So welcome to this week's edition of The Path Went Chili. So On.
We're going to be co hosted by Jewels and I because Ashley is away this
week, so we're gonna go back to our format where I tell Jewels about
a case that I'm very familiar with and she's going to react to it and
we'll discuss it. And I decided to do the nineteen eighty six disappearance of
nine year old Antonette Kadito, which took place in the small town of Gallup,
New Mexico. This is a very famous case. It was on Unsaw
Mysteries. I covered it on The Trail Went Cold about two years ago,
but I wanted to revisit it because last week the Trace Evidence podcast released a
new update episode revealing a lot of new information which had never been made public
before. And the reason that this has come out now is because of a
YouTube series that just came out called Disappeared in Darkness, which is hosted by
a former journalist named Crystal Gutierrez. She was able to obtain some files from
an FBI investigation from the mid nineteen nineties and there's a lot of new information
in there that has never been made public before and is making me look at
the case in a different light. So that's why I wanted to revisit it
and have an all new discussion about it. And there will be a lot
to talk about jewels. Are you familiar with this case? You know?
I think I heard a podcast on this case maybe a year or two ago,
enough so that when you sent me the audio to listen to to familiarize
myself with it for when we discussed it later on, I was like,
oh, yeah, I definitely remember this, but the details are a little
bit murky, and I purpose fully didn't look it up or look into any
of it. I wanted it all to be fresh, and I wanted to
be surprised and have like genuine reactions for the listeners. Okay, so yeah,
I'll give you a lot of the details, and then we'll discuss certain
aspects of the case. And I'm going to start off by telling you the
official narrative of the case, which has been told for over thirty years now.
It's going to turn out that a lot of the stuff that I'm sharing
with you may have turned out to be false. But when we finished talking
about the known facts of the case, that's when I'm going to reveal the
new information and talk about how it takes the case in a totally different direction.
So we started in nineteen eighty six in the town of Gallup, New
Mexico, and our victim is nine year old Antonett Kayodeto, who was originally
born on Christmas Day in nineteen seventy six, so she would be nine years
old at this point. She's a biracial child because her father, Larry Astrado,
was Hispanic and her mother, Penny Kayodeto, belonged to the Navajo nation.
But Penny and Larry would wind up separating, and then Penny would go
on to have two more daughters with another man. And at this point,
Sadie, the second daughter, is seven years old and the youngest daughter,
Wendy, is five years old. I believe Penny was now raising her children
as a single mother, and even though Antonette is only nine years old at
this point, she is pretty much considered to be the mother figure in this
family. She is considered to be very mature for her age and helps a
lot around the house trying to take care of her younger sisters. And as
we're going to talk about, Penny did not have the best reputation as the
most responsible parent. She was known for going out a lot and partying,
so Antonette pretty much had to take the reins to ensure that Sadie and Wendy
were well taken care of. I think we see this dynamics so often with
single parent household, not necessarily that the parent is like an absent parent,
or that they've got a substance use disorder or anything like that, but just
that they're spread really, really thin across many different things. They're trying to
make a living, and then trying to be a mother to three daughters is
a huge endeavor, and I'm sure in retrospect, Penny looked back and was
like, of course, there were things that I could have done to be
a better mother, and maybe the pressure shouldn't have been on Antonette to be
that mother figure. But we often see the eldest child, particularly if it
is a female child, take on that role of mother to their younger siblings
when the mother isn't present for a variety of reasons, whether they'd be that
they're at work or either with a boyfriend, or they're abusing drugs or alcohol.
So it is a huge amount of responsibility to put on a young child
exactly. It really does not sound like Antonette had much of a childhood at
all. And this was a very low income housing area. The family did
not have a lot of money, so Penny was stretched thin and had to
rely on Antonette a lot. And as we're going to talk about later on,
one of the theories that would come up is that perhaps Penny decided that
having three kids was too much of a burden, and that's why she may
have decided to get of Antonette. But the whole thing began on the morning
of April the six, nineteen eighty six, which was a Sunday, and
all the children woke up at seven am in order to go to Bible school,
and right from the outset you see some alarm bells with the way of
this story unfolded because the previous evening, Penny had gone out to a bar
with some friends and left her children in the company of a babysitter until she
arrived home at around midnight, and that in itself is an unusual But the
story, which has been shared for a long time is that after Penny sent
the baby sit her home, she let the children stay up very late playing
with her and they apparently did not go to bed until around three am.
And that's very unusual for children who were aged nine, seven and five to
go to bed at three am and then be up four hours later in order
to go to a Bible school. And even though the house had four bedrooms,
it was apparently common practice for all three daughters to sleep in the same
bedroom with Penny, and her story has always been that they went to sleep
shortly four three am, but when she woke up at seven am, Antonette
was gone. I mean, there are those types of families that do all
like to sleep in like a communal type of a situation, all in one
bedroom. But if you have a house this large, you would think that
people the children would be sleeping in like a children's bedroom, you know,
like all the girls would be in there. They're kind of of that age
where you may want a little bit of independence rather than sleeping in a room
with your mother. And that's not to judge a situation in which parents choose
to do that. I mean, it is extremely atypical, but it does
work for some families. But what I do find really strange here, and
I honestly call bs on it, it just does not sound plausible, is
that after the babysitter goes home, you let the children stay up until three
am, Like you wouldn't even do that with like a sixteen year old.
