Reno teen Marcia Shirree Thomas was a loved daughter and sister who was on the honor roll and talked about going to college one day.
Siobhan McAndrew
Reno Gazette Journal
8.14.24
The colorful Care Bear stuffed animals on Marcia Shirree Thomas’ rainbow sheets didn’t move the night of June 9, 2009. The dinner left in the microwave for her to heat up when she got home was untouched.
And the Reno girl who loved to style her hair in front of the mirror wasn't in the bathroom.
The night Marcia, 14, left to visit a friend was the last time her family would see the girl who was on the honor roll and dreamed of going to college.
She loved to climb trees, play volleyball and design clothes for her dolls. When she walked into a room at 6 feet tall, she captivated even the adults with her ability to make everyone laugh.
“She went through life like if she wasn’t making you laugh, she wasn’t doing her job," said her big sister Kuranda Randolph, 32. She was 17 when Marcia went missing.
Vanished
Marcia was the baby of the family, the youngest of Nneka Randolph's five children.
“She was just my special baby,” Nneka said. “She just was that kind of child.”
Kuranda, three years older, was closest to Marcia.
“I thought of her as my baby,” Kuranda said of dressing her sister in cute outfits and attaching bows to her hair. “I still think of her as my baby.”
The two shared a room the summer after Marcia finished middle school. Kuranda remembers Marcia talking about going to visit a friend on the last night she would see her.
When Kuranda woke up and didn’t see her sister in her bed, she didn’t worry. She pictured Marcia on the couch eating cereal.
It wasn’t until she saw the dinner she'd left for Marcia untouched in the microwave that she knew something was wrong.
They called the police. Because Marcia had run away in the past, the case was classified again as a runaway.
But Nneka Randolph said she didn't think her daughter took off on her own.
“She didn’t just leave,” she said.
Searching the streets for Marcia
In the days and weeks after her sister vanished, Kuranda remembers driving up and down Reno streets looking for her. Their mom printed flyers.
The case never made the local news. Police will often release information on a child with a medical issue or thought to be in immediate danger, but a repeat runaway is less of a priority for many agencies.
“We looked and couldn’t find her,” Nneka said. "No one was helping us."
It was about two months after Marcia went missing that a family friend said they thought they saw the girl in the Bay Area.
The family still has no idea why or how the girl ended up in Irvine, California. Kuranda believes she was taken against her will.
"I know if I had walked with her to her friend's house, she would not have disappeared," Kuranda said.
But after months of searching in Nevada, Nneka, her daughter Kuranda and her son moved from Reno to Richmond, California. They had started searching there based on the only tip to where the teen could be.
The family still lives in Richmond today.
They handed out flyers like they had done in Reno. They spent hours driving streets looking for Marcia.
When a friend said she might have been seen in Bakersfield, California, they drove nearly five hours, returning home again with no information.
Days turned to months and months to years spent driving up and down random streets.
“My mom was always just this superwoman who never gave up,” Kuranda said. “I had to convince her we couldn’t keep driving to look for her.
“But we never gave up hope Marcia would come back.”
Kuranda said she stared intently at the face of anyone who resembled her sister. A few years ago, she went up to stranger.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
Kuranda told the woman the story of her sister when she didn’t get the answer she desperately hoped to hear.
“The woman gave me a hug.”
Vanished without a trace
There was something different about this cold case for Reno Police Detective Tamara Lamoureaux.
New to the missing persons beat, Lamoureaux has nearly two dozen runaway and missing juvenile cases. She also has 14 adult missing person cases, most of those suspected homicides.
Cases range from labor and sex trafficking to children who were removed from their home but ran back to parents, Lamoureaux said.
"They run back to their parents and the parents hide them. ... If we don't have a crime involved, I can go and knock on a mom or dad's door until I'm blue in the face and they don't have to answer the door."
It was late last year when Lamoureaux opened Marcia's file. It stood out because there was no current information on this girl, who would now be 29.
