ARLINGTON 2012 COLD CASE SOLVED — SHE WAS STABBED 100 TIMES, AND DNA FINALLY NAMED HER KILLER 

Newly released court documents reveal DNA evidence on a fork led to a real estate agent’s arrest in a murder case that went unsolved for 14 years. Arlington police say Myra Velasquez killed her friend Irasema Chavez Sanchez during a robbery in 2012. Fox 4 reported on her arrest Monday. Today, investigators >> Someone knocked on Irasema Chavez’s door.

And for some reason, she let them in. What happened next was so brutal that investigators found her stabbed more than 100 times. Not 10. Not 30. Close to 100 wounds on a 32-year-old woman inside her own kitchen, in her own home. In a city where she should have been safe. The person who did it didn’t leave behind a name.

They walked away. They went home. And for the next 14 years, they lived as if Irasema Chavez had become nothing more than a forgotten case number in a filing cabinet in Arlington, Texas. They were wrong. Because inside that apartment, the killer had left behind something they never knew investigators would eventually be able to use against them.

A single microscopic piece of themselves. A droplet of blood. No bigger than a pinhead. Sitting on a bedroom television stand, waiting. 14 years later, that tiny mistake would finally tell police who killed Irasema Chavez. Somebody she trusted enough to let close. Close enough to stab her nearly 100 times. Didn’t just take her life.

They tried to erase her. And for over a decade, the only person on this earth who knew exactly what happened in that apartment was the one person who caused it. By the end of this video, you’re going to know her name. The name of the person Irasema Chavez let into her home the night before she died.

 And when you hear who it turns out to be and what she was doing with her life while Irasema’s murder sat unsolved for 14 years, I promise you it is going to make you sick. This is the case of Irasema Chavez, and this is how a discarded plastic fork finally ended 14 years of silence. Welcome to Mysterious Crime Chronicles. If you’re new here, this is where cold cases come to die a second time.

 We don’t do speculation dressed up as fact. We dig through the police reports, the court filings, the news conferences, and we tell you exactly what happened in exactly the order it happened so you understand not just what this killer did, but how they got away with it for as long as they did. Before we go any further, let us know in the comments where you’re watching from.

We’d love to hear from you. And if you’re new here, click on the subscribe button so you never miss any of our upcoming videos. Now, let’s go back to January of 2012. Before Irasema Chavez became a headline, before she became a cold case number, before she became a decade and a half of unanswered questions, she was just a 32-year-old woman living her life in Arlington, Texas.

She lived on the second floor of the Aspenwood Apartments, a modest complex near South Collins Street and East Timberview Lane. It’s the kind of place you drive past a thousand times without noticing. Ordinary. Unremarkable. The kind of place where nothing is supposed to happen. Irasema had family close by.

 Close enough that on the morning of January 20th, 2012, her niece was dropped off at her apartment to spend the day with her. Think about that for 1 second. A child was sent to her apartment that morning. Someone trusted Irasema enough, loved her enough to hand a little girl over to her care for the day. That child would be the one to find her.

We’re not going to dwell on the details of what that little girl saw when she walked into that apartment. Some things don’t need to be repeated to be understood, but we want you to sit with this fact for a moment because it matters for everything that comes next in this story. The last act of violence committed against Irasema Chavez was so severe that the person who discovered her body was a member of her own family, a child.

That’s who we’re talking about when we talk about the victim in this case. Not a statistic. Not a headline. A woman who had a niece who wanted to spend the day with her. A woman whose family lived close enough and trusted her enough to leave a child in her care. And in a matter of hours, that same family would be standing outside her apartment while police tape went up around the door.

A woman in her early 30s living independently in Arlington with family close enough to trust her with a child on a random Friday morning. That’s not a small detail. Think about how many people in your own life you would trust with that responsibility. Not everyone gets that kind of trust. Irasema had it, and it’s worth remembering that as we walk through what happened to her because somewhere between the woman her family trusted enough to leave a child with and the crime scene investigators walked into hours later, something happened that we

are only now, 14 years later, beginning to understand. At approximately 8:51 in the morning, officers with the Arlington Police Department responded to Irasema’s apartment after a family member called 911 reporting that she was unresponsive and covered in blood. When police arrived, they found her inside.

