Rita Gutierrez-Garcia, a mother of three from Colorado, vanished under mysterious circumstances after an evening spent with family. Her disappearance left few leads for investigators until another woman’s chilling account of survival brought crucial insight into the case. This connection, though tragic, eventually unraveled the enigma behind Gutierrez-Garcia’s fate, as detailed in a recent episode of Dateline: Secrets Uncovered on Oxygen.

Although Gutierrez-Garcia and the other woman were strangers, their lives became intertwined through their encounters with the same dangerous individual. Unfortunately, only one of them survived to recount the ordeal, shedding light on the peril both women faced.

When Gutierrez-Garcia still hadn’t returned the next day, Romero went to talk with her daughter’s ex-boyfriend, but he insisted he hadn’t seen her.

Panicked, Romero turned to the Longmont Police Department for help.

A Violent Attack Four Months Earlier

As Det. Cody Clark set out to learn more about Gutierrez-Garcia’s life, he discovered that she was a responsible single mom, working two jobs to help support her sons and hoping to become a paralegal.

“It didn’t make any sense right off the bat,” Clark said of her sudden disappearance. “But it wasn’t anything that pointed to us thinking that there was any foul play or anything nefarious going on either.”

As the days passed without any sign of her, Clark looked into the men in Gutierrez-Garcia’s life, but each one seemed to have an alibi for the early morning hours of March 18 when the 34-year-old disappeared. 

Then, Clark learned that just four months before Gutierrez-Garcia disappeared, another woman endured a horrifying attack after spending a night out with friends at the same group of bars. 

As Kaylene would later tell Dateline Correspondent Keith Morrison, after going to the bars on Thanksgiving night in 2017, her group of friends moved to an after party at a nearby house. That’s where Kaylene said she started to feel confused, nauseous and disoriented and wanted to go home. She’d arranged to call a friend for a ride earlier that night, but her phone was dead, so she plugged the phone in to charge it and then went outside to get some fresh air, hoping to clear her head.

That’s when a man she’d met at the bars earlier that night, came outside and handed her the phone and her purse and said they had to leave because something bad was happening inside. 

“He picked me up and just started walking with me, arm around my waist, and was like carrying me because I could hardly walk or stand,” she remembered. “I was starting to get scared, but I didn’t know what to do.”

He drove her to a house, took her inside and told her she could plug in her phone at the top of an upstairs hallway, but when she got up to the second floor, he pushed her into a bedroom, threw her onto a bed and began to repeatedly strangle her as he raped her.

“You can’t even swallow, you can’t breathe,” she remembered. “You can’t make sound and it just goes black.” 

Kaylene said the man told her that he was going to kill her, but when he turned away she was able to escape. She ran down the stairs and encountered an unexpected sight: another man, a woman and some children in the living room.

Kaylene promised not to call the cops and the man who had been in the living room agreed to drive her home. 

When they were stopped at an intersection, Kaylene leapt from the car and ran to her mother’s house, where they called police. Detective Sandie Jones met them at the hospital. 

“It was the worst I’d ever seen,” Jones recalled. “Her eyes had hemorrhaged and she had marks on the back of her neck. She had bruises on her arms and her legs.” 

The nurses took photos of the injuries and performed a rape kit.

After locating the owner of the after-party house, Jones was able to identify the man that left with Kaylene as Juan Figueroa, a former cadet in the Longmont Police community outreach program.

Figueroa had been dismissed from the program designed for aspiring police officers after he was caught stealing a taser. Jones tried to locate him, but, by then, Figueroa had gone into hiding. 

Rita Gutierrez-Garcia is Spotted With Juan Figueroa

Four months later, Gutierrez-Garcia disappeared. According to investigators, she was spotted on surveillance footage at the bar talking to a man who was trying to hit on her. Her cousin remembered the man introduced himself as Juan Figueroa. Although Gutierrez-Garcia dismissed his advances, her cousin remembered Figueroa was in the parking lot around 2 a.m. when Gutierrez-Garcia was waiting for her ride to pick her up.

According to her phone records that night, Gutierrez-Garcia’s phone had been stationary for about 20 minutes sometime after 2:30 a.m. in the same spot where surveillance footage captured a white pickup truck, with distinctive orange construction lights across the top. When Gutierrez-Garcia’s phone began moving at a quick pace at 3:03 a.m., detectives saw the same truck—which was later linked to Figueroa—leaving the area.

“He wasn’t just the last person seen with her before she left,” Clark said, “but that he may have been the last person with her period.”

Detectives also learned that Gutierrez-Garcia’s phone called 911 around 3:07 a.m., but there was no one there when the dispatcher answered. The call center tried to called the number back twice, but there was no answer and authorities were unable to trace the call.