Texas 1974 Cold Case – Teens Vanished Two Days Before Christmas

Fort Worth, Texas, December 23rd, 1974.  The families had missing persons posters printed up and a reward fund established.  Well, uh 9 days ago, I thought maybe they had just went somewhere, but now I don’t believe they have. I believe they’ve been picked up.  December 23rd, 1974. Two days before Christmas, a teenage girl with long brown hair and green eyes kissed her husband goodbye and headed out to finish her Christmas shopping.

She was 17 years old and already someone’s wife. She was already someone’s stepmother. She was still in high school and she was already carrying more life than most 17-year-olds know what to do with. But she carried it with the kind of quiet steadiness that made the people around her feel like everything was going to be okay.

Her best friend was 14 and her boyfriend had just given her a promise ring that very morning. A promise ring. She was wearing it on her finger as she climbed into the car. New and bright and full of everything that a promise ring at 14 means. The entire future compressed into one small piece of jewelry given by a 15-year-old boy who loved her.

And the youngest of them was nine, nine years old, and she had begged her way into coming. She didn’t want to spend the day alone at home. She wanted to go to the mall with the older girls, to be part of something, the way younger kids always want to be part of something. Her mother had said no. And then, because it was 2 days before Christmas and her daughter’s eyes were wide and pleading and she was 9 years old and it was the holidays and what could possibly go wrong, her mother finally said yes.

They drove away from Southeast Fort Worth sometime before noon on December 23rd, 1974. They never came home and for more than 50 years, the families of Rachel Trlica, Renee Wilson, and Julie Ann Mosley have been living inside that sentence. Never came home. No body, no confession, no answer. Just three girls who drove away from a neighborhood in Fort Worth, Texas on a cold December morning heading to a shopping mall to buy Christmas presents, and disappeared so completely that five decades of searching, thousands of tips,

hundreds of interviews, and the full weight of an unsolved mystery have not been able to find them. This is the story of the Fort Worth Missing Trio, and it is one of the most haunting cases I have ever had to sit with. Because the horror here is not just what happened. The horror is that we still do not know what happened, and the people who love these three girls have had to live in that not knowing every single day for 50 years.

Before we go any further, my name is Joe, and if you are new here, welcome to Vanished Women and Children. This channel exists to remember the women, children, and vulnerable people the world moved on from too quickly. If stories like this matter to you, subscribe and ring the notification bell. And while you’re down in the comments, tell me where you’re watching from.

 I always love seeing how far these stories reach. Now, let’s go back to Fort Worth. Mary Rachel Trlica was born on November 15th, 1957. She went by her middle name, Rachel, the way some people carry their truest self in a name that wasn’t the first one they were given. She was a student at Southwest High School in Fort Worth, Texas.

5 ft 6 in tall, brown hair, green eyes, a small scar on her chin, a chipped upper front tooth that somehow made her smile more real, more hers. She had gotten married in July of 1975, just 6 months before she disappeared. She was 17. Her husband, Tommy Trlica, was 21. They lived with Rachel’s older sister, Deborah, who had actually dated Tommy before Rachel did.

Tommy had a 2-year-old son named Shawn from a previous relationship. And Rachel, 17 years old, still in high school, had taken on the role of stepmother to that little boy as naturally and completely as if she had always been his. She worked a part-time job. She managed the household. She was, by every account, a responsible and mature young woman doing the very best she could with a life that had already asked a great deal of her.

 She was also still a teenager who wanted to go Christmas shopping with her best friend 2 days before the holiday. Because no matter how much life you are carrying, you are still 17. And it was almost Christmas. Lisa Renee Wilson was 14 years old. She also went by her middle name, Renee. She had shoulder-length wavy brown hair with reddish highlights.

She and Rachel had been close friends for years. The kind of friendship that forms in the particular gravity of girlhood, where the bond becomes so natural that the families around it become close, too. Renee had a boyfriend named Terry Mosley, a 15-year-old boy who lived across the street and who had, on the morning of December 23rd, given her a promise ring before she left.

