Original subtitles

We have his baseball jersey in here from Little League.

We played Texas 2, Daigle.

The experience of not knowing where your child is and if he's okay, it's really

hard. You can't sleep at night.

You're constantly looking.

I want to be very careful with what I say.

He started to...

to turn into somebody else.

Your mind goes to the most horrible place.

This was a repeated thing for 10 years.

I'd see somebody that could possibly look like him. I would follow them.

And then I would have to explain myself to them. I'm not crazy.

I'm just trying to find my son.

The last day that we remember seeing Chris was November the 7th. He went to

school that morning. My mom took him.

My mom said Chris was depressed, and he was tired of going to school every day

and being told what to do. Are you okay, Chris?

Yeah, I'm all right, Grandma.

I'll see you after school, hon.

He just wasn't happy, and that it wasn't like him.

A junior at Hightower High School, 17-year-old Christopher Daigle was one

of the popular kids.

Chris was tall, handsome, I mean, always dressed nice and cute, and definitely a

head-turner.

Always going to make you laugh.

All the guys wanted to hang out with them, and the girls most definitely,

they wanted a chance to be with them.

I'm trying to keep from using smartass, because that's the best term to describe

him. He had this way about him to where he could

suggest something with a smile, and then... That was it. Everybody was like,

yeah, yeah, that's a good idea.

And no one knows Chris better than his grandma, Wanda, who he has been living

with since he was three.

She could take better care of him than I could as far as financially.

She spoiled him rotten.

She had him motorcycles, four-wheelers, three-wheelers, anything he wanted, he

got.

She ended up getting him the K5 Blazer, which he loved that.

She really took care of him.

He loved his grandma.

He could be mad as the devil at her, but he'd have never left her.

Never.

The night after Wanda dropped Chris off at school, dinner time comes and goes,

but Chris never shows up.

We thought he was just spending the night with...

Some of his friends and that he would just come home the next day.

And usually if he didn't come home and we didn't worry, he was always with his

friends.

The following morning, there's still no word from Chris and calls to his cell

phone go unanswered.

His family reaches out to his friends.

starting with Brittany Parker.

Chris went to school that day, and then he had come by my house for a little

bit. His state of mind wasn't anything out of the normal for him. He left.

He went over to our friend Ashley's house, got a phone call, said, hey, you

want to go do this or that? And he said, yeah, and he was picked up by his friend

Ricky.

And everyone saw a truck pull up, and he got a duffel bag, threw it in the back

of the truck, and they took off.

And that was the last time anybody saw him here, other than his friends.

His good friend Ricky says he and Chris drove to the nearby mall to hang out.

Hey, man, take a look.

Ricky had just said that they'd seen some girls there.

You going to talk to them for a little bit? You going to hang out?

No, I got to go.

Sure.

They wanted to leave and go someplace, but Ricky's mom called him.

But we had to come home, so Chris left with the girls.

I'll see you later, okay?

All right, have fun.

But no one knows anything about these girls, not even their names.

Nobody seemed to know where he had gone.

I'd hear of other people missing.

I never thought it would happen to me.

Chris was always so much fun, always playing and running around, and he was a

daredevil.

When he was like three years old, he would try anything.

And he didn't like the word no.

If you tell him no, he couldn't do something, he was going to do it just to

show you he could do it.

Definitely 100% all boy.

He started playing baseball when he was five years old.

Then he was on select teams, and then he went to high school, and he played on

Hightower High School baseball.

Chris was very talented. I was very, you know, happy and just always bragged

about how good he was.

Ready, brother? Heads up.

You only get three strikes, right?

One, two, three, and that's it.

Yeah, sure.

Bring it.

He would have got scholarship. I mean, he was really good.

Chris would dream about it.

Running and telling people, no, he's out at first base. I couldn't believe that

he could have a baseball game in his sleep.

But in the summer before his senior year, Chris's major league dreams are

shattered.

There was an incident where somebody threw a bottle.

And it hit Chris, so Chris got mad and threw it back, and it hit the coach.