 She was pronounced dead at the scene. The official count, later confirmed by investigators, was staggering. Irasema Chavez had been more than 100 times. Let that number actually land. Not multiple stab wounds. Not several. Over 100 individual wounds inflicted on one woman’s body inside her own kitchen. That is not the number of wounds you get from a robbery gone wrong.

 That is not the number of wounds you get from a stranger who panicked. Detectives who have worked violent crime for decades will tell you the same thing. When a killer stops counting their own strikes, when the attack goes on long after the first fatal wound would have already ended a life, you are not looking at simple anger.

 You are looking at something closer to rage. Something personal. Something that doesn’t stop until every ounce of it has been spent on the person in front of you. And here is the detail that would haunt this investigation for the next 14 years. There was no forced entry. No broken door. No shattered window. No pried lock.

 Whoever did this did not break into Iracema Chavez’s apartment. She opened the door. Somewhere in Arlington, Texas on the night of January 19th, 2012, a person Iracema Chavez knew, someone she trusted enough or was at least comfortable enough with to let inside her home, walked through that door and within hours left her stabbed more than 100 times in her own kitchen.

That single detail, no forced entry, became the foundation of everything investigators believed about this case from day one. This wasn’t random. This was someone Iracema knew. Now, hold on to that. Because it is going to become the single most disturbing thread in this entire story. If this case has your stomach turning already, good. It should.

 That means you understand exactly what kind of person we’re dealing with here. Stay with us because it gets worse before it gets better. And if you haven’t already, tap that like button right now. It genuinely cost you nothing and it’s the only way this platform tells us that Erasema’s story is worth putting in front of more people.

She waited 14 years for someone to say her name. The least we can do is make sure people hear it. In the hours and days after Erasema’s murder, Arlington police moved fast, at least initially. Crime scene investigators processed the apartment inch by inch and in the bedroom, on top of the television stand, they found something that would end up being the single most important piece of evidence in the entire case, a droplet of fresh blood.

It wasn’t Erasema’s. The sample was sent to a crime lab and the results confirmed what detectives suspected. The blood belonged to an unknown Hispanic female. Not the victim. Someone else had bled inside that apartment. Someone who was there, close enough to the violence that a piece of themselves was left behind.

Investigators also noticed something else. Erasema’s television was missing. Gone from the apartment entirely. And then there was the surveillance footage. A camera near the apartment complex had captured someone climbing the stairs to Erasema’s unit on the night before she was found. The figure was dressed in baggy, hooded clothing.

They knocked. They appeared to exchange words with whoever answered and then they were let inside. Police released that footage to the public hoping someone, a native somewhere, would recognize the person in it. A neighbor, a co-worker, a relative who’d seen those clothes before. Nobody came forward with anything usable.

The blood sample was run through CODIS, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, the national database used to match crime scene DNA against known offenders. There was no match. Whoever left that blood behind had never been arrested for a crime that required their DNA to be collected. They were, as far as the system was concerned, a ghost.

And once that database search came back empty, the case did what cold cases have done in police departments across this entire country for decades. It slowed down. Leads dried up. Detectives moved on to newer, more urgent cases sitting on their desks. Irasema Chavez’s file didn’t get closed.

 It never technically closes, not for a homicide, but it stopped being anyone’s priority. Think about what that means for a second. A woman was stabbed more than 100 times in her own home by someone she let inside. Police had surveillance footage of the killer’s face partially visible. They had a blood sample directly linking to that killer’s DNA.

 And still, still, this case went cold for over a decade. We’re not saying the detectives in 2012 didn’t care. Cold case work is often less about incompetence and more about the limits of the technology available at the time. DNA phenotyping, familial matching, genetic genealogy, none of that existed in a usable form in 2012 the way it exists today.

