The MySpace Catfish and The Girl in the Hole | The Case of Julie Ann Gonzalez | UNSEEN

"Don't play games, don't tell me I'll take a polygrapher, but you have to take one first, there is a woman missing, the mother of your daughter is missing." This is George Delacruz, the family of his missing wife is convinced he has something to do with her disappearance, enough that they've brought him onto Dr. Phil. "I don't have anything to do with Julie's disappearance, but please don't see me as a suspect. Julie's family is trying to banger that me so they can try to get custody of my daughter." According to George, Julie abandoned their two-year-old daughter Leila to run away with the stranger, but Julie's mother, Sandra, doesn't believe a word of it. "Julie would not leave Leila behind with Leila's father, she would never have done that, never. Leila was everything to Julie." Right before her disappearance, Julie posted on Facebook that she couldn't wait to get Leila back because she missed her so much, but the tone of her online messages took a disturbing turn in the days that followed. "This is something that was on her MySpace page. It says, 'I wanted to run away, I'm sick of my life. Have you seen this?' So this was the day after you had reported her missing. Who put this post up if not Julie?" The post back up George's story and convinced the police that Julie left voluntarily until George makes a mistake. "And like I said, I'm new here, I know her." "You said I knew her, let's pass to him." "Yes, but I never heard." After the episode airs, the police receive a disturbing call from George's own mother. "This detective's got?" "I'm sorry to bother you, please, but I'm. " "Yes, ma'am." "I'm going to be sick." "I find a very, very big call." "Is there anything in the hole?" "I was trying to take in him, but I don't want to continue." "Why don't you want to continue?" "Because I'm just here." George still has custody of Leila, Julie's two-year-old daughter. For Julie's mom, that means her granddaughter's life is now at risk too. And with the police refusing to act, she's banking everything on the show, believing a polygraph could expose George's lies and finally force the police to act. "I'm going to tell you what the results are right now." He was asked, "Are you responsible for Julie's disappearance?" He answered, "No." He was asked, "Did you cause Julie's disappearance during the month of March?" He answered, "No." Those were not truthful answers. He failed the polygraph test. And this was not a close call. This was not a close call at all. If he scored a minus two or three, that would be conclusive. "Minus three to either of those questions is deceptive on this particular format." And his score was minus 14. This was filmed on May 3, 2010, a little over a month after Julie's disappearance. Three years later, George is still walking free. He has custody of Leila, and the police are already considering the case cold. But Julie's family refuses to give up on her. "I want people to know that this girl is loved. This girl is missing." "This girl is a person. She people are looking for her. She's important to us." According to George, he was home with Leila on March 26. The day Julie disappeared, he claims that instead of picking up their daughter, she asked him to keep her for the weekend and left in a hurry. Julie had never done anything like this before, so his account doesn't sit well with those closest to her, especially her mother, Sandra, and her and Dora. "We were puzzled. We were stunned. We didn't understand. But we also knew that she would never leave Leila like that. She would never walk away from her." "We as the family knew that something was very wrong." The day Julie disappears, Sandra and Dora contact the rest of the family, desperately trying to piece together what little information they have. When night comes, they call the police. Only to be told they have to wait before Julie can be declared missing. "I just didn't know who to look at or where to turn at this point. Sandra's a mess. Everybody's a mess. I had to go to work early in the morning, but I didn't. Instead, I drove the route that she lived driven." Julie works as a pharmacy technician at Walgreens. When Dora decides to check her workplace, she isn't there. But as she passes another Walgreens, she notices a familiar car sitting alone in the parking lot. It was Julie's car. So I run inside and I ran up and down the aisles, hoping to catch her. Hoping to catch her and look at it some snacks or something. Nothing. She wasn't there. So I go to the clerk and ask the clerk, "We've seen this girl." He said, "No." It all began in 2006. Julie is a teenager working at her grandparents' general store. In dripping springs near Austin, Texas, it's there that she meets the first love of her life, Aaron Bro. The problem is that Aaron is a little older, and when Julie's family discovers their relationship, they refuse to let them date. Soon after, Julie decides to move in with her and Dora in Austin. At her new school in the city, Julie eventually meets her future husband, George Delacruz. "When I met George, he kind of hid behind Julie. But Julie said, "Don't let him fool you. He might not look like a lot, but he is a very intelligent person." "I don't think George ever had a girlfriend before, Julie." "But by the time Julie and George graduated from high school, they were boyfriend and girlfriend." Julie's future seems promising. She