Without a Trace: Three Girls Went to a Mall . . .

It is one of Fort Worth’s most enduring—and maddening—cold cases, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme.

Over its forty-eight-year history the case has taunted investigators with a suspicious letter and a phantom phone call received, swamps dredged, bones, teeth, and underwear analyzed, rewards offered and posters distributed, cars raised from lakes, and psychics and one Hawaiian dowser consulted.

After forty-eight years the case comes down to this: few clues, fewer suspects, and no closure.

About noon on December 23, 1974 Rachel Trlica, seventeen, Renee Wilson, fourteen, and Julie Moseley, nine, set out to do some last-minute Christmas shopping at Seminary South mall (La Gran Plaza today). Rachel parked her Oldsmobile on an east lot near the Sears store.

Renee was determined to be back home by 4 p.m. to attend a Christmas party that night. Julie’s mother had told her to be home by 6 p.m.

When those two times passed, parents of the girls grew concerned and went to the mall to investigate.

They found the car. It was locked. Purchases that the girls had made that day were on the rear floorboard.

Rachel’s mother went into the mall, into every store, and asked each manager to make an announcement to see if the girls were there.

The parents notified Fort Worth police, but police never act as quickly as worried parents would like.

So, that night the fathers of the three girls, armed with a shotgun, staked out the abandoned Oldsmobile, waiting for any ne’er-do-well who might return.

Although the parents feared foul play, police theorized that the girls had run away from home (although none of the girls had done so before).

Seminary South about 1962. (Photo from Jack White Photograph Collection, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.)

That theory gained support the next morning—December 24—when a letter arrived at the home of Rachel and her husband of six months, Tommy Trlica, twenty-two.

In the upper-left corner of the letter’s envelope the name “Rachel” was scrawled in pencil. But the envelope was addressed rather formally: to “Thomas A. Trlica.” Rachel called her husband “Tommy.”

The stamp on the envelope had been canceled that morning. The cancellation did not include a city, and the ZIP code of the cancellation was blurred. Investigators interpreted the five-digit number to indicate that the letter had been mailed either from Throckmorton, Texas, from Eliasville, which is near Throckmorton, or from Weatherford.

Inside the envelope was a sheet of paper with this message written in ballpoint ink in a childish scrawl:

“I know I’m going to catch it, but we just had to get away. We’re going to Houston. See you in about a week. The car is in Sear’s upper lot. Love Rachel.”

The original l of Rachel’s signature on the letter had been a short loop that looked more like an e. The writer had gone back over it, making it a taller loop.

Nonetheless, one investigator thought the handwriting matched a known sample of Rachel’s. But the parents of the three girls and Rachel’s husband were skeptical that Rachel had written the letter.

Over the years various investigators would deem the letter to be genuine, a prank, and inconclusive. Three times FBI analysis of the handwriting was inconclusive.

But consider this: The envelope’s stamp was canceled on the morning of December 24—and thus the letter was written and mailed before that time. The first news account of the girls’ disappearance did not appear until that evening’s Star-Telegram. That account said that the girls’ car was “parked and locked on the east side of the center.” And yet the writer of the letter had known that “The car is in Sear’s upper lot.”

After examination of Rachel’s car yielded no clues, police investigators turned to the mall. Oh, certainly employees and shoppers in the mall had seen the girls. A few remembered Renee’s T-shirt with “Sweet Honesty” printed on the front.

But police learned nothing useful.

In the absence of solid leads and forensic clues, theories abounded: The girls had left the mall of their own volition, perhaps with someone they knew; the girls had been taken from the mall against their will; or perhaps some combination of the two: The girls had left voluntarily, but then something sinister happened.

On December 27 a reward fund for information “leading to the recovery” of the girls was established.

But as the year ended the Star-Telegram could report only “no news” news.

The new year started with the first of many false leads as undergarments found near Justin were determined to be unrelated to the case.

Within a week of the disappearance of the three girls, their families were in contact with psychics.

First up was Mr. Joseph of Dallas, whom the families visited in person.

“The psychic told us things about Renee that I would not expect him to know,” Renee’s mother, Mrs. Richard E. Wilson, said. Mr. Joseph told the families that “dope is involved, there are three to five people involved, and the girls are being held against their wills.”

“He told us that Renee cannot get home,” Mrs. Wilson said, and visualized the girls around a lake with horses nearby.

Mrs. Wilson also said Mr. Joseph said Julie Moseley had been wearing red tennis shoes—a detail not reported in the media.

Mr. Joseph asked Tommy Trlica if 150 meant anything to him as a sum of money. Trlica said $150 in bonds had been in the Oldsmobile the day his wife drove it to the mall but was not in the car when police examined it.

Mr. Joseph also said he “sensed” that something was wrong with the letter reputedly written by Rachel Trlica to her husband. He said he felt that the girls had gone north toward “Grapevine, Oklahoma, or Illinois,” not south to Houston.

