Paydays and a Plastic Bin: The Disappearance of Annie Suazo
Annie Royale Suazo was 50 years old, working as a clerk at See's Candies inside the Meadows Mall in North Las Vegas, Nevada, and living with her adult daughter, Bethany Rodriguez. She had separated from her husband in 2000 and, shortly afterward, began a new relationship with a 27-year-old man named Michael Messick. On April 3, 2001, Annie left her apartment with Messick in her own minivan, and she has never been seen since. Within days, that same minivan turned up freshly cleaned, and Messick's own mother was found dead inside a plastic storage bin. He was eventually convicted of murdering them both. Only one of those two women has ever actually been found.
A Fresh Start After Separation
After separating from her husband, Annie found herself starting over in her fifties, working retail at a candy counter and living alongside her grown daughter for support. It was during this period of rebuilding that she met and began dating Michael Messick, a relationship that would end up defining, and ending, the final chapter of her life.
A Relationship Daughter Warned Against
Bethany Rodriguez noticed a pattern in her mother's new relationship that troubled her from fairly early on. Messick, she observed, only seemed to pay real attention to Annie in the days immediately following her weekly paycheck, disappearing from the picture in between until the next payday rolled around again. Bethany warned her mother directly to keep Messick away from her, concerned about what appeared to be a relationship built more around access to money than any genuine connection. Messick was, by multiple accounts, a heavy amphetamine user during this period, a detail that helps explain both the erratic attention and the eventual violence that would follow.
The Morning She Left
In the early morning hours of April 3, 2001, Bethany discovered that her mother had let Messick into their shared apartment. The two women had a brief argument about his presence there, and shortly afterward, around 6:00 a.m., Annie left with Messick, driving off in her own minivan. She never reported to work that day, and no one in her family ever heard from her again.
A Van That Had Been Cleaned
On April 9, six days after Annie disappeared, her minivan was found abandoned along Charleston Boulevard. Investigators who examined the vehicle noted that it appeared someone had deliberately cleaned it, going so far as to shampoo the interior carpeting before it was discovered. Small brown stains found inside tested negative for blood, offering no immediate forensic breakthrough, but the thoroughness of the cleaning job itself was already a significant red flag, the kind of effort that suggested someone trying hard to erase evidence of whatever had actually happened inside that vehicle.
A Mother in a Storage Bin
Two days after the van was found, on April 11, investigators made a far more definitive and gruesome discovery. Michael Messick's own mother, a woman named Hisayo Sami Miller, was found dead inside her condo on the 2100 block of Quarry Ridge Street, her body wrapped in plastic and placed inside a storage bin, left in her bathtub. An autopsy revealed she had been both beaten and stabbed multiple times in the chest, with a plastic bag covering her head and a bungee cord wrapped around her neck. Whoever killed her had also attempted to clean up the scene using bleach. Inside the storage bin alongside her body, investigators recovered a knife and a pair of men's jeans in a size consistent with Messick's own build. When informed that his mother was dead, Messick reportedly appeared to be under the influence of drugs at the time and showed essentially no emotional reaction to the news, asking only for a cigarette.
Blood in the Geo Metro
Forensic examination of Messick's own vehicle, a Geo Metro, turned up traces of Annie Suazo's blood tucked beneath the rubber lip of the car's cargo hatch, physical evidence directly connecting him to whatever had happened to her, even in the total absence of her body. Investigators similarly recovered his mother's blood from within his vehicle, giving them forensic ties to both victims from the very same car.
Charged With Two Murders
Messick was arrested and formally charged with his mother's murder based on the physical evidence recovered from her condo. A grand jury separately indicted him in April 2002 in connection with Annie Suazo's presumed murder as well, and prosecutors ultimately elected to try both cases together in a single combined proceeding, presenting the connected evidence from both killings to one jury at once.
A Trial Without Eyewitnesses
Opening arguments in Messick's trial began in 2003. His defense attorney argued that prosecutors had no eyewitnesses to either killing and no fingerprint evidence directly tying him to the crimes, and further argued that the state had failed to establish any clear motive, particularly in Annie's case, where investigators themselves acknowledged they could not fully explain why he would have wanted to kill her. The defense also characterized Messick in broader terms as someone who had always marched to the beat of his own drum, a person a little different from most people, an argument aimed at explaining his unusual, unemotional demeanor without conceding guilt. Prosecutors, for their part, pointed directly to that same lack of emotional reaction as evidence of a man capable of committing exactly the kind of violence the physical evidence suggested.
Convicted of Both
In May 2003, the jury convicted Michael Messick of first-degree murder in his mother's death and second-degree murder in Annie Suazo's presumed death. He received two life sentences without the possibility of parole for killing his mother, along with a consecutive life sentence carrying parole eligibility after ten years for Annie's murder. He appealed the convictions, and that appeal was denied in February 2005, leaving both convictions and sentences fully intact.
Still Missing
Unlike his mother, whose body was recovered from her own condo within days of her death, Annie Royale Suazo has never been found anywhere. Investigators have offered a clearer theory for why Messick killed his mother, reportedly out of fear that she might report his ongoing drug use to authorities, but the motive behind Annie's presumed murder has remained far murkier, with investigators openly acknowledging they were never able to fully establish why he would have killed a woman he had been dating for only a matter of months. Annie Suazo remains classified as an endangered missing person more than two decades after that April morning when she climbed into her own minivan with a boyfriend her daughter had already warned her about, and drove away for the last time.
The timeline itself remains one of the more unsettling aspects of the case. Annie disappeared on April 3. Messick's own mother was murdered just over a week later. Whatever happened to Annie in the days between those two events, and whatever combination of drug-fueled instability and calculation drove Messick to kill two women connected to him within the same short window, went to the grave, or at least to a life sentence, with him. He has never disclosed what he did with Annie's remains, and no search conducted in the years since has ever turned up any trace of her.
Anyone with information is asked to contact the North Las Vegas Police Department at 702-633-9111.
Sources
- The Charley Project: Annie Royale Suazo
- Las Vegas Sun: Trial begins in killings of mother, girlfriend
- Las Vegas Sun: Man loses appeal in killing of his mother, girlfriend