graduates early and earns a scholarship to St. Edwards University. She plans to become a pharmacist, but when she becomes pregnant, her priorities change. She puts college on hold and moves in with George and his mom. Julie is determined to make their new family work. She and George eventually get married. And after Laila is born, Julie starts working at Walgreens while studying to become a pharmacy technician. But while Julie builds a career and supports their family, George does the opposite. After losing his job following Laila's birth, he starts spending an absurd amount of time playing video games up to 18 hours a day. Julie would come home and find the house a mess, find Laila with a dirty diaper, you know, hungry. George was playing video games all day long, and so Julie found out that she couldn't depend on him. Before long, Julie becomes the family's sole provider, while George stays home with Laila. And as the pressure on Julie grows, so do the problems in their marriage. I would always hope that George would step up as a man, as a father, as a husband. She wanted Laila to grow up with two parents because she did not, but Julie came to me and said, "I don't want to be married anymore. I want to get a divorce." In December of 2009, Julie files for divorce, but George refuses to cooperate. He won't sign the papers, and his behavior becomes increasingly erratic. At one point, he claims to have amnesia, pretending he doesn't recognize Julie or even Laila. Then, in January, he leaves a disturbing note in Laila's diaper bag for Julie to find. He told her that he took some pills, and I guess basically saying farewell. "Did you believe it was employed to control her and manipulate her back?" Yes, anything he did was a ploy to try to get her to feel sorry for him or to be around him. By then, Julie has moved back in with her grandparents in dripping springs, but because she and George share custody of Laila, she can't cut him out of her life. When she meets him for exchanges, she often returns with bruises. He would show up at her job. He would leave notes on her car. Julie did not want anything to do with George. All she wanted was the divorce. But just as Julie is trying to put her marriage behind her, something completely unexpected happens. One night, while grocery shopping, she runs into someone she hasn't seen in years. Her first love in high school sweetheart, Aaron Broe. "At her lowest points in her life, she sees a familiar face. Julie came home and she's direct to Aaron." She says, "I forgot what I was buying because we were talking for about an hour and I didn't walk out of there with anything." Over the next few months, Julie and Aaron quickly grow close again for the first time since leaving George. Julie finally seems ready to move on, but George refuses to let go. "July was definitely afraid of George. Every time she went to go drop off or pick up Laila, she made it a point to take someone with her." Whether it's Aaron, Dora, or one of her many cousins, Julie makes sure to never be alone with George. But on March 25th, George suddenly asks to keep Laila for one more night. Julie reluctantly agrees, hoping to avoid another fight. The next morning, Julie's supposed to pick up Laila from George's house. Only this time, Julie goes alone. "It just so happens that the only day that she didn't take anybody with her, she disappeared." Although Sandra and Dora are convinced George has something to do with Julie's disappearance, they have nothing to prove it. Even worse, many friends and family members start dismissing her disappearance after receiving text messages supposedly from her or seeing new posts on her social media. Worse, the messages all seem to corroborate George's story. It's far from enough to sway Dora and Sandra, but it's exactly the kind of thing that would convince the police. "Since Julie and George were going through a divorce, I think the police thought that Julie maybe needed some time to herself, but Julie and George separated October of 2009. I felt that George knew more than what he was telling us." In the messages, Julie claims she's okay and tells everyone to stop worrying. She says she needs to get away from Austin and that she's gone to Colorado with a man she met online. Aaron even receives a message from her saying their relationship is over, but that doesn't line up with what happened the morning of the day she disappeared. After spending the night at Aaron's place, Julie asked him to come with her to get Leila, but he couldn't because he had worked that morning. Later, when Aaron got home, he found a love letter addressed to him on his pillow. Julie wrote about how much she loved him, how she wanted to marry him, and have children with him. Later, that same day, he suddenly told it's over. For Dora, none of this adds up, but as expected, the police see the text as proof that Julie is still alive and refuse to look any deeper. So Sandra and Dora start searching for her on their own, and they know exactly where to start. She went to confront George, George met us at the door with his mother and with Leila and his arms. And they invited us in and we sat down, and we said, "George, what happened to Julie?" And he said, "When she came by to pick up Leila, she seemed very odd, and I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "She just looked real like frustrated, and she said she needed to get away for a few days, so she asked me to keep