CA CA - Lillian Rochelle Holmes, 21, Pasadena, 22 March 1984

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The detective has replied, initial dental records indicate it's not a match but he's still waiting on the DNA determination.
 
Bumping for Lillian. Still no news, and I still haven't found ANYTHING about her at all, not even a record of her birth.
 
Still no updates, and still nothing about Lillian anyway. The alumni association did not reply to me for months, then replied saying that they had already replied, and that they cannot help/are unwilling to help in any way. :/
 
deca said:
I am not sure where that blogger gets the 6:30 time. First of all, I don't see that reported, although I may have missed it.

It seems unlikely IMHO. Most department stores don't open until 9 or 10. Even if she was to come in early she wouldn't have come in 2 hours early. I used to work retail and they wouldn't have product demonstrators come in usually until the store opened.

The only thing I can think of is she was going to go early on the bus and then meet up for breakfast with someone by the mall. A coworker? A boss?
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The Charley Project page & Lillian's NAMUS profile coincide with the blogger's 6:30 AM time reference for when she left the house, so it's seems that's the likely time she left her residence. The news article above then states she was seen boarding the bus at noon-1 PM. I believe both the times are correct, so the question is what was she doing in that time frame? I question if she even really got on the bus at all. What if the witness was mistaken? Is there any way to tell by some kind of record if she did board the bus? If the witness was mistaken and Lillian never boarded the bus, this leads into a new set of possibilities. She may have went missing much longer before noon or 1 PM, leaving the possibility she met up with someone in that time frame who may have more information.
 
amber1 said:
The Charley Project page & Lillian's NAMUS profile coincide with the blogger's 6:30 AM time reference for when she left the house, so it's seems that's the likely time she left her residence. The news article above then states she was seen boarding the bus at noon-1 PM. I believe both the times are correct, so the question is what was she doing in that time frame? I question if she even really got on the bus at all. What if the witness was mistaken? Is there any way to tell by some kind of record if she did board the bus? If the witness was mistaken and Lillian never boarded the bus, this leads into a new set of possibilities. She may have went missing much longer before noon or 1 PM, leaving the possibility she met up with someone in that time frame who may have more information.
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I agree that the witness may have been mistaken, but either way there is some weird unaccounted for time.

If Lillian got on the bus at 1, what was she doing for HOURS before that? And if she got on a bus headed to work at 1, that's a bit weird too, if it was a job at a mall presumably she would have gone in the morning.

But if she did leave home at 6:30, where did she go? Did she even intend to go to the job? Who offered her the job? I'm assuming that LE did look into this stuff and found no leads. I'm actually a bit more positive about LE efforts, actually, since I had some dealing with the Christopher Wells case ( WA WA - Christopher Wells, 16, Seattle, 13 Dec 1972 - Websleuths Crime Sleuthing Community ). It's a classic "there are few details in this case" situation, until I asked Seattle police for some basic info, and they sent me a scanned version of basically the entire police file, which showed that they had actually done a fair bit of digging and interviews at the time.

I've tried asking Pasadena about the same but they can't disclose anything, basically... Maybe someone else would have better luck.
 
21 year old Lillian Rochelle Holmes went missing in Pasadena California on 3/22/1984. Lillian was last seen by her father when she left her Pasadena home at approximately 6:30 am on her way to start a new job demonstrating products at Robinsons in the Santa Anita Mall located in Arcadia, CA. Lillian was last seen boarding an RTD bus in Pasadena carrying a blue dress over her shoulder. Lillian was never seen or heard from again. It is believed that Lillian never made it to the new job at the mall but it is unknown where exactly she vanished along her journey between her home and the mall.

Impossible to jump to any conclusions here because there is hardly any info at all. She got a job, went on the bus and was seen there but never arrived to the job.

Google Maps

Here's the mall at Arcadia, looking at the map its very close to Pasadena. If she really went on the bus how could she miss it. I assume she had been there before and what could have happened along the way?

on namus it sais that her father was the last to see her leave home but in charleyproject is said that "Holmes was seen boarding the bus"What if she never left home? perhaps it wasn't her on the bus.
 
