MCALLEN - A 68-year-old retired businesswoman with no criminal history was found brutally murdered in an upscale McAllen neighborhood. Four years have passed, and no one's been arrested for the crime.
Zetta Jo Fair was 68. She was a beloved mother and grandmother, with no enemies. She lived in a quiet 2nd Street community made up of stylish condos.
She loved volunteering and sticking to her routine. On the morning of July 28, 2005, she went to buy milk, then put her groceries away, and said goodbye to her boyfriend as he left for the gym.
No one knows what happened next.
Her boyfriend found her dead when he returned a few hours later.
McAllen police took the call at 11 a.m.
Fair's sons, David and Larry, were soon told the news. They say they'll never forget the day. They remember what they were doing and where they were standing when they got the call.
"I needed to get there right away. Something terrible had happened to mom," says Larry Fair.
The autopsy states the 68-year-old woman was found "in a lounge chair with a pillow on top of her face, a long sleeve shirt around her neck. She... had been strangled with the shirt."
"This is something you see on TV or in the movies. It's not something you'd expect in McAllen," says Fair's son David.
Shortly after the murder, a clue surfaced. A picture was taken at the Hidalgo International Bridge, showing a man driving Fair's Lexus SUV into Mexico.
It was taken at 10:44:44, 15 minutes before McAllen police got the phone call that Fair was dead.
Days after the murder, state police and the FBI found Fair's car in a Reynosa side street, just a few minutes from the bridge.
NEWSCHANNEL 5 spoke to the commander of the state police for this story. He tells us he's only been on the job a month and knows nothing about the case
However, Pablo Contreras remembers when it happened. He and his son run a family welding business in Reynosa. The shop's just a few feet from where Fair's Lexus was found.
They watched when a strange man parked the car, got out, and never came back.
Police later questioned Contreras and his son. They showed them mug shots of possible suspects.
"They asked if we knew anything about the truck... They told us what happened and said they'd killed a woman," Contreras tells us.
Eight months after Fair's murder, the pixelated photo of the man driving her Lexus was plastered on billboards across the Valley.
Police and Fair's family were hoping someone would recognize him, but they got nowhere.
"A series of things have pointed us to Mexico," says McAllen Police Chief Victor Rodriguez.
Fair's two sons even considered hiring a psychic, hoping for anything that would get them closer to identifying their mother's murderer.
McAllen's police chief says psychics are useful only if you have nothing - no evidence, no suspects.
But this case is anything but void of information. Investigators tell us they have a warrant ready to go and enough evidence to link a suspect to the 68-year-old's murder. It's information that's being made public for the first time.
"We obviously have evidence in this case. We believe we can connect the perpetrator once we identify him," explains Rodriguez.
Police have plenty of evidence retrieved from the crime scene and Fair's car.
Investigators have two suspects. They're ready to make an arrest. But they have a dilemma.
"One whom we have a photograph of (but) no identification," says the police chief. "And the second whom we have a name for, but, well, he's not in custody."
We're told there's no photo of the second suspect.
Both people are believed to be hiding in Mexico.
"We do get asked quite often... 'Anything on your mom? Anything?' We say, 'No, nothing,'" says ??
All Fair's sons can do is hope someone will remember something.
?? says, "Hopefully one day we'll find answers."
Zetta Jo Fair's SUV was returned and sold. Someone else now buys groceries and puts them away in what used to be her home.
Her sons are left with the pain of losing a mother. They want closure. They want to know why someone would brutally murder their mother.
If you have any information on Zetta Jo Fair's murder, your asked to call McAllen police.
