25 years later: Missing records, lingering questions prompt second look at Stinnett teen’s death

AMARILLO, Texas (KFDA) - Officials may be poised to take another look at a young girl’s death in Stinnett, Texas over 25 years ago.

Vanessa Ann Ocana was 16 years old when her body was found under a patch of scrub on the corner lot of Mesquite Street.

“My memory is this,” begins Brianna Bryan, the oldest of the five Bryan siblings. “The last day of April in 2000 was a Sunday. I got a call that day that Vanessa was missing. So, I went home to help look for her. It wasn’t quite May when she was gone.”

Brianna describes the week she spent looking for her younger sister. Phone calls, driving to her friends’ houses, more phone calls. Repeat.

One week later, on May 8, 2000, she got the call that they found her sister’s body.

“I immediately raced to where the crime scene was and I get out of the car,” she recounts. “There’s some police there, my dad’s there, my stepmother’s there...There was just an instinct that something was really wrong."

“Not only would nobody talk to me, but they said it was suicide,” she continues. “I was like, this isn’t a suicide it just didn’t make sense.”

Brianna goes on to explain that her father told her that Stinnett Police ruled it a suicide and quietly closed the case.

This year, Daniel Bryan decided to get the records for his sister’s death.

Daniel was only 3 years old when Vanessa died. His sister lives in his mind as a mosaic that he has carefully assembled from the borrowed memories of family members.

The records, to Daniel, are his way of adding to the portrait of her that he carries in his mind.

“I went to Stinnett to look for records,” he says “I go to the Stinnett Police, they couldn’t shoo me away fast enough. So, I go to the Justice of Peace...and they send me to Borger....”

The goose chase for the records led him to Borger where he located the death certificate and then the autopsy with the help of Hutchinson County Sheriff’s Office.

“Look, I work in the military so I may not understand the autopsy, but I do understand gun language," he goes on to explain that several things in the autopsy stood out to him.

“She’s 87 pounds and barely 5 feet tall,” he says. “They say she shot herself in the heart with an AK-47...but the report says the gun was found not even remotely close to her body. Do you buy that?"

The weapon police said Vanessa used to take her life was an assault rifle bought as a Christmas present for Daniel’s father by his stepmother in December 1999.

When Vanessa went missing on that last Sunday in April, Daniel’s father reported the AK-47 was gone as well.

When Vanessa’s body was found one week later, the AK-47 was found a short distance away from her body, according to Daniel.

Brianna recalls that police confiscated the assault rifle that day.

“[My stepmom] bought my dad another AK-47 because police had the other one,” says Brianna. “A little bit later, police returned the AK-47 to my dad so then he had two of them. I was so confused, why were they not investigating this.”

In several significant research studies, teenage females are least likely to use a firearm to the chest as the method of suicide, usually opting for less violent methods like poisoning or cut wrists. Males hold the overwhelming majority for using a gun to commit suicide and it is typically done by a gunshot to their temple.

This means Vanessa, in theory, chose the most uncommon manner of suicide and targeted the area of the body that a female would be least likely to choose.

“She hated guns,” adds Brianna. “Hated them. It makes no sense.”

Daniel went off record to share several more key details with Vanessa’s autopsy that stood out to him enough that he called the Attorney General.

“She followed up and called me back,” says Daniel. “There are records missing. There are papers that should exist, but they don’t. There’s a lot more to it, but I’ve been told that they’re re-opening the case.”

NewsChannel10 reached out to Stinnett Police Department to find out more and will update when we get a response.

Daniel admits that he had long held suspicions that his sister’s death may not have been by her own hand. And he isn’t alone.

Brianna brims with emotion when she recounts the days leading up to her sister’s death.

“They always cast her as this runaway and she wasn’t,” she says. “She just wasn’t allowed in the house. She was staying with John; she didn’t have anywhere to go.”

Brianna explains that her sister and stepmother often clashed. As a result, the teenager would frequently sleep on the couch at her boyfriend’s house. She was a dedicated student who attended school despite her unsteady housing.

Had police considered the possibility of Vanessa’s death as being a homicide, they would have likely zeroed in on her then-boyfriend, John Ashley Griffin.

Griffin was well known to law enforcement in the Stinnett and Borger area.

In October 2000, Griffin and a co-defendant, Michael Noel Beam, shot and killed a woman during the robbery of a bait shop in Moore County. After the slaying, the two men fled the state in a stolen car and stolen guns.

“Legend says that Griffin just wanted to have the experience of killing somebody,” said G. Downey, a historian who lives near Lake Meredith. “They hid out in a cave outside town and then took off to Las Vegas.”

Texas Rangers tracked the two to Las Vegas and brought them back to be tried for capital murder. Beam served his sentence and was released; Griffin is currently serving a life sentence in prison.

If Vanessa’s death was indeed caused by anyone but herself, Griffin would have been the first person law enforcement looked at--except for one thing.

“I asked my brother why they didn’t try to put this on John to begin with,” Brianna says. “He said what I remember as well: that John was in jail when Vanessa went missing.”

Incident reports obtained from Hutchinson County Sheriff’s Office show significant gaps in the date and times of an incident and the written report.

One supplemental report dated three days after the actual incident states that Griffin was taken to Amarillo on a mental health warrant the day before Vanessa went missing.

When the Pavilion refused to admit Griffin, he was turned over into the custody of his father--but no time and date for this exchange is put in the report.

The timing of Griffin’s mental health warrant is significant because several court documents show that Griffin had a hearing scheduled for the morning of May 1, 2000.

At this court date, Griffin’s probation was extended by two years and ordered to be sent to a drug treatment program several hours away. They show that Griffin was not released from custody.

Yet there are incident reports provided by HSCO that report taking him into custody on May 4, 2000.

If Griffin never left custody after his hearing on the morning of May 1, then he never crossed paths with Vanessa on the days leading up to her death.

The question remains: who did?

“Just when we think there’s a little bit more information and answers.....” scoffs Brianna. “It could be anyone. It could be suicide. It could be anyone...."

Most frustrating of all is the uncertainty.

“We don’t know what’s next,” says Daniel. “We know the Attorney General’s decision to re-open it, but we don’t even know their next steps with that......so we wait. Like we have been.”