The Disappearance and Slaying of Cindy Davis Rendon

Gone Cold - Texas True Crime

Vincent Strange

True Crime, Society & Culture, News

4.6 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 4 December 2025

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In February of 1983 23-year-old Austin mother Cindy Davis Rendon vanished from her parents’ home in Northeast Austin. It was a normal Tuesday morning — Cindy fed her baby daughter, spoke briefly with her parents before they left for work, and planned to head to her shift at the Internal Revenue Service later that afternoon. But when her estranged husband arrived to pick up the baby, he found the front door wide open, breakfast spilled on the floor, and Cindy gone without a trace.

Days passed. Then an anonymous envelope arrived in the mail containing some of Cindy’s personal belongings — but offered no explanation. Months passed. And then, in July, a camper in Pace Bend Park found a skull protruding from the earth. The remains were soon confirmed to be Cindy’s. She had been killed and buried in a shallow grave soon after she disappeared.

Investigators believed they had their suspect — Cindy’s estranged husband, Jose “Joe” Rendon. A grand jury agreed, indicting him for murder. But a legal technicality collapsed the case before it could ever reach a judge and jury, and a second grand jury refused to re-indict. No one has ever been held accountable.

Forty years later, Cindy’s family is still waiting for justice — and her killer still hasn’t been made to answer for what happened on that ordinary morning in Austin.

If you have information that could help bring justice for Cynthia “Cindy” Davis Rendon, please contact the Travis County Sheriff’s Office tip line at (512) 854-1444.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Gone Cold Podcasts may contain violent or graphic subject matter. Listener discretion is advised.
0:08.7	February 1, 1983, in a quiet neighborhood in Northeast Austin. It was morning, but the sun had already
0:17.1	began to warm the cold air. Inside a modest home on Bryn Mard Drive, a 23-year-old mother
0:24.7	moved through her morning routine. She dressed in comfortable clothing, set breakfast out
0:30.9	for her baby. There wasn't much to do but enjoy being a mother and wait for her parents
0:36.4	to return later that day so she could
0:38.8	leave for work. She made a phone call. Nothing was out of place. Nothing was loud or dramatic,
0:47.0	at least not that anyone heard. But suddenly, perhaps, her morning ended. A door was left standing open. A baby was alone, and a woman
0:58.6	was missing. There were no signs of a struggle, not a trace of where she went. Hours became
1:05.9	days, then weeks, then months. Hope was tested, lowered, and finally buried.
1:14.8	This is the story of what happened to Cindy Davis-Rendon.
1:34.4	Austin, Texas in 1983 was a city perched on the edge of transformation.
1:42.2	Not yet the high-gloss tech hub and music pilgrimage site the world knows today, but no longer just a sleepy college town wrapped around the state capital and
1:46.5	hunky-tunks. Growth had pressed in from every direction, stretching the boundaries of a place that had
1:53.7	long tried to keep its eccentricities close. Nearly 400,000 people called Austin home then. State workers and politicians, students and professors,
2:06.5	bikers, bartenders, musicians, cowboys and misfits. They shared crowded sidewalks and
2:14.0	bar tops, all humming to a soundtrack that was unmistakably Austin.
2:20.3	But for all its charm and creativity, the city in the early 80s wasn't insulated from the darker
2:27.1	tides rolling across Texas. The oil bust had hit the Lone Star State hard.
2:34.1	Austinites watched neighboring cities stumble under the weight of unemployment,
2:39.5	collapsing real estate markets, and folded businesses.
2:43.8	Their city escaped the worst of it, thanks in part to the University of Texas
	...

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