FORT WORTH, Texas — Just after noon on Dec. 23, 1974, two teenaged girls and their 9-year-old friend decided to do some last-minute holiday shopping at Fort Worth’s Seminary South Shopping Center.
Seventeen-year-old Rachel Trlica, her friend, 14-year-old Renee Wilson, and 9-year-old Julie Ann Moseley never returned home.
Trlica’s 1972 Oldsmobile 98 was found in the Sears parking garage. Inside were the presents they had bought. There was no sign of the girls.
Fifty years later, their disappearance remains one of the most baffling missing person cases in Texas.
From the beginning, Wilson’s mother feared the worst had happened to them. She told Dallas television station WFAA in a 1975 interview that all the girls were good kids and they weren’t likely to have been runaways. One of the missing girls, Trlica, had recently been married.
A few days after their disappearance, Trlica’s husband received a strange note. It appeared to have been written by Rachel. The message said the girls had gone to Houston, though the family immediately doubted its authenticity. FBI handwriting analysis was inconclusive.
In April 1975, an anonymous tipster said the girl’s bodies had been buried under a bridge in Port Lavaca on the Texas Gulf Coast. Their families watched as the police and volunteers searched, but nothing pertaining to their disappearance was found.
Over the years, thousands of leads have been followed, dozens of searches completed and hundreds of people interviewed, but still no answers.
Trlica’s brother, Rusty Arnold, said he won’t give up searching for his sister. He was 11 years old when she disappeared. Arnold, who has kept extensive notes and news clippings about the mystery, said he is determined to find out the truth.
“I just want to find my sister. As long as there’s a breath left in my body, I want her to know that I’ll be trying to find her,” he told WFAA in 2022.
Now, 50 years later, it remains a mystery as surviving family members still ask the question: “What happened to our girls?”