The three families consulted other psychics by mail, sometimes sending them an article of clothing that had been worn by the girls. About sixty percent of the psychics claimed that a “blue hippie van” was involved in the disappearance. The same percentage believed—like Mr. Joseph—that the girls had traveled north, not south as the letter had claimed.

But one psychic told the families that the girls’ bodies were in a shallow grave near a creek in Mansfield. Rachel’s mother—Mrs. R. W. Arnold—Rachel’s older sister Debra, and Mrs. Wilson walked several miles of creek bank, following a map the psychic prepared.

“At one point,” Mrs. Arnold said, “where one of the girls was supposed to have been, Debbie reached down into the water and pulled up the skull of a pig.”

Six weeks after the three girls disappeared, about 11 p.m. on the night of February 6 Mrs. J. W. Moseley, mother of Julie, received a telephone call. The caller was a girl. Mrs. Moseley later told the Star-Telegram that she believed that the girl was her daughter.

“I’d be willing to swear it was her,” Mrs. Moseley said.

She said that when she answered the telephone no one spoke to her at first, in spite of the fact that she said “hello” several times.

And then, as Mrs. Moseley started to hang up the receiver, she heard a low moan, and a girl said, “Mama.”

“I asked, ‘Who is this?’ and Julie said, ‘Mama’ again,” Mrs. Moseley said.

Mrs. Moseley by then was positive she was speaking with her daughter and asked the caller, “Is this Julie Moseley,” and the caller replied, “Yes.”

“Listen, if this is someone playing a joke, please stop. I can’t take anymore,” Mrs. Moseley told the caller. Mrs. Moseley said she then asked the caller where she was, and the girl said she did not know.

“Julie said ‘Mama’ once more and was just starting to say something else when the phone was hung up,” Mrs. Moseley said.

“I just kept screaming ‘Julie!’ after the phone went dead,” Mrs. Moseley said, “and then I realized, after a few minutes, that I was hearing a dial tone so I hung up.”

She said the girl wasn’t speaking normally and sounded either drugged or sick.

“I know there is the possibility someone is putting me on,” Mrs. Moseley said, “but I’m positive that was Julie on the phone. At least I now know she is alive, and that helps, but where is she?”

In March 1975 Rachel’s mother, Mrs. Arnold, learned that a woman had told clerks at Seminary South that she had seen a man forcing a girl into a pickup at the mall on December 23. Inside the pickup were two girls and second man.

Nothing came of that information.

Over the decades the families of the missing girls, frustrated by the police investigation, would hire several private investigators. One of the first was Jon Swaim. In April 1975 an anonymous caller told Swaim that the bodies of the three girls were under a Texas Highway 35 bridge near Port Lavaca on the gulf coast.

In February Port Lavaca police had received a similar claim about the three girls. Police had searched area bridges but found nothing.

In April Swaim and members of the girls’ families were present as one hundred people searched for six hours and found exactly what the police had found in February.

Also in April 1975 bones of a girl and a woman found near San Antonio were determined to be unrelated to the Seminary South case.

Not surprisingly, Tommy Trlica, as Rachel’s husband, was a suspect but only briefly. In 1976 he divorced his missing wife, remarried, and moved to Throckmorton. He lost contact with his former in-laws.

The private investigators hired by the three families had to follow up leads both legitimate and ludicrous. One of the latter came in May 1976 when a “professional dowser” (person who uses a divining rod) in Hawaii wrote to private detective Swaim.

Writing from Honolulu the dowser wrote that the girls had been killed and their bodies dumped, not buried, in brush near a gas well off Texas Highway 36 three miles east of the town of Rising Star.

Members of the missing girls’ families, hoping against hope after sixteen months, were present as forty lawmen and volunteers beat the bushes amid the jackrabbits and jackpumps of rural Eastland County for five hours, after which time the dowser was being referred to as a “psycho,” “nut,” and “somebody who ought to be investigated.”

Later that summer Swaim and Tarrant County investigators were in Brazoria County after the skeletal remains of one male and two females were found in a field.

On the fourth anniversary of the girls’ disappearance in 1978 Fort Worth police investigator George Hudson admitted, “We’ve never even gotten them off the parking lot of the shopping center.”

The year 1981 brought two disappointments to the families of the three girls.

Human bones were again found in Brazoria County in a swamp. The bones were unrelated to the Seminary South case.

Since the beginning of the mystery, Fort Worth police, via news stories, had appealed to witnesses to come forward.

In 1981 a Houston man who had been in Fort Worth visiting his sister told police that on the day the girls were last seen he had been at the mall when he saw three men force three girls into a van near a supermarket in the mall. The man said that when he approached the men, one of them said the oldest girl was his wife. The man said he had made a mental note of the license plate number. But he went back to Houston and was unaware of news coverage of the missing girls until he moved to Fort Worth and heard about the case from a friend of Rachel’s mother, who said police tried to hypnotize the man to learn the license plate number but failed and could not give him “truth serum” because of a heart condition.

By Christmas 1982 the girls had been missing eight years. Renee Wilson’s mother said of her daughter: “Oh, I dream about her quite often. I know that she hasn’t changed. She’d be tall, and headstrong, spoiled, you know.”