 But somewhere in the gap between we have DNA and we have a name, 14 years passed. 14 birthdays Irasema never had. 14 years her family spent walking past the killer who, as far as anyone could tell, had simply gotten away with it. And the person responsible? They didn’t go into hiding. They didn’t disappear. They kept living their life in the same city, a few miles from the apartment where they left a woman to die in a pool of her own blood.

This is the part of true crime cases that never makes it into the highlight reel. But it’s the part that matters most if you actually care about how justice works in this country. A cold case doesn’t go cold because detectives stop caring about the victim. It goes cold because departments are underfunded, understaffed, and drowning in active cases that need attention today while a case from 12 years ago competes for the same detectives time.

It goes cold because the technology that could have solved it in 2012 simply didn’t exist yet in a form police could use. And it goes cold because, brutally, there are only so many hours in a day and only so many detectives to work them. None of that is an excuse the family of a murder victim should have to accept.

 And to Arlington’s credit, this case didn’t stay buried forever. Someone, at some point, made the decision to pick this file back up and ask the FBI for help. But we want you to sit with how close this case came to never being solved at all. If nobody in that department had looked at a 14-year-old file in November of 2024 and decided it was worth one more shot, Myra Velasquez could very easily still be free today, still posting vacation photos, still showing houses to strangers who have no idea what she allegedly did in 2012.

For 4 years, the case sat largely untouched. Then, in 2016, Arlington investigators tried something new. They sent the unidentified DNA sample to a company called Parabon NanoLabs, which specializes in a process called DNA phenotyping, using genetic markers to predict physical characteristics like ancestry, eye color, and hair color, and generate a composite image of what a suspect might have looked like.

Parabon produced a predicted image what their unknown suspect might have looked like around the age of 25. Police released it. It went out to the public the same way the surveillance photos had 4 years earlier. And once again, nothing. No confirmed identification. No breakthrough. Just another image added to a growing pile of almost answers.

Imagine being Irasema’s family during these years. Every time the case resurfaced in the news, a phenotyping image, an anniversary story, a segment on a local cold case unit, you’d feel that flicker of hope again. And every time, it would go nowhere. You’d watch the story fade from the news cycle. You’d go back to waiting.

That is what 14 years of an unsolved murder actually looks like. It’s not one dramatic moment of grief. It’s a decade and a half of small, repeated disappointments. It’s watching your daughters, your sisters, your friend’s killer walk free year after year, while you’re expected to simply continue living. And here’s the part that should really make your blood boil.

 While Irasema’s family carried that weight for over a decade, the person responsible for putting it there was, according to police, out there building a life, a career, a social media presence, vacations, all while a 14-year-old murder sat unsolved a few miles from where they slept every night. We’ll get to exactly who that person is very soon.

But first, you need to understand how they were finally caught, because it is one of the most quietly devastating twists in this entire case. Real quick, if you’re the kind of person who actually wants justice for cases like this one, not just the entertainment of it, drop a comment telling us what you think happened behind that door in the moments before the first stab wound.

 We read every single comment on these videos, and honestly, some of you catch details we miss. This case is about to take a turn, and I want to know what you’re thinking before we get there. In November of 2024, 12 years after Irasema Chavez was murdered, the Arlington Police Department’s Homicide Unit did something they hadn’t tried before.

 They reached out to the FBI’s Dallas Field Office to ask a single question. Could this case be a candidate for the FBI’s investigative genetic genealogy program? If you’re not familiar with genetic genealogy, here’s what you need to understand about how powerful, and how terrifying, if you’re a killer, this technology has become. Investigators don’t need to find the actual suspect’s DNA sitting in a database somewhere.

