There’s a rule in the Gammill household: If you’re out past 11 p.m., call Mom and let her know if you’re not coming home.
Jennifer Gammill reminded her daughter, 20-year-old Kayeleigh, of that rule when Kayeleigh left their Salinas, California home around 5:30 p.m. on August 17, 2022. “She’s like, ‘No, no. I know, Mom. I’m just gonna be gone for a couple hours and I’ll be home,’” Jennifer recalled. “And I’m like, ‘OK, fine. No worries.’”
Two years on, Jennifer has replayed the last moments she saw Kayeleigh over and over in her mind. “She was in good spirits,” she said. “Just happy, smiling.”
Kayeleigh told her mother she was just going to meet with a friend — somebody Jennifer knew.
Kayeleigh’s phone was broken at the time, but Jennifer says that her daughter would always find a way to contact her if she needed to. So Jennifer felt she had no reason to worry. “She was like, ‘I love you, Mom,’ and left,” she said.
Jennifer left the house shortly after Kayeleigh did and was only mildly surprised when she returned home a few hours later and her daughter wasn’t back yet. “There was no alarm,” Jennifer said. “I didn’t really get concerned until the next morning when I didn’t hear from her.”
Jennifer called the person Kayeleigh said she was going to meet the previous day. “He didn’t know anything about picking her up,” Jennifer told Dateline. “We don’t know who she went with.”
At that point, panic set in. Jennifer began contacting Kayeleigh’s other friends. “Nobody had heard from her. Nobody had talked to her,” she said. “That was really unusual for my daughter.”
The next day, August 19, Jennifer reported her daughter missing.
The following two weeks were agonizing for Jennifer, who told Dateline she was “mostly [running] on adrenaline” while her daughter remained missing. “I was staying busy, going to work every day,” she said.
In the early morning hours of August 31, Detective Arras Wilson of the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office knocked on Jennifer’s door.
Kayeleigh’s body had been found.
“There was a person who actually observed her body on the coast,” Detective Wilson told Dateline. That person called 911.” The caller said the body was in Big Sur, which is approximately 60 miles from Salinas. “There was a turnout, uh, on the west side of the road of Highway 1. And there was a very steep cliff on the other side of this turnout,” Det. Wilson said. “And her body was found at the bottom of that cliff.”
Jennifer Gammill told Dateline that Kayeleigh went to Big Sur with her friends “quite a bit,” but doesn’t know if the area above where she was found was a regular hangout spot for them. “I can’t even force myself to go out there yet — still to this day,” she said.
Detective Wilson is the lead investigator on Kayeleigh’s case. He told Dateline his department has gathered a “significant amount of evidence,” but would not “go into specifics” about the investigation. He also declined to comment on whether authorities have any persons of interest in what he confirmed to be Kayeleigh’s homicide.
Jennifer told Dateline she believes Kayeleigh was murdered the night she disappeared and had been dead for the entire two-week period prior to her body being discovered.
Less than a month after Kayeleigh’s body was found, another woman from Salinas disappeared: Arelie Garcia.
Arelie vanished on September 22, 2022, after leaving her home around 6:30 a.m. Her car was found in Big Sur, about 25 miles from where Kayeleigh’s body had been found.
Reporter Sara Rubin covered both cases for the Monterey County Weekly. “When I first wrote about Arelie’s case, I did also write about Kayeleigh,” she told Dateline. “It did feel just remarkably similar — and it was a different version of a similar kind of story.”
Detective Wilson said the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office examined the possibility that Kayeleigh and Arelie’s cases could be related. While they can’t definitively rule out the possibility, Det. Wilson doesn’t believe they are. “I’ve seen no indication in my investigation that there’s any connection between these two cases,” he said.
Jennifer also doesn’t believe the two cases are connected and, ultimately, wants both cases to be solved. “They both deserve as much attention as possible,” she said.
After nearly two years without answers in her daughter’s case, Jennifer feels as though she’s living a nightmare. “I still can’t wrap my head around it, to be honest,” she said. “I mean, I know it’s real. But I’m still waiting for her to come home.”
Jennifer describes Kayeleigh as the kind of person who befriended people from all walks of life, fueled by the pure, genuine desire to make other people happy. “She touched so many people,” she said. “I still have people reaching out to me today of stories here and there, you know, just how she impacted so many people’s lives.”
Jennifer has 20-year-old twin sons, Kobee and Koree, who both miss their sister dearly. “She was a mom to them,” she said. “She used to love them to death.”
After Kayeleigh’s death, Jennifer fell prey to nagging thoughts, as any parent in her situation might. “Why couldn’t it have been me?” she remembers feeling. “Doubt starts coming and, like… ‘Why wasn’t I there to protect her?’”
She’s forced herself to put those thoughts aside. “I can’t do that to myself anymore, though, because I have to — have to still be strong for my boys,” she said. “So I have to — I have to remember her happy smile. The way she used to call me — make me crazy, you know? And all those kinds of things.”
In her mind now, there is one other thing that will help Jennifer move forward: justice. “Someone has to know something,” she said. “I’ll never heal, but that — having closure and justice will help me process.”
Anyone with information about Kayeleigh Gammill’s case is asked to call Det. Arras Wilson with the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office at 831-759-7203.
Arelie Garcia is still missing. Her case was recently featured on Season 3 of the “Dateline: Missing In America” podcast in the episode titled “Mystery on Highway 1.” Anyone with information about Arelie’s disappearance is asked to call the Salinas Police Department at 831-758-7393 or the anonymous tip line at 831-775-4222.
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