Debra Barajas
Debra Ann Barajas
44 YOA
Disappeared from: Omaha, NE
Date Went Missing: May 25, 2006
Remains found in 54300 block of 195th Street
Pacific Junction, near Glenwood, IA
Mills County, IA (jurisdiction)
Remains Found: November 14, 2006
Debra (Debbie) Ann Barajas was last seen the afternoon of May 25, 2006, heading to the Omaha vicinity of Park Avenue and Leavenworth in Omaha, Neb. When she didn’t arrive, she was reported missing to the Nebraska Missing Persons Information Clearinghouse.
Nearly six months later on Tuesday, November 14, 2006, Barajas’ remains were discovered in a Pacific Junction ravine northwest of Glenwood, Iowa, near the 54300 block of 195th Street in Mills County, Iowa. The rural community’s population barely topped 500 people.
The Iowa State Medical Examiner’s office — with the assistance of a forensic anthropologist — used computerized tomography scans from Barajas Guitierrez’s medical history to verify her identify.
Barajas’ body was discovered just a few miles away from where the body of 25-year-old Brianne Smith — also of Omaha — was found five months earlier.
Both women were prostitutes with crack cocaine addictions.
In November, 2006, authorities announced they were investigating whether several Nebraska women who also worked as prostitutes were slain by the same man — a man who killed himself amidst an investigation into his ex-wife’s death.
Thomas Tomich
Thomas Tomich, 50, who officials said stuffed his ex-wife’s body into a barrel 23 years ago, came under investigation after links were discovered connecting him to Barajas Guitierrez. Tomich had bailed Barajas Guitierrez out of jail just nine days before she went missing.
According to the Omaha World-Herald, law enforcement records showed that on May 16, 2006, Tomich had spent $250 to bail Barajas out of the Sarpy County Jail, where she’d been incarcerated for a month on a misdemeanor drug possession charge.
The two also had another connection.
Any time Barajas wanted time to herself, she’d spend the night in an empty apartment at the Rorick apartments and condos near 22nd Street and St. Mary’s Avenue in Omaha; Tomich worked as a maintenance man at Rorick.
Courtesy WOWT Ch. 6 OmahaTomich was just about to be arrested for the 1983 slaying of his ex-wife, Lois Tomich, when he killed himself by jumping out of the 11-story building.
In an Omaha World-Herald article dated November 17, 2006, Barajas’ family said Debra hadn’t signed a lease and didn’t pay rent at the Rorick apartments, and they didn’t know how she got into the rooms. They began to understand once they learned of her relationship with Tomich.
Chief Deputy Marty Bilek of the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office in Nebraska confirmed what many already had begun to suspect.
“Tom Tomich associated with prostitutes,” said Bilek in a Nov. 18, 2006 interview published by the Associated Press. “He’s a killer, who was also active in the 1980s, and we know now he might have killed again.”
Barajas’ sister Dena Gutierrez told the media the family saw Debra about a week after she’d been bonded out, but then she had left.
Debra Barajas
“She would call and say, ‘Mom, I’m okay. I’m going to stop by,” Barajas’ mother, Mabel Gutierrez told WOWT-TV. “But that day, we never heard back from her.”
By January 2007, investigators in both Iowa and Nebraska said they believed it was unlikely Tomich killed Smith or Barajas, though they did feel the two women may have been killed by the same person.
“We are still calling Tom Tomich ‘a person of interest’ in Debbie’s death, but we are looking at others,” Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation Special Agent Dave Dales told the World-Herald. “There are still other people we have to rule in or rule out.”
Debra was born April 5, 1962.
If you have any information about this unsolved murder, please contact the Mills County Sheriff’s office at (712) 527-4337.
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