“Everything was going to be OK as long as my big sister was with me,” Ruby Hall told Dateline about her sister, 13-year-old Blanca Elisa Roberson, who went by her middle name. “Life was going to be great.”
The thought of Elisa takes Ruby back to afternoons spent biking together down to the harbor in Aransas Pass, Texas — a corner of the world which, in their minds, belonged only to them. “Our whole lives seemed to revolve around these few blocks,” Ruby said. “It was like we had no cares in the world.”
Ruby describes her sister as a “cool kid” — a true product of ‘80’s hair bands and MTV. “Everybody seemed to like her. She had so many friends,” Ruby said. “And I was the tag-along little sister that wanted to just keep up with her and was so excited to be able to hang out with her.”
The eldest of four siblings, Elisa was the only one born in Nicaragua like their mother, Marina Tomchak. “I didn’t speak English,” Marina told Dateline, with whom she spoke Spanish. “She was the one that helped me all the time when I went to appointments with the doctor or wherever I had to fill out paperwork. She was my translator.”
Marina described Elisa as a mature child, who acted as a sort of “little mom” for her siblings. “Having her, who helped me with everything, was a blessing,” she said. “She was a blessing for the whole family — she was like the soul of the home.”
But even with some adult responsibilities, Elisa was still a kid, which made those bike rides with her little sister all the more special. Ruby remembers it as an almost escapist feeling — careless, wind in her hair, riding alongside her best friend. “It kind of kept us kind of protected and safe in our little make-believe world where we can escape from some of the bad stuff that was happening — or hard adult things,” she said. “So, when Elisa went missing, it was kind of like the spoke that kind of held the wheel together. And it felt like everything just kind of fell apart after that.”
Ruby thinks about the day Elisa disappeared often.
It was Sunday, August 6, 1989. Around 5:30 p.m., Elisa came home from a friend’s house. Another friend, who lived a few blocks away, called the Roberson house shortly after Elisa walked in. “Debbie asked her if she could come over and play,” Ruby said. “And my mom had told [Elisa] it was already getting late and that she needed to stay home.”
Over the phone, Debbie suggested that she and Elisa meet halfway at Kieberger Elementary School, which was between their houses — about a six-minute walk for Elisa. According to Marina, Debbie told Elisa that her father would take them home after they finished playing. “And then I said, ‘Well, then that’s fine,’ because that wasn’t the first time they made that deal,” Marina said. “So I felt good when she told me that they would bring her home later and she wouldn’t need to walk back.”
Elisa headed out to meet her friend.
The rest of the Robersons spent that late Sunday afternoon at home. Then, the phone rang again. “Debbie called our house and asked if Elisa was there,” Ruby said. According to Ruby, Debbie told the family Elisa never showed up at the school, so she returned home to call the Robersons. “My mom says she felt that it was a long enough time period that it shocked her, because she thought she should be with [Elisa] at this point.”
Marina asked Debbie to go back to the school and check if Elisa had shown up. A few minutes later, Debbie called again. No sign of Elisa.
At that point, panic set in. Marina and Ruby began calling Elisa’s friends asking if anybody had seen her while Debbie and her father drove around looking for her. At around 9:45 p.m., Marina called the police. “A police officer came to our home at some point and took the initial report,” Ruby told Dateline.
Marina remembers the conversation she had with the officer in their home that night. “He thought that she would show up after a while and that maybe she’d gone down another path and got distracted talking to another friend,” she said.
Linda Thompson was a lieutenant with the Aransas Pass Police Department in 1989. She was the original investigating officer in Elisa’s disappearance. “It was a department policy that if a child was involved in any way in an offense, I was being contacted immediately,” she told Dateline. However, she says, the officer who took the initial report did not contact her on the night of August 6, so it wasn’t until the next morning that she found out about Elisa’s disappearance.
“I hate that. I hate that that happened, but it did. We got a 12-hour-late start on investigating her case,” Thompson said. “I firmly believe, had we started that night when the call came in, it would have been a different scenario. I think it was probably already too late, but I think we might have been able to find Elisa and solve the case.”
After reporting Elisa missing that night, the Robersons waited and worried.
“Ruby and I stayed awake all night — all night, watching the window, panicking,” Marina said. “And I thought that maybe the police would come tell me something, but no one ever showed up.”
Ruby remembers that night, too. “I just remember this god-awful feeling, like, in my gut — like, it’s a feeling I’ll never forget of just, you know, ‘Something’s wrong,’” she said. “And your little 12-year-old mind and body can — can feel that you just know something’s wrong. Your sister’s not home. And she’s not coming home.”
The next morning, the Robersons went to the Aransas Pass Police Department. Linda Thompson remembers seeing the family walk into the station right before a dispatch officer handed her the report about Elisa’s disappearance.
Thompson knew the Robersons and knew that Elisa acted as translator for her mother. She says when she saw the family at the police station and Elisa wasn’t with them, it immediately worried her. “I felt like I had been kicked by a mule. I knew immediately that something really bad had happened — and if we didn’t get real busy, real fast, it was going to continue to be bad,” Thompson remembered thinking. “Well, unfortunately, we got real busy real fast, but we — it made no difference whatsoever.”