You mean, maybe you let a sixteen year old stay up with their friends
and watch movies until they pass out, but you're not going to be like,
hey, you can stay up with me until three. It just doesn't
sound like it's grounded in reality exactly. And as we're going to find out
later on, at least one of the daughters would later tell a story which
says that that wasn't true at all, that this was even though this was
a story that Penny told the police, it's really untruthful. And it's like
it's one of those things where you're reading about the case and none of the
law enforcement people are treating it as particularly unusual, but you're like, did
I hear that right? Did these girls really stay up till three am?
Because I know when I was at age, I was not staying up that
later, particularly when I had to be up early the following morning. Oh
my gosh, I remember sitting on the top of the stairs. And my
parents got divorced when I was really young, like maybe when I was four.
They were divorced, separated when I was three, and I remember when
my mom was like dating this guy and I wanted to stay up later and
she'd be like, no, you got to go to bed. And I
remember sitting at the top of the stairs. And then later when my mom
moved out and my dad had the house, doing the same thing with my
dad and he'd be like, You've got to go to bed. And I
mean, I wouldn't say that my parents were extremely lenient, but I wouldn't
say that they were extremely strict either. And I think when I was that
age, I was, you know, you got to go to bed by
ten pm at the latest. How old was Antinette at this time? Old?
Nine years old? Yeah, they would have been like, you got
to be in bed by nine pm. Maybe if they let me stay up
a little bit later, it would have been ten pm. And I do
recognize that all families operate differently, but I'm going to go out on a
limb here and say, pretty much, no families are going to let their
nine years old and younger girls stay up until three am? What are you
doing until three am? Like, I don't, I just don't even understand
what one could be potentially doing. Are you having a movie marathon? Why
are you still awake? What is keeping you up at that time because most
people are going to be overcome with exhaustion by like one am. So it
just seems fishy or like you said, that law enforcement didn't key into this
is really interesting to me. Yeah. I think they probably did key into
it, but they just didn't let it be known publicly at that time.
But according to Penny, when she woke up, none of Antonette's clothing or
personal itings were missing. The only thing that was not there was the paint
nightgown she had last been seen wearing when she went to bed. Even though
Penny was certain that she had locked the front door and latched the adjacent screen
door before she went to bed, she noticed that these doors were now unlocked
and unlatched, So she started wondering maybe Antonette just decided to step out into
the morning air or something. But once she checked with all the neighbors and
found out that no one had seen Antonette, she got really concerned and finally
called the police in order to officially report her missing. So here is the
very first version of events. So what allegedly took place in the middle of
the night. We're going to hear a number of different stories, but at
the time, the one that was reported in the newspapers back in nineteen eighty
six was shared by the middle daughter, Sadie. He claimed that both she
and Antonette had been woken up in the middle of the night by the sound
of knocking at the front door, and when Antonette went to see who it
was, Sadie said she heard the sound of a man and a woman outside
identifying themselves as an aunt and an uncle and saying, hurry up, opened
the door, we're called out here, But apparently Antonette looked out the window,
did not recognize the man out there and refused to let them in,
and then returned to the bedroom. And then, according to Sadie, she
soon heard someone knocking on the front door a second time, and while she
recalled seeing Antonette get up and leave to go see who it was, Sadie
said that she stayed in bed and pretty much fell asleep immediately thereafter, so
she could not be certain if Antonette actually opened the door, but her family
said that Antonette would never opened the door for strangers, particularly in the middle
of the night. But what seems weird is that Penny said that she slept
through all this, that she did not recall hearing these two knocks at all.
And though if you look at the layout of the house, you'll see
that the bedroom she was in, the master bedroom, was very close to
the front door. So it seems weird that these two kids would be awoken
by these knocks but Penny would not hear anything. Was Penny a drink her,
Yeah, she was, so that has been pushed forward as an alternate
possibility. If she had been drinking heavily that night or doing drugs and passed
out, then potentially she could have slept through it. Yeah. I think
that is extremely possible, maybe even probable. Like you said, there are
different scenarios here. We've got more information. If she is indeed involved,
it very well could be a cover story. But on the other hand,
if she isn't involved, then it could be an excuse in that if she
was very intoxicated, and I mean if she could have been up till three
am drinking you're really exhausted, there may have been other substances involved, hence
the three am going to bedtime. It's just a little bit odd to be
sitting around your home, even just drinking alcohol if you're not having a party.
