The oldest of four siblings, Cynthia Williams was fiercely protective. She helped hold her family together and dreamed of becoming a nurse.
Her little brother remembers watching his sister style her hair with high bangs and apply dark lip liner. She was one of the few Indigenous girls in their Los Banos, California, neighborhood at the time. Cynthia stood out, her brother says.
“We used to brag about our sister, she was our leader,” Raymond Meza says. “She was like a second mom and we were proud of her.”
Cynthia had her first of six children at 16, shortly before moving for the first time to Parker, on the Colorado River Indian Tribes’ land. Throughout her life, Cynthia endured abusive relationships, was raped by a family friend and struggled with addiction, Raymond says.
She tried to build a life for herself and her children. She sought treatment for her addiction and enrolled in vocational school, where she graduated at the top of her class in a nursing assistant program, Raymond remembers.
But her life did not follow a straight line toward recovery. She returned to drug use and, as her addiction deepened, stayed with relatives and friends, sometimes picking up odd jobs like cleaning houses.
“She started self-destructing; she started using again,” Raymond says, adding that someone had sold her drugs outside a Narcotics Anonymous meeting she’d been attending to help stay sober.
When Cynthia was found tortured and murdered near Parker in March 2016, Raymond says rumors and judgments about her began almost immediately. She was 42 and an enrolled member of the Colorado River Indian Tribes.
Some of the cruelest comments, her brother says, came from within the tribal community, including social media posts that reduced Cynthia to her addiction. She wasn’t their “perfect victim,” he says.
“She wasn’t this squeaky-clean person. She was the girl on the corner that everyone looks past, she’s the kind of girl that my wife (a detention officer) books in and sees on the daily,” Raymond says.
“But she was loved and she was a person, and that’s what I try to get across to everybody,” he continues, his voice steady. “Her lifestyle doesn’t mean that she didn’t have an army of people that loved her, and it didn’t mean she deserved anything that happened to her.”
In the decade since his sister’s murder, Raymond has carried that message beyond Cynthia’s case, advocating for other Indigenous families searching for loved ones or seeking justice after a death. For him, the fight is about making sure Missing and Murdered Indigenous People are treated like they matter.
The scale of the ongoing injustice is difficult to measure, as there is no complete accounting of Indigenous people who are missing or have been murdered nationally or in Arizona.
Arizona is home to 22 federally recognized Tribal Nations and was identified in a 2018 national study as having the third-highest number of Indigenous women and girls going missing or being murdered in the country. The Urban Indian Health Institute’s study is among the most comprehensive nationally and identified just over 500 cases, 153 of which did “not exist in law enforcement records” at the time. It includes cases from 1943 to 2018, with about 80% since 2000.
An Arizona legislative study two years later found that 160 Indigenous women and girls had been murdered in Arizona between 1976 and 2018. Using data from the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, the study identified 12 missing Indigenous women in Arizona at the time. The committee behind the study disbanded in 2022.
Together, the studies have become foundational sources for understanding the scope of how many Indigenous people go missing or are murdered, as well as the vast historical undercount in Arizona.
In 2025, Arizona Luminaria launched a statewide MMIP database for a deeper investigation and wider understanding of this issue.
The same year Cynthia was murdered, 2016, at least four other Indigenous women were killed in Arizona. At least one Indigenous woman, Misty Rainy Bedonie, went missing that year, according to Arizona Luminaria’s public records review.
Given underreporting and gaps in law enforcement’s public records, Luminaria’s database isn’t a complete accounting of the ongoing injustice. So far the database includes more than 100 Indigenous women and girls who have gone missing or were murdered in Arizona over the past 70 years, from 1956 to 2026. The investigative project includes stories about the lives of Indigenous people at the center of this issue — like 7-year-old Rhia Almeida from the Tohono O’odham Nation — and shares what they mean to their loved ones.
In that same span of seven decades, more than 100 people identified as Native American are listed as missing in Arizona as of Oct. 26, according to NamUs. Of those, the national database shows 24 were identified as female, all of whom are also documented in Luminaria’s database.
“Not my baby”
Raymond says the family initially defended Cynthia when others raised concerns about some of her behavior over the years. But as her drug use deepened, they saw frightening changes, including emergency room visits and calls in the middle of the night saying she couldn’t breathe and something was wrong with her chest.
