Transcript of Bloody Triple Murder Madness - El Rancho, New Mexico

Hello everybody, and welcome back to "Small Town Murder"— Express!

Yay, Choo Choo!

Yay indeed, Jimmy. Yay indeed. My name is James Petrigallo, I'm here with my co-host.

I'm Jimmy Wissman.

Thank you, folks, so much for joining us today on an absolutely nuts edition of "Small Town Murder" Express. As always, 10 pounds of murder in a 2-pound bag, and we have a just a diabolically crazy, gross.

Terrific.

Okay.

Let's go on a trip, shall we?

Yeah.

We are going to Jimmy's favorite state in the 50.

Fuck.

You know which one that is, don't you, Jimmy?

Dusty bitch in New Mexico.

By the way, he has no idea what we're doing. All I have to say is Jimmy's least favorite state, and it's New Mexico.

So bad.

He hates it so much.

They call it the land of enchantment. Enchant this. Fuck that place.

It's not very one time driving through New Mexico, it was a sunny day and it was warm, but in the shadow of a bush there was some snow, and that was this much enchanting. I was like, that's kind of enchanting.

I suppose that's kind of cool to see. Yeah, to see snow on a desert floor is so weird.

80 miles an hour going, just all the enchantment was gone a second later, and it was back to New Mexico. So I get what you're saying.

Yeah. If you get to one of those gas station truck stops that's embedded in a rock.

In a rock.

And they have the fake deer and antelope and.

It's weird.

What are you doing? What? Why is this why does this place suck so bad?

This is El Rancho, New Mexico.

Oh yeah.

El Rancho. Not the El Rancho Hotel, which is.

No?

By Gallup. This is different. This is in North Central New Mexico.

Oh, okay.

Up top there. Yeah, 25 minutes to Santa Fe.

Uh-huh.

I know the way to Santa Fe, and it's through this shithole, apparently, so that's the way to go.

It's your own? It's gotta be.

It's an hour. I don't know. I just know it's 25 minutes to San Jose, about an hour and 20 to Albuquerque, and three hours and 20.

Santa Fe, not San Jose.

Not San I know. That's the joke.

Got it.

Yeah.

Got it.

So I had to stick something in there. And three hours. 'Cause we were talking about that when we were in San Jose.

Yeah.

We brought that up. Yeah. We were three hours and 20 minutes to Farmington, New Mexico, which was our last episode there.

Last one.

Yes. Episode 701, The Meaningless Mutilation Murders.

Uh-huh.

That was weird stuff. This is in Santa Fe County, area code 505, which is that the whole state, I think?

Probably. There can't be that many people there.

No, there really isn't. Population here, definitely not that many. 1,342.

Wow.

It's a small place. It's a very small place. It's in like the they counted in the Santa Fe statistical area because it's sitting out by itself out there. Median household income here, pretty low. 20,000 under the national average is $48,068. Median home cost, also well below the national average, $240,100, which is.

That's pretty steep.

A little steep if you're making 48 grand a year for your whole family. That's tough. History of this town. Well, it started out here in the 1300s. The Puebloan people, Pueblos, were here, and yeah, they moved from the mountains down into the river valleys to farm. There's local streams and, you know, irrigation they were doing here. The area was first part of Spanish New Mexico, then Mexican territory, then became the part of the US after 1948, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Oh.

There's been a lot of kind of strife between the Spanish settlers and their.

And the Pueblo Indians.

And the people who are from there, yeah. So during which a lot of the many northern Pueblos were abandoned, and then there was resettlements, and then there was a smallpox epidemic that wiped a lot of people out.

Oh, goddamn it.

There's a lot. It was an awful big deal here. In after World War II, the Santa Fe metro area kind of got a little bit bigger because also it's close to Los Alamos, which was the huge site of the Manhattan Project and all this government stuff. So I think this is a place like if you're in the government and you're going to Los Alamos, you probably fly into Santa Fe and then go over there. So that's how it works. Now, reviews of this town, there are no reviews of this town that I could find.

Is that right?

But I found a couple reviews of the county, which will give you an idea of what's going on here. Here's five stars. It's a great place to live, other than rent being so high and minimum wage doesn't cover. Either you are poor or you are rich. No in between here. Which could be said.

There's rich people there. Wow.

That could be said pretty much that sounds like a description of America as a whole at this point.

Oh yeah, most places at this point.

Here's five stars, and this is a great one 'cause this could be like Sedona. There's several places that this could go. And Santa Fe, New Mexico's got a lot of that mystical spirituality shit going on.

Yeah.

Not religion, but like, you know.

No, just in touch with the.

Turquoise and the earth.

The vortex.

Well, here this review. More crystals, more crystals, more crystals, more crystals, more crystals, more crystals, more

crystals, more crystals.

That's the whole review.

Is that what they do there? Is it a crystal town?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just like Sedona. And then here's two stars. There are people driving through Santa Fe smoking products laced by companies and citizens alike with nanometals, gallium, aluminum, neodymium, beryllium, et cetera. Chaff and other pesticides, glyphosates. Taking that it is only one part of the United States' geographic territory, they would have to put check on that to be rated anything undit health, really.

That person smoke.

I don't know what's in the water in northern New Mexico, but it's making this person insane.

Some sort of phosphate.

I don't know what's happening. Things to do here. We got the Santa Fe Spring Festival.

Santa Fe's got a spring fest.

A spring. They have all sorts of fests. They got a wine festival, a harvest festival. Well, this, the big attraction here is to watch the annual sheep shearing. Let's watch a guy.

Do they only do that once a year?

Let's watch a guy shave a sheep, I guess, at this thing. They use historic methods from centuries past. I guess they pin it down and scrape it with a sharp rock, which doesn't sound great.

Big straight razor.

Yeah. See traditional weaving and dying demonstrations, along with child-centered crafts. Jesus, this sounds boring. We got a guy playing live Spanish guitar at 10:00 a.m.

Sure.

You got a meet Harley the Buffalo.

Oh, what's he doing?

The Buffalo. You go meet him. He's a big Buffalo. I don't know. Civil War infantry demonstration.

Yeah.

All right. The Lightning Boy Foundation, which is hoop dancing. I don't know.

Oh, native hoop dancing. That's what I do.

Yeah, there you go.

Really fucking cool.

Okay. That makes that's a good deal here. The Entra Flamenco Youth Dancers.

Yeah.

And folk dancing from New Mexico, Baileys Day Salon. So there we go.

I feel like just let me know when the hoop dancing is around.

Yeah, let's do that.

And then I'm going back home.

Tell me when the sheep's being sheared so I can avoid that, please. I don't want to see that awful torture.

That looks horrible.

Oh, yeah.

Have you seen that?

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

They look so helpless and I realize it's probably helping them.

