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The students had never seen a criminal case file before, but already, they thought they were on to something.

The undergraduates had signed up for a brand-new class called Special Topics in Crime and Criminology: Forensic Assessment of Cold Case Files, offered by the University of Texas at Arlington in partnership with the local police department. One of the students, Jacey Concannon, had languished at an all-day breakfast chain and in a series of jobs in the medical field before returning to college in her late 20s, hoping to become a forensic scientist. Now she and other students were staring down a murder that had occurred years before any of them were born. No one had ever been arrested for the crime, let alone convicted.

Two weeks into their review, the team—Concannon, alongside younger students Jenna Lewis, Preston Schroeder, Natalia Montoya, and Samantha Underwood—gathered around a table in the forensic lab to share their findings and discuss theories. Montoya, a criminology major who also works at Starbucks, was the first to mention a potential suspect. “This name keeps coming up,” she said. “Wait,” Concannon replied. “I noticed that name in another report.” The name had caught the attention of another student as well.

The person in question had no alibi for the night of the murder and had failed two polygraph tests, according to police records. And it was written right there in the files: The suspect had confirmed, in a police interview, that they were glad the victim was dead.

The more details the students uncovered, the more convinced they became. Could it really be? Had five students done what a veteran homicide detective had failed to do more than 30 years earlier?

“We were pretty confident this was something that needed to be investigated right away,” Concannon said.

In recent years, when a new break in a cold case makes headlines, it’s often because of updated genealogy tools or forensic detection technology. In the murder of a young mother named Cynthia Renee Gonzalez, it took something else entirely. Following the discovery in the classroom, Cynthia’s now-adult daughter would learn of the potential new finding, just a year after her latest plea for an update in the case, as would her long-mourning friends and family. Eventually, so would a new suspect accused of the murder.

It would turn out there was a reason no one ever saw the suspect right in front of them—and that the new twist in the case was just the beginning.

At first, Jessica Roberts wasn’t sure what her father meant when he said her mother was missing. Twenty-five-year-old Cynthia hadn’t come home from work the night before, but Jessica, only 6 years old, didn’t know where her mom worked or what she did there.

Tall and athletic, with long, teased auburn hair, Cynthia was an exotic dancer at Playmates, a seminude bar tucked amid the sprawl of Arlington, Texas, the largest suburb in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. Cynthia was also an entrepreneur. From the dining room table of her modest apartment, she owned and operated Beauty and the Beast Entertainment. Her company delivered stripteases, called stripograms, to private audiences, such as bachelor parties and individual clients, usually as a gag gift.

Jessica lived with her dad in another town, but she was staying with her mom on Sept. 16, 1991, a Monday, when a dancer for Beauty and the Beast had a last-minute conflict and was unable to perform that evening. None of Cynthia’s other dancers were available on such short notice. Cynthia decided to do it herself, so she called her estranged husband, Don Gonzalez, a vending technician, and asked him to leave work to pick up their daughter.*

It had been a treat for Jessica to spend time with her mom. With their visit cut short, she became upset. Her mom tried to comfort her, but Jessica cried as her dad drove her back to their home in Azle, a small suburb on the northwestern fringe of Fort Worth.

Cynthia also had lived in Azle, with Gonzalez and Jessica, for a time. A doting mother, she had enrolled her young daughter in cheer and dance classes, and the family whiled away summer days camping and boating on Eagle Mountain Lake, a reservoir down the street from their house. By early 1991, after Cynthia and Gonzalez’s marriage of more than six years crumbled, Cynthia was the one who moved out. She had met another man, and they were said to be living together in her Arlington apartment. They were even discussing marriage.

The day after Jessica’s tearful ride home, her dad told her that her mom had disappeared. He dropped Jessica off with a friend while he and others went out to search the streets of Arlington. Days passed with no word from Cynthia.

Then, less than a week later, as Jessica was in her bedroom, being comforted by her maternal grandmother, Linda Gandy, her father appeared.

“My dad is the one who told me,” Jessica recalled over the phone recently while driving in the Fort Worth area, where she’s lived all her life. “He just came in my room and told me that my mom was dead and somebody had shot her, point-blank. There was no easing me into it.”