Leila for a few more days." And he said, "George, you're full of ****. I said, "You're **** alive." I said, "There is no way that you're telling me that Julie came to you. Asked you for help. And asked you to watch Leila?" The mother says, "Don't talk to my s-I will talk to your son as I choose. It's a serious. And he was the last person to see her." I said, "He knows him." Every day in April, Dora, Sandra, and their entire family either search for Julie or raise awareness by handing out flyers to draw the community into the search. Family and friends of missing Austin mom Julian Gonzalez are tightly clutching her photos as they pray for her safe return on the steps of the state capital. The only measure police take is to set up an unadvertised tip line, but Dora makes sure as many people as possible know about it. With each day that passes without news of Julie, crushing guilt and sorrow away on Sandra and Dora, but the two sisters won't let it sway them. Instead, the pair make their quest to find Julie their soul focus, contacting every media outlet that will listen to them and hear Julie's story. "We reached out to local media stations and to several advertising companies. There was one company that was kind enough to donate her billboard. It was painful to see Julie on that board. It was the most disgusting feeling. You don't know where your loved one is. But it wasn't time to be emotional. It was time to work. Time to find her. Is it?" And their commitment doesn't go unnoticed, "We went local media first. If you have seen my daughter, just please come forward in the national media. The desperate search for a missing 21-year-old mother out of her." And then, after national media, I got a phone call from the producer of the Dr. Phil Show. A little over a month into Julie's disappearance, Sandra and Dora are invited on the Dr. Phil show. On set, the family faces George and his mother Victoria again. The sisters have two goals. First, they want to get Julie's story in front of as many eyes as possible. Second, they want to somehow prove that George is lying. Sandra believes this might be the only way to force the police to take Julie's disappearance seriously. "I know George was the last person to see her and I want him to clear his name because if he doesn't have anything to do with Julie's disappearance, clear your name, take a polygraph." George seems resistant at first, but refusing the test would only fuel the family suspicions. Backstage, he sits down with former FBI polygraph examiner Jack Tramargo and takes the test. But when it's over, George doesn't return to the stage. Instead, Dr. Phil and Tramargo meet with him privately in the host's office. There, they finally reveal the results. "A straightforward question, did you kill Julie when you responded to the operative question it showed that you were not telling the truth? What do you know about this that you haven't told us?" George tries to explain the results away. He says he feels so guilty for it in his words, not stopping Julie from leaving, that part of him feels responsible for whatever happened to her. But Tramargo points out that this isn't the only question George failed. He also showed deception when asked whether he was responsible for Julie's disappearance, whether he knew where she was, and whether he had hurt her in the past. On this type of polygraph, a score of minus 3 on any question would be considered deceptive. George scored minus 14. After Dr. Phil informed George that he failed miserably, his mother was very surprised. "What you did?" "I didn't do nothing." "Please tell the truth, Nicole." "I get to hear the truth." "Tamargo, did you do something wrong to tell you?" "No, he said not about me. I was not involved." "I'm just begging you for something, it's not about me." "Do you understand that I don't think bad of you? I don't know what happened, I wasn't there, George, you're the only one that knows. We're not trying to make you have to be a bad guy, we're just trying to find Julie." "Yeah, but now my mom thinks wrong, man, magic, oh my God, no, no, no, no, no." Off camera, George suddenly threatens to hurt himself. Dr. Phil immediately stops questioning him, effectively ending the show and offers to get him help. This prompts George to change his entire demeanor. He instantly stops crying. Instead, George is smiling and laughing. "George, I'll be in touch now, okay? Are you going to the hospital and you're going to take care of yourself, right?" "Yes, I am." "Okay, all right." But George's problems are far from over. Less than 24 hours after the Dr. Phil taping, Victoria, his own mother, calls the police on him. "I'm sorry to bother you, please, but I. " "Yes, ma'am." "I'm going to be single. I find a very, very big hole." "Is there anything in the hole?" "Oh, I will try to dig in, but I don't want to continue." "Why don't you want to continue?" "Because I'm just care." The man at the other end of the line is Detective James Scott from Austin Police Missing Person's Department. This is the second time he's been made aware of a suspicious hole in Victoria's backyard. The first time, George explained that he was turning their shed into a living space and needed to run cables underground, but when the detective sees it for himself, something seems off. The hole is large enough to fit a body. His team examines it and finds nothing. But after seeing the family confront George on Dr. Phil, Scott wonders whether