Well, it just looks like it's a scene in Stripes when they everybody goes to get their hair cut for the army. That's what it reminds me of, where they're like sad fucking hairs flying everywhere.

Yeah.

It just looks so sad. That said, let's talk about a murder here, everybody.

Here we go.

All right. Let's start out and talk about some nice people. I'll tell you right away, they're nice. We're gonna start out in 2011.

Oh.

All right. We're gonna talk about Lloyd Ortiz. He's 55 years old, and his wife, Dixie Ortiz, 53 years old. They've been married for 34 years.

Wow.

So I mean, they got married young and stayed married. They have two kids, two girls at some point here. Lloyd runs a tile company, and Dixie runs activities at a nursing home.

Oof.

So they're salt of the earth, these people.

Yeah.

So between the two of them, they're pretty busy. If you run your own business, you're very busy, and it's a tile business is not glamorous. It's hard work. It's real work.

That'll nick your hands up a lot. That's tough.

Oh, your knees are gonna hurt. Your back's gonna hurt. It's a life of pain, and I guess there's plenty to do at the nursing home also here.

Oh, meeting a new person every day.

That's yeah.

And saying goodbye to somebody every day. That's horrible.

Every single day. Yeah.

Yeah.

So Lloyd basically works. He's up with the sun working. I mean, that's how it is. And he works a lot of times till after 9:00 at night. So he's working 14-hour days.

Gotcha. Yeah.

He has Ortiz Tile Contractors. It operates out of the family home, and nothing glamorous. Just making a good living for your family. That's all he's doing here.

Wow. So thin set.

So much thin set. So Dixie works in a nursing home in Los Alamos as the activities director, and her daughter, Angela, said that Dixie didn't see the job even as work. She just liked helping people.

Really?

Didn't even see it as a job.

Wow.

Yep. One of the coworkers said she has such a big heart and a fierce advocate for the elderly.

Yeah.

She just loves old people and wants to wipe their butts.

My son's doing that right now. It's a tough gig 'cause they.

Yeah, it's tough.

And you also have to say no a lot to them 'cause they offer you a bunch of their shit.

Oh, yeah.

When they like you, and you have to you're not allowed to accept that.

No, no. That would be can't do that.

Man, wrote my son a $17,000 check.

Yeah. You can't be you can't be a prison guard and take shit from the inmates. Like, and that's generally what you're doing here. It's not gonna work.

My son came home and he goes, "I can't accept this?" I'm like, "No." He goes, "I sure would like to." I was like, "I'm sure I would."

Bet you would. Yeah. So when yeah, they just said she's a great lady. So they have two daughters here in the '70s. They have Angela and Cherie. C-H-E-R-I-E. So Cherie.

Cherie maybe?

Cherie maybe. Yeah. Either way, we're gonna call her we'll call her Cherie for now.

Yeah.

Okay. 'Cause she's gonna come up a lot. Now, 1989, Cherie and Angela are teenagers, and that is when somehow Lloyd and Dixie come across a seven-month-old baby boy named Steven, who's got apparently no parents.

What?

And is a baby that they can adopt. And apparently, Steven, this is how nice they are. This is not, oh, a brand new shiny baby boy. This kid has problems, medical problems that are gonna persist his whole life, and they're gonna sign up for this. So.

Where'd they come across this baby?

That is that I'm not positive.

Okay.

Something tells me it has something to do with church because they're big into church. So he had cerebral palsy, apparently.

Oh.

Which is not gonna get better.

Couple of angels.

Oof.

Yeah, that doesn't heal.

No. The left side of his body doesn't work very well. Cherie said, "My brother, he was a shaken baby who wasn't even supposed to live. He had so many mental and physical disabilities to begin with. That's who he is."

Oh my god.

They were told that he's probably never gonna walk. He might never speak.

Because somebody shook him?

He had problems to begin with, and I think that is why someone got frustrated and shook him, which is horrific.

Oh my god.

That happens a lot. Kids with a lot of medical problems tend to get abused more because they're driving you crazy.

It's frustrating. Yeah, you can't communicate with them.

People snap. Yeah, which is horrible, obviously.

Wow.

So I mean, to take this on and it's not this, it's a person, but to take that baby on is you have to be a fucking angel.

Yeah.

An angel. You know what I mean? You know, like we just adopted a cat, and there was cats, and we're like, there's some cats that need like medication, and we're like, "Ooh, we gotta do that every day? That's tough." And as shitty as it is to say, but that's what you think about. You know what I mean?

Yeah. When you're donating your time, you have to understand and be honest with yourself what you're capable of donating because.

Exactly. That's what I'm saying.

People sign up for so much, and then they're like, "Oh, no."

Yes.

And then the cat gets rehomed again.

That's right.

Or the kid gets rehomed again. You can't do that to a kid.

You can't do that. And that's why that's what happens with a lot of foster kids.

Oh.

That's why they're in 20 homes by the time they're 15.

Right.

It's horrible. So it's gonna take a lot of work, obviously, but he apparently comes out and is way more capable and able than anyone would have ever thought he was.

Wow.

He walks. He talks. He's got a great personality. He's very well liked. He.

Josh Blue.

Yeah. You could call him like Josh if you don't know who Josh Blue is. He's a funny comic. He was a great guy and a good friend of ours.

Amazing.

And just a wonderful guy. I love him a lot. He's a great guy.

Very capable.

Oh, he does shit. I mean, he wouldn't he has cerebral palsy, and he's a comic.

He has children.

He has children that he fucking can't stand. He's hilarious. He's just a great guy. And he plays soccer.

And he made that.

He plays soccer, and he's like good too.

Yeah. Plays for the US. Yeah.

We saw him hurt Ben Roy. That's pretty funny.

He can throw.

He can throw.

Holy shit.

Punches. He was like, "Jesus Christ, man. What the hell? Stop." Yeah. Don't get Josh drunk and let him take a swing on you. He can do some damage.

He'll blacken your eyes.

He will. So at church, the pastor said he would walk in and greet everyone who came in because he was like the church mascot. Everybody loved him because he like overcame all of this stuff. And he had been through a couple of brain surgeries. He had constant debilitating headaches.

Wow.

So for all this and this is we're talking early 2000s.

Yeah.

Doctors prescribed him medical marijuana.

Atta boy.

For his symptoms. So his family had a medical marijuana card for him and a license to grow it as well because there's not really any.

And to cultivate.

There's nowhere to get it in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico, really. So it's fucking back then.

I think that was the fourth state that got it, right?

Oh, probably. Yeah.

I think it went Washington, Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico. I think that's true.

California had medical too pretty early.

Oh, there was California first, right?

Yeah. I think they were one of the first anyway.

Yeah.

So they had a locked fence at the back of their property where they grew weed plants for Steven.

Yeah.

They had 17 legal plants growing back there.

Awesome.