Cynthia Renee Gonzalez was pronounced dead on Sept. 22, 1991. For many years, Jessica knew almost nothing else about the murder. Whenever she asked her dad for details, she says, he became angry and refused to speak. Gonzalez eventually remarried and had four more kids, but he held on to a big box of Cynthia’s clothes and other keepsakes, including a lock of hair and bottle of her perfume.* Jessica liked to crawl into the box, sometimes taking a nap inside. She often sifted through the belongings. A whiff of Cynthia’s signature scent, Lauren by Ralph Lauren, helped her remember her mom.

As a teenager and young adult, Jessica tried to learn more about her mom’s case. She requested a copy of the autopsy report, but it raised more questions than answers. Every so often, she called the Arlington Police Department to request an update, but there was rarely much to share. Wedged between Dallas and Fort Worth, Arlington is a city of 400,000 that employs six homicide detectives who contend with an average of 15 to 25 new cases a year. With no dedicated cold-case squad, they also juggle approximately 100 older investigations. Cynthia’s case was one of those. In 2011 the investigation had been shelved in the department’s cold-case archives.

In May 2024, Jessica called the police department one more time. By now, she’d been married for several years and was raising a young son of her own. She spoke with a homicide sergeant named Blake Ritchie. While he didn’t have any updates for her, the conversation with Jessica apparently struck a chord, and he asked a homicide detective named Anthony Stafford to review Cynthia’s case.

Stafford was feeling slammed at the time. Bald with a wry grin framed by a tidy beard, Stafford is a former chef who worked in some of the world’s most celebrated kitchens, capped by a stint at Noma in Copenhagen, before his pivot to police work. He had recently arrested a man suspected of robbing and killing a Vietnamese restaurant owner, a gruesome case in which the victim’s head had been run over during the alleged getaway.

During a scrap of time between active investigations, Stafford opened the digitized files from Cynthia’s case. He began to sift through hundreds of disordered pages. He didn’t see any new leads or evidence holding potential for DNA testing, so he set the files aside.

The case likely would have continued to languish if not for the sergeant’s chance encounter with a professor that fall.

Patricia Eddings, an expert in trace evidence, is short, with fiery red hair and a cheery Mississippi drawl. Before she became an educator at UT–Arlington, she spent decades as a forensic analyst working high-profile cases such as the Branch Davidian siege in Waco.

In October 2024, Eddings was intrigued to learn that a local homicide sergeant, Ritchie, was set to deliver a campus lecture on a cold case she had worked in 1985: the murder of Terri McAdams, a UTA student who was found beaten to death in her off-campus apartment. Working with the FBI, Arlington police had finally solved the crime that summer through genetic genealogy, matching the killer’s DNA to relatives in a public database.

Toward the end of his presentation, Ritchie lamented the police department’s struggle to reopen cold cases such as McAdams’. Because the city’s homicide detectives were constantly responding to new murders, several weeks might pass before they could return their attention to an older case from the vault. By then, he said, their memory of the case’s intricacies was already fading. It was almost like starting over.

That was the aha moment for Eddings. Unlike the city’s homicide detectives, her students in the department of criminology and criminal justice had nothing but time on their hands, even if they didn’t always realize it. “They tell me they don’t have time,” she told me, “but they have time for things they want to do. And I knew they would be excited about this.” When his presentation ended, Eddings found her way to Ritchie and asked if he would consider working with her undergraduate students.

Police can be territorial about open cases. To Eddings’ surprise, however, Ritchie was receptive, even enthusiastic, as were his supervisors. When the fall 2025 semester rolled around, police delivered flash drives containing the records of three murder cases to Eddings’ newest class. The files for Cynthia Gonzalez’s murder were the oldest.

Concannon and her teammates plugged the drive into a shared laptop and clicked it open. “We were kind of going in blind,” Concannon said.

They’d been expecting a large file, but sorting through 400 pages was overwhelming at first. Then it became addictive.

Growing up in Fort Worth, where many of her friends knew her as Cindy, Cynthia Renee Gandy was a talented athlete who was popular with her classmates. Her obituary describes her as the “high school queen” her junior year. But her father wasn’t in the picture, and her mother, Linda Gandy, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that Cynthia’s life began a “downward spiral” after the family moved to a different neighborhood. Cynthia dropped out of Fort Worth’s Carter-Riverside High School during her senior year, in 1984. Four months later, 18 and pregnant, she married Donald Gonzalez, who was nearly seven years her senior. Jessica was born that December.

