there was younger brother marty and the baby, debbie. tina was the eldest. she watched as cathy excelled in school. cathy was exceptional. cathy made her own way. she didn t follow a role model. reporter: nobody guiding her and nobody pushing her. exactly. she had her own drive. she used to tell her younger sister that she had to leave her mark. you had to leave your mark in this world so that people would remember you when you moved on. reporter: you have to leave your mark on the world. did you teach her that? no, that was just her. reporter: seems like an admirable thing for a kid to come up with. well, cathy was different. reporter: beautiful, smart and social. and popular. you knew more about her dating life than maybe your mom and dad did. yes, i believe to some extent, yes. reporter: cathy dated a few guys in high school, but no one she was terribly stuck on. and then in 1994, out of high school and a young woman of 20, cathy started to see a boy named albe
and the police said? well, you know, you don t know that. maybe she went off and but i knew. reporter: that she could have met some guy and they re in vegas right now. and you re saying no. reporter: not possible? at that point you want to yell and scream at them and tell them, that s not true. you don t know, not my cathy. reporter: the torrez family was not going to wait for police to catch up to what they already knew that cathy was not someone who d just disappear. they went to reporters. mary spoke to knbc in los angeles. this is one thing that nobody should have to go through. reporter: and took the search into their own hands. the police department wasn t receptive. so i told my mom, okay, give me a picture. reporter: tina was in charge of flyers. mary worked the phones at home. and younger brother marty kept watch in front of sav-on. hi, did you guys receive a flyer? reporter: soon it wasn t just the torrez family searching for
came home after her shift at sav-on ended. and the next morning, there was still no sign of her. mary called cathy s friends and no one had seen her. so mary got in the car and scoured the streets of placentia, searching for cathy and her red toyota corolla. cathy s sister tina saw the wrenching worry in their mother s face. she was a mom full of pain. she was a mom who who was hurting because she was looking for her baby. she would say, just find the car. if you find the car, it was like an equation. find the car, you ll find cathy. reporter: you get any sleep sunday night? no. just waiting. reporter: you don t want to call the police because that makes it real? that s right. it makes it real because you re still holding onto the hope that she s going to come running in through that backdoor. reporter: by monday, cathy still wasn t home. panic was setting in and mary called the police department to report her daughter missing.
ignore it. reporter: i mean, was this like the hatfields and the mccoys? what happened? there was no communication, no associations with them, you know. that that was basically it. that they became estranged. reporter: which made it difficult for tina, who was still married to sam s older brother, armando. police continued to work the case, but the fact was, they had no solid leads. they weren t even close to arresting anyone. but then two years after cathy torrez was murdered, an unexpected meeting put this investigation in the fast lane. an explorer scout with a familiar last name inspires a renewed search for a killer. that is a weird convince coincidence. we don t believe in coincidences. in terms of treating sensitivity, 3 days is really fast.
reporter: to daron wyatt, it felt more like fate. and just months later, in january 1997, his lieutenant suggested daron apply to the homicide unit. so i ended up putting in for that job and being selected. reporter: it wasn t long before he cracked open the doors that housed the homicide files. and i open the cabinet and i see the torrez case. and i remembered the incident with debbie from about a year earlier. so i pulled it out and i started reading just on free time, just reading it a little bit. reporter: by then, the cathy torrez case had been cold for a good three years. and essentially no work had been done on it for at least the last two years. reporter: from the beginning, police had suspected cathy s one-time boyfriend sam lopez had something to do with her murder. but they had nothing connecting him to the crime. no witnesses. no dna. and sam had that solid alibi. tina was still married to sam s