Yeardley:  Hey, Small Town Fam, it’s Yeardley. I want to remind you that if you want access to bonus episodes and regular episodes a day early and ad free, and our community forum and other behind-the-scenes goodies, you got to go to smalltowndicks.com/superfam. And then in the top right-hand corner, hit that little tab that says join. And then listen to the end of today’s episode for a sneak peek at today’s new bonus episode.

 Hey, Small Town Fam. It’s Yeardley. How are you guys? I hope you’re all well and ready for a great episode. Today, we have Deputy Brandon on the mic. You might remember him from last season, Season 14 where he gave us a case we called Bedeviled.

 This case barrels down the tracks like the proverbial freight train as the murder suspect is identified fairly quickly, but he’s also fairly organized, so he doesn’t stay put after the crime is committed and goes to what I’m sure he considers to be great length to cover up his involvement. That means Deputy Brandon’s investigation goes into hyperdrive involving multiple agencies across state lines and a witch doctor. Yep, proving the rule that there’s no such thing as a run-of-the-mill murder investigation even when you have an obvious suspect early on. Finally, I want to let you know that this case involves domestic abuse. So please take care when listening. Here is Mine.

[music]

Yeardley:  Hi, there. I’m Yeardley.

Dan:  I’m Dan.

Dave:  I’m Dave.

Paul:  And I’m Paul.

Yeardley:  And this is Small Town Dicks. 

Dan:  Dave and I are identical twins- 

Dave:  -And retired detectives from Small Town, USA. 

Paul:  And I’m a veteran cold case investigator who helped catch the Golden State Killer using a revolutionary DNA tool. 

Dan:  Between the three of us, we’ve investigated thousands of crimes, from petty theft to sexual assault, child abuse to murder.

[Small Town Dicks theme]

Dave:  Each case we cover is told by the detective who investigated it, offering a rare, personal account of how they solved the crime.  

Paul:  Names, places, and certain details have been changed to protect the privacy of victims and their families. 

 

Dan:  And although we’re aware that some of our listeners may be familiar with these cases, we ask you to please join us in continuing to protect the true identities of those involved-

Dave:  -out of respect for what they’ve been through.

[unison]:  Thank you.

Yeardley:  Today, today, today on Small Town Dicks, guess what? We have the usual suspects. We have the one and only Paul Holes.

Paul:  Hey, hey all. Look at you. You’re trying to surprise me there, aren’t you?

Yeardley:  I am.

Paul  But I caught you with it so.

Yeardley:  You did. [Paul laughs] He was ready for me. I was like the pitcher in the baseball game, what do you do when the guy’s trying to steal second base? You throw it to the first base guy.

Paul:  Pick him off.

Yeardley:  Yeah, I was trying to pick him off, but he was ready for me. Anywho, we [chuckles] digress already. We have Detective Dan.

Dan:  Hello there.

Yeardley:  Hello, you. And we have Detective Dave.

Dave:  Number three.

Yeardley:  [chuckles] And Small Town Fam. We are so pleased to welcome back to the podcast Detective Brandon.

Brandon  Hello.

Yeardley:  So, Brandon, we know from your previous episode that you and Davewent to the police academy together many years ago, and you managed to stay in touch even though you worked at different agencies. And you have high praise for each other. And we really loved your first episode. It’s such a good one. We called it Bedeviled, and it aired in Season 14, which was last season, and it’s a murder that involves some alleged devil worship, so there’s that. [chuckles] So, Brandon, please tell us how this case came to you.

Brandon:  So this case took place on September 11th, 2017. I was working as a detective with the Medford Police Department, and I was actually driving up to Roseburg to interview a bank robbery suspect and I was just on the outside of city limits, Roseburg, when I got a call from my detective sergeant who told me that there had been a murder within the city of Medford. He gave me the address and asked me to do my interview later and come back and assist with the murder investigation.

 So when I got on scene, detectives had been on scene for about 45 minutes to an hour, and I got a briefing from one of the detectives. So the briefing that I got, the information that I learned that had been developed while I was traveling down, was the victim of this case was Noemi. And she was still on scene when I got there. It’s a residential neighborhood, middle class neighborhood, and she was laying face down on the walkway right in front of the front door of their house. So they have the driveway that goes up and then a little cement walkway that kind of wraps around and goes to the front door.

 I learned that Noemi had been stabbed multiple times, and interviews had already been conducted with Noemi’s family. And what we had learned from those interviews was that Noemi had two small children with a guy named Enrique, and they were living in California together. It was an abusive relationship, and Noemi’s family lived in the Medford area. So she took the kids and moved up to Oregon to get away from that abusive relationship with Enrique. There had been a lot of issues between Noemi and Enrique during the breakup and during the move that had concerned not only Noemi, but her entire family. Her brother was living at the house. Her mom, dad, the whole family was living together in this house.

 And one of the examples of the concerning behavior was a few days prior to this, Noemi’s brother was outside and saw Enrique walking up the side of their house over to by the window. And he’s like trying to peek through the window. And so Noemi’s brother confronts Enrique and asks him what he’s doing, you need to get out of here. And so he takes off. Noemi’s brother did not see Enrique get in a vehicle, but he just left on foot. So Enrique is supposed to be living in California. There’s no reason for him to be in Oregon at that house, snooping around, right.

Yeardley:  And do we have a name for Noemi’s brother?

Brandon  Miguel. So a couple days after that, one of Noemi’s family is driving in Medford and sees a vehicle, a silver vehicle, four-door sedan pull up at the traffic light and they look over and it’s Enrique. And so they take a quick picture of the car and then they give Noemi the information and just said, “Hey, we saw him driving. This is a car he’s in. Be on the lookout for him.

Yeardley:  Because he’s in your neighborhood now again, even though Enrique’s supposed to be in California.

