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To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, check us out at patreon.com slash Forensic Tales. Hey everyone, Courtney here. Before we get to the episode, you need to hear about the new true crime podcast I've been binging, the Military True Crime Addict Podcast.
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That's Military True Crime Addict. Available on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now. Also available at MilitaryTrueCrimeAddict.com and on Facebook at Military True Crime Addict. Subscribe today and give them a listen. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. Christmastime, the most wonderful time of the year.
Children laugh, families bond, Christmas joy lives everywhere. Everywhere except Fort Worth, Texas. Two days before Christmas, three innocent girls went shopping at the mall then mysteriously disappeared. No clues, no suspects, nothing. Could forensics give Christmas back to the families?
This is Forensic Tales, episode number 67, The Fort Worth Missing Trio. ♪
Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell.
Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.
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In December 1974, students in Fort Worth, Texas were on Christmas break, just like every other kid across the country. Kindergarteners up to high schoolers had two weeks off, including Julianne Mosley, Rachel Treikla, and Lisa Renee Wilson. Rachel Treikla was the oldest of the group. At 17 years old, she stood 5 feet 6 inches with bright green eyes.
She was married to a fellow high school classmate named Thomas. In today's world, being married at 17 years old sounds completely crazy. But back in 1974, being a teenager bride wasn't a cause to pick up the phone and call Child Protective Services. Thomas was 21 years old, and his marriage to Rachel was his second. Before Rachel, he was married to her older sister, Deborah.
Another common occurrence in the 70s. Lisa Renee Wilson was the second oldest of the group. At 14 years old, Lisa went by her middle name, Renee. Renee was the naughty one of the group, but she was also the hopeless romantic. A couple days before Christmas, Renee's boyfriend, 15-year-old Terry Mosley, surprised her with a promise ring.
Julie Mosley was the youngest of the group. At only nine years old, Julie stood just a couple inches above four feet tall. She had sandy blonde hair and big, sparkling blue eyes. On the morning of December 23, 1974, Rachel needed to do some last-minute Christmas shopping. She wanted to go shopping at the Seminary South Shopping Center in Fort Worth, Texas.
Rachel didn't want to go alone, so she asked her friend Debra if she wanted to tag along. But Debra was tired. She didn't want to go fight the crowds at the mall. So she told Rachel, no, I'm just too tired. You go on without me. Rachel still didn't want to go shop by herself. So she asked her 14-year-old friend, Renee.
Rachel and Renee were friends since they were practically born. So when Rachel asked her to go Christmas shopping that day, Renee was excited. Renee told Rachel that she would go to the mall with her on one condition. Renee needed to be home by 4 o'clock p.m. That's because she had plans to go to a Christmas party with her boyfriend, Terry.
And, like all girls, she wanted to be home with plenty of time to get dressed up for the party. That morning, Rachel left the house in her husband's 1972 Oldsmobile 98. She picked up her friend Renee, staying at her grandparents' house. Janet and Julie, Renee's boyfriend's sisters, were all hanging out at her house. This was the kind of neighborhood where kids hung out everywhere.
So when Rachel got to Renee's house, the girls asked 11-year-old Janet if she wanted to go to the mall with them. But Janet said she wanted to stay back because she had another friend coming over. That's when 9-year-old Julie overheard the declined invitation. Julie asked if she could tag along. She told the girls she wanted to go because she didn't want to spend the day alone.
Rachel and Renee weren't exactly thrilled about the idea of babysitting a nine-year-old at the mall. To get out of it, they told Julie she could only go to the mall with them if she called her mom and asked for her permission. The older girls were sure this would get them out of taking Julie. That's because Julie's mom said no to pretty much everything. Julie bolted to call her mom.
She begged her mom for permission to go to the mall with Rachel and Renee. Her mom told Julie no, like she always did. She told Julie that she didn't have any money and thinks it's better if she just stays home. But Julie was insistent. She told her mom that she really, really wanted to go to the mall with her older friends. Usually, Julie's mom would stick to her guns and say no. But this time was different.