Yeah. And he had the chronic head pain, and apparently this helped him. By 21 years old, so 2011, where we started, Steven is he still lives at home with his parents, which.

Yeah.

That's fine. But he's doing great though. He really is. He's an outgoing person. He has friends. He has you know, he's made a life of what they said that he wouldn't have one. So now Cherie or Cherie, however you will call her Cherie, Cherie is the one daughter. She lives on the other side of the fence from them. She lives behind like in the house in front of or behind.

Back there.

Yeah. With her husband, Jessie, Jessie Rios, and they have a couple of kids as well. Yeah. And they have the other daughter, Angela, that we talked about too, Lloyd and Dixie. So now Cherie's son, Robert, is friends with a boy named Nicholas Ortiz. No relation. Ortiz is an extremely common name in this area. I was reading like it's like Smith or Jones or something. It's as common as it gets. So no relation.

It's part of who they are. Yeah.

Yeah. And apparently, the daughters didn't even mind when they brought this baby with disabilities in, and they were like, "Oh, that's fine." They took to him and tried to help him as well.

All together. Yeah.

Great people. Very nice. So Nicholas is 16 years old. He's a little 5'5", little guy.

Yeah.

Not a very big guy here. He grew up a few miles from El Rancho, and he also went to church, and that's how he knew them, was through church. One of the pastors said he was one of the most eager helpers that they had at church. He was really into helping out. His pastor said Nicholas was there almost pretty consistently. Those are that's a weird word salad. Almost pretty consistently.

Almost pretty.

Almost pretty consistently is a lot. Wow. And always willing to help if we were doing something at church. "What do you need me to do?" Or he would go to the youth pastor and say, "What can I help out with this? What can I do here?" And constantly wanting to be part of what we were doing, he showed himself to be a very pleasant young man.

Right.

All right. So Nicholas is a very pleasant young man. He's got a lot of like social media, a lot of like inspirational shit and biblical shit and stuff like that.

Wow.

"Your future is created by what you do today, not tomorrow." Shit of that nature. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Corporate motivational posters.

That kind of thing. Yeah. Little kitty dangling.

Yeah.

Also, he claims to be in a gang here at 16, but there really, as we'll find out, there really isn't any gang 'cause there's nobody really around to be in a gang with him.

Right.

It's just him and another friend of his, and they call themselves Sir Trace or Sir Tresse, South 13.

Sir Tresse? They think they're in Sir Tresse.

That's what they're calling themselves.

Okay.

This is in 2011 too, so.

Yeah.

You know.

SUR, that one. Sir Tresse.

Yes.

Okay. All right.

Exactly. His friend is Jose Ribel. He's 15 years old, and that's the kid he hangs out with, and they're the gang.

Just two dudes.

It's two dudes. There's a chick later we'll talk about too, but she's older, and she's maybe the most pathetic person in this story 'cause she's like 23 hanging out with 16-year-old boys, which.

Nice.

That the psychology there, you don't have to say I mean, 16-year-old girls don't want anything to do with 16-year-old boys. What the fuck does a 23-year-old girl want to do with a 16-year-old boy? That's terrible.

Oh, they're hard, James. They're badass.

Yeah. They're real hard. Yeah. So Cherie and Jessie take pity on Nicholas. He had a tough home life, but he seems to be a nice kid despite that. Frequent bouts.

Mr. Tresse, yeah.

Yeah. Besides that. Frequent bouts of volatility, a lot of fighting at home, very chaotic home environment. So Cherie offers him a room at their house. "You can live with us."

Okay.

To get out of that environment.

Which are a drywall.

Yeah. And he's friends with her son. They go to the same church. He seems like a nice kid. They want to help him out. Their parents did that, so why not? So he lives there for several months, has his own room, and he even he spends a lot of time over at Lloyd and Dixie's house too.

Yeah.

'Cause they're on the other side of the fence, and they love taking in a stray. So.

Sure do.

They feed him all the time, and they like having him there and all that kind of thing. They drove him around wherever he needed to go. Later on, the relationship is described as he had a real tight relationship with the Ortiz family. He was almost like one of their children, and he loved both of them. Both Dixie and Lloyd got along really well with them.

Yeah.

And nobody really disputes that here. Then out of nowhere, they started noticing things missing once in a while.

Oh, Nick.

Little things missing. Cherie and Jessie noticed cash disappearing. They walked in on Nicholas going through their shit, like rifling the drawers. They're like, "Hey, come on."

Oh, no.

So they said, "Okay. We're not gonna throw you out. We know you're fucked up, and we know you come from a bad environment and all that kind of thing. So here's what we're gonna do. You need money? Tell you what. You do chores, and we'll pay you. And then you can make money that way." Which is not a bad angle giving the kid a chance to redeem himself. If he just needs money and didn't know how to go about it, and that's all he ever knew to do was to steal it, maybe you can teach him not to steal it. And if he takes to that, great. If not, which he probably won't, fine. But you never know. Maybe that'll help.

Was there a punishment or just the.

No, they told him.

Just the avenue of success?

No, they just gave him an avenue of success and said, "If you want to get money, you do things, and you earn money. That's how you get " They were like teaching him a life lesson that they didn't think he knew of you have to earn your money, basically. But it doesn't stop the stealing, obviously. At one point, he stole a .22 caliber gun. He stole a jug of coins. Yeah. He admits later on that he broke in the house through an open window and stole the gun. Now, early June 2011, about two weeks before Father's Day, his behavior starts really getting on Lloyd and Dixie's nerves a little bit.

Almost, yeah. They're ready to start talking about giving up.

Well, at one point, they found him Lloyd and Dixie found him hiding in the backyard, and he didn't use the gate. He didn't knock. He climbed the fence and was hiding in the yard. And they're like, "Okay. This is you can't do that."

That's sneaking around.

Yeah. Come knock on the door. That's fine.

Yeah.

So Lloyd told him to, "Leave my family alone and go back to your parents. Like go back from whence you came, essentially."

We're giving up on you.

Cherie sent him home, said, "We can't do it." This is about two weeks before Father's Day.

Oh, boy.

He the way Nicholas put it was, he said he lost contact with the family, quote, "After he got blamed for stuff that he didn't do."

Oh.

He says he never did all that. He said, "Lloyd just told me I left up my trust with them and not to go near them anymore."

Wow.

I don't know what that mean. I maybe messed up.

He got told.

He was trying to effed up, something like that. So that's how it goes. And he even said he told the cops who talked to him about the thefts. He said that, "If I ever find out who did it, I'll call you guys and tell you. I didn't do it. So I'll even I'll help."

He's gonna look for the real killer.

He's gonna look for the real killer on the golf course.

Yeah.

Now, Jose Ribel, his gang brother there, the two of them with their two-man gang, he's got a cousin, and that is Nicholas's girlfriend for a while and then kind of on and off whatever the fuck they are. She's Ashley Mae Ribel, and she's goddamn 23 years old fucking around with a 16-year-old, which is.