A friend, Lora Chionie, says that Cynthia was deeply committed to her daughter but had a rough life in Azle. “I remember seeing her with some bruises that we never talked about,” she said in a recent phone interview. (Jessica says she never saw her parents fighting.) But there were better times too. Chionie and Cynthia often partied with international business executives and once found themselves in a hotel room with players from a visiting NFL team. One of the athletes bought Chionie a new set of tires for performing a striptease. “We were crazy,” she said. “We had so much fun.”

But by 1991, Cynthia and Gonzalez were locked in a contentious custody dispute for their daughter, recalled another friend, Michelle Feigenbaum, who met Cynthia on the local entertainment circuit. But Cynthia was also talking about a new man in her life—a man she was wild about.

In 1991 Army veteran and divorced dad Anselmo “Tony” Ortiz, who also goes by the nickname Rocky, was working full time and attending college. He needed to let off a little steam. One night, he found his way to a local topless place.

The way Ortiz describes it, he walked through the door of Playmates and instantly locked eyes with the gorgeous dancer mingling with customers on the other side of the room. At the time, Ortiz sported a veritable headdress of 1980s rock ’n’ roll hair. Cynthia, the object of his desire, had enormous hair of her own, which she teased into a plume. It was love at first sight, an experience the now-63-year-old says he hadn’t had before—and hasn’t since.

Ortiz scored Cynthia’s number that night, and they met a couple of days later, before her shift at Playmates. The couple’s budding romance was complicated by the fact that Ortiz was already living with a woman named Janie Hatley, who waitressed at a different gentleman’s club in the area. When Ortiz broke up with Hatley, he turned around to leave when, he says, she punched him in the back of the head and sent him tumbling to the floor. Ortiz says that he then stood up and kneed Hatley in the stomach. She couldn’t breathe, so he called 911. When police arrived, he says, Hatley told the officers she fell down the stairs. (According to APD’s Records Services Division, the facility does not keep records dating so far back. An attorney for Hatley said he was not at liberty to discuss Ortiz’s claims and that Hatley was unavailable for comment.) The relationship, Ortiz thought, was over.

Ortiz knew Cynthia by her middle name, Renee, the stage name she used at Playmates. He remembered meeting her in late summer, in a whirlwind courtship that he described as a Hallmark movie. Newspaper accounts and police records indicate that they met several months earlier, around January 1991.

Whether they lived together in her Arlington apartment for just a few weeks, as Ortiz recalled during a phone call from his home in Tioga, a small town north of Fort Worth, or several months, as records indicate, Cynthia was clearly in love as well. She and Ortiz spent every possible second together, he remembers. They also went on family outings, Cynthia with Jessica and Ortiz with his son, who was around Jessica’s age. On a notebook on her coffee table, she wrote Cynthia Renee Ortiz, doodling hearts around her prospective married name.

Cynthia was also working steadily at Playmates. Fellow dancer Heather Berry, who now manages the Justice for Cynthia Renee Gonzalez Facebook page, said she and Cynthia entertained anyone who came in with cash: businessmen, construction workers, next-door neighbors, and famous people alike, including original members of Arlington’s homegrown Cowboys From Hell, the heavy metal band Pantera.

Berry went onstage right after Cynthia. The friends coordinated songs and outfits, with Cynthia sporting a Stevie Nicks look with black lace gloves past her elbows. She had a way of belly-dancing to “Rhiannon,” the classic Fleetwood Mac song, that turned heads throughout the club. After a good night, Berry and Cynthia would walk out with about $150 each.

At Playmates, Cynthia kept her personal life relatively private, but Berry believed she was still very much in love with Gonzalez. Cynthia was more open with Berry about her recovery from addiction, an experience that bonded the dancers because Berry was also in recovery. Cynthia went to rehab in 1991 and, Ortiz says, proudly carried a Narcotics Anonymous key chain.

Although precise dates are hard to track down, Cynthia founded Beauty and the Beast Entertainment around the time she separated from Gonzalez. To advertise her business, she affixed a decal and phone number to her white 1984 Pontiac Fiero, a sporty two-seater with retractable headlights. Friends believe she viewed the stripogram company as her way out of dancing at Playmates.

