- The Houston mom accused of falsely reporting her son, Rudy Farias, "missing" is a divorce court regular.
- She's claimed eight marriages since age 17; two of her exes have called her a bigamist in court docs.
She's the Elizabeth Taylor of fugazi missing persons cases.
Janie Santana — the Houston mom accused of pretending her son, Rudy Farias, disappeared as a teenager in 2015 — has done a lot of marrying, unmarrying, and claiming to be married over the decades.
Since her first wedding in 1985, Santana has been in and out of family court, waging war on her many husbands.
Exactly how many husbands remains unclear.
But Santana, now 55, has claimed in court documents to have had eight of them.
It's a string of legal, common-law, and in one case ultimately fictitious husbands stretching back to her first "I do" at age 17.
Insider has unearthed nearly 40 years of court documents, in hopes of better understanding the woman that Houston police say remains under investigation for allegedly claiming her son was missing for eight years when he was home all along.
Her marital battles have been ugly ones, filled with cross-accusations of adultery, cruelty, and fraud.
And as they begged Texas judges to set them free, two of Santana's husbands — her seventh, in this document, and her fourth, in this one — accused her of serial bigamy.
That fourth husband's allegations were "substantially correct," and proven "by full and satisfactory evidence," a judge said in voiding that common-law marriage in this ruling, from 2013.
Who else has called Santana a bigamist? Santana herself.
In 2000, she referred to her own simultaneous second and third husbands — an overlap she described in this document — as she she went to court to void that third marriage.
So, what happened to all those husbands?
Over the years, judges have put asunder nearly all of Santana's eight actual and claimed marriages, in the process resolving what court documents appear to show had been almost continual overlap.
Two of Santana's marriages ended in divorce.
Three were voided or annulled by judges.
And one — the marriage she claimed was her second, from 1997, to the owner of a Houston furniture store — turns out to have been an utter fiction.
That's according to the Texas marriage index for 1997, and Santana's own statement in this subsequent filing.
"I never had any kind of relationship with this woman," this second purported "husband," Patrick Rocha, told Insider. "Let alone a marriage."
That takes care of six of Santana's actual and claimed husbands. But the above math still leaves the fates of two marriages — her sixth and eighth — unaccounted for in the public record.
Insider has not been able to determine through divorce records how — or if — either of these two marriages officially ended.
Repeated attempts to reach Santana and husbands number six and eight — the latter of whom Santana married within a year of claiming her son was missing — were not successful. Santana has not been criminally charged.
"How she got anyone to marry her is beyond me," Santana's niece, Cass Postel, 50, of Houston, told Insider.
"She is one step ahead of everybody, and I don't think we're ever going to know the truth."
Here then, without further "I do," is a timeline, created through public documents, of the many, many marriages of Janie Santana.
Husband No. 1: Divorced
Anselmo Uresti, June 1985 - April, 1995
Janie Santana was 17 and truck driver Anselmo Uresti was 20 when they married in Houston on June 29, 1985. They divorced on April 28, 1995.
Their son, Charles Uresti, would die in a motorcycle accident at age 21, soon after enlisting in the Marines.
A year after her divorce, Santana's only other child was born in Houston: Rudolph "Rudy" Farias IV, subject of the ongoing missing-son mystery.
His father, Rudy Farias III, was a Houston Police officer who would be paying $1,000 per month in child support for Rudy when he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 2014, while under investigation for his overtime.
Farias and Santana do not appear to have ever married.
Husband No. 2: Fictitious
Patrick Rocha, July, 1997 - August, 2000
In August, 2000, Santana was eager to annul her marriage to husband number three.
So she told a Houston judge, in these pro-se court papers, that there was a little impediment to that marriage. And that impediment was local store owner named Patrick Rocha.
Rocha had been her husband, she told the judge, since July 15, 1997, and not by "divorce, annulment, or death" had they parted.
It's unclear what Santana's claim of a Santana-Rocha "marriage" was based on. The Texas marriage index for 1997 makes no mention of one.