Unbelievable.

The pinnacle of pathetic for a young woman. I mean, pinnacle. That is that's sad.

What does she.

You don't have to do that.

To do that.

Oh, boy. Yeah. I mean, the psychology there is pretty goddamn obvious of what's going on here, so.

Yeah. She's seen or been through.

Yeah.

Participated in.

Something's gone wrong here.

Experiences has got the best of her.

Now, she was a church kid starting out too. The same pastor who said good things about Nicholas said she started coming to church as a little girl. Actually, her and her sisters, we absolutely loved. She was always at the church. Always. I don't think a day went by that her and her sisters were never at the church. They would come and clean. They would come and help us with the yard. They would help us with performances, with dramas. She went to school with the pastor's sons and grew up with them. She went to prom with the pastor's oldest son.

How about that?

Yeah. He said as she got older, she became less and less involved in the church to the point where she never came back again. I would hear bits and pieces that she was running with some of the wrong people, the wrong crowds, drinking, drug use, even to the point where she was getting involved in doing things a little bit criminal.

Oh, wow.

So she went from church girl to like in the wild guys, which why would kids spend all their time at church when things are bad at home?

Yeah.

And I mean every day. I don't mean going to church once I mean, if you show up every day.

Yeah.

I just want to help with the yard work. I bet you things aren't great at home.

Why don't you have anything else teenager to do?

Exactly. Or just kids at all. It just seems like that's a to them, they caught that as this is a safe place.

Right.

Where people don't there's not chaos here, essentially. So for them at the time, for a lot of people, it's not a safe place if you've seen anything about the Catholic Church.

Sometimes it's very dangerous.

But for them, it was a refuge. So by her mid by her 20s, she's got felony convictions, burglary, drug charges.

What?

And she's fucking a 16-year-old. So you can count child molestation on that too.

Shot that one too.

Yeah. Gets a check on that one too.

Also a felony.

Also a felony. She also knows Lloyd and Dixie because she grew up with Steven and went to school with him. She's two years older than Steven, so she knows Steven. And she said that when and she liked Lloyd and Dixie too because she said when her own mother died, Lloyd and Dixie helped pay for the funeral.

Wow.

These people are fucking angels. They're saints, these people.

They take care of everybody within their orbit.

That they can possibly do.

Yeah.

They do. It's that's amazing. So they help bury her mother, and she grew up with Steven. Now, she lives in the area and drives a gray car. That's important later. Okay.

Yeah.

Jose Ribel, he's 15 years old, Ashley's first cousin and Nicholas's friend and gang brother and huge I can't make air quotes that big. Like here, I'll use both hands for one.

Yeah.

Both hands. Those are your air quotes there.

Gang.

Gang. So basically, they're two they're cousins, sort of, kind of, not really, but they kind of think of themselves as cousins. And the other cousins, Jose and Ashley, are described as best friends who like to smoke a lot. So her days consist of hanging out with 15-year-old boys and smoking weed as a 23-year-old girl. Yeah. Now, Jose has a history of violence against his own family and has threatened Ashley in the past and threatened other people in the past in his family.

A little vulnerable.

Yeah. And he said that at one point this is wild. I guess at one point, there's a documented thing, allegedly, that something happened in the neighborhood, and Jose was worried that somebody was gonna tell on him.

Oh.

So he told somebody, "You see that baby there? That baby will die if you're a rat," allegedly. I don't know.

Right.

Yeah.

Jose's hard.

Yeah. And a relative of his named Alyssa later said Jose once showed her a tattoo that he had in his teens.

Yeah.

And he said to her that this represents the three souls I took.

Okay.

15-year-old bluster. I'm tough. Stay away from me.

I've got the mark of the three souls.

Three souls I took. And Jose is left-handed, by the way, just like the gray car. That's just something to put in his file, okay?

Yeah.

Now, Sunday, June 19th, 2011 is Father's Day in New Mexico and everywhere else too.

Nice time to be alive. Yeah.

Nice time. Now, on Father's Day, Cherie makes enchiladas for her dad.

Oh.

It's Father's Day. So she walks them over from her side of the property to her parents' side and lets herself in. She has the spare key. They go back and forth. We don't know exactly when this was. I don't know if this is the morning or there's been reports that it was as late as 7:00 PM. So anywhere from like 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM, this could have happened. We're not positive somehow. But she walks in, and she said, quote, "I walked in, and I was like, 'Mom?' And then I walked over to her in the master bedroom to shake her, and her head was blown."

Oh, boy.

And so I ran to the kitchen to check for my brother and dad, and I thought my it was my dad laying on the floor in his underwear because his face was so blown off. And I ran home screaming, screaming for my husband.

Oh, man.

So she said she walks in and sees horror, obviously. Unidentifiable faces. That's insane.

Yeah. A male in underwear, face gone.

Face gone.

A mom in bed, face gone.

Face gone. Now, we find out that the body in the kitchen is not her father. It's actually.

It's Steven.

It's poor Steven.

That's fucking awful.

As if he hasn't been through enough. But she was the damage was so bad, she couldn't tell her father from Steven, who aren't even related.

Yeah.

So Jesse comes here, and he's the one who said to her, "Listen, that's Steven in the kitchen. Your dad is dead too, but he's in the backyard." So she was like, "Oh, thank God. That wasn't my father." And he's like, "Not so fast."

Hold on. Yeah.

Yeah.

Found him too.

She said, "I started to " or he said, "I started to run toward her, and that's when I saw a hole close to her temple and dried blood down her face." Dried blood, okay?

Yeah.

So somebody calls 911. The New Mexico State Police respond because there's no police force in El Rancho. So they find Dixie. She's in the master bedroom in her pajamas with trauma to her right temple. They find Lloyd in the backyard near a tree with injuries to his head and upper body. They find Steven face down on the kitchen floor, struck repeatedly in the head and shoulder area, and he has a deep defensive gash on his thumb. So Steven was fighting back no matter. Which is saying something.

No gun?

That's this is the thing here. Lloyd is struck seven times. Nicholas or not Nicholas. Dixie. Dickalis. Dixilis.

Yeah.

Dixie was in the master bedroom. She is struck twice in the head near the right temple, never got up. And then Steven, they think that must have heard the commotion of whatever and came out of his room in his underwear and tried to fight off the whoever the intruder is and had a deep defensive gash on his thumb. They said he is struck 17 times.

Just aggressive for a guy against a guy that's got physical ailments.

Yeah. Lots of them. Yeah.

Yeah.

That are pretty substantial.

Wow.

And this is like we'll find out what the weapon is too, but it's an absolutely fucking brutal.

Devastating weapon. Yeah.

