Chapter 1: What happened to Melissa Casias on June 26, 2025?
All right, everyone, if you have been waiting for the perfect moment to pick up my latest novel, The Missing Half, this is it because it is officially out on paperback and there is more waiting for you inside. There is nothing better than getting cozy and diving into a story that you can't put down. And now you can take the missing half anywhere.
Crack the spine, roll the cover, and lose yourself in a mystery that will keep you guessing until the very end. And in paperback, the ending extends beyond where the story has before. And just when you think you have it all figured out, now there is a new chapter. One more piece of the puzzle. One more twist that you didn't see coming.
If you're ready for a story full of secrets, surprises, and a final turn that will stay with you, grab your paperback copy of The Missing Half now, wherever books are sold. Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. Listen, last year, I received an email from a crime junkie.
A woman named Jasmine wanted help because her aunt had recently vanished from Taos County, New Mexico, and no one could agree on what happened to her. But everyone did agree to speak with us because at the heart of it, they all say they want to know what happened to her. Her husband and her daughter think she left on her own. Her other family believes that she was a victim of foul play.
And I'll be honest with you, I don't know what to believe. Each side believes their theory so fervently that I'm afraid my recounting of the facts as I know them are going to upset everyone. Because even the facts don't make sense. But that usually means that we're missing something, a piece of the puzzle that maybe one of you out there hearing this right now might have.
And there is a small chance that missing piece has bigger implications than I could have ever imagined when I first read Jasmine's email last year. This is the story of Melissa Casillas. On the afternoon of Thursday, June 26, 2025, 18-year-old Sierra Casillas is working at a coffee shop in Taos, New Mexico, when she steps away to check a voicemail from her dad, Mark.
Now, his tone is tight, like something is off. He wanted her to know that he had just gotten a call from her mom's supervisor, who told him that Melissa hadn't shown up for work that day. Now, to Mark, that seems impossible because he and Melissa both work at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is a superintendent. She's an administrative assistant.
They share a car and commute together every single day, including that day. So how could she not be there? But Sierra already knows something he doesn't, which is that Melissa drove the hour and 15 minutes back from the lab after dropping Mark off. So she was there at the house at like 7.30, 7.45-ish when Sierra woke up that morning, which was way out of the norm, by the way.
But she told Sierra that she had forgotten her security badge. And since she was back home anyway, she would probably just work remotely or maybe even take the day off. Now, Sierra kind of assumes that she had done the latter because she saw her mom for a second time later in the day, just before 1 o'clock, when she'd stopped by the coffee shop Sierra works at to bring her lunch.
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Chapter 2: What were the circumstances surrounding Melissa's disappearance?
Yes, tell him to find a ride home. That was at 1.33 p.m., not too long after she'd stopped by to bring Sierra lunch. And why isn't she just answering Mark? Yeah. This is a thing I couldn't tell you. I mean, I'd be pissed. Well, Mark says that it wasn't unheard of for him to get rides home with a colleague. So he says that, like, I mean, he doesn't say he was pissed or whatever.
He just says he makes this plan, didn't think much more of it until Melissa's supervisor called him at around two saying that she'd been a no call, no show, which he says that is what totally threw him for a loop. Now, on the phone with dispatch, Mark had said that Melissa didn't take anything with her. But when he and Sierra actually look more carefully, a few small things are missing.
Melissa's toothbrush, her reading glasses, and sunglasses. And most significantly, what they calculate to be a 90-day supply of her thyroid medication.
That doesn't exactly scream foul play, right?
No, but Melissa just leaving without a word to her family does not make sense either. Mark tells police that they were supposed to leave the next morning for a camping trip. And beyond that, Melissa is a devoted mother. Mark has three daughters from a previous marriage, but Sierra is Melissa's only child and the two of them are close in a way that is hard to overstate.
Especially after Sierra survived a car accident in 2022 that killed her best friend, a girl who had been like a sister to her. And from that, Sierra suffered serious injuries and the emotional damage lingered for longer than the physical ones. Like it had been a rough few years. But things were finally looking up. Sierra had just graduated high school.
She was set to move to Albuquerque in the fall for beauty school so she could become an esthetician. And Melissa had planned to rent a two-bedroom apartment there to, like, stay with her for the first couple of months just to, like, get her settled. And Mark told us that he planned to kind of go back and forth. Plus, he tells police that they have a strong marriage.
Melissa has never mentioned wanting to leave him, like, never mentioned wanting to leave the girls. None of it. Like, this just doesn't make sense. Right.
So why would she walk away from all of that?
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Chapter 3: How did family members react to Melissa's sudden absence?
But they detain him and seize his phone, which is worth noting because despite what he apparently later tells his daughters, he did not hand it over voluntarily, according to what police told us. They have to apply for a search warrant to get its contents by doing a forensic download, which that's going to take some time.
