Wesley Billingsly was a little down on his luck in 2018. The 24-year-old had lost his job at an advertising agency and hadn’t been able to find a new job right away. When he was unable to come up with his share of the rent for the San Diego, California apartment he shared with roommates, he was asked to move out. Wesley knew he couldn’t afford to get another apartment; he started staying with three different friends, bouncing back and forth between their homes. Friends recalled seeing him in Pacific Beach, California on June 12, 2018, but then he seemed to vanish without a trace.
Wesley arranged to meet some friends for dinner on the evening of June 12, 2008, but he didn’t show up and didn’t call them to say he wasn’t coming. When they tried to call his cell phone, all their calls went straight to voicemail; it appeared Wesley had either turned his phone off or the battery was dead.
Wesley had planned to help some friends move on June 13, 2018. Once more, he didn’t show up and didn’t call to excuse himself. Calls to his phone kept going to voicemail, and he never called or texted anyone back. Some of Wesley’s friends finally told his mother that they hadn’t been able to reach him. She told the San Diego Police Department that he was missing.
The mother of Wesley, Christel Billingsly, was scared and begged people for help. “He’s never done this before, and now it looks like he vanished…we’re looking for him…”I need to find my son, but I don’t know where he is. He usually posts a lot on social media, she said, but he hadn’t. He usually posted several times a day, so the fact that he hadn’t logged into his account was very worrying.
There was a lot of communication between Wesley and his friends and family before he went missing. Everyone noticed when he stopped answering his phone all of a sudden. Christel said, “It’s not like Wesley; he talks to his family all the time.” Every couple of days, his brother and I—it stopped.”
Wesley’s black Ford Expedition was also missing, so the police put out an alert so that patrol officers would know that the car was linked to someone who was missing. Christel put up about 500 posters in Pacific Beach and the area around San Diego University, but police hadn’t found many clues and weren’t sure if Wesley had gone missing on his own or had been a victim of crime.
Christel was worried that Wesley’s car might be gone. “Has someone taken his truck and left him somewhere?” I have a feeling that something is wrong. She said that her life had been hard in other ways, but nothing was as bad as her son going missing. “This is a terrible nightmare.”
He grew up in Sacramento, California, and moved to San Diego for college after high school. His degree in business and marketing from San Diego State University was given to him in 2016. He moved back to San Diego in February 2018 after getting a job at an advertising agency. He had moved back to Sacramento after graduation and lived with his mom for a while to save money.
He didn’t have enough money to support himself after losing his job, and he didn’t want to go back to Sacramento. He probably didn’t tell his mom that he was no longer working because he didn’t want to make her nervous. Also, she didn’t know that he was staying with friends because he was kicked out of his apartment.
The fact that Wesley didn’t have a permanent address made the investigation harder, as he was moving back and forth between three apartments, making it harder to figure out where he had been seen most recently.
Investigators said they had talked to a number of Wesley’s family members and friends, but none of them could give them any information about where he was. Everyone they talked to said it was very unusual for Wesley, who was normally very social, to just disappear. They didn’t have any proof of foul play, but it was clear that Wesley wasn’t the type to just vanish.
Wesley hadn’t been seen in two months, and his mother was getting more and more desperate to hear from him. She offered a $3,000 reward for information that would help her find him. I told them to come forward out of the goodness of their hearts, but I guess that doesn’t work, so I bet…You can have the money if you can help me find my son or his truck. I need to know what took place with him. “Someone knows.”
Authorities from the San Diego Police Department said they found Wesley’s car two months after he went missing, but they wouldn’t say what clues it might have held. It had been left behind on a street in San Diego’s South Bay neighborhood. There were some of Wesley’s personal items inside, but the missing man was nowhere to be found.
Wesley’s 25th birthday should have been on August 17, 2018, but it wasn’t. Christel didn’t buy her son gifts; instead, she drove from Sacramento, California, to San Diego to hand out missing person flyers and ask people to help her find Wesley.
Wesley might have crossed the border into Mexico, so Christel looked for him there for a while. She told Mexican authorities that she was missing and checked Mexican jails and morgues with the help of a translator. She couldn’t find any signs that Wesley was in Mexico.
Even though it had been nine months since Wesley went missing, Christel was still walking around San Diego, looking for any sign of him. She focused on places he was known to hang out, like the Vons grocery store on Pacific Beach’s Garnet Avenue. She made sure that every telephone pole in the area had a copy of his missing poster in a prominent place. “I try to stay positive, but nine months is a long time.”
Christel thought that there were probably people in the area who knew what happened to Wesley but were afraid to tell anyone. “But this is my kid…”I hope they think of their mom, brother, uncle, or someone else.It’s not okay at all.”
In the hopes that Wesley would call someone, Christel kept paying for his cell phone so that his number would stay active. However, Wesley hadn’t used it since before he disappeared, as shown by his phone records.
Wesley’s first anniversary of going missing was coming up, so Christel asked for help finding him again. She also talked to her son and told him she missed him and couldn’t wait for him to get home. “I’m going to keep looking, calling people, posting on Facebook, putting it on the news, and knocking on doors.”
Wesley has not been seen or heard from since July 2023, and police still don’t know what happened to him. A lot of ideas and rumors have been spread about the case, but none of them have helped police find Wesley. His mother is still looking for him, and there is a $10,000 reward for information that leads directly to Wesley’s location.
He was only 24 years old when he went missing in June 2018 in the Pacific Beach area of San Diego, California. Two months later, his 2001 Ford Expedition was found in the South Bay area. It had some of Wesley’s things in it, but no clues as to where he was. The last time we saw Wesley, he was 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighed 135 pounds. He has hazel eyes and brown hair. Please call the San Diego Police Department at 619–531–2000 or 619–531–2777 if you know anything about Wesley. There is a reward for information that leads straight to Wesley.
