Still No Closure in Woman’s ’95 Disappearance

Two years after the disappearance of Sandra Nevarez from a laundermat here, the discovery of unidentified remains in the area has pitted relatives’ hope for her survival against their desperate need for closure in the case.

An answer may not come for months, say police, who have asked family members for blood samples to help determine through genetic testing if the bones, found in November, are those of the mother of four.

The recent development has also widened a rift between some of Nevarez’s relatives and her husband, Pete, a truck driver for 20th Century Fox studios in West Los Angeles, who was questioned by Los Angeles Police Department detectives early in the case but never charged.

“I tried to make amends. I tried to talk to them. But eventually I said, ‘You guys go your own way and I’ll go mine,’ ” Pete Nevarez said, after spending Friday, the anniversary of his wife’s disappearance, posting fliers near the laundermat, alone. The couple’s children, all 18 or older now, have moved away since the disappearance.

Sandra Nevarez--described as devoted to her family--at age 41 became one of 185 unsolved abduction cases for the LAPD on Jan. 17, 1995, after her car was discovered in a rear parking lot of the laundry, situated between a drugstore and smaller establishments of a Hubbard Street strip mall.

The rear lot is often used by regular patrons like Nevarez because spaces are plentiful and close to an open back door.

Nevarez had dropped off her youngest child, Joseph, at school just two hours before she was seen at the laundermat around 10 a.m. At 4 p.m., the dependable Nevarez failed to pick him up.

Later that evening, Joseph, now 18, and the couple’s oldest child, Anthony, now 25, searched for their mother at the laundermat. The brothers discovered the neatly folded laundry inside the trunk of their mother’s car, a small pool of blood on the ground under the rear bumper and her purse nearby with its contents still inside.

In the days and years that followed, relatives and friends posted fliers throughout the area. Many news reports appeared, then faded.

The family organized about 50 people to canvass dozens of abandoned buildings because Nevarez’s brother, David Rodriguez, had a vivid dream that his sister was tied up in an empty room.

“A day doesn’t go by that I don’t think of Sandra,” Rodriguez said last week. “I thought I saw her the other day, driving down the street.”

City Councilman Richard Alarcon helped approve a $25,000 reward that loosened no tongues before it expired. A Glendale private investigator charged $1,000 for his initial work, and since has done $4,000 worth of labor free of charge because he grew close to the family and was obsessed by the case.

A group of psychics even searched Lopez Canyon pro bono after they said their senses drew them to that site on a map.

But none of the fruitless efforts was as painful as the police questioning of Pete Nevarez, which led some relatives to suspect he had a connection to the disappearance and others to defend him.

LAPD Det. Patti Ferguson, who first handled the Nevarez case, said that spouses often become suspects in missing-persons cases, but that investigators never found a financial gain or jealousy motive for Pete Nevarez.

“We are in contact with him and he calls us at least once a week trying to find out if there has been any progress,” the detective said. “But until we know what happened to her, no one is considered innocent.”

Reached at his Sylmar home, Pete Nevarez said he has given up on appeals to suspicious in-laws and is eager to resolve the mystery that has tormented the family.

“Anybody can think whatever they want to think,” he said, adding later: “I myself am at the point that if [the bones] are Sandra’s remains, that means it was meant to be over with. But there’s always that one chance out of a million that she is alive. You always keep one slim hope there.”

A few miles away, Nevarez’s siblings echoed similar hopes at the home of sister Christine Alvidrez. Of the skeletal remains found in November along a narrow service road between the laundermat and the Foothill Freeway, Alvidrez said, “I think she wants to come home and is waiting to come home, and it’s up to us to find her.”

But shortly afterward, Alvidrez reluctantly nodded in agreement when her older brother, Rodriguez, said, “There’s got to be an end. We have to accept the hand God dealt.”