Raymond says his family and, in his view, their community didn’t initially realize just how quickly methamphetamine use could become destructive. While the drug wasn’t new, by the late 1990s and early 2000s it was becoming a growing public health concern, particularly in the West, according to a 2000 High County News report.
“It happened so fast, we don’t even know when it started, but she changed,” Raymond says. “Like overnight, all her priorities changed.”
One night in early March 2016, Raymond’s younger sister called after hearing a body had been recovered from a canal in the area. She’d been trying to reach Cynthia without success.
Raymond says he initially dismissed the rumor because it wasn’t unusual for Cynthia to disappear for weeks at a time. It had been only a couple of days since he last heard from her.
Concern in the Colorado River Indian Tribes community grew. Raymond recalls co-workers checking on their own aunts and sisters in the middle of their shifts as word spread that something terrible might have happened.
He soon went to the Colorado River Indian Tribes Police Department to report Cynthia missing, mostly to put his younger sister’s mind at ease. At first, Raymond had the feeling the officer thought he was wasting the department’s time.
“I didn’t mind because I didn’t want it to be my sister, I wanted to be wasting his time,” Raymond says.
Then he mentioned a tattoo Cynthia had on her arm. He was told to expect a call soon. He felt a chill. He did not want to believe the exchange meant anything beyond protocol.
The next day, Raymond received a call from the FBI, asking for his mom’s address. He says he hurried to reach her before the agents arrived.
He was too late to spare his mom.
“I could hear her screaming, ‘Not my baby, not my baby,’” he says.
Killers ID’d months before arrests
Raymond says he was shown a photo of the body recovered March 9, 2016, from a canal in Poston, a town about 15 miles south of Parker and within the Colorado River Indian Tribes’ land.
He was looking at his sister’s body. The image made the violence impossible to dismiss.
“Someone zip-tied her, wrapped her in plastic and threw her in a canal,” Raymond says.
A complaint filed in the U.S. District Court of Arizona in November 2016 says Cynthia had duct tape over her mouth and ligature marks on her wrists. Someone used a black marker to draw on her body. Portions of her dark brown hair had been shaved off.
“Her face was beaten up and the top of her head was like somebody scalped her,” Raymond says.
He describes the injuries as evidence of the torment his sister endured before her death.
The complaint, referring to a Mohave County Medical Examiner’s Office autopsy report, states Cynthia had multiple cuts on her body and was stabbed four times. She ultimately died of asphyxia due to drowning. Multiple blunt-force injuries were also a significant contributing factor to her death, according to the report.
“She didn’t die from her beatings or her wounds, they found water in her lungs. She drowned,” Raymond says. “She went through all of that. She was tortured.”
Raymond remembers that when Cynthia was scared, she would tell people she was going to go get her brother. He wants to be that protector his big sister remembers. He wants to believe “she would be proud” of how he still speaks up for her.
And then his voice breaks. Raymond finally lets himself cry.
The FBI and Colorado River Indian Tribes Police Department worked together to investigate Cynthia’s murder, according to the complaint. It shows that at least one FBI agent and one tribal police officer were present for nearly every stage of the investigation documented in the complaint.
Community members pointed both tribal and federal investigators to Cynthia’s killers, later identified as Jeffrey Scott Williams and Sharon Marie Clark, early on in their investigation, according to the complaint. Some said Cynthia may have owed Jeffry Scott Williams money. Others said she seemed scared of something, or someone.
Several people also told investigators that Williams’ girlfriend, Clark, had been telling people about how she beat up Cynthia before “having a guy take her somewhere,” according to witness accounts described in the complaint.
Raymond says many people offered support, particularly from outside the tribal community. He recalls harsher criticism from tribal members, including cruel social media posts that said she deserved what she got.
“The more they did that, the taller I’d stand,” Raymond says, adding that some of the criticism continues today. “I’m way past that. I don’t care what your thoughts are about her because right now, my sister’s in a place where no one can touch her. No one can hurt her.”
For Raymond, the victim-blaming wasn’t just another source of pain for his family. He believes it also affected how seriously some officials treated Cynthia’s case, contributing to delays in an investigation he thinks would have otherwise been resolved sooner.
“That’s what we say about the police here, that it’s hard to get tribal police to even do investigations because they already have a preconceived notion of people, they already have their mind made up,” he says. “If you were to call in and say a name, they’ll just make that little face like ‘Oh my God,’ and then it’s not a serious call anymore. That’s the biggest problem around here.”