That was it. It threw him off the team.

When he got kicked off the baseball team, that was devastating for him. That

was like world-crushing.

You kind of saw this light in him kind of start to dim a little bit, and he

changed.

He started to turn into somebody else.

He really didn't associate with his friends as much as he did after that

happened.

He was hurting.

The following day, Chris doesn't show up to school at all.

It wasn't, like, concerning. It wasn't a big deal. Okay, so he's at school or,

you know, he's doing something else.

When I go home, I call him. He doesn't answer.

Call him a couple more times. He doesn't answer. Start talking to some other

friends. Okay, well, where's Chris? Has anybody seen him? No, nobody's spoken

with him.

That's not right.

I remember my grandma calling me, and I was just like, what do you mean missing?

Like, he ran away?

That's what I figured it was.

Some of Chris's friends think the duffel bag suggests he was leaving for good.

When he lost baseball, he was sad and he was mad and angry.

He was like, I'm moving. I'm going to leave. I'm going to run away.

You know, you have to think about the mind in adolescence, in 16 and 17.

Something minor in their world is huge, and they feel like they can't handle it

anymore.

I thought he just took off.

Just him and his friends were going to go to the beach for a few days, and he

was just going to haul ass for a few days, and then he would be back.

But according to Chris's friends, in the months after getting kicked off the

team, his behavior changed.

I want to be very careful with what I say.

He started to make some decisions that I know that he wasn't.

super proud of he started to party a lot more he didn't care so much because the

one thing that he really was passionate about um was kind of stripped from him

but if chris is running away from his problems he has no idea the trouble he

is heading into people are crazy they are crazy you just don't know

It was Saturday morning when Chris didn't come home, so my mom called the

police department, and they were telling her to wait, and he would probably be

home. Well, he didn't come home, so then she went to the police department and

got him to take a police report, and they were telling her that he probably

just ran away.

The police department thought he ran away because he liked to go with his

friends. He would sometimes check in with his mom or grandmother, but

sometimes he didn't.

You think he's just going off blowing off some steam and he's going to come

back home.

You know, there's thousands of runaways in our country, if not more. I would

never want to be that parent in that situation.

But they have to figure out, is this child really in danger?

Did this child leave on their own?

Did he run away before?

Other friends think something more complicated had been going on with Chris

ever since he got kicked off the baseball team four months earlier.

He didn't really know how to deal with it. He didn't have the best coping

skills.

He said he was going to run away just because so many things were going on.

But Chris's family refuses to believe he would leave without a word.

They just truly act like he just ran away.

And like I said, he would never run away. Never. He might get mad and leave

for a couple days.

But he'd be back.

I went looking for Chris everywhere because when he didn't come home, I

thought something happened to him. He could have been hit in the head and was

laying in a ditch, and it was cold.

I went around to the creeks and ponds and ditches. I had poison ivy on me.

I made posters and put them up at the different stores.

I remember meeting up with her and us going,

All over the place, hanging posters for missing person posters.

Have you seen them?

If so, please call us and let us know.

We went and parked down these streets and sat and watched to see what kids

came and went from their houses.

Always were watching.

You think, okay, well, maybe he did go somewhere else. Maybe he has another

group of friends that...

He just kind of clicked with, and you just start to question your relationship

with him, thinking that, okay, well, if he did run away, why would he just kind

of leave us all in the dark?

A part of me just felt like it was kind of a waste of time, you know? I didn't

feel like anything bad had happened to him, you know what I mean?

I felt like, in my mind, I was still having a lot of hope.

But there is one family member who may have spurred Chris to leave town.

I'd have to say Chris and my dad were probably the closest.

Out of all of his kids, Chris probably loved him the most.

Chris's parents separate soon after he's born.

Chris wanted that. Perfect story.

The house life, the home life you see on TV.

You know, where you have a mom and dad that love you.

No matter how much he would say he didn't bother him, he didn't care.

He's happy where he's at.

Deep down, it killed him inside.