But one thing they're able to do really quickly while he's at the station that day is verify his alibi. The lab confirms that he was at work that day, and even his drive home is accounted for because of that co-worker who gave him a ride. He confirms that trip. However, that doesn't close anything out.
No, it doesn't seem like he could have physically done anything to Melissa, but that doesn't prove that he wasn't involved or that he doesn't know more than he's letting on. So police get a search warrant for the Cassius home. 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.
Is he basically showing up and saying, don't look for her again?
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.
He already told them about the finances, though. Like, he mentioned it that very first night.
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.
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Chapter 4: What theories emerged about Melissa's potential whereabouts?
Wait, she was having an affair? No, that's the thing. Not that anyone knows of. I think he's just guessing. Says, you know, it could have been a contractor or maybe a hunter she knew or a photographer from Colorado. Sometimes he insinuates to the family that he knows exactly where she is or who she's with, but he won't give names, which feels so weird to them and weird to me even.
Even the theory that she would leave him for another man in general, though, I can't really get my head around from his telling. Because in his first interview, he told detectives that their marriage was great. There was nothing wrong there.
But that's not what police heard from other people, some of whom described Mark as egotistical and controlling, a man who allegedly emotionally and financially abused Melissa. And people have different understandings of Mark and Melissa's finances. Some say that she was burdened with paying for everything, even though Mark made more money.
So sure, she might have been in debt, but like in their eyes, that's really Mark's fault. And yeah, there were lawsuits and stuff, but records show that the majority of those were against Mark alone. Some people even say that the couple had talked about splitting up after Sierra graduated. And Mark had basically said that everything was his, so Melissa should be ready to just move out.
So when Melissa was talking about her plans to stay in Albuquerque with Sierra, it sounded to them more like a marital separation than just like this mom helping her daughter get settled, which is what Mark was saying.
And Sierra had just graduated, right?
Like nearly a month before this. So the timing is interesting, which police obviously confront him with. Now, initially, he tells them none of this is true. And he told us the same thing, though he acknowledges that Melissa had told people that stuff. But according to Agent Mata, Mark ultimately confirmed it to police, admitted that he had encouraged Melissa to leave if she wasn't happy.
I mean, so maybe this is why he seems so confident in this walking away theory. Like he told her to go.
Maybe. But then why won't he tell people who he thinks she's with if he thinks that he even has like a sliver of an idea? I mean, here's one of like the stranger parts of this story. Mark starts putting up these mysterious posts, like coded language, that he says only Melissa could understand. A way to let her know that he's tracking her.
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Chapter 5: What evidence was found in the Casillas home following Melissa's disappearance?
But this time, it's not just stories or his word. This time, Mark has proof. Armed with information from Lloyd about exactly where he last saw Melissa and the blue truck, Mark had taken Sierra out to retrace Lloyd's steps. And in essence, he's trying to retrace Melissa's. Not with old-school hunting tactics. He was looking for any house with a surveillance camera pointed at the road.
And dude hit pay dirt. He finds a video from a house off of Highway 518 that you have to see to believe. The timestamp is 2.18 p.m. on June 26th when Melissa, alive and well, not stumbling, comes into camera frame. She's alone and walking at a brisk pace, not as if she's scared or anything, just purposefully.
She's wearing what looks to me like the same outfit we saw her in when she dropped lunch off to Sierra. But now her hair is pulled back and she's carrying a small backpack on her shoulders. For the Casillas side, this video is proof that Melissa walked away on her own two feet by choice. And Mark told us he wasn't thinking about vindication or exonerating himself at that moment.
But it's hard to ignore what this video means, that there might be a whole nother side to this story. A completely different narrative about how and why Melissa went missing that will have you questioning more.
Just when everyone was beginning to believe that maybe something happened to Melissa in her home, video footage emerged that proved Melissa was out of her house and walking down Highway 518 alive and well. Something her husband, Mark Casillas, has been saying since early on. And his version of events reads like a completely different book.
Not a shady, callous husband who had his wife killed, but a frustrated one who says that his wife abandoned him and their daughter, leaving behind not so much as a note or explanation. Even then, though, Mark says that some of the allegations against him aren't just misinterpreted. They're downright wrong.
So let's go back to that first night when police were there and the Mondragon showed up and told us that Mark was hostile and bad-mouthing Melissa. Mark told us that never happened. He says that he didn't speak with them at all that night. He was completely focused on dealing with police. Then there's that argument that we're told he and Melissa had that morning about the e-cigarette, right?
He like caught her vaping. It takes him a few interviews to come clean about any relationship issues to police. But he says that he only withheld that information because he wanted them focused on finding Melissa, not eyeballing him. He also says that this like fight or argument wasn't some big blow up, just this like minor marital spat.
And he denies that Melissa ever cursed at him or told him to find his own ride home.
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Chapter 6: What role did Mark Casillas play in the investigation?
I mean, unless you were... The hiding stuff you didn't want anyone to ever find out about.