It's a little bizarre and there's just something that really doesn't feel right about
it. So perhaps she was just really really drunk and didn't hear the knocking
on the front door. I mean, I'm a heavy sleeper. I'm not
a big drinker, Like I'll have a drink on occasion, but I'm not
a drinker where I'm drinking to get drunk, like I fall asleep. I'm
really tired. The chance of me waking up in the middle of the night
to the sound of knocking at the door, I probably wouldn't hear it,
whereas like my husband is keyed into like every single little sound. Are you
like that? Are you a heavy sleeper? I can be. Yeah,
So I think it is plausible that I could have slept through some knocking if
I was really really tired. But it does seem kind of unusual that both
Sadi and Antonette could be woken up twice within the course of the same night
and Penny just did not recall hearing anything. Well, they probably weren't drunk,
yeah, exactly, hopefully hopefully, Yeah, I hope that Penny was
not that irresponsible a mother, so they launched a missing person's investigation from Antonette.
Could not find any trace of her, and the investigation remained at a
stand for about an entire year until April the twelfth, nineteen eighty seven,
when a dispatcher at the Gallup Police Department received a phone call from a very
frightened sounding girl who repeatedly said that her name was Antonette Kidito and that she
was calling from Albuquerque. The dispatcher tried to ask the girl for more details,
but then the girl was interrupted by the sound of an angry, unidentified
man who yelled, who said you could use the phone, and then the
girl screamed and some scuffling could be heard before the call was abruptly cut off.
And I know that I sent you a link to the audio file because
you can find the nine one one call on YouTube. So what are your
thoughts on it? It was terrifying, like just to hear the panic in
this little girl's voice. I one hundred percent think that it is a genuine
nine one one call. I don't believe for a second that that's a prank,
but something about it is strange and that it does feel like if if
it is a kidnapping, it's an atypical one, because what type of kidnapp
would a child then have the potential to access to telephone? It seems a
little bit strange. So there is just this one element of this kidnapping,
of this nine one one call that does feel a little bit odd or a
hate saying a typical over and over again, but that is exactly what it
feels like. Yeah, I mean, some people have speculated that the call
could have been some sort of mean spirited prank, because whenever a missing person's
cases make the news, there'll always be people who like decide to like mess
with the police or torment the families. But you listen to the call and
it's a little girl who does sound genuinely frightened. So if it was a
prank, it was a pretty well done one. One other thing worth mentioning
is that the call it apparently lasted over a total of forty seconds, but
because this is technology from nineteen eighty seven, it does not sound like the
dispatcher was able to trace it. But they've only released twenty seconds of the
audio, which is the one you can find on YouTube, but it's been
reported that the original recording contained the sound of another voice in the background,
which may have belonged to an elderly person, and they could be heard asking
who is on the line when the man yells at the crying girl. I
mean, I can understand withholding details from the public, but it seems strange
to me that this case is still unsolved after thirty seven years and we've never
heard the full forty second audio. We've only heard that twenty second snippet.
And all I could think was, why not play the voice of this other
person in the background, because maybe someone will recognize it and it could help
the case. I mean, this would potentially support the narrative that there could
be family involvement, because in a situation where say a family member takes another
family member, and especially when it's a young child, you might not have
a situation where you need to bind their hands and their feet. But in
a regular kidnapping, I would think that you would be sequestering that child somehow,
and you would be binding their hands and feet. You would be making
it in paulible for them to escape and impossible for them to be able to
call for help in any capacity. But that isn't what we see here,
if this is indeed genuine exactly, I mean, we have seen some other
documented kidnappings like Elizabeth Smart, where the captor keeps the victim in captivity for
so long and creates such a climate of fear that they eventually give them a
little freedom and allow them to do stuff like go out in public because they
think, I've put so much fear into this young person, she won't dare
try to escape or do anything to try to get away. And that could
have happened here. If Antonette was being held captive for a year, that
maybe her kidnapper decided to give her some more freedom and let her wander around
the house, but then she decided to use the opportunity to make a phone
call. The audio was played for Penny, and she said that she was
absolutely certain that the caller did sound like Antonette, but she claimed she did
not recognize the voice of the man on the recording. And a lot of
people have speculated, like, if she really was being held captive in Albuquerque,
why what she called the police departments and Gallop or why wouldn't she try
to call home or dial nine one one. My theory about that is that
in nineteen eighty seven, only fifty percent of the communities in the US had
nine one one, So I'm thinking that either Antonette didn't know how to use
it, or had never heard of it, or it was just not available
in that section of New Mexico. And another point worth mentioning is that her
family did not actually have a house phone at the time she was abducted,
and that Penny only installed one just in case any kidnappers called or the police
needed to get hold of her. So if Antonette's trying to escape and wanting
to phone for help, she's not going to phone her mother because her mother
did not have a phone. And I've kind of theorized that if she was
such a responsible person around the house, that perhaps at one point she memorized
the phone number for the Gallup Police Department and that's why it was the first
number she dialed when she was trying to call for help. Yeah, I
doubt she had like a phone book right there where she had a list of
potential police numbers that she could call, because it wasn't so easy as it
is today, where it's like you just called nine one one and you're connected.
So the fact that she would be responsible enough to remember a number.
I don't think we could get too bogged down in which number she called Gallup
or Albuquerque. I think the fact that she remembered one of them is pretty
amazing, if that is indeed a genuine phone call, which I do think.
