Inside the 42-Year-Long Missing Person’s Case of Baby Holly Marie: How They Found Her

It was a busy morning at Naifeh’s Deli and Grill in Cushing, Oklahoma, on June 7, 2022. Waitress Holly Marie, a 42-year-old mother of five, was putting the last batch of cookies in the oven for a large takeout order when a detective and an official from the Department of case-solving and the Texas Attorney General’s missing persons stopped by unannounced and asked to speak with her.

As they sat together in a booth, officials said they were investigating the double homicide of a young couple in the 1980s near Houston, Dean and Tina Clouse. As Holly – who was adopted as a child and raised by a pastor – listened in stunned silence, investigators said they had reason to believe she was the slain couple’s daughter. And her biological family was desperately looking for her.

The Texas detective pulled out a grainy photo of a smiling couple holding a baby and placed it on the table in front of her.

“I was in shock — I couldn’t move,” Holly tells PEOPLE this week. “I could only cry and look at my parents. I finally had faces.”

For Holly, it was the end of the search for her biological parents. At the same time, the meeting with authorities marked a new beginning with joyful relatives who knew her as a baby and finally saw her again in an emotional Zoom call later that day. “I had a family that was praying and looking for me and wanted to meet me, wanted to find me,” she says.

Despite everything she’s learned about her life, Holly, whose new book Finding Baby Holly: Lost to a Cult, Surviving Her Parents’ Murder, and Saved by Prayer out Nov. 7, wants more answers about his birth parents and what happened to them in the 1980s.

Tina, 17, and her husband, 21-year-old Dean Clouse, were looking for a fresh start when they moved to Lewisville, Texas, in August 1980 with their young daughter, Holly Marie.

Their stay was short-lived.

“Tina wrote and said they got their apartment and she was happy,” said Tina’s older sister Sherry Green, 65, who returned the letter, which was returned without a forwarding address. “They were barely in the new place for two, maybe three weeks, and then they left.”

That letter was the last time Dean and Tina’s families heard from them.

Dean and Tina Clouse with baby Holly.

Family history detectives

On November 8, 1980, Philip McGoldrick, pastor of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Yuma, Arizona, was running late for a meeting when he heard a knock at the back door of the church. When he peered through the window, he saw three women dressed in white robes, members of a religious group known as the Family of Christ. “I open the door to say, ‘Well, can I help you?'” McGoldrick tells PEOPLE. “I expect them to say, ‘We need some money for gas or food.'”

Instead, the women offered him a baby girl. “I asked, ‘Do you need someone to babysit?'” he says. “They said, ‘No. Not. We want to give this child.’”

The baby disappeared in 1980, and her parents were killed. She’s just been found alive – but questions remain

Shocked, McGoldrick spoke to more women who told him they couldn’t raise a child because of their nomadic lifestyle, which includes separating couples and banning the killing of animals for meat and skins.

“They convinced me that they would give this baby to someone,” he says. “I was glad they found a place where it was safe to leave her.”

Before the women disappeared, one of them, believed by police to be Tina, handed McGoldrick a birth certificate as well as a note from Dean renouncing his parental rights to Holly.

Then, in late December 1980 or early January 1981, members of Christ’s family—including a follower named Sister Susan—left Dean’s red burgundy 1978 AMC Concord two-door with his mother Donna in Daytona, Florida, informing her that her son and his wife joined their group, gave up all their possessions and no longer wanted to have contact with their families.

“We envisioned her living in some kind of group commune, having a very good quiet life, them and Holly, and maybe even more kids,” Green says. “At least that’s what I was hoping for.”

Authorities believe Tina Clouse signed a note waiving her rights to Holly.

Courtesy of the Texas Attorney General

Unbeknownst to the family, on January 6, 1981, the Harris County Sheriff’s Department in Texas received a call from a man who told them he had found a dismembered arm in his German Shepherd’s mouth. Five days later, the remains of Dean and Tina were found. Tina was strangled and Dean died of a fractured skull.

Despite the attention of the local media, the police were unable to identify them. In 2011, the Harris County Medical Examiner’s Office exhumed their bodies to extract DNA. A decade later, Misty Gillis, a forensic genealogist, searching the Doe Network website for a case of unidentified missing and murdered people came across the Harris County Does. Gillis then teamed up with another forensic genetic genealogist, Allison Peacock, and began building family trees of the unidentified couple.

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In a few days, Dean and Tina’s relatives were identified. But the biggest surprise came when Dean’s sister asked what happened to the couple’s baby, Holly.

