Found Deceased IL - Vanessa Ceja Ramirez, 22, murdered, Midlothian, 2 Nov 2020

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StarryStarryNight said:
According to the linked article, the 50 victims were involved in sex work and were habitual illegal drug users. Still victims and their murders need to be solved, but I’m not so sure the victim in this case fits that description and would be included with this possible serial killer. That being said, I know pretty much nothing about the victim here except her age, so please let me know if I am wrong about this.
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From all I've seen so far (there may be other information not yet shared), she doesn't seem to fit this profile, as you said. Articles reported her occupation as teacher's aide and that she was a college student.

The People Magazine article about her murder had this quote from family:

"She's just somebody that we believed in, that had our future in her hands, just like most of our kids here," Alejandro Villegas, her uncle, told CBS Chicago. "She was a sweet child that was humble, smiled, shy. She was a good person. And she just didn't deserve anything of this."

Edited to add: I'm not implying a victim of any background deserves anything bad to happen to them. Just that from what is currently known, Vanessa's victimology seems to be very low risk as pertains to lifestyle factors.
 
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Thank you @StarryStarryNight and @Yemelen, you both are absolutely correct. My sincerest apologies, I didn’t read the whole second article before I supported any correlation between the cases. I apologize for any confusion.
To clarify for all, she definitely doesn’t fit the victim profile.
She indeed by all accounts I have read was a teachers aide and was out on a hike with family, you both are correct I do not see that perp totally changing and targeting a woman in broad daylight who had the potential to more immediately be reported missing.
Definitely tragic for all those other women and their loved ones, but in those cases, as others pointed out, the victim profiles are clearly very consistent and she indeed does not fit it.
Next time I will sleep before I comment :) thanks for keeping the facts in check all!
 
Yemelyan said:
Univision Chicago in their video coverage of the murder, showed the location of her cell phone's last ping as the Manchester Court Apartments, which is located at
14730 Central Ave, Oak Forest, IL 60452
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What do you make of that? Whoever killed her may live there, or was she actually taken there at some point?
 
Knox said:
What do you make of that? Whoever killed her may live there, or was she actually taken there at some point?
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IMO it depends on what LE may know about her phone. If her phone wasn't with her body when found, then possibly it was discarded near the complex or was just physically in that area before the offender powered it off. If her phone WAS with her, then that's a totally different thing.

I'm also interested to hear more details about where her body was actually found. Midlothian Meadows is where she was last seen hiking with her family members. The southeast corner of the nature preserve is supposedly where her scent was last detected by tracking dogs. But her body was supposedly found in an area called Bremen Wood, which is actually not a contiguous part of Midlothian Meadows. It appears to be a smaller wooded section geographically closer to the apartment complex where her phone last pinged. If this information on locations is all accurate, it makes me think she was put into a vehicle at some point. I don't see an offender being able to walk her under duress to the Bremen Wood location. But you can park there.
 
So this is all contingent on the information in the current news articles being correct. Some cited "Bremen Wood" and it's unclear to me if this is a part of the Midlothian Meadows reserve or if it's a separate part of the trail system called "Bremen Grove." You can see a map of all the forest reserves and recreation areas contained in the trail system here:

Tinley Creek Trail System - Forest Preserves of Cook County
 
StarryStarryNight said:
According to the linked article, the 50 victims were involved in sex work and were habitual illegal drug users. Still victims and their murders need to be solved, but I’m not so sure the victim in this case fits that description and would be included with this possible serial killer. That being said, I know pretty much nothing about the victim here except her age, so please let me know if I am wrong about this.
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However, it is not that a SK would target only prostitutes or addicts; he targets sex workers because of convenience. Gary Ridgeway claimed to hate prostitutes, but if I am not mistaken, the murder of a woman who was not, and merely gave him a lift, (or vise versa), is on him as well.

What I want to say, the same SK who usually targets prostitutes could have abducted any lonely woman in an abandoned place if the opportunity was there. MOO.
 
Here is an article from just a few hours ago talking about the reward that is being offered in her case: $4,000 reward offered for information in killing of 22-year-old woman found strangled at Midlothian forest preserve

I think it has some clarity on the location of her body. In the article, it states that the speakers are standing just steps from where her body was found and that they are in the Midlothian Meadows preserve. So the Bremen Grove information must have been early confusion on the part of different reporters.

There is a new detail in the article that her hands were bound.
 
Some good information in this new article:
Reward increases to $7,500 for info in murder of Vanessa Ceja-Ramirez

The award for information has been increased.

The article gives the detail that the reason Vanessa gave her mother for going back to the car during their run was that she felt tired.

Neighbors reported to the news station that police were seen removing bags of evidence from an apartment at the complex where her phone last pinged.

Neighbors reported seeing federal and local authorities removing items from an apartment unit. Police would not confirm that information.
“It will be interesting to see what they had in those bags,” Holmes said.