Julie's parents were going through a messy divorce. And out of feelings of guilt, Julie's mom decided that just this one time she'd say yes. She told Julie, yes, you can go to the mall with Rachel and Renee, but you have to be home by 6 p.m. Julie was ecstatic. She quickly hung up the phone and ran outside to tell the girls that her mom, her mom said yes.
Rachel and Renee weren't thrilled. Now, they had a nine-year-old tag along to the mall with them. Oh well, they thought. How bad could this really be? Before leaving, Renee asked her boyfriend Terry if he wanted to come along. He said no. Like many guys, shopping at the mall two days before Christmas just wasn't his thing.
Besides, he already promised a friend of his that he would spend the day with him. He told Renee to go have some fun and that he loved her. The three girls got inside of Rachel's car shortly before noon. Their first stop that afternoon was to the Army Navy store in Fort Worth. Renee needed to pick up some items, including a pair of jeans she had on layaway.
After the stop at the surplus store, the girls headed to the Seminary South Shopping Center. Seminary South opened back in 1962 and was known to be a Hispanic-themed shopping center in Fort Worth, Texas. Some of the mall's original tenants included all the major department stores, like Sears, G.C. Murphy, and Striplings.
It was the type of mall that teenage girls in Fort Worth flocked to on the weekends. While Rachel, Renee, and Julie were shopping at the mall, their families went on with their regular days, completely unaware that their lives were about to be flipped upside down. Four o'clock came, and four o'clock went. The girls weren't home. Renee's parents were first to notice.
Renee told her parents that she planned to be home by 4 p.m. to get ready for that Christmas party. She had plans to show off that promise ring that her boyfriend gave her. Next, Julie's mom was fuming. Julie promised to be home by 6 p.m. Julie's mom knew that she shouldn't have let her daughter go. And then finally, Thomas, Rachel's husband, noticed that she hadn't come home yet.
He feared their car must have broken down. Once it was past 6 p.m. and the girls still hadn't returned home from the shopping trip, all three families drove down to the mall. One person was designated to stay home, and that was Julie's older brother and Renee's boyfriend, Terry. Terry agreed to stay home just in case someone called with any news about the girls' whereabouts.
Now, this incident took back in the early 1970s, an era way before cell phones. So when the girls didn't return home, their families couldn't just pick up the phone and call them to find out where they were. Instead, they had to drive down to the mall themselves. They drove down several routes that they believed the girls might have taken earlier that day.
They wanted to find out if Rachel's car did break down and if they were maybe stranded somewhere on the side of the road. But each roadway was empty. No sign of that Oldsmobile anywhere. Unable to find Rachel's Oldsmobile on the roads, the families headed to the Seminary South Shopping Center. They were still hunting for any sign of the car or the girls. But when they arrived at the mall, they were faced with a tremendous task.
It was two days before Christmas, one of the busiest shopping days of the entire year, and the families were trying to locate one car in a sea of thousands. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. After a couple hours of searching every parking lot at the mall, the families finally found the Oldsmobile 98. The car was parked in a Sears upper-level parking lot. The doors of the Oldsmobile were locked.
On the floor of the back seat was a single wrapped Christmas present. It appeared as though the girls made it to the car after their shopping trip. But where on earth were they now? Something that has always brought me joy is listening to stories about how other people have overcome obstacles in their life. Because these stories provide me with such inspiration, that's why I subscribe to the Hero Makers Podcast.
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After locating Rachel's abandoned car on the Sears parking structure's upper level, Rachel's mom, Fran, and younger brother, Rusty, headed into the mall right before closing. As each store was closing for the night, Fran and Rusty asked the store's managers to page for the girls to meet their family at the front door. After each page, the family waited.
And after each page, the family's fears intensified. Nothing. After the mall closed for the night, the family stayed all night looking for the missing girls. It appeared that the girls made it back to the car because of the Christmas present. They were hopeful that the girls ran off somewhere and returned to the vehicle. The hours ticked by. The night grew darker. And still, nothing.
They started calling all of the girls' friends. They asked friends if they had seen or heard from Rachel, Renee, or Julie. But the calls all turned up nothing. Next, the families called all the local hospitals in the area. Maybe one of the girls got hurt, and they're being treated at a local hospital. Unfortunately, the hospital calls returned the same result. Nothing.