About five dancers worked for her. One was her boyfriend, Ortiz, who says he performed as the Lone Ranger, complete with mask and holstered six-shooters. When Cynthia knocked on a client’s door, she often dressed as a Pizza Hut delivery driver.

That was the costume she wore to her gig on Sept. 16, 1991. She did not enter the booking in her datebook, which was unusual, but Ortiz told police the stripogram had been scheduled for 6:30 p.m. at a private residence near the busy intersection of South Cooper Street and Grand Avenue, a few blocks south of the UTA campus. Her shows typically lasted 15 to 20 minutes.

Ortiz, who had left the apartment at about 3 that afternoon to attend an aviation class at a nearby airport, told me he came home later that night to find the TV and stereo still on. Cynthia had also left behind two unopened packs of cigarettes, indicating to him that she had not intended to stay out long.

When she didn’t come home, Ortiz phoned Gonzalez. He hadn’t heard from her either. They didn’t panic at first. “We let it go a little bit, ’cause we thought she might be out partying,” Gonzalez later told the Star-Telegram. Around noon the next day, Gonzalez reported Cynthia missing to the Arlington police.

Putting aside their differences, her husband and boyfriend went looking for Cynthia that afternoon. Ortiz says Gonzalez found Cynthia’s white Fiero surprisingly quickly. The car was parked on a quiet residential street, Cedar Springs Terrace, a couple of miles from her apartment and about a mile and a half from her gig.

Michelle Feigenbaum, Cynthia’s friend, remembers things differently. She says she was in a group of searchers that discovered the Fiero. They were worried that Cynthia was locked in the trunk, but they were also afraid to taint any evidence by touching the car. “It really creeped me out,” she recalled.

They called the police, who told them to leave. Cynthia was not in the trunk. Her Pizza Hut outfit and a prop pizza box were in the car, folded neatly.* There was no sign of a struggle, seemingly offering no clues. No one on Cedar Springs Terrace knew Cynthia or had thrown a party the night before. “Her whereabouts are absolutely unknown,” a police officer told the Star-Telegram.

Friends and loved ones continued to comb the area for signs of Cynthia, searching creeks and sewer drains and putting up flyers on utility poles. They consulted a psychic, who said that Cynthia’s body would be found near water.

The disappearance was also starting to make local news. “Stripper’s Mom Fears the Worst,” a Star-Telegram headline blared. In a subsequent article, Cynthia’s mom, Gandy, who’d put up a $2,000 reward, criticized the newspaper’s focus on her daughter’s profession. “If the news had called Cindy a mother instead of a stripper, then people and maybe even the police would be more concerned,” she told the paper.

Around sunset on Sept. 22, six days after Cynthia was last seen, a rural landowner was walking her dog on a private dirt road 40 miles south of Arlington when she noticed a foul odor. The woman has not been publicly identified, and a neighbor said she has since died, but her property sat about a mile west of the Interstate 35 West freeway, next to the enormous Turkey Creek Landfill, off a winding country lane. Investigating the smell, she ventured about 50 feet off the dirt road, toward heavy woods, where she peered into a tree-lined creek bed. There, she discovered the body of a naked woman. Heavy rain had fallen that week, and the body was badly decomposed. Her face was unrecognizable, but the Johnson County authorities who responded to the crime scene quickly suspected that she was Cynthia.

Ortiz says an Arlington police detective called him and asked what fingernail polish Cynthia had been wearing when she disappeared. Ortiz, who often painted Cynthia’s nails for her, knew immediately. “They’re hot pink,” he said.

The color matched. “Tony, we found her,” he said the detective replied. Later, Cynthia’s body was officially identified by her fingerprints. She’d been shot several times in the chest.

Berry, the dancer who worked with Cynthia at Playmates, said she was clocking in that evening when the head waitress informed her that Cynthia’s body had been found. She says the club dedicated the evening to Cynthia, playing her favorite songs. Berry felt as if she were in a fog. Onstage, she cried through her dances.

A week after Cynthia was discovered, police still had no leads or suspects. Besides the gunshot wounds, an autopsy revealed no signs of trauma. Nor was there evidence of sexual assault, although decomposition made that difficult to confirm. Because Cynthia’s white Fiero had been released to Gonzalez before it could be properly fingerprinted, police said it wasn’t useful to the case either.

