Zita Gutierrez left work on Aug. 22, 1980 to meet friends at a Montgomery County nightclub.
But the Montgomery College student, then 24, never made it to the club. She hasn’t been seen in more than 30 years.
Gutierrez, of Rockville, was studying at Montgomery College and was working at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda for the summer. A week before she disappeared, she had started another job as a cocktail waitress at Bethesda’s Kenwood Country Club, according to information from the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs.
On Aug. 22, she left work to meet her fiance and a group of friends at a nightclub, according to NamUs. She’d made plans to pick up a friend near NIH by 9:30 p.m., and a co-worker said he saw her car leaving the country club at about 9:25 p.m. He couldn’t confirm whether she was in the car, though, and Gutierrez hasn’t been seen since.
The next day, her car — a 1971 Dodge Challenger — turned up in a parking lot across the street from a bus stop near NIH, according to NamUs.
Gutierrez is described as a Latina woman about 5 feet tall, weighing 110 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes. She often wore a gold ring with a green stone and a silver watch with a silver metal band, according to NamUs. Anyone with information on her case should call Montgomery County police at 240-777-0788.
