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The Death Investigator with Barbara Butcher
The Death Investigator with Barbara Butcher (2025) S01E01
The Death Investigator with Barbara Butcher (2025) Season 1 Episode 1
The Death Investigator with Barbara Butcher (2025) S01E01
The Death Investigator with Barbara Butcher (2025) Season 1 Episode 1
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FunTranscript
00:00.
00:22Murder, it's a brutal language.
00:25Every injury on a victim is like a chapter in a book.
00:29And the death investigator's mission
00:31is to understand the story that those wounds tell.
00:36This was a massacre of an entire family.
00:41There was a woman found, shot to death, in the elevator.
00:44I looked up, and that's where I saw brain matter.
00:48By the grace of God, if I would have went with her to the store,
00:50I wouldn't be sitting here in front of this camera right now.
00:53The second body is found.
00:56All hell broke loose.
00:58Why does a killer stab a person over and over?
01:03The knife was impaled in his neck.
01:05This is literally a nightmare.
01:07What is going on?
01:09The death investigator became really, really crucial.
01:13We counted on whoever butcher to set us in the right direction.
01:16The body tells us a story.
01:19The more you kill, the more you do, the more evidence you leave.
01:25You don't have to be Dick Tracy to figure out that this is all related.
01:29It's all hands for the entire homicide squad.
01:31This is getting really, really crazy.
01:35We've got three crime scenes and five people dead.
01:39In March of 2000, a series of baffling murders struck this Bronx neighborhood.
01:55In my 23 years as a death investigator in New York City, I've seen how violence can torment a community.
02:04And in this case, the question that haunted everyone was, who would be next?
02:11Detective Negron.
02:12How are you doing?
02:13Terrific.
02:14It's good to see you, David.
02:18It's been a long time, right?
02:1925 years.
02:20Yeah.
02:21You lived in the Bronx.
02:22In the South Bronx.
02:23Yeah.
02:24In the Bronx.
02:25Just like this.
02:26It was very family-oriented.
02:28I've never had a homicide here before.
02:31How do you feel about being right here where it was?
02:34Well, I think about it a lot.
02:36It's a lot, right?
02:37Yeah.
02:38And it never leaves your head?
02:39No.
02:45About 9.30 that night, we got a call in the office that there was a woman that was found in the housing development.
02:53Shot to death at the elevator.
02:57She was found by some children.
03:00Obviously, patrol responds.
03:02They've notified a 4-9 detective squad.
03:05I responded to the housing location and discovered the victim.
03:12She was light-skinned, possibly Hispanic, long brown hair, and she had been shot through the head.
03:18The elevator here?
03:19This is a tight spot.
03:20This elevator is the same one.
03:2125 years later.
03:22What did you see first when you opened this?
03:23Well, there was a female.
03:24The body was right here to the right, slumped down.
03:28She was wearing a coat and some sweatpants, and I looked up, and that's where I saw on ceiling hair, brain matter, part of her skull, and hair, long strands of hair stuck to the ceiling.
03:41Yeah.
03:56Brain, bone, chip, blood, hair.
03:59Yeah.
04:00I looked at her.
04:01I looked at the ceiling.
04:03I knew that was a gunshot wound to the head.
04:06This was a 9-millimeter shell, right?
04:08So that explains the power to make this go through here.
04:10Yes.
04:11The Bronx DA had and still has a practice of responding to every single murder scene with a lawyer and a videographer.
04:25Our job is to help the investigation, because everything has to get documented.
04:29Today's date is March 3, 2000.
04:32The time is approximately 12.30 a.m.
04:35This is the Bronx County District Attorney.
04:36We're located at Homicide Crime State.
04:40We notified the M.E.'s office.
04:43They sent the death investigators.
04:47In 2000, I was a senior investigator, a supervisor, and a trainer.
04:52Now, among those thousands of homicides, I remember this case in particular.
04:58This call came for a body found in an elevator in the Bronx.
05:03My death investigator gets on scene.
05:06We get in there in the elevator, very careful where we place our feet.
05:11We don't want to disturb the scene, but it's inevitable that you're going to step in blood.
05:16That's why we take a photo before going in and after we leave, so it's clear which footprints are ours.
