Our card this week is Maria Mary-Fay-Mendez, a wild card from Texas.

Maria Mendez was never put on a deck of cold case playing cards in Odessa, but she should have been.

And she would have been if her case file hadn't been lost for almost 40 years.

But that changed recently when a young detective found her file and read about the woman

who'd vanished after a fight with her husband in 1984.

Now she is uncovering clues in the case that are starting to unravel not one, but two mysteries that had haunted

West Texas for decades. I'm Ashley'm I'm In 2022, Detective Lauren Gonzalez stood atop a ladder in the basement of the Odessa Police Department,

searching through boxes of homicide cases from the 80s.

She was looking for clues about a string of sexual assaults committed by a predator known

only as the Southside rapist, thinking maybe he'd escalated to murder.

While she didn't find anything about her mysterious assailant, she did find something else.

As I'm going through the box for murders in 1984, there's a file and it's written in Sharpie

on the front of the file, missing person.

And I pulled it out because it was misfiled.

Missing persons don't go in these boxes.

Those go in different boxes.

Detective Gonzalez skimmed the folder. It was for a 39-year-old woman named Maria Mendez,

who went by Mary Faye, or Mary, mostly, which is what her family called her, so we will too.

She was a mom of three living in Odessa who'd been reported missing by her mother in August of

1984. I've never heard of her before. And so just looking at the front page, there's a part of the

report on the bottom that says disposition. And this is where they would put recovered missing person and the date, things like that.

But it was empty.

...