Vanessa Villa was an 11-year-old Hispanic girl from Fort Worth, Texas, who was murdered on August 4, 1986. She lived with her mother and two siblings and had worked at a flea market in Dallas earlier that day. Vanessa was described as dedicated to school despite struggling with English and had once written a note asking her mother to take her away from the neighborhood because of its high crime rate; the note was later found hidden in a dictionary after her death.

While Vanessa’s mother and siblings were out running errands for a period reported as between 20 minutes and an hour, a man named Juan Ramon Segundo broke into the family home and attacked the girl. When the family returned they found Vanessa unconscious in her bedroom; she had been raped and strangled. DNA testing linked Segundo to the crime; he was arrested in 2005, convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 2006. Later legal proceedings over his intellectual capacity led to resentencing in 2022 to life with the possibility of parole, a result that frustrated Vanessa’s family.

Did anyone in Fort Worth know Vanessa or remember her from school or the neighborhood?