Horrifying. It looks like something that's not even real. Like it's you just like a horror movie they made it for a prop, but it's you could buy it at Home Depot. It's fucking crazy. So Lloyd's wallet is on the kitchen counter next to Steven's body. It's full of money, by the way.

Huh.

Because he deals a lot in cash and things like that and for his business. There's also safes in the house, and none of them have been touched.

What the fuck?

None of the safes. One officer said it was the worst crime scene he's ever been called to. He said, "This is three people. The ferocity of it was just horrifying." There's no gunshot residue and no obvious weapon because at first, they thought these are there's holes in these people, a lot of them. They thought they were shot, and then they realized they're not shot. There's no forced entry anyone could point to. They don't know what happened. Now, they're thinking maybe this was a robbery gone wrong, but like we said, Lloyd's.

It's all kind of money.

Wallet is full of cash. The two safes in the house, one safe held $4,000 and the other had $80,000 in it. So.

Wow.

Yeah. A good amount of cash.

They were doing great.

Both were untouched. 17 marijuana plants out back, untouched.

What?

Nobody pulled their weed plants, nothing. And it was now, the safe was pretty secret. Like Cherie and Jesse and the other kids, nobody knew about that.

Didn't know about it. Okay.

No. But they have all this stuff, so they're like, "If the motive was robbery, whoever did this did a terrible job."

Yeah.

Awful. Now, they talked to Cherie and Jesse first because they found the bodies, and their stories too are a little weird, and so they want to get this locked in here. They say they arrived home just after midnight. They went for an evening at the casino and got home and were watching a movie.

It always after a casino.

It's always good.

Never go to the casino.

Never ever.

It's always bad.

It's always bad. These people that live in like the middle of nowhere like this, that's all there is to do is the fucking casino. It's open all the time. It's horrible. So they just shit all their money away. It's terrible. So Jesse says to the cops that he heard some noise coming from the other side of the fence. So he went out there and stood there for a minute, and then he went back in.

Waited to hear some more and then heard nothing else, so he went inside.

Went back in. But some time goes by in the evening, and Jesse says, "I left something out of my story, guys."

Oh.

Yeah. He said, "All right. Remember how I said I heard a noise and I went out and just stood there for a minute and came in?"

Yeah.

Kind of lied about that. Why would you lie at all about this?

Why did you lie?

He said that, "Okay. I heard a noise outside. The dog started barking, so I got up and grabbed my gun and looked outside," he said.

Yeah.

He said he saw a gray car driving away, and he heard someone shout from the road, "Hurry up. Let's go." Okay. So Jesse said, "So I had my gun, and I jumped in my truck and followed this gray car until they started driving crazy, and I lost the car."

Oh.

Then I drove home. And he said, "So I just went back to sleep figuring it was teenagers messing around, doing some vandalism or something. So we just went back to sleep."

Didn't go look to see what they vandalized.

No. Just went in there. Now, the officers were like, "What an odd thing to leave out of your story."

Right.

Like a potential actual.

Anything. Yeah.

That's why would you leave there was people there saying, "Hurry up. Let's go driving away. I chased them with a gun through the streets, and I'm just gonna leave that part out." Not only leave it out, but replace it with, "I stood outside for a second and then came back to sleep."

And heard nothing and went inside.

It's very weird. So what they're doing the police do not initially release the actual cause of death stuff. They actually release publicly that the family had been shot. That's what they say first because they want to keep this particular detail. So they said that three people were found shot to death, and the state police were trying to determine whether it was a homicide or a murder-suicide at this point still, which is completely crazy when you hear the scene because this would be impossible to do to yourself. So this is total bullshit.

So whoever did it's got to be going, "What?"

Yeah. "What the fuck?" So then, according to Cherie and Jesse, about 14 hours after the police finished searching the house, the state office of the medical examiner recommended crime scene cleanup companies to them because I'm sure he gets a I'm sure there's some kickback system in this, but they know this type of thing. So the cleaner showed up that evening, which is the same 24-hour period as the killings pretty much. They were still there when state police came back to search the house again for a murder weapon.

Really?

And they're like, "It's all been cleaned. That's it."

Yeah. We're just looking for a murder weapon. Keep sponging.

Yep. A report said that noted that the carpet from the bedroom was already in a biohazard bag by the time the investigators returned, which is all shit they need. So everything's being bagged by a cleaning service, and that's not good.

No. The house has been bagged and bleached. You can't there's nothing for you now.

Done. Nothing. No forensics, no DNA, shit like that. Now, they end up finding a weapon, and it's definitely the murder weapon, in a field next to the house. It was just tossed. Not buried, not hidden, just thrown in a field. Not even with some brush on top of it. Nothing. It is an axe. It's a Maddox, I believe they're called. The one that is it's curved. The axe blade is curved like a nasty-looking fucking murder weapon, and out of the back of it is just a giant straight fucking pick.

It's a pickaxe.

A pickaxe. But the way it's round, it's crazy. It looks like a murder weapon.

It's like a fireman's weapon in like a really raging fire.

Yeah. This is like in the murder weapon section of Home Depot. You find this over there.

Oh, you know what it looks like? It looks like what wildfire people carry.

Yes. Yeah. Back to this because we mentioned this earlier in a different episode this week. The Last Action Hero, it's the axe that the guy has that he throws at Schwarzenegger as he ducks and it goes over his face. It's that axe.

I think that's double axe on that.

That might be double. But one side is like that and then a giant fucking pick.

Yeah. And the other's jetted out. Yeah.

It's disturbing. And it is covered in fucking blood in this field.

Wow.

Covered in blood. They find out it has three DNA strands on it: Dixie, Lloyd, and Steven. None of anybody else. No fingerprints from anybody either.

Wow.

So June 19th, somewhere between June 19th and June 21st, so somewhere in this time when all this becomes public, a teenager named Eric Zubia or Zubia, he goes to the police and says that, "I got a phone call. This kid I know says he did it."

Oh.

Yeah. He said, "Nicholas. Nicholas Ortiz said I killed those I did it." And the cops are like, "Yeah, right. Fine." Because this is what kids do. They brag about shit they didn't do to try to sound tough. You shouldn't brag about a triple murder probably. That's not bright. But kids brag about shit, and the police completely just blow it off. They write it down and everything, but they're like, "He didn't do this. Sorry."

They're not following up on it.

No. So he goes there on June 21st to tell them that. Now, a week after the murder, that's when the medical examiner and everybody, they confirm it was actually blunt force trauma and penetrative wounds with the back of the pickaxe.

Stabbing.

It's fucking crazy. And they say that state investigators say they have no suspect and no motive for this.

Wow.

So for the next year, this stays in this crazy limbo, stagnant state.

No worries.

Swamp water for a year. But police are narrowing in on who they think did it, and that's Cherie and Jesse. Those are their suspects based on Jesse's lie and Cherie found the bodies.

Cherie found Jesse.

