Episode 163: Desiree Thompson

After a violent confrontation at home, a woman disappears, sparking a decade-long search. Will Desiree ever get justice?

Episode Media

Desiree and her mother Sheri *(Facebook)*

California City and the surrounding desert of Antelope Valley *(Google Maps)*

Jose Lara’s house in 2012 *(Google Maps)*

Episode Sources

Episode Transcript

Welcome back to Bite-Sized Crime. This week I’m bringing you a case that has experienced many twists and turns on the road to justice. This episode discusses sensitive topics, so listener discretion is advised.

In January of 2012, 30-year-old Desiree Nicole Thompson was living in California City, an hour east of Bakersfield, California. Desiree was a single mom raising four children between the ages of 4 and 15. She loved them more than anything and would have done anything to protect them.

That was a big part of why Desiree had left her husband. They hadn’t been married very long – he wasn’t the father of her children – but Desiree was tired of the abuse she had suffered at the hands of Edward Gibson. At first, Desiree thought she could fix Edward, repair the issues in their relationship, but it soon became clear that she had to leave. She had to prioritize the safety of her children and herself. She decided to file a restraining order against her husband.

As is the case with many abusers, Edward didn’t let the restraining order stop him from being violent towards Desiree. On the morning of January 7, 2012, Edward showed up at Desiree’s house, banging loudly on her door before finally kicking it down. He assaulted Desiree, smashed her cell phone, and threatened her with a shotgun. She managed to barricade herself inside and used the house phone to call for help, but by the time police arrived, Edward had fled the scene. Officers filed a domestic violence report, but Desiree knew it wouldn’t stop her estranged husband from coming back again and again.

Later that evening, nursing her bruises and needing emotional support, Desiree went to visit a friend. She stayed for a few hours, then used her friend’s phone to call her mom around 8:30. Desiree then told her friend that she was going to stop by a convenience store on her walk back to her house and would call when she got home safely.

But Desiree didn’t call again, and based on the events of the day, her friend had a bad feeling. They contacted the California City Police Department and reported Desiree missing.

Thankfully, police took the case seriously from the get go and didn’t wait to start searching. Officers canvassed the area, talking to neighbors and checking nearby stores and restaurants. They also immediately started looking for Edward Gibson. He already had a felony conviction for domestic violence against Desiree, and he had attacked her just hours before she disappeared. He clearly had the motivation and desire to harm Desiree, and they needed to find him.

Unfortunately, officers didn’t have any luck finding Edward Gibson. Cal City Police put out a BOLO for him, but they didn’t have the manpower for a statewide search. They had to focus on finding Desiree.

Days passed, then weeks. Investigators were at a loss. California City was small – only about 14,000 people lived there – but it covered over 200 square miles of desert in Antelope Valley. Witnesses had seen Desiree at a convenience store on 83rd street the night she disappeared, but sometime after leaving the store, Desiree had vanished. There was no trace of her.

Desiree was entered into the national missing persons database, and investigators took DNA swabs from her family to build a profile in case she was found. The Cal City Council offered a reward of $25,000 for information, and local news outlets featured the case. Desiree’s mom Sheri posted often on social media, determined to keep her daughter’s face in the public eye. But as time passed, Desiree’s case got less and less attention. Her file sat on a shelf, looked over by each new detective that came through the department. It would be a decade before new information came to light.

On January 7, 2022, Sheri posted on Facebook to mark the ten-year anniversary of Desiree’s disappearance. She shared pictures of Desiree with her four children and wrote about how much she missed everything about her daughter. She said, “I am fighting for justice for you and I won’t stop until I get it.”

Her emotional post caught the attention of a man in California City and brought him to tears. It was time to share what he knew.

Years earlier, he had met a man named Jose William Lara. They went to church together and soon became friends, spending time playing soccer and pool. Jose’s wife had died of cancer in 2011, and he seemed lonely.

One day, the friends were drinking together when Jose started to talk a lot, something he often did when he drank. This time, Jose told his friend about a party he had attended in January of 2012. A bunch of guys dressed in black had disrespected him and pushed him to the ground before throwing him out of the party. Bleeding and angry, Jose went home, but the rage didn’t dissipate. He got in his pickup truck and drove back to the party, planning to get revenge. As he drove, he saw someone walking down the street and thought it was one of his assailants, but it ended up being a woman, someone he had never seen before. Jose told his friend that he had been so angry that he had to take it out on someone – it didn’t matter who.

Jose invited the woman to his house for a drink, and she climbed into his truck. When they got there, Jose told the woman to grab a beer from the small refrigerator in his bedroom, and when she did, he smashed her head against it and stabbed her repeatedly with his machete. He was so filled with rage that he couldn’t stop even after the machete broke. When it was over, he buried the woman’s body in his backyard and covered the shallow grave with a tarp.

Now, a decade later, Jose’s former friend sat with a police detective and told him everything he remembered about the drunken confession, a tale that had haunted him for years. When he saw Sheri’s post and saw Desiree’s picture, he knew that she was the woman Jose had murdered. The friend signed a sworn statement and told the detective that Jose had told several people the same story, including his father.

When police spoke to the man’s father, he corroborated his son’s statement. The father recalled Jose coming to their home in January of 2012 with a bad cut on his hand, saying that he had gotten it in a fight. The father took Jose to the hospital to get it treated, but Jose gave the hospital staff a fake name and said he didn’t know how he had cut his hand. A few weeks later, Jose had confessed to his friend’s father, telling him the entire gruesome story of how he had stabbed and killed a woman in his bedroom. He also said that he had burned both his and the woman’s clothes in a barrel in the backyard to cover up the evidence.