 A ring with a single stone. She was wearing it when she got in the car. She was also excited because she knew what she was getting for Christmas. Her parents had a stereo system waiting for her. She was counting down the days. She had a Christmas party to attend that evening with Terry, and she wanted it to be home by 4:00 to get ready.

 She was 14, and she had a promise ring and a stereo coming, and a party to go to, and the whole world was still the kind of a place where those things mattered more than anything else. And Julie Ann Moseley was nine, the youngest, Terry’s little sister. She was the neighborhood kid who wanted to tag along, who didn’t want to be left home alone while her brother’s girlfriend and her friend went somewhere fun. She loved ponytails.

She liked to roughhouse. She was, in Terry’s own words, just a little kid. She called her mother Ray Ann that morning and asked if she could go to Seminary South Shopping Center with the older girls. Ray Ann said no. “You don’t have any money. Just stay home.” But Julie kept asking. She complained about having no one to play with.

She whined, the way nine-year-olds whine, with the particular persistence of a child who has not yet learned that some no’s are final. And Ray Ann, exhausted and working, and trying to get through the holidays, finally gave in. “I’ll go,” she told Julie, “but be home by 6:00.” That is the last instruction Ray Ann Moseley ever gave her to her daughter.

The girls left around noon. Their first stop was an Army and Navy surplus store in Fort Worth, where Renee had a pair of jeans on layaway. They picked them up. Then they drove to the Seminary South Shopping Center in South Fort Worth, a sprawling mall anchored by a Sears department store, and parked her car, Rachel’s 1972 Oldsmobile 98, on the upper level of the Sears parking lot.

They went inside. Witnesses would later confirm they were seen in the mall that day. They shopped. They they bought things. The gifts were eventually found still in the car, wrapped and waiting on the rear floorboard. Two pairs of jeans purchased and placed there by someone who intended to come back for them.

 Someone who had every reason to expect they would be going home. The girls were supposed to be back by 4:00. Renee had her Christmas party to get ready for. Julie had promised to be home by 6:00. 4:00 came, then 5:00, then 6:00. No one came home. Terry’s father, Richard Wilson, lived close enough to the mall to get there quickly.

 He went to look for them. He found Rachel’s car exactly where it had been parked. In the Sears upper lot, doors locked, gifts sitting undisturbed in the backseat. No sign of the girls, no note, no explanation, no anything. He called the families. The families gathered at the mall. They waited in that parking lot through the night because that is what families do when they have no other choice, when the alternative to waiting is accepting something they are not yet able to accept.

They waited and watched the parking lot in the dark. Two days before Christmas for three girls who did not come back. When the police were finally called, the Fort Worth Police Department’s Missing Persons Bureau did what investigators did far too often in that era when it was girls who had gone missing.

 They labeled them runaways. Runaways. A 9-year-old girl two days before Christmas who was excited to be home by 6:00. A 14-year-old wearing a brand new promise ring counting down to a stereo and a Christmas party. A 17-year-old married woman with a 2-year-old stepson at home. Runaways. Because of that designation, Rachel’s car was not immediately processed for evidence. No fingerprints were taken.

The first critical hours and days of what should have been a full missing persons investigation were lost to a classification that the families knew immediately, completely, without a single moment of doubt was wrong. Something has happened to them. Renee’s mother, Judy Wilson, told Dallas television station WFAA just 9 days after the girls vanished. I know it.

 It is just not like them. They would not have just run off. She was right. She would spend the rest of her life knowing she was right and never getting an answer. On the morning of December 24th, 1974, Christmas Eve, 1 day after the girls disappeared, Tommy Trlica found something in the mailbox, a letter. It was addressed to Thomas A.

 Trlica, written in ink on a sheet of paper wider than the envelope it had been folded into. The envelope itself was written in pencil. In the upper left corner of the envelope, where the return address would normally go, was a single word, Rachel. Except if you look closely, and investigators did look closely, you could see that the name had been written wrong the first time.

 The final letter had been written as an E first, then gone over again, laboriously corrected into the proper L. The letter read, “I know I’m going to catch it, but we had to get away. We’re going to Houston. See you in about a week. The car is in Sears upper lot. Love, Rachel.” Sit with that letter for a moment because every single word of it is wrong in a specific way.