And a decade later, in this document, Santana herself would turn around and deny she'd ever been married to the man, blaming the mixup on identity theft by a woman she said had stolen her driver's license at a bar in the late '90s.
Her original claim of a second marriage to Rocha would come back to haunt her, though, in 2013, when it was cited as evidence of bigamy in court papers filed by Santana's seventh husband.
Rocha, meanwhile, denies ever even having dated Santana, who he said had merely been a customer in his Houston furniture store some 25 years ago.
"I'm devastated to be even remotely associated in any way with this woman," Rocha said.
Husband No. 3: Annulled
John Paul Gonzalez, August, 1998 - February, 2001
That second "marriage" did come in handy, though, when Santana went back to court to ditch her next marriage, to John Paul Gonzalez.
A year after Santana's sworn, 2000 claim that she had said "I do" to Gonzalez without first having said "I don't" to Rocha, a judge approved the annulment she sought.
The decree of annulment was awarded on February 22, 2001 to "Janie Santana Farias."
Insider was unable to reach Gonzalez, who the decree stated had waived his right to fight the annulment at trial.
Husband No. 4: Voided
Roberto Larios, Circa 1999 - Sept. 9, 2013
Roberto Larios first appears on Santana's marital docket in 2010, when he filed a ponderously-titled "Petition for Declaratory Judgement and Division of Jointly Owned Assets."
He wanted his stuff back, in other words.
In his petition, Larios swore that he and Santana were not married, but that she owed him money, including for his investment in an unsuccessful "Santana's Sports Bar."
Santana fought back eight months later with a cross-petition that insisted that she and Larios were indeed married, and had been since sometime around 1999.
And she, Janie Santana Larios, wanted a divorce. And alimony. And most of their stuff.
Grounds? "Discord," her cross-petition said. And "cruel treatment," "adultery," and "abandonment" on top of that.
And as for Rudy, then 13?
Both she and Larios are his parents, she claimed, in demanding Larios, and his estate after his death, be "ordered to make payments for the support of the child."
A Harris County, Texas, judge found there was indeed a common-law, Santana-Larios marriage, Larios notes in a doozy of a response filed in May, 2011.
In it, Larios accuses Santana of two sets of bigamies, one in the late '90s and the other in the early teens.
He also accuses her of lying under oath when she testified that the actual bride at that wedding to Gonzalez, husband number three, was an identity-thieving female relative.
Larios countered that the relative couldn't have impersonated Santana at the wedding because she was serving a 25-year jail sentence at the time.
In a later response of her own, Santana insisted, again, that she was not a bigamist. Rather, she claimed, she was the victim of not just one, but two identity thieves.
The Santana-Larios common-law marriage was declared void in this decree, dated September 23, 2013.
The judge found Larios's arguments to be "substantially correct" and "proved by full and satisfactory evidence," the decree said.
The judge also rejected Santana's claim that Rudy Farias was Larios's son. Santana was ordered to pay Larios $43,000. Attempts to reach Larios by phone and email were unsuccessful.
And now, a brief, non-marital digression
In 2004, Santana took Bobby Duayne Lott to court seeking child support. The effort was unsuccessful, and the case was dismissed in 2005.
It's unclear which of Santana's two children, Charles or Rudy, this effort involved. Both Lott and Anselmo Uresti are mentioned as parents in Charles Uresti's obituary. Lott declined to comment on the matter.
Husband No. 5: Voided
John T. Rodriguez, Circa 2002 - June 7, 2007
When Harris County sheriff's deputy John T. Rodriguez died at age 49 on June 7, 2007, an obituary listed his survivors as "his wife Janie S. Rodriguez; his son Rudy Rodriguez and step-son Charles Uresti."
Someone using the screen name "Rudy Rodriguez" — Farias would then have been 10 years old — posted a lengthy, all-caps tribute, signed "YOUR LITTLE SON RUDY," on the legacy.com post.
A month later, Santana stepped forward to claim Rodriguez's north Houston house, where she and Rudy had also been living, declaring herself to have been his common-law wife of five years.