 They only need to find a relative, a cousin, a distant family member who once spit into a tube for one of those consumer ancestry kits, never imagining that decision would one day help catch a murderer in their own family tree. The FBI agreed to take on the case. For nearly 2 years, investigators built out that family tree, branch by branch, generation by generation, cross-referencing the unknown DNA profile from Irasema’s bedroom television stand against distant genetic relatives, public records, and historical documents. It’s slow. It’s

exhausting. It’s the kind of work that doesn’t make for dramatic television, but it is exactly the kind of work that finally, after 12 years of silence, produced a name. Here’s what most people don’t understand about that 2-year process, and why it matters so much in a case like this one. Genetic genealogy doesn’t work like the DNA matching you see on television, where a sample goes into a machine and a name comes out 5 minutes later.

Investigators build what’s essentially a family tree using small segments of shared DNA to estimate how closely two people might be related, second cousin, third cousin, once removed. Then they turned to public records, obituaries, census data, marriage licenses, birth announcements. They cross-reference every branch of a growing, sprawling tree, narrowing the pool of possible matches generation by generation, name by name, until, if they’re lucky, and if the work is done carefully enough, one name survives every filter.

It is slow. It is meticulous. It is the kind of work that requires a level of patience most people don’t have. And for two full years, that is exactly what a team of investigators did with Irasema Chavez’s case, because a family had waited 12 years already, and somebody finally decided that wasn’t good enough.

In April of 2026, the genetic genealogy team notified Arlington detectives that they had identified a potential suspect. Her name was Myra Velasquez. And when detectives read her file, they didn’t find a stranger. They didn’t find someone Irasema had never met. According to the Arlington Police Department, Myra Velasquez was, at one time, a close friend of Irasema Chavez.

Sit with that for a moment. 12 years of searching for a stranger. 12 years of assuming the answer was hiding somewhere out in the world, in the shadows of that grainy surveillance video. And the entire time, the answer had a name Irasema would have recognized instantly. The answer had probably eaten dinner in that apartment.

 The answer had probably laughed with her. Police said Velasquez lived just a few miles from the crime scene. She had been inside Irasema’s apartment before. She was not a stranger who broke in. She was someone Irasema Chavez opened the door for. Having a name is not the same as having a case. Investigators needed Myra Velasquez’s actual DNA to confirm what the genetic genealogy work suggested.

That she was a match to the blood left behind on that television stand 14 years earlier. They couldn’t simply walk up and ask for a sample. So in May of 2026, detectives did what investigators have done in cold cases across the country. They waited for her to throw something away. They collected a discarded item from her trash.

 And separately, according to reporting on the case, investigators also recovered a plastic fork Velasquez had used and discarded during a meal. That fork, an object so mundane, so completely unremarkable, the kind of thing you use once and throw away without a second thought, carried her DNA. It was sent to a crime lab. And it matched. The DNA on that fork matched the DNA in the blood droplet recovered from Irasema Chavez’s bedroom 14 years earlier.

Think about the absolute banality of it. A woman got away with a murder this brutal for over a decade. She built a life. She traveled. She worked. And in the end, it wasn’t a confession. It wasn’t a witness. It wasn’t a guilty conscience that caught her. It was a piece of plastic cutlery she used at a meal and threw in the trash without thinking twice.

14 years of getting away with it. Undone by a fork. On July 16th, 2026, Arlington police obtained a warrant. The following day, July 17th, Myra Velasquez, now 42 years old, was arrested and booked into the Tarrant County Correction Center. She was charged with capital murder. She is being held without bond. If you’ve made it this far into the video, I need to do one small thing for me before we finish this story.

 Hit subscribe right now. Not because I need the number, because cases like Irazema’s only get solved when enough people care enough to keep asking questions, keep sharing these stories, keep refusing to let departments quietly file these women away as unsolved forever. Every subscriber to this channel is one more person keeping pressure on cases just like this one.

Irazema waited 14 years. The people who loved her deserve every single person watching this to actually care about how it ends. Now, let’s talk about who Myra Velasquez really is, because what police say she was doing with her life while this case sat cold is frankly one of the most disturbing parts of this entire story.