Rachel called her husband Tommy, always Tommy. The envelope said Thomas A. Trlica, a formal name, a stranger’s name for a man his own wife had never called by his full legal name in their entire relationship. Rachel had written her own name countless times. She had never misspelled it.

 The paper was too big for the envelope. The envelope was in pencil. The letter was in ink. The postmark was blurred, a zip code that could have been from Eliasville, 2 hours west of Fort Worth or Weatherford, 30 miles away, but the exact origin could not be confirmed. The families looked at that letter and they knew, every single one of them.

 They knew in the way that people who love someone know, their handwriting, their voice, their way of saying things. Every member of the families immediately went, “Nah, uh.” Julie’s brother Terry said decades later. “This isn’t happening. It’s not real. Why would they take a 9-year-old girl to Houston?” Julie’s aunt Sandy said. “Most kids don’t want to run off right before Christmas.” Terry added.

“Renee seemed happy at home and she was really excited because she knew she was getting a stereo system for Christmas. And my sister, she was a 9-year-old at Christmas time. No one was having an issue that they wanted to run away from.” The FBI analyzed the letter three separate times over the years.

 Handwriting experts examined it. Each time the result was the same, inconclusive. They could not say definitively whether Rachel had written it. They could not say definitively whether she had not. The letter was and remains one of the most chilling and unresolved pieces of evidence in the entire case. Because it means that someone, either Rachel herself under duress or someone who wanted to buy time after taking these girls, sat down and wrote those words, held that pen, folded that paper into an envelope too small for it, and mailed it

on Christmas Eve to a 21-year-old man whose wife had not come home. That letter bought the perpetrator, whoever he was, an entire week. A week during which the police, clinging to the runaway theory, did not treat this as the abduction that every family member and every reasonable reading of the evidence suggests it was.

A week in which the trail went cold in ways that 50 years of subsequent investigation have never been able to fully warm. The families did not wait for the police to catch up with what they already knew. They started distributing missing persons flyers across Texas. They contacted newspapers. They made noise.

They refused to let their daughters become one more name in a file cabinet somewhere. In 1975, frustrated with the pace of the official investigation, the families hired a private detective named John Swaim. Swaim followed leads, organized searches, chased tips. In August of 1975, he identified a 28-year-old man who had worked at a local store where Rachel had applied for a job.

 A man who was making a string of obscene phone calls to young women in the area, using job applications to obtain their personal information. He had also once lived in Rachel’s parents’ neighborhood. Nothing conclusive ever came of that lead. In April of 1975, Swaim took 100 volunteers to Port Lavaca, Texas, on the Gulf Coast after an anonymous tip suggested the girls’ bodies had been buried under a bridge there.

They searched for days. They found nothing. In 1976, an oil drilling crew discovered three skeletons in a field in Brazoria County. Investigators rushed to compare the remains to the girls’ dental records and x-rays. It was not them. Witnesses came forward with fragments that were never enough. A store clerk said a woman told her she had seen the three girls being forced into a yellow pickup truck near the mall.

A truck with lights on top. The witness who said this could never be located by police. In 1981, a man said he had been in the Sears parking lot the evening of December 23rd and had seen a man forcing a girl into a a van. When he moved toward them, the man in the van told him it was a family dispute. He walked away.

 He was being honest. He had no way to know what he had just walked away from. In 2001, the case was officially reopened. Investigators announced they had interviewed at least 20 new witnesses who had seen the girls at the mall on the afternoon of their disappearance. They said they had narrowed the possible suspects down to five individuals.

A former Fort Worth police officer came forward claiming he had seen three girls in a pickup truck in the mall parking lot at approximately 11:30 that night, appearing relaxed, apparently willing. The investigation moved forward, then stalled again, the way cold cases do when evidence is just thin enough and witnesses are just uncertain enough that no case can be made.

 Terry Mosley, the 15-year-old boy who gave Renee Wilson a promise ring on the morning of December 23rd, 1974, the the last morning he ever saw her, uh has it own theory about what happened. He has said openly that he suspects Rachel’s husband, Thomas, had something to do with the disappearance. Thomas was never officially named as a suspect.

