Presents Still in the Car: The Fort Worth Missing Trio

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

July 13, 2026

Two days before Christmas in 1974, three girls climbed into a 1972 Oldsmobile 98 in Fort Worth, Texas, and drove to the Seminary South Shopping Center to finish some last-minute holiday errands. By that evening, the car was found locked in the mall's upper parking lot near Sears, the Christmas presents the girls had just picked up from layaway still sitting inside. The girls themselves were gone. Mary Rachel Trlica was 17. Lisa Renee Wilson was 14. Julie Ann Moseley was 9. More than fifty years later, none of them has ever been found, and the case has become known simply as the Fort Worth Missing Trio, one of the longest unresolved child and teen disappearances in Texas history.

Three Girls, One Car

Rachel Trlica, who went by Rachel rather than her first name Mary, was the oldest of the three at 17, a student at Southwest High School who had been married to her husband, Tommy Trlica, for roughly six months. She stood 5'6" with long brown hair, green eyes, and a distinctive chipped upper front tooth, and it was her car, a 1972 Oldsmobile, that the three girls used that day.

Lisa Renee Wilson, generally called Renee, was 14 and in ninth grade, a girl with light wavy brown hair and brown eyes who had, that very morning, received a promise ring from a new boyfriend. She was wearing bluish purple hip hugger pants, a white sweatshirt printed with the words Sweet Honesty, and red and white oxford shoes, and she had specific plans that day, wanting to be back home by 4:00 p.m. for a Christmas party with that same boyfriend.

Julie Ann Moseley was only 9, the youngest of the three by a wide margin, a girl her family remembered as someone who loved wearing her hair in ponytails and roughhousing with her brothers. Julie's presence on the trip that day was, by her family's own account afterward, something close to a fluke. She had asked to tag along at the last minute, and her mother, Rayanne, had reluctantly agreed only on the condition that Julie be back home by 6:00 p.m.

A Trip to Seminary South

The three girls left shortly before noon on December 23, 1974, headed for the Seminary South Shopping Center, where Rachel and Renee planned to retrieve items they had put on layaway before Christmas. Multiple witnesses at the mall reported seeing the three of them there over the course of the day, moving through stores in what appeared, at the time, to be an entirely unremarkable holiday shopping trip. At some point in the afternoon, that changed. When family members went looking for them around 6:00 p.m., after none of the girls had returned home on schedule, they found the Oldsmobile sitting locked in the upper level Sears parking lot, with the newly retrieved Christmas gifts still inside. There was no sign of Rachel, Renee, or Julie anywhere in or around the vehicle.

The Letter That Didn't Add Up

The following day, December 24, Tommy Trlica received a letter purportedly written by his wife. It read, in essence, that she knew she was going to catch trouble for it, but that the three of them had to get away, that they were headed to Houston, and that they would be back in about a week, signed with her name and noting that the car had been left in Sears' upper parking lot.

Almost nothing about the letter held up to scrutiny once the families examined it closely. The envelope was addressed formally to Thomas A. Trlica, even though Rachel, by every account, only ever called her husband Tommy in any personal correspondence. The name Rachel appeared to have been misspelled in the return address corner before being corrected. The letter itself was written in ink on paper wider than the envelope it arrived in, an odd mismatch for a document supposedly written and mailed in a hurry. The postmark was smudged in a way that made the zip code difficult to read with confidence, though some examinations suggested a number associated with small towns like Eliasville or Weatherford rather than anywhere along a route to Houston. FBI analysis and handwriting experts who examined the letter over the following decades were never able to conclusively determine whether Rachel had actually written it herself.

The families rejected the runaway explanation from the very beginning and never wavered from that position. Julie's mother, Rayanne Moseley, said plainly that she knew her daughter and she knew the other two girls, and that they were not runaways. Renee's mother, Judy Wilson, pointed out that her daughter would never have skipped the Christmas party she had been looking forward to, let alone disappeared before the holiday itself. Rachel's mother, Frances Langston, said that while some people might believe the girls left with someone they knew, she would believe until the day she died that the girls had been taken.

