When Roxanne Heredia’s older sister vanished more than a decade ago, she was still too young to fear the worst.
“What I remember is just that one day she was here, and then one day she wasn’t, and we were looking for her, my mom was putting posters everywhere, looking everywhere, taking phone calls,” she recalled in an interview with The Daily Beast.
In those initial hours after 13-year-old Alexandra Anaya went missing on Aug. 13, 2005, police believed the teenager may have left her home in Hammond, Indiana, of her own accord.
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Her mother, Sandra Anaya, thought they might be right, even though she couldn’t think of any reason why her daughter would just up and leave.
“I don’t know why she would [run away], but I was like, well she’s a teenager, and we’ve all been there,” she said in a 2018 interview with Case Files Chicago.
The family didn’t wait around to see if the police department’s prediction was right, however. In addition to offering a reward for any information, Heredia—who was only 6 at the time—recalled scouring the neighborhood with her mother and her twin sister, Romi.
“We were up whole nights just going through the streets looking for her,” she told The Daily Beast.
They contacted all the teen’s friends, went to their houses, and put the word out in the neighborhood that they needed to find their big sister.
But even then, there seemed to be more-or-less innocuous explanations for the seventh-grader’s absence. Maybe she had just entered the rebellious phase of adolescence. Maybe she was at a friend’s house, and they were hiding her.
“We didn’t think anything of it, we were just like, ‘Oh, Alex is being bad. Where did she go?’ We thought she was going to come home,” Heredia recalled.
Nothing out of the ordinary appeared to have happened, at least immediately before Alexandra vanished. She’d eaten White Castle with her mother late that night, and when her mother left the house again in the early hours of the next morning, the teen had said she was going to bed.
But when her mother got back, the 13-year-old was gone.
“I went inside and she wasn’t inside her room… I started getting worried, ‘cause she would never just leave,” Sandra Anaya recalled in the 2018 interview.
About a week after Alexandra Anaya’s disappearance, even police had started to lose hope that the Clark Middle School student had simply run away. She’d never been one to act out, and it was becoming clear she didn’t leave on her own after all.
“We’re concerned,” then-Hammond Police Chief Brian Miller said in a press conference at the time. “She has a decent relationship with her mom. There’s no evidence they were fighting, so the circumstances are unusual.”
Just three days after the teen’s disappearance, while police in Hammond fielded tips in their search and Anaya’s family kept chasing down leads, a group of boaters in Chicago noticed something strange in the water.
It was a human torso wrapped in chains. The limbs and head had all been severed, and were not found at the scene.
The body was found floating in the Little Calumet River, part of a waterway connecting Hammond and Chicago.
Sandra Anaya was immediately alerted to the discovery and asked to provide a DNA sample to help with identification, according to local news reports from that time.
“My sister said, ‘I don’t know why you want it, because that’s not my daughter,’” Alexandra’s aunt, Martha Urbina, told NWI Times. “But I knew because of the location.”
The DNA results wouldn’t come back for another several weeks, leaving Alexandra’s family in an agonizing limbo that would never end—only get worse.
“I got a phone call, and she just said, ‘Unfortunately, it is your daughter,’” Sandra Anaya told Case Files Chicago. “I really don’t remember a lot. I just know that the officers picked me up off the floor.”
Heredia recalled that day almost as if it were a storm, lashing and uprooting everything in its path, and changing the world as she knew it forever.
She immediately knew something was wrong when her cousin, who was babysitting her and her sister, received a phone call and began to cry uncontrollably. Then, she said, her mom “came home and she just told us that she knows we’re little and she knows we’re not going to understand … but Alex passed away and she wasn’t going to be with us anymore.”
With the devastating news, the family clung to the only thing they could—to at least be able to lay Alexandra to rest. But they couldn’t even do that, because police could never find the rest of the teen’s body.
“We don’t know what we’re going to do,” Urbina, the aunt, told NWI Times at the time. “My sister wants to see her face and her long hair.”
Anaya said she had a nagging feeling her daughter was never able to truly “rest in peace.”
“Her hands are somewhere else. Her head is somewhere else,” the mother was quoted as telling the outlet.
Even now, more than 15 years later, the parts of Alexandra that her family remember with the most warmth–her bright eyes, glowing smile–are not among the cremated remains they keep in urns.
“We have her ashes but we only have certain parts of her body. We’re missing her head, we’re missing her legs and her arms,” Roxanne Heredia told The Daily Beast.
Sixteen of Alexandra’s birthdays have passed since the discovery of her body, and the family has been forced to go through each one with the persistent pain of knowing no one is behind bars for her murder. That, and that whoever killed her was a monster.
“The real horrifying stuff is what he did to her, I just couldn’t believe he was that vicious,” retired Hammond Police Lt. Ron Johnson told The Daily Beast. Johnson probed the case when it was first a missing person’s case, and then continued to investigate the teen’s murder.
No one really knows what the teen went through in the moments leading up to her death, and because so much of her body was never found, an autopsy could only reveal so much about her injuries, Johnson said.
That she’d been decapitated, for instance. And sexually assaulted.
And that just a short time earlier, she’d been munching on French fries with her mother. Per local media reports at the time, they were still undigested in her stomach at the time she was killed, a grim reminder of how quickly the horror of that night unfolded.
Her cause of death remains unknown. As do the particular circumstances of how she wound up about 10 miles from home in the Little Calumet River in Chicago, and if she was lured out of her home or taken by force.
“I vaguely remember them interviewing us when we were little, asking us if we remember anything, did we wake up .. and I don’t remember anything. I think we were sound asleep, knocked out,” Roxanne Heredia told The Daily Beast.
