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Michelle Le: On ‘Dateline’ — Missing California Nursing Student Found Dead, Killed By Best Friend Giselle Esteban

By Traciy Reyes
Published on: 02:00 PST, Dec 29, 2016

The death of former missing nursing student Michelle Le is back on television. This time, the murder case will air on Dateline NBC. The Dateline episode, “Vanished,” aired on television in 2013. Michelle Le was tracked down and murdered by her ex-best friend, Giselle Esteban. The Inquisitr brought you the story when it aired on Investigation Discovery’s See No Evil and Oxygen’s Snapped. Dateline will outline the case and bring you key points in the investigation that led to the killer’s arrest.

Michelle Le’s dead body was found decomposed after months of being exposed to the elements. The body was in such a bad state that a cause of death couldn’t be determined. According to Dateline NBC’s coverage, Michelle Le first vanished in May 2011. What was strange was that she disappeared from the safest place one would expect, Kaiser Permanente Hospital, where she was a nursing student.

Authorities say that 26-year-old Michelle Le was in class one minute and the next minute she had completely disappeared. The last anyone knew was that Michelle was going to her car to retrieve an item. Someone in her car was later seen speeding out of the parking lot.

The bizarre mystery left Michelle Le’s family baffled and sick with worry. The tenacious nursing student was not the kind of person to leave class and fail to return without warning. It didn’t take long for detectives to unravel Michelle’s life and find a deadly connection between her one-time best friend Giselle Esteban and her disappearance.

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California detectives learned that Michelle Le’s former friendship with Giselle Esteban had turned ugly. Esteban was convinced that Michelle Le was after her boyfriend, especially after learning that the two had a brief relationship at one time.

However, the man at the center of the controversy, Scott Marasigan, denied ever having sex with Michelle Le. Still, Giselle Esteban had cooked up an entire sexual fling in her mind, which she believed existed between the father of her child and her best friend, CBS-SF Bay Area reported.

“Marasigan testified on Monday that he never had sex with Le, either during their month-long dating relationship or at any later time. He said Tuesday that Esteban was irate at him when she learned that Le had confided to him at a party in 2005 that she was pregnant and was planning to have an abortion. Esteban was also pregnant at the time and ultimately gave birth to the couple’s daughter on Oct. 31, 2005. Marasigan said he and Esteban had “some discussions about whether I slept with Michelle” but he denied Esteban’s allegations that he’d had an affair with Le.”

Giselle Esteban decided that she needed to settle it in the worst way possible: She was going to kill Michelle. To do it, she tried to hunt down exactly which class Michelle would be attending that day. Then, she stole a nursing lab coat and walked the halls looking for Michelle Le. Detectives know that this is what happened because hospital video surveillance captured it all.

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Prosecutors believe at some point she accosted Michelle Le at her vehicle, evidenced by the blood found in the car. From there, no one knows exactly how Michelle was killed. But her body was later found dumped after months of trying to locate her.

Some other details that stand out

Giselle Esteban was so obsessed with Michelle Le that internet searches show that she looked up her name 300 times, according to NBC Bay Area.

The family and the community were so distraught that they offered a $65,000 reward for info leading to Michelle’s whereabouts.

Records show that Esteban had a history of depression and disturbing behavior. Read about that here.

Be sure to watch Michelle Le’s sad story on Dateline NBC. It airs this Friday, December 30 at 9/8 p.m. Central.

[Featured Image by Paul Sakuma/AP Images]

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