Shadows of pain, grief and hope have long been cast across Fran Langston’s face.

Despite the odds, she still believes she will eventually discover what happened to her daughter, Rachel Trlica, who, along with two other girls, disappeared from outside a Fort Worth, Texas, shopping mall on December 23, 1974.

‘Hopefully somebody will wise up and come tell us where they are,’ Langston told DailyMail.com.

Rachel, 17, Renee Wilson, 14 and nine-year-old Julie Ann Moseley had left home at about 10:45am to go Christmas shopping in the eldest girl’s 1972 Oldsmobile.

On the way to the Seminary South Shopping Center, today called La Gran Plaza mall, they stopped off at a local Army/Navy surplus store to pick up two pairs of jeans for Rachel – still in high school, she was married and step-mother to a two-year-old boy.

Credible eyewitnesses say the girls were seen together inside the mall and had waved to a friend as they exited the building via Sears.

They had said they would be home by 2pm. But by 3pm, with no sign of the trio, Julie Ann’s brother, Terry, became concerned and began checking with the other families.

By 4pm family members were frantic and a search party had arrived at the mall where loud public announcements were made seeking the girls but to no avail.

Then their empty car was found parked outside near the Sears store. Inside were two pairs of jeans – a new pair and old pair that Rachel had got changed out of while at the surplus store.

The following day an eerie letter was delivered to Rachel’s home that read: ‘I know I’m going to catch it, but we just had to get away. We’re going to Houston. See you in about a week. The car is in Sear’s upper lot. Love, Rachel.’

The letter itself was handwritten in ink. The envelope was addressed using pencil. Rachel’s name was originally misspelled as ‘Rachee.’ The mistake was still obvious, even though the second ‘e’ had been gone over with an ‘l.’

The families were immediately suspicious of the letter’s authenticity and the speed at which it arrived. To them it made no sense that the three girls would suddenly run away – especially two days before Christmas – and leave the car behind.

Police, though, initially believed the letter to be genuine.

Over the decades the case has caused deep, unending heartache and pitted family members against each other.

Thousands of tips and eye-witness sightings have come in but the whereabouts of the girls remains a painful mystery.

‘A woman came forward to me a year ago and told me she’s the one that wrote the letter,’ Rusty Arnold, 61, Rachel’s younger brother, told DailyMail.com.

He was aged just 11 when the girls vanished into thin air and has been on a never-ending quest to solve the mystery since, doggedly chasing every lead.

‘She said that she lived two doors down from Renee’s family and, sure enough, that was true,’ he said.

‘She said her daddy forced her to write the letter and he told her what to say to cover something up. She thinks her daddy did this.

‘We pursued it as far as we could go. It got turned over to the police and I believe they got her DNA. I think they’re going to compare it to the DNA on the letter.

‘We went to my lawyer’s office and had her rewrite the letter. I told her exactly what to say. Our handwriting expert says that, you know, she didn’t write the (original) letter.

‘She said she came forward because it was on her conscience and she just wanted to let us know what happened. But, understand, I get these stories all the time.’

Rusty added: ‘I’ll tell you, it’s hard. There’s been literally thousands of leads coming in, but none of them have ever panned out. I can’t tell you how many holes I’ve dug.’

Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable, but his mother Fran believes the strongest lead came from a man who said he saw the girls in a van behind the Sears store.

Rachel’s mother Fran claimed the elderly man was from out of town and had been waiting in his car for a friend when he saw three men with the girls.

He said he looked up and saw Rachel coming towards him. ‘She grabbed hold of his door and begged him to please help her,’ said Fran.

The witness was going to help but was ordered to mind his own business, with the assailant with Rachel adding: ‘This is my wife!’

At the same time, the two other girls exited a van nearby, according to the eyewitness, but were pounced on by two more men and bundled back inside the vehicle.

When the witness was in town a few years later he contacted the family again after seeing the story of the girls on the local news and visited with Fran at her home.

On seeing a picture of her missing daughter, he told her: ‘That’s the baby who asked me to help her and I couldn’t do it.’

Fran added: ‘Now, with all my heart, that’s what I believe happened. The witness has been long dead now. That was 45 years ago.

‘The police tried to give him some polygraph tests but he wasn’t healthy enough and was also hard of hearing.’

Rusty, a roofing contractor, said: ‘He wasn’t involved. He was an old man. The police couldn’t do anything with it, so they just dropped it.’

The mystery of the missing girls caused a huge rift between Rusty and his sister, Debra Hopper, 69, and the siblings didn’t speak for 20 years.