In a strange twist, the father told police that he had written all of this down in a letter back in 2012 and had delivered it anonymously to the police department, but somehow it hadn’t been taken into evidence. Luckily, the father had kept a copy of the letter for himself, perhaps sensing that he may need it someday. He told the detective that he had been afraid to come forward in person, scared that he may be deported – or worse. But he, like his son, had been haunted by memories of Jose’s confession over the years.

With this new information, Cal City detectives knew they had to act. On March 25, 2022, they served a search warrant on the house where Jose had lived at the time of Desiree’s disappearance. The current residents were cooperative, allowing investigators to fully explore the property. Inside the home, forensic teams removed portions of flooring from the main bedroom and swabbed patches of the concrete underneath that tested positive for blood.

In the backyard, investigators from the FBI’s Evidence Recovery Team used ground-penetrating radar to detect changes in the soil. When they started digging, they found a shoe and pieces of charred clothing. Then, they found what they knew to be human remains – bones, teeth, and hair. Next to the remains was a broken machete blade.

While investigators processed the scene, another team was doing surveillance on Jose Lara’s apartment across town. They knew that as soon as he learned they were digging in his old backyard, he would try to flee. When they got word that remains had been found, they followed Jose to a gas station and detained him for questioning.

At the police station, Jose was calm, answering detectives’ questions through an interpreter. He was informed of his rights, but he claimed he didn’t know why he had been arrested. Detectives started asking him questions about what he had been doing back in January of 2012. He told them about the party where he had been assaulted and said one of his attackers had cut him with a knife. He admitted that he had been angry after the party and said he had decided to spend the night at a friend’s house, but he couldn’t recall the friend’s name.

Finally, detectives told Jose that they believed he had murdered someone all those years ago. Jose denied it. They told him that they had blood in his house and a woman’s body in his backyard. Jose said, “You have what you have, bring it.”

While Jose sat in custody, the medical examiner was working to identify the remains and determine a cause of death. Even with advanced decomposition, they were able to see that the woman had been stabbed multiple times, and several of those injuries had been to her face. Her death had been violent and her body had been discarded without a care.

Finally, in July of 2022, the Kern County Coroner confirmed that the remains belonged to Desiree Thompson. Her body was cremated and her ashes were returned to her family. Her mother Sheri told KGET that she finally felt relief after the devastation of the last ten years. “Pain and relief at the same time. Every time I touch her, it brings those emotions because that is the only way I can hold her now.”

Desiree’s children – now teens and young adults – were also relieved to have some measure of closure after not knowing where their mother was for ten long years. Sheri told KBFX that she was doing all she could to protect them from the brutal details of their mother’s death while also fighting for justice. “I want to make sure they get everything they can on this guy… It’s taken too long and I want to make sure that this person is put away for life… I just hope that he hasn’t done this to anybody else.”

Jose William Lara pleaded not guilty to the charge of first-degree murder. He was denied bail because the judge believed he posed a significant danger to the public. In May of 2023, his trial began.

Prosecutors laid out the events of January 7, 2012, before the court, starting with Desiree’s turbulent morning. They hypothesized that when Jose Lara had approached Desiree and offered her a ride and a drink, she had accepted because it was better than going home where she didn’t feel safe. She had no idea that what awaited her at Jose’s house would be even worse.

The defense argued that Desiree’s estranged husband was the one responsible for her death. After all, Edward Gibson had attacked her that very morning and had a history of violence against her. He had disappeared before officers arrived at the house and had been on the run ever since. He had motive and opportunity.

But the DNA evidence was strong. Desiree’s blood was in Jose Lara’s bedroom and her body had been found in his backyard. It took the jury less than 30 minutes to find him guilty of first-degree murder.

At his sentencing, Jose continued to deny his involvement in Desiree’s murder. The judge listened to the victim impact statements, then sentenced Jose Lara to 25 years to life in prison.

In court, Sheri spoke about her daughter’s love for her family and how they remember her every day. She expressed her gratitude to the investigators and to the court for seeking justice even after so much time had passed. “This is a blessing. This man will go away, he’ll rot the rest of his life and not be able to hurt anybody else, and that’s the whole point of getting justice for her, as well as justice for other people, that this man can’t go out there and hurt anybody else.”

Unfortunately, the family’s peace wouldn’t last long. In early October of 2025, just a few weeks before this recording, an appellate court overturned Jose Lara’s conviction. The 5th District Court of Appeal in Fresno found that the judge in Jose’s case failed to consider the pre-trial evidence that Jose likely has an intellectual disability. According to the court, the judge should have sent him for further examination before allowing the trial to begin per state law. Now, Jose will undergo a competency exam – something that should have been done back in 2022. If Jose Lara is found competent to stand trial, he can be retried for Desiree’s murder. If not, he may be sent to a state hospital for treatment. He is expected to be back in court at the end of October.

Naturally, Desiree’s family was devastated by this turn of events. Sheri told KERO that she understands that Jose Lara has the right to appeal his conviction, but she believes the evidence against him is strong. She plans to be there for every step of the process. She told KGET, “I wish I didn’t have to go through this, but I just have to suck it up and be strong and fight for my daughter. And I’ll fight for my daughter until my last breath.”

Desiree Thompson was a loving daughter, sister, and mother. She did not deserve to be taken away from her family in such a brutal way. She deserved to watch her children grow up, to live a long and happy life. We can only hope that justice will soon be served.