Trial in 1986 kidnapping, death of Lexington girl starts. ‘That face will never leave me.’

A long-awaited kidnapping and murder trial got underway at the Lexington County Judicial Center on Tuesday, but jurors won’t hear that the only eyewitness to the abduction identified the defendant as her 4-year-old sister’s kidnapper.

Judge Debra McCaslin ruled against the testimony before jurors had been seated in the trial of Thomas McDowell, as prosecutors with the S.C. Attorney General’s Office argue the North Carolina man is guilty of one of the Midlands’ most well-known cold cases.

The trial is still expected to feature dramatic testimony as the family of Jessica Gutierrez confronts in court the man accused of kidnapping and killing Jessica almost 40 years ago.

McDowell, now 63, has been held in the Lexington County jail for almost two years, ever since he was arrested at his North Carolina home in Jessica’s 1986 killing. Jessica’s disappearance was long considered one of the Midlands’ most notorious cold cases. She vanished from her home in the Edmund community overnight on June 6, 1986.

Before the trial got underway, Jessica’s sister Rebecca Gutierrez testified at an evidentiary hearing, as McDowell’s public defenders sought to exclude her identification of McDowell in a photo lineup more than 20 years after the crime.

The only clue to what happened to Jessica at the time came from her then-6-year-old sister, who said she saw “the man with the magic hat and the beard” take Jessica from their shared bedroom. Jessica has never been found.

On Monday, Rebecca Gutierrez testified that she remembered the man who came into her room decades ago and picked up her little sister as she slept next to her. Gutierrez told the court she squinted her eyes and pretended to sleep, but still remembers what the abductor looked like as the moonlight shone through the window above the girls’ bed.

“I see him every night before I go to bed,” an emotional Gutierrez said. “That face will never leave me, even if I try to forget it. I’ve replayed it in my mind, asking what would have happened if I’d screamed or waked up my mom.”

She said she remembers details of the man’s face as well as the tall, wide-brimmed hat he wore, which her 6-year-old self could only identify as a “magic hat,” she said.

But what jurors in McDowell’s trial won’t hear is that an older Gutierrez was shown a photo lineup by investigators in 2007, from which she picked out a booking photo of McDowell taken about eight years after Jessica disappeared.

McCaslin ruled that too much time had passed for the identification to be admitted. She also noted that a 6-year-old Gutierrez had initially identified the kidnapper as “a Black man.” McDowell is white.

Questioned by defense attorney Sarah Mauldin, Gutierrez said she couldn’t recall making that identification as a child. “There were a lot of people asking questions that day,” she said. “I just wanted it to end and for everything to go back to normal, and it never would.”

McCaslin also refused Mauldin’s request to make arguments that would cast suspicion on an ex-boyfriend that Jessica’s mother, Debra Gutierrez, had broken up with shortly before Jessica’s abduction. That man was often looked at as a prime suspect by different investigators before they linked a fingerprint collected at the scene to McDowell and arrested him in 2022, Sgt. David Pritchard with the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department testified.

But McCaslin ruled that there was no direct evidence tying the ex-boyfriend to Jessica’s disappearance, and that while the defense could argue a third party may be responsible for the crime, attorneys could not implicate another suspect by name.

McDowell lived in the area at the time, and briefly dated Debra Gutierrez. Shortly after Jessica’s disappearance, he stole a car, drove to North Carolina and raped a woman, for which he spent a decade in a North Carolina prison between 1987 and 1997.

While he was being held in the Polk County, North Carolina, jail, McDowell told a story to fellow inmate Michael Fowler that Fowler found “devastating.”

“He told me that he had went into a window and broke into a house and took a little girl out, and took her out to a logging place and he raped her and cut her up with a machete,” Fowler testified Tuesday. “I’m from a small town. We don’t have a lot of crazy stuff like that going on.”

In 2008, McDowell testified as part of his brother’s death penalty appeal in California, describing the physical, sexual and psychological abuse the two brothers were subjected to growing up in York County. McDowell’s older brother Eddie is on death row in California for a 1984 conviction of felony murder, burglary, attempted rape and attempted murder.

Thomas McDowell is accused of murder, kidnapping, first-degree burglary and failure to register as a sex offender. He is represented by David Mauldin and Sarah Mauldin. The prosecutors are Kinli Abee and Heather Weiss.

Weiss told the jurors in her opening statement they would hear about “a mother’s worse nightmare, and a sister’s nightmare that she can never wake up from.” The jurors’ job is to answer the question of who killed Jessica Gutierrez, and McDowell is “the only person who answers the ‘who’ question.”

Sarah Mauldin said the jury would hear about the suffering of the Gutierrez family, but that the burden of proof was on the state to show beyond a reasonable doubt that McDowell is responsible. “Don’t allow their pain and their grief to shift you from your job,” she said.