Finally, the families knew they needed to call the Fort Worth Police Department. When the call came in about three missing girls to the Fort Worth Police Department, the case was handed to the department's Youth Division of the Missing Person Bureau.
Investigators quickly assumed that they would be working a runaway case. It looked like a few young people went to the mall as a ruse to their families. And then they decided to run away from home. Pretty common for teenagers, right? When the police sent officers to the abandoned car in the parking lot, they found no evidence. Nothing on Rachel's car suggested foul play was involved. There was no blood, no evidence of a physical struggle in or around the car.
But from the get-go, Rachel, Renee, and Julie's families were adamant to police that these girls wouldn't just run away. They weren't the runaway types. The families argued to police that nothing about the girls' behavior suggested that they had plans to run away. The girls invited several other people to the mall that day, including Terry, Debra, and Janet. If they were planning on running away, why would they invite friends to go with them?
The families also pointed to the fact that the girls didn't take anything with them. They didn't bring any of their personal belongings. No clothes, no extra money, zilch. How would they survive anywhere else without even a change of clothes? Plus, and probably most obvious, they left their car behind. What teenager is going to run away and leave their car behind?
After receiving a lot of heat from the girls' families, the Fort Worth Police Department eventually decided to take this case seriously. They no longer believed they were dealing with a case of a couple runaway teenagers. On December 24, 1974, the day following the disappearance, investigators received a massive break in the case.
While the families couldn't eat or sleep since the girls vanished, Thomas Trickla, Rachel's husband, received a handwritten letter in his mailbox. The letter had been postmarked that very morning. Rachel's name was written on the envelope's upper left-hand corner. But other than Rachel's name, there was no return address. The letter appeared to have been written by Rachel herself. It read,
I know we're going to catch it, but we just had to get away. We're going to Houston. We'll see you in about a week. The car is in the Sears Upper Lot. Love, Rachel. The second after Rachel's husband Tommy read the letter, he tossed it on the ground. He knew Rachel didn't write that letter. Thomas knew instantly his missing wife didn't write that letter.
What struck him as odd was the fact that someone addressed the envelope in pencil, but the letter itself was written in pen. He also found it strange that the sheet of paper was wider than the envelope. The letter was addressed to Thomas A. Tricla. Rachel never called her husband Thomas. To her, he was Tommy, not Thomas.
It appeared that Rachel's name on the envelope's upper left-hand corner was misspelled. It looked like Rachel had initially been spelled with an I, R-A-C-H-I-L. Then the I was written over with a lowercase e. It was like someone elongated the letter I to look more like an E. That's odd, Thomas thought. His wife wouldn't misspell her own name.
Thomas handed the letter to the Fort Worth Police Department. First, investigators verified the letter's postmark. Could they identify the letter's origin? The postmark didn't contain a city, only a blurred zip code that appeared to say 76083. But the police studied the zip code a little closer. It was hard to tell whether the number 3 was either a 3 or
or a partial 8. The number appeared to be kind of backwards, like a hand-loaded stamp had applied it, or maybe the number really was a partial 8. After bringing in a forensic handwriting analysis expert, the Fort Worth police eventually concluded that the zip code was either 76038 or 76088.
If the zip code was 76038, the letter was postmarked in Elvisville, Texas, an unincorporated community in Young County. And if the zip code was 76088, the letter was postmarked in the city of Weatherford in Parker County. Either way, the letter was postmarked that same morning somewhere in the state of Texas. Thomas and the rest of Rachel's family didn't believe she wrote the letter, but
On top of all the letter's irregularities, her family didn't think that it looked like her handwriting. The letter was written in a slanted cursive style. This was completely different than anything Rachel wrote in the past. But six days after Thomas received the letter, the police announced that their forensic handwriting expert had made a decision, that the letter was in fact written in Rachel's handwriting.
But maybe she was forced to write it. The letter stated the girls would return home in about a week. As the week concluded, the girls' families were anxiously awaiting their return. Every knock on the door, every friend visiting, and every car driving by would set off an abundance of hope. But after a painfully slow week, nothing. The letter lied.