Chris's dad was in prison for an extended period of time.

So that brought a lot of anxiety for him.

It made 4, 6, 8, 9, 5.

Drug.

It was always drug.

He would go to prison and he would be there for years.

When he would come home from prison, he would just, oh, daddy loves y'all, I

miss y'all so much, you know, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that.

Empty promises.

As soon as my dad got out and got back into the life, my dad's ripped out of

Christopher's life again.

It's just a never-ending cycle.

There's a thin line between love and hate.

Just a few weeks before Chris disappeared, His father is scheduled for

release from a Texas state penitentiary.

When he was supposed to be getting out of jail, that's when Chris was telling

me, Dad's coming home, I don't want to see him, you know, just, I'm tired of

everything.

Maybe Chris ran away to avoid seeing his father, but according to Chris's family,

after his release, his dad moved to another town in Texas.

As the days morph into weeks, the urgency to find Chris mounts.

Detectives did everything they could.

They put flyers out. They got dental records.

They obviously talked to the family a lot.

The kids at school, they had to go talk to an interview.

How long have you known him for?

He was in high school, so you can imagine how many friends he had and who

he hung out with.

Some of the rumors were that he went to Missouri, that he met somebody online.

One of them was that he ran away with some of his friends to go to Oklahoma.

Another one was that there was another friend that moved north somewhere and

that he was with him.

One person told me that, no, he'd gotten into it with some bad group of people

or whatever in our area.

They had gotten into it, and so they had taken him.

Everything grew and changed, and this little bit would get thrown in here, and

that little bit would be thrown in there.

It makes you crazy.

It makes you crazy.

They followed up with leads, and they talked to everybody, but it seemed like

it was going down a lot of different rabbit holes.

As weeks pass with no sign of the teenager, Chris's family believes

there's only one explanation left.

Just that somebody did kill him.

That's the only thing why he wouldn't have come home.

And that was always in my mind, that somebody did kill him.

That way we couldn't figure out who was his enemy.

Who would have won him dead?

We kept his Christmas presents. We put them in a box and put them up in the

attic just thinking, you know, if he ever came home, we could give them to

him.

It was rough. I mean, gosh, Grandma kept Chris's room just the way it was. I

mean, for the longest. No one was allowed to go in there.

You better not walk in that room. Don't touch his door.

Just stay out of there. I want it just like he left it when he comes home.

It was really hard for my mom because she was so close to Chris, and it took a

toll on her as far as her health, too. She deteriorated, you know, from the

worry and constantly looking for him and just everything she, that's all she

did.

While Wanda never stops hoping her grandson will walk through the door,

Chris's mom and aunt are convinced he's been murdered.

That's what we couldn't figure out. Who was the enemy?

He didn't have too many enemies. Like, who would want him dead or who would not

want him around?

Maybe my dad owed somebody money. Somebody could have taken it out on him,

you know, through the drugs, through that lifestyle.

Maybe he was trying to do something for my dad and pay off a debt to save my

dad's life.

You have to remember, Missouri City is very close to Houston.

Even though it's a small town, it has that feel.

Missouri City is not void of gangs, not void of drugs, just like any other big

city.

When police were going through the computer, they found something about a

gang in the area by the school.

I talked to some of his friends. His friends said that, well, he had said

something to, like, the leader of it.

Say what was on his mind and have temper.

Definitely let you know when he was mad.

So far, there's no evidence to support any theories about potential enemies.

But Chris's state of mind on the morning he went missing suggests another tragic

explanation.

There were...

A couple of conversations where Chris had talked about, you know, the idea of

not waking up again or just disappearing, not wanting to be here

anymore.

Because he lost such a large part of his identity when he got kicked off the

baseball team.

You know, there were some really intense times where he was suicidal.

On paper, it made sense that he had it in him to hurt himself.

It didn't make sense to Mom, because as a parent, you don't want to think that,

right? You want to find your kid. You don't want that as your final answer.