A veteran homicide detective named Jim Ford tried to retrace Cynthia’s last steps. Although Cynthia had not documented her Monday evening stripogram in her datebook, Ford apparently was able to confirm that the booking had been legitimate. He also spoke to a witness who had been working the drive-through window at an Arby’s restaurant near the corner of South Cooper and Grand, the same intersection where Cynthia had said she was meeting her client. The Arby’s employee noticed Cynthia’s Fiero parked at a car wash across the street from about 9 to 11:45 that night, hours after the stripogram was supposed to end.

One by one, Ford also tracked down the men in Cynthia’s life. He followed some for months to learn their patterns, and he ultimately eliminated more than a dozen suspects. Gonzalez had been home with Jessica. Ortiz had been at school. Other potential suspects had alibis of their own.

Colleagues told me Ford worked the case tirelessly. In December, he was named Arlington’s Officer of the Year. In a newspaper article, one of Ford’s fellow officers described him as a member of the old guard who chain-smoked cigarettes and worked late, “like the old TV detectives,” with Coke cans and 7-Eleven cups strewn around his disorderly desk. Wearing cowboy boots and a handlebar mustache, he had a Texas twang and a quiet, calm presence that disarmed suspects, eliciting confessions. “He was one of their best detectives ever,” said Eddings, the trace evidence expert and UT–Arlington senior lecturer, who often worked with Ford on murder cases. “None of us can say enough good things about Jim Ford. He was outstanding.”

His other leads exhausted, Ford turned his attention to a serial killer named Kenneth Allen McDuff. Along with an accomplice, McDuff had kidnapped and murdered three teenagers in a small town south of Fort Worth in 1966. After Texas paroled McDuff in 1989, he went on to rape and murder at least six more women, including a victim kidnapped from a car wash in Austin, Texas.

The car wash connection seemed promising to Ford, but he was never able to link the serial killer to Cynthia. McDuff was recaptured in 1992 and executed in 1998.

Ford retired in 2010, and he died in 2013, two years after Cynthia’s case was assigned to the cold-case archives.

To find their way into Cynthia’s unwieldy case at the start of the fall 2025 semester, Concannon and her teammates tackled the project much like a task force would, dividing it into sections. One student reviewed evidence logs, while another followed up on interviews and polygraphs. Other team members studied DNA analysis, crime scene photos, and so on. There were videos and audio to review as well.

Before long, the students were arriving to class early, staying late, and showing up to the forensic lab on their days off to continue their research. There were several days that Concannon spent eight hours poring over files. Some of the detectives’ notes had been written in cursive, which she helped translate for her younger teammates.

Shortly into the review, the team members had their epiphany. In the weeks that followed, their suspicions crystallized. They had to tell police.

Midway through the semester, Detective Stafford was scheduled to visit Eddings’ class to chat with students and answer questions. One week before his visit, the students emailed him a list of 35 questions that largely circled around Janie Hatley, the Arlington waitress who’d dated Ortiz.

Hatley’s wasn’t a name Stafford recognized from his own review of the case earlier that year. He’d never even considered a female suspect. But the list of questions piqued his interest. The students had been reviewing digital files. Now Stafford and his partner, Detective Julie Evans, hauled six boxes of records and physical evidence into the police department conference room and spread them across the table.

Ford, the original detective, had interviewed Hatley not long after Cynthia’s death. According to a police affidavit, Ortiz had been dating Hatley and Cynthia at the same time. Weeks before Cynthia’s death, after Ortiz broke things off with Hatley, she allegedly became hysterical. According to a police affidavit, Hatley said that she and Ortiz were soulmates and that he would never be rid of her.

Ford determined that Hatley was the only person who couldn’t provide an alibi for the night of the murder. She claimed she was off work and home alone—that she had unplugged her phone and gone to bed. When the detective asked her to take a polygraph, she consented. During the examination, the polygrapher asked Hatley if she knew who shot Cynthia. She was also asked whether she was the one who shot Cynthia. Hatley said no to both questions but showed the highest level of deception in both answers, according to an affidavit that Stafford later filed.

One week after her first test, she submitted to another polygraph. She failed again. The polygrapher concluded that Hatley showed significant indications of deception, suggesting that she had hired someone to kill Cynthia.

