Everything about 25-year-old Cynthia Gonzalez's murder in Texas in 1991 pointed to a male killer.
Gonzalez was an exotic dancer who worked private events, sometimes for solo customers. The night Gonzalez was last seen alive, she was meeting with one such male client. And when her body was found dumped in a ditch along a remote, country road, she had been stripped naked.
So when the 34-year-old cold case landed on Detective Anthony Stafford's desk at the Arlington Police Department last year, he was focused on finding the man who did it.
That is, until recently, thanks to some surprising sleuths: a group of college students.
As part of a new and remarkable partnership, detectives gave the case file to students in a criminology class at the University of Texas at Arlington earlier this year. By the end of the semester, the students were struck by a woman mentioned several times in the case file. So they asked Stafford about her.
