A 16-year-old girl became worried about her mother's well-being when she texted her to pick her up after her shift at a Texas Taco Bell and the response she received didn't seem like it came from her mother.
Her mother, 34-year-old Crystal Lynch, often texted in complete sentences, but the person texting her back with "short slang words" sounded more like her stepfather, Marquise Rochard Glasper.
Two months before this day, Glasper allegedly "pistol whipped" Lynch, according to the daughter. The daughter, identified only by her initials C.L., reported her mother missing the next day. Lynch was last seen with her husband around 9 p.m. on May 6 in their Houston town home, and the Houston Police Department now believes that Lynch is dead.
Six months after Lynch disappeared, Glasper, 37, is now in custody, charged with his wife's murder, tampering with a human corpse, and for being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm. An attorney for Glasper could not be immediately identified for comment.
Lynch, who stood at 5'1" and weighed 120 pounds, was last seen wearing a gray tank top with gray pajama pants marked with yellow and purple emojis. Her body has still not been found.
In court Monday, Glasper's bond was set at $400,000, and prosecutors said that in a hearing slated for December, that bond may increase to $1 million.
On the night she disappeared, Lynch's daughter waited hours for her mom to pick her up from the Taco Bell where she worked. Instead, her stepfather arrived around midnight in a silver Jeep with a gun with "blue grip tape wrapped around the handle" sticking out of his pants pocket.
The teenager recognized it as the gun her mother and stepfather shared and was surprised, per the documents, "because normally Marquise would have it hidden."
Back at their Houston apartment, Lynch still was not home. As the main caregiver to her 16-year-old and 10-year-old daughters, she had never before let multiple days pass without communicating with her daughters, according to police, who called her disappearance "highly suspicious" in the charging documents.
The night before Lynch went missing, she went on a double date with a friend and a man that was not her husband, according to police, citing an interview with the friend as well as text messages between them that investigators believe Glasper read, then posed as his wife to try to get more information about the affair from her friend by text.
C.L. was present during the friend's interview, and according to police, "interrupted her statement" to tell detectives that her stepfather "had made comments in the past, that if he ever finds out about" Lynch "cheating on him, he will kill her."
Per the charging documents, C.L. said that Glasper, who was previously convicted of aggravated robbery in 2017, had been violent toward her mother in the past.
And, in a phone interview with a detective, Glasper also allegedly admitted to physically assaulting Lynch after another alleged affair, which Glasper claimed had occurred while he was incarcerated, per the charging documents.
By the time investigators reached out later that month to swab the silver Jeep used to pick up Lynch's daughter from Taco Bell and believed to have been used just before that to dump Crystal's body, investigators allege in the charging documents that Glasper "remained evasive and stated that he wished he had known sooner because he has already gone through it and cleaned it twice."
Even still, investigators noted that "blood was indicated on the swab collected from the interior rear passenger side" of the vehicle.
Months after Lynch's disappearance, in August, police received written permission from the owners of the property to search the two-story town home where the couple lived with Lynch's two girls and which investigators noted "appeared to have been vacant" since Lynch went missing.
Passing by food rotting on the stove and in the fridge, investigators located within the home "two hammers, a hatchet and a box of 9mm ammo with three bullets remaining," per the charging documents.
In Lynch's deserted bedroom, investigators found what appeared to be "blood-soaked underwear," along with possible blood-stained sheets, comforter, mattress and pillows, as well as what appeared to be blood dashed along the headboard and splattered across a bedroom wall. Investigators also found, per the charging documents, a possible blood stain that had seeped under the floorboard of the bed, measuring eight feet
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