Rachel, Renee, and Julie's families continued searching for the missing girls. They canvassed the neighborhoods, posting missing persons flyers on every telephone pole. They posted flyers on the front doors of every business. The families contacted newspapers from across the country. They wanted to do everything they possibly could to get the news out about the missing girls. The world needed to know their girls weren't runaways.
the media started to refer to the case as the Fort Worth missing trio. One of Fort Worth's detectives' biggest constraints with the case was simply their time era. This occurred in the early 1970s, a time when DNA testing simply didn't exist. The police couldn't recover DNA or other valuable forensic evidence from Rachel's car and then maybe match it to a suspect.
DNA testing wouldn't become available until 1985, almost 11 years later. It would take several more years for DNA testing to be available across police departments and crime labs in the U.S. So in the case of the Fort Worth missing trio, the police's hands were essentially tied. No DNA testing availability likely caused valuable forensic evidence to be lost.
They couldn't swab the car's door handles for a suspect's DNA because there was no way to test it. They couldn't really do much with fingerprints, even if they found one. The U.S. didn't create a national fingerprint database until the later part of the 1990s. By the time scientists created this type of forensic testing, it was way many years later that they weren't able to go back and test the car.
So since Fort Worth police officers couldn't rely on forensic testing to find the missing girls, they had to rely on good old-fashioned police work to try and find them. Police began tracking down potential witnesses. The police knew the girls made it to the mall because of the parked car outside of Sears. They were last seen on December 23rd, two days before Christmas. The mall was packed with potential eyewitnesses.
The search was on. At least 20 people saw the girls at the mall. Many told the police that the girls stood out to them because they remembered the t-shirt that Renee was wearing. It was a yellow-green t-shirt that read, Sweet Honesty across the front. Others remembered what Rachel and Julie were wearing. Julie, who was nine, was wearing a red t-shirt with dark-colored jeans and a pair of red tennis shoes.
The eyewitnesses also recalled seeing Rachel's wedding ring on her finger. Most of the eyewitnesses who saw the trio at the mall didn't report noticing anything suspicious. Everyone reported that the girls looked like your typical teenage girls out shopping at the mall. However, one person disagreed. Fort Worth police officers interviewed a night watchman stationed at Alkin Laboratories, a building right down the street from the mall.
The watchman told police that in the afternoon the girls disappeared, he saw a car with two men and three girls inside. But when the police investigated the watchman's claims, they found nothing. Weeks grew into months, and still no sign of the Fort Worth missing trio.
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By the spring of 1975, Rachel, Renee, and Julie had been missing for over six months. Frustrated with how the Fort Worth Police Department handled the case, the families pooled their money together in order to hire a private investigator named John Swaim. From the onset, Swaim held press conferences. At the press conferences, he slammed the police for not finding the girls.
He bashed them for not having a single suspect after all these months. The press conferences seemed to work. In 1975, John Swaim received his first big tip in the case. In August 1975, John Swaim found a 28-year-old man who worked at a local store, a store where Rachel had applied for a job right before her disappearance.
Swaim discovered this man was making obscene phone calls to girls who applied for jobs at the store. In total, the man harassed six young female applicants. The creepy man also lived in Rachel's parents' neighborhood. John Swaim thought this man sounded like a solid suspect in the case. But after a little digging, nothing.
A few weeks later, another tip came in about the possibility of female remains discovered along a bridge in Port Lavaca. The private investigator assembled a team of 100 volunteers to search underneath local bridges, but they found no trace of the girls. Nothing. By March 1976, the case of the Fort Worth Missing Trio was as cold as ever.
The police didn't even have a list of possible suspects in the girls' disappearances. With nowhere else to turn, they enlisted the help of a psychic. The psychic told the police that Rachel, Renee, and Julie could be found near an oil well. A search team was deployed to an oil well in Rising Star, a small town in Eastland County, Texas, a location the psychic said she saw the girls' bodies.
But after an exhausting search of the area, nothing. In 1979, five years into the Fort Worth missing trio search, the investigation took an unexpected turn. John Swaim, the private investigator working the case, died of a drug overdose. And it wasn't just any drug overdose. His death was ruled a suicide.