That's bad. So it's not good. So it's very and everybody in town thinks that they did it too. It's like apparently a weird rumor. They said, as a matter of fact, the pastor of the church here said that for the next year and change, basically, the daughter was the only person that anyone talked about as a suspect in town. And in church, people gossip and they do all that, only the daughter. Police never name them publicly as suspects, but that's who everybody thinks is a suspect.

And Cherie and Jesse are the beneficiaries.

Part of them. Yeah, at least. So if you want to know if you're a suspect, that's a way to find out. If you get the check, you're less likely to be a suspect than if you're not. If it's frozen, you're a fucking suspect. So it's interesting. Now, the police had to put in writing that they weren't suspects. Cherie said, "Everything my dad worked for is going to be repossessed, foreclosed because of this, because of the cops' mistakes." And Jesse said, "I feel that the police, if they would have done a thorough job, they could have eliminated us the first day."

Yeah.

You shouldn't have lied also.

Right.

A year after the murders, psychic Sylvia Brown, remember her on TV all the time, she made a televised appearance to talk about the case and make a psychic prediction. She named Jesse Rios as the murderer.

You bitch.

Cherie's husband. Not fucking television, which is crazy.

Yeah.

Daytime.

I don't fuck anything up.

Daytime TV. So people really think of that because Jesse had a gun. He had a truck. He said the first statement left out that chase. He admitted that he and Lloyd argued on occasion, but he said it was just for petty things, and it would be they lived on top of each other. People are going to argue a little bit, and he said it was forgotten once it was over. So police searched Jesse and Cherie's house. Nothing came back forensically. Casino footage from the night before lines up with the couple's account of exactly where they were when they said they were, but that was well before the murder would have happened anyway.

Doesn't change anything. You were at home when it happened.

Yeah. So the police, after a while, start to kind of think that maybe it's not them actually.

Distance a little bit?

A little bit because they're like, "Something would have come up. We would have gotten something on them." So they said they've conducted more than 120 interviews in four states over a year. They have a bunch of evidence they've collected, but they said, "This homicide is the number one priority for our investigations bureau in the northern half of the state. One thing we've learned through modern-day policing is that a year from now, two, three years from now, one piece of critical information may come up and break the case wide open."

He's on meth.

I think he has enough problems. Imagine someone that has palsy on meth. That's a bad joke plan.

Josh has plenty of energy.

So boundless energy. If you gave Josh meth, we gave him booze, and it went crazy. Booze and weed. If you gave Josh meth.

Booze and weed. And he had too much energy then.

Yeah. He was fighting his friends.

Two down.

Some scotch and some weed. So anyway, also, then somebody changed their story and said, "That wasn't it." Then other reports said the family may have sold drugs, and they're like, "No." They said the weed on the property was for my brother's prescription because that came oh, they had weed plants. Maybe they were selling it, and there's a big. No.

They do have a grand in cash, James.

True. True. But he also has a tile company that runs out of the house. So that makes sense. He keeps it as safe as his bank. You know what I mean? That's the thing. So they're going through it all. Meth rumors, the weed, maybe it was this, maybe it was that. Then at one point, Angela remember Angela, the.

Yeah.

Fulonius 23-year-old child molester there?

Yeah.

Oh, no, not that one. I'm sorry. Not Angela.

It's the other sister.

Yeah. The other sister. Yeah. I was talking about the other one. So Angela, the other sister, she said, "You guys should talk to Nicholas Ortiz." So they questioned him, and he was calm. They said, "Do you know anything that could help us?" And he said, "I don't. The only thing I've heard was what people have told me from the news." He said, "Yeah, I did have tension with the family. They asked me to leave, which is kind of nothing new for me. I get asked to leave places quite often."

I'm told to leave a lot.

Yeah. He said he was at home that night, the night going into Father's Day, when they think this happened late at night. He said he woke his dad up just after midnight for Father's Day and said, "Happy Father's Day." And then he went to sleep, and his family corroborated it that they remember him waking the father up, saying, "Happy Father's Day," and then going to bed. So October 2012, Ashley that's the one I was thinking about. Ashley Roybal, not Angela. Ashley is the child molesting felon. She is 25 years old and in custody on burglary and felony larceny charges.

Oh, she's a real asshole.

Oh, yeah. They said, "All right, Ashley, you have the right to remain silent." They give her all that, and she waves it away and says, "I have information about the El Rancho murders. Don't worry about reading me my rights. We're going to get right to business. I'm going to get out of this because I know something worse."

I don't want to be charged with larceny.

Yep. So they said, "Why are you telling us this?" And she said, "Because it's not right. I grew up with Steven. I went to school to him. I wanted to come, and I just couldn't." So they're like, "Hmm, okay." So they said for months now, the only names were going around was the family, and now you throw this one in here and saying this. So she does another interview saying, "Okay, well, we'll look into all your shit. You think it's " because she tells him it was the Nicholas and it was that other kid, and they have a gang and all this shit.

Right.

And she left him out to try to protect him.

Really?

Yeah. Just left him out of the scenario.

She's going to ruin her boyfriend's life and save her cousin?

That's what she said. Well, they're not together anymore. So yeah, the three she said, "We planned the burglary together. Jose backed out, but Nicholas went in and did this," basically. She said that there's no fingerprints or anything because Nicholas wore socks over his hands to not leave any prints or anything. Socks. So they go looking for the gray car because they said she said, "What kind of car do you drive?" "I drove a gray car." Then they remember Jesse saying he chased a gray car. So they say, "Oh, well, let's find the car."

She ran it into the fucking ground over a year ago, probably.

That's it. There's a reporter named Alex Tomlin who said, "So Ashley tells the police that they cooked up this plan to go in and steal money and marijuana and that Nicholas knew the house. He knows the family. He's going to be in and out, right?" She drops the two guys, Jose and Nick, off at the family's house. The way the story goes from there, there's this Jose kind of backs out, but Nicholas decides to go ahead and go in, and he goes in, and he commits the crimes, and he calls to get picked up, and she picks him up. Yeah.

It's not a lot. Yeah.

Not a lot to go on, but they have this call log and communication between Nicholas, Ashley, and Jose on the night of the murders, peaking around the time of the killings. So you see the communications get closer and closer. So they put this in front of Nicholas here, and he said, "Well, I did break in through a window and steal a gun after they kicked me out, but that's all I've done." They said, "Your name has come up quite a bit, and we're talking in reference to the Ortiz homicide. And I know we've talked to you a few times, so I'm hoping you can run by me pretty much what happened."

Yeah.

So he says, "I'm going to be honest with you, and this is really the only thing I could remember. We had broken into the house and stole a gun." They said, "This is at Steven's house, right? How'd you get in?" And he said, "There's a bathroom window that was opened in there. And honestly, that's the only thing I could remember that might have happened around that time." So that's what he's saying. So they said, "So why are these people putting themselves at the Ortiz residence and saying they're with you? Why would they throw themselves under the bus? This doesn't look good for you."

