Mom relives daughter’s 1986 kidnapping during Lexington trial. She relives it every day

The mother of a 4-year-old girl kidnapped and killed in 1986 had to relive on Tuesday the day her daughter disappeared. But Debra Gutierrez told a Lexington County jury that wasn’t unusual.

“I remember like it was today,” Gutierrez testified. “To me, every day is June 6, 1986.”

That was the day Gutierrez woke up in her Lexington County home to find that her young daughter Jessica had disappeared. For almost 40 years, she has had no explanation for what happened to the girl that night. Now, the state is prosecuting a man Debra Gutierrez once knew, Thomas McDowell, who is accused of kidnapping and murdering Jessica, in a trial this week at the Lexington County Courthouse.

The girl’s body has never been found.

Gutierrez recalls the day she woke up to her older daughter Rebecca asking her for cereal. She awoke to a mess in the living room of their mobile home, with the front door open, the curtains and screen torn off their front window, and the family’s outdoor dog running around inside the house.

Amidst all the chaos, she asked where Jessie was, and could barely process the answer when Rebecca told her “a man in a magic hat” had taken Jessica from her bed during the night.

“That didn’t make any sense to me,” Debra Gutierrez recalled Tuesday. “I don’t know who I became, I went crazy and started screaming her name. I went into the room, picked up the covers, looked under the bed, the closet, the half-bath. I went all through my home calling my daughter’s name... I even crawled under the mobile home.”

When she still couldn’t find her daughter, she grabbed Rebecca by the shoulders and started shaking her, unable to accept that someone “in a hat you could pull a rabbit out of” had stolen her daughter.

“I picked her up and I slammed her into the wall, I don’t know how many times,” Gutierrez said. “She’s crying, and I’m like ‘you’ve got to tell me where she is.’ It took me years to know that she had seen somebody.”

Rebecca Gutierrez testified earlier that she saw a man in a tall, wide-brimmed hat in the dark of the sisters’ shared bedroom take her sister away.

Prosecutors worked to establish for the 12 jurors that McDowell wore a similar style cowboy hat at the time. A former girlfriend, Patricia Keeler, testified that she often saw McDowell wear such a hat and identified an old photo entered into evidence as showing his hat.

Keeler also testified that McDowell would often take her on dates and park his car along a frontage road near the county landfill. Former sheriff’s deputy Clark Rowe testified that on the night Jessica disappeared, he saw a car similar to one owned by McDowell’s mother driving down the same frontage road, although he was unable to identify the driver or locate the car afterwards. He didn’t find the incident noteworthy enough to write a report at the time.

For years afterward, the Gutierrez family had no idea what had happened to Jessica. It wasn’t until 2022 that McDowell was arrested, after investigators tied a fingerprint found on one of the home’s windows to McDowell. Gutierrez testified that she “compulsively” cleaned her home, especially that window, because her children would often open it while playing outside to call for her inside the home.

It had been months earlier when McDowell had been there to do some work on the house for Gutierrez, and she was adamant on the stand his print could not have been there that long. She also recalled a time McDowell was at the home and Debra Gutierrez had to climb through the front window to retrieve her key, she said. That showed him the window was insecure, she said.

The mother also told the court she recalled the moment before she went to bed that night, when she thought she saw the light of a cigarette through the window. Investigators later recovered a cigarette butt from the area outside the home.

“I put my face up to the screen and I kept waiting and looking,” she said. “I was waiting about 15 minutes, until I thought, ‘Nah, it couldn’t have been anybody.’ I just passed it off.”

Defense attorney Sarah Mauldin pointed out that Gutierrez did not mention seeing the cigarette flash in her statement to police at the time. Gutierrez also denied that an ex-boyfriend had been staying in the mobile home prior to Jessica’s abduction, although Mauldin pointed out her past statements mentioned him living there.

The difficulties in getting witnesses to remember exact details after such a long time was highlighted by the testimony of former investigator George Tansil. He testified he couldn’t recall specific items he had entered into evidence when the S.C. Law Enforcement Division had searched McDowell’s mother’s car, and was only able to positively identify them because he and his partner had signed their names to them when they were collected. Mauldin asked if he was usually questioned about his work more than 30 years after the fact.

“Usually it would be a few months to a few years,” Tansil said. “Thirty seems to be a bit much.”