‘I had hope still’: Mother of abducted Lexington girl grateful for cold case arrest
For the mother of missing girl Jessica Gutierrez, Thursday’s news that there had finally been an arrest in her 1986 abduction came almost as an act of divine intervention.
“I’m glad God brought me to see it,” Debra Gutierrez said. “I prayed he would bring me through it, and we’ve waited for this a long time.”
Gutierrez said she had kept touch with a team from the Federal Bureau of Investigation that had taken up Jessica’s case last year, so she wasn’t too surprised when she got a call from them on Thursday. She thought it likely would be another incremental update on a case that had been a constant in her life for more than 35 years, ever since her 4-year-old daughter was abducted from her bed in their Lexington County home.
Instead, the agents were calling to tell her an arrest had finally been made. Thomas Eric McDowell, 61, of Wake Forest, N.C., had been taken into custody and charged with murder, kidnapping and first-degree burglary in Jessica’s case.
“I was totally surprised,” she said, saying the news was a relief but also “bittersweet.”
The family had never been able to properly grieve Jessica. Unsure if she was alive or dead for so long, the young girl never received a grave marker. The only memorial to her is on a bench at a cousin’s Swansea-area church.
“After 20-some-odd years, I had to prepare myself to think she was dead,” Gutierrez said. “But I was never prepared for that. I had hope still. If you don’t have a body, you’re just stuck in the middle.”
Gutierrez said she had long suspected McDowell’s involvement, ever since fingerprints lifted from the scene matched to him after he was convicted of a sexual assault in North Carolina in 1987. He was living in Lexington County at the time of Jessica’s abduction, a distant family acquaintance after McDowell’s uncle married Gutierrez’s cousin, she said.
“I knew his were the only (fingerprints on the home’s window) because I used to clean those windows every night,” Gutierrez told The State. “If you weren’t living here you wouldn’t have known that, but I used to Windex the storm door. Otherwise, there would have been a hundred fingerprints on there.”
Gutierrez said she had been hopeful for a resolution since the FBI visited her last year at her home, not far from where Jessica was taken so long ago. She trusted them to investigate what happened to her daughter.
“I knew that to hand my daughter over to them, I had to feel good in my heart, and I did,” she said. “They have been good to let me know what they’ve been doing.”
Still, despite finally having a definitive answer about what happened to Jessica, Gutierrez said she still has a long way to go to overcome the sense of dread the mystery has left with her for more than three decades.
“My older daughter said, maybe now we can pull the curtains back and let in some sunshine,” she said. “But I’m not there yet... For every one of him out there, there’s 90 more behind him.”
But she still gets some satisfaction from knowing the man accused of taking her daughter will finally have to answer for it.
“I can’t get rid of all of them,” she said. “But I got one of them off the street.”
This story was originally published January 7, 2022 at 2:45 PM with the headline "‘I had hope still’: Mother of abducted Lexington girl grateful for cold case arrest."
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