The Aransas Pass Police Department organized searches for Elisa, which, according to Ruby, lasted weeks. Thompson told Dateline that, about five or six days after Elisa’s disappearance, the agency brought in a team of dogs to try to locate her. “There were ground trackers, there were bloodhounds, there were air scenters, there were cadaver dogs,” she said. “Every dog we ran stopped in the exact same spot.”
Thompson told Dateline the dogs each independently alerted at the intersection of Goodnight Ave and 8th St., which would have been on Elisa’s way to Kieberger Elementary School. She believes somebody picked Elisa up in a vehicle at that intersection. “The actor saw her [walking towards the school] — it’s somebody she trusted,” Thompson said. “She hopped in the car for a ride.”
According to Thompson, Elisa left her house about five minutes before Debbie left hers that night. “That five minutes was the opportunity for the actor to grab Elisa,” she said.
Linda Thompson told Dateline she still thinks about Elisa’s case 35 years later.
“I’ve thought about that case — if not every day, every week for the last 35 years,” she said. “I’m a mother, and a grandmother, and a great-grandmother. Just the humanity of having a case for a child — a member of our community — come up missing... and I couldn’t return her to her mother in any way or form. That’s a big responsibility. It was my job to find her and I couldn’t do it.”
Aransas Pass Chief of Police Eric Blanchard joined the department in 2012, 23 years after Elisa disappeared. He would not share specific details about Elisa’s case, but said it “became alive again with new information” in 2016. In the intervening years more interviews were conducted and it “got a little cold again,” he said, as the department waited on evidence to be processed. According to Chief Blanchard, the investigation has recently gained traction again.
“We have been able to focus back on that case again [in 2024],” the chief said. “We are having movement on the case, which we anticipate with — hopefully within the month or two months, we’ll be able to get further along in what we had acquired from 2016.”
Ruby told Dateline that, in 2016, she and her family were brought to the Aransas Pass Police Department for questioning. She says the department has since accused them — specifically Elisa’s mother, Marina — of having something to do with Elisa’s disappearance.
“What happened to us in 2016 caused us to shut down. And it was so traumatic. We’re still, as we speak, still processing what happened to us,” Ruby said. “We’re fighting for answers for Elisa — to find, you know, to find her, or to find justice for her. But we’re also fighting the accusations that the police department has put up.”
Marina told Dateline the department’s accusations has caused them “many problems” in the years that followed. “They traumatized [Ruby] pretty badly — and me, too,” she said. “I quietly suffer from that.”
Chief Blanchard responded to the allegation that the Aransas Pass Police Department has accused the family of being responsible for Elisa’s disappearance. “Personal communications or interactions that [the Roberson family] may be sharing with [Dateline] that [they’ve] had with law enforcement in the investigation — that’s [them] sharing. But until I have some greater level of confirmation one way or the other, I would never implicate publicly an individual, a family, or — or anybody,” he said. “At this time, I won’t share any people of interest. I can’t share suspects. I can’t share — even potentially — the belief of where the evidence is taking us. All I can say is that we do have a direction that is evidence-driven and we’re following that.”
Chief Blanchard believes it’s very likely that Elisa was murdered. “I think with the time that has elapsed it’s very unusual that you see missing persons don’t at some point — you know, after 35 years — reemerge,” he said. “I kind of feel like we are missing — we are investigating a — maybe a homicide, or some type of death investigation.”
Ruby agrees, and says she’s slowly coming to peace with the fact that her sister may never get justice. What she’s not ready to do, however, is stop trying. “People keep telling me, ‘You keep making noise. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.’ And they just keep telling me, ‘Don’t stop. Keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going,’” she said. “I thought, ‘You know what? I’m going to show them we’re not afraid. And we’re all — you know, we’re not gonna back down.’”
Earlier this month, the family held an event for Elisa in Aransas Pass. “It was to remember her, Elisa — Blanca Elisa — to honor her by walking the path that she walked that day,” Marina told Dateline. The event was healing for the family, although Marina says it’s still hard to think about Elisa. “There’s people who say that, maybe, as the years pass, everything will get better. But no, no, no; it’s an everyday thing. And just as I start to talk about her, I’m already crying and my heart starts beating — and I think it wants to break out of my chest,” she said. “Nothing changes, and especially knowing that we don’t have an answer or an idea and that nothing has been resolved.”
Marina says at some point over the years, she felt like all that she could do was wait for Ruby to get older. She says Ruby has the strength and the spirit to fight for Elisa in a way she never could. Ruby “is the brave one,” she said. “She can do things that I can’t do.”
Ruby is continuing the fight but admits that, in the moment, she sometimes loses sight of what’s important. “When things get so hard and, like, when you’re fighting so hard, I have to step back and I have to sit here and say, ‘What am I doing this for?’” she said.
And then she remembers. “I’m doing this for Elisa.”
And just like that, Ruby’s thoughts turn to those few blocks in Aransas Pass where she and her sister felt invincible. “I get taken right back to us riding our bikes,” she told Dateline. “There’s not one day that I go where I don’t think about her, so she’s never forgotten.”
Anyone with information about the disappearance of Blanca Elisa Roberson is asked to contact Aransas Pass Police Department Captain Kyle Rhodes at 361-758-5224. You can also anonymously submit a tip through CrimeStoppers.
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