Brandon  Correct. Yeah. So Noemi had a job where she worked a night shift and she would get off work 06:00, 07:00 in the morning and come home and go to sleep and do whatever she’s going to do for the day. But she was working from the evening until the following morning was the shift that she worked. And when I got that call at about 06:45 AM how this call came into law enforcement was a neighbor was on a walk coming up the sidewalk, and she looked over to the right and sees this woman laying on the ground. And she’s not moving, she’s not responding. So it came in as a person down call that the patrol officers responded to, and when they got there, saw multiple stab wounds and a crime scene.

 So one of the things that we had with this case on the front end is we don’t know if Enrique did this, but he’s definitely a person of interest. With the past violence, the concerning statements from the family, the threats he was making no Noemi leading up to this. And what we had was a picture of the car he was in with the plate. And that became monumental to really get ahead of this thing very quickly. So we ran that plate and it came back to a rental car company in Red Bluff, California. And we contacted the company, and we learned that Enrique had rented this car several days prior and was due to return the vehicle on today’s date at noon. So we had a very small window, by now, it’s early morning. So we contact Red Bluff Police Department. We ask him to sit on the rental car company parking lot and give him the plate. When he comes in, he’s going to be a person of interest in a murder that we have.

Yeardley:  Did Noemi and Enrique have a car? And would Enrique have rented a different car so he wasn’t in his own car.

Brandon  So Noemi had her own car. Enrique also had a vehicle. And we don’t know why he rented the car. I don’t know the condition of his car, if it would have made a several hour drive stuff. But based off my own experiences in investigating cases, if somebody’s going to kill somebody, when they’re planning it out, they don’t want to use things that are going to bring back to them, like their own vehicle.

Yeardley:  Right.

Dave  And just for relativity’s sake, where this crime occurs, how far is it from Red Bluff drive time?

Brandon:  Oh, it’s about, I’d say, three and a half, four hours. So we get that squared away with the rental car company. When I got the information during my debrief, I was assigned to do the search warrant on Enrique’s phone. So we had his phone number from the family. And one of the things we do with a search warrant is we ask for the cellular phone provider, which in this case was AT&T, to give us historical GPS information, which tracks where they went. And then, we also asked for live geolocates, commonly referred to like as a ping. So, when we get that information, a judge reviews the facts of the case and says, “Yeah, you can serve AT&T with a search warrant. We’ll get all the information with the dates that we requested from this date to this date, where they were at and where they’re currently at, at least the location of that phone.

 So I left the scene, I go back, and I start working on the warrant. I get it signed. And this case is actually really cool because we’ve all, Dan and Dave investigated cases where you end up having to work with outside agencies or businesses. Sometimes they’re very helpful in a good case, and sometimes they’re not so helpful, and sometimes you have to wait a long time. And in this case, we had to work with a lot of outside companies and resources and they were so helpful.

 And I’ve always said sometimes you get a case where it feels like you’re just striking out on everything you try to do and you’re digging and digging. It might take a year to solve it, and it seems like nothing is lining up. And then you get those other cases where it’s like it was just handed to you, where everything lines up and it still takes a lot of effort to get there. But this is one of those cases where when it’s your time to get caught. Its your time to get caught.

Dave:  I think about that most of Paul Holes’ cases were kind of gift wrapped,-

[laughter]

Dave:  -didn’t require a whole lot of investigative skill.

Paul:  Like what one case, 24 years to open that gift wrap.

Yeardley:  That’s nothing.

[laughter]

Dave:  Well Paul, you’ve talked about on this podcast and in other media events the challenges that you had reaching out to different agencies while you were investigating Golden State Killer. Speak to that, what the differences are.

Paul  It is something that with many cases, not just Golden State Killer, but other cases, even active cases, that cross jurisdictional lines, and you run into agencies or whether it be private vendors that are fully willing to cooperate, they get it. They know that they have to provide you with the information in order to help progress the investigation. Then you run into some jurisdictions that for one reason or another, aren’t willing to play ball with you. And oftentimes it can be neighboring jurisdictions. And what I’ve seen is petty interpersonal squabbles.

 Let’s say you have patrol guy, one from one jurisdiction and another patrol guy from another jurisdiction. Early in their careers, they have a beef with each other. Now one’s the sheriff and the other is the chief of police. And the sheriff goes, “I’m not going to help that agency.” So you run into that type of politics. And part of it is human nature, but it’s also not seeing the bigger picture. And the same thing with the private companies. You know some private companies, they want for their own protection from liability. They want to make sure that the paper is served on them and it’s all proper. But they will bend over backwards to get you what you need. And they do it fast.

 They understand the urgency, especially in an act of homicide investigation. And then other entities, they just put up roadblock after roadblock. And then when they finally concede, “Yes, I understand, I have to get you this.” It takes forever. You could be stuck, you could be dead in the water waiting for that critical information in order to move to the next step in the investigation. With Brandon speaking up and saying in this case, everything was dropping in line. Well, that’s awesome to hear because that means everybody understood the critical roles that each of them played, even if they weren’t active in the investigation itself.

Yeardley:  Right. You’re all going for the common win, the common goal.

Brandon:  In this case when I got the warrant signed, I sent it to AT&T and I didn’t hear anything back for probably about half hour, 45 minutes. So I called and I talked to a person down in Florida because that’s where their headquarters is in Florida. And I was told that Hurricane Irma was hitting the Florida area and AT&T made all their people go home, [chuckles] except for like two people, for extreme exigent, emergent situations.

Dave:  Keep the servers running.

Brandon:  Yeah. And when I heard that, I thought, “Oh no, we’re not going to get this for days.” And they’re like, “We can try to transfer you to one of the people, but we don’t know if they’ll even answer their phone.” And I’m like, “Okay.” This lady answers the phone the employee from AT&T and I explained the case, “Hey, we got this lady that’s been stabbed multiple times. We had an outstanding suspect.” And she goes, “I will have this to you in like 10 minutes.” And I was perfect. So it was amazing the cooperation and the work that they did to do that.

Yeardley:  Brandon, when Noemi is found stabbed on the steps of her parents’ house, is she already dead?