But polygraphs are unreliable and inadmissible in court, and Hatley maintained her innocence under further questioning.

She did admit to Ford that she still loved Ortiz and “would do anything in the world for him.” She also said that Ortiz was the only person she cared about and she kept no secrets from him.

And Hatley made a further disclosure: According to Arlington police, she said she was glad Cynthia was dead. She also allegedly admitted that she had thought about killing Cynthia herself, or having her killed.

Despite her disturbing admission, Ford apparently let the matter go, and he spent the next year and a half pursuing other suspects. Then, in February 1993, a Vietnam veteran named Robert William Hardee was arrested in Grand Prairie, a Dallas suburb that borders Arlington. While under arrest on charges unrelated to Cynthia’s case, Hardee asked to speak with Ford.

Hardee told Ford that he was Hatley’s closest male friend, and he gave a sworn statement claiming that she had made a number of confessions to him regarding Cynthia’s murder. Hardee’s statement has not been made public, but police say that Hatley told him she had killed Cynthia because Hatley and Ortiz were soulmates and she couldn’t live without him. After Cynthia’s body was found in the rural creek bed, police say, Hatley told Hardee she was being investigated as a suspect and asked him to provide her alibi. (It’s unclear whether he acquiesced.)

Hardee and Hatley’s relationship seems to have been platonic, although Hardee admitted that he had romantic feelings for his friend. Around the first anniversary of Cynthia’s death, he finally told her he loved her. She allegedly replied that they could never have a relationship because she was evil and that she had killed Cynthia to get Ortiz back.

Hardee shared one last potential bombshell. He said that Hatley told him she had lost her apartment keys in Cynthia’s Pontiac Fiero on the night of the murder. Police had actually found the keys when they searched the car the next day. They knew the keys didn’t belong to Cynthia, but they apparently did not link them to Hatley at the time.

After speaking with Hardee, Ford followed up with Ortiz, who’d never met Hardee. In a sworn statement, Ortiz said that Hatley told him in October 1991, the month following Cynthia’s death, that she was the one who had killed Cynthia. In a slightly contradictory claim, laid out in a police affidavit, Hatley also allegedly indicated that she was with someone else who killed Cynthia, going so far as to describe the four gunshots she heard and noting that Cynthia had been shot four times in the chest by a .44 Magnum pistol. In addition, Hatley reportedly told Ortiz that Cynthia had been raped and that her clothes were thrown away at a dump. She bragged that she had people who would do anything for her.

According to Ortiz’s statement, Hatley provided the same motive to him that she had given her friend Hardee: With Cynthia out of the way, Ortiz would come back to her. Indeed, police say that Ortiz and Hatley resumed their relationship after Cynthia’s death but that it ended again within six months. (Ortiz disputed the claim that he ever dated Hatley after he broke up with her to be with Cynthia.)

Not everything lined up. For one thing, there was no evidence that Cynthia had been raped. Also, she’d been shot by a .38 Special revolver, not a .44 Magnum. It is also notable that Ortiz apparently did not report Hatley’s alleged confession to police until Ford tracked him down following Hardee’s statement in 1993. In a recent interview, Ortiz said he chose not to inform police because he hadn’t believed that Hatley was being truthful. “I had no inkling that it was Janie, none, even though she had told me weeks later, that she did it and blah, blah, blah,” Ortiz told me. “And then she’d say, ‘Well, I was just mad at you, you know. That’s why I said that. I didn’t really do it.’ ”

Through her defense attorneys, Hatley—who changed her name to Janie Perkins after she got married in 1995—said she is innocent of the allegations.

Back at the police department conference table in 2025, Detectives Stafford and Evans passed case documents back and forth. In the weeks before the murder, Stafford said, officers had responded to several disturbances involving Ortiz and Hatley after their breakup. Cynthia was involved in some of them, but Stafford said that she eventually tried to smooth things over with her rival. The two women even went out together, just the two of them, he said, to meet other men.

After more than five hours, Stafford and Evans cleared the table to focus on the crime scene, comparing the evidence to the witness statements. In their opinion, Hatley seemed to know details that only someone who was involved in Cynthia’s murder would know.