"Generally, when you start looking into the whereabouts of a person, they have had contact with either law enforcement (or) they have gotten a driver's license or a state ID. They have registered to vote. They have gotten a loan on a car. They filed taxes. They have social media.
"None of that was listed for her," Lamoureaux said. "In 15 years, this kid didn't pop up on the radar."
Lamoureaux knew she would have to reach out to other agencies for help. She contacted the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, a repository and resource center for missing, unidentified and unclaimed person cases across the United States.
She was able to get a picture of Marcia from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which had reached out to the family when the girl first went missing. Marcia's school picture was still on their website.
Multiple agencies helped Lamoureaux connect with Nneka, who confirmed she hadn’t seen or heard from Marcia since the night she went missing.
Lamoureaux looked for anything that could connect her to answers, struggling at times to find new information and connect with law enforcement in other states.
"If this case is happening today, there would have been a lot more leads. There would have been a lot more protocols in place to make sure somebody would follow up. There are certain things we have to do now that weren't required" in 2009, Lamoureaux said.
"We have come so far in missing person cases because they realized more and more missing person cases are ending up as homicides."
Reno detective links case to 2009 homicide
When Lamoureaux came across the case of a murdered Jane Doe in Irvine, California, she stared at the black and white police sketch of the unknown girl.
According to Irvine police, the girl was picked up by brothers Zenaido Valdivia-Guzman and Gabino Valdiva-Guzman on Sept. 5, 2009 — three months after Marcia had vanished from Reno.
When she began to panic, they beat her, police said. She was assaulted and strangled to death, police said.
The two men drove to an industrial park, doused her body with gasoline and set her on fire, police said. The burned body was found early the next morning.
DNA from under Jane Doe’s fingernails was entered into a crime lab database. The brothers were linked to the homicide a few months later after one of them was arrested on a domestic violence charge.
Zenaido Valdivia-Guzman, 36, was convicted of first-degree murder and murder in the commission of a kidnapping on Nov. 15, 2022.
His brother, Gabino Valdivia-Guzman, will be tried later this year.
Police say information and suspected reasons for how the girl got to California won't be released while Gabino Valdivia-Guzman is still awaiting his murder trial.
Lamoureaux put the Jane Doe sketch next to the school picture of Marcia.
“I could see the resemblance," she said. "I just had this feeling.”
DNA from sister, mom confirms link
Lamoureaux called the Irvine Police Department.
“I need you to look at these two pictures for me,” she told them.
“I just need someone else to see how much I think they look alike.” she said.
When others agreed there was a resemblance, Lamoureaux reached out to the Richmond, California, police department for help.
Unlike current missing and runaway cases, where DNA and dental records are obtained by police two months after a person is missing to be kept on file, there was nothing to compare Marcia to the Jane Doe.
Police would need Kuranda and Nneka Randolph’s DNA.
'Her name was Marcia Shirree Thomas, and she was my baby sister'
Kuranda remembers going into the lab to have her DNA taken. It was a simple mouth swab, but the results were anything but that.
“I was scared of what the answer would be,” Kuranda said. “I was hoping it wasn’t her and that she was alive.”
She had spent her life wanting so desperately for her sister to be out there, somewhere.
“I wanted her to see me as a mom and meet her nieces and nephews,” Kuranda said. “I wanted to meet the children she would have had.”
When the DNA match confirmed what Lamoureaux suspected, Kuranda cried for days, horrified at the details of her sister’s death.
Nneka said she tried not to think about how Marcia died.
"It doesn't matter now," she said. "I just wanted my daughter back."
Nneka wants to have a service for her daughter now that there are answers. She’s waiting for information on what remains, if any, are available.
Kuranda and Nneka plan to attend the second trial. It is expected to be in November. If Gabino Valdivia-Guzman is convicted, they hope to speak at his sentencing. They were robbed of the chance when Zenaido Valdivia-Guzman was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
“I want him to look at me and know what he took,” Kuranda said.
And she wants everyone else to say her sister’s name.
“Her name was Marcia Shirree Thomas, and she was my baby sister.”
