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HOUSTON – A man has been sentenced to life in prison for murder eight years after his girlfriend’s disappearance.<\/p>\n
Erik Fardell Arceneaux was found guilty earlier this month<\/a>.<\/p>\n Maria Rodriguez’s remains have never been found.<\/p>\n Maria Rodriguez reported missing in 2018 <\/p>\n The backstory:<\/p>\n Rodriguez was last seen on June 21, 2018, after she left her daughter with the babysitter before heading to work.<\/p>\n According to investigators, her coworker reported receiving unusual text messages saying she would be late, and then another one hour later saying she was being chased by three men.<\/p>\n Her sister reported her missing when she didn’t show up for work or pick up her daughter from the babysitter’s home.<\/p>\n Questions about their relationship <\/p>\n Arceneaux reportedly told police that he and Rodriguez were a couple. According to the district attorney’s office<\/a>, they were dating for six months.<\/p>\n After her disappearance, her family raised questions<\/a> about their relationship.<\/p>\n “She never said that she had a boyfriend. She would go to the gym. What I know is that he\u2019s her trainer and, what I\u2019ve learned is that, he kept, like, texting her and sending her notes,” her sister told FOX 26 in 2019.<\/a><\/p>\n Cell phone records reveal details of disappearance <\/p>\n Rodriguez\u2019s sister found call logs from that morning and shared them with FOX 26 back in 2019.<\/p>\n “I found out that he had called her a million times, so I reached out to him,” her sister, Gloria, told FOX 26. “Supposedly, she was supposed to take him to an interview that day. Supposedly, she never made it to his house.”<\/p>\n According to court documents, cell phone records showed Arceneaux\u2019s and Rodriguez\u2019s phones together near his house on Evella Street the day she disappeared. Police also found a surveillance video allegedly showing the suspect walking away from Rodriguez\u2019s truck after abandoning it in the 100 block of Port Street. Later that same day, Arceneaux was allegedly seen leaving a Home Depot with a chainsaw and trash bags.<\/p>\n Suspect arrested 4 years after murder charge <\/p>\n Arceneaux was charged with murder in 2019.<\/p>\n He was finally arrested in 2023 in Houston by members of the U.S. Marshals’ Gulf Coast Violent Offenders Task Force.<\/p>\n He was booked into the Harris County Jail, and his bond was set at $1 million.<\/a><\/p>\n The Source: FOX 26 was present during Erik Arceneaux’s sentencing verdict. This report includes information from previous FOX 26 reporting.<\/p>\n Crime and Public Safety<\/a>Houston<\/a>Top Stories<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HOUSTON – A man has been sentenced to life in prison for murder eight years after his girlfriend’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":399541,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[1046,56,58,57,223,2053,216,393],"class_list":["post-399540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-crime-publicsafety","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news","tag-news","tag-top-stories","tag-tx","tag-us"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399540\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/399541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}