A teenage mother disappears without a trace, and as her story fades from view, her family searches for answers. Will Nicole’s killer be brought to justice?
Episode Media
Episode Sources
- Genevieve Nicole Munoz – The Charley Project
- Genevieve Munoz – Uncovered
- Genevieve Nicole Munoz – The Doe Network
- Missing in Biloxi
- Missing teen had 3-month-old baby | Part 2
- Cold case confession | Part 2
- Justice judge steps down from cold-case hearing
- Suspect in 1994 slaying denied bond | Part 2
- Man gets maximum in teen’s 1994 slaying
- Crime victims remembered
- Obituary: Genevieve Nicole Munoz
- Readers’ tips have helped solve cold cases
- Killer released from prison after serving less than 4 years of 20-year sentence | Part 2
Episode Transcript
Welcome back to Bite-Sized Crime. This week I’m bringing you a case from the deep south, the story of a young woman who was on the cusp of changing her life when she suddenly vanished. This episode discusses sensitive topics, so listener discretion is advised.
Genevieve Nicole Muñoz grew up in Biloxi, Mississippi, a southern beach town on the Gulf of Mexico. One of four siblings, Nicole was described as vibrant and energetic. She also had a soft heart, especially when it came to children and animals. At school, Nicole championed the underdog and was always the first to stand up for others. She had a protective nature, and everyone loved her.
Shortly after she turned 17, Nicole learned she was pregnant. With her family’s support, Nicole decided to keep the baby, and her boyfriend Micheal said he wanted to be involved. Their son Dillon was born in the spring of 1994, and Nicole loved the little boy more than anything.
But being a teenage parent wasn’t easy, and Nicole was grateful to be surrounded by her family. She was determined to finish high school and pursue a career, and she wanted to make sure baby Dillon would be cared for. Together, the family made the decision for Nicole’s parents to legally adopt Dillon so he could be added to their health insurance. Nicole started saving up money for the legal fees while balancing schoolwork and motherhood.
Although Micheal wanted to be involved in raising Dillon, he and Nicole often argued about what that looked like. According to friends, Nicole wasn’t happy with how controlling Micheal was, and although she wanted her son to have his father in his life, she was having second thoughts about her own relationship with Micheal. The constant fighting and his possessive behavior was wearing on her, and she was unsure of how to proceed. How could she balance Dillon’s needs with her own boundaries?
On the morning of June 11, 1994, Nicole had plans to meet up with Micheal so they could go shopping for baby items at Edgewater Mall. Around 10am, Nicole said goodbye to her parents, telling them she would be back in a few hours. She put Dillon in his carseat in the back of her 1988 Plymouth Reliant and drove away.
But hours passed, and Nicole didn’t come home. Her parents started to worry – usually Nicole would call if she was running late so they would know where she was. As darkness fell and there was still no sign of their daughter, they decided to call Micheal’s house to see if she was there. Maybe she had just lost track of time.
When Micheal answered the phone, he told Nicole’s parents that she wasn’t there. He said that she had been there around noon but had just walked out and left Dillon behind.
This news set off alarm bells for Nicole’s parents. They immediately drove to north Biloxi where Micheal lived with his mother and siblings, expecting to get more answers in person. But Micheal just repeated the same story – Nicole had walked out, leaving Dillon in his care.
Nicole’s parents took the baby and drove back home, fighting their rising panic. Her father Vicente later told the Sun Herald that Nicole would never leave her son. “I knew right away something was wrong.”
The family contacted the Biloxi Police Department and asked to file a missing persons report. They explained that Nicole had been planning to come home right after her shopping trip with Micheal and that she would have let them know if her plans had changed.
They also mentioned a fight that Nicole and Micheal had gotten into the day before. According to her brother Nicholas, Nicole had been upset with Micheal and accused him of not doing enough to help with the baby. The argument had escalated and turned physical, and Nicholas had stepped in to protect his sister. When everyone had calmed down, Micheal agreed to take a more active role in raising Dillon, and he and Nicole had made plans to go shopping for baby items on the 11th. Nicole’s family felt that this fight was an indication that Micheal had harmed Nicole somehow, that he knew more than he was saying.
But the officer who took the report apparently disagreed. Perhaps because of her age – Nicole had just turned 18 – the officer listed her as a runaway and told her family that she would probably come home soon.
The family refused to accept this. Rather than waiting on the police to take action, they launched their own search, which immediately proved fruitful. Within 24 hours, they had found Nicole’s car sitting abandoned in a parking lot at the Gulfport-Biloxi Regional Airport.
Nicole’s parents reached out to airport officials and asked to see the surveillance footage from the day Nicole disappeared. They searched through hours of footage, hoping to see Nicole wandering around the airport, purchasing a ticket, or even boarding a plane. But there was no sign of her, and unfortunately, the spot where her car sat was just outside the line of sight of the parking lot cameras. It appeared to be a dead end.
After about a week of searching, Biloxi police sent Nicole’s information to the local newspaper, publishing a description of what she was last seen wearing: cut-off jeans and a shirt with horse designs on the front. Anyone with information was asked to contact the police department or reach out to Nicole’s parents. The notice was published twice, a tiny blurb in the classified section, and that was it. The disappearance of a teenage mother wasn’t front page news.
Police did try to follow up on the airport lead. Around the same time Nicole disappeared, her best friend Vera had left for vacation with her family, heading to Italy for a month. Had Nicole decided to join them?
