Rochelle "Rocky" Ihm was a 20-year old Phoenix native who had recently moved to San Diego with her family.
She worked as a paralegal, was a graduate of Arcadia High School, and attended Scottsdale Community College.
In July 1986, her families former gardener Robert Yama, who was 33 years old, offered to pay for a plane ticket for her to take a trip home.
Rochelle took Yama up on the offer. But instead of staying at Yama's home, she instead stayed with friends at a house in the 4800 block of East Brill Street near the intersection of 48th Street and McDowell with her friends Chuck Dietrich and John Edcox.
Edcox and Dietrich claimed this made Yama angry. They also said Yama was upset that Rochelle asked him for money.
The next day, Yama picked Rochelle up to take her to a former Greyhound bus station in downtown Phoenix.
She never made it home.
But Greyhound employees reported to police that they had not seen Rochelle at the bus station. Rochelle was diabetic and could not last long without her medication.
In a 1987 Arizona Republic article, Yama said he was not interested in discussing the case or even thinking about it.
Yama died in the summer 2005. Yama's father passed away in 1998 and his mother died in 2019. Yama's sister died in October of 2005, just two months after her brother. Yama's family lived in Mesa.
It is unknown if Yama lived with his family in Mesa in 1986, or in a different location in the Phoenix area.
According to documents found in the Maricopa County recorder, Yama was discharged from the army in 1976 after serving in Vietnam, and in the early 80's lived in Tempe with Tina Yama, his wife. It is unknown if he divorced Tina but she is not listed in his obituary.
Rochelle's sister did an interview with the local news several years ago pleading with the public for information in her sisters disappearance. But nobody to this date has come forward.
Rochelle's parents have since died.
It does not appear Rochelle is currently in the Silent Witness program. Robert Yama remains the only known suspect in Rochelle’s disappearance.
It is unknown if Yama ever gave statements to investigators or if he ever had a history of violence.
Sources
Archived news articles from 1987-2005 (posted in an info dump sub I created for subreddits that don’t allow images)
News feature
The Charlie Project page mentions a sapphire ring with eight diamonds, I wonder if anything like that ever turned up at pawn. Doesnt sound especially unique but surely valuable enough to hold on to.
More details, pulled from the newspaper articles OP listed:
Rocky lived in San Diego, she and her family had recently moved there but otherwise had lived her whole life in Phoenix. The plane ticket was San Diego TO Phoenix. The flight was the day before she went missing, July 12th 1986.
The gardener, Robert Yama, still lived in Phoenix. He says he paid for the ticket because she was short on money. He picked her up from Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport on Saturday July 12th, and then they drove to Mesa (suburb about a 20 minute drive SE of the airport) where they visited with his parents.
Later that evening, she went with other friends to dinner in Scottsdale (suburb that starts about 15 minutes north of Mesa). She then went to “a number of parties“ with those friends that evening. According to police, her friends said she was “using drugs” that night - specifically, marijuana and cocaine. A year after her disappearance, investigators stated that they did not believe the drug use had anything to do with her disappearance.
After the parties, Rocky and friends stayed at one of the friends’ homes in East Phoenix (same general area as the airport) and “spent the rest of the night talking.” One of the men present that night says that Rocky and her friends arrived at the house past midnight, getting there in the early morning hours of the 13th.
Rocky seemed happy at the house — until Yama called the house and “she had words” with him. It doesn’t state how Yama knew what house she was at and what the phone number was.
Rocky told her friends that Yama was angry with her for not spending enough time with him on the trip, and because she wasn’t staying at his house that night. Her friends also reported that Rocky and Yama argued about money, with her saying she had wanted to borrow money from Yama.
Both the friends and Yama agree that Yama came by and picked her up later on that morning of Sunday the 13th. Yama says he then dropped her off at the Greyhound station at noon and she was planning to take a bus home to San Diego. However, one of the male friends at the house said that he was actually planning to fly home to California with Rocky that day, and that she was supposed to call this friend when she was ready to go to the airport. He says he even had his bags packed for the trip, but that she never called.
One last note: Rocky needed to take daily insulin injections to manage her diabetes. It isn’t stated in any of the articles if she had any more insulin on her. I am not an expert on diabetes. This was the mid-80’s and she was only planning on being gone for 24 hours — in those circumstances, would an insulin-dependent young person have been likely to be carrying additional insulin on them? If so how much could or would such a person likely have?
My opinion: Yama almost certainly killed her. There is a chance she was planning on catching a flight with the other friend, then changed her mind, didn’t call her other friend to tell him, let Yama drop her off alone at the bus stop and something else happened to her right after she was dropped off causing no one to see her and her to never board a bus or call anyone to tell them her plans… but this seems unlikely to me. It sounds to me like she didn’t have the money to get back to San Diego and that Yama didn’t want to give her the money because she wasn’t staying with him, thus her other friend planning to fly out with her, he was presumably going to pay for their tickets.
Yes, I agree with you that she is no longer alive and that Yama is the culprit. I also don't know how much insulin a person would be able to carry with them, or if that's changed since the 1980s, but it can't be that much I would think. Also, it's clear she didn't have money to get more, and if she had gotten more (which she would've needed as she was obviously a Type 1 diabetic), there would've been a record of it. Probably she went to the same pharmacy to get it. so...it doesn't bode well in this case if she never showed up to get more.
I just did a couple of searches about insulin, and what mostly came up was TSA instructions about how to safely transport insulin when you're traveling. They say take at least a week's supply when traveling, but you have to store it in a certain way. Also, she would've needed associated supplies like glucose tabs for low blood sugar (juice would probably work in a pinch), a syringe and needles, and a glucose monitor. The first portable blood glucose monitors came out in 1980-81, so I'm betting she had one. It wouldn't have been enough to just get the insulin; you'd also need to buy these other supplies.