Brandon:  Yeah, she’s deceased. And obviously no life saving measures would have helped her condition. And just to kind of recap too, I’m working on the search warrant for the phone. A few detectives are assigned with Noemi, the autopsy. Other detectives are working on information on Enrique. Where does he live? There’s a lot of moving parts with these cases and that goes back to the MADIU, the Major Assault Death Investigation Unit, or the Klamath County Major Crime Team. And the importance of throwing all resources at these cases when they first occur because there’s so much going on and so much that needs to be done and they really are taxing on your resources.

 So when I get the AT&T result, I look at the historical data for where Enrique was and he had gotten into Medford a day or two prior to when this murder happened and where she worked at where Noemi was employed. Enrique’s vehicle is hitting in the parking lot constantly all around her work. And then a substantial amount of time is driving within her neighborhood where Noemi lives constantly throughout the day, just going back and forth between those locations.

Dave:  Full on stalker mode.

Brandon:  Yeah. Leading up to the morning of the murder, Enrique’s vehicle is parked a couple blocks down from her house and is sitting for hours. And then it moves to Noemi’s work while she’s working, and then it moves back down to the house, and it sits there, and it’s just going back and forth. And when I say the vehicle, we knew it was a vehicle because we’re only pinging the phone. But thank God we live in a time of exterior cameras on residential houses, because they’re everywhere.

Dave:  I was going to say, you know, you’ve got detectives on scene, and you’re going to canvas because you’re looking for ring cameras and the like.

Brandon:  Absolutely. And we had a plethora of video. So when I say the vehicle’s moving, we’re comparing it to video surveillance that was seized on residential houses where the vehicle’s moving at the same time on these cameras that the ping is moving, around the neighborhood. So we’re able to know that it’s there. The phone ends up leaving, matching the surveillance video. It’s hard at night with cameras and stuff to make a positive identification on somebody at night, with these cameras at distance and stuff. Some surveillance video caught one person getting out of that vehicle, the rental car, and walking up. And then you see him running back and getting in the vehicle. And then the phone is on I5, heading south. And so at that point, it’s like, “We got PC for this guy to arrest him.”

Break 1

Yeardley:  Okay, just to recap a little bit, Brandon, you have probable cause to arrest Enrique based on seeing the rental car on doorbell camera footage and tracking his phone. And the tracking of the phone matches the movements of the rental car. But you can’t actually get a positive ID on Enrique from those doorbell cameras because it’s too dark. All you can see is the outline of the assailant.

Brandon:  Right. So we let Red Bluff PD know. And sure enough, Enrique pulls into the Red Bluff parking lot for the rental car. And Red Bluff police officers get out, they take him into custody. And the only statement that he gave when they told him he was under arrest, is this for what I did in Oregon. And so that’s the only statement that he gave during this case, which we’ll take that.

Yeardley:  Wow.

Dave:  That’s quite an admission.

Yeardley:  Quite.

Dave:  And so you guys instruct Red Bluff PD to take Enrique into custody, and also you’re going to seize the car.

Brandon:  Right. So that’s another thing how these get so taxing is, you know, when we get the call, “Hey, Red Bluff has him in custody.” You might have detectives doing a really important task that are now the three of us are driving down to Red Bluff and we’re going to do the search warrant for the vehicle, search warrant for Enrique’s house, search warrant for Enrique’s person. That’s a multiple day trip that they’re going to stay in Red Bluff for four days.

Dave:  It’s a huge pain in the ass because now you have to get warrants signed through the court in California where you want to execute these search warrants. So it’s just another level of red tape that you’re going to have to jump through. It’s more complexity to the case.

Dan:  And you’re not sworn in California.

Brandon:  No. So you’re working with those agencies and they’re a detective division. We do it too, you know. And I’m sure you guys have had detectives from all over the place show up at your office and need assistance to further their case with our jurisdiction you know.

Dave:  Yeah.

Brandon:  And this is one thing I do want touch on when it comes to traveling because it’s kind of a two-part thing I wanted to talk about is a lot of people that have never been in law enforcement think, “Oh, they caught the guy, good job, the case is over.” And the amount of work to do the investigation, leave no stone unturned and to truly be that nonbiased fact finder of the truth, where you are getting to the bottom of everything lasts months. It is months and months of work after you put cuffs on the guy. Because if you don’t do that and you’re like, “Oh, we have enough, we arrested him.” And you leave it at that.

 When it goes to a trial, your case is going to be torn up because every defense attorney is always going to try to target the work the officer did and the incompetence that was done with it. That’s going to be their strategy in most trials has attacked the investigation. And it’s amazing what you’ll find on the back end in these cases. When you start unturning these stones, trying to leave no stone unturned. You might find somebody said something that gives a pretty good defense to the suspect and you got to run that down and make sure that whatever the situation is that you did get the right person or track that lead down where you finally get to the source and it’s a rumor or the person where it started it, they weren’t there, they didn’t see anything. They saw it on Facebook. And then they started telling people like they were there, and you have to track those down and plug those holes to make sure that you get a successful prosecution on your case.

Dave:  I tell people that the greatest lesson I ever learned as an investigator was a defense attorney poking all kinds of holes in what I thought was a pretty good investigation. But you do an honest take, and I was like, “Okay, I got to step up my game.” So you start to look at your investigation, like at trial. What’s the defense attorney going to ask about me doing this particular task and why I did it and what were other things that I could do? It’s all this. We’re just trying to raise a little bit of doubt, but I understand why they do it but it also makes you a better investigator.

Brandon:  Absolutely. Yeah.

Paul:  Actually, it’s refreshing to hear this because, I spent the last almost four years of my career over in DA investigations, and I was overseeing, managing multiple investigative units. And one of the biggest frustrations that DA’s offices have are investigators that don’t see things the way you guys just talked about, where you’re trying to plug holes. Basically, they feel that their job is just to get the case charged up to the DA’s office. And then it’s the DA investigators jobs to have to go and flesh that case out and track down all these other holes that are in the case. And it really is, it requires both entities, the local agencies, investigators as well as the DA investigators in order to do that. But the individuals like yourselves that try to flesh the case out in its totality is so welcomed by the DA’s offices because now the focus is on prosecution and not investigation.

