Christie Wilson's body found on killer's property 15 years after teen went missing, family marks 'day of peace'
After 15 long years, the family of Christie Wilson, California woman who was abducted and murdered as she left a casino, can celebrate "a day of peace" after authorities announced they found her body in the yard of the same man who was convicted of killing her. While the development may not hold any significant ramifications from a legal point of view, it offers Wilson's family a chance to give her the goodbye she deserved and prosecutors the physical proof they had been seeking all these years to back their assertion that they had convicted the right man.
Wilson had been 27-years-old when she disappeared in the early hours of October 5, 2005, from the Thunder Valley Casino in unincorporated Placer County in Whitney, California near the city of Lincoln following a night of gambling, reported SF Gate. A missing person report led to investigators pulling surveillance footage from the casino and the immediate identification of a suspect: Mario Flavio Garcia, a 53-year-old IT specialist who had been working as a project manager for Sutter Health, was married with two children, and a youth soccer coach.
As Wilson enjoyed herself at the casino, investigators had noticed a man repeatedly trying to strike a conversation with her throughout the night, and eventually, leaving with her at around 1 am. Having identified him as Garcia via Thunder Valley's player membership system, they obtained a warrant on his car and uncovered physical evidence that seemingly tied him to her disappearance, including her hair and spots of her blood.
They also spoke to his co-workers, who told them that a day after Wilson disappeared, Garcia had shown up to work with scratches on his hand and a bruise under one eye that he claimed he suffered after falling out of a tree he was trimming. Nevertheless, without a body, the evidence against him was still circumstantial, which meant prosecutors had the unenviable task of convincing a jury that he had murdered Wilson without definitive physical proof.
They succeeded. In 2007, Garcia was found guilty of first-degree murder and possession of a deadly weapon, a collapsible baton that was found in his car, making the case the first in Placer County history where prosecutors had secured a murder conviction without a body.
That ruling followed a two-month trial that included 90 witnesses, as well as the 53-year-old making the fatal mistake of taking to the stand in his defense. The jury later shared they believed he was lying when he claimed he said goodbye to Wilson in the parking lot that night and left.
Garcia was subsequently sentenced to 59 years to life but investigators were still irked that they had not found Wilson's body. They had looked for years for clues to its location and used cadaver dogs, helicopters, divers, and other methods to search numerous places in Placer and Nevada counties, including the 4.5-acre Garcia property, without success.
But earlier this week, thanks to new technology from ground-penetrating radar, as well as some guidance from an unidentified figure, authorities refocused their search on a particular area of his property and found skeletal remains. After they were moved to the Placer County morgue for examination, dental records confirmed they belonged to Wilson.
At a press conference in Auburn with the Wilson family and District Attorney Morgan Gire, Placer County Sheriff Devon Bell announced the finding, which he said was made without Garcia's assistance. He said the now-67-year-old is a "convicted murderer who refused to cooperate, who would not supply any information to contribute to closure for the family" and "is exactly where he needs to be -- prison."
Gire similarly stressed that this development was the culmination of more than a decade of hard work from the authorities. "I want to make it very clear that finding Christie was the result of efforts of the Sheriff’s Office and the D.A.’s office, no one else, not the person responsible for her death," he said, according to the Sacramento Bee. "No one ever gave up looking. It was everyone's mission to find her... Today, the family can begin to grieve properly."
Wilson's mother, Debbie Boyd, said the announcement would mark a "day of peace" for their family. "It’s a peace we haven’t had, and we are so happy to finally be able to close this chapter of torment and be able to move forward with great thanksgiving,” she said. “Today is a day that absolutely reflects some of the greatest level of perseverance in police work that a victim’s family could ever ask for.”