Julie's phone and social media accounts were tampered with, so he sees his every electronic device he can find in the house, including George's laptop, cell phone, and Xbox. But oddly, the investigation completely stalls after that. Sandra still calls Scott every day, desperate for any development, but as the case grows cold, those calls become increasingly difficult for both of them, and Scott knows exactly how that makes him look. "The time I know I came across to her very harsh, very cold, very distant, and tell her, "Hey, look, you can't call me more than once a day. Matter of fact, don't call me at all, I'll call you. If you don't stop calling me, I will stop taking your calls. You won't even know where this investigation is going. And sadly, you have to do that because as a parent, they don't realize I already have to report to my supergit what I'm doing all day every day." Eventually, the case moves from Scott and missing persons to homicide detective Roger Sanchez. "They started collecting her DNA from our homes and started collecting evidence of Julie's, started asking a lot of questions about Julie and really trying to get to know who she was or who she is. And it really made us feel like he was listening." The transition of the case from missing persons to homicide was because it provided more resources and more manpower. We had no evidence, however George's cell phone could potentially provide digital evidence. "I got to a point where I started to suspect that the digital evidence was hiding the actual truth pertaining to Julie's disappearance." But Sanchez knows very little about digital evidence, so he brings in Jim Cook, a digital forensic expert, to help make sense of the evidence collected three years ago. "And looking at Julie's call detail record, I can see that Julie was fairly articulate. Complete sentences, proper spelling, upper and lower case letters, etc. Once Julie goes missing, the text activity shows misspelled words. No punctuation at all, fully uppercase letters versus upper and lower case, that is totally uncharacteristic of her normal activity, and in essence is the first piece of the puzzle." And when Jim Cook takes a fresh look at the evidence, it doesn't take long for him to see where it's pointing. "I came to the conclusion based upon Julie's postings that somebody else was actually using Julie's device. I believe that the killer was actually using the digital data to cover their tracks. I knew that we needed more digital evidence to help crack the case." Since pretending to be Julie would have required access to her phone and social media accounts, Cook starts digging through devices seized from George in 2010, his laptop and media give him something to work with. Shortly before appearing on Doctor Phil, George searched how to cheat a polygraph on Google. Then the expert hacks into his Xbox. Day after day, the gaming console records marathon sessions of up to 18 hours, except on March 26th, the day Julie disappeared. But as suspicious as this may look, this can only prove so much. So he moves on to another source of evidence. Julie's cell phone records. We took Julie's historical call on detail records and we mapped out that activity in the antennas and cell sites that she actually connected to. Julie arrived at approximately 1132 George's mother's residence. Her device appears to be their front excess of three to four hours. The two days thereafter, it connected to the cell site and sector that cover George's mother's house. Her device never left Austin. For the first time in three years, the police finally have evidence that Sandra and Dora were right all along. George was pretending to be Julie. George had possession of Julie's device. George went through great lengths to manipulate the digital data, but Julie was speaking to us when she could not speak. Within a few months, Jim Cook assembles enough evidence for the Austin police to arrest George. Two years later, on April 13th, 2015, five years after Julie's disappearance, George's trial begins. Along with the array of digital evidence pointing to George, the jury is presented with a portrait of Julie's final months before her murder. Then, after six days of testimony, the jury must decide on a verdict. Sitting in that courtroom waiting for the verdict, I just was looking around and thinking, "This is a nightmare. Why am I going to wake up from this?" I was just praying that Julie would get justice. After seven and a half hours, the jury finally returns to the courtroom. A jury today convinced an Austin man of murdering his wife, despite not having a body. We the jury found defending George Delacruz guilty of the offensive murder. When the judge read the jury's verdict, there was loud sighs of relief, crying. It was an incredibly emotional courtroom. George's sentence to life without parole and immediately sent to prison. Today, Dora and Sandra still grieved Julie's loss, but their half a decade-long quest for justice not only honored her, it also brought Leyla back into their lives. My hope for Leyla is that she never forgets where she came from. It's better sweet to see Julie and Leyla looking so much alike because we want Julie here, and I wish Leyla knew how much she is like her mom. Julie's body was never found, but Sandra is still hopeful. I pray for George to place compassion in his heart, to speak, but then I accept the reality that he may never talk, but my belief says never say never.