 22 minutes vanessa's mother gloria spoke of her daughter she spoke of vanessa's sense of duty that conviction that led her to join the army and gloria spoke of the circles under Vanessa's eyes, her losing weight, losing sleep.

After several months spent at Fort Hood, she spoke of her daughter's death and those she felt were responsible.

But she ended with this, quote, divine justice does exist, and God exists, and he's alive, because I'm here standing upright.

And that is a miracle, because I was on the way to dying.

It's a miracle because what I asked of God was life.

And here I am in God's name.

And I'm going to keep going.

Finally, it was Cecily Aguilar's turn.

Steve Campion again.

She got up and she asked to speak directly to the family.

And this was right after Vanessa's sister spoke, her mother spoke, and so the

atmosphere in the room was really tense and it was really sad.

Cecily Aguilar expresses remorse.

Quote, I'm hoping to convey my sincerest apologies to the Guillen family.

The question why this happened weighs heavily on my mind, and I ask myself, how could I allow myself to become involved in something this terrible?

She continues, I am sincerely sorry, and I know sorry is very inadequate.

I own up to my actions in the crime, and I do take responsibility.

Cecily concludes saying she wishes the Guillennes as much healing as possible.

Quote, I pray that God will give you all the comfort and strength that you need to endure this tragedy that your family has suffered.

When she apologized to the family, I remember sitting there thinking, you've got the defendant after all these years addressing the family and saying, I'm sorry, but really not providing any details on what drove her to do it, except saying, I don't know why I did it.

And that just seems so unsatisfactory in the end.

When Cecily spoke directly to us, I didn't really pay much attention to her words.

I find it hard to believe that those words had any meaning, had any remorse.

So I didn't really bother to even think about the option of forgiving her.

I don't think there's forgiveness for any of that.

Vanessa's gone, nothing's going to bring her back and what was done to her.

And her body is just something that's not normal.

And

she went to that extent and farther to cover up for somebody that she knew was in the wrong.

Cecily Aguilar received a 30-year sentence, the maximum the judge could hand down.

According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, she's being held in a medium security prison in West Virginia.

With that, it seemed that some measure of justice had been served.

And yet.

It's still hard to wrap your head around because if

you sat there in that courtroom that day, the government said that Vanessa was bludgeoned to death with a hammer inside a room on an army base.

And the suspect was then able to take the body off the army base and dispose of it.

And that in itself is hard to believe, right?

And why did it happen?

Why did Aaron Robinson kill Vanessa in the room?

What did Vanessa know?

What did Aaron want?

The question of why Aaron did this, that's the question that haunts the family.

That's the question that haunts anybody who's covered this story.

I don't think we're ever going to have the answer to that question.

After the hearing was over, Myra Guillen says that her mother asked to speak with Cecily privately.

Her request was granted.

I talked to Myra in September.

She told me she wasn't in the room for that private meeting, but what she says her mom told her is extraordinary.

Mom told me that Cicily asked her for forgiveness, and my mom told her that she was forgiven.

And I understand that my mom is a person that forgives.

Again, she's full of faith.

I'm not saying that I can't forgive her maybe one day, but it's just hard, you know, to accept that.

My mom has always been a person who

she's not an angry person.

Not all of us can say that we would easily forgive someone who would hurt our loved ones.

And my mom was one of those people.

So it gives her closure and helps her heal.

And, you know,

we all have different ways of coping.

So that was hers.

And

there was something else.

And another thing she said was that she wished she would have had a mother like my mom.

Someone that would have probably mentored her in the right path in life, showed her what love was.

I mean, it just shows how big my mom's heart is.

It's been more than five years since Vanessa Guillain's death.

In that time, her family has searched for answers, for justice, and in at least one case, for the capacity to forgive.

But that's not where Vanessa's story ends.

Far from it.

Because now there are new questions.

Questions like, what, if anything, can stop this from happening

again?

It had to take my sister's life for us to realize the bigger issues.

Was this a botched investigation by the U.S.

Army?

Fort Hood, Texas will never forget Vanessa again.

We're going to get to the bottom of it.

And how could it have happened when nobody knew about it?

That's next time.

Vanished.

What happened to Vanessa is a production of ABC Audio and 2020.

Hosted by me, John Quinodis.

Produced by Shane McKeon, Nancy Rosenbaum, Sabrina Fang, and Nora Ritchie.

Fact-checking and production help from Audrey Mostek and Annalisa Linder.

Tracy Samuelson is our story editor.

Our supervising producer, 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 Marculis.

Josh Cohan is our director of podcast programming.

Laura Mayer is our executive producer.

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My name's Chad.

And last name?

From executive producers Eli and Peyton Manning.

Remember, I'm wearing a prosthetic mask.

This is acting.

And starring Glenn Powell.

He thinks you're a rubber choo-to-eye.

Not rubber.

I'm a man.

Made of flesh.

The Hulu original series, Chad Powers, is now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for bundle subscribers.

Terms apply.

New episodes Tuesdays.