Dancing on Her Grave (3 page)

Showgirl, Interrupted

Her name was Debora. She was a showgirl.

When I first heard about the case of the missing Las Vegas dancer, the old Barry Manilow song from the seventies, “Copacabana,” kept playing in my head. The tune tells the tale of Lola, a showgirl, whose lover, Tony, a bartender, is murdered by a gangster out of jealousy.

Would the story of Debora Flores-Narvaez’s missing case turn out to be as ill-fated as the one in those lyrics? I wondered. After all, this was Sin City, and Debora’s friend had sure sounded desperate.

Mia Guerrero, a friend of Debbie’s, had reached out to me on Facebook. I had met the young dancer more than a year ago at a station event where she was modeling. Mia had come up to introduce herself and to tell me she
was also from Colombia, like me. I was then the anchor for the Univision Network in Las Vegas. I covered the beat. I’d seen, and knew, the seedier side of the Strip.

Mia’s message had arrived on December 16, 2010, at 8:59
P.M.
She told me a friend of hers, another dancer by the name of Debbie Flores-Narvaez, had disappeared. Mia mentioned that her friends were also very worried about Debbie’s whereabouts. She wanted my help as “a very special favor” to please try to air news about her disappearance in our newscast. Her message was kind, and ended with a “God bless you.”

I was not going to sit on this story, and Mia did not have to wait long.

Debora had gone missing four days earlier, on December 12. It was sudden and unexpected, and, like most disappearances, her absence was what her family and friends referred to as oddly “out of character” for Debora Flores-Narvaez, whom everyone called Debbie. We began to cover her disappearance, even though the police were still treating it as a missing person’s case.

Her name was Debora. She was a showgirl. But she also had a bachelor’s degree in international business, a master’s degree in international finance, and a degree in law. Her diplomas were hung proudly on one of the walls in her condo, in a building located across the street from the famed Luxor Hotel, the one with the Sphinx in front. It was called the Onyx Apartments.

But despite her academic degrees, Debora wanted to be a dancer. It was her passion. And she’d moved from Baltimore to Las Vegas in order to pursue that passion.

On the day just after her disappearance, her dream would’ve become a reality. Debora Flores-Narvaez had been only one day short of realizing her lifelong dream of becoming the lead dancer in a Las Vegas show, when she disappeared without a trace.

She had been slated to star as the lead in what was dubbed by the show’s producers as “the Strip’s most seductive, sensual show,” the spectacle
FANTASY
at the Luxor. There had been two rehearsals scheduled on Sunday, December 12, 2010, one in the morning and one in the evening. Debora had attended the first one, in the morning, but she was surprisingly, conspicuously absent from the evening rehearsal.

According to authorities, the last person to have seen Debbie was her ex-boyfriend, Jason “Blu” Griffith, another dancer, who’d allegedly seen her for the last time on December 12 at approximately 7
P.M.
It was Debbie’s roommate, an aerialist named Sonya Sonnenberg, who had alerted the police to her roommate’s absence from the
FANTASY
rehearsal. This was after another friend from out of town, Shannon Hammitt, had also phoned in her concerns to the police.

Investigators usually look closely at family and friends first when something like kidnapping or foul play is
suspected. But Debora’s case had not been ruled as either. She was just missing on a day when she surely ought to have been present, and eager, at her rehearsal. She was a dancer; this was her big break.

Her name was Debora, and it was Christmas.

As the days went on and there was still no word, Debbie’s friends and family started to panic. Debbie’s sister, Celeste, flew to Las Vegas on December 17, their mother’s birthday, using up all of her savings, and borrowed a car to look for her sister herself. The city with its many lights seemed menacing, almost blinding her through her tears.

Celeste was a single mother, but she hadn’t thought twice about leaving her children behind during Christmas. It was a time usually filled with toys, games, and merriment; a time when Aunt Debbie would have sent them presents and cards, and called to sing them Christmas carols over the phone, with her lovely singing voice. She was always singing, her friends remembered.

Family was everything to Celeste, as well as to Debbie, who had stayed in constant contact with her family until the night of December 12. Surely her tightly knit Puerto Rican family would have heard from her this month. Surely Debbie would have called on her mother’s birthday. Debbie usually visited her family over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays—“She loved the holidays and would bring gifts, and we would celebrate together,”
Celeste said—but this year she had not been planning to go to Atlanta, where her parents and sister and nephews resided, nor visit any family in Puerto Rico, because she had rehearsals, very important rehearsals. But surely she would have been communicating in some way with her family, about her Vegas holiday plans, their upcoming family reunion, reminiscing about Christmases past. Celeste could not live without her little sister, she thought, and the possibility of losing her was becoming more oppressive by the day, as time went on and still there was nothing, not a word from the vivacious young woman.

