Traffic stop leads to arrest in years-old unsolved murder of woman, unborn child

A man suspected of killing his girlfriend and her unborn child and then hiding their bodies in a Wisconsin farmhouse was arrested in a Missouri traffic stop after three years on the lam, according to the Gladstone Police Department. 

Jose Eduardo Dominguez Garcia, 26, was pulled over shortly after midnight on Nov. 23 when an automated license plate reader indicated that the red Ford Fusion he was driving northeast of Kansas City, Missouri, was stolen, the department wrote in a press release. 

The driver reportedly had a number of fake ID cards on his person and gave officers several different names around 12:34 a.m. on NE Englewood Drive in Gladstone, police said.

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Ultimately, police identified him as Jose Eduardo Dominguez-Garcia, 26, who was wanted on first-degree murder, murder of an unborn child and hiding a corpse charges in Missouri’s Chippewa County, per the release.

Dominguez-Garcia was issued those charges on Dec. 12, 2021, after a dark-haired, pregnant corpse recovered a year earlier in an abandoned farmhouse in Wheaton was positively identified as Rosaly “Cindy” Chavarria Rodriguez, 24.

An informant reportedly told officers about the body’s location during a drug investigation, per the Leader Telegram.

The corpse, found hidden in a purple suitcase on the abandoned property on Oct. 14, 2020, was found wearing a shirt that read “Sprecher’s Restaurant and Pub,” per NBC 15. 

Staff at the restaurant told police that Chavarria Rodriguez had worked there as a pantry cook for two weeks and was last seen there on July 2 before she stopped showing up for work and, ultimately, the corpse was found, per the Leader Telegram.

Dominguez-Garcia also worked at the restaurant, according to KMBC. He reportedly picked her last paycheck up for her on July 23, according to the Leader Telegram.

In an interview with the Reedsburg Police Department on July 23 that year, Dominguez-Garcia told detectives that he had broken up with Chavarria Rodriguez on July 4 after he learned she had been cheating on him, per the Leader Telegram. He said he knew the woman was pregnant, and that she had told him the unborn child’s father was a different man. 

Investigators found Dominguez-Garcia’s abandoned 2003 Volkswagen Jetta in the Wisconsin Dells area on Aug. 26, 2020, per the Leader Telegram. In the trunk, they noted fluids that indicated a decaying body may have been stored there at one point, per the outlet. 

Surveillance footage captured the same car along 2655 Highway T, in the area where the woman’s body was uncovered, on July 23. 

Chavarria Rodriguez’s ex-husband had reported the Peruvian national missing on July 21. 

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Dominguez-Garcia is currently behind bars at Clay County Detention Center in Liberty, Missouri, jail staff confirmed to Fox News Digital. It is unclear when he will be extradited to Wisconsin to face the charges against him. 

Former Chippewa County Sheriff Jim Kowalczyk said Chavarra Rodriguez’s was the only unresolved murder investigation he left before his retirement, and that he was glad to see an arrest made. 

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“This has been a very long and intense investigation,” Kowalczyk told the Leader Telegram on Friday. “A lot of time and effort was put into this investigation by many agencies, and as a result, he will be brought to justice.” 

The former sheriff said he was surprised Dominguez-Garcia was arrested in the United States, as “all indications… led us to believe he went back to his country of origin.”

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Fox News Digital could not reach the Chippewa County Sheriff’s Office, the Chippewa County Prosecutor’s Office or the Gladstone Police Department at press time.