Juan Rosas was a 43-year-old Hispanic/Latino man from Denton, Texas, whose life ended far from home on a patch of ground beside Interstate 35 near Davis, in Murray County, Oklahoma. On June 7, 2020, a passing motorist spotted his body lying in a small field near Exit 47 off the highway, close to the junction with Highway 77, and called 911. When investigators arrived, they treated the scene as a suspicious death; the medical examiner later determined that Rosas had been killed by a gunshot
wound, turning the discovery in the field into a full homicide investigation.
The story of how he came to be there began the day before, on June 6, 2020, in Corinth, Texas. Investigators later concluded that Rosas had been kidnapped from his home in Corinth and taken across state lines into Oklahoma. Sometime between his abduction and the following morning, he was shot and left in the field outside Davis. The distance between his quiet residential life in Texas and the lonely roadside where he was found underscored for investigators that this was not a random encounter but a planned act of violence that had unfolded over hours and across two states.
As law enforcement in Texas and Oklahoma worked together, the case quickly moved from a mystery body to a targeted killing. The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation identified the deceased man as Rosas and began piecing together his final movements. Once his kidnapping and the gunshot wound were confirmed, the search turned to who had taken him from his home and why. The multi-agency investigation led to the identification of several suspects with close personal ties to Rosas, suggesting that the crime had been carefully orchestrated rather than impulsive.
By early September 2020, OSBI announced that two suspects had been tracked down and arrested in Texas on first-degree murder warrants in connection with Rosas's killing. A 20-year-old woman and a 23-year-old man were taken into custody and held in Texas pending extradition to Oklahoma. Later reports named them as Shannon Mayorga and Randall Rudd. Both were ultimately charged with first-degree murder and kidnapping, accused of participating directly in the abduction from Corinth and the fatal shooting that ended with Rosas's body being dumped alongside I-35.
The legal outcome for those two suspects came in 2022, when Mayorga and Rudd pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping in Murray County. A judge sentenced each of them to life in prison on the murder charge, with all but the first 20 years suspended, and an additional 10-year sentence for kidnapping to be served at the same time. The pleas and sentences acknowledged their roles in the kidnapping from Texas and the killing in Oklahoma, closing part of the case and formally tying them to the crime that had begun with Rosas's disappearance from his home.
But the investigation did not end there. Authorities also identified a third suspect, Guadalupe Figueroa, who was described as Rosas's girlfriend and the mother of Mayorga. OSBI investigators believe that she was the architect of the plot, planning the murder and directing Mayorga and Rudd to carry it out. A warrant was issued for Figueroa on a charge of conspiracy to commit murder, and she is considered wanted in connection with the homicide. Investigators believe she fled to Mexico, specifically to the Monterrey area in Nuevo León, and she remains a fugitive. While two of the people responsible for Rosas's death are serving life sentences, the woman suspected of orchestrating the crime is still being sought, leaving a lingering sense of unfinished justice in a case that began with a body in a field beside the highway.
