A Bay Area Mom Vanished Into Thin Air. Her Story Has Never Been Told.

Teresa Wismer McKinley went missing from her Vacaville, Calif. home in Sept. 1979.

Courtesy of Heather Gonzalez

Two days after Heather Gonzalez’s sixth birthday, her mother walked out the door for the final time.

As far as anyone knows, 27-year-old Teresa Wismer McKinley was headed to Peña Adobe, a park not far from her Vacaville home. Sept. 16, 1979 was hot, with highs in the 90s, but McKinley only planned on reading a book in the fresh air. Hours later, when she hadn’t returned home, her husband called the police.

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Less than two years later, the lead detective was removed from the department after killing his wife, McKinley was still missing, and two little girls were struggling to navigate life without their mom.

“More effort goes into looking for a pet than what seemed to go into looking for her,” Gonzalez said in a phone call last week.

The homecoming queen

Teresa Lynn Wismer was born in Los Angeles on Aug. 17, 1952. She was vibrant, pretty and popular, winning the title of homecoming queen when she was just a freshman. But everything changed when Teresa learned she was pregnant at 16. She dropped out of Big Bear High School and married her boyfriend, Michael McKinley, who was just a year older. Their first daughter was born, then a second. The young family moved to Vacaville, where Michael had relatives and a job repairing telephones for Pacific Bell. Teresa, however, had to start fresh. “Everything she knew was in LA,” Gonzalez said.

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McKinley threw herself into raising her daughters. She made their clothes, styled their long, straight hair — “my hair was always impeccable,” Gonzalez remembered — and cherished artistic pursuits like painting and playing guitar. “I know she sounds like a mystical creature,” Gonzalez laughed.

Life at the home on Spindrift Way wasn’t always magical between Teresa and Michael McKinley, though. “It wasn’t picture perfect,” Gonzalez said. “I know it was a little rocky. It was tense.”

When McKinley failed to return home from the park on that mid-September Sunday, her husband called Vacaville police. The responding officer was Detective Ron Head. After taking an initial report, it seems little was done to find McKinley. Her disappearance wasn’t announced to the public or featured on the news; this article is the first in the 45 years McKinley has been missing.

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Vacaville police Det. Kaley Sullivan, who recently reopened the case, said investigations were very different in the 1970s. “It wasn’t uncommon for people to decide to up and move off and have a new life,” she said. “There wasn’t as much attention to missing person cases.” The onus was on loved ones to make flyers or public appeals, and it seems McKinley’s family didn’t press for publicity at the time, Sullivan said.

Through interviews, Head learned that Teresa had overdosed about a month before she went missing. In looking back through the police report, “the prevailing thought is that her disappearance was ultimately the result of a suicide,” Sullivan said. It’s possible that belief may have led detectives to scale back the investigation.

Gonzalez firmly believes the overdose was taken out of context. One of her aunts said McKinley “swore up and down that was an absolute mistake,” and in her mother’s many letters to loved ones, Gonzalez said there aren’t any obvious red flags about her mental state. She had just finished her GED and was looking forward to working as a hair stylist. One other thing nags at Gonzalez.

“If she had taken her own life, her body would have been recovered somewhere,” she said.

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‘A daily torture’

Sixteen days into McKinley’s disappearance, a Napa County sheriff’s deputy on patrol around Lake Berryessa found her green Volkswagen abandoned on the side of the road. It had a broken window, but there was no evidence of a crime committed inside the car. It wasn’t checked for fingerprints, and within a short period was returned to the family.

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Gonzalez and her husband, JC Gonzalez, used to make trips to Lake Berryessa to memorialize McKinley. But in recent years, Heather began suspecting something was “weird” about the location. To her knowledge, McKinley had no connection to the spot, and she couldn’t think of any logical reason why she might have driven an hour away to the Napa side of the lake.

“Heather just had a different opinion about where she might be,” JC Gonzalez said. “It didn’t make sense for her car to be there or her to be there. So we did stop that ritual.”

The Volkswagen was the last piece of solid evidence. Fifteen months after its discovery, Det. Head was pulled off the case for a shocking reason: He’d killed his own wife.

Late on a Friday night in January 1981, Head was at home when he heard an intruder in his garage. He went to confront the person, gun in hand. “I need an ambulance,” Head reportedly told a 911 dispatcher moments later. “I just shot my wife thinking she was a prowler.”

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Janice Head, 34, died of a single gunshot wound to the face. Media reports circulated that the couple had recently separated, and Janice had snuck into the home thinking she was about to catch her husband with another woman. Despite the unusual circumstances, even prosecutors agreed with Det. Head’s assertion that the shooting was accidental; he was sentenced to four years in prison on involuntary manslaughter and gun charges and removed from the Vacaville Police Department.

Looking back, Gonzalez sees it as the moment that destroyed any momentum in her mother’s case.

“I just feel like I need to do something,” she said. “And even if I’m not able to uncover or do anything to bring my mother home and give her a proper burial, it hurts my heart that she was discarded like a piece of trash.”

Growing up with a missing mother shaped Gonzalez in countless ways. Still, she found a way to thrive: going to college, starting a family, working as a flight attendant for United while juggling another job as a Realtor in the Bay Area. She keeps close ties with her mother’s family and holds dear to McKinley’s collection of letters and artwork.

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“I call it an invisible handicap that I carry with me,” Gonzalez said. “It’s like a daily torture.”

“This has been a question mark, a curiosity, a bottomless pit,” added her husband JC. “The uncertainty and no closure that comes with a missing person. I’ve witnessed her throughout the years swinging like a pendulum from one side to the other.”

Since the case was reopened last year, Gonzalez, her sister and her father have all been interviewed by detectives. Without a body, every option is on the table: homicide, suicide, accident. Gonzalez has weighed them all over the years.

“I absolutely do not believe my mom left. I do not think she’s out there living her best life,” she said. “And I also don’t think she chose her exit from this earth. I think something happened to her. What that might be, I’m not sure.”

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Det. Sullivan said it’s possible McKinley’s remains are already “in a lab somewhere,” unidentified for decades. The county is also exhuming graves of John and Jane Does and testing them to extract DNA. With cold cases cracked this way seemingly every week around the country, Gonzalez can’t help but feel new optimism.

“I’m addicted to true crime,” she said. “And my family is like, ‘That is so unhealthy. Why do you do that to yourself?’ For me it’s satisfying to see other families get resolution, and I get hopeful.”

Detectives have been cautious about making promises, Gonzalez said, especially because they have active investigations to prioritize. But the case has more energy than it has in years, and there’s a chance, for the first time in decades, that Gonzalez may be closer to answering a lifelong question.

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“I used to look out the window, waiting for my mother to come home,” she said. “Now I look out the window and wait for detectives to walk up my walkway with news.”

Anyone with information about Teresa McKinley is asked to contact Vacaville police at 707-454-5722. Callers can remain anonymous.

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