When Vera’s family returned from vacation, law enforcement met them at the airport. Vera was shocked to learn that her best friend had been missing since June. She told the Sun Herald, “They asked if we thought she ran away, if she’d ever talked about leaving. She never did. I knew what had happened. I knew Nicole was gone. She wouldn’t have just left. Then, it just seemed like they were focused on finding out that she’d just run away. But I knew. I knew.”
Biloxi police upgraded Nicole’s case from runaway to missing and endangered, and they even reached out to the local FBI field office for help with the search. But before long, the few leads they had dried up, and the case went cold.
Years passed, and Nicole’s family struggled to accept that the vibrant young mother was truly gone, that something very bad had happened to her. They continued to search, continued to beg the police to revive Nicole’s case. If they could just get someone to take a second look, they might be able to discover the truth.
Finally, in March of 2008 – fourteen years after Nicole disappeared – someone took an interest. Margaret Baker, a reporter for the Sun Herald, came across Nicole’s case and decided to write a feature for the paper. Suddenly, Nicole’s story was front page news. Her family was finally able to share her story the way it deserved to be told.
Vicente spoke openly about the family’s pain, saying, “The terrible thing that you have to go through as a parent is every day you drive and just out of the clear blue your mind suddenly looks at a river as you pass over it or a hump in a field and you wonder if that’s where she is. We wanted to believe anything else but we know. We know what happened to her. We know she’s dead.”
The article shared details of Nicole’s disappearance that had not been made public before. Now, the entire city of Biloxi knew that a young mother had disappeared and that the last person to see her didn’t have a good explanation for where she had gone.
Not only did the article reach thousands of local residents, it also reached detectives in the Biloxi Police Department’s cold case unit. Nicole’s case had sat on the shelf for over a decade, but now there was a renewed interest. Captain John Miller told the Sun Herald that his team felt they could solve the mystery even after all this time. “We entered it with an open mind and decided we’d just follow all the leads.”
The cold case unit officially reopened the case and began combing through every file, every piece of information, no matter how insignificant it may have seemed. They interviewed dozens of people, anyone even remotely connected to Nicole, and every conversation seemed to point them in the same direction: to Nicole’s boyfriend Micheal.
Detectives quickly saw that Nicole and Micheal’s relationship had been one of control and abuse, marked by constant fighting over custody of Dillon. Nicole had wanted out, but didn’t want to deprive her son of a father figure. The decision to have her parents legally adopt Dillon would have helped her set boundaries with Micheal, and he didn’t like it.
In the years since Nicole’s disappearance, Micheal had fathered several more children and had eventually moved to Peoria, Illinois, 800 miles north of Biloxi. In September of 2008, he was working in the service department of a Saturn dealership, and detectives decided to pay him a visit.
When detectives approached Micheal at the dealership and told him they were there investigating a cold case, he didn’t seem surprised at all. In fact, he was ready to confess.
Micheal told detectives that on June 11, 1994, Nicole had come to his house to pick him up for their shopping trip. They sat at the kitchen table to talk, but as was their pattern, they got into an argument. Micheal said he picked up a .38-caliber pistol that his mother had been cleaning at the table and the gun accidentally went off. Nicole was struck in the shoulder, and she fell to the floor, unconscious and covered in her own blood. Micheal tried to revive her, but when he realized she was dead, he panicked. He and his mother Dianne worked together to clean up the blood in the kitchen before wrapping Nicole’s body in trash bags and putting her in the trunk of Dianne’s 1993 Chevy Beretta. Then they drove around town, finally stopping near the ballfields at Hiller Park. They placed Nicole’s body in a dumpster and went home. Dianne then drove Nicole’s car to the airport and abandoned it in the back of the parking lot, where it would be discovered the next day.
Micheal David Lamb was arrested and charged with the murder of Genevieve Nicole Muñoz. He was sent to the Harrison County Jail and held without bond.
According to court documents, Micheal had told a slightly different version of events to his ex-girlfriend, who came forward after Micheal’s arrest, when she felt safe to do so. Micheal had told her that in the middle of his argument with Nicole, they had grappled over a kitchen knife. Micheal stabbed Nicole in the stomach, and after she bled to death, he dismembered her body before placing it in trash bags and disposing of it in the dumpster. Whichever version was true, Micheal Lamb was about to face justice.
In April of 2009, Micheal pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 20 years in prison, the maximum sentence allowed by Mississippi law. Nicole’s family expressed their gratitude to the cold case detectives who had finally brought them closure.
Then, in December of 2012, the Muñoz family got a devastating phone call: Micheal Lamb had been released from prison just four years into his sentence.
According to a spokesperson from the Mississippi Department of Corrections, Micheal’s sentence had essentially expired. In 1995, the state passed a “truth in sentencing” law requiring offenders of certain violent crimes to serve 85 percent of their sentence. Because Michael had killed Nicole a year before the law passed, he was eligible for early release.
Tragically, Nicole’s mother Victoria passed away not long after learning that her daughter’s killer walked free. Vicente told the Sun Herald, “This is the way my wife and I spent our last Christmas together – listening to a voice telling us they were letting the murderer of our daughter go. This wasn’t justice for Nicole. This wasn’t justice at all.”
Nicole’s brother Nicholas shared the same sentiment, saying, “Michael Lamb murdered a human being and he essentially got away with it. This is not just an injustice to our family. It’s an injustice to our state. We let a killer go free.”
Genevieve Nicole Muñoz was a vibrant young woman with her whole life ahead of her. She deserved to watch her son grow up and to build a life for herself, to choose what path she wanted to follow. Sadly, that future was taken from her, and her family has had to live the truth of the statement, “Justice delayed is justice denied.”
If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic abuse, please contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or text START to 88788 for free and confidential help.