Atlanta Police Department

The Atlanta Police Department is the public agency at the center of the investigation into the disappearances of Edward Villarosas’s two wives. Its earlier inquiries could not connect him to either disappearance or establish that the women had been killed; years later, detectives from the department joined a wider effort to reopen the cases, test new leads, and pursue evidence that could support prosecution.

Role in the Original Investigations

The two women disappeared five years apart while Villarosas was their husband. The cases drew suspicion, but investigators found no solid link between him and either disappearance. He maintained that the women had left him for other men, and his alibis were described as ironclad. The cases therefore remained classified as missing-person investigations rather than homicide cases.

Landon Chestnut worked on the second case as a detective with the force. After learning of the first disappearance, he tried to determine whether the two cases were connected, but could not establish a link. The first case had occurred five years before he became a police officer, and time and city budget cuts limited follow-up on plausible leads. The investigation’s failure was consequential for Chestnut: his frustration over the unresolved case was one reason he later left the department and joined Duan Jeffries’s private-investigation firm.

Reopening and Evidence Constraints

When Duan learned that Kimani Cannon’s mother planned to marry Villarosas, he and Chestnut revisited the unresolved cases. The proposed investigation included contacting a detective they knew at the Atlanta Police Department to reopen both files, checking Villarosas’s activities after he moved from Atlanta, and seeking information from the missing women’s families and friends. Investigators also planned to ask whether either woman had been seen or heard from since disappearing, leaving open the possibility that Villarosas’s account was true even as the repeated pattern raised doubts.

The story distinguishes suspicion from proof. Duan explains that the prior investigations produced no basis to arrest Villarosas, and that he and his wives had not even been in the same cities when the disappearances occurred. A detective’s sense that something did not add up could guide inquiry, but it could not substitute for evidence. Budget cuts had further constrained the original work, leaving the cases short of the support needed to pursue every plausible lead or reclassify them as homicides.

Joint Investigation and Escalation

The renewed inquiry joined private investigators with local and out-of-state law-enforcement agencies. Detectives from the Atlanta Police Department traveled to Shreveport alongside a Shreveport police detective and Chestnut, representing the Peachtree Private Investigative Firm. The planned questioning of Villarosas formed part of a broader effort to establish what had happened to his former wives.

The investigation gained a major lead when Stein Green admitted that Villarosas had hired him to kill both women. The admission was not treated as sufficient by itself: Duan emphasized the need to substantiate Green’s account, noting that a jury might see it as the word of a prisoner against that of a man who appeared respectable. Investigators sought corroboration in old bank records showing large withdrawals around the times Green said he had been paid and in phone records documenting calls between the two men. Neither record alone established what the money or calls meant.

Search and Consequences

Local and federal officers searched wooded areas near Orlando and Atlanta where Green said the remains were located. Detectives from the Atlanta Police Department were already on their way to question Villarosas in Shreveport; the investigation’s stated next step was to charge him and extradite him to Georgia if the remains were found. The department’s role had thus shifted from confronting a pair of stalled missing-person cases to coordinating investigative and evidentiary steps in a possible double-murder prosecution.

After Villarosas was arrested in Las Vegas, he was transported directly from there to Atlanta. The account does not describe the department’s specific actions during the arrest or transport, but its detectives’ earlier participation connected the reopened Atlanta cases to the multi-agency response. The contrast defines the department’s place in the story: the original inquiries left the women missing and Villarosas beyond arrest, while renewed collaboration and the pursuit of corroborating evidence brought the investigation closer to resolving the case.