Evelyn & Alex Hernandez | True Crime & Colouring Transcript & References
- The DIY Detective
- Dec 27, 2025
- 8 min read
Welcome to True Crime and Colouring. Today we’re gonna colour in this skull diagram while I tell you about the saddest case you've never heard of. If you'd like to colour along with me, you can grab this True Crime Colouring Book at the link in the description.
So I recently watched the Hulu series Murder Has Two Faces and within the first minute of the first episode I was astounded I had never heard of Evelyn Hernandez. So I want to tell you about Evelyn and her two sons and let you know how you can use your own detective skills to help solve her murder.
Let’s get into it.
The year is 2002 and the place is the San Francisco Bay Area. A heavily pregnant young woman vanishes. Her due date comes and goes but there’s no sign of her or her baby. Sadly, several months later her remains wash ashore in the San Francisco Bay.
It’s a story you’ve probably heard many times over so you might be thinking, “why didn’t you say this was the Laci Peterson case?”
Well, that’s because it’s not. Same time, same place, almost the same circumstances, but three entirely different victims. Their names are Evelyn Hernandez, her 5 year old son Alex Hernandez, and her unborn son she planned to name Fernando.
So who was Evelyn Hernandez?
Evelyn was a 24 year old single mother living in San Francisco. She had a 5 year old son Alex and at the beginning of May 2002, she was just one week away from her second son’s due date. Interviewed for the Murder Has Two Faces docuseries, Evelyn’s friends and family say she was a dedicated, doting mother who was so excited for baby number 2. She emigrated from El Salvador as a teen and worked multiple jobs to support her family.
At the time Evelyn disappeared, she was also receiving disability benefits due to complications with her pregnancy. On May 1st, the last day she was seen alive, Evelyn dropped Alex at school, ran several errands including buying a new wallet, picked her son up, collected her mail which contained a benefits check, and spoke with one of her sisters on the phone.
The next day, when Evelyn didn’t arrive at the baby shower her family had planned, they began worrying that she had gone into labour or had a complication with her pregnancy. They began searching for her, calling and visiting hospitals, but couldn’t locate her. They also discovered that Alex never arrived at school that morning. It’s unclear when exactly her family first contacted the police, but according to the SFPD website, Evelyn and Alex were formally reported missing on May 7th, her baby’s due date.
Evelyn was reported missing to police by both her family, and, separately, by the man she had been seeing at the time of her disappearance - Herman Aguilera.
Herman was a 36 year old limo driver, the father of Evelyn’s baby, and a married man. SFPD detectives have said that there were some complications in the relationship at the time. Evelyn had reportedly decided to stop seeing Herman because she didn’t think he would leave his wife, and because he was paying for her apartment he wanted to be able to stay there. Herman’s wife reportedly knew about Evelyn but didn’t know that she was pregnant.
According to police, Evelyn’s apartment appeared normal and there were no signs of a struggle there. In the following months, there was no further activity on Evelyn’s phone or bank accounts.
Several days after Evelyn and Alex went missing, Evelyn’s new wallet was found in the gutter on Linden Street in South San Francisco, just over 6 miles from her apartment and just a couple blocks from the limousine depot where Herman Aguilera worked. The wallet contained the uncashed disability check that Evelyn received in the mail on the evening of May 1st.
However, months would go by with no new leads and no movement on the case. No sign of Evelyn, Alex, or baby Fernando. Nothing.
Until almost three months later, on July 24th, 2002, partial remains washed ashore in San Francisco Bay near the Embarcadero and Folsom Street. The body was just a torso, severely decomposed by months in the water. But it was clearly the remains of a woman who had been pregnant.
DNA testing eventually confirmed that the remains were Evelyn. However, her unborn son and her five-year-old Alex have never been found. The decomposition of her body meant there was no clear cause of death. Without that, building a murder case becomes incredibly difficult.
Apart from a phone call Evelyn had with one of her sisters on the evening of May 1st, Herman was the last person known to have seen her. He told police he last saw Evelyn on April 30th, when they went shopping at IKEA, bought a bed for Alex, and then assembled it at Evelyn's apartment. When police interviewed Herman about his whereabouts on May 1st, he said he was working for the limousine company in the evening. They also interviewed his wife who said that he came home that evening as usual, they watched a movie and went to bed, effectively giving him an alibi for the night.
Aguilera maintained his innocence throughout the investigation. His attorney said he had cooperated with police and was "deeply saddened" by Evelyn's death. By September 2002, Aguilera stopped cooperating with investigators.
Police have never declared Herman a suspect or person of interest in Evelyn’s murder nor the disappearance of her sons. It’s not clear where Herman is now though some sources say he moved to El Salvador.
Evelyn was callously murdered, and her two sons still remain missing.
Now, if having zero answers wasn’t frustrating enough, just seven months after Evelyn disappeared, five months to the day since her body was recovered, Laci Peterson disappeared. 27 years old and eight months pregnant, Laci disappeared from her middle class neighbourhood in Modesto, 90 miles from San Francisco.
