LEXINGTON, S.C. — It was an unthinkable incident that occurred on the night of June 5, 1986.
An intruder broke into a home on South Lake Drive in Lexington County, entering through a broken window.
In one of the bedrooms, four-year-old Jessica Gutierrez was asleep in a bed next to her sister Rebecca.
Investigators said the intruder entered the children's bedroom and was able to lift the sleeping Jessica out of her bed and exit the home through the front door without rousing the girls' mother.
Jessica's mother awoke the next morning to find her young daughter missing, never to be seen again.
The case went cold until January 2022, when the Lexington County Sheriff's Department finally made an arrest. Thomas Eric McDowell, then 61, was arrested on suspicion of burglary and the kidnapping and murder of Jessica. He was taken into custody by the Wake Forest Police Department at his home about 20 miles north of Raleigh, North Carolina, and transferred to the Lexington County Detention Center.
During the initial investigation, the then six-year-old Rebecca told detectives she remembered seeing a man take Jessica out of the bed and carry her away. McDowell was living in Lexington County in 1986.
"We took a fresh look at this case in September when FBI special agents and analysts assigned to its specialized Child Abduction Rapid Deployment team and prosecutors with the South Carolina Attorney General's Office came to Lexington," Lexington County Sheriff Jay Koon said at the time of McDowell's arrest. "SLED agents also joined us in reviewing initial reports and interviewing more than 125 people. Because of the work we did, coming together as a team, we were able to sort and connect more pieces of the puzzle about what happened to Jessica all those years ago."
The case will be handled by the Attorney General's Office, which has held the case since 2015.