Ashley Flowers

They take Melissa's phones, they take Mark's boots, and they run a presumptive test on that stain by the fish tank, which comes back positive for blood.

So they send out swabs of that for further testing.

Meanwhile, the Mondragons decide to organize a search party, which kicks off at Melissa's parents' house on Saturday, June 28th.

Now, Mark says he didn't even know that that was happening.

I guess he stumbled across news of it on Facebook.

But once he does, he shows up.

Not to help them look for his missing wife, though.

According to the Mondragons, he comes to tell them that he's figured it all out and he is sure that Melissa left on her own.

He says he'd spent some time going through her paperwork and discovered that their finances were in far worse shape than he had actually realized.

I don't think those words, don't look for her, came out of his mouth.

But he is there to tell them why he thinks she left on her own.

Right.

But now he wants them to understand like the severity of it, which he says he is just now finally like getting a good grasp of, though, like the signs seem to have been there.

So starting a couple of years back, that's when Mark says he got this humiliating wake up call.

He had taken some co-workers out to lunch, tried to pay, and his cards were declined.

He looked into it and learned that his checking and credit accounts were overdrawn and that his savings account had been drained.

When he confronted Melissa about it, she told him that she'd used the savings to pay their taxes, an explanation that he accepted.

But it rattled him enough that he decided to separate their finances.

He told us that he took over the major bills like vehicle payments, health insurance, and he left Melissa to handle the smaller monthly expenses.

But by June of 2025, there were at least two huge signs that things had only gotten worse.