 And one detail from the night the girls disappeared has stayed with Terry for more than 50 years. When police found Rachel’s car and Thomas was located at a bowling alley, he was told what was happening. And, according to Terry, he said he would come. And then he finished his game. Whether that is the behavior of a guilty man or a man in shock who could not process what he was being told, we cannot say.

Thomas Trlica has never been charged. He has never been officially named. And the truth is, in the absence of a confession, in the absence of remains, in the absence of a definitive answer, everyone who ever touched this case, every suspect, every witness, every blurred zip code on a penciled envelope exists in the same unbearable limbo as the families. Not knowing.

There is a woman named Francis Langston. She is Rachel’s mother. She was there in December of 1974 when her 17-year-old daughter did not come home. She has been there every December since. Rachel’s brother, Rusty Arnold, was 11 years old when his sister disappeared. He has spent his entire adult life searching for her.

He maintains a Facebook page dedicated to the case, the Missing Fort Worth Trio, which has drawn more than 13,000 members from cities and countries all over the world. He keeps notes. He keeps news clippings. He has organized search parties. He has driven back roads. He has called investigators. He has refused in 50 years to put his sister down.

“I just want to find my sister,” he has said. “As long as there’s a breath left in my body, I want her to know that I’ll be looking for her. And every Christmas, every Christmas since December 23rd, 1974, his mother, Francis, puts three angels on her front lawn. Three angels. One for Rachel. One for Renee. One for Julie.

Think about that for a moment. Think about what it means to put three angels on your lawn every Christmas for 50 years because your daughter went shopping and never came home. Think about watching the neighborhood children grow up. Think about watching Christmases stack on top of each other. 1975, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, 2020, and still placing those three angels on the grass because to not do it would be to admit something you are not willing to admit.

To take them down would mean giving up, and Frances Langton has never given up. The generation of parents is nearly gone now. Renee’s parents, Julie’s parents, most of them have passed away. They died without knowing what happened to their daughters. Think about that. They died without knowing.

 They went to their graves holding a question that never got an answer. That is not grief. That is something that doesn’t have a name yet. Julie’s mother Ray Ann carried something particular and terrible with her until the end. The knowledge that she had said yes. That Julie had asked and she had eventually given in and the girls had driven away and never come back.

 Terry says it plainly. My mom beat herself to death the rest of her life after saying yes that one time. She said yes once on a December morning when her daughter didn’t want to be lonely and it cost her everything. And Terry himself, the 15-year-old who stayed behind, who chose to visit a friend in the hospital that day instead of going to the mall, who gave Renee a promise ring and then never saw her again, has carried the weight of that choice for more than 50 years.

 Not guilt exactly. He had no way to know, but the specific haunting echo of a decision made on an ordinary morning that turned out to be anything but ordinary. “I gave her a promise ring that morning,” he has said, “and I never saw her again. That’ll mess up your mind when you’re 15. It would mess up your mind at any age.

” The Seminary South Shopping Center, the place where three girls parked a 1972 Oldsmobile and walked inside and never came out, is now called La Gran Plaza de Fort Worth. The building is still there. The parking lot is still there. The Sears upper lot where Rachel’s car was found, locked, presents sitting in the back seat, is still there.

The geography of that day is still in the city, still visible, still walkable. Fort Worth rebuilt around the mystery without ever solving it. In May of 2023, on National Missing Children’s Day, Clear Channel partnered with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Texas Center for the Missing to place billboards across North Texas.

Billboards showing age-progressed photos of the three girls. What Rachel might look like in her 60s. What Renee might look like. What Julie, the 9-year-old who begged her way into going to the mall, might look like at 56. Millions of fresh eyes on a 50-year-old question. “We never forget about a missing child, no matter how long time has passed,” said Leemie Con Sofer with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

“We know that it could take just one person with information, one development to break a case wide open. We maintain that hope for this trio. One person, one memory, one thing seen in a parking lot on a December afternoon in 1974 that someone has never told anyone, for whatever reason, fear, uncertainty, the inability to know how much it mattered, that one thing may still exist.