Brandon:  Yeah. And you have to do that. And really, even on the small cases that you get, if you do that on the small cases, that’s just practice for when you do get the murder or the major crime. You’re already used to doing the full meal deal on everything.

Dave:  And you’re building your reputation over at the DA’s office and among defense attorneys that they go, “Oh, this was a know nothing see felony. And he still wrote two search warrants, checked with all the neighbors. Like, this person’s thorough.” It at least gives the other attorneys that are going to be involved in the process, they go, “Oh, this guy, he goes the extra mile. He’s squared away.” That’s a good reputation to have.

Paul:  Brandon, just backing up a little bit. You had video surveillance showing the single male leaving the car, and the video surveillance showing this male running back to the car, how long in between those video clips was it, and how many times had Noemi been stabbed?

Brandon:  So at this point in the case, we didn’t know how many times she’d been stabbed. The autopsy had not occurred yet. And as far as the timing of it, it was early in the morning when she got home soon as she pulled up in her driveway, it happened. And the vehicle on the phone was immediately on i5 after that. So we had a few hours where we were behind the curve, but we caught it quick enough that when Enrique pulled his rental car into the parking lot, we were able to get him in custody. And that’s where the backend work of the historical geolocation really came into being a huge pillar in this case, to create the timeline. Because in all cases, you got to create a timeline of events and really have a tight wrap on knowing exactly the timeframe.

 That’s with a lot of cases, because when you interview people and you don’t have that good basis of a timeline, it allows for a bunch of lies to come in that you don’t know if it’s a truth or a lie. But when you have that really tight timeline, you can really pin people in when they’re trying to lie to you and get confessions that way by saying, “No, you said you were here, but we know you were here at this time.”

Dan:  Just going back to the video, you’ve got, presumably Enrique, you’ve got a male leaving his car caught on a home surveillance system, and then you’ve got that same male coming back to the car. I guess my question is, “Did Noemi’s assailant, was he lying in wait?”

Brandon:  Yeah. So he basically gets to the house, and there’s a pickup truck parked in the driveway, and he has a blanket, and he’s lying in the bed of the truck with the blanket, waiting for her to come back. So the assailant was lying in wait for Noemi, and the blanket was found on the edge of their house and had blood on it. And there’s blood droplets from where her body position was on the cement. And they were going towards the direction of the corner of the house. And that’s where the blanket that had a little bit of blood on it was. And that blanket was originally in the bed of the truck. That’s how we kind of put that together. It was one of the family’s truck. And they’re like, “Yeah, that blanket was in the truck.” It’s now on the side of the house, has blood on it.

 So we suspected that the assailant had a cut on his finger. Obviously, it could be Noemi’s blood that was on his hand, that was dripping off his hand. But oftentimes when somebody uses a sharp instrument to stab somebody, especially when there’s multiple stabs, the blood gets on the handle of the knife, becomes slippery, their hands slipping across the blade as they’re stabbing, and that becomes really important. The other thing we can do is look at the blood droplet and how it’s positioned on the ground and know if it’s dropping at a walking pace versus a running pace. Because you could see if you have a droplet of blood at 90 degrees and it just drops on the ground, it’s going to create a fairly perfect circle.

 When you start getting at angles where people are running or moving quickly, it’ll hit and kind of splatter out on the ground and get these little fingers that kind of come off the blood droplet. It appeared he was moving at a quicker pace, whoever it was that stabbed her, right. Because at the time when you’re looking at blood droplet, you don’t know the events that happened, but you’re able to know they were running this direction.

Dave:  So from the time that you see the male who’s back and forth between Noemi’s work and Enrique is back into Noemi’s residential neighborhood back and forth, back and forth. At some point, Enrique settles back into the residential neighborhood, exits the car, walks up, presumably to Noemi’s property. How long between that and Enrique running back to his car and being on i5 within moments. What’s that time period?

Brandon:  It was about an hour or two where he was waiting.

Dave:  So Enrique spent quite a bit of time in that truck bed.

Brandon:  Yeah. This had a lot of planning involved. And the more evidence that we started and the more timeline we started getting together, we saw the preparation and plan that he had in this. It’s one thing when you get a murder done like a passion crime, versus a relationship where there’s extreme hatred and a clear deliberate plan that’s carried out.

Paul:  As you’re investigating these cases, whether you’re an investigator or you’re a CSI, you have to pay attention to the elements of the crime. And here, Enrique, he’s showing malice aforethought. This is really it’s not, as Brandon said, “A crime of passion.” He’s lying in wait for an hour. He’s renting a car days before, he’s driving around trying to figure out Noemi’s pattern of life and when he possibly would be able to kill her. This separates first degree murder from second degree murder in California. And then potentially you might have some special circumstances that could be stacked on top. So, this is critical in terms of like what Brandon’s doing with the phone is he’s establishing. Yeah, this isn’t a crime of passion. This isn’t a self-defense case. Enrique is planning this.

Brandon:  Absolutely.

Break 2

Brandon:  So where we’re at with this, Enrique is in custody in Red Bluff. We have a team of detectives going to Red Bluff to, like we said, manage the car, the crime scene of the car, and work on his house. We want to see what kind of information his house might have and take a cell phone too, because that is a huge thing. Just because we have AT&T’s information now, we have to match it up to that cell phone, that IMEI number on the phone. It’s like the fingerprint, every phone’s different, has a unique print. Now we need to correlate the two pieces of evidence into that. So they’re working on that. And when I start looking at the historical cell phone information from AT&T, I see that Enrique drives i5 all the way down to Anderson, California, gets off the freeway and goes to Walmart in Anderson, California.

 He’s there for a substantial time and then he gets back on i5 and goes straight to the car rental company. So Detective Kirk Cromwell ends up getting ahold of our Walmart loss prevention and asked for assistance in looking at Anderson California’s loss prevention security cameras. And just like AT&T, Walmart loss prevention was so helpful. Within minutes we’re linked into Anderson’s system through our loss prevention getting video from their Walmart. And what we saw was the rental car pulls up, parks in the Walmart parking space, Enrique gets out. Now we have them positively ID’d because it’s daytime, better cameras, a lot of cameras.

