Richard Garcia was larger-than-life.
To his younger siblings, Rosanna Nowak and Marty Garcia, he was Rick. “We know him as Rick. A lot of people know him as Richard,” Rosanna said.
Rick was accomplished. “He was the student body president at the University of Arizona,” Rosanna told Dateline. “He did work for Jim McNulty — U.S. Congressman Jim McNulty.”
“He was, uh, sort of like the beginning of an activist,” she added.
In addition to being successful, 26-year-old Rick was outgoing and had a wide network of friends, according to his siblings. “He was just very social, very easygoing, and, uh, constantly just a good friend to a lot of people,” Rosanna said. “He touched so many lives,” brother Marty told Dateline.
One of those lives he touched is a woman named Cathy Lankford. Cathy and Rick met while working in the University of Arizona’s admissions office. The two quickly became close friends.
“He just had this, like, incredible laugh and smile, and everybody was his friend,” Cathy said. “I mean, even to this day, I always think, ‘I have never known anybody to have as many friends as he had.’ I mean, that’s just the type of person that he was.”
But Rick’s promising future was cut short. Rosanna, who was 21 at the time and still living at home in Bisbee, Arizona, says she remembers the day like it was yesterday. “I relive it all the time,” Rosanna said… “Especially every 29th of May.”
It was May 29, 1986. Their mother was outside watering the plants. “All of a sudden, a police car pulls up,” Rosanna recalled. A Bisbee police officer who was a friend of her mother’s came to the door. She invited him inside.
Rosanna saw her mother’s demeanor change, as if she sensed something was wrong. “OK, which one is it?” Rosanna remembers her mother asking the officer, referring to her two sons and her husband, who were not home at the time. “Do you have a son by the name of Richard Garcia?” the officer asked.
She did. And then the officer broke the news. Rick was dead.
Rosanna ran to a neighbor’s house. “I called Marty. He was working at a dealership in Sierra Vista, which is 30 miles away,” Rosanna said. “I said, ‘Marty, get home. Get home as fast as you can.’ He goes, ‘Why? What’s going on?’ I said, ‘Just get home.’”
Their father was out of town for work at the time, about three hours away. They asked family friends who lived in the area to go be with him so he wouldn’t be alone when they called to give him the news.
When they called, they relayed what they said police had told them: Rick died in a hotel room in Tucson, Arizona. He’d been murdered.
“Garcia was likely murdered on 5/28/1986 and found on 5/29/1986,” Detective David Miller of the Tucson Police Department Cold Case Unit told Dateline in an email. “Garcia’s body was found at 350 S. Freeway in a room at a hotel named the Old Pueblo Sheraton. This hotel has changed names over the years.”
According to Rosanna, Rick was living in California at the time but was back in Arizona for some work meetings. Rosanna says Rick had told them he intended to visit them while he was back in town, but never did. They learned he had been out with friends the night before his death.
“A maid went in, thought he was asleep, and closed the door,” Rosanna said. “She went back a little while later, he was in the same position, and then she alerted her management, and then they — that’s when they discovered him.”
A detective from the Tucson Police Department who was friends with Rick was able to identify him.
The Tucson Police Department would not disclose to Dateline what evidence was found at the scene.
Detective Miller says the autopsy report lists pulmonary and cerebral edema as Rick’s cause of death. A manner of death was not listed.
According to the family, the Tucson Police Department was particularly interested in a certain vehicle: Rick’s rental car. “They actually discovered the car in Susanville, California,” Rosanna said. Susanville is nowhere near where Rick lived.
Detective Miller told Dateline Rick’s car had been stolen. It was “found by the Lessen County Sheriff’s Office in CA, on 5/31/1986,” he wrote in his email. The man driving the car was arrested for car theft. While he was in custody, Tucson detectives were able to interview him.
“Based on what [he] told detectives, he’d been picked up while hitchhiking in California by a white male driving Garcia’s car,” Miller said. “The white male left Collins with the car in a small town between Sacramento and Reno.”
Authorities learned the man had been released from custody in Santa Cruz County, California, just hours before Rick’s was believed to have been killed and quickly ruled him out as a suspect.
“The white male that picked up [the hitchhiker] has never been identified and is still considered a suspect,” Detective Miller told Dateline.
According to his siblings, Rick’s class ring and wallet were found inside the rental car. Brother Marty still has the ring to this day.
The University of Arizona has honored Rick’s legacy over the years. On their alumni page, it states that in 1987, the year after Rick’s death, “Five hundred people participated in the first ‘Tour of the Tucson Mountains,’ a bicycle fundraising event on April 5. The ride was dedicated to former student body president, the late Richard Garcia.”
Rick was a member of the “Chain Gang,” an exclusive club for juniors. Now called the “Links Junior Honorary,” the club still awards a “Richard Garcia Memorial Scholarship” each year to one of its members.
There is also a plaque in Rick’s memory at the Graham-Greenlee dorm, where he had been head resident. “I was there not too long ago just to visit it. I just felt closer to him,” Rosanna told Dateline. She says there is also a room in the admissions office dedicated to her brother.
Rick’s parents have both passed away. They never found out what happened to their son.
His memory lives on now with Rosanna, Marty, and all those Rick touched in his short time.
“Family was first,” for Rick, Marty said. “His family and his friends were first,” Rosanna echoed her brother. “He was just a special person.”
College friend Cathy Lankford doesn’t want Rick’s case to be forgotten, and she wants justice. “It’s really bothered me all these years that it has gone unsolved,” she said. “I think about him a lot.”
Marty and Rosanna hope for justice for their older brother, too. “Just to tell Rick that we did this,” Rosanna said.
With no suspect identified, and no more leads to follow, justice — and answers — seem almost out of reach.
“The case is not open,” Det. Miller told Dateline. “However additional lab work and research may lead to further investigation by the Cold Case Unit. Advancements in forensic processing and investigative research capabilities are being developed at a much faster rate than I can recall in my 25-year career. This is exciting and we try to think outside the box.”
Anyone with information is asked to call the Tucson Police Department at 520-589-8932.
If you have a story to share with Dateline, please submit it here.