Johnson, the ex-cop, said no one expected the teen’s disappearance to end the way it did.
“You don’t think something like that [would happen],” he told The Daily Beast. “We had no reason to think that she was hurt or taken away or anything” early on.
No one has ever been charged in the 13-year-old’s murder. Her mother’s ex-boyfriend, Rudolfo Heredia, was hit with stalking charges shortly after Alexandra Anaya’s death, but he was found not guilty, and he was never officially named as a suspect nor a person of interest in connection with the teenager’s disappearance.
In a criminal complaint filed with the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Indiana at the time, prosecutors alleged that Rudolfo had been stalking Sandra Anaya prior to her daughter’s murder. Prosecutors noted the teen’s remains were found a few blocks from his residence in Riverdale, Illinois. In a September 2005 interview with Chicago police detectives, Heredia admitted to “following and watching” Sandra Anaya at her home on several occasions, and to making a copy of the key to enter the residence, according to the complaint.
The complaint listed five calls made from Heredia’s home telephone number to Sandra Anaya’s residence on the night of Alexandra Anaya’s disappearance. Sandra Anaya told investigators she had broken up with Heredia the past spring after Alexandra Anaya told her he’d been sexually abusing her for years, according to the criminal complaint. He was never charged with any sex crimes.
Heredia was not the biological father of Alexandra Anaya, though he and Sandra Anaya had twin daughters, Roxanne and Romi. Roxanne Heredia told The Daily Beast she has not had contact with her father since around the time of his trial.
“Anaya said that both she and her daughter were afraid of Heredia,” the complaint noted, referring to Alexandra.
Heredia was charged with “travel in interstate commerce for the purpose of killing, injuring, harassing, or intimidating Sandra Anaya” and he pleaded not guilty to the charge. In January 2006, a jury found him not guilty. Alexandra Anaya’s murder had not been brought up during the trial, by either the defense or prosecution.
Arlington Foley, Rudolfo’s lawyer during the federal stalking trial, declined to comment for this article, citing client-attorney privilege. Attempts to reach Rudolfo directly were unsuccessful, as were attempts to reach his sister, Norma Heredia, who defended him against the stalking allegations prior to his 2005 trial. Sylvia Van Witzenburg, a retired Chicago Police detective who questioned Heredia after Anaya’s body was found, said the man repeatedly denied any involvement in the murder.
Indeed, no suspects were ever named in the grisly killing. And the case was plagued by a lack of forensic evidence from the get-go, Van Witzenburg noted.
“All that we ever had was her torso,” she told The Daily Beast. “We never found what he cut her up with. I’m sure it was in the bottom of the river, too.”
Van Witzenburg added that the case has stayed with her over the years, and the lack of charges always bothered her.
Asked if she thinks someone might eventually confess or come forward with evidence, Van Witzenburg said, “I pray they do.”
The fact that no one has been held accountable is an open wound for Alexandra’s family.
“It’s tragic, ‘cause she didn’t do nothing to nobody, she was 13. She didn’t deserve what she went through,” Roxanne Heredia said, her voice breaking.
Her tone changed as she described Alexandra while she was still alive, not as the victim of a brutal murder.
“She was basically like my mom. I mean, My mom worked two jobs, she was always at work, so [Alex] would take care of us,” she said of herself and her twin sister, Romi.
“She would feed us, teach us stuff. She taught us our colors, our ABCs, our numbers… I know we would get on her nerves. She had to take us everywhere she went, cause my mom was at work. We were her annoying little sisters,” she continued, her smile almost audible on the other end of the phone.
In August 2016, the FBI and the Chicago Police Department announced the creation of a new task force that would take on the Anaya case.
“We’re going to bring justice to this crime,” FBI Special Agent Courtney Corbett said at a press conference unveiling the initiative.
Investigators doubled down on efforts to solve the case, re-interviewing those who were in Alexandra Anaya’s life and re-submitting evidence for testing.
They also revealed a clue that had previously been withheld from the public: The 13-year-old had been wearing a gold religious medallion when she was killed, and it was never found, meaning her killer might have hung on to it.
A spokesperson for the FBI’s Chicago division declined to comment on whether there were any new developments in the case since the 2016 announcement.
“We continue to seek new information regarding her murder and offer a $10,000 reward for information that may lead to an arrest and conviction,” FBI spokesperson Siobhan Johnson said.
The Chicago Police Department did not respond to a request for comment. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Indiana declined to comment.
Johnson, now retired, said he has not been involved in the case for several years, but he believes there is a great deal of evidence that has been held back from the public to protect the integrity of the investigation.
“I’m sure there’s certain things they don’t want out there because nobody knows it,” he said, adding that the killer likely “reads this stuff, too.”
The ex-cop added that the Anaya case was part of the reason he decided to finally retire after decades in law enforcement. “It was definitely the most stressful and painful of my 33 years,” he told The Daily Beast.
“The guy’s still walking the streets or whatever he’s doing now,” Johnson continued. “And I’m sure this is not the first time he did it, if he did this kind of vicious crime. It can’t be the first time he did it, ’cause you don’t just do something like that out of the blue, you know.”
Roxanne Heredia lives with the fear of knowing her sister’s killer is still out there every day.
“I always had this idea that he was going to come back and he was going to do something to us,” she told The Daily Beast.
The family moved to Texas for several years to escape the constant reminders of the murder, Roxanne said, but they returned to the Chicago area a few years ago.
And while she said she “got to be more accepting” of what happened as she got older, that haunted feeling has persisted, especially now that she’s back in the shadow of her sister’s murder—and potentially on the turf of the murderer.
“What if one day I just ran into him, or I just see him, would he recognize me?”
