The Bexar County Sheriff's Office has made an arrest in the 2019 death of Meagan Gonzales, the 20 year old San Antonio woman whose remains were discovered, burned, on farmland in the southwest part of the county almost seven years ago.
Deputies arrested Joey Emiliano Tovar-Vargas on Thursday evening, October 29, and jailed him on an evidence tampering charge, along with a separate smuggling warrant out of another county, KSAT reported after the sheriff's office announced the arrest. He has not been charged with murder, and the investigation remains open. He is presumed innocent.
What investigators say they found
Gonzales was last seen around November 11, 2019, in Tovar-Vargas's vehicle, according to the sheriff's office account reported by KSAT. Investigators believe the two had been dating. Her truck was recovered on December 2, 2019, off Northwest Loop 410. On December 3, a property owner working a field off Wisdom Road found a body. It had been burned, was badly decomposed, and was wrapped in a blanket with an unusual pattern. It was identified as Gonzales.
Investigators said Tovar-Vargas was a suspect early but that little tied him to the case until this year. The break came from the cold case team running newer forensic tools over material collected years ago, above all his cellphone, which officials called a "treasure trove." According to the sheriff's office, his phone's location records put him close to the spot where her belongings were discarded and close to the complex where her truck was abandoned. Investigators say the device also held internet searches on how long fingerprints survive and on deleting social media profiles, along with photos that showed the patterned blanket in his home before her death.
Blood found in the truck bed was later matched by DNA to Gonzales. Witnesses told investigators they watched him get rid of items soon after she vanished, and one says he asked for help moving a body, according to the sheriff's office. Officials added that he is under suspicion in domestic violence cases involving three other women, each of whom survived.
A family that would not let it go
Her father, Eddie Gonzales, spent years running his own investigation. In 2025 he told KSAT, "I'm not going to give up until the responsible people get arrested." He said police initially declined to take a missing person report because his daughter was an adult, and that the family later spotted a man driving her truck, who fled when they confronted him. He commissioned a sketch of that driver, and in 2024 a nonprofit helped produce an AI video of Meagan to renew attention. Crime Stoppers had offered up to $5,000 for information leading to an arrest.
Our count: 2,544 days
November 11, 2019: Gonzales is last seen, by the sheriff's account.
December 2 and 3, 2019: Her truck is found, and then her body, 22 days after she was last seen.
October 29, 2026: Tovar-Vargas is arrested, 2,544 days after she was last seen by our arithmetic, or about six years and 11 months.
Why the charge is tampering, not murder
Tampering with evidence lets prosecutors hold a suspect while a homicide case is built, and in Texas it is not a minor charge when a body is involved. Under Texas Penal Code 37.09, the offense is a third degree felony, "unless the thing altered, destroyed, or concealed is a human corpse, in which case the offense is a felony of the second degree." A second degree felony carries 2 to 20 years in prison under Penal Code 12.33. KSAT reported that the charge relates to disposing of the body, so if the corpse provision applies, the exposure on that count alone would be up to 20 years.
A homicide charge can still follow, because murder is generally not bound by the filing deadlines that limit most crimes, as we explained in Why Murder Never Expires. The case joins a string of old cases reopened by new forensic work this fall, including the Spokane arrest in the 1986 killing of Mary Ann Turner. Here the tool was not genetic genealogy but a phone already in investigators' hands, examined with technology that did not exist in 2019.
Two Taps News stories summarize reporting and the analysis discussed on Two Taps and Friends. They are not legal advice. Read our standards.