05:23Then they notice the gunshot wound in her chest, stab wounds, and her throat is slit all the way across and deep.
05:36It's unusual that you have more than one type of wound on the victim.
05:41Why would one person shoot the person, then going to take out a knife and stab them?
05:46I thought right away it's more than one person.
05:48The victim is unknown identity.
05:51The police department's first job is to figure out who she is.
05:56Detectives knocked on every door, trying to work on finding exactly what apartment she lived in.
06:02To see if anybody saw someone come into the building, someone leave the building.
06:07And this was 2000, there was no cameras on that building.
06:11Word spread quickly through the building that someone had been murdered.
06:16Everybody was scared, because nothing like that never happened.
06:22Then the cops came knocking on my door, and they just was asking, did you see anybody?
06:28Do I know what happened?
06:30And when they showed me the pictures of her shot in the head, I literally lost it.
06:38Because my friend was dead.
06:48Yeah.
06:51Chanel identified the victim as a 39-year-old Evelyn Santos.
06:58I told him, I said, Evelyn was truly my friend.
07:00We lived right next door to each other.
07:02And we just was kicking it, doing what we usually do.
07:05She said, I could use a couple more beers.
07:08You know, we young.
07:09I said, girl, just go to the store and come right back.
07:12So she got in the elevator.
07:14And I heard like a pop, pop.
07:18Like a bang, bang.
07:21But I thought it was the incinerator.
07:23Then somebody was in the hallway screaming that somebody was dead in the elevator.
07:30It happened so quick.
07:31And by the grace of God, if I would have went with her to the store, I wouldn't be sitting
07:35here in front of this camera right now.
07:37I could not believe that my friend was gone.
07:43And then I remembered about Teresa, her daughter.
07:48According to Chanel, Evelyn's 14-year-old daughter, Teresa, was at home babysitting her
07:53little niece, Gabby.
07:56This is probably one of the most difficult conversations a human can have with another
08:01human to inform them that their parent is dead.
08:06Teresa, she was hysterical.
08:08I want my mother.
08:09I want my mother.
08:10That's all she kept saying.
08:12She said, yeah, my mom was going out.
08:17I thought she was going to come right back.
08:19And she never did.
08:21It's bringing back a flood of memories for me.
08:27And it's heartbreaking.
08:29Teresa and the four-year-old child were removed from the scene and brought into the 49 precinct.
08:39The police department has to notify Gabby's parents, Denise, who is Evelyn's sister, and
08:46her partner, Irvin Aguilar, that they have this little four-year-old.
08:50They don't answer the phone.
08:52And we're trying to contact the rest of the family now.
09:01The phone rang.
09:03And it was my mom.
09:06And my mom said, Evelyn was killed.
09:11I was like, did I hear what I heard?
09:15Who would do that to Evelyn?
09:18Evelyn was my first cousin on my mother's side.
09:21She was just a wonderful person.
09:24I mean, anyone who would meet her would not hesitate to say the same.
09:31We come from a very large Puerto Rican family.
09:36We lived in close proximity to each other.
09:40It was a family relationship that was trusting, loving, understanding.
09:50The oldest is Evelyn, then her sister Irma, and after Irma is Eduardo, and then finally Denise.
10:00Denise's partner was Irving and the father of Gabby.
10:05Evelyn had two children, Anthony and Teresa.
10:10Anthony was always on the move.
10:12Anthony was not there at the time of the murder.
10:14Teresa, she would stay all the time in that mother's house.
10:18Teresa was very, very close to her mom, Evelyn.
10:22So my concern was for her and how she was.
10:27As police continue to try and track down Gabby's parents and other family members,
10:35we're wrapping up the death investigation and sharing the findings with detectives.
10:41The choreography of murder that always enters my head,
10:45how I figure out where was the person standing, where was the perpetrator standing,
10:50what was happening at that moment.
10:52So the elevator's at the lobby floor, and the victim is standing in there, going somewhere, heading out.
11:00So ordinary, relaxed.
11:02Now, the door is pulled open, and who's standing out there?
11:06A person or two people.
11:08I'm thinking.
11:11She's in the center of the elevator.
11:14She starts to step out.
11:16Perp or perps.
11:17Open the door.
