More than two decades after Sharon Van Gilder was found strangled on a Pierce County road, the man accused of killing her finally sat before a jury Monday in Tacoma. Miguel Angel Urbano-Vazquez, now 50, faces aggravated first-degree murder charges in Van Gilder's death along with rape charges tied to three other women, in crimes prosecutors say stretched from March to October 2002.
Van Gilder, 39, met two men at a Tacoma tavern on a cold spring night in 2002 and was later found naked and strangled on a county road, according to The News Tribune. Her body turned up along the 15600 block of 74th Avenue East in Spanaway, and the sheriff's office said there was no evidence left at the scene, leading investigators to conclude she had been killed elsewhere and dumped there, according to the Pierce County Sheriff's Office. The Pierce County Medical Examiner ultimately identified her through fingerprint records.
A DNA Match Breaks the Case Open a Decade Later
Van Gilder's murder sat alongside three unsolved Tacoma rape cases for nearly ten years until the Pierce County Sheriff's Office created a dedicated Cold Case Unit in 2012, where retired Detective Sergeant Tim Kobel re-examined her file and cross-referenced it with the other assaults, per the sheriff's office account. A deputy reviewing the files noticed Urbano-Vazquez's name connected to Van Gilder's case and two of the rape cases, then sent black hairs recovered from her body along with swabs from two other victims to the state crime lab. A Tacoma detective, hearing of the match, sent a fourth rape victim's swab for testing as well — and a crime lab analyst is expected to testify that all four samples carried the same DNA profile, according to deputy prosecuting attorney Sarah Park.
That DNA match led Pierce County prosecutors to formally charge Urbano-Vazquez with Van Gilder's rape and murder in 2012, along with two counts of first-degree rape and one count of second-degree rape involving three other women, according to the FBI's Seattle field office. But Urbano-Vazquez was not in the country. He had already been deported to Mexico, and the warrant sat unexecuted for six years until the Pierce County Sheriff's Office formally requested FBI assistance in 2018, per KING 5 News.
Located in Mexico, Arrested Years Later
FBI agents told Pierce County cold case detective Sgt. Lynelle Anderson in 2019 that they had located Urbano-Vazquez in Mexico, kicking off a four-year international legal process to finalize extradition paperwork, according to KIRO 7 News. He was eventually arrested without incident on March 14, 2023, in Chimalhuacán, State of Mexico — a city about 22 miles east of Mexico City — through a joint effort involving the FBI's legal attaché in Mexico City, Mexico's kidnapping investigation unit, and the Fiscalía General de la República, per the FBI Seattle field office.
His extradition to Washington wasn't completed until May 2025, more than two years after his arrest. The U.S. Department of Justice highlighted the case in a late-May 2025 national release detailing fugitive extraditions secured from Mexico and 13 other countries for violent crime prosecutions. Once back in Washington, Urbano-Vazquez was booked into Pierce County Jail on May 15, 2025, and held without bail following an initial appearance before Superior Court Commissioner Barbara McInvaille, according to the account later published by The Chronicle. At his arraignment, he appeared in jail attire, used headphones to hear a Spanish interpreter, and entered a not guilty plea through defense counsel.
What Prosecutors Say Happened in 2002
According to Park, the June 2002 victim was approached by Urbano-Vazquez in a vehicle while walking in Tacoma at night. He drove her to detached garages in the Lincoln District instead of her requested destination, struck her in the head with a red wrench, and threatened to find and kill her if she spoke about the assault, Park told jurors, as reported by The News Tribune. Prosecutors say three men raped an August 2002 victim at the same garages; she escaped by jumping into a newspaper delivery person's car.
Police responded to an alley outside the garages on October 5, 2002, after a woman reported she had been raped by two men. Two men had invited her and another woman into a car to party, prosecutors allege, and one man held a knife to her neck and raped her while the other man encouraged the assault. The victim went to a hospital and initially lied to detectives about what happened, according to the outlet's reporting. Park has told jurors that Urbano-Vazquez targeted intoxicated women looking to party, expecting them not to talk.
Defense Challenges Consent and Credibility
Defense attorney David Katayama, of the Department of Assigned Counsel, has asked jurors to find Urbano-Vazquez not guilty. He told jurors they would hear about the alleged victims' addiction issues and histories of prostitution, and argued jurors should question whether consent was actually withheld. Katayama also said there would be no evidence that Urbano-Vazquez profiled a certain type of woman or was hunting victims, per The News Tribune's courtroom account.
If convicted of aggravated first-degree murder, Urbano-Vazquez faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of release or parole, as required under Washington state law. Judges have no discretion to impose a lighter sentence once that charge results in conviction.
A Family's Decades-Long Wait
Van Gilder's eldest brother, 72-year-old Douglas Walthers of Enumclaw, attended the trial's opening with a cousin. Van Gilder was born and raised in Enumclaw, had two children, David and Alexis, and was married to Dan Van Gilder before the couple later divorced, according to Walthers. “She had a very, very big heart. She really didn’t deserve this kind of an ending to her life,” Walthers said of his sister.
Walthers praised the investigators who worked the case over the years, including retired cold-case detective Lynelle Anderson. The trial opened Monday in Tacoma and is expected to continue into mid- to late November 2026.
