The Model Who Chased Wealthy Men and Vanished With a Green Bag: Lourdes Gruart
Lourdes Maria Gruart's family fled Cuba in 1960, part of the wave of Cuban exiles who left the island in the years following the revolution, and she grew up in the United States chasing a life considerably more glamorous than the one her family had been forced to abandon. She earned a degree in international affairs from the University of Florida at Tampa, studied ballet and modeled during college, and moved to New York to pursue modeling professionally after graduation. In 1983, she relocated to Milan, where she found real success as a runway model, walking for fashion houses including Armani and Valentino during a period when Italian fashion was at the height of its global influence. The money, by most accounts, never quite matched the prestige of the names on her resume. She returned to the United States in 1988 as the fashion industry's tastes shifted toward younger faces, eventually settling into steadier but less glamorous work as a fit model and staff member at a modeling agency back in New York.
A Woman Who Aimed High
Friends and acquaintances who spoke about Lourdes in the years after her disappearance described a woman with a consistent, almost strategic pattern in her romantic life, a preference for dating wealthy, prominent men rather than settling into anything more ordinary. She reportedly dated Bob Marx, the stepson of Frank Sinatra, for a period, and through that connection pursued his friend Muhammed Khashoggi, son of the famous Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, one of the wealthiest men in the world during that era. When that pursuit stalled, Lourdes was said to have visited Santeria practitioners seeking spells intended to lure Khashoggi back to her, a detail that speaks to how seriously she seemed to take these pursuits, treating them less like casual romance and more like a calculated project. Later, her attention reportedly shifted to Gene Pressman, chairman of the upscale department store Barneys. None of these relationships appear to have produced the lasting financial security Lourdes may have been hoping for, and by 2000 she was still living relatively modestly in a small Manhattan apartment on East 83rd Street, a long way from the runways of Milan.
A Brother Who Needed Somewhere to Stay
In the months before she disappeared, Lourdes had allowed her younger brother, Mario Gruart, to move into that apartment with her. Mario had been arrested for marijuana possession in July 2000 and was unemployed at the time, and Lourdes, who had reportedly bailed him out financially on more than one occasion over the years, let him stay while he got back on his feet. The arrangement did not go smoothly. Friends described Mario as an opportunist, someone perpetually tangled up in some scandal or scheme, and Lourdes grew increasingly frustrated with his continued unemployment and his failure to move toward independence. Shortly before she vanished, she asked him to move out, and the two of them had a loud, documented argument in the apartment they shared.
A Story That Never Quite Held Together
On October 14, 2000, according to Mario, Lourdes told him she was heading to Europe for a modeling job that would keep her away for about two weeks. He said she left the apartment around eight that morning carrying a large green bag and got into a waiting car. She was never heard from again. Investigators, working to verify even the most basic elements of that account, discovered a problem almost immediately: Lourdes's passport had expired back in 1988 and had never been renewed, making any European travel, on the timeline Mario described, essentially impossible without a passport she did not have. Her mother added another inconsistency, telling police that Lourdes never traveled anywhere without notifying her beforehand, and that she had received no such notice about any trip.
When Lourdes's family and investigators went through her apartment, they found nearly all of her personal belongings still there, untouched, with one conspicuous exception: her lingerie was missing. That detail fed into an unconfirmed but persistent theory that Lourdes may have been involved in some form of sex work in the period before she disappeared, though nothing concrete was ever established to support it, and it remains speculation rather than documented fact.
A Suspicious Couch and an Unproven Case
Mario's behavior in the days after his sister vanished drew direct scrutiny from the NYPD. He disposed of the couch from the apartment shortly after she disappeared, telling investigators he was simply following her prior instructions, though no replacement couch ever arrived and no one seems to have witnessed the removal happen, an absence that struck people following the case as strange for a piece of furniture that size being taken out of a Manhattan apartment building. He also moved a number of Lourdes's other possessions during that same window. Investigators treated Mario as a serious person of interest for a period, given both his financial dependence on his sister, the argument that preceded her disappearance, and his own criminal history, which included a string of burglary charges in Florida during the 1980s, an episode that reportedly ended with him fleeing into a lake and being caught with a gun and stolen jewelry in his car. Despite all of that, investigators ultimately concluded they did not have evidence directly connecting him to whatever happened to his sister, and no charges were ever filed against him. He has consistently denied any involvement in her disappearance.
A Life Built on Reinvention
Lourdes's entire adult life, in a sense, had been a series of departures and reinventions even before October 2000, which is part of what made her family so unwilling to accept her brother's story at face value. She had left Cuba as a child, left Florida for New York as a young woman, left New York for Milan when her modeling career needed a bigger stage, and returned to New York again once Milan stopped needing her. Each of those transitions had been documented, discussed with family, planned around. The idea that she would simply climb into a car one October morning and vanish entirely, with no passport, no advance warning to her mother, and no contact afterward, broke sharply from the pattern of a woman who had always kept the people close to her informed about where her life was headed next, even when where it was headed involved chasing men considerably richer and more prominent than anyone in her own family circle.
Three Possibilities, No Answer
More than two decades later, investigators remain genuinely uncertain which of three broad explanations accounts for what happened to Lourdes Gruart. She may have disappeared voluntarily, walking away from a life that had not delivered the security or status she had spent years pursuing. She may have taken her own life, though nothing in the case file points toward a specific reason to believe that over the alternatives. Or she may have been the victim of foul play, a possibility the inconsistencies in her brother's account, the missing couch, and the general strangeness surrounding her final hours have never fully allowed investigators, or amateur researchers who have picked over the case in the years since, to rule out. The New York Police Department still lists her case as open, and still asks that anyone with information contact them directly.
What makes Lourdes's case difficult to sit with is not any single piece of dramatic evidence, since the case never produced one, but the accumulation of small, unresolved contradictions surrounding an ordinary Saturday morning departure that somehow left behind an entire life, an apartment full of belongings, a family that never heard from her again, and a brother whose story about a European job never once matched the facts investigators were able to confirm.
Sources
- The Charley Project: Lourdes Maria Gruart
- She Goes By Jane Podcast: Lourdes Gruart
- Crime Solvers Central: Lourdes Gruart Missing Person Case
- Websleuths: NY - Lourdes Gruart, 46, New York City, 14 Oct 2000
