Alisa Goods, a 63-year-old New York grandmother of five who vanished during a Las Vegas visit, was found dead in a drainage ditch near Harry Reid International Airport, days after someone sent bizarre texts from her phone asking for gas money and Bitcoin.
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police responded early Thursday after a caller reported a deceased woman in a drainage area near Wayne Newton Boulevard and the Terminal 1 parking garage. Officers identified the woman as Goods and pronounced her dead at the scene. The discovery ended a search that had stretched nearly two weeks, and left her family with more questions than answers.
Goods had traveled to Las Vegas to stay with a longtime friend, Roger John. She left his apartment near Maryland Parkway and Tropicana Avenue around 12:45 p.m. on August 8, headed to catch a bus to a nearby CVS for iron pills. She never came back.
John told Fox News Digital that he was not immediately alarmed. Goods sometimes spent hours shopping. But when she failed to return, he started calling and texting her. No response. He contacted her family.
Two days later, on August 10, Goods was formally reported missing.
Police reviewed surveillance video that painted a grim picture. The footage appeared to show Goods falling down an embankment on August 8, getting back up, and then collapsing. No further movement was observed after that. Additional surveillance from the same afternoon showed a woman believed to be Goods near the airport.
How a woman headed to a drugstore ended up near one of the busiest airports in the country remains unexplained. The CVS she was walking to sits in a different part of the city from the airport grounds where her body was eventually recovered. No official explanation has been offered for that gap.
The case carries echoes of other disappearances where surveillance footage became the critical, and sometimes only, investigative thread. In one recent case, surveillance footage captured an accused killer stalking a University of Washington student before a fatal attack, underscoring how video evidence can reshape an investigation overnight.
Las Vegas police have not publicly stated a cause of death for Goods. Fox News Digital reached out to the department for additional information, but no response was reported.
Four days after Goods was last seen alive, on August 12, her family began receiving text messages from her phone. The messages did not sound like her. The sender asked for gas money, and for Bitcoin.
Her niece, Alana Calloway, immediately recognized the texts as suspicious. Calloway told CBS News that she challenged the request directly:
"I said, 'What do you need gas for? The car?' My aunt does not drive. There is no car."
The detail is striking. If surveillance footage shows Goods collapsing on August 8 with no further movement, someone else was sending those messages four days later. Who had her phone, and why they were soliciting cryptocurrency, are questions that remain unanswered.
Unexplained digital activity following a disappearance is a pattern that surfaces in other missing-persons cases. Investigators examining the Nancy Guthrie disappearance questioned whether ransom notes sent after she vanished were genuine, a reminder that communications from a missing person's accounts can mislead as easily as they inform.
Whether Las Vegas police are treating the Bitcoin texts as evidence of foul play, a scam by someone who found the phone, or something else entirely has not been disclosed.
Before the body was found, Calloway had spoken publicly about her aunt's character, trying to generate leads. She told KLAS-TV that the disappearance was completely out of character:
"This is not like her to just go missing. She has a family that loves her, cares about her. We want her home and want her home safe and alive."
That hope ended Thursday morning. In a statement provided to KTNV, Calloway confirmed the worst:
"Our hearts are broken. We were notified that my aunt was found, unfortunately, not the way we wanted her to be."
She continued, asking the public for space while the family tries to understand what happened:
"This is an unimaginable time. Words cannot describe the pain our family is experiencing right now. We just want to thank the public for the outpouring of love, support, and prayers. We also want to thank the media for helping bring attention to this situation. This hurts so deeply. We are still trying to learn the details surrounding her death. We ask for continued prayers and privacy as we grieve."
Roger John, the friend Goods was staying with, described his last interaction with her in simple terms. He told KLAS-TV:
"Last I saw her, she was going down the stairs. And I said, 'OK, see you later.' And that's the last time I saw her."
The timeline raises hard questions that Las Vegas police have not publicly addressed. Goods left an apartment at 12:45 p.m. to walk to a CVS. Surveillance footage from that same day shows her collapsing near the airport, miles from her stated destination. Her body was found in a drainage ditch near the Terminal 1 parking garage nearly two weeks later. And in between, someone used her phone to request Bitcoin from her family.
No cause of death has been announced. No suspects have been named. No criminal investigation has been publicly confirmed. The family has said they are still trying to learn the details.
Cases like this one test whether local law enforcement has the resources and urgency to deliver answers to families left waiting. Other recent disappearances have exposed similar frustrations. In Tucson, human remains found near the home of missing woman Nancy Guthrie turned out to be unrelated to her case, prolonging an already agonizing search. And in a separate cold case, a former youth pastor charged decades later in his wife's suspicious death at Zion National Park died in a Las Vegas jail before the case could reach trial, a reminder that delayed answers sometimes become no answers at all.
Alisa Goods was a 63-year-old grandmother who went out for iron pills on a summer afternoon. She deserved to come home. Her family deserves to know why she didn't.
