ARANSAS PASS - When you think of cold cases in the Coastal Bend it's hard to forget the face of 13-year-old Elisa Roberson. She vanished from Aransas Pass 17 years ago without a trace. 6 News took another look at the chilly trail. It's a case that still haunts Elisa's best friend to this day. For the first time she speaks about her tragic loss.
Roberson's youthful face still lights up the Aransas Pass Police Department, and her sixth grade picture is frozen in time on numerous national web sites. Sharla Yell remembers their fun times together.
"She'd come over and hang out all the time every day. Ride bikes, sit in my house and play Nintendo or Atari...the old games (laughs)," said Yell. She remembers that on August 6, 1989. Elisa was not herself.
"We sat around the house playing Nintendo, playing games like always and then it came time to get ready to go to church 'cause we went to the same church. But she didn't want to go, and she didn't want to go home and she wanted me to stay home."
But Sharla went to church without Elisa and got a call about an hour later.
"Debbie Green explained to me Elisa was supposed to meet her at her house and never showed up." Elisa's friend Debbie waited and waited. For the past two years, Captain Roberto Gonzales has had his hands on the case.
"Her friend came up to the halfway point of one of elementary schools, but Elisa never showed up," said Gonzales. "We spoke to a subject, person last year, again...didn't go anywhere."
Twelve years after Elisa Roberson disappeared, this cold case heated up. A map was anonymously mailed to 6 News showing where Elisa's body might have been. But that search turned up nothing.
Another interesting twist made its way into our newsroom again three years later. Elisa's mother e-mailed a reporter. She described the man she thought knew something: Ralph Gonzales. He was an old boyfriend who told her days before Elisa's disappearance: One day he was going to do something that would make her "...remember him forever..."
"I read a statement that said they did talk to him and all, again that lead didn't go anywhere," Gonzales said.
Sharla claims she was also accused.
"I received phone calls from her mom and people in town...accusing me and my sister of knowing what happened to her - we were being harassed," she said. But still, no one has stepped forward to offer any promising pieces to this puzzle. Captain Gonzales believes someone out there knows something.
If you have any information on this cold case, you're urged to call the Aransas Pass Police Department.
