Vehicle belonging to missing Gregg County woman found with human remains inside

GREGG COUNTY, Texas (KLTV) - After years of searching, East Texas authorities say they have recovered the vehicle belonging to a missing woman. Rosemary Rodriguez, of Kilgore, disappeared back in October of 2019. She and her green car were nowhere to be found, until last night.

The Gregg county sheriff’s office confirms the woman’s car was found in a densely wooded area off of Mount Pisgah road, near Liberty city.

“We have confirmed it is the vehicle we’ve been searching for, for the last two years, in fact since October 2019,” said Gregg county sheriff Maxey Cerliano.

That vehicle was the lime-green hatchback that belonged to Rodriguez, who vanished in October 2019.

“I do feel like it was a huge weight lifted off our shoulders, slightly. We still have a long road to go, there’s still a lot of unknowns,” said Rosemary’s daughter Francis Rodriguez.

After two years of exhausting every possible lead, investigators were led to the location off Mount Pisgah road, through a happen chance.

Investigators caught a break when and individual walking the property actually walked up on the abandoned vehicle.

The discovery of the car was made Thursday night.

It was spotted well off the road covered by thickly overgrown foliage.

So thick that heavy equipment was brought in to clear a path.

“Had to build a road or cut a road through the woods to get to the vehicle to extract it. We do have remains inside the vehicle,” Cerliano said.

For Rodriguez family, it was an agonizing two years not knowing anything about her disappearance or how her car could have just vanished.

Now there are more questions.

“The car didn’t end up in the middle of the woods on it’s own, like that. Someone had to have put it there. And I want to know what happened. I need that,” said daughter Lita Walker.

With the extraction of the vehicle, now the process of forensic examination begins. They will try to determine if there is any evidence inside the vehicle, along with positively identifying the remains.

Rodriguez vanished in Oct. 2019 with no clues as to what happened to her. She was last seen leaving her boyfriend’s house in the Mount Pisgah area the previous day.

Employees at a Kilgore Walmart alerted Rodriguez’s family after she didn’t show up for work. Her green Chevrolet with an Oklahoma University sticker on the back vanished as well.

Authorities removed the car from the woods just after the noon hour on Friday.

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