The point you bring up is interesting when you bring up what you said
just a little while ago about the Elizabeth smartcase. Where you see the people
there, people who were held under darress eventually are given more freedoms, you
have Stockholm syndrome kind of kick in for some people. You have situations like
Colleen stan where when she was released after being sexually tortured and held in this
box for it was like years. I think when she was let go,
she just like left and didn't go to the police. Wasn't until I can't
remember the man, the guy's name Cameron maybe, yeah, I can't remember
his last name, but when his partner found Jesus or whatever, and she
decided to tell the pastor, and then the pastor got the police involved,
and then they talked to Colleen and then all of this came out and it
was like, whoa, she just is let go and she doesn't even go
to the police. But it's like he had told her this whole time that
this organization was watching her and that if she made a wrong move they were
going to come for her. They've got all this time to brainwash, so
it does make sense that she could have had a little bit of freedom,
and they might have trusted that she wouldn't be calculated enough at her young age
to wait for that moment to try to make her move. Well, now
that we're on the subject of captive girls being allowed to be taken out in
public, that brings us to the next development in the case, which took
place in nineteen ninety one. The FBI decided to release an age progressed a
composite sketch to show what Antonette would have looked like at fourteen, because she
had been missing for about five years at this point, and after this composite
sketch was released, the authorities were soon contacted by a waitress from a diner
in Carson City, Nevada, who claimed that she had served a teenage girl
matching Antonette's description. According to the waitress, the girl was in the company
of a white man and a white woman who she described as looking unkempt.
She said that to the girl who looked like Antonette like appeared to be really
shy and frightened and never looked up, and that when she was serving them,
she would do weird things like intentionally knocked her fork on the floor and
get the waitress to go pick it up, as if she was trying to
capture her attention. And then later on the couple and the girl left,
and when the waitress was coming to collect the plates and the check, she
found out that the girl had written a message under a napkin with the words
helped me and call the police. And of course, once this waitress saw
Antonette's age composite sketch, she thought she bears a resemblance to this girl,
so that's why she decided to contact the authorities. In retrospect. I do
not believe that this girl was Antonette. I think this was probably a mistaken
eyewitness siding. But it's kind of a compelling mystery within a mystery, because
it makes me wonder who was this girl and why was she writing these secret
messages in order to call for help. I mean, I guess there's any
number of reasons. It could have been a situation where she could be with
her family members and maybe she's being abused in some way. That's why she's
not looking up. She might not be kidnapped. It could be really simple,
or she could be another missing child who's being kidnapped. There is no
shortage of that when you look all across the US. You don't even have
to look locally. It could be somebody from another state. But it could
just be somebody so simple as there's violence in the home, they're being abused,
whether you know, psychologically, emotionally, sexually, and they really need
some kind of law enforcement intervention. Yeah, that's the vibe I got,
just the way that she was acting her body language, and she was in
public where it felt like she was fearful of the two people she was with
and was just trying to capture the waitresses attention. And it makes me feel
kind of bad for because if she wasn't Antonette, it makes me wonder what
happened to this girl. I hope she turned out all right. But one
reason that I am inclined to think that the eyewitness was mistaken is because we
see so many missing persons cases where they see a photograph of the missing victim
and then see someone that they're completely certain is the victim, but then it
turns out they were wrong. Well, this is a case where she's not
even judging the appearance on a current photo of Antonette. She's looking at an
age enhanced composit sketch to show up what Antonette might look like at age fourteen.
But we don't even know if those things are really accurate. So I
am inclined to believe that the waitress just saw another girl who kind of looked
like the sketch. I'm inclined to agree with you, just because we've got
eyewitness sightings that are so problematic. We've got nobody to substantiate this possibility that
this could be Antonette based on what she looked like. They're like, if
there was another couple of waitresses, maybe one of the cooks had seen her.
There was a few other people that were like, yeah, you're right,
it could be her. But again, when we're working off an imperfect
sketch here, this isn't like just a composite sketch of Antonette, like you
said, it's age progress. So they're just assuming she's going to progress like
that. There's a lot of variables that go into how someone ages and how
someone grows, how much sunlight they're getting, what type of food they're eating,
you know, their psychological state, how much exercise they're getting. There's
so many different factors. Just how well taken care of she is. You're
just going to assume that she's going to age in this linear way, but
that isn't always the case. Somebody could be stunted with their growth, or
they could they could flourish, they could grow taller and bigger, their facial
features could be slightly different for a variety of reasons. Say she breaks her
nose, So I just think that the probability of that actually being Antonette is
pretty low. Yeah, I totally agree, particularly when you learn the new
information that I'm going to share later on. But that exiting what is important
in the long run, because it compelled the Gallop Police Department to start performing
a new investigation and reinterview people connected to the case. And they also brought
in an FBI agent because if Antonette had been kidnapped and cross state lines,
it would technically make it a federal case under the FBI's jurisdiction. So the
lead detective from the gallop d a guy named Marty Escabelle, as well as
an FBI agent named Kevin Miles. They decided to interview Antonette's youngest sister,
Wendy, who would have only been five years old at the time her sister
went missing. And as you recall, the person who originally shared the story
about the knox on the door in the middle of the night was the middle
sister, Sadie, So I don't think Wendy had really talked about her all
that much. And what's interesting is that Escabelle and Miles decided to approach Wendy
while she was at her school playground. They decided not to question her in
the presence of her mother, and this is when Wendy just suddenly told an
all new story where she said that sometime during the early morning hours, she
was awakened by a knock at the front door, and when Antonett went to
answer it and asked who it was, a man replied that it was her
uncle Joe, and according to Wendy, she saw Antonette open the door.