Her medical condition, I think, makes it impossible that she just ran off and changed her identity. There's no way you could get all of that documentation back in the 1980s when you have Type 1 diabetes and need daily insulin injections to stay alive. Everything like that took a lot longer back then. Just replacing a social security card took weeks, if not months, and involved physically having to go to a Social Security Administration office and proving your identity. You had to make an appointment for that visit. Then you have to wait for the new card to be mailed. It was a huge pain in the ass.
Although thinking about it, one thing that didn't take that long back then was getting a driver's license. I got my first driver's license in the Midwest in 1986 (the same year she disappeared). It took less than a day. It took less than a couple of hours, actually. We went in early in the morning, I took the written test, took the driving test (which I barely passed lol), and I walked out with my driver's license in my hands. Nowadays, it takes several weeks. You have to make appointments, etc., and then wait a couple of weeks to get the license mailed to you.
I'm rambling, but I think the medical condition is the tell that she died pretty quickly after she disappeared. There's just no way she could've lived long without the insulin, and she didn't show up in a hospital in diabetic shock either.
They should've leaned on Yama really hard. Maybe they did. He did the smart thing and quit talking to the cops. If you're clever, you know that if the cops are really leaning on you hard, it's because they don't have enough evidence to prove your guilt. It makes sense. If they've got the evidence, they don't need to do this. They'll just charge you and hand you over to the legal system.
Type 1 diabetic here. This is my assumption, based off personal experience as well as the experiences of friends. The "golden rule," so to say, is to bring double the amount of supplies that you think you'll need. She most likely brought enough insulin for at least 2 or 3 days, as well as syringes and, as the person above me stated, most likely her testing kit. But she wouldn't have NEEDED to have glucose tabs on her or anything like that. If her blood sugar dropped, any form of juice, soda, or candy would have worked; if she was only planning on being gone for 24 hours, I'd once again assume that she wanted to pack lightly. Without insulin, she would have ended up in DKA (diabetic ketoacidosis) fairly quickly. It can take a few hours, but usually a day (or so) without insulin for someone to end up in DKA, which is extremely painful and overall one of the worst feelings imaginable (in terms of one a medical emergency).
I hope that helped with any questions you may have had regarding her T1D!
It's very unlikely that she just went off to live a new life.
So she was a drug addict. That explains everything. Why didn't they just say that from the start.
"drug addict" and she used party drugs while out with friends?????????
If he offered her a plane ticket home, why was he driving her to a Greyhound bus station?
And why couldn't her own parents send her a ticket home? Kind of odd that the gardener would. Clearly he had the hots for her.
They mean former home, as in Phoenix. She flew to Arizona on a ticket paid by Yama, then stayed with friends and then Yama claims to have driven her to the bus station to go back to her new home in San Diego by bus.
It's weird that they bought a one-way ticket, back in the 80s. Those were often more expensive than round-trip, and since she would be returning, it makes no sense at all that they did it that way.
I agree.
Even more weird that their gardener paid for her trip.
He probably had the hots for her and expected her to be grateful but instead she ended up partying with her friends and staying with them instead of him, which made him angry.
She was 20 years old and pretty. She should have known better and just asked her parents for a round trip plane ticket to avoid all that hassle.
I was confused by this too. Did they go from rich to poor or something? Or maybe her family cut her off financially?
Unfortunately rhe OP was unclear. “Home” meant her new home in San Diego not her home she grew up in in Phoenix. She moved to San Diego and decided to visit her old home in Phoenix in 1986 and went missing from Phoenix and did not get back to her new home in SD
The point still stands, why would anyone buy a one-way airline ticket to travel from San Diego to Phoenix? Was the purchaser (the gardener) not expecting/planning to need a return ticket?
Was the story about dropping her off at the Greyhound station only that - a story - because a return airline flight would have needed to be purchased days (if not weeks) in advance, but a bus ticket could theoretically be purchased same day/just prior to departure and would provide a suitable alibi?
I know it still stands. I was just making things clear duh
Photos of her really highlight her distinctive jaw/underbite? I am no expdert on this, but hopefully people have scanned Jane Does for this feature. Given the timeframe (assume Yama was questioned soon after she was noted to be missing), it's more likely she was concealed nearby and hasn't been found yet.
Is there any particular reason why we should believe her friends' version of events? Are there any other witnesses who saw Yamma pick her up?
I mean, maybe I'm missing something, but based on this write-up all I see is a young woman who disappeared after spending the night with two young men who immediately blamed a third one. All the "evidence" seems to be hearsay.
I don't get how people can be "convinced" Yamma is guilty. Is this a race/class thing?
She was with a large group of girlfriends and they eventually went to stay at a home of two of their male friends. From the sources, it seems all of her girlfriends and the two guys agree on this story. More importantly, Yama admits he picked her up from the house on the 13th. He claims he dropped her off at the Greyhound bus station. So the friends and Yama all agree that he picked her up from their house on his own. I posted a comment with more details gleaned from the AZ Republic articles, in this thread, the link to my comment is here if you want to check it out. I think the extra info gives more context.
It sounds like both her friends and Yama said that Yama picked her up. It also sounds like there was not a connection between Yama and the friends she was staying with, ie not much reason to collude on a lie
This is a no brainer
So she took a trip back to Phoenix in 1986 and went missing from Phoenix not SD. Yours wasn’t clear
Posted in my community 🙌🏻
Wait, her last name is lhm? That's not even pronounceable. Isn't that like illegal to have only 3 letters in a last name?