Yeah. Why would they say they were at a murder scene and the cell towers corroborate that and that you're there?

What's up with that? And he says, "Listen, I want this to be over as much as you guys."

Oh, do you?

We're on the same team here, pal.

Look, starting five. Let's all get together.

Let's do it. Listen, let's hands in the middle and say solved. I'm tired of having to look over my shoulder. I know you guys follow me. I see you guys, and I'm just tired of it, and I want it to be over. And then after about an hour and a half, he says, "With all due respect to you guys and all that, I'd really like to just stop talking and go home."

Oh.

So he does. Another year goes by. Does that have anything?

Oh, my God.

Because I mean, you arrest him, and it just looks like they're trying to save their own asses. Who knows? It's too much of a mess. So now they turn to Jose. He tells them the same story as Ashley pretty much. "Dropped off. Nicholas wanted to go in and kill. He ran away. Nicholas went in and killed." That's what he said. And then he says the whole but he says the whole idea of killing the family wasn't his or Nicholas's. It was Ashley's, my own cousin.

Ashley's idea?

That's what he said. So he throws her in there now.

Uh-oh.

So then they get Nicholas back in there, and he said this. They're telling him basically they have him dead to rights, and he says, "I want to get it over with. I want to get processed, and I just want to start doing my time already." This is before they've even arrested him. He just said, "Basically, if you're going to say I did it, then just throw me in prison and get it over with. I'm tired of this shit," is what he said. So Nicholas didn't talk much about he's still going to church. At one point, he came to the pastor, and the pastor said, "Nicholas came and says, 'It feels like something's unraveling or coming down the pipe, and I just need some prayer.'"

Uh-oh.

Five total charges. Nicholas said, "I don't agree with two of the charges on there." So that's interesting. And they were the two charges that weren't murder. He didn't agree with those.

Robbery or whatever. Yeah.

Yeah. He didn't murder anybody, though. So here are the different versions here. According to Ashley, Nicholas called her the next day and told her more about this. He said he killed the family with a pickaxe and had thrown it outside the home, which was information that Ashley shouldn't.

Nobody knows.

Exactly. So it's very interesting. Also, they find out that they figure whoever did this was right-handed based on the angle. So they don't think it's Jose because he's left-handed, if we remember. So Nicholas said, "Me and them were just hanging out, drinking a little bit and getting high." Ashley said the boys needed money. Nicholas knew about the safe and the marijuana because he'd lived there. The plan was a burglary. She agreed to drive, and nobody said anything to her about the killing. And Jose's version is the plan was to rob the house for money and weed.

Took it from grandpa's house.

Grandpa. Ashley supplied socks for their hands and plastic bags for their feet so they didn't leave footprints also.

Oh.

Wow.

That doesn't look ridiculous.

No. You don't look like an asshole going in there. So basically, Jose said Ashley said, "Why don't you just kill them? What are we doing? Why are we fucking around?" She's a gem this one. So they said that basically, Nicholas said he watched a few movies and woke his dad up around 12:00, then just after midnight. Nicholas's father testified he was in bed just after midnight. His son came in, wished him a happy Father's Day. Meanwhile, there's Cherie and Jesse watching movies after a night at the casino.

All right.

And also, I mean, that sounds right. And also later on, apparently, Nicholas texted Ashley about 20 minutes after the drop-off and said Jose had punked out. So we got that also. So they reconstruct it. Nicholas knocked on the back door. Lloyd answers. Maybe it would have come out to check on the barking dogs. They said they struck him. Nicholas struck him quickly across the head, across the body by a pickaxe here and struck over and over again until he collapses under an evergreen tree.

Wow.

Goes inside. Dixie's in the master bedroom. She's struck twice in the head near the right temple. Never got up. She might not have ever awoken.

What?

Might have just been over. Steven heard the commotion, comes out to the kitchen, confronts Nicholas. He fights him, gets the defensive wound. He's struck 17 times because he pissed Nicholas off. And yeah, that's brutal. So that's also, according to Jose, Nicholas said, "Steven wouldn't die." He had to really go after him. And also, he told other people the hardest part was when Steven looked at him because he knew him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

After he'd already been hit.

Yeah. No shit. So then they called Ashley. Nicholas called Ashley and said, "Come get me. Come get me." She drives back, finds him near the house. He has blood all over him, a sock on his right hand, a trash bag on his foot. It's a mess. And Ashley said, "That's when he told me that he used a pickaxe. He told me he got Lloyd first, then Steven in the kitchen, then Dixie in the bedroom."

But he's older. You brought it, lady.

That's the thing. In Ashley's version, Steven dies before Dixie, but in the prosecution version, in the state's version, Dixie dies before Steven. It's a small thing, but something that a defense attorney could pinpoint. Nicholas also kept saying, she said, "I messed up. I killed them." That's what he kept saying. So then they cleaned up. Ashley drove Nicholas to her grandparents' house so he could shower. And in Jose's version, it was her grandfather's house, the same grandfather whose axe.

His grandfather.

Was in the field there. Bloody clothes in a bag. Ashley later admitted to police that she had disposed of the clothes after the slayings. So that's a tampering with evidence charge right there. Nicholas is given clean clothes to walk home. And Jose's, where he was, is kind of mushy here. Ashley's account and Jose's account of where he was don't match. Jose said he saw Nicholas afterward, and Nicholas looked like he had seen a ghost. According to Ashley, Nicholas also threatened her and told her she better keep quiet.

Oh.

So we don't know which one that is. So this is crazy. A judge denies him bail, citing Nicholas as a flight risk. And in June 2015, though, a judge reconsiders it and sets bail at $100,000, 10% cash. So 10 grand. You can get them out. Nicholas pays the 10 grand, and he's out.

Oh, my God.

He's released to a third-party custodian in Albuquerque and barred from traveling north of Santa Fe.

Okay.

Okay. Now, Ashley appears in court on her own burglary case. She's, by the way, pregnant and in custody by June 2015. Prosecutors told the court she could also be implicated in murders, even though she hadn't been implicated. August 2015, she pleads guilty to several charges, including burglary under a deal that requires her to testify against Nicholas. And sentencing will be decided basically on how well she testifies. Jose is given immunity to testify.

Really?

Immunity.

They believe he didn't have anything to do with it.

Apparently, or they really want to get him in there. And he's given them the details they need. So the case goes to trial. The lawyer for the defense said, "I've done a lot of trials. Try not to overreact to anything. Just be neutral and fair and even keeled." But I have to say I was uncomfortable with the large contingent of people from El Rancho is what he said afterwards. How many people showed up like, "Whoa, this is like a lynch mob, and it's uncomfortable."

No, they want him. They want to do it instead. All right.

