How (Not) to Get Rid of a Body

I knew something was wrong.

Something happened to her.

Her killer thought he was gonna get away with it.

He formulated a plan.

Like some sort of Vegas magic act,

he made the body disappear.

It's like finding a needle in a haystack.

There's such a vast expanse of where it could be.

No one would have believed

that anyone would have gone to such lengths...

to hide a body.

On May 31st, 2019,

Esmeralda Gonzalez was reported missing

to the Las Vegas metropolitan police department.

Esmeralda was last seen by her family

on May 26th, 2019.

After two days,

her brother responded to Esmeralda's address

to check up on her.

When he got there,

he found her not there.

Her brother called me and told me that she's missing.

I was in denial.

Esmeralda was a very driven young woman.

She was born in Mexico

and she came to Las Vegas at a very young age.

And she was able to finish up college,

she bought her first house,

she ended up buying a second house

and turned it into a rental property.

She became Instagram famous.

She had thousands and thousands of followers.

Why would this girl, who is 100% independent, go missing?

And I knew something was wrong.

Her family told us...

Esmeralda was living in a pretty nice neighborhood

and making pretty good money.

But we found she suffered from mental health problems.

When she was on her medication,

she was fine.

But if the medication

stopped working for her,

then she would have episodes.

A week before she went missing,

her brother called me and he told me

that her mental disorder is acting up again

and something's going on with her medicine.

My news assignment editor

said there's this report of a missing Latina.

She was in a very, very fragile state of mind.

To me, it hit home a little more

for the simple fact that her parents had come

to the United States

for the same reason my parents came here.

Her family just wanted a better life.

That just makes you feel sick to your stomach.

"What was her mental state?"

is, uh, the reason why something happened to her.

I didn't know how to react.

It was all like a complete mystery

what really happened.

For me, all cases are kind of like a puzzle.

When the police detectives

first came and spoke to us about the case,

they described it as a missing persons case.

But there's no indication,

really, that anything criminal has happened to her.

We went to Esmeralda's house

to see if the disappearance was a result of something

that happened there.

There wasn't a lot of disturbance at her house.

But she left her phone,

her car was there.

We did find that she had video cameras

on her door and within the house as well.

And we're able to obtain video footage from the cameras

in Esmeralda's house.

This video footage shows her behavior

around her house in the days leading up

to her disappearance.

She's acting erratic, strange.

She's heard muttering nonsense, phrases...

and jumping at nothing.

You can see that Esmeralda is essentially

not in a right mind during that period of time.

Even though she's clearly having

kind of a mental breakdown.

Nothing in the house ends up helping

as far as where she went.

The fact that she left items that could be tracked.

Her cell phone,

her debit card, credit cards,

and even her vehicle at her residence,

questions also arise on whether or not

she was trying to escape from someone.

We conducted interviews with family members

and others friends that showed that Esmeralda

had a boyfriend, John.

Last time that I'd seen her

six to eight weeks before she went missing,

I went to her house and she instantly stopped me

and she said, "You cannot come in here.

I have a new man.

He's extremely jealous. He's controlling.

He watches my cameras.

He doesn't want you around here."

I was like, "This is very odd."

We look into John to see what his criminal history was,

and discovered that there had been a report

of a domestic dispute

between Esmeralda and John on the 29th of May.

She is ultimately reported as missing on the 31st.

So we become concerned.

John ends up being rather forthcoming

with information and his own whereabouts.

He turns over a cell phone.

He allows detectives to essentially

go through social media.

Stuff like that.

We used cell phone records

with location data to determine that John

was not with Esmeralda since May 29th

in the days leading up to her disappearance.

At that point in time,

we don't have enough to move on John.

The Missing Persons Unit

then did a canvas of the neighborhood

where Esmeralda lived.

They contacted several neighbors.

A lot of people have ring doorbells

that capture video not only at their front porch

or sometimes even out in the front yard or the street.

One of the neighbors says,

"Oh, hey, I have video footage

of a girl knocking on my door."

We did retrieve that security footage.

They're kind of taken aback.

The video footage showed Esmeralda dressed

in her lingerie and high heels.

She appears very confused.

When a person is reported missing

and you know that they have a history of mental illness,

then we do become concerned about their welfare.

The fear would be that

they could become a danger to themselves

or a danger to someone else in the community.

The longer a missing person goes missing,

the colder the case gets,

the harder it is to put things together.

Now we have a question,

what has happened to her?

And you can see that at 2:33 a.m. timeframe

is the last time she can be seen alive

when she's walking down the street.

Where did she go?

She's leaving on her own volition from her house,

but her behavior is very erratic,

and she just disappears from that moment.

We were concerned,

will this missing persons investigation

ultimately become a homicide investigation?

When people are missing for us

for a certain amount of time,

we assume it's gonna ultimately end

in a homicide case.

But we need a body.

Without a body, you have trouble proving

that someone's dead or that a crime has occurred.

It's frustrating because you kind of know

that Esmeralda's family must be suffering,

and this family wants some closure.

And we can't give it

because we can't definitely say what happened.

We can't essentially tell that family to give up hope.

The hardest part is just not knowing

what really happened.

I was afraid somebody was doing harm to her.

And then you're just searching all over town,

going everywhere that you know that she normally goes.

Where she gets her nails done,

the gas station.

Is all her friends and family.

You're going everywhere you can think that she possibly went to,

putting flyers up all over town.

Then approximately six weeks later

on July 18th, 2019,

Metro PD's homicide unit

receives an anonymous tip via a phone call.

The information in the anonymous tip

was that a prostitute came to be in the company

of a person called Christopher Prestipino

and that she had been held against her will

for a couple days and was ultimately murdered

by Christopher Prestipino.

We had doubts about whether or not

Esmeralda is the girl that was discussed in the...

In the tip.

However, that gets me interested.

This was the first real significant break in the...

This investigation.