Anthonette Christine Cayedito

Case background and investigation

Anthonette Christine Cayedito was nine years old when she disappeared from her family's apartment in Gallup, New Mexico. According to NBC News' Dateline, which drew on local newspaper reports from the time, her mother, Penny Cayedito, came home around midnight on the night of April 5-6, 1986, while her three daughters were with a babysitter, and went to sleep sometime before 3 a.m. Not long afterward there was a knock at the door. Anthonette's younger sisters recalled her going to answer it; she did not come back to bed.

Her mother found her missing at about 7 a.m. when she got up to take the children to Bible school, and reported it immediately, NBC reported. One of the sisters told authorities she thought the person at the door had been one of their uncles. Police questioned him and ruled him out. According to Wikipedia's summary of later reporting, one sister said about five years after the disappearance that she had seen two men take Anthonette to a van as the girl shouted to be let go. Another sister has since expressed uncertainty about parts of that account, and it has not been confirmed by investigators.

About a year after the disappearance, Gallup police received a telephone call from a girl who said she was Anthonette and that she was in Albuquerque. NBC reported that a gruff male voice was heard asking who had said she could use the phone before the line went dead, and that the call could not be traced. Whether the caller was really Anthonette has never been established, although Wikipedia notes that her mother said she recognized the voice.

A few years later a waitress in Carson City, Nevada, reported serving a teenage girl she believed might be Anthonette, seated with a couple. After the group left, the waitress said she found a note under the girl's plate asking for help and for someone to call police, according to NBC. That lead also went nowhere.

Penny Cayedito died in 1999. Wikipedia's account, citing a Gallup detective, says she had failed an FBI polygraph and that investigators believed she knew more than she had disclosed; she was never charged with any offense. In 2022 Anthonette's sister Sadie Acevedo told CNN she believes the disappearance may have been connected to a relative.

No one has been charged. In April 2020 the FBI, the Navajo Nation Division of Public Safety and the Gallup Police Department issued a joint reminder that they are still searching for her, and the FBI renewed its appeal on the 35th anniversary in 2021. Tips can be given to the FBI at 505-889-1300 or tips.fbi.gov.