Before his death, Swaim destroyed all of his case files, including the missing trios. Any evidence from the missing trio went to the grave with him. Two long years later, Fort Worth police received another tip in the investigation. In the spring of 1981, investigators were called to an area in Brazoria County. Human remains were discovered.
After a month of investigating, the human remains did not belong to either Rachel, Renee, or Julie. The Fort Worth missing trio was still missing. That same year, a witness came forward claiming to have been in the Sears parking lot on the afternoon of December 23, 1974. The witness claimed to have seen a man pushing the girls inside of a van.
He told the police when he asked the man what was going on, the crazed man responded, none of your business, it's a family matter. The man jumped in the van and drove away. Fort Worth police have never confirmed or denounced this man's claims. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, several more tips came in about female human remains being discovered in the surrounding areas.
but none of the remains belonged to the missing trio. Rachel, Renee, and Julie were still missing decades after they disappeared. All that was left of them was Rachel's Oldsmobile left in the Sears parking lot. And without any promising leads coming in, the case of the Fort Worth missing trio was closed. The families of Rachel, Renee, and Julie did their best to move on with their lives.
They did their best to try and come to terms with the harsh reality that these girls may never be found. Whoever took them would never be held accountable. They may never know what exactly happened back on December 23, 1974. But even though the missing case was cold, their families never gave up hope.
In 2001, investigators did something that shocked everyone, including the girls' families. They reopened the case. 27 years after the disappearance, the police officially reopened the Fort Worth Missing Trio case. With the case reopening came a fresh set of eyes to review the evidence. Homicide detective Tom Barcher with the Fort Worth Police Department was assigned to the case.
Huge advancements in forensic testing caused the case to be reopened. By 2001, we developed highly sophisticated crime labs that could test for things like fingerprints, DNA, and even trace evidence. Before 2001, DNA testing would take sometimes six, seven, eight weeks to complete. The same DNA testing was only taking forensic scientists now one to two days to do.
So in 2001, when the Fort Worth Police Department reopened the missing trio case, they were hopeful that forensic testing and the advancements in this type of testing would help them. When police announced the case's reopening, they held a press conference that delivered bombshell news.
The head detective announced that they had narrowed down a possible suspect list to under five individuals. Incredible, right? Before this press conference, we didn't know of any possible suspects, let alone a list of only five. So the department also announced that it had a theory in the case. Based on the circumstances, they believed that more than one person was involved in the girl's disappearance.
Whoever took them was likely someone that the girls trusted or possibly even knew. This theory accounts for the fact that none of the other shoppers at the mall heard or saw anything out of the ordinary. Remember, this mystery occurred two days before Christmas, one of the busiest shopping days of the year. There would be dozens of people buzzing around that Sears parking lot.
If the girls went with someone they trusted or someone that they knew, that would explain why nobody noticed anything unusual. It could also explain why the girls left Rachel's car in the parking lot. They thought they were coming back. One of the new leads police were investigating in 2001 was a tip provided by a former police officer who worked as a security guard at the Sears store.
The security guard worked on the night of the disappearance and reported to police a strange encounter with a fellow security guard. He said he got into an argument with another security guard that night, and during the argument, he saw three girls sitting inside of that man's pickup truck.
He recalled noticing the girls were all seated in the front row. The youngest girl was sitting right next to the driver, the second oldest was in the middle, and then the oldest girl was next to the passenger side door. This sighting was reported to Fort Worth police back in 1974, but was never investigated. At the time, the police didn't believe this had a connection to the missing trio case.
So in 2001, when detectives reopened the case, they tracked down the security guard in the pickup truck seen with the three girls inside. Police sat down and interviewed him about the incident in 1974. But he denied it. He denied being with Rachel, Renee or Julie that night. He denied having ever met the missing trio.
After months of investigating in 2001, and even with a fresh set of eyes on the case, the case was once again cold. Another seven years went by before another solid lead arrived. In 2018, Fort Worth police received a tip about two cars found at the bottom of Benbrook Lake. The tip came in that the submerged vehicles might have a connection to the missing trio.