Lillian reminds me of one of serial killer Samuel Little's victims, killed in Los Angeles in 1987. He usually lured women into his luxury cars, so I wonder if maybe she was walking to the bus and he offered her a ride.
 
This is a difficult case. Primarily due to how long ago it was - it's hard to know how differently things were run back then as to now. Also, because there seems to only be one major article about it.

I don't know if this was ever true for department stores, but product demonstrators seem to be hired outside - they're hired by the product company itself or an agency and go into the stores to do demos. For instance, Costco's food stations are staffed by an outside company, and the various "roadshow" products demoed are also employed by the product company and go to a different store every two weeks or month.

A starting point would be to find out Ms. Holmes was hired by Robinson's itself or by an outside place.

I cannot stress how much everything is literally different. The mall is now called the Westfield Santa Anita. Robinson's May got bought by Macy's, and there is a Macy's at that mall now, but it may not be the same one - a few malls in SoCal had both a Robinson May's and Macy's and they shut one down when merging. Ar my local mall they vacated the newer Macy's and kept the original RM's, but could have easily been reversed.

The RTD doesn't exist anymore - it was merged with another entity and became the LA County Metropolitan Transportation Agency (LACMTA, branded as Metro). I have no idea what the bus route/stops structure was in 1984.
 
deca said:
I am not sure where that blogger gets the 6:30 time. First of all, I don't see that reported, although I may have missed it.

It seems unlikely IMHO. Most department stores don't open until 9 or 10. Even if she was to come in early she wouldn't have come in 2 hours early. I used to work retail and they wouldn't have product demonstrators come in usually until the store opened.

The only thing I can think of is she was going to go early on the bus and then meet up for breakfast with someone by the mall. A coworker? A boss?
Click to expand...
It seems she was going to the laundromat to get a blue dress.
 
I worked on this case. What I gathered was that she left home at 630am. She went to a laundromat. Someone saw her getting on a bus between noon and 1pm. Then 'poof.' It was her first day at a job demonstrating products or something like that at Robinson's. She was probably really concerned about her appearance because it was her first day and the kind of job it sounded like. I think she is reasonably safe on the bus and pretty safe in the mall. However, the parking lot is a different matter. She could have been abducted there.
 
Presuming that Lillian was abducted in the parking lot of the mall, then there are uncanny similarities to the case of Cindy Lee Mellin. Mellin was:
  1. similarly aged (19 years old, Lillian was 21)
  2. Female
  3. Californian
  4. a department store employee
  5. abducted in a parking lot by all reasonable assumptions
  6. abducted during her commute by all reasonable assumptions (she was leaving work whereas Lillian was commuting to work)
There is a 14-year difference between the disappearances.
 
UncoolNegated said:
Presuming that Lillian was abducted in the parking lot of the mall, then there are uncanny similarities to the case of Cindy Lee Mellin. Mellin was:
  1. similarly aged (19 years old, Lillian was 21)
  2. Female
  3. Californian
  4. a department store employee
  5. abducted in a parking lot by all reasonable assumptions
  6. abducted during her commute by all reasonable assumptions (she was leaving work whereas Lillian was commuting to work)
There is a 14-year difference between the disappearances.
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Did you find anything about the bus and where it would stop along the way?
 
alllads said:
And if she got on a bus headed to work at 1, that's a bit weird too, if it was a job at a mall presumably she would have gone in the morning.
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Not necessarily, retail job hours are all over the place. I used to work retail and I was often scheduled for random times, depending on whether I was doing a 4-hour, 6-hour or 8-hour shift.
 
Aurora90 said:
Did you find anything about the bus and where it would stop along the way?
Click to expand...
As of 1983, the RTD bus route from Pasadena to Pomona (Arcadia is on the way to Pomona) was Route 187. In 1989, the Los Angeles Times wrote that Route 187 "runs from Pasadena to Pomona, including stops at Pasadena City College, Santa Anita Race Track and the City of Hope Medical Center." There were likely other stops too, and they just called out a few of the more well-known locations.
 
How is it possible for someone to take a bus and never be seen again? It is always risky to go to work, maybe she had not worked for a long time without having any income and you go and take a risk...
whatever it is rest in peace
 

  • lillian_rochelle_holmes_1.jpg
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Holmes, circa 1984
 
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