We’ve all done it. Googled an old flame, or a friend you haven’t heard from in a while.
You might find their digital footprint with social media accounts sharing life updates, job announcements, photos, and more.
But the last thing you’d expect to find is that something horrible happened to that person.
Yet that’s exactly what David Ocmond found when he tried to look up his old friend from school, Tanya May. “When I put her name in Google, the first thing that popped up was about her death. And I was like, ‘Oh, my God,’” David said. “It was a huge shock.”
Tanya’s body was discovered about 15 miles north of Fort Stockton, Texas, on September 27, 2007. According to the Texas Department of Public Safety cold case website, the 26-year-old was last seen on September 17 in Odessa, less than an hour away. Her boyfriend reported her missing the next day. When officials found Tanya’s body, it was “under a mesquite tree approximately 50ft from an oil field road” and she had been “stabbed multiple times.” According to the Texas DPS site, her body “appeared to have been drug from the dirt road in an attempt to conceal her body.” Dateline reached out to the Texas DPS for an update on the status of the investigation but has not yet received a reply.
David tried to find as much information as he could about what happened to his old friend but says there wasn’t much out there. “The more I, like, looked into it, they were like, ‘Oh, it hasn’t been solved,’” he said. “And they really didn’t have a big idea of kind of what happened.”
David couldn’t imagine who would want to hurt the kind girl he knew back in Baytown — a small city right outside Houston. “When I first met Tanya, I want to say we were in middle school, and we were, you know, just friends,” he said. “Eventually we started dating, you know, I guess -- for as much as you can in middle school.”
“She was very, like, kind of, soft spoken,” David said. They spent a lot of time together, often at his house. Eventually Tanya moved to another city in Texas, and while they kept in touch at first, she broke things off with him when she met someone else and decided she didn’t want to do long distance anymore.
But there were no hard feelings, according to David. So years later, when he learned of Tanya’s fate, David decided to try to do something about it. “I ended up posting something about it on Facebook,” he said. That’s when he got a message from a woman named Jaime Villanueva, who said she went to high school with Tanya. “She saw [the post] and she reached out to me.” The pair compared notes on what they knew about Tanya and her case.
“It seemed like nobody really even knew about her,” Jaime Villanueva told Dateline. “It’s such a small town. It’s like, ‘How could you not have some sort of lead as to what could have happened?’”
Jaime also remembers Tanya as being soft spoken. “Super sweet. Never, you know, trying to draw attention to herself,” she said. “If someone needed help, she was more than willing to go and help them.”
So Jaime — who spends her free time looking into cases as an “internet sleuth” — was also trying to champion Tanya’s case. “The way I look at it is: I would want someone to help me in that situation. And she just didn’t have a lot of support,” Jaime said. “I just jumped in there like, ‘Hey, send me what you have, I’ll look into it.’” She began gathering all the information available on the internet and tried contacting the authorities. But at the end of the day, it wasn’t enough to solve the case.
Jaime says she worries that Tanya’s story is falling through the cracks. “A lot of these cases that are out there that get solved, it’s all because they have the media coverage, they have eyes on it,” she said. “I feel like she’s just falling off the radar and don’t feel like that’s right.”
After publishing this article, Dateline received an email from a woman named Angel Caruso, who says she is Tanya’s younger sister, and is grateful that Tanya’s friends are still thinking about her all these years later. “It’s nice to know she isn’t forgotten,” Angel wrote. “We love her very much, and we miss her every day.”
Dateline interviewed Angel shortly after receiving her email. “She was 10 years older than me,” Angel said. “She always took time to make sure that she spent time with me, even though we were, you know-- there was a difference in age.”
“I was always sort of, like, her little Barbie doll, almost,” Angel said. “We were very close. She was always very sweet to me.”
Angel, who was in high school when Tanya was murdered, says she was shocked when she learned what happened to her sister. “I kind of had a little mini breakdown,” she said.
She couldn’t do much at the time, but as she got older, she says she tried to advocate for her sister, too. “I tried to reach out. It was hard to even find who had the case a lot of the times,” Angel said. She added that she did get in contact with an officer from the Texas Rangers Cold Case unit years ago, who told her that the case “was an open investigation” but that “they hadn’t had any tips in a while.”
Old friend David Ocmond hopes that someone with information comes forward. “Nobody ever got held accountable for it,” he said.
“Maybe they want to say something, and they just kept it quiet for so long and now it’s like a thing of the past,” David said. “So maybe, you know, more attention brings that to the forefront of their mind.”
Texas Crime Stoppers is offering a cash reward of up to $3,000 to any person who provides information that leads to the arrest of the person/persons responsible for the murder of Tanya May. To be eligible for the cash rewards, you must call the Crime Stoppers hotline at 1-800-252-TIPS (8477) and can remain anonymous.
You can also call the Texas Rangers at 1-800-346-3243 or submit a tip online. You can also contact the Odessa Crime Stoppers at 432-333-TIPS or submit an anonymous tip on their website.
If you have a story to share with Dateline, please submit it here.
Editor’s Note: After publishing this article, Tanya’s sister reached out to Dateline. We have updated this story to include her perspective.
