The family of Mireslaba Vasquez Ramirez can finally put her to rest following DNA test that proved the skeletal remains discovered last summer were indeed their missing daughter.
Tuesday the FBI released the long awaited results of tests comparing the DNA gleaned from the remains with those of Ramirez’s family.
“It’s good to identify this woman,” Tooele County Sheriff Frank Park said. “This progress in the investigation by my detectives has helped bring some closure to the family and will hopefully help bring this case to a close.”
Mireslaba Vasquez Ramirez was a 21 dealer at Wendover’s State Line Casino and a mother of three when she was first reported missing by her estranged husband Jose Ramirez Rodriguez. She was 29 years old at the time of her disappearance.
According to then Tooele County Sheriff Frank Scharmann, Ramirez-Rodriguez told friends a day later that the woman jumped out of their car near the Ibapah Indian Reservation about 40 miles south of Wendover on alternate US Route 93.
Scharmann added Rodriguez never reported his wife missing before he disappeared a day later. Police, Scharmann said, immediately became suspicious of the man’s story since they had already learned that the woman told friends that the couple was planning to travel to Elko 110 miles to the west of Elko on Interstate 80. A week after the disappearance the Tooele County District Attorney’s office charged Rodriguez with felony kidnapping.
The man has not been heard or seen since his wife’s disappearance almost 12 years ago. The man has not been heard or seen since his wife’s disappearance almost 12 years ago, however some in Wendover’s tight knit Mexican community believe that since his disappearance in 1998, the man has returned to Wendover to exact more revenge on his wife’s alleged infidelity.
While police have never been notified at least one other death, a suicide in her supposed lover’s family is popularly blamed on Rodriguez.
A four-day search of the very rugged Gold Hill area where Mireslaba Vasquez Ramirez was said to have fled yielded a pair of earrings were positively identified as belonging to the missing mother of three. Apart from the jewelry however search parties found no signs of the woman.
Some fifty miles separate the body from her earrings which would mean her killer made two separate dumps in opposite directions on very little traveled side roads.
According to one investigator familiar with the case the only possible reasons for the distances and remote locations between the body and the earrings was to stymie police and lay a false trail away from the body.
A week after it was begun the search effort was scaled back and some law enforcement officers began to openly speculate that the woman might have been killed.
Investigators said they were also frustrated by the lack of cooperation from Wendover’s large Mexican community immediately after her reported disappearance.
According to investigators at the time they hit virtual stonewall from the couples relatives and friends when asking for information about either the suspected victim or the suspected killer.
According to sources within Wendover’s tight knit Mexican immigrant community the motive behind the woman’s possible murder and also for the lack of cooperation with police was that her husband believed she had been unfaithful.
While adultery has always been grounds for divorce and until the last half of the 20th century a crime in American culture, the magnitude of the act is almost insignificant when compared to how it is viewed in Latin or Middle Eastern cultures. In those cultures even today a woman’s chastity is a direct reflection of her father’s, brother’s and if married husband’s honor. As such even suspected infidelity is often punished by death at the hands of the closest male relative.
Instead of being considered a murderer, the assailant is considered a defender of his own and his family’s honor by the community. And without help from the community chances the odds against either of the couple being found grow almost insurmountable.
According to then Sheriff Scharmann just one week before she went missing, her husband Jose Ramirez Rodriguez was arrested for pistol whipping another man in the State Line who Rodriguez suspected of having an affair with his wife.
According to the missing woman’s parents the couple’s marriage was marred with domestic violence.
Jesus Vasquez Sr. said his daughter at the time endured a violent marriage in recent years. Rodriguez and Ramirez had been married about 10 years, he said.
“When they were first married, it was a good relationship, then things went bad,” Vasquez said in Spanish. “He would often hit her.”
While the missing woman was the primary bread winner in the family, her husband occasionally worked at the potash plant.
In the late 1990’s work at the plant was scale back dramatically and some two dozen workers lost their jobs. In addition to jobs losses some of the plants canals extending for miles into the salt flats were abandoned.
Intrepid Potash the current owners of the property told investigators when the body was discovered that they haven’t done work in that area for quite some time.
“It was by a canal, but it was not in the water. It was just laying face-down, and it had been there … Uncovered, not buried, for quite a while,” said Tooele County Sheriff Frank Park.