I would sit at work, and in the downtime, I would go on the missing

persons website, and I would look for the unidentified bodies and see if

any of them could be him. Were they in the right age range? Were they male?

What date did they go missing?

Until you actually have that body and actually know, you never lose hope.

You never lose hope.

Missouri City finally said that there was too much, too many different

stories. They couldn't confirm anything.

So they basically turned it into a cold case file, and they just stopped trying

to do anything with it.

You work it for so long, and there's nothing else you can do. If you have

nothing, you have nothing.

What do you get?

What do you do?

His favorite color was blue, and my mom collected blue faces and things and put

around his picture.

I like the angels, like guardian angels watching over Chris.

I felt bad for my sister when all this, because, I mean, that's her son. That

was her firstborn.

It's unreal, the rollercoaster of emotions that we had to endure right

there.

And his work gloves and not.

Baseball gloves.

Always wanted to be different, set in trends.

They said he could get a better grip on the bat.

Mentally and physically, it took a toll on her, and she changed.

Honestly, I think it changed us all.

We even went to psychics.

I really didn't believe in psychics, but I would try anything to find my son.

She told us some really interesting things.

Where Chris was with three guys.

They went down a long dirt road.

There were no lights. There was a tree line.

There was an altercation. Chris was shot in the head.

I asked the lady, I said, where is he? And she actually drew us a map.

She drew a picture of a fence.

And the tree was there, and how the tree and the fence grew into it, and it had

been there for a long time. It was a low area, and it was like water would run

through, and the pictures of wheels and rims on the vehicle.

I took off work one day with Tracy, and we were going down fence lines and

whatever. We found some bones.

Call the police.

It wasn't his. They were animal bones.

And look at the cars when they drove by. I did.

We'd sit with the front door open and watch outside, too.

You're constantly looking for them, and it's like your life stands still all you

think about.

Day and night is, where is he? Is he okay?

Where do I look now?

I made a promise that I didn't care how long it took or whatever I had to do,

that I was going to find him.

Living with the constant fear of what may have happened to her son, Tracy

opens her home to other teenagers in distress.

A lot of the kids would run away, and I was scared that something would happen

to them on the street.

So I would let them come and live with me, and I would take care of them and

help them.

In the fall of 2007, five years after her son's disappearance, Tracy takes in

Josh Fretz, a troubled teen a few years behind Chris in school.

I really didn't know him that well.

He stayed maybe a week and a half.

And then one day he saw a picture of Chris.

And I think that's when he took off.

And I went and spoke to Josh's mother because I was worried about him. And she

told me that something happened to him when he was 13 years old and he won't

talk about it.

Tracy senses Josh knows something about Chris, but she never sees him again.

More years pass, but Chris's mom refuses to give up searching for her son.

I took a job at a bar that was close by the house because the kids were old

enough to drink, and I thought, well, somebody might get drunk, slip up, say

something.

How are you two doing?

Good. She mingled with the kids and tried to make friends with those kids to

see anything and everything that she could find out.

Where are you guys from?

We're from around here.

Every time someone would come in from the school, I'd say, oh, do you remember

Chris Daigle?

And one day, one of the girls from school came in, and she said that she

had heard something, but she didn't want to tell me anything about it, just that

she knew something.

So I gave her the detective's information, and she said that she would

talk to the detective.

I felt that...

Maybe something could come of it.

The young woman goes down to the police station and tells detectives what she

knows, starting with a conversation she had with one of Chris's good friends,

Ricky Mendoza, two months after Chris disappeared.

She said that she was in a car with Ricky Mendoza.

And they got on the subject about Chris.

And he said that he killed Chris.

And she's like, no, you did. There's no way.

He's like, yeah, I'll show you where his body is.

I'll show you.

So they drove down to this field and he pointed.

He says, right over there.

According to the woman.

The field that Ricky had taken her to is in nearby Fort Bend County.

But after an exhaustive search, police come up empty-handed.

Nothing really came out of it after that.

They felt like there was another rabbit hole. They didn't have any proof of

anything.