When the Texas District Attorney’s Office of Unjustified Cases and Missing Persons began investigating the missing Holly case and the back-to-back murders of Dean and Tina in January 2022, they knew that “in order to start solving the homicide part, we had to find out, ‘OK , where is this baby?'” says Mindy Montford, whose unit assisted the Lewisville Police Department, Volusia County Sheriff’s Office, Harris County Sheriff’s Office, Arizona Attorney General’s Office and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children on the case.

But investigators immediately hit a roadblock when they tried to obtain Holly’s Florida birth certificate. The records were sealed, which indicated juvenile records or adoption, and the only way to get them was a court order.

Holly Marie.

Dean and Tina Linn Clouse Memorial Fund

After the judge unsealed the records, “There it was, the adoption certificate,” says Montford.

Confirmation was just what investigators needed. He gave them the names of the adoptive parents, Philip McGoldrick and his wife Constance, and the state where the adoption took place, Arizona.

Shortly thereafter, investigators discovered the whereabouts of Holly and McGoldrick in Oklahoma and Constance in Arizona.

However, what they did not know were the circumstances behind the adoption.

“Did Philip kill her biological parents?” Montford says. “And then he kidnapped her? We had no idea what happened.”

The area near Houston where the bodies of Dean and Tina Clouse were found.

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Montford and Lewisville Police Detective Craig Holleman interviewed Holly at a deli in 2022, asking her what she knew about her adoptive and biological parents.

Growing up in a loving home, Holly was told at an early age that her biological parents loved her but had disowned her because of their religious beliefs. “My dad always told me what a miracle I was,” says Holly.

But she didn’t know they were killed.

“It was hard to learn about their murders and tragedy,” she says.

Meanwhile, investigators met with McGoldrick, who says he was halfway through the story of how he met Holly when one of the investigators “started asking tougher questions.”

“After a while, I’m thinking, ‘Oh, he thinks I might be the one who killed them.'”

Montford says McGoldrick was quickly ruled out as a suspect.

Dean and Tina’s grave in Harris County, Texas.

Dean and Tina Linn Clouse Memorial Fund

Investigators believe Dean and Tina joined the Christ family after they moved to Texas and followed them to Arizona where the group – led by Charles McHugh, also known as Jesus Christ Lightning Amen – had a winter camp near Blythe, California, around 40 miles from Yuma.

Investigators do not know how long the couple stayed in Arizona or how they ended up in Texas.

“The fact that they’re together, I think they were leaving,” says Sgt. Rachel Kading, an investigator with the Texas Division of Unsolved Cases and Missing Persons, tells PEOPLE. “Either they came together while traveling with their individual groups, or they came together at some point and left the group and never traveled with the Christ family at all.”

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Kading says investigators are trying to find anyone who may have had contact with the follower of Christ’s family who went with Rosemary Garcia, who was with Tina the day she left Holly and is now believed to be deceased.

“We believe she was there and orchestrated everything,” says Kading. “She had three teenage daughters and their names were Rosemary and the Three Js.”

Rosemary stayed at Camp Blythe and traveled with the group around the Yuma area, she says.

The teenagers, who were named Jill, Joy and Jan, may have met Tina, Kading said.

Kading, who interviewed close to 50 former and current members of the Christ family, says there is no evidence the group was involved in the killings. “I think everyone’s first thought, based on our history with these types of groups, is that they must be responsible, but there’s just no evidence that they are,” she says. “However, I think if it was someone associated with the Christ Family, it was probably an extraordinary member, a temporary member, someone who may have just started traveling with the group. I don’t believe anyone we’ve talked to has given us everything they know or remember.”

Kading also says that Dean and Tina could have been hitchhiking and that “some sick person picked them up”.

Holly holds a photo of herself and her parents after being visited by officers in June 2022.

Mindy Montford / POLARIS

The unit hopes that the case will be solved.

“I think it’s solvable,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton told PEOPLE. “As long as there are still people who know, we have a chance to solve it. There’s a decent chance that the people associated with them have important information that would help us get one step closer to solving the problem. Just like finding Baby Holly, it took decades, but eventually we got the right information to figure that part out.”

Today, Holly feels doubly blessed. After reuniting with her biological family last year, she developed a bond with her paternal grandmother, Donna, who died in October. She and her biological family have become supporters of Genealogy for Justice, a non-profit organization dedicated to solving cold cases through genetic genealogy, and the Dean and Tina Linn Clouse Memorial Fund, with proceeds going to identify other John and Jane Doe. She encourages people to take a DNA test and enter it into public databases.

“Not knowing what happened to your loved one, it’s excruciating,” says Holly. “We can all be part of the miracle of a family finding out what happened to their loved one. And all we have to do is go wipe our mouths.”

He prays, he says, that “the tragedy of my parents opens the way for new miracles.”

If you have information about Dean and Tina Clouse, please contact [email protected].

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