But then Wendy then said that she saw two men grab Antonette and forced her
into a brown van which was parked in front of the house before they drove
away. So the investigators immediately asked Wendy, why did you wait five years
to tell us this story, and she said, well, I was worried
I was going to get in trouble. I saw that my mother was crying
a lot of the time and seemed upset, so and I was worried that
no one would believe me. So that's why I didn't say anything until now.
But she said that she didn't really get a good enough look at the
two men to provide much of a description. And it turned out that Antonette
did have an uncle, Joe, who was married to Penny's sister back in
nineteen eighty six, but after interviewing him, investigators learned that he had a
rock solid alibi on the night Antonette when missing, so they ruled him out
as being the person who went to the door that night or having any involvement
in Antonette's disappearance. But the story, of course, is so weird because
it completely predicts the story that Sadie originally provided back in nineteen eighty six.
That's so strange. It's so weird that there actually is an uncle show.
But I wonder if they checked his alibi back then, and that's why they
know that he had a rock solid alibi, because who could be asked about
where they were on a date five years ago and be like, oh,
yeah, I was exactly doing this one thing and be able to provide it
to police five years later. That just seems odd. But maybe they already
have that information, and they'd already interviewed all of the people close to Antoinette
and all of her family members and so on. But don't you think it's
like a little bit odd these two guys like creep up on the playground and
they go to interview her when she's unaccompanied by an adult. It seems a
little odd. I mean, I understand why they did it, because they're
trying to get a genuine answer, but all it sounds a little sketchy when
you do that to a child. And it's kind of funny because they show
a reenactment of it on Unsolved Mysteries, and as far as I can tell,
Wendy is playing herself and the two investigators are playing themselves. And while
they didn't say so publicly at the time, I get the feeling that maybe
they privately had some suspicions about Penny that they weren't telling the whole truth,
and this is why they decided to question Wendy without the presence of her mother,
thinking that, Okay, if we finally speak to her and Penny has
been withholding anything, then maybe Wendy will tell us. But instead she gives
them a completely different story about this uncle Joe, which no one was expecting.
And it is true though it does sound like that, like they did
look at Uncle Joe back in nineteen eighty six and then they checked him out
again five years later and became convinced that he did have a solid alibi and
wasn't involved. So the speculation was that if this story was true, then
whoever knocked on the door that night had intimate knowledge of Antonette's life and figured,
well, if she's comfortable with her uncle Joe and we says her uncle
Joe, then she'll be willing to open the door, and then we can
use this opportunity to kidnap her. Okay, question for you, what do
you think about the veracity of Wendy's statements given how young she was at the
time, Like how accurate do you think that they could potentially be or do
you think that there's a possibility that she may have conflated kind of other information
and kind of external information and built some narrative in her head because children have
been known to do that. Well, that was what I was thinking originally,
because like we've had this story from Sadie that there was a man and
a woman knocking on the door in the middle of the night, claiming to
be Antonette's aunt and uncle, saying let us in, we're called outside.