On that first Christmas in 1974 after Renee disappeared, Mrs. Wilson had kept Renee’s gifts under the tree. As the years passed, Mrs. Wilson could not part with the gifts and stored them in her attic. They were still there in 1982.

Perhaps the case’s most dogged searcher—more dogged than the police or the private investigators—over the years has been Rachel Trlica’s brother Rusty Arnold, who was eleven when his sister disappeared.

Arnold created a website and a Facebook group to keep the case in the public eye.

About 1996 Arnold met private investigator Dan James, who had followed the case since the beginning.

In December 1999 James personally offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone responsible for the disappearance of the girls.

James said several “credible witnesses” had told him they had seen Rachel since her disappearance.

“One was in 1998 around Christmas,” he said in 1999.

James said he had received death threats from anonymous callers warning him away from the case.

In 2000 the Star-Telegram wrote that Arnold and James believed that Rachel visited Fort Worth during the Christmas season each year. James said he believed that Rachel was the only one of the three girls still alive.

He was evasive about details of his theory of what happened to the girls.

“I believe that [a] person facilitates and maintains an effort to keep Rachel Arnold [Trlica] away from Fort Worth. I believe that Renee Wilson is not alive. . . . I believe that something dreadfully wrong, and probably a fatality, occurred involving Julie Ann Moseley,” he said.

By 2000 Rusty Arnold’s theory was that the two older girls—Rachel and Renee—had enough family problems in 1974 that they indeed might have run away from home.

Arnold’s mother—who by 2000 had remarried and was Mrs. Fran Langston—disagreed with her son. She said Rachel would not have left her terminally ill father and also had been looking forward to her first Christmas with her stepson.

“I think the girls were taken. They didn’t leave of their own free will.”

Rusty Arnold in 2000 said his sister Rachel and Renee might still be alive. But he, like James, feared that Julie Moseley had met with foul play.

The mystery strained family ties, especially between Rusty Arnold and his older sister Debra, who briefly had been engaged to Tommy Trlica before Tommy married Debra’s sister Rachel.

In 2000 Rusty Arnold said that “someone close to one of the girls had something to do with the disappearance.”

Debra was less obtuse. She told the Star-Telegram in 2000:

“I know he [Rusty] blames me. I know he thinks I had something to do with it. . . . Rusty thinks this letter that Tommy got the next day—he thinks I wrote it. . . . I didn’t write this letter. I don’t know who did. I don’t know what happened to my sister. Maybe white slavery. That’s the only thing that makes sense to me. I have nothing to hide.”

Their mother blamed private detective James for “poisoning Rusty’s mind.”

In 2009 the Star-Telegram printed these photos of the three girls. About 2004 the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children had used software to show how the girls might appear in 2004.

Over the last forty-eight years the mystery has been a part of many a Fort Worth Christmas as the Star-Telegram has printed a story on the anniversary of the girls’ disappearance, a sad counterpoint to seasonal stories about grateful recipients of Goodfellow Fund aid and the lighting of the city’s Christmas tree downtown and the dismal odds of a white Christmas.

The case has never produced anyone whom police would call a suspect, but in 2018 Rusty Arnold said he was investigating “a person of interest.” And although he would not name that person, he said he had a theory: The person of interest lived within five miles of Benbrook Lake and had disposed of a car soon after the three girls vanished in 1974.

So, Arnold began to wonder if that car had been disposed of in Benbrook Lake. A marine salvage company used sonar to locate three cars submerged in the lake.

In September 2018 Arnold, his mother, and more than one hundred friends and members of the missing girls’ families gathered at the lake as the marine salvage dive crew braved treacherous “black water” to depths of forty feet to raise the first car—a 1960 Corvair—from the lake.

“The car did not have any evidence linking it to my sister or the other girls,” Arnold later said.

But his mother said, “I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.”

The next month Rusty Arnold and his mother again watched as the dive team assembled at the lake to raise the second submerged car.

“I’m hoping they open that trunk and find remains. All these years, we’ve been waiting,” Mrs. Langston said as she watched from a chair on shore.

The car was a Lincoln Continental. But its vehicle identification number showed that it was a 1976 model—made two years after the girls disappeared.

A year later, in 2019, the dive team attempted to raise the third car from the black water of Benbrook Lake. But the car was severely rusted, the edges of its sheet metal like razor blades. The car fell apart as it was being lifted out of forty feet of water.

“My heart was broken,” Arnold said in 2019. “Because I’ve been working for five years on these cars. We promised my mom we would get all three out. And now we can’t live up to that promise. She’s eighty-one years old now, bless her heart. I sure would like to get closure for her before she goes.”

And there the coldest of cold cases stands.

Over the years the loss of the girls, the hopes raised and then dashed, family recriminations, thousands of dollars spent, and lack of closure took their toll on the members of the girls’ families. Mrs. Langston, Rachel’s mother, wrote a poem that perhaps sums it all up:

“If only you knew what it would mean
to mend our hearts,
To say it’s been a bad dream.”

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