Dan:  Cameras everywhere.

Brandon:  Yeah.

Yeardley:  And aren’t Walmart cameras some of the best in the business? Isn’t that what you guys say?

Dan:  I’ve run into good Walmart cameras and I’ve run into some bad, I think more of what sometimes bothers me. And it’s probably changed now. Walmart used to have cameras directly over the cash registers. And basically, you’d get a video of somebody’s bald spot.

Yeardley:  Right. [chuckles]

Brandon:  I want a shot of their face. So you have to chase other cameras throughout the store to get those face shots. But especially when you’re investigating financial crimes like fraudulent use of a credit card, I need to see your face uttering that credit card at the point of sale, that’s the critical piece of evidence. I don’t want the shot from above, I want the face shot.

Yeardley:  Who has the best?

Brandon:  Target.

Yeardley:  Target has the best surveillance cameras in the biz.

Brandon:  So we get the video from Walmart. We see Enrique walking into the store. We see the hat he’s wearing, the glasses he’s wearing, the shirt, the pants, his shoes. Everything is on that video really identifiable. He goes in, selects some clothes, buys them, goes into the changing room, changes out of his clothes, walks back to his car, walks back into the store and begins buying Clorox bleach wipes, and all sorts of cleaning supplies. We get the receipt for all the supplies that he bought. So we knew exactly what he bought. And then on video, he’s going out to his car, and he begins detailing out the car with all the cleaning supplies that he just purchased.

Dave:  in the parking lot.

Brandon:  In the parking lot at Walmart.

Dan:  And this is after the murder?

Brandon:  Yes. So he’s on i5, heading down, stops at Anderson, buys a new change of clothes, buys the cleaning supplies, and he immediately starts detailing his car in the Walmart parking lot.

Yeardley:  And the clothes that he changes out of when he’s at Walmart, are they bloody?

Brandon:  We cannot see any blood from the cameras of the clothes he was initially wearing when he walked in.

Dan:  Enrique changes in the changing room. Does he take his original clothes back out to the car?

Brandon:  Yeah.

Dan:  So they’re in a bag.

Brandon:  Yeah. And then once he’s done cleaning the car, he takes the bags that he had purchased the items in and looks like he’s putting the items in those bags. Then he walks outside of the store and drops one bag in a trash can. Then he goes in the store, drops another bag in a different trash can. And we see him going through the entire store placing these items of garbage in all the different receptacles. Then he gets in his car, and he’s gone. So we call Walmart in Anderson and we say, “Hey, what does your trash service look like there?” They said, “Well, every two hours, we empty our trash can into our big dumpster. It’s a compactor in the back. And blue bags are exterior trash cans, white bags are interior trash cans.” So they kind of got it divided up like that.

 And they said, “Every two weeks, Anderson County Waste Management collects our big compactor and takes it away.” We’re like, “When is that due?” And they’re like, “Three days from now.” So think about it. All the garbage from Walmart sitting in this compactor that’s almost due for a pickup. That’s a lot of garbage we’re going to have to go through.

Dave:  This is why I’ve been shaking my head, because I already knew that at some point, law enforcement’s going to have their hands in that trash. And I would rather serve a search warrant on a horrible heroin house than ever dig through trash. Trash dumps are the nastiest. Ugh, terrible.

Brandon:  Absolutely terrible. [Paul laughs] I’m pointing at our man right there, Paul Holes.

[laughter]

Dave:  It’s horrible. I can’t even imagine what Paul’s been through on some crime scenes.

Brandon  So we call Anderson law enforcement, and we ask for an officer to go sit on this dumpster. Now that we have this information, we got to make sure that there’s no tampering with bags being taken out, anything like that. So they say, “Yeah, we’ll go sit on it until you have somebody come down here.” Because think about that patrol cop, “Hey, we got an assignment for you. You’re going to go sit on the Walmart dumpster.”

[laughter]

Dave:  That’s what I was just thinking about too. I’m like, “You got Red Bluff is already tied up on suspect in a rental car, and now somebody’s getting reassigned to go babysit a dumpster.” And you’re just like, “This isn’t even our case. What the f–”

Brandon:  Well, and they didn’t want to obviously stay there all night or however long it’s going to take for us to get down there. So we had to send another detective down there to sit on a trash can until the next morning until we could move forward.

Dan:  Meanwhile, Walmart’s just stockpiling their trash pickup outside of the dumpster because you don’t want to add evidence.

Brandon:  Absolutely. So we get a hold of the Anderson Waste Management. We said, “We need a pickup truck, that you pick these massive dumpsters up with, and we need a clean spot at your facility where you dump this that is pristine.” So Anderson Waste Management was awesome. They’re like, “Absolutely. We’ll give you a pristine piece of land. We’ll give you a truck.” So that next morning, another team of us went down. I was part of this team. My team went straight to the waste management to inspect where they were going to have it, just to make sure there’s nothing there, take before pictures, all that stuff.

 The other team met the truck down there at the dumpster. They loaded up just like when he sees a car following it the whole way, keeping eyes on it the whole time, making sure nothing was tampered with. And then it pulls up to the management, their facility and they start unloading this thing. It wasn’t as tall as your ceiling of trash, but it felt like it. It felt like you were standing next to a mountain of garbage. Think of all the bags that get thrown away at Walmart over a two-week period. It is just insane how much garbage there was. And we have pictures of us standing there getting ready to go through this pile of garbage, every single bag.

Dan:  Tyvek suited up.

Brandon:  Oh, absolutely. And mind you, this is September 11th and it is still hot like August during the day, you know July and August and September. And it was like an 85-degree day out on this landfill of just hours going through every single bag.

Paul:  Yeah. And like 50% of the trash at Walmart are dirty diapers.

Brandon:  Oh, terrible, terrible.