But then Antonette looked out the window saw that it was two people's she did
not recognize, and then refused to open the door. And it's never been
clarified if Wendy was awake or witnessed this particular event, but it could be
a thing where she was so young at the time, and maybe Sadie's told
her this story that a bunch of stuff has entered her head to convince her
that it was Uncle Joe knocking on the door that night, and then Antonette
answered, and who knows, maybe she had a vivid dream about it and
was convinced it was reality, and then all these years later that was the
story she shared with police. Because it's pretty easy to manipulate or implant false
memories with people, even in a way that isn't malicious. I mean,
psychologists do these experiments where they show people these pictures of their family on a
vacation in a certain place, and they like superimpose their heads in there,
and then they tell them about, oh, yes, no, you went
to Hawaii, you were there, don't you remember that vacation? And then
as time goes on, they start filling in the gaps. They'll start telling
you all these details of these vacations. They genuinely believe that this is something
that happened to them. It's really not hard to do. So if you're
like a seven year old child and you're having an older sibling tell you that,
it could be pretty easy to take on that information. But it is
also possible that she too saw something similar. It is true, and we'll
talk more about this later on, but I think there is also a possibility
that her mother could have fettered that story. And basically, he said,
if the police come to question you again, tell them that uncle someone claiming
to be Uncle Joe was at the door, even though it may not even
be true. So I first became familiar with this case when it was featured
on Unsolved Mysteries in December of nineteen ninety two. It had all this information
about Uncle Joe and the sighting of the diner, and it also played the
audio of the phone call. And watching it now, it's very bizarre because
at the time there had never been any public suspicion that Penny was considered to
be a suspect or that the authorities believe that she knew more than she was
telling. So watching it, you just assume that Penny is a really bereaved
mother who's doing everything possible to try to find her daughter. And there's this
very weird section where they show Penny Pink visit to a Navajo medicine woman who
was holding what they call a centuries old Navajo ceremony called the Crystal Ritual,
and which she is attempting to contact Antonette's spirit, and the medicine woman is
shown on camera saying that she believes Antonette is still alive and being held against
her will somewhere in the southwest United States, and may have even had her
own child at that point. And of course watching this at the time,
it's like, Okay, this is unsolved mysteries. They love looking at people
who supposedly have psychic abilities and stuff, so they're just kind of doing this
for the camera. But as the years went on, authorities would start directing
suspicion about Penny. So you have to wonder, is she visiting this Noveljo
Medicine a woman just to like give off the impression that she's innocent and that
she has no knowledge of what happened to her daughter. Yeah, it could
go either way. I mean, she could be trying to do too much
in the sense that she's trying to like just put herself out there, like
the lady doth protests too much. Let me just go around and like do
all of these things and try to look the most innocent. But it also
could just be this is part of her culture and she's really trying to connect
to it in order to speak to her daughter's spirit or in order to commune
with her in some type of way. So it could be interpreted in a
multitude of ways. If you're in the camp of thinking that she has something
to do with Antonette's disappearance, then it could just be like this lady is
doing this for optics type of a thing. Yeah, it's certainly possible in
retrospect that that's possibly what she was doing. I'd be really curious to know
who came up with the idea of taking the case to Unsolved Mysteries to begin
with, because if Penny had involvement in Antonette's disappearance or knew what happened to
her, I cannot see her deciding to want to get the national exposure for
the case on television because Unsawd Mysteries did play a role in solving a lot
of cold cases back during the nineteen nineties. But if it's a case where
law enforcement decided to take the case to the show, then I can see
Penny thinking, well, it's gonna look suspicious if I'm not interviewed and don't
go along with it, So I'm gonna try it for optics. I'm going
to play the role of the bereaved mother. What about Jule Kaylor. Did
he bring that case to Unsolved Mysteries or was that law enforcement? I don't
know that for certain. I have a feeling it wasn't. I think it
was probably Dottie's sister because she was working fervently to find her and he pretty
much figured, well, they're gonna put me on camera. I got nothing
to hide, so I'm just gonna say whatever the hell I want and the
rest is history. Yeah, that was shocking. I mean there are certain
people like Tim McClure, you know, in the Murder of Terry McClure that
didn't come off very well either. There's some where you're like, why are
you even doing an interview? Somebody should have told you no, but yet
they just go full force. And I think a lot of times it's a
lack of education. With Juel Kaylor, it was not that he was an
intelligent man. He just chose to do the interview, and I think he
was completely just like unaffected by the fact that he may come off in a
certain way. He just knew that there was nothing that could be brought forth
to be able to put him in prison. So he was just like a
little flagrant about it pretty much. Yeah, And in this case, it's
like, Okay, well, who's the one who's pushing this forward? Because
we do see people who just love attention, even though it might be like,
hey, I had something to do with what happened to my child,
it might be like what could I do to garner the most attention? Because
I'm somebody who feeds off of that. Well. I will say that at
the time I originally watched this, and for many years afterwards, I never
thought a Penny Kayidito and Duke Kale are in the same sentence. Like,
I didn't really feel suspicious about her at all. I mean, I did
find the story weird that Antonette woke up in the middle of the night to
answer the door, but Penny seemed like a genuinely grieving mother. It kind
of took me by surprise many years after the fact, when I found out
that the authorities were suspicious of her. She was going through a really rough
time after Antonette's disappearance, as she spent many years struggling with alcoholism and had
to be institutionalized a few times. And it was in April of nineteen ninety
nine when she passed away at the age of only forty six due to cirrhrosis
of liver and cardiac issues. And this is interesting, Apparently the FBI they
had interviewed her sometime in the mid nineteen nineties, and they said that they
were planning to reinterview her on her deathbed, but she passed away before they
could do so. So it seemed clear that they believe she might have had
some knowledge that she way have wanted to get off her chest, but they
just never got the opportunity to get it. Damn. Yeah, I know.
So that's sad that they never got that opportunity, and like just wanted
to touch on really quickly in regards to what you said earlier about how you
didn't think of Penny and Joel kaylor in like the same vein because you thought,
like, she's just a grieving mother. I think even if she is
involved, she still can be a grieving mother. I think one can look
back in retrospect and go, I have the I have these great regret.
This isn't what I should have done. I am, you know, falling
apart at the seems here emotionally. I mean, people do make mistakes.