The fall semester was more than halfway through when Stafford visited the UT–Arlington forensic lab on Nov. 6. He was joined by his police chief, Al Jones, and a media relations coordinator who recorded the session. Addressing more than a dozen criminal justice and forensics students—including two other groups who’d reviewed different cases for their class assignment—Stafford announced that U.S. Marshals were waiting outside a house in Azle, the same town where Cynthia had lived with her husband and daughter.

The Marshals were in Azle, Stafford explained, to arrest Hatley—now Perkins, age 63—on a warrant for capital murder. The lab erupted into claps and cheers. Concannon became misty-eyed. The students passed around tissues as Stafford shared Cynthia’s diary with the class.

Stafford had also phoned Jessica and asked her to come by the police department. The timing was inconvenient. Jessica and a friend were set to leave for a long road trip to a fantasy convention in South Bend, Indiana. She asked if Stafford could tell her the news over the phone.

“No, I have to tell you this in person,” he replied.

A detective led Jessica to the same conference room where Stafford and Evans had sorted through the evidence only days earlier. Now Stafford walked Jessica through the recent developments in the investigation, culminating in the arrest and charge of a suspect more than 34 years after her mother’s murder.

Jessica began to sob. She knew nothing about Perkins. It felt surreal, and Jessica says she was slow to process the news. But it turned out there was another shock to come.

Later that month, Jessica returned to the police department, along with Eddings and her students, for a celebratory press conference that rocketed the news of Perkins’ arrest across the globe. The novel partnership between students and police to break open a decades-old murder case, with a love triangle at its center, was irresistible fodder for the media’s true-crime boom. One of Eddings’ co-workers heard about the arrest on the radio in China.

As TV producers jockeyed for scoops and access, prosecutors in the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office, in Fort Worth, were faced with another task. They spent much of the winter and early spring of 2026 behind the scenes, readying to present the case to a grand jury, which would weigh the evidence and determine whether to indict Perkins for Cynthia’s murder. Grand jury proceedings are secret in Texas, as are their schedules. Heading into spring, there were rumors of delays. But on March 23, 2026, four months after Perkins’ arrest, the district attorney’s office finally issued an announcement.

The grand jury, in fact, had declined to indict Perkins.

In a statement, Assistant District Attorney Kim D’Avignon blamed her office’s failure to secure an indictment on a lack of admissible evidence that would have proven the case beyond a reasonable doubt. “We will not give up hope that someone knows something that could help us to successfully prosecute this case in the future,” she said.

In a statement of his own, Perkins’ defense attorney, D. Miles Brissette, ripped the “premature and highly publicized accusations” leveled against his client.

Suddenly, the narrative had whipsawed. What happened?

From the public record, it never made much sense that a respected homicide detective like Ford would have failed to look more seriously at Perkins when he had a chance more than three decades ago—why it took five students to see what he couldn’t. One theory was that Ford suffered from tunnel vision. He was so locked into the assumption that only a man could have killed Cynthia that he disregarded Perkins’ multiple alleged confessions. Or maybe Ford was more clear-eyed than that. What if he simply realized he didn’t have the goods? We just don’t know.

In an interview prior to the grand jury’s decision, Stafford alleged that Perkins had had help in the murder plot, theorizing that her friend Robert Hardee, who died in 2012, had more to do with the killing than he had let on when he tipped off Ford to her alleged confessions in 1993. Stafford did not respond to questions after the grand jury issued the no bill, but an Arlington police spokesperson referred me to a general statement that the department stands by the investigation but respects the grand jury’s decision.

The DA could try to indict Perkins again, especially if other witnesses come forward or new evidence emerges. When Stafford obtained the warrant for Perkins’ arrest in November, he also secured a search warrant to collect a sample of her saliva. He submitted it for DNA testing against evidence from the case that he declined to describe to me. He expects results this summer, if not sooner. The story of Cynthia Renee Gonzalez may not be over.

Jessica later likened the recent developments in her mom’s case to an old TV show she’d seen over and over. “This season left off on a cliff-hanger halfway through, unexpectedly,” she said.

Concannon is interning this semester at the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office and is set to graduate this spring. She hopes to pursue a career in forensic science, as either a crime scene or crime lab analyst.

Even with the uncertainty in this case, Eddings tells me, she has been inundated with queries from other educators interested in starting their own cold-case classes across the country. After all, students and murders are never in short supply. Eddings is offering her class again this fall.