Paul:  Yeah. [chuckles]

Dan:  Needles, everything.

Dave:  But it paid off.

Brandon:  Yeah. So I’m talking thousands of bags that we went through, right. After hours of digging through this, what was kind of cool is once we got into one bag, all the other bags were relatively close to that because the way it was collected and dumped and stuff. So this is what we found out of it. We found all the clothing that Enrique had originally walked in before he bought anything, Every piece of clothing. His sunglasses that he had on, his hat, his shoes, his socks, everything. And there appeared to be a little bit of blood droplets on some of those clothing. And then the other thing we found was a sheath blade for a Mossy Oak knife sheath like that Rambo style knife that you would buy.

 We found receipts from purchasing the cleaning supplies at Walmart that matched up to the receipts that Walmart gave us. All the cleaning supplies, like the container, the Clorox wipes and all that. And then in one bag we found the Clorox wipes that were used to detail his car that had red substance appearing to be blood all over the wipes.

Dan:  Interesting.

Brandon:  We recovered some cigarette butts and just some other miscellaneous items. But the clothing was the biggest, the thing that we liked. We never found the knife.

Yeardley:  So Brandon, you didn’t find Enrique’s knife, but you found the sheath that the knife goes in.

Brandon:  Yeah. And that was located in the bag of clothing that he was wearing. So it’s not like it was just a random bag that we opened that had it. It showed ownership that that was his knife with his items in that bag. And it had like, where you put the knife back into the sheath, it had what appeared to be blood.

Dan:  Perfect.

Yeardley:  Oh, wow.

Brandon:  While all this is going on, the autopsy is performed-

Yeardley:  -on Noemi.

Brandon:  Yeah, on Noemi. Noemi was stabbed over 40 times. So it’s one thing to stab a person and kill them, but when you continue to stab that many times.

Dave:  Were the wounds concentrated in a certain area?

Brandon:  Yeah, chest, neck, underarm pit, some defensive wounds on her hands.

Dave:  Just a frenzied rage attack.

Brandon:  Absolutely. So we get that information from the autopsy, collect our evidence, and then I thought this was pretty smart of Kirk Cromwell. Kirk Cromwell is looking at the knife sheath when we get back to that apartment, and he Googles to find out who sells those, the Mossy Oak knife. So we get a picture of it on the internet with a matching sheath. And the only store in our community that sold that was Fred Meyers. So Kirk goes down to Fred Meyers and says, “Hey, how many knives did you sell of these between these dates that Enrique had been in our community?” They said, “Well, we sold three of them.” So he pulls up the surveillance video, and the night before Enrique killed Noemi, he goes to our Fred Meyers and buys that knife with a matching sheath and everything.

 So when you start looking at this with the evidence that followed from the arrest, you have all the surveillance video from the neighborhood where it happened at. You have the vehicle that we seized, we had all of his supplies that Enrique was walking into Walmart with, walking out. And even though we didn’t get the knife blade, we got the purchase of the knife, the date and time, and then the sheath blade that was disposed of. And then just a suspicious behavior, dumping everything into the different trash cans and stuff.

Dave:  All this follow up and corroborating of facts and finding evidence is extremely important. Prior to becoming a detective, there were times where I’d be like, “Aha, that might be a little bit overkill. Why do I need to keep seizing evidence? Why do I need to keep doing this?” It all matters because you never know what a suppression hearing is going to exclude from an event or a trial. So it really is just being thorough. And we used to have patrol officers who didn’t understand why we would be so thorough when we came out that– why are you taking 300 photos of this death investigation scene? And I’m like, “Because I ran out of room on my little disc. I would take more.” If you’re only taking 10, 15 photos on your crime scenes, you are doing yourself and the investigation a disservice. It feels like overkill with you guys doing all this. It’s just thorough and it’s the way it’s supposed to be done. And we really want, young cops. This is how thorough you need to be. Keep going, keep going.

Brandon:  Absolutely. One of the things too, when the detectives were with Enrique doing swabs and all their photographs of them, he did have a cut on his hand, which would be consistent with the way he was holding the knife and his hand slipping across a blade. But Enrique did not provide any statements to us or give anything. We did get his phone though. So on the backend, we end up applying for a search warrant for his phone to search it. And it’s all in Spanish. One of our detectives is bilingual, and he spent a long time, weeks, going through all the text messages. And basically, in substance, what we got from Enrique’s cell phone was he is infatuated with Noemi. He’s very angry at her, and he’s been talking to a South American witch doctor that is giving him, like, “Hey, I see Noemi with another man.” All these are through text messages, emails, all that stuff off his phone. And that’s really when Enrique gets that information from this witch doctor in South America, seeing Noemi with another man, that’s where his behavior really spools up with his obsession with her and with his anger towards her.

Yeardley:  That’s when Enrique really loses it. And do you think that’s when he formulates a plan to kill Noemi or is it more impulsive?

Brandon:  Yeah, no. Those messages with the dates of them and everything was lining up in contrast with the timeline to when he came up to Medford and ended up carrying out his plan.

Dan:  So Enrique gets this heads up from a witch doctor, like, “Hey, I have visions of Noemi with another man, and within a few days, he’s up in Oregon.”

Brandon:  Yeah.

Dan:  Okay.

Break 3

Brandon:  So that isn’t a whodunnit case. where you get there and you have no idea who did it, but just the work on the backend to bring all that evidence together and the cooperation we had from everybody that wasn’t law enforcement that helped us achieve this case in a timely manner was phenomenal. The other thing that I just want to talk about too, is every agency works differently. Every agency has different budgets that they have to stay within. And it’s expensive when you’re sending pretty much your entire detective division to different locations in California and hotels and all that stuff. That adds up. I’ve worked with some agencies that was really hard to travel when you needed to solve a case just because limited budgets and stuff. The one thing about Medford Police Department is their command was awesome. Anywhere you needed to go to solve a case, it’s like, “Yeah, if you need to go, go.”

Dan:  The way it’s supposed to be.