Holmes is the community activist who worked with her family to help find her and is helping organize the award.
 
Yemelyan said:
Here is an article from just a few hours ago talking about the reward that is being offered in her case: $4,000 reward offered for information in killing of 22-year-old woman found strangled at Midlothian forest preserve

I think it has some clarity on the location of her body. In the article, it states that the speakers are standing just steps from where her body was found and that they are in the Midlothian Meadows preserve. So the Bremen Grove information must have been early confusion on the part of different reporters.

There is a new detail in the article that her hands were bound.
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I don't think there is any confusion -- she was "last seen" (I assume by her mother and the friend) at Bremen Grove, which was 4 miles west of where her body was found (Midlothian Meadows). Here is the map:

https://fpdcc.com/downloads/maps/trails/english/FPCC-Tinley-Creek-Trail-Map-10-15.pdf

Like you said, Bremen Grove isn't necessarily connected to Midlothian Meadows. Unless you take 159th street (which isn't a connected trail and is a main road), I suppose you could access the two areas via the blue and blue dotted trails, but that looks like quite a long walk.

I don't understand how the police reports say they were walking in Midlothian Meadows but she was last seen in Bremen Grove. I assume that they began their walk in Midlothian Meadows, and that VCR walked all the way to Bremen Grove with the group before she decided to turn around.

The report said her phone was "off" -- I assume it was off when her family reached the car and realized she wasn't there (her mother and/or friend most likely were trying to call her but couldn't get through), but that it was on when it pinged at 147th and Central. These apartments are pretty much in the middle of Bremen Grove and Midlothian Meadows (just north of both) -- but the apartments are closer to the Bachelor Grove Woods than they are the Midlothian Meadows (see map above). So if VCR was brought to the apartment and the murder occurred there, why wouldn't the killer use Bachelor Grove Woods instead of the farther MM to dispose of the body? I almost feel like because of this, that the attack happened in the MM woods, and that the killer brought back the phone as a trophy to his apartment after the murder occurred. Then he either realized the phone was on and either destroyed it, turned it off (which is hard nowadays because almost everyone's phone is protected with a passcode, etc.), or the battery drained. I could be wrong though.

I'm not pointing fingers but I'm curious about this friend who was on the walk. Was it her friend? Her mom's friend?
 
Userid said:
I don't think there is any confusion -- she was "last seen" (I assume by her mother and the friend) at Bremen Grove, which was 4 miles west of where her body was found (Midlothian Meadows). Here is the map:

https://fpdcc.com/downloads/maps/trails/english/FPCC-Tinley-Creek-Trail-Map-10-15.pdf

Like you said, Bremen Grove isn't necessarily connected to Midlothian Meadows. Unless you take 159th street (which isn't a connected trail and is a main road), I suppose you could access the two areas via the blue and blue dotted trails, but that looks like quite a long walk.

I don't understand how the police reports say they were walking in Midlothian Meadows but she was last seen in Bremen Grove. I assume that they began their walk in Midlothian Meadows, and that VCR walked all the way to Bremen Grove with the group before she decided to turn around.

The report said her phone was "off" -- I assume it was off when her family reached the car and realized she wasn't there (her mother and/or friend most likely were trying to call her but couldn't get through), but that it was on when it pinged at 147th and Central. These apartments are pretty much in the middle of Bremen Grove and Midlothian Meadows (just north of both) -- but the apartments are closer to the Bachelor Grove Woods than they are the Midlothian Meadows (see map above). So if VCR was brought to the apartment and the murder occurred there, why wouldn't the killer use Bachelor Grove Woods instead of the farther MM to dispose of the body? I almost feel like because of this, that the attack happened in the MM woods, and that the killer brought back the phone as a trophy to his apartment after the murder occurred. Then he either realized the phone was on and either destroyed it, turned it off (which is hard nowadays because almost everyone's phone is protected with a passcode, etc.), or the battery drained. I could be wrong though.

I'm not pointing fingers but I'm curious about this friend who was on the walk. Was it her friend? Her mom's friend?
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There are comments on the social media postings of multiple news outlets that featured this case from family members that state who the other person on the walk was.

And I do think, respectfully, that the news media has reported some confusing facts about where she was last seen and where her body was found. Some of these earliest articles have since been updated but at least one originally said her body was found in "Bremen Wood," which evidently doesn't exist.

In another example of muddled reporting, in the latest article about the $7,500 reward, the article reports that her phone pinged at Oak Forest Apartments but that's not a real place either...it's actually the Manchester Court Apartments that are associated with that address.

However, just because the reporting to the public is wrong doesn't mean that LE doesn't know a full set of facts. If they indeed removed evidence from an apartment near the last ping of her phone I think that's a really encouraging sign.
 
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