In September 1994, 23-year-old Hispanic woman Melissa Badillo disappeared from her home in Fort Worth, Texas. She never returned. Days later, her nude body was discovered in a wooded area. The young woman had been strangled. At the time, the case remained unsolved, and her family was left devastated. Melissa Badillo's infant daughter, Angela, was just five months old when her mother was killed.
She was raised by Melissa's sister, Sylvia Sanchez, who shielded her from the full truth of her mother's fate until years later.
For more than a decade, the murder of 23-year-old Hispanic woman Melissa Badillo remained a cold case. It wasn't until 2010 that a breakthrough came. A cold case detective, Tom O'Brien, noticed that the circumstances of Melissa Badillo's death bore similarities to other unsolved cases linked to Juan Segundo, a convicted serial killer already on death row. O'Brien discovered that fingernail scrapings collected during Badillo's autopsy had never been tested for DNA. When they were finally processed, the results confirmed Segundo's involvement.
Juan Segundo, who had previously been convicted of multiple rapes and murders—including the 1986 killing of an 11-year-old girl—was identified as the suspect in the murder of 23-year-old Hispanic woman Melissa Badillo. Segundo had been a neighbor and the older brother of Badillo's best friend, making the revelation especially painful for her family. Despite the DNA match, authorities have not confirmed whether Segundo will be tried for Badillo's murder, as he was already serving a death sentence at the time of the discovery. Nonetheless, investigators have continued to examine other unsolved cases for potential links to Segundo.