Brandon:  Yeah. And you know, for any law enforcement listening, that is so important to have command that understands the importance of doing it right and getting after it and chasing your leads. So it was really cool.

Dan:  I’ve got a bank robbery suspect and I’m pretty sure he bought a ticket to Bora Bora I’m going to have to go down there.

Brandon:  Absolutely.

[laughter]

Dan:  And I’m pretty sure he’s staying in a five-star hotel. So I’ll need to be there.

Yeardley:  In an overwater bungalow.

Dan:  Yes.

Paul:  It just underscores the cost of actually providing a public service. You do what it takes. And I’ve seen public service managers who, they’re tight wads and they pride themselves on basically trying to preserve the budget, thinking somehow that that’s going to be a positive thing into the next year and the next budget cycle. And so that’s where you start seeing resources not being applied to cases because it’s going to be too expensive. It’s going to eat into the appropriation for this particular budget item, whether it be travel or overtime. That’s the biggest thing. Brandon’s talking about, detectives going down to Northern California. The biggest expense is going to be the overtime with the number of detectives that are on this case. So it does get expensive, but that’s part of doing business.

Dave:  Yeah. The one thing that I wanted touch on is, so Noemi and her children move away from Enrique. Were Enrique and Noemi still in contact with each other? How does Enrique figure out where Noemi is?

Brandon:  Yeah, so they have two kids together and he’s bio dad. So there’s communication still going on through their children, and trying to co-parent and stuff. So that’s the connection that they still had. So it wasn’t like a clean breakup where they can just go their separate ways. So when we get into the prosecution side of this, by the time it was all put together, just an abundance of evidence, like you said, if there’s any suppression, we still got list a mile long to put to trial. So the DA’s office says we don’t do deals on murder cases. So they offered him 25 to life and he took it and it didn’t go to a trial. And I think with the, you know if you take it to a trial, there may be a longer sentence with the brutality that was carried out, the planning. We talked about murder one versus murder two and different things that can happen when somebody takes it to a trial. And so he was upstate for 25 to life right now.

Dan:  Meanwhile, he’s orphaned two children.

Brandon:  Yep. Absolutely. They don’t have their dad. They don’t have their mom.

Dave:  Are the kids with Noemi family?

Brandon:  Correct.

Dave:  That’s the best outcome you could ask for, I guess.

Yeardley:  Right. I guess. Brandon, was the witch doctor implicated in any way? I’m guessing not. But nowadays, do you remember the famous case, whether or not one agrees with it, most recently about the girl who was encouraging her friend to kill himself. And then he does, and she’s also charged. I’m assuming this was probably a little too vague. Even though the witch doctor said, “I see Noemi with other men, I think you should take her life.”

Brandon:  Yeah. Like I said, all the messages were in Spanish. But in talking with Detective Garcia, who went through all the messages, there was nothing that I was made aware of through all the data that he went through, that the person Enrique was contacting in South America was telling him to murder her. It was more like a psychic, like, “I’m in a bad relationship and I need guidance and what the future holds and stuff.” And even if he did, he’s in South America. We can’t enforce laws down there, you know our laws and hold them accountable and bring him up on that stuff.

Dave:  So you didn’t follow up with that person? [laughs]

Brandon:  We did. We actually consulted him and said, “What does Enrique’s future look like?” And he said, “I see prison bars.” So he accurate on that? No, I’m just joking.

[laughter]

Yeardley:  Brandon, did you learn anything in particular from this case? What was the overarching takeaway? And do you have kids?

Brandon:  Yeah. I do have two kids, two daughters.

Yeardley:  So how does a case like this affect you as a father, as a human being once you clock out?

Brandon:  Yeah. So to answer your first question on what I learned from this case is, when you have a team of really competent detectives that have been doing it for a long time, every case you work, you learn something new from and there’s nothing that two detectives or two officers can’t figure out when they start working through the problem. And in this case, everybody put their heart and soul into it. And you’re talking about overtime. It was like work 30 hours, sleep three hours, work another 25 hours. It’s just going, going, going and nobody slacked. Everybody worked hard and worked well and ran with the things that they were assigned to do. And like, I talked about Kirk Cromwell, chasing down that lead on the sheath that was found, little things like that.

 You just see that they’re working hard, and it was an honor to work with them during that time, you know, a lot of them have retired. That’s what I remember from these cases. Isn’t necessarily the case. What I remember more is the memories of working with the other detectives. To answer your second question about the kids, I think the longer you do the job and the more exposure you have to violence and death, it just becomes normal. It’s like going to work on a Monday that was a busy day. I’ll have a busy week this week, and it just becomes almost normal. It doesn’t become crazy or like, “Oh, this one’s really bad.”

 Occasionally you do have those cases where it’s really bad that does affect you, but those are few and far between when you start being submerged in this kind of work. And the cases with my kids that kind of bothered me are the shaken babies or the infant deaths, especially when my youngest was that age. Where I would get home after working, an infant death or a shaking baby, and she’s in her crib sleeping, and I’m like having to nudge her and wake her up to make sure, that I could see her still breathing. And it just sometimes those cases make you want to go home and hug your kids and hug your wife.

 And it’s actually pretty cool. The good side of the police work, because some of it’s dark and it’s hard on your mind and your soul and different stuff at times. But the good thing with it is you’re dealing with families that have immense problems and hurt and pain in their life, and tragic things happen to them. And when you get home, you realize, my life is really good. I’m not dealing with my son or daughter, you know, passed away or whatever’s going on. [chuckles] And then like every family, little nitpicky things will happen with the kids arguing or the wife arguing. And little things like that that come, get your shoes off the carpet you know, things like that aren’t big deals. And when you walk in after a terrible case and terrible loss of life, you realize those things are not big deals, and what might have been a big deal, before you go into that case, you realize, “Oh, this is an easy problem to have.”