The estate battle took three years to reach a settlement.
Santana agreed to drop any claim that the two had been married. She also dropped her claim that Rodriguez was Rudy Farias' adopted father.
In return for backing off, "Ms. Santana would have received title" to 10023 Valley Lake Drive, Houston, where she allegedly hid Farias, according to one court document describing the estate battle.
But Santana "breached the agreement," including by failing to pay the estate $8,000, the document said.
Santana's seventh husband would cite this attempt to claim Rodriguez as a common-law husband in the 2013 petition he filed to void his own marriage. calling it evidence of bigamy.
Husband No. 6: Status unclear
Sucre Amaury Diaz, Dec. 5, 2009 - ?
Public records show that on December 5, 2009, Sucre Amaury Diaz, 48, married Janie Santana Rodriguez, 41, in Harris County, Texas.
Yes, Santana was still using the legal name Rodriguez, despite agreeing to no longer claim he was her common-law husband.
The status of this marriage is unclear.
Insider could find no record of a Diaz-Santana divorce in any of the jurisdictions where it would need to be filed, including in the three counties in Florida where Diaz has lived, or in the one county – Harris, Texas – where Santana has lived. Attempts to reach Diaz and family members were not successful.
This sixth Santana marriage is also mentioned as evidence of bigamy in the seventh husband's 2013 petition to void his own marriage.
Husband No. 7: Divorced
Gilbert S. Quiroz, October 23, 2012 - May 1, 2015.
It was just ten days short of his first wedding anniversary that an Arizona Air National guardsman named Gilbert S. Quiroz sued to void what he called his "purported" marriage to Santana.
The marriage is void, he argued, due to the overlapping of Santana's marriages to five other men: Rocha, Gonzalez, Rodriguez, Larios, and Diaz.
The court battle between Santana and Quiroz would last some two years.
At one point, Santana swore swore under oath, in an affidavit that Quiroz had used sex to trick her into thinking the relationship was still on, "so that I would give him money to pay his debts which he constantly held over my head."
"The entire time he was telling me lies, he was cavorting with another woman," Santana claimed.
After a November, 2014 default judgement in Quiroz's favor, Santana asked for a do-over, explaining that she'd missed the trial because she hadn't been told the date.
When her request for a retrial was denied, Santana sued Quiroz for divorce. and continued flinging mud.
She accused Quiroz of "extreme cruelty" and adultery, and demanded "a disproportionate share of the parties' estate" because, she claimed, the breakup was his fault.
Quiroz could not be reached for comment, and his attorney on the case declined to comment.
A divorce was granted in Harris County on May 1, 2015, just three months after Santana reported her son missing.
Before the year was out, she married again.
Husband No. 8
Robert Ortega, December 8, 2015 - ?
Just nine months after reporting that her son, Rudy Farias, had vanished — an alleged ruse Houston police say she kept up for eight years — Santana walked down the aisle again.
Her new husband was Robert Ortega, a longtime licensed pipefitter from California.
Ortega left a wife of 20 years for Santana, according to a relative who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals from other family members.
It's unclear how they met, though Ortega does travel a lot for work, the relative said.
Santana's niece, Postel, told Insider that Ortega and Santana shared two houses — the north Houston house she inherited from Rodriguez, and Ortega's own home in Humble, Texas.
Postel believes Santana was able to shuffle Rudy between homes, hiding him from Ortega for two years. One day in 2018, Ortega "saw Rudy and freaked out." At that point, Ortega left, Postel said.
"He did mention that he saw Rudy, even though he was supposedly missing," the Ortega relative told Insider. "That's when he left."
Ortega is now living in Arizona and is in a new relationship. He has told family members that he and Santana are no longer married, the relative said, "but nobody knows what's true anymore."
Insider could find no record of a Santana-Ortega divorce in any of the jurisdictions where it would need to be filed, including in the three counties in California and Arizona where Ortega has lived, or in the one county – Harris, Texas – where Santana has lived.
Repeated attempts to reach Ortega and additional family members were not successful.