I mean, that's a catastrophic mistake if you do that. But I think
that to assume that they aren't going to grieve, I think would be a
wrong assumption. I think unless you're you know, a psycho path, you're
probably going to have some sort of grief, even if they were kidnapped or
died at your hand. Oh yeah, Like I never got the sense that
Penny was a psychopath. I do believe that if she was complicit in her
daughter's disappearance or gave her away, that she eventually came to suffer great remorse
about it, and I think that's what led to herself destructive lifestyle and her
becoming an alcoholic and dying at such a young age. But it was kind
of weird because the detective who was interviewed on Unsolved Mysteries, Marty Escabell.
He was interviewed for a newspaper article in two and ten, and by that
point he had left the department and was no longer working on the case,
and for the first time he publicly expressed his suspicions about Penny, saying,
quote, I'm pretty confident that Penny had knowledge of who took Antonette based on
her failing a polygraph test and ministered by the FBI. End quote. So
in retrospect, you're now thinking it makes a lot more sense now that he
decided to go and interview Wendy alone while she was on the playground because he
had these suspicions about Penny all along. Yeah, and you know, as
an investigator, even though that's the wrong move in the sense that you can't
really go forward with anything that child says in court because they need to have
a guardian present. But if you're trying to just get to the crux of
the story here, and you really want to see if this is going to
kind of diverge from her initial statement, if there's going to be anything unique,
if there's going to be similarities, because what they're looking for is consistency.
Right. There may be other elements that you remember, but the general
like meat of the story should remain the same. It's when somebody's giving you
something completely different, You're going, WHOA, Okay, why why is this
different? And I think it's because of all those reasons that we discussed previously.
It could just be because she's conflated these memories with her sister Sadie.
It also could be because her mother has fed her this, and it also
could be because it is a genuine memory. Yeah, it is possible.
Like I'm sure they were just checking like every option that they had. But
it did surprise me though, when I was researching my podcast episode that other
police detectives did have some suspicions, not specifically about Penny, but against members
of the family. Because I found a nineteen eighty seven article in the Albuquerque
Journal where a police detective said that where he confirmed that no one had yet
been ruled out as a suspect, including family members, and he said this
quote, My gut feeling is that some family members may not be telling us
all they know. He said that police originally did not know that a number
of people had been in and out of the Kaiadido residence on the night of
Antonette's disappearance, And it was one of those things where Penny just did not
reveal this ahead of time and only like did it like days after the fact,
even though you should tell police everything if your child has gone missing.
So it sounds like they had suspicions about her from the get go, but
we're electing to keep it private until after Penny passed away. So murky and
like insidious. What would these family members want with Antonette? What did they
do with her if they were indeed involved? Did they hold her against her
will? Did they sell her into sex trafficking? Did they keep her for
some kind of nefarious purpose. It's just so convoluted and confusing, and I
hate to even think of the awful things that could have befallen this little girl.
But the fact that police seem to keep coming back to this common denominator
of the family. We hate as true crime podcasters to ever point the finger
at the family unless there is substantial evidence to prove their involvement. But when
law enforcement keep revisiting this and keep articulating their suspicions, there's potentially something there.
Oh yeah, Like it should be confirmed that Penny was never publicly named
as a suspect or person of interest, and that even if law enforcement had
their suspicions about her, they did not have any evidence to show that she
was involved, which is why they kind of kept their suspicions private. But
one other thing I wanted to address is that there's a rumor that has spread
about Penny for many, many years. I've seen it on online message boards
and inforums and discussions about this case that she reportedly purchased a new sports car
the very week after Antonette went missing, which it was true, would look
very very sketchy because this was a family living in poverty in a low income
housing area, and she should not have the money for a sports car.
So if it was true, it lends possible credence to the idea that maybe
she sold her daughter for money and was just kind of flaunting it now that
Antonette was gone. But the problem is, I've never been able to find
any media source, any newspaper article that shares this sports car story, and
I'm trying to figure out where it originated. And I think someone who claimed
to have inside knowledge of the case left this comment on web sluice many many
years ago, and I think people have taken this comment and spread it as
fact. But I just want to confirm here that I have no idea if
this story about Penny getting the sports car is true. I've never seen this
verify by any credible source, and I will go out on a limb and
say if she was involved, and that's a big if, Like we don't
know one hundred percent here, and I haven't heard the rest of the story
and what this new information is. But if you want to get rid of
a child because three children are too much of a burden, you're not going
to pick your oldest child, who takes on a motherly role and does a
lot of the work for you, unless it's for some type of monetary gain.
You would pick the youngest because they would be the most of a burden.
That would at least be my thought process. What would you think,
Yeah, I've got the same thing. I mean, even though I have
my suspicions about Penny, I do find it unusual that if she had too
many children that she would give away the oldest one who has helped her out
so much around the house and become the mother figure and is also going to
have a memory of her previous life, because theoretically, if she decided to
give away Wendy, she's still only five years old, so if she goes
off as someone else, she could forget her identity and lose all memories of
her family. So it just seems weird unless she encountered someone who had a
special interest in Antonette and then decided I'm going to give her away because that's
the only way i can make money and relieve myself of a burden. I
mean, maybe she knew somebody that was like, this is the age group
that I like, right, prepubescent, but not a five year old.
