Episode 84:
The Girl Who Vanished From Bed: Mexico's Most Mysterious Cold Case

A wealthy family's four-year-old youngest daughter vanished from her room without a trace — she was simply gone when they woke up. Police searched the house, the apartment complex, and her room multiple times. Then, nine days after she went missing, they found her dead in a bizarre place. None of it made any sense.

The night the child vanished, a blackout disabled all security cameras. The Paulette case became one of Mexico's most infamous cases, and the truth was bizarre.

Huixquilucan, one of Mexico's most exclusive neighborhoods, was built for the upper class, with private guards and security cameras at every complex. The Guevara family fit right in: thirty-eight-year-old father Mauricio ran a successful real estate business, and thirty-four-year-old mother Lizette Farah was a respected lawyer. They had two daughters, seven-year-old Lisette and four-year-old Paulette, and two live-in maids, Erica and Marta — six people under one roof.

Gone by Morning

On the evening of March 21, 2010, the family returned from a weekend at their lake house, the girls asleep in the car. Lizette carried Paulette to her room, soothed her, and laid her on the bed before closing the door. The next morning at 7:30, housekeeper Erica went to wake the children — the eldest woke normally, but Paulette's bed was empty. A frantic search of the room, the closets, and every hiding spot in the house turned up nothing.

Police found no signs of a break-in, and the building's security guard confirmed no one had entered or left overnight. A neighborhood-wide canvass turned up no suspects and no motive against the family. The idea that Paulette had wandered out on her own didn't hold up either — the front door was still locked, and more importantly, Paulette had been born prematurely and lived with cerebral palsy affecting the left side of her body, leaving her with limited mobility and a significant speech impairment. If she'd been taken, she likely couldn't have fought back or even cried out.

A Mother Under Suspicion

Lizette threw herself into the search — flyers, banners, a televised plea sitting on Paulette's bed clutching her favorite doll, begging any kidnappers to leave her daughter somewhere safe with no questions asked. The broadcast moved the public, but produced no real leads, and even pressure from Mexico's Attorney General failed to move the investigation forward. A full week passed with nothing — no camera in the heavily monitored complex had caught anything at all.

As frustration grew, suspicion turned toward Lizette herself. The financial strain of two maids and her husband's struggling real estate business was mounting, and some wondered whether the burden of caring for a disabled child had become too much. Her flat affect in the days after the disappearance, later described by a psychiatrist as detached rather than grief-stricken, only fed the theory — as did a recorded phone call in which Lizette told her older daughter, "To be honest, people will probably believe we had something to do with Paulette's disappearance." The maids' accounts also conflicted with the family's version of who had put Paulette to bed that night. Her husband Mauricio, initially united with her, began distancing himself and eventually told the press, "I know what happened to my daughter, and I know who did it — but the full truth will be revealed in court, along with the evidence," before moving toward divorce.

Found in an Impossible Place

On March 31, the ninth day of the search, police isolated the family and staff in separate hotel rooms for questioning and returned to the empty apartment with forensic investigators — at which point the entire complex suffered a power outage that knocked out every security camera in the area for several hours. When the search resumed at 2 a.m., investigators returned to Paulette's room and noticed dark stains on the blanket, and an unusually wide sixteen-centimeter gap between the mattress and bed frame. Pulling back the sheet, they found Paulette's body wedged face-down in that gap, dressed in a blue knit top and red reindeer pajama pants.

The autopsy concluded she'd suffocated from a blocked nose combined with pressure on her chest and abdomen; adhesive marks on her cheeks matched medical tape the family said they used nightly to keep her mouth closed while sleeping, since she breathed through it habitually. But the timeline made no sense: the room had been searched repeatedly over nine days, with police recording video of the mattress area that showed nothing unusual, and search dogs — which should have reacted to the smell of decomposition — showed no response at all. One of the maids testified she had personally lifted the mattress to check underneath and found nothing.

A Case Closed, and a Video That Reopened It

Despite the unanswered questions, the case was closed as an accident: Paulette had supposedly rolled off the bed in her sleep, fallen into the gap, and been unable to free herself due to her disability. Public backlash followed when footage from the discovery was released showing Paulette's foot becoming visible the instant police lifted the sheet — found, critics said, far too easily for a body supposedly overlooked for nine days.

Given the family's elite status, suspicion grew that authorities had interfered to protect them, with theories that the blackout had been arranged to mask the body being moved back into the room. The government pushed back by questioning the footage's authenticity, arguing official searches happened during the day, not at 2 a.m. — an explanation many found unconvincing given that Paulette's body was plainly visible on camera. Suspicion deepened further when viewers spotted reindeer-patterned pajama pants — matching what Paulette was found wearing — visible in the background of an earlier interview filmed in Lizette's room while Paulette was still missing. Lizette explained she'd bought matching pajamas for both daughters and that the pants belonged to her elder daughter, though the explanation didn't account for why sleepwear was sitting out during such a fraught interview in the first place.

Final Thoughts

Those who suspected Lizette believed Paulette had become a burden to the family, that her mother's anger boiled over the night they returned from their trip, and that the body was hidden elsewhere before being staged back in the bed once the investigation calmed down — though even this theory struggled to explain why anyone would take the far greater risk of returning the body rather than simply disposing of it. With no way to resolve the contradiction, the investigation went no further, and Lizette faced no criminal charges. Mauricio, despite his public claim to know the truth, never spoke publicly about it again once no trial ever took place. The couple divorced, and a court later awarded Lizette custody of their elder daughter. Lizette subsequently sued the government for defamation and emotional distress and lost.

The case remains one of Mexico's most debated cold cases, later covered in a Netflix series, with persistent theories that Enrique Peña Nieto — governor of the state at the time and later Mexico's president — moved to bury the investigation to protect his political image. Lizette now lives in seclusion, still remembered by much of the Mexican public as the mother who never gave a satisfying answer for what happened to her daughter.