Following up on the lead, investigators raised both of the cars from the lake. They investigated the scene and found no connection to the girls. Nothing. Over the decades, the Fort Worth Police Department continues to receive tips about the missing trio. But as of today, none of the tips have led to the discovery of any of the girls.
Rachel, Renee, and Julie have not been seen or heard from since December 23, 1974. They've been missing for 47 years, vanished from a Sears parking lot. The families have maintained their belief that the girls didn't run away. They continue to point out that the three girls invited others to go with them to the mall that day.
If they were planning on running away, it doesn't seem likely that they would invite others. After researching this case, I also struggle with the idea that they ran away. To me, nothing about their disappearance adds up to a case of a few teenagers running away. Renee was the one who wanted to be home by 4 o'clock p.m. that day. She wanted to be home early in order to get ready for a Christmas party with her boyfriend, Terry.
A boyfriend who had just given her a promise ring that same afternoon. Rachel, the oldest girl, was married to a husband at home. Plus, there's Rachel's car, the one they drove to the mall that day and was found parked in the parking lot. If the girls were really looking to run away that day, why wouldn't they take a car with them? Then there's the handwritten letter, the letter that Rachel allegedly sent
wrote to her husband the day after they disappeared. To this day, the families don't believe that Rachel wrote the letter. They point to the misspelling of her name on the front of the envelope. They point to the handwriting. They point out that whoever wrote the letter addressed it to Thomas. When Rachel never called her husband Thomas, he was Tommy to her.
Well, I mentioned earlier that the Fort Worth Police Department had a forensic handwriting expert look at the letter. Now, initially, back in 1974, experts believed that Rachel might have written the letter. But they also said it was possible that she may have been forced to write the letter.
Over the decades since the girls disappeared, dozens of forensic handwriting experts have analyzed the letter, including the FBI. Any forensic handwriting expert with the FBI yielded inconclusive results after analyzing the letter. Even the FBI was unable to say whether or not Rachel wrote the letter. This is something we may never know.
But it's the family's belief, as well as my own belief, that Rachel didn't write that letter. Not only have the families had to deal with not knowing what happened to the girls, but they've also become subject to prank calls. Over the years, the parents have received countless phone calls from people claiming to be their daughters or claiming to know where they are.
The phone calls got so bad at one point that they've had to change their phone numbers continuously. The Fort Worth missing trio case has haunted the city of Fort Worth for over four decades. In 2021, investigators are no closer to solving this one than they were back in 1974. There has been zero arrests in the case, zero traces of Rachel, Renee, or Julie in over 40 years.
Until we find them, many still hold out hope that they could still be alive. Age-progressed photographs of the girls have been created to determine what they might look like if they were alive today. This is a case that has haunted so many people. A case with so many possible theories. If you're from Fort Worth or have just heard about the case, you probably have your own theory about what happened.
Now, of course, I don't know what happened to Rachel, Renee, or Julie, but my opinion is that they were kidnapped. I believe they were approached by someone around Rachel's car in this year's parking lot. This person was either someone they knew or someone who didn't come across as a threat to them.
At some point during the interaction, this person was able to gain the girl's trust. Maybe it was even two or three people. I think one of the girls put the wrapped Christmas present in the backseat of Rachel's car, believing that they would be back soon. Then they got inside of this person's car and drove away. This explains why nobody in the parking lot heard or saw anything suspicious.
The girls willingly got into this person's car because they trusted them. What happened next? Well, that's a complete mystery. I don't know where they are or what this person did to them. Maybe someone killed them either right away or possibly later on. Maybe Rachel was forced to write that letter back to her husband. Whatever happened, we may never know.
But what we know one thing for sure, that these poor families from Fort Worth, Texas, Christmas will never be the same. To share your thoughts on the Fort Worth missing trio case, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at Forensic Tales. Let me know what you think happened to Rachel, Renee, and Julie. Do you think there's a chance they're still alive?
Also, to check out photos from the case, be sure to head to our website, ForensicTales.com. I'll be posting photographs of the letter as well as the age-progressed images of the missing girls. Don't forget to subscribe to Forensic Tales so you don't miss an episode. We release a new episode every Monday. If you love this show, consider leaving us a positive review or tell friends and family about us.
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