Well, yes, there had been one text message Debbie wrote to her mother a couple of days before her disappearance, apparently in haste.
It read: “In case there is ever an emergency with me, contact Blu Griffith in Vegas. My ex-boyfriend. Not my best friend.”

Celeste had mixed feelings about the text message. “When my mom sent me the message and I read it, I took it to mean that if something happened to her, [Griffith] was the guilty party, but it seemed as though she was texting very quickly and left out some words. So, I then interpreted it as if something happens to her, to call him, he would know what was going on. I didn’t think it was anything bad.” Celeste thought Debbie might have been texting very quickly and had perhaps left something out. “It was like she didn’t finish the text, you know?” she said.

Celeste added that when their mother asked if everything was okay, Debbie replied: “Yeah
Mami
,
just keep it for your records.”

At the time, her mother thought Debbie meant her ex could be helpful in case of an emergency.

The police refrained from comment. The PIO, or public information officer, Jacinto “Jay” Rivera stated during an interview with us: “We can speculate that she thought something was going to happen to her, but only Debora can solve this mystery, because she was the one who sent the text message. We don’t know exactly what she was trying to communicate to her mother, or what made her send that sort of text message.”

Las Vegas is a relatively small city with a population of just under six hundred thousand people. The dancer community is even smaller, and it’s common for people to know one another, especially in the entertainment industry. Jason “Blu” Griffith and Debbie Flores-Narvaez had met in November 2009 at an after-party for “locals” at an indoor arena football, and they got together on Thanksgiving of 2009. Mia Guerrero, Debbie’s friend who first reached out to me, was a fellow dancer, a model, and a very pretty girl in a city peopled with beautiful entertainers. She has long raven hair and a gorgeous body, like so many in the trade. She had met Debora at work, and they’d become fast friends. According to Mia, Debbie talked constantly about her boyfriend, Jason “Blu” Griffith.

“At first she talked a lot about him, always saying things like, ‘I was with my boyfriend,’ or talking about them being always together,” Mia told me. “She always talked about how much she loved him, and ‘my boyfriend this,’ and ‘my boyfriend that.’”

But recently, Mia said, she had also noticed that Debora seemed sad, that something was not quite right with her. “I not only noticed in her attitude, but in the way she carried herself. Even though Debbie was always a very private person, she seemed sad to me. Then I figured it had to be about her boyfriend, because she was always talking to him on the phone. I thought to myself, ‘what is going on with Debbie?’ She was always smiling and happy, always making everyone around her happy.”

But there were obvious indications of trouble in the relationship. According to police reports, Jason “Blu” Griffith faced a December 2010 court appearance after a violent incident between the couple that had occurred that past October. The court report, dated October 21, 2010, stated that the defendant (Griffith) “did willfully, unlawfully, and feloniously, use physical force against Debbie Flores,” by taking her iPhone, and that when Debbie went to retrieve it, Griffith had pulled her hair and kicked her. Apparently, he had also bashed Debbie’s head against the windshield of her car.

As December 2010 went by and Debora was still missing, her smile seemed to be fading from her photographs
we aired on television. Her sister, Celeste, appeared to be losing weight, and hope, very rapidly. On the nightly television news, she pleaded with whoever might have Debbie, “Let her go, and let her be, and let her come home with us.”

And all I knew was that her name was Debora, and she was a showgirl.

Sin City: For a Reason

I first visited Las Vegas as a tourist in November 2007, and did not particularly like the city. It was an enjoyable place for a vacation, but, as they say, I wouldn’t want to live there. I recall asking the taxi driver what it was like to live in such an insane city as we navigated through the hustle and bustle of Las Vegas Boulevard. He got upset at my question and replied, annoyed, “You must know this is like any other city. I go to PTA meetings!”

In February 2008, I got an e-mail from a news director from Las Vegas whom I had met at Univision Miami. She told me about a weekend anchor position at her station. It was open—was I interested? Two weeks later, I was on a plane bound for the “insane city” to accept the offer.

While Miami, the seat of Univision headquarters, is nestled between balmy Caribbean and Atlantic waters, and its Latin population makes it warm and even boisterous at times, Vegas has its own peculiar sounds and sights. There was always something happening on the Strip, where everyone looks carefree and happy; oftentimes a bit too happy. The city might not be insane, but it is schizophrenic. For instance, there are the constant comings and goings of taxicabs carting off visitors, sometimes inebriated, to the casinos and the malls; the neon brightness that makes a stark contrast with the arid desert sands beyond its playful gaming enclave; and, of course, the police car and fire truck sirens that blare at any hour of the day or night.