But like, wouldn't you leave a note for that? Like, to me, this is like if you're if you're so overwhelmed by like your marriage or your financial situation or whatever, like, why would you leave this mystery behind? Like, so to me, this doesn't make a ton of sense. So the second option is she walked away to start over, to live somewhere else, be with someone else, whatever that looks like.
And in that scenario, maybe something on those phones would have told people exactly where she was going or like given away a plan that she didn't want found out.
And have police pulled her iCloud data?
No, this is where it goes like a layer deeper. They tried.
Okay.
She didn't just wipe her phones. Apple told them that her backup had been completely scrubbed too, like her iCloud, with nothing left to recover.
I didn't even realize that was possible. Is that actually possible?
It is, but it's not as simple, right? Agent Ezekiel Esquivel-Mata says that that level of digital erasure takes intention. Like it's more than just hitting a few buttons on an iPhone.
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Chapter 7: What new leads were discovered in the search for Melissa?
Agent Mata says that he did speak with Rick again at some point, but I don't know what came of it. And we don't really know much about Rick, even. Old court records from the 90s mention multiple DWI charges. I don't see anything violent on his record. But there is some weirdness here, right? That, like, I don't know how you can ignore. And pieces that deserve, I believe, more investigating.
I mean, this bizarre statement allegedly about a decapitated body, the odd behavior, the blue truck. I mean, did they look at the truck? Like, what if he hit Melissa? Yeah, there's no looking into the truck as far as I know. But I mean, like the idea of like him knowing he has like DWI, I think it's an interesting theory, like Rick related or not.
People said that Melissa used to walk on Highway 518 before. Like, is it possible that she was just out there for a walk and then some kind of accident happened? Yes, maybe that's possible. But then even in that theory, I come back to the phones. You don't wipe your phone and your iCloud if you're just going to go on a walk. So I don't know, this Rick thing, it might be nothing.
But this whole interaction that Mata had with Rick, I think this is what casts a shadow over everything now to me. Because when they say that a lead went nowhere or that they cleared someone, I question what that means. How deep did they really go? Like another example, remember Diego, the very first person that Melissa's family was suspicious of before they ever were questioning Mark?
This is Sierra's ex-boyfriend who, after the car accident, had like some brain damage and apparently had been making threats, sending Melissa like sexually explicit text messages. Well, another agent who worked the case said that Diego wouldn't speak to them at all. But then Agent Mata says that Diego did give an initial statement by phone.
And I guess he explained away the explicit text that he sent Melissa. He told police that he meant to send it to someone else. But then when investigators tried to get him to give a formal statement, Diego said that he couldn't make it. Then he told them that he wanted his attorney to be with him. But he never said who his attorney even was. And it doesn't seem like police are pushing.
Now, we couldn't get in touch with Diego, and I'm not saying that he's involved. I just want to be able to close the loop on some of these things. But I keep finding that really hard to do. Though, for what it's worth, Sierra doesn't think that Diego had anything to do with her mom going missing. She doesn't see how he could pull something like that off.
Now, for all the things that I think may not have been done, I do want to highlight the things that were. Police poured a lot of resources into the physical search for Melissa. They used helicopters, drones, tracking and sent canines all through the dense mountainous terrain around Highway 518. Although official searches didn't start until days after she disappeared.
But they ran facial recognition alerts across the nation. But to date, nothing has ever come of that. And there has been no bank activity, no passport applications in Melissa's name, no driver's license changes, no prescription refills for her thyroid medication, which she needs as a thyroid cancer survivor. So there is just no trace of her anywhere.
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Chapter 8: How has the investigation into Melissa's case evolved over time?
that funds work in the same aerospace field that Monica worked in, he goes missing February 27th, 2026, walks out of his Albuquerque, New Mexico home with a gun and his wallet while leaving behind his phone and other belongings. And then, poof, gone. Now, I mean, you can see this is very tenuous, but the coincidences have people asking questions.
Melissa especially could have been an easy target if she had the right information or connections, right? Like she was in a bad financial spot. Someone promises her a new life or a new start.
Okay.
But she's identified as a good target by someone. They see all the trouble she's in. They offer her a way out. She takes it, leaving her family behind to clean up the mess.
Yes. But, like, I mean, her family's going to have to clean up the mess if she just walked away on her own. Like, so, I mean, to me, that's not, like, any less of a reason why she wouldn't have done it. And remember, her and her husband, they just got their clearance taken away. I'm telling you, like, I don't know.
And this could like begin to explain how she could start over without her ID ever popping up, like how she'd get more meds, like she would have this whole new identity.
Like in a way easier way if someone's helping you, right? Like I, no matter what, if she walked away, I think she needed someone's help to do that.
Yeah.
But then, come back to the phones. It's always, like, the phones for me. If she walked away connected to this thing or not, why wouldn't she just take her phones and get rid of them? Like, I know you don't want to keep them.
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