Yeardley:  We had a guest on the podcast describe what Dan and Dave and Paul refer to as the tail of law enforcement. Working in law enforcement, the T-A-I-L. And he said so interestingly and eloquently, I thought, where he said, when he first got into law enforcement, he was, “Go, go, go give me all the hard shit, I’m here for it.” And whatever the fallout from those really hard cases was, he set aside. We’ve often heard it just put it in a box and put it in a box. When he retired, of course, all of that stuff sort of comes rushing back to fill this vacuum, which used to be the day to day on the job. And what he likened it to was there was always going to be a price to pay.

 I decided to defer payment until I could no longer defer payment. And it came for me. He said it was a very hard thing. It wasn’t necessarily a regretful thing. He really loved the work he had done, but he was kind of not prepared for it. I think he thought maybe he would be one of the ones who didn’t have to pay that price. Does any of that resonate with you?

Brandon:  Absolutely. It’s kind of funny that that got brought up because when I was working in Medford as a detective, I felt like I had a lot of gas in my tank to continue working. I thought I could continue being a detective until the day I retire. I love it. It was something that I felt was more of a hobby to me versus work. And I was not burnout at all. And I realized when I got back on patrol at the sheriff’ office. Patrol work is hard and you’re dealing with high emotion quickly, rapidly evolving issues. But when you’re a detective, you know the victim’s family, you get to know them, their story becomes your story. And for me, the hardest part was writing the police report.

 Because when you’re in the middle of the investigation, it’s not affecting you and bothering you because you have a goal in mind of solving the case, right. When all the dust settles and the guy’s in jail and the case has been solved, now it’s time to put the case together on paper. And you’re listening to that 911 call of them screaming and you’re slowing it down and listening to it 10 times to write one sentence, to put in your report of what was being said. The confessions of the people, rather it’s the victim that is falling apart in the interview and telling you the most heinous things that happened to them.

 And then the suspect lying about it and then admitting to it, all that when you start typing that up and reliving it after the goal has been accomplished of solving and arresting the person you know and solving the case, and you are doing that for two weeks, living on paper, just typing and typing and typing and being submerged in it. You get home and you just feel dirty. You feel exhausted. You feel like a part of your soul has left with that case, and on patrol, you don’t have that. When you’re a patrol deputy or a patrol cop, you don’t have those long reports, that experience.

 So when I got back with the sheriff’s office, I’m off at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, my phone’s not ringing. [Yeardley laughs] I walk into an empty house, the kids are at volleyball, wife’s still working. I have free time, and I did not know what to do with it. And I am not anxious person, but I was overwhelmed with anxiety of having nothing to do. And I sat there in my house, and I was like, “Screw this.” I’m putting my patrol stuff back on. I’m going traffic over time until the family gets home. And I started doing that and I was like, “This ain’t healthy. You got to get away from work.” And it took about a year of talking to retired cops that are now seeing psychologists and talking about price to pay that they deferred.

 And I’ve talked to cops too that are retired, that when their grandkids have a birthday or Thanksgiving dinner, big family functions, they sit in a corner in the chair and they don’t engage with anybody because they don’t know how to, because their minds are shot, and that’s a warning sign when your hobbies become chores. You plan a trip, you plan to do something, and as the time gets closer to do it, you’re like, “I don’t have time to get ready to go. I’m just going to cancel it.” Or it just seems hard to get there. Those are warning signs that payment is– that’s going to be the effects of it.

 And so I’ve kind of been on this journey the last year of just getting my mind back, right. Getting healthy, spiritually healthy, mentally healthy. And that’s kind of a push that I want to really expose and push towards other cops that are here. Because the goal is not to retire. That shouldn’t be the goal. The goal should be to retire with a healthy mind so when you walk out of the doors, you can go enjoy life, your hobbies, your family, and continue life so you don’t have to work years to get to that point after retirement.

Dave:  Well said.

Yeardley:  Really well said. You should go around the country and share that with other law enforcement agencies.

Brandon:  [chuckles] Well, I hope they’re listening.

Yeardley:  We get a lot of mail from our listeners, which we love, and we get a lot of mail from law enforcement, both who are still in it and retired. And one of the things they really respond to is the candor that you all are willing to share about your experience, what it’s like to both still be in it and what it’s like to get out of it. Both are complicated, and so appreciate your generosity so much.

Brandon:  Well, thank you.

Yeardley:  Thank you so much for bringing that case to us today. Now, we’ve had two cases from you, Brandon. There’s a little like occult weirdness happening in both of them.

Brandon:  That’s the only two, really, that I could think of that kind of had, witch doctors, Lucifer involved.

Yeardley:  Perfect.

Dave:  So, Small Town Fam, on your bingo card, you can check those two boxes.

Yeardley:  Right. Thank you.

Paul:  Great job, Brandon.

Brandon:  Thank you, guys.

Dan:  Great case. Great job.

[music]

Yeardley:  Now for a sneak peek at today’s bonus episode.

Speaker 1:  In the history of the justice system of Scotland, Helen McDougal, William Hare, and Margaret Hare are the luckiest serial killers in history because they were caught, and they got away with it.

Yeardley:  To listen today’s bonus episode and access hundreds more, go to smalltowdicks.com/superfam and hit that little join button.

 Small Town Dicks was created by Detectives Dan and Dave. The podcast is produced by Jessica Halstead and me, Yeardley Smith. Our senior editor is Soren Begin and our editors are Christina Bracamontes and Erin Phelps. Our associate producers are the Real Nick Smitty and Erin Gaynor. Gary Scott is our executive producer, and Logan Heftel is our production manager. Our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell. And our social media maven is Monika Scott. It would make our day if you became a member of our Small Town Fam by following us on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube at @smalltowndicks, we love hearing from you.

 Oh, our groovy theme song was composed by John Forrest. Also, if you’d like to support the making of this podcast, go to smalltowndicks.com/superfam and hit that little join button. There, for a small subscription fee, you’ll find exclusive content you can’t get anywhere else. The transcripts of this podcast are thanks to SpeechDocs and they can be found on our website, smalltowndicks.com. Thank you SpeechDocs for this wonderful service. Small Town Dicks is an Audio 99 Production. Small Town Fam, thanks for listening. Nobody is better than you.

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]