Despite my initial negative impressions, however, I soon found that I enjoyed my work as a journalist in Las Vegas. After about a year anchoring on the weekends and reporting during the weekdays, I moved on to anchor the weekly nightly news. I covered various stories, from a strippers-on-wheels controversy—almost naked women who traveled by bus to different party destinations—to the high-profile O.J. Simpson robbery case at one of the casinos.

As a producer for one of the newscasts, I was always logging in to other media outlets to confirm that I hadn’t missed anything for my show, such as any late-breaking story. It had been sometime past 7
P.M.
on December 16
(shortly before receiving Mia’s Facebook message) when I first logged in to the
Las Vegas Review-Journal
and read reporter Francis McCabe’s article about how a showgirl from the show
FANTASY
was missing. Knowing it was the sort of story our viewers would be interested in, we immediately called the communications office at the Metropolitan Police Department and got a confirmation of the report. Minutes later, I received a media release announcing a press conference the next day. On December 16, 2010, we aired our first 11
P.M.
newscast about the missing woman.

Just the day after Debora’s disappearance was confirmed by the Las Vegas Police Department, her car was found. On the afternoon of Friday, December 17, Las Vegas police found Debora’s 1997 maroon Chevrolet four-door Prizm. It was tucked away, in an apparent attempt to hide it, in an empty lot about sixteen miles from her ex-boyfriend Jason Griffith’s house. It had no license plates, but the dancer’s makeup bag had been left on the passenger’s seat.

I went to the scene with my photographer to shoot some video of the area. The police had found the car through an anonymous tip, which later proved to have come from an area resident.

“The car was located in the northeast part of town, it was drivable, and a license plate was not attached on the vehicle,” said Lieutenant Rob Lundquist of the Las
Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s Missing Persons Unit.

As I drove home late that night from the news station, I cast an occasional glance at my rearview mirror, the missing girl’s image fresh in my mind as I passed the Luxor, on the Strip. I spotted the silhouettes of several young women walking alone and wondered,
where on earth could Debbie be?

The dancer had last been seen leaving the Onyx Apartments, where she lived, near Tropicana Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard.

Had Debbie been driving away? Had she sensed some imminent danger? Or had she run into serious trouble by some careless gamble, a stroke of bad luck?

My heart stopped for a second, and my reporter’s instinct and my woman’s intuition told me that something was very wrong. When I initially communicated with Debora’s friend Mia, I asked her for a family member’s contact information. She sent me the telephone number for Debbie’s sister, Celeste, and later both women, Mia and Celeste, showed up at the station to be interviewed. At first, Celeste did not want to cry or accuse anyone in front of the cameras. But she looked like she was in a fog, and said the ordeal was a nightmare. Still, she tried to appear optimistic. “I’m not going to think I’m not going to find her. I’m going to bring her back with us,” she assured us, and our viewers. Her outward confidence was
not entirely convincing. Celeste and her younger sister, Debora, shared similar facial features, but Debbie’s were softer. Both were shapely, pretty women with long dark hair and an exotic look, but Celeste was a great deal taller than her petite sister, who was only five feet three inches tall, tiny and compact, like the dancer she was.

Almost a week had passed since she vanished, and the search had intensified without yielding any results. Officer Jacinto Rivera, the public information officer for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, voiced the all-too-familiar ominous mantra: “The more time that goes by, the worse the outcome may be.”

Despite the solemn news he delivered, Officer Rivera always tried to be pleasant, invariably polite, and extremely diplomatic. A tall, handsome man in his early forties, Rivera was born in Chicago, but his family was from Mexico, and he spoke Spanish with a Mexican accent. He became the spokesperson to all the Spanish-language media, and we interviewed him so many times a week at the station that people started asking him for autographs whenever he went out to a Latin restaurant with his family, or even to the supermarket. He was invariably amicable and often complied with these requests from his “fans,” especially from the children.

All of the Las Vegas police officers, including Rivera, continued to work on Debora’s missing case. During a press conference with the local media, the authorities said
they had intensified their search for the missing woman, taking into account the possibility she may have left of her own accord. While certainly logical from law enforcement’s point of view, that possibility always strikes a bitter note with family members and friends in missing persons’ cases, especially if they feel strongly, as they did here, that that was not the case at all.

The invitation to that press conference at the police headquarters, located in downtown Las Vegas, read:

Metro Seeks the Public’s Assistance in locating 31 year old Missing Person Debora Flores-Narvaez

Lieutenant Rob Lundquist, from the LVMPD Missing Persons Unit, took the podium and addressed the media on December 21, 2010.