‘I thought she may have had something to do with it,’ said Rusty, ‘but I was wrong. We proved it through DNA.’

Some believe that Thomas ‘Tommy’ Trlica, Rachel’s husband, then 22 and already on his second marriage, was connected to the disappearance. He was previously engaged to Debra, Rachel’s sister, and the three had been living together.

Tommy had gone bowling in the evening on the same day his young wife went missing.

Citing abandonment by Rachel, he married Josephine Beck, also 17, in December, 1976, and has been married several times since.

‘I don’t think he really cared. We don’t want him in the city limits of Fort Worth,’ said Fran of her former son-in-law.

‘A lot of people say he had something to do with it. Everybody did. They gave him two polygraph tests and he passed them both.’

Raymond Arnold died six months after his daughter’s disappearance aged 39 and Fran remarried.

Recounting that terrible day five decades ago, Rusty said he believes the girls never made it back to their car once they left the mall. There were no security cameras.

‘Several credible witnesses saw them at the mall, so they did actually make it there,’ he said.

‘After they walked out the back door of Sears, something happened to them.’

Believing the girls had run away, police failed to dust the Oldsmobile for fingerprints and returned it to Tommy Trlica a day later.

‘They treated them as runaways for the first year,’ says Rusty of the police, which severely hampered the investigation.

The families hired a private investigator, Jon Swaim, who worked on the case for three years and reportedly encouraged detectives to dig deeper.

In 1975 he received a tip that claimed the girls’ bodies were buried under a bridge near Port Lavaca, 330 miles south on the Gulf of Mexico. But on inspection nothing was found.

There was another search in 1981 after bones were discovered in Brazoria County, southeast of Houston. The landscape was searched for days with some bone fragments unearthed but they were unrelated to the girls.

In 2018, with the help of volunteer divers, Rusty began removing the wreckage of three cars from beneath Benbrook Lake, 16 miles west of the mall, but, again, this produced nothing.

When the investigator died of a drug and alcohol overdose in 1979 – ruled a suicide – he had ordered all of his case files, including that of the Fort Worth trio, be destroyed and they were duly burned.

Rusty is suspicious but when discussing a possible conspiracy involving authorities, he is tight-lipped, saying: ‘I have no proof of that.’

There have been countless more theories over the years.

At one point Rachel’s family suspected the girls’ disappearance was related to the death of another local girl and family friend, Licia Ann McGee, 17.

In January 1978, she also vanished and her body, almost decapitated, was found in the trunk of a car on the side of a Fort Worth freeway after leaving a Christmas party.

‘We thought for years that it could be related,’ said Rusty.

Terry Moseley was 15 when his younger sister Julie Ann vanished. He had also recently started dating Renee Wilson, who was a year younger than him.

The same morning he had given Renee a promise ring depicting two dolphins with bodies entwined and heads facing each other.

‘It was probably someone that they knew and they were comfortable with,’ Terry told DailyMail.com. ‘I feel like it was someone who knew Rachel as she was the eldest.

‘There’s no way that Julie, a little girl excited for Christmas, would run away.’

Rusty, an enthusiastic guitar player, owns a cherished Gibson acoustic guitar which has pride of a place in his home. He has his sister’s signature laser etched on it. ‘After 50 years, I brought Rachel home,’ he said.

An anonymous $50,000 reward leading to the arrest and conviction for anyone responsible for the girls’ disappearance or that leads to their bodies, was recently made.

Today, Fran still bravely faces the unimaginable challenge of dealing with her beloved daughter’s disappearance.

‘It’s been hard,’ she said. ‘And still, hopefully, someday somebody’s going to find them or dig them up. That’s all we can hope for.’

Officer Buddy Calzada of the Fort Worth Police Department insisted that detectives have always been dedicated to the case.

‘The police department back then took this case seriously along with any evidence or successful leads,’ he told DailyMail.com.

‘It’s not like a TV show – cases aren’t solved in 45 minutes. It doesn’t happen that way. We didn’t have security cameras, license plate readers and Ring cameras. If it happened today then somebody would have hopefully seen something.

‘We’ve had 30 to 40 detectives over the years look at this case, going through the evidence. We’ve done everything we can up to this point to assist the family, turned over every rock,’ he continued.

‘If the individual responsible for this reads this article they should come forward so we can close the case and save the families (more) hurt’.

He added: ‘Our hearts are with the family. While they have the heart involved we are the hands. Since day one the heart and the hands have been working together to help solve this case. We’re the ones with boots on the ground. Any time we have credible evidence we’re doing anything within our means to help solve this case’.

[H/T Daily Mail]