Within one day, more than 900 family, friends, and neighbours were searching for her and placing missing posters. Police searched on foot, bicycle, and horseback, and used canines, watercraft and helicopters. Initially the family coordinated a reward of 25 thousand dollars for information. With growing attention, the reward increased to 250 thousand, then 500 thousand.
The media frenzy was insane. For months practically every media outlet from major networks down to regional newspapers camped out, fighting for glimpses of her husband coming and going from their house and constantly peppering police for answers.
Scott Peterson gave several sit down media interviews along with multiple pleas for public assistance in helping find Laci and baby Connor.
Within one week, the media coverage had led to various tips, including Scott’s girlfriend coming forward to identify herself and reveal that Scott was having an affair with her, but she didn’t know he was married.
Four months later, in April 2003, Laci's body washed ashore in San Francisco Bay. Just like Evelyn. Sadly, Laci's unborn son Connor's body was also found nearby. Police tracked Scott as he began fleeing towards Mexico, eventually arresting him near the border. He was tried, convicted and originally given the death sentence which was later changed to life in prison.
The similarities are chilling. Two heavily pregnant women. Both in their twenties. Both disappeared from the greater Bay Area. Both found in the same stretch of water. Both cases involved a suspicious partner. But the media coverage? Not even remotely similar.
Laci Peterson's face was everywhere. People magazine put her on the cover. Multiple times. It was national news and major networks covered her case obsessively. Even in 2025 Netflix released a new docuseries about the case. The name Laci Peterson is known around the world.
But Evelyn Hernandez? Her case got barely a whisper of coverage. A few local news stories. That's it. In some coverage, she's even been called the other Laci Peterson. But Evelyn Hernandez deserves to be known in her own right, not as an “other”. Alex and baby Hernandez both deserve to be found and the family deserves closure.
Being a part of solving cases like these is no longer limited to law enforcement. Increasingly we’re seeing citizen detectives play a role in bringing answers to families and criminals to justice.
The DIY Detective was created to help true crime fans like you put your detective skills to the test and share information on how everyday people can help and have helped solve real cases. If you love solving a good mystery or puzzle, try out our free games app with daily true crime themed challenges. Sign up at theDIYdetective.com/games.
So why did Laci Peterson's case become international news while Evelyn Hernandez's case was ignored?
The uncomfortable truth is what journalists and researchers call "Missing White Woman Syndrome." It's a term coined to describe the disproportionate media coverage given to missing person cases involving young, attractive, white, middle-class women compared to cases involving women of colour, poor women, immigrants or women from marginalized communities.
These two cases couldn’t make the disparity any clearer. Same time, same place, similar circumstances, vastly different attention and outcomes.
In the years following, advocacy groups, journalists, and even some law enforcement officials publicly criticized the disparity. The Evelyn Hernandez case became a textbook example of how bias, whether conscious or unconscious, shapes which victims get attention and which don't.
This isn't just about media coverage, though. It's about resources too. High-profile cases get more investigative attention, more tips from the public, more pressure on law enforcement to solve them. When a case gets media attention, people pay attention. They come forward with information. They keep the case alive.
This ultimately raises the question about the price of justice. Does money buy justice? If white, middle class victims get more attention, and therefore more man hours from both the public and the police, then aren’t they more likely to get justice?
Evelyn Hernandez and her sons deserved the same attention, the same resources, the same justice as Laci and Connor Peterson. Evelyn was a hardworking, immigrant, single mother on disability, but this in no way means that she, her sons and her family don’t deserve justice. Evelyn herself deserves to be remembered as more than a footnote in someone else's famous case.
As of the end of 2025, Evelyn Hernandez's murder remains officially unsolved and Alex and her baby are still missing. Evelyn’s case went cold, and her killer - whoever that person is - has never faced justice.
But it's not too late to change that. This is where you come in.
Cold cases get solved when people pay attention. When someone remembers something they saw. When a piece of information clicks into place. When enough pressure builds that law enforcement revisits old evidence with new technology.
So while you may not have lived in San Francisco in 2002 nor have first hand information, the true crime crowd is incredibly powerful.
Even without a direct connection to the case, you can help by doing what we're doing right now - talking about it, sharing Evelyn's story, and making sure her name isn't forgotten. Because the more people who know about Evelyn Hernandez, the more likely it is that someone out there who has a piece of the puzzle will come forward. And the more public interest grows, the more the right people have an opportunity to get involved. Whether it’s a private organisation who can fund DNA testing or someone who notices a connection to another case somewhere else.
Professional investigators do incredible work, but they can't be everywhere. They can't know everything. Sometimes it takes someone outside the system - someone who sees a connection, remembers a detail, or refuses to let a case fade into obscurity - to break things open.
That's what the true crime community does best. We keep these cases alive. We demand answers. We refuse to let victims be forgotten just because they didn't fit someone's idea of the "right" kind of victim.
So share, remix, duet, stitch, talk about Evelyn. What do you think happened to her? Where do you think her sons are? What happened to them?
If you do have first hand information you can find the relevant tiplines at the link in the description.
Thanks for colouring with me today. If you want to colour along with the next case, grab the True Crime Colouring Book at the link in the description. Make sure you hit subscribe for more cases like this that need your help, and for cases where everyday citizen detectives helped bring criminals to justice.
Comments