With no evidence or testimony to support the woman's strange story about Chris's

friend Ricky, the case continues to languish.

A year later, in the summer of 2010, a new detective is assigned to look at the

department's cold cases.

What I like about cold cases, number one, is bringing closure to family.

I couldn't imagine the wondering what happened to my loved one.

This one intrigued me because there were some leads in it where it just seemed

like it just dropped off and it wasn't followed up.

There was a statement from a female.

She said that she was with Ricky Mendoza, and he was bragging that he did

something to Chris.

Detective Rob decides the field the woman identified in Fort Bend County

deserves a second look.

So we called Texas Department of Corrections, and they brought some

cadaver dogs down, and we ran two dogs.

And they had it.

I thought we had some. I thought, oh my gosh, Chris is buried here.

We cleared out this huge area, started digging up the ground.

Everybody was exhausted.

And then all the hope started to deteriorate because we weren't finding

anything.

go on a roller coaster from this is it, we're going to find Chris, to

what are we going to do now?

When we went to the field and we didn't find anything, we knew we had to start

going and talking to some people.

I figured after time expired that somebody would be eventually willing to

talk.

So we tracked down one of his buddies, Joshua.

Now in his early 20s, Josh Fretz was one of Chris's many friends questioned

during the initial investigation.

We found out where he worked, and we went down to his job in Houston, and I

talked to his boss.

Hey, Josh, there are a couple guys out here that need to talk to you.

Okay.

Josh Fretz is also the troubled kid who briefly stayed with Chris's mother.

So Joshua comes in, and I introduce myself and my partner to him. We sit

down at this conference table, and I'm starting to already get a little vibe

that something's going on.

Josh was nervous.

Josh was scared.

During the headlights look, a little flushed, antsy a little bit.

We explained why we were there. I said years have gone by, and...

How would your family feel if they had no idea what happened to you?

His eyes started watering a little bit.

Joshua asked me, he goes, am I going to get in trouble?

I said, it depends. Did you kill Chris?

Joshua asked me, he goes, am I going to get in trouble?

I said, it depends. Did you kill Chris?

And he said, no.

And I said, okay, then you're not going to get in trouble.

So Joshua tells me a story about Ricky Mendoza and the jealousy that he had

towards Chris.

This is the first time in all these years that police learned Ricky had a

problem with Chris.

Ricky and Chris played baseball together.

They were friends.

You ready for this, Ricky?

Two very different people.

Chris was very loud, could talk to anybody, was goofy, you know, laughed a

lot. And Ricky was very stoic. Just throw the ball.

Ricky always stood in his shadow. He wasn't the all-star player that Chris

was, you know. Chris had all the friends. Chris was Mr. Popular.

Ricky didn't get that many invites. You know, he was kind of the chubby kid with

bad acne and, you know.

Only thing he had was a cute girlfriend.

Josh said that Ricky saw Chris in school and Chris was in a classroom and he

was messing around or flirting with Ricky's girlfriend at the time.

It made sense because Chris was a big flirt, but at the same time, it would

have been a joke or it would have been silly.

From the story, Ricky was very overprotective.

You know, I'm your boyfriend, you're not going to talk to other guys.

I think that Chris had the personality that Ricky wanted to have.

I think it ran on a much deeper level than just fighting over a girl.

According to Josh, on the afternoon of November 7, 2002, Ricky decides to get

his revenge.

Ricky went to a house that Chris was at, got him in a truck, got Josh

and another individual and said, let's go pick some mushrooms.

They went out to this field and parked the truck.

They hopped the fence, he said.

He said they walked around the pasture.

Josh said they were all looking on the ground for shrooms, and Ricky had his

shotgun with him.

And he said he looked up, and he saw Ricky pointing in the back of Chris's

head.

Ricky pulled the trigger.

He said he saw Chris's eyes roll on the back of his head.

And he saw blood, and then Chris was just motionless on the ground.

He said, we were freaking out, we just started running back to the truck.

And when he said that, so descriptive back then, I knew he was telling the

truth.