“What we know is that on December 14 a missing person’s report was filed by Debora’s roommate [Sonya Sonnenberg], stating that she had not seen Debora for a couple of days.” He then went on to say that the police had made contact with Debbie’s family and friends, and had spoken with her ex-boyfriend. Though Jason Griffith was not named, Lundquist said of him that “he is cooperating with us. He did confirm he spoke with Debora on the evening of Sunday, December 12.”

At the moment, Jason Griffith was only a person of interest, not a suspect in Debbie’s disappearance. In any
investigation involving missing persons, any person with knowledge of the missing individual is considered a person of interest to the police.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department has a great relationship with the community. Every time there is a case where they need cooperation from the residents, they call a press conference. The department is also very humble about recognizing the fact that many cases couldn’t have been solved without the community’s help. Their Crime Stoppers program is successful: it’s one of the best in the country.

So, in the case of Debora’s disappearance, they were asking for help.

“What we are asking the public, or urging the public, is that if anyone has any information, please contact the Police Department [through] Crime Stoppers.”

The lieutenant did not leave out the fact that Debbie could have left on her own, though unsurprisingly, Celeste objected vehemently to the idea that her sister might have disappeared on purpose.

“She never missed a rehearsal!” she said, facing the camera. “It was the first day of rehearsal for her solo!” The past tense seemed to weigh heavily on her.

Celeste and I became instantly close, as if through some unspoken bond. In a matter of days, Celeste arrived at the station practically asleep on her feet. She told me that the past couple of days had been exhausting. Her
nights became an endless nightmare, and the light in her eyes that was like her sister’s sparkle seemed all but extinguished. She couldn’t eat, sleep, or rest. She was on the phone constantly and asked me, every time she came, if she could leave some missing person’s flyers with her sister’s photo and information in the station’s lobby. We always said yes to her, of course.

The mystery and the lack of information were very frustrating for local news teams—from every television station in Vegas, as well as print media—let alone for Debora’s family. It was hard to maintain hope for a positive outcome. Celeste shared the same visceral feeling I had about her sister’s car. “When they told me they found her car abandoned, my heart sank. I got very shaky and woozy, and felt really sick to my stomach, knowing the car was abandoned and my sister was still missing.” She seemed visibly ill to me. It must have been unbearable for her to see her sister’s face flashing on the television screen night after night, her life an open book of revealing photographs.

But again, on camera, the older sister gathered herself and appeared composed, hoping for a miracle.

“We want to bring her home to be with her family. We all love each other, and the family is not complete without her. We want her to come home!” she pleaded. Celeste was trying to keep her hopes up, and reassured us, and
our viewing audience, and Debora’s friends again, “I am certain that I will see her again, that she will be alive and well, that I will find her and everything will be okay.”

On Friday, December 24, 2010—Christmas Eve—two hikers on the Arizona side of Lake Mead stumbled upon the charred remains of a woman’s burned body on Kingman Wash Road, about a mile from the O’Callaghan-Tillman Memorial Bridge, at around 11:30
A.M.
National Park Service spokesman Kevin Turner reported the incident to the Las Vegas police. Although the body was technically found in Arizona, Las Vegas homicide detectives rushed to the scene, since sources familiar with the investigation stated that the victim had a similar body type to that of the missing dancer. By now, Debora Flores-Narvaez had been missing for twelve days, and this finding did not bode well.

Lake Mead is the largest reservoir in the United States, located on the Colorado River about half an hour away from the center of Las Vegas and the Strip. It is “the place to go” during the summer, offering kayaking and jet skiing, swimming, hiking, and wildlife viewing, although there is no dangerous wildlife in the area, only some tortoises.

But despite all the fun activities, the Lake Mead
National Recreation Area has a darker reputation as well. The lake is located at the junction of three desert ecosystems—the Mojave, the Great Basin, and the Sonoran deserts—all of which are known to be places where criminals try to hide bodies. Criminals in Nevada often hide bodies in abandoned areas of the desert or dump human remains in the reservoir. It is not uncommon to hear reports of a “body found” near Lake Mead.

Clark County, Nevada, coroner Mike Murphy advised that his office would autopsy the body immediately with the Mohave County, Arizona, medical examiner present at the procedure. Murphy gave no timeline for making identification, but said his office would work as fast as possible in order to be able to notify the victim’s family. During the past couple of years, Clark County’s coroner’s office has had an agreement with the surrounding counties to perform many of their autopsies. They perform some from Nye and Mohave counties.