 It may be sitting in someone’s memory right now. This case should make you think about what we lose when we label missing girls as runaways. When the first instinct of the people responsible for finding them is to decide they left on purpose, that they chose this, that whatever happened to them is somehow their own doing.

Rachel was 17 and married. Renee was 14 with a promise ring. Julie was nine and wanted to be home by 6:00. None of them, not one, fit the profile of a girl who ran away. The families knew that instantly. The evidence, what little there was, pointed that way immediately. And yet, an entire week of critical investigation was lost to a presumption that the people closest to these girls could have corrected in minutes if anyone had asked them.

This is what this channel exists to name, not to assign blame 50 years after the fact to investigators who operated in a different era with different tools and different assumptions, but to say clearly, the pattern of dismissing missing girls, of treating their disappearances as choices rather than crimes, has cost families answers they deserve to have.

 It cost Frances Langston 50 years of three angels on a lawn. It cost Rayanne Mosley a lifetime of saying yes. It cost Terry Mosley, the girl he gave a promise ring to on the last morning he ever saw her. It may have cost Rachel, Renee, and Julie whatever chance they had. Rachel Trlica, Renee Wilson, Julieann Mosley.

 Rachel was 17, married, already someone’s stepmother, still in high school, still figuring out what kind of woman she was going to be. She had green eyes and a small scar on her chin and she called her husband Tommy. She wrapped Christmas presents and put them in the backseat of her car and she intended to come home. Renee was 14 wearing a promise ring, excited about a stereo and a Christmas party and the particular joy of being 14 and in love and having the whole world still arranged in the way that makes those things feel enormous. She intended

to be home by 4:00 to get ready. Julie was nine. She just didn’t want to be alone. She begged her way into a December afternoon that she was supposed to be home from by 6:00. She was just a little kid. They have never been found. Not a trace. Not a bone. Not a single piece of physical evidence that has led to a door that opened.

Just a locked car in a parking lot. Two pairs of jeans wrapped as gifts and a letter with a misspelled name that someone mailed on Christmas Eve to buy themselves a week. Somewhere in Fort Worth or somewhere beyond it, there is an answer. There is someone who knows or knew or saw something they have never said out loud.

The families believe that. The investigators who have spent decades on this case believe that. We have to believe that. Because the alternative is that three girls drove away from a neighborhood on December 23rd, 1975 and the world simply swallowed them whole and no one will ever know. Francis Langston puts three angels on the lawn every Christmas.

 Rusty Arnold is still searching. Terry Mosley is 66 years old and he is still talking about the girl he gave a promise ring to on a Tuesday morning in December 50 years ago. They deserve an answer. All of them. Every single one. Say their names. Rachel Trlica, Renee Wilson, Julie Ann Mosley. And if you know anything, anything at all, call the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 1-800-LOST.

 That’s 1-800-8-4-3-5-6-7-8. Or contact the Fort Worth Police Department at 817-335-4222. The case is still open. The families are still waiting. I need to hear from you on this one. Where are you watching from? Drop it in the comments. Fort Worth, Texas? Somewhere across the country? Somewhere on the other side of the world? Tell me what you know about this case.

Or what you had never heard before today. Tell me what you think about a system that labeled three missing girls, including a 9-year-old, as runaways and lost a critical week of investigation. Tell me what stays with you after hearing about the promise ring. Or the three angels on the lawn every Christmas.

 Or a mother who said yes one time and spent the rest of her life carrying it. Tell me what you’re still sitting with. Every single comment gets read. Everyone. And if Vanished Women and Children is not yet part of your regular viewing, now is the time. Subscribe, ring the notification bell, and share this video with someone who has never heard of Rachel Renee and Julie.

Because the more people who know these names, the more likely it is that someone, somewhere, finally remembers something. That is not wishful thinking. That is how cold cases get solved. One person. One memory. One comment. One share. Subscribe and help us keep telling stories like this one.

 These three girls have been waiting 50 years for someone to care enough to keep asking. We are asking.