Josh's story is uncannily similar to the account of Chris's death given to his

family by a psychic eight years earlier.

Police tracked down the other teenager in the car that day, David Garcia.

We just need to hear it from you now.

He's nervous.

I was like, what happened to Chris?

And I was like, you need to tell me the truth because I already know.

Okay.

So he tells the same story.

At the end of the interview... David gives detectives directions to a wooded

area near the field where Ricky had forced them to help hide Chris's body.

The field is just 1,500 feet from where the girl had taken them two years

earlier.

So we're walking around, and Sergeant McKinnon looks down the ground, and he

sees what appears to be a bone sticking out of the ground.

He was like,

it looked human to me.

DNA analysis confirms the bone belongs to Christopher Daigle.

We found bones, a few bones. We didn't find all of Chris.

After all these years, detectives assume animals for the rest of his remains.

I guess it was early to mid-August my sister called me and said, Samantha,

they found Chris.

And I'm like, what?

It's giving me chills now.

She said they're arresting Ricky Mendoza today.

We just both broke down and cried.

Finally, we're getting there.

It felt like, okay, finally, something has happened.

It was probably over.

We could finally quit waiting for him to knock on the door.

We could finally bury my nephew and just thank God that we were finally going to

have him.

Justice, something for Chris.

As the trial approaches, the family now knows why it took almost 10 years for

the truth to come out.

We heard that Ricky told the boys, y'all better not say a word of this.

Do you understand me, or you'll be next.

When Chris first went missing, I know that they questioned Ricky, but nothing

really came out of it after that.

I was friends with Ricky's parents, so our families have known each other for a

long time.

It's just something you didn't expect.

In February of 2013, Ricky Mendoza stands trial for the murder of

Christopher Daigle.

Setting through that whole trial, it was like a living hell.

Ricky came in with a smiling face and, you know, like, huh, 10 years

already, dude.

Nothing's going to happen.

If it hasn't happened by now, y'all ain't going to get me now, you know?

And I guess he recognized me because when he looked at me, he smiled weak and

blew a kiss at me.

Right then is when I realized he's cold-blooded.

Sitting there watching this kid walk into that courtroom every day with his

mom, his stepdad, his other family, his sisters,

all walking in there as a family, sitting there watching the witnesses

go up one by one.

He sits there. He never says a word.

He never shows remorse.

I don't think.

Kids understand the finality of death.

The trial was difficult.

Ricky wouldn't even speak during the trial. He was sat emotionless.

His mother was on the stand, and she broke down and collapsed, and they had

to carry her out, and he still just sat there.

It's unbelievable that somebody could just take it upon themselves, say, okay.

You looked at my girl.

I'm going to kill you.

I'm going to take you out to the field and kill you.

After almost two weeks of testimony, a jury finds Ricky Mendoza guilty of

murder.

When they gave that verdict, it was like I could breathe again.

It was finally over.

Before Ricky is sentenced.

The family walked through the field where Chris's partial remains were

discovered.

We were all going to pray and kind of have a little memorial service for

Chris.

And we're walking along, and trucks had driven through there, whatever, so there

were ruts.

And I guess it had pushed up or erosion, and you could see pieces of bone there.

What are the odds of that happening?

So we started digging, and the more we dug, the more bones we started to find.

It still hurts that all that time he was so close right there, just maybe four

miles from my house, and I had no idea.

That was hard.

I made him the promise I wouldn't stop until I found him. I didn't realize that

I was going to be the one to actually take him up.

My grandma Wanda, she passed away a little bit after the trial.

She got peace before she passed. She knew, finally.

It was a little peaceful knowing that they were going to be together finally,

you know.

There are still a lot of days where I wish that he was still around to be able

to call or, you know, go have a beer with.

I forgot the sound of his voice.

I just miss him.

I wish I knew where Chris would be today and what he would be doing.

A lot of things were taken away from me.

You don't ever get those back.

But he's in a better place now.

And I'll see him again one day.