Man convicted of kidnapping, killing 4-year-old Lexington County girl in 1986

After three days of hearing evidence in a decades-old missing person case, a Lexington County jury on Thursday convicted Thomas McDowell of kidnapping and murdering 4-year-old Jessica Gutierrez in 1986.

The convictions for murder, kidnapping and first-degree burglary followed a week-long trial at the Lexington County Judicial Center. Prosecutors laid out evidence against McDowell, who was arrested in 2022, more than 35 years after Jessica was taken from her bedroom in a Lexington mobile home.

Jessica’s mother, siblings and other relatives were in the court when the verdict was read. The reading of the first guilty verdict was met with audible gasps and sobs from the gallery.

Judge Debra McCaslin sentenced McDowell to two concurrent life sentences for murder and burglary, but delayed sentencing on the kidnapping charge. Under the law as it stood in 1986, the 63-year-old McDowell will be eligible for parole after 20 years.

“Mr. McDowell, this was a 4-year-old child,” the judge said. “This mother needs to know where her child is and I hope she gets to find out.”

Members of the Gutierrez family spoke to the court before McDowell was sentenced. Debra Gutierrez, Jessica’s mother, reiterated that she still wants to find out what happened to her daughter.

“All that I ask of him is to please, please tell me where her body is,” Gutierrez said. “I deserve closure.”

Rebecca Gutierrez, Jessica’s sister who was in bed with the 4-year-old the night she disappeared, said she blames herself for the abduction anytime she considers the life her sister could have had.

“The weight of the guilt weighs heavy on my heart when I consider a world without her presence,” said Rebecca Gutierrez, who was 6 when Jessica was kidnapped on June 6, 1986. She asked McCaslin for the “maximum sentence.”

Jessica’s brother, David Gutierrez, also had strong words for McDowell, saying the loss of his sister had changed the dynamics of his whole family and deeply wounded his mother. As a 5-year-old, he was afraid to play outside after his sister was taken. He feels the loss even more now that he has children of his own.

“I pray this man’s soul has the same percentage with God that we have of finding the remains of my sister,” he said.

Jessica’s other sibling, sister Kim, also expressed her appreciation for the verdict.

Defense attorney Sarah Mauldin asked for leniency, considering that McDowell had been a law-abiding citizen since he was released from a prison sentence in North Carolina in 1997.

McDowell had lived in Wake Forest, N.C., for 25 years before his arrest in Jessica’s kidnapping and murder. Speaking on his behalf, Ted Wilder told the court he had not only employed McDowell as a carpenter but allowed him to live in a home next door to his own family, where he had become like “an uncle” to Wilder’s children and his sister’s children. In all that time, Wilder said, he had never seen McDowell express anger at anything.

“I believe this verdict was found against the wrong person,” Wilder said.

Lexington County Sheriff Jay Koon said Thursday’s verdict brought “justice for Jessie, and healing for Miss Debbie, David, Rebecca and Kim.”

Attorney General Alan Wilson thanked the FBI’s Child Abduction Rapid Deployment team for taking on the Gutierrez case in 2020, which ultimately led to McDowell’s arrest. He also praised Heather Weiss and Kinli Abee as “five-star prosecutors.”

After the state rested its case Thursday, McDowell told the court he would not testify in his own defense, and the defense team of David Mauldin and Sarah Mauldin rested without calling any witnesses of their own.

The jury began deliberating around 1:15 p.m., after both sides made their closing arguments. The verdict was announced two hours later.

In her closing arguments, Abee tasked the jury with delivering justice to the Gutierrez family.

“For 38 years they wondered who came into their house, who took that little girl, who is the man in the magic hat,” Abee told the jury. “They don’t have to wonder anymore, because the man in the magic hat has been sitting in this courtroom all week.”

She laid out the web of connections tying McDowell to Jessica’s abduction: a fingerprint on the window, the finding of a cigarette that was the same brand he smoked at the Gutierrez home, and his appearance, which matched the description given by Rebecca of the kidnapper, down to the cowboy hats he wore that a 6-year-old could have identified as a “magic hat.”

Abee also said McDowell himself had confessed to the crime to a jailhouse friend, Michael Fowler, someone Abee said had no reason to make up a story and couldn’t have known so many details without the killer telling him.

Fowler testified that during a stay in the Polk County, North Carolina, jail in 1986, McDowell had confessed to him that he “went into a window and broke into a house and took a little girl out, and took her out to a logging place and he raped her and cut her up with a machete.”

In her closing argument, Sarah Mauldin argued that the case against McDowell is too circumstantial for jurors to not have reasonable doubt about his guilt. She argued there was no evidence McDowell had ever committed sexual acts on a child before or since Jessica’s disappearance. There is also no reason to think he bore any ill will toward the Gutierrez family, Mauldin said, for whom he had done work on their home some months before. That could explain the fingerprint on the home’s window, she said.

She said it was unbelievable that Rebecca Gutierrez — who testified that she squinted her eyes the night Jessica was taken — could have made out so many details of the man who took her sister. It’s particularly unbelievable because Rebecca testified that the room was illuminated by the moonlight in the window when the moon that night set at 7 p.m., Sarah Mauldin said.

Mauldin also said Rebecca’s behavior at the time — sleeping through the night, waking up to play with her siblings, eating breakfast and only mentioning the abduction when her mother asked — suggested that she didn’t see her sister being taken, and “the man in the magic hat” is something she’s come to believe because of the trauma of the event.

She also questioned Fowler’s reliability as a witness. Mauldin argued that Fowler’s claim that McDowell said he cut up a girl “with a machete” is too extreme and would have likely created more physical evidence.

“It’s human nature to expect answers,” Mauldin said, “but the fact is we don’t know what happened to Jessica and may never know.”

Since Jessica’s body has never been found, prosecutors worked Thursday to establish that Jessica is dead.

FBI analyst Amy Paparozzi testified that she did an exhaustive search using specialized law enforcement databases as well as publicly available information and could not find anyone living in the United States with Jessica’s information.

Jonathan Leader, an archaeologist who has conducted searches to find Jessica’s body, testified that a body Jessica’s size likely would not have remained intact for long because of animal predation and the acidity of the soil. There’s even less likelihood if the attacker dismembered Jessica after killing her.

But the defense disputed that evidence. Sarah Mauldin got Paparozzi to say she could not search for any other names that a living Jessica might be using today, and David Mauldin solicited from Leader that he may not have been able to find Jessica’s body because she was never there.

Speaking after the verdict, Debra Gutierrez said she hoped McDowell could now answer the question of where Jessica’s body is. She also thanked the jurors for hearing her family’s pleas for justice.

“You took a bad man off the streets,” she said.