Yeah. He said, "I was concerned that there was going to be some kind of physical confrontation out in front of the courthouse between the Ortiz family and the group from El Rancho." So there were some sparks there, definitely. Meaning Nicholas Ortiz, not the other Ortiz. It gets confusing. So the defense in his opening statement said, "He wasn't the kind of person that would do something like this in my perception, and I believe that he did not. I believe that he may have had something to do with planning it or saying, 'Yeah, let's go in and get this money,' but he did not want anything to do with the physicality of killing these people.

Fuck you.

Yeah. They testify about when Nicholas got kicked out. Ashley testifies and everything she had to testify in, the confession, the disposing of the murder of the clothes, and supplying she denied supplying the axe, socks, or bags, even though Jose said she did. Jose testified here, all that kind of thing. In the middle of Jose's testimony, he mentioned a previously undisclosed agreement with prosecutors, and the defense said that they had never turned over that document to the defense.

That's it.

Not guilty. Yeah.

We said so.

Now, he also says that his client faces 112 years. So the case goes to jury before Memorial Day.

That's all the evidence they have.

That's it. They were sent home early, the holiday weekend off. They came back the next week. Seven women, five men on the jury, and they say they are hopelessly deadlocked.

Yeah, that's tough.

First-degree murder, 8 to 4 for conviction. Aggravated burglary with a deadly weapon, 10 to 2 for conviction, and conspiracy to commit burglary, 7 to 5 for acquittal.

Oh.

So that's very interesting. They retry him again just after Thanksgiving of 2016, and they tell again, "The real killer is Jose," the defense says. I believe that Jose was hired to do this killing. Now it's a hit.

Oh, wow.

I think someone else came in there and cleaned up the scene completely so that there were no prints, there was no DNA. It was just not what you would think what would happen in a scene like that.

Yeah, it's called crime scene cleanup.

Yeah. And because Jose's got immunity, they can really pin it all on him because they're like, "He's got immunity." So obviously, they said he never spent a day in jail on this, not even an hour. He wasn't even a suspect. Meanwhile, they got my guy, and there's no nothing. There's no DNA. There's no fingerprints. Blah, blah, blah. So the same testimony basically comes in there. And the verdict is they start deliberating late on Wednesday, and they have a verdict by Friday afternoon, and they find him guilty of everything this time.

Yeah.

Turned to the other one, Susan Stinson, and said, "And you too, you little shit." She's fun.

She would have said some of that to her kid when he was a kid. You know what I mean?

Yeah. It's fucking amazing. So there's a motion for a new trial before sentencing comes down. They end up finding there's a fundamental error in the second trial.

Really?

They didn't even say what it was. The judge just said it was a fundamental error. Didn't even say what it was and reversed everything.

Wow.

Even his own lawyer, Nicholas's lawyer, said it was highly, highly unusual. You don't get this to work before sentencing ever. It never works. So the state moves for reconsideration. They appeal to the Supreme Court. It takes 10 days for the Supreme Court to decide. That's a crazy decision. Reinstated. Fuck you. So yeah, they said the motion for a new trial based on alleged defects in the jury instructions was filed more than seven months later and therefore clearly untimely. So they're not even saying they were wrong. It just wasn't timely.

Oh, my.

It wasn't filed a lot. His lawyer, Nicholas's lawyer, called the ruling disgusting and cowardly and said, "It bothered me a lot." Ashley makes a deal.

He gave me a win and then took it away.

And took it back. Ashley took a deal. The police settled several cases at once, including unrelated burglaries, probation violations. She pleads guilty to conspiracy to commit aggravated burglary and tampering with evidence. You, ma'am, may fuck off more than 20 years with 6 years suspended and credit for about three and a half years, meaning no more than 10 and a half years in prison, and maybe less than that with good time.

Right.

Jose is never charged. Nicholas here, they said, yeah, the defense said.

Was Jose there?

At the sentencing?

No, no, no, no. We don't know if he was at the crime scene or not.

No fucking idea if Jose was at the crime scene or not. He might have gone in. He might have done some of this.

Never charged.

We have no idea. Immunity. Can't be charged.

Oh, my God.

So the defense says, "The best available research indicates that even serious juvenile offenders are far more likely not to desist from criminality as they mature. It seems extraordinarily unlikely that he would live to the time of his release." The prosecution said, "There is a definite end date. Therefore, it's not life without the possibility of parole." So basically, the fact that he was under 18 when it happened, that one law doesn't apply that you can't give them life without parole, even though they're saying it's essentially life without parole because his out dates passed his out date in life, essentially.

Right. He passed his horn on date.

It's crazy. So a friend of his named Kelly testified and said, "The media has portrayed Nicholas to be a monster. He's a good, good man with a wonderful soul, and he deserves a second chance." And Nicholas just.

What?

Nicholas said, "I did not do what I'm facing my life in prison for." And the judge says, "Well, you, sir, may fuck off 25 years on each murder count, concurrent, though." So 25 years. 85% is required as a serious violent offense. So he's got to do 85% of 25 years.

Is it 20 years, 18 years, something like that?

And his crimes, he's got credit for time served from 2015, projected parole eligibility late 2036 or early 2037. So he'll only be in his 40s. Plenty dangerous still.

What the fuck?

Cherie said, "I just don't understand what more a person would have to do in this state to get a life sentence. I'm still in shock that that was truly his sentence." Angela, the other daughter, said, "I think my three beautiful family members deserved a lot more than this. There's no way he's going to be a better person in 25 years. His debt will never be paid. It doesn't matter how much time he has. It's never going to be paid because I can't get my family back." I honestly feel like he got I honestly don't feel like he got enough time. He took three lives, and they're worth far more than 25 years. To be completely blunt, I truly feel for his family.

Yeah. He did a terrible, terrible thing. Brutal. This is one of the worst I've ever heard.

Yeah. It's fucking hard. The cops said this was horrifying. Cherie also said, "Jose got off scot-free. He even had the balls to ask for a reward."

Oh.

Ballsy. It was really not only a slap in the face for my family who suffered so brutally, but for our justice system in New Mexico." Wow. That's fucking brutal. And for Steven, she says, "He has so many disabilities, and the way Nicholas killed him, I mean, just unbelievable. Somebody with that kind of hate and evil in them should never, ever be allowed to walk the streets." There is a Supreme Court he goes to for appeals and all that. Sentence confirmed.

Wow.

And apparently, Ashley is still in jail now. She might be getting out pretty goddamn soon, though. And there you go. That's El Rancho, New Mexico, in a pretty goddamn fucked up ass.

I'm so mad at you for doing this. I am terrified of these people.

Twisted story. It's twisted, right? Yeah.

Those are dangerous human beings.

All three are dangerous. All three.

Way too close.

As we've heard before. Yeah.

That is an asshole of a giant animal.