A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

his Porsche in the 1984 Miami Grand Prix during the last week of February. The dark sports car, Number 51, was as familiar to race fans as Chris himself was. On February 26, he was seen around the track, and so was twenty-year-old Rosario “Chary” Gonzalez, a pretty dark-eyed girl with dreams of succeeding as a model. A pharmaceutical company had hired Chary and several other attractive young women to pass out free samples of a new pill containing aspirin to the race fans. The “models” all wore red shorts and white t-shirts.
    Chary Gonzalez left her home in Homestead, drove north for twenty-three miles, and arrived at the parking lot of a hotel close to the racing action. She picked up her tray of samples at the pharmaceutical company’s tent at 8:30 that Sunday morning. She was a little tired because she had been on the phone with her fiancé until almost two A.M. , making plans for their June wedding. But she was young and her smile was vibrant as she moved through the sea of people on Biscayne Boulevard near Flagler Street and the Bayfront Park.
    It was shortly after one P.M. when Chary dropped her sample tray at the company tent, saying she was going to take a lunch break and then return. But she never
did
come back to finish the day’s work. There were so many girls in white t-shirts and red shorts that no one noticed one of them was missing.
    Rosario Gonzalez had told her parents she would probably be home for supper in Homestead between six and seven that Sunday in February. When she wasn’t there by nine, they were worried—worried enough to call the Florida Highway Patrol to see if there had been an accident involving their daughter. There hadn’t been, but Chary still wasn’t home at 3 A.M. Some sixth sense told the Gonzalez family that Chary was in terrible danger. “We were so hysterical, screaming and crying,” her father said, “We couldn’t control our emotions long enough to say a prayer.”
    Miami Homicide detectives were handed Chary’s case the very next day, Monday morning. Miami has a tremendously high homicide rate as well as a high number of adults who simply disappear for their own reasons. But the vanishing of Rosario Gonzalez was treated seriously from the beginning. She was happy at home, madly in love, and thrilled to be planning her wedding. She had no reason at all to run away.
    Detectives’ questions produced only a few witnesses who remembered seeing Chary on Sunday afternoon. One of the other models who handed out aspirin samples said that she and her mother had seen Rosario. “She was following a man, or maybe just walking behind him in the crowd,” the girl said. “He was white, and looked as if he was in his late thirties.”
    It wasn’t much to go on, but a police artist produced a sketch of the man from the other model’s description and distributed it to the media. The
Miami Herald
printed a story about Rosario’s disappearance, and a scattering of “sightings” trickled in. A man on the Pompano Turnpike called police to say that he’d seen a girl resembling Rosario jump out of a car near the Turnpike Plaza and run. But two men had chased after her, caught her, and it looked as if they were struggling with her and beating her as they forced her back into the car.
    The motorist said he’d followed their car to the turn-off to Boca Raton and managed to get the last three numbers of the license plate. It was a little help—but not much; the Motor Vehicles Department at the Florida State Capital in Tallahassee fed the numbers into their computers and got back
12,000
cars which had that combination of numbers on their plates. It would be virtually impossible to check out the whereabouts of all the registered owners.
    Beth Kenyon didn’t know Rosario Gonzalez, although she may have read about her disappearance in the paper or seen the story on the evening news. Beth’s school was in Coral Gables, just south of Miami. On Monday, March 5, only a week after Rosario Gonzalez’s disappearance, Beth didn’t come home to the apartment she shared with a roommate on Ives Dairy Road.
    Her roommate assumed that Beth had gone to her parents’ home in Pompano Beach, about thirty miles up the Florida coast, so she was not really worried—not until someone at the high school where Beth taught called the next morning to ask why she hadn’t come to work. Beth’s roommate called Bill and Dolores Kenyon, and learned that they had not seen Beth nor did they know of