And I'm just speculating here. This is just an idea, but it just
seems like such an odd thing to give away a child who will be the
first out of the home, so you will have to provide the least amount
of support for her. Right because she's nine, she'll be out of the
house in nine years in theory, and so she'll be out. But a
five year old, you're going to have many more years of support, and
you have to do so much more for a five year old, especially in
a situation where you have your eldest daughter who's basically taken on the mom role
when you're out working or drinking or whatever she was doing. So it just
seems very strange that she would be the one to get rid of if you
felt like you had too many kids. I just think logically, you get
rid of the child who is the most work and that's typically the youngest.
And to expand upon that point, Antonette was described as being very headstrong and
mature for her age. So if that is actually her making the nine one
one call, that would kind of fit with her personality that even if she's
being held captive by someone, she's probably smart enough to say, if I
say the right things, he might give me some freedom to wander around the
house and I'll use this as an opportunity to call the police. And once
Again, that's a reason why it doesn't seem logical to give away a nine
year old child unless the person who abducted her specifically wanted her. And we're
going to talk about this later on, but there has been a suspect who
popped up on the radar who may have had an interest in Antonette. Well,
before I talk about that part, I wanted to mention that in twenty
sixteen, the Albuquerque Journal decided to run a thirtieth anniversary article of Antonette's disappearance,
and Wendy decided to speak about the case for the first time, I
believe the first time she had been interviewed since the Unsolved Mystery segment back in
nineteen ninety two, and Wendy revealed that she had also led a very rough
life with issues with substance abuse with drugs and alcohol, and like her mother,
she also had been institutionalized for some point. She even said as she
was growing up that her and Penny would become so bereaved about what happened to
Antonette that they would actually drink together or get high together in order to numb
the pain, because her disappearance was just causing so much grief for the family.
By this point, Wendy had had a total of five children, and
there were times where the children were actually taken away from her by the state,
and she also got involved with criminal activity where and she was affiliated with
a gang at some point. But by twenty sixteen, she said she had
finally cleaned her life up. She was letam in California with her husband and
her children. She had reconciled with them, and she finally spoke about the
case and how it led her down such a self destructive lifestyle that she finally
checked herself into rehab and finally reconnected with her kids and was now living a
happy life. But she still wanted to find out what happened to her sister.
But of course she said that after all this time, she didn't have
any real insight of what happened. She was now saying that she didn't really
believe that the Uncle Joe knock actually happened. She was kind of vague about
how she said it. She didn't really say that it didn't happen. She
just says that maybe it wasn't my uncle Joe who showed up at the house
that night. But her most interesting comment is that she said she was now
as strange from her other sister, Sadie, who had not talked about the
case in many, many years. I don't think she had gone on the
record since nineteen eighty six. And as we're going to talk about momentarily,
Sadie has recently come out with some new insights which will cause you to look
at the case in a different light. I was just going to say,
I really want to hear what Sadie has to say. She was the middle
child, right, so she would have a little more insight, and she
was the one who had a story right from the jump. So I would
give a little more veracity to the statements of Sadie than that of Wendy,
just because of the age different. Sadie was seven, Wendy was five.
Your recollection of things at the age of five is kind of murky at best,
but it gets a little more solid, I think by the age of
seven. So I'm really interested to hear what she has to say and why
the two of them are strange. Well, I still don't know why they
were estranged. I get the feeling they might have different outlooks on what they
believe happened to Antonette, and as Sadie has recently been interviewed, but I
still have no idea if she's reconciled with Wendy. But I can kind of
understand because Wendy's fell into substance abuse issues in criminal activity, and as far
as I know, Sadie has stayed away from that. But I get the
sense that Wendy and Penny we're like getting into drugs and alcohol to deal with
the grief of losing Antonette, whereas Sadie wanted to handle things differently, and
that's probably why she became a strange from her family. This new information that
came out I mentioned in the intro. They launched a new YouTube series called
Disappear Into Darkness, which had a two part series about Antonette Kaidito's disappearance,
and it was hosted by a journalist named Crystal Gutierrez, who finally got some
access to some files from the FBI, because, like I mentioned, during
the mid nineteen nineties, they did an interview with Penny where she supposedly failed
a polygraph and they did an in depth exploration into her story. But this
investigation, none of the results were released publicly until this very moment, and
most importantly, Crystal Gautierrez actually tracked down Sadie and got an interview with her,
and she agreed to go on the record for the first time and tell
a different version of events that we've heard for the past thirty seven years.
Wow, that is pretty insane to go that long and to be radio silent.
There's a variety of reasons, and I can never judge a family member,
especially a sibling who was a young child and incredibly traumatized from that.
But to find that moment and to find that strength to go I want to
tell my story, that is so powerful exactly, And some of the stuff
that Sadie says here is pretty shocking and it makes you wonder, like why
she never mentioned it earlier. But I guess she was just dealing with so
much grief that she just did not feel comfortable going on the record about this
and making it public. So I think this is about a good point to
end Part one. So join us next week for Part two as we continue
to discuss the unsolved disappearance of Antonette Kayadito, Robin, do you want to
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