The complaint describes witnesses pointing to both Williams and Clark — who were later convicted of murdering Cynthia — as possible suspects within a week of her body being found in early March. Investigators first interviewed them separately around the end of March, according to the complaint.
It wasn’t immediately clear why they weren’t arrested for another eight months. Neither the Colorado River Indian Tribes Police Department nor FBI responded to requests for comment from Arizona Luminaria about Raymond’s account.
One incident in particular stands out to Raymond.
Raymond says a man went to then-Colorado River Indian Tribes Police Chief William Ponce, saying he couldn’t sleep because he knew who was responsible for Cynthia’s death. Raymond says Ponce turned him away. The man continued trying to get tribal officers to listen, but no one acted on the information, Raymond says.
Ponce now serves as La Paz County sheriff. He did not respond to a request for comment from Luminaria about Raymond’s claims. His LinkedIn page indicates he stopped serving as the tribe’s police chief in October 2016, the month before Cynthia’s killers were arrested.
Raymond says it wasn’t until Cynthia’s younger sister connected the man with the FBI that they were able to arrange for him to wear a wire and record hours of incriminating conversations with Cynthia’s killers. Raymond says the recordings soon led to the arrest of Williams and Clark in November 2016.
“So the case was already solved from the gate, but the chief, William Ponce, wouldn’t listen to it,” Raymond says, his voice growing faster and louder as he names the tribal police chief whose department helped investigate his sister’s death.
Raymond’s account of the man attempting to reach tribal police and later being wired by federal investigators to record conversations with Cynthia’s killers is not detailed in the 33-page federal complaint reviewed by Arizona Luminaria. However, the complaint notes that “more than eighty interviews were conducted” over the course of the eight-month investigation, but only about a dozen witness interviews were documented in detail.
In their interviews with investigators, Williams and Clark admitted to being involved in the crime against Cynthia to some degree but ultimately blamed each other for the killing.
They both pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and aiding and abetting in 2017 and were each sentenced to 25 years in prison. Neither was a member of the Colorado River Indian Tribes.
“What if she didn’t matter?”
When Cynthia was killed, Raymond didn’t know what to do. He says his first instinct was to find the people responsible himself.
“I wanted to go kick some doors in and I wanted to go kill somebody,” he says.
Then he watched his mother, devastated by her eldest daughter’s death, as she sat beside him. Raymond says he realized if he went after the people he suspected were responsible, his mother and younger sister might also follow him into that violence. He couldn’t let that happen.
Instead, he turned to the community for help.
“We were so lost that day,” Raymond remembers.
He and his family asked to hang posters at local businesses. They started collecting tips about what could have happened to Cynthia and sharing them with the investigators. They initially pooled about $5,000 of their own money to put toward a reward fund for information leading to the arrests of his sister’s killers.
The reward was increased to $15,000 with funds from “the tribal government, law enforcement and donations from the family,” according to a 2016 news report.
In May 2016, Raymond helped organize a march against drugs in their community, hoping to also draw attention to his sister’s case. Cynthia’s photo was printed on the back of the event’s shirts.
“I was scared nobody would show up,” he says. “What if she didn’t matter?”
About 300 people came — most from outside the surrounding La Paz County communities. Their presence meant the family’s message was getting out.
The following year, another Colorado River Indian Tribes family asked Raymond to help in their search for a missing loved one.
Molina Yazzie went missing in August 2017 and was found dead weeks later, about 17 months after Cynthia’s murder. While Molina’s death was ruled an accident, her family continues to question that determination. They suspect foul play.
Just before Christmas that year, Raymond organized another march, this time with Molina’s cousin Katrina Yazzie, to raise awareness about her case under the group name Stand Strong Together. The community group has gone on to organize at least one local march each fall since then, targeting violence in their community and raising awareness of Indigenous people who have gone missing or been killed.
Raymond’s advocacy has since taken him from Parker to the Arizona State Capitol, a red T-shirt on his back and a megaphone in hand.
At an “End the Violence” march in Sept. 2024, Raymond led more than 50 people through a tribal housing development, leading attendees in chants for justice. The march came just months after 17-year-old Anthony Logan was killed in Parker in June, thrusting his name and memory into the center of the gathering. The teen was shot as he sat in his vehicle outside a community park, according to local news reports.
Loved ones carried photographs and posters bearing the names of their own missing and murdered relatives. Among them was Cynthia, whose little brother has spent years making sure her story isn’t forgotten.
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