Buried On 70th Street

For nearly five years, one Lubbock address held the answer a family was still searching for.

In November 2013, eighteen-year-old Zoe Gabrielle Campos disappeared after an ordinary night with family. She had returned home, sent a late-night message, and was expected to pick up her mother from work. She never arrived. What began as a missing-person case became a long true crime investigation shaped by fragments: phone-location reporting, an abandoned car, a leather jacket in the trunk, traces of DNA, shifting statements, and a house on 70th Street that never fully left the record.

Buried On 70th Street follows the case from Zoe's last known movements through the nearly five years her family lived without knowing what had happened. It traces searches near Lowery Field, the recovery of her car at Driftwood Apartments, early interviews with Carlos Andrew Rodriquez, and the 2014 cadaver-dog search at the residence later tied to the burial site. The book examines why information can accumulate without becoming proof-and how delay changes the meaning of every clue once the truth is finally recovered.

The investigation narrowed again in 2018 through jailhouse information, renewed search activity, and a warrant seeking blood evidence, trace evidence, and human remains. After Rodriquez initiated contact with detectives from jail, received Miranda warnings, and waived his rights, he confessed. He then directed investigators back to the former residence, where Zoe's remains were found buried in the backyard.

The legal outcome is clear. Rodriquez pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, a jury sentenced him to life in prison, and the conviction was affirmed on appeal. Yet legal resolution did not make the public record complete. The full autopsy, toxicology, confession transcript, bodycam footage, digital extraction, DNA laboratory report, search logs, and other investigative records are not all publicly available in the materials examined by the book.

That distinction-between a solved case and a fully visible record-drives this victim-centered true crime account. The narrative does not invent private thoughts, dramatize unavailable evidence, or turn uncertainty into accusation. It separates established facts from reported claims, defendant explanations, procedural questions, and records that remain outside public view.

Written in a restrained investigative style, Buried On 70th Street is for readers drawn to missing-person cases, cold case investigations, forensic evidence, courtroom proceedings, confession and recovery narratives, and Texas true crime. Its focus remains on Zoe, her family, and the human cost of the five years when an answer existed but had not yet been found.

Follow the evidence through the last ordinary night, the searches that stopped short, the confession that changed the case, and the ground where silence finally met proof.