Over her shoulder for 14 years. According to reporting on her arrest, Velasquez worked as a real estate agent in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. She had an active social media presence. She promoted property listings. She posted about vacations, trips that, according to news coverage published around the time of her arrest, took her far outside the state, far outside the country, in the years after Irazema Chavez bled to death in her own kitchen.

A real estate agent. Someone whose entire career depends on trust. Depends on people believing that she is exactly who she presents herself to be. Reliable, warm. Someone you’d let show you around a home. Someone you’d hand a set of keys to. According to Arlington’s police chief, Al Jones, Chavez and Velasquez were described as close friends who lived near one another.

 Velasquez had been to Irazema’s apartment before that night. This was not a woman meeting a stranger for the first time. This was someone Irazema had let into her life long before she ever let her through that door for the the time. To this day, according to investigators, a clear motive has not been made public. Police have said only that it remains unclear.

 We’re not going to pretend to know what happened inside that apartment on the night of January 19th, 2012, or what could have driven a friend to do what happened to Yarasema Chavez. Speculating about a specific motive that hasn’t been confirmed wouldn’t be responsible, and it wouldn’t be fair. Not to Yarasema, and not to the legal process that Velasquez, like anyone charged with a crime, is entitled to.

But here’s what we do know, and what we can say plainly. For 14 years, while Yarasema Chavez’s family buried her, grieved her, and waited for answers that never came, the person police now say is responsible for her death was, by all appearances, living an ordinary, comfortable life a few miles away, working, traveling, building a career on trust, while the friend she allegedly murdered lay in a grave, unavenged.

That is the part of this case that should stay with you long after this video ends. Not just the violence of it, the number of wounds, the blood on the television stand, the surveillance footage of a hooded figure at the door. It’s the years, the ordinary, unremarkable years a person got to keep living while the family of the woman she allegedly killed did not get the same privilege.

Think about every ordinary interaction Myra Velasquez is alleged to have had in those 14 years. Every client she showed a house to. Every open house she smiled through. Every vacation photo she posted with a caption about gratitude, or adventure, or making memories. If the allegations against her are true, every one of those moments happened in the shadow of something she alone knew the truth about.

 She got to choose, every single day for 14 years, whether to say something. And every single day, according to what investigators now believe, she chose silence instead. While a family 2 miles away lit candles at a grave and begged the universe for a name. That is the specific, quiet cruelty of a case like this one. Not just the violence in the apartment.

The 14 years of nothing that came after it. At the news conference announcing the arrest, Arlington homicide detective Tracy Dickson, who had worked this case, was asked what it meant to finally have an answer after 14 years. She fought back tears, telling the family, “That’s why.” Dickson said. “Being able to share that with a family is why we do this work, and they were very grateful.

” 14 years. And the moment that broke through a veteran homicide detective’s composure wasn’t the arrest itself. It was picturing the families’ faces when they were finally told the truth. Arlington Police Chief Al Jones called the genetic technology that cracked this case a game-changer for law enforcement. A tool that is now reopening cases across this country that everyone had quietly accepted would never be solved.

Detectives say the DNA evidence, while central to identifying Velasquez, will not be the only evidence presented at trial. Investigators have said Irasema’s cell phone data will also play a role in the prosecution’s case. Though they have declined to share specifics ahead of court proceedings. They’ve also confirmed that investigators were able to interview Velasquez directly.

 Though again, those details are being saved for the courtroom. Myra Velasquez remains in custody at the Tarrant County Jail, held without bond, facing a capital murder charge. Her case is now moving through the Texas court system, and like every defendant in this country, she is legally presumed innocent until proven guilty.

 What happens next will be decided in a courtroom, not by us, and not by the internet. Here’s where this case stands today. The mystery of who left blood on Irasema Chavez’s television stand 14 years ago has been solved. A name has finally been attached to that DNA. An arrest has finally been made. But an arrest is not the same as justice.

Justice, if it comes, will come slowly in a courtroom, months or years from now.