Jessie Foster

Case background and investigation

Jessica Edith Louise Foster, known as Jessie, was born May 27, 1984, and grew up in Kamloops, British Columbia, with her mother, stepfather, and three sisters. In April 2005, at age 20, she accepted an invitation from Donald Vaz, a man she had met in Calgary and considered a friend, to travel to Florida, New Jersey, and New York. The trip ended in Las Vegas in May 2005, where Foster stayed rather than returning to Canada. Her family later learned, according to the Charley Project and news accounts, that she had been sex trafficked from Canada through Atlantic City to Las Vegas. Over the following months she was arrested on prostitution-related charges in June and September 2005 and was the victim of battery on several occasions, including a beating that fractured her jaw and put her in the hospital.

Foster moved in with Peter B. Todd in North Las Vegas, describing him to relatives as her fiancé. Investigators and a private investigator hired by her family later concluded that Todd had acted as her pimp and had beaten her severely. Foster maintained near-daily phone contact with her family in Canada, and she was last heard from by telephone at her residence near the 1000 block of Cornerstone Place in North Las Vegas on March 28, 2006. Todd told police she left the apartment on April 3 for a dentist appointment and that when he returned home she was gone, along with nearly all of her belongings except her makeup and hair dryer — items her family said she would never have abandoned. Todd cooperated with investigators and has maintained his innocence; police did not name him a suspect.

Family members noted that Foster had planned to attend her sister's wedding reception that April and had left behind roughly $20,000 from a car-accident settlement that she intended to use for university. Her credit cards, bank accounts, and cell phone have shown no activity since her disappearance, and the North Las Vegas Police Department classifies her as an endangered missing person under NamUs case MP177.

Foster was one of four women engaged in sex work who disappeared from the Las Vegas Valley between 2003 and 2006. The bodies of the other three were eventually recovered; Foster remains the only one never found. In July 2015, according to the Calgary Sun, investigators examined Neal Falls — a man shot and killed by a woman he attacked in Charleston, West Virginia, whose car contained weapons, restraints, and a list of escorts' names — as a possible suspect in the four Las Vegas cases. Falls had rented a home in Henderson, Nevada, from 2000 to 2008. Investigators also looked at whether Rex Heuermann, the accused Gilgo Beach killer who held Las Vegas timeshare properties in 2004-2005, could be connected; police have confirmed no involvement by either man has been established.

Foster's mother, Glendene Grant, became a prominent anti-trafficking advocate, founding Mothers Against Trafficking in Humans and maintaining numerous websites publicizing the case, which was also featured in Benjamin Perrin's book Invisible Chains. Foster's father, who had offered a cash reward for information, died in 2020. As of the case's twentieth anniversary in 2026, North Las Vegas police reported no new developments, and the disappearance remains unsolved. Anyone with information is asked to contact the North Las Vegas Police Department or Crime Stoppers at (702) 385-5555.