Witnesses Who Came Forward Too Late

Over the years, a handful of witness accounts emerged that seemed to describe pieces of what may have happened that afternoon, though none of them ever led to a confirmed resolution. In early 1975, a young man came forward saying he had seen the three girls in the mall's record department shortly before they vanished and had briefly spoken with Rachel, noting that another person appeared to be with them at the time. Around the same period, a store clerk reported that a woman had told her she witnessed the girls being forced into a yellow pickup truck with lights mounted on top, near a grocery store called Buddies located inside the shopping center. That original witness was never located or verified by investigators. In 1981, a different man came forward describing an incident in the parking lot in which he saw someone forcing a girl into a van, and said that when he tried to intervene, the man in the van claimed it was simply a family dispute. In April 2001, a former Fort Worth police officer who had also worked security at Sears, Bill Hutchins, stated that he had seen the three girls with a security guard on the night they disappeared, a claim the guard in question denied.

A Private Investigator's Dead Ends

The girls' families, frustrated by the pace of the official investigation, hired a private detective named Jon Swaim to pursue the case independently. Swaim's investigation turned up a genuinely disturbing lead in August 1975, when he discovered a 28 year old store employee who had been making obscene phone calls targeting young female job applicants, including Rachel herself, though the lead never resulted in any charges connected to the girls' disappearance. In April 1975, acting on a tip, Swaim led a hundred volunteers searching under bridges near Port Lavaca, Texas, without finding anything. In 1976, an oil drilling crew in Brazoria County uncovered three skeletons that investigators hoped might belong to the missing girls, but the remains turned out to belong to an unrelated teenage boy and two unrelated women. That same year, Swaim followed a psychic's tip to an oil well near Rising Star, Texas, again without result. In 1979, Swaim himself died of a drug overdose ruled a suicide, and before his death he had ordered all of his case files on the investigation destroyed, closing off whatever additional leads or theories he may have developed independently over the preceding years.

Decades of Searches Come Up Empty

Official law enforcement efforts continued in fits and starts over the following decades. Investigators initially treated the case as a probable runaway situation, a classification the families fought against from the start. In 1981, human remains discovered in a swampy area of Brazoria County prompted a month-long investigation that once again proved unrelated to the case. In January 2001, the case was formally reopened and assigned to homicide detective Tom Boetcher, who developed a working theory that the girls had likely left with someone they trusted, though he believed multiple people may have been involved in whatever happened afterward. In 2018, two vehicles pulled from Benbrook Lake, a body of water near Fort Worth long rumored to be connected to the case, were searched and yielded nothing relevant. In May 2023, the Clear Channel media company announced a partnership with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and the Texas Center for the Missing specifically aimed at generating new tips for the cold case, nearly fifty years after the girls vanished. Across all of these efforts combined, investigators have followed thousands of leads, conducted dozens of physical searches, and interviewed hundreds of people, without ever producing a conclusive answer.

What Families Still Believe

Terry Moseley, Julie's older brother, was 15 years old at the time his younger sister disappeared, and decades later he still remembers her as a girl who loved ponytails and roughhousing, someone whose place on that shopping trip was such a last-minute addition that her presence in the car at all still strikes him as almost arbitrary bad luck. He has said his mother spent the rest of her life blaming herself for the single moment she agreed to let Julie go along. Julie's aunt, Sandy Harkcom, remembers her simply as a sweet little girl, and has been openly dismissive of the runaway theory that circulated in the earliest days of the case, asking why anyone would take a nine year old girl along on a supposed trip to Houston if the older girls had simply decided to run away together.

More than fifty years after Mary Rachel Trlica, Lisa Renee Wilson, and Julie Ann Moseley disappeared from a Texas shopping center two days before Christmas, none of the three has ever been found, no one has ever been charged, and the letter that arrived the day after they vanished remains exactly what their families always insisted it was: not an explanation, but a piece of the mystery itself.

Anyone with information is asked to contact the Fort Worth Police Department at 817-335-4222 or the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children at 1-800-843-5678.

Sources