“We went looking for her around the house, nothing. I didn’t start panicking until we checked with all the neighbors, went to every house, and nobody had seen her,” Penny said.
Authorities immediately launched a search in the surrounding foothills. But, the effort came up dry, and investigators revealed their suspicions that Anthonette had been kidnapped.
Penny continued searching for her daughter, but time continued to pass without any clues. Then, one year later, the Gallup Police Department received an eerie phone call from a little girl.
The girl claimed they were Anthonette Cayedito, and stunned, the dispatcher quickly asked where she was. Sadly though, before the girl could respond, a male voice appeared in the background and ended the call.
“Who said you could use the phone?” the man reportedly yelled before hanging up.
Investigators later played a recording of the phone call for Penny, who claims the girl was undoubtedly her daughter. However, she had no idea who the man was.
“I listened to that tape over and over and over. And just by the way she said her last name and the way she screamed sent chills all over my body. A mother knows, and I know that was her,” Penny recalled.
Nonetheless, the phone call did instill new hope in both Penny and investigators that Anthonette would eventually be found. Still, despite search efforts, four more years passed with little case advancement.
The FBI eventually released two age-progression photographs that would resemble Anthonette at fourteen years old. And, four months later, a strange potential sighting of Anthonette in Carson City, Nevada, was reported to FBI Agent Kevin Miles.
According to Miles, the tipster was a waitress from a Carson City restaurant who claimed to have witnessed a bizarre incident earlier that day.
“She waited on a table at which sat a male and female, rather unkempt, and a small girl about the age of fourteen or fifteen,” Miles explained.