11:18Jam the gun right under her chin.
11:21Right like that.
11:22Yes.
11:23And shoots.
11:25And then she slumps down, dead, obviously.
11:30Then she gets a shot to the chest.
11:36And then the throat, slashed deep.
11:39As soon as you nick that carotid, you get that first spray of blood.
11:44I mean, it's 140 millimeters of pressure, right?
11:46Yes.
11:47Shooting out like a garden hose.
11:49We don't see that at all here.
11:51There's no blood.
11:52No.
11:53Because if your heart's not pumping, you're not bleeding.
11:55It's not going to come out yet.
11:56And then there's three more stab wounds.
11:59So now we're talking about overkill.
12:01There's no blood spray, no splatter, nothing.
12:04So obviously, this is all post-mortem stuff.
12:07And for me, that's rage.
12:09That's personal.
12:16She's still warm, near 98.6.
12:20There's no rigor mortis.
12:22This tells us quick killing.
12:25So time of death, certainly under an hour.
12:31I went to the Bronx, where Evelyn lived.
12:36There was a swarm of police cars.
12:40And there was, like, yellow police tape.
12:42There was probably about six other family members who showed up at the precinct.
12:47Evelyn's daughter, Teresa's inside.
12:51With my niece, Gabby, I just, you know, took her hand.
12:56And one of the detectives told me Denise and Irving were missing.
13:03It's like two or three in the morning.
13:08It was odd that they didn't come and pick up their daughter.
13:12If this happened to Evelyn, Denise would be here.
13:16I mean, they don't live far.
13:19With the brutal nature of this crime against Evelyn, police are concerned because now they knew they had a violent killer on the loose.
13:28And could there be other bodies?
13:29What would make someone kill five family members, including a kid?
13:39That is a complete bloodbath.
13:42There's a knife shoved through their throat and actually pinned to the floor.
13:48And I just felt at that moment that my world was gone.
13:55It's a message.
13:56This person's enraged, and they want to demonstrate that rage.
14:0139-year-old Evelyn Santos is found shot and stabbed in the elevator of her apartment building.
14:20And now Bronx detectives are unable to locate Denise Santos and Irvin Aguilar, the parents of four-year-old Gabby.
14:28Denise was supposed to come and pick up the baby.
14:31If she hasn't showed up, she won't answer her cell phone.
14:37I didn't know exactly what's going on.
14:40So we go to Denise's house.
14:42It's 5 a.m. in the morning.
14:44It was still dark in Denise's house.
14:48The front door was locked.
14:50They had dogs, and they're in the basement.
14:53And the dogs are going berserk.
14:55The dogs gave me that feeling.
14:57They did something wrong.
14:59Why would they be barking at 5 o'clock in the morning so loud?
15:04This is Denise's here.
15:06This house right here.
15:07Front door, and over to the right, it's the side kitchen door with a little porch.
15:13The detective that I was with took a bucket and flipped it over, and he got on top.
15:18He saw a body on the floor.
15:24So I want to see it myself.
15:27And I got up top, and I looked, and sure enough, there was a body on the floor there.
15:31The fire department came, broke down the door.
15:40We saw a body of a woman on the floor.
15:43Dark hair.
15:44And she's in a pool of blood.
15:46There's also a big kitchen knife sticking out of her neck.
15:55Negron didn't really examine the body any more than that.
15:57But then when he looks around the house, it looks like it's been ransacked.
16:01You can still hear the dogs barking like crazy.
16:06We have our guns drawn.
16:09As we go in room to room, there was clothes everywhere, open boxes.
16:16There was a big square hole that might have been where a whole safe was taken out.
16:23Once it's all cleared, we go back down to the first floor.
16:28At the kitchen table, it was the victim's ID.
16:31We realized that it was Denise Santos, Evelyn's sister.
16:37At that point, now we know Evelyn's dead, Denise is dead, and it looks like there's some type of burglary in her house.
16:48The body tells us a story.
16:51This one's a little different from Evelyn Santos.
16:54There was no gunshot wound, but she's been stabbed 14, 15, 16 times.
17:00And she's laying with her head to the side.
17:04A knife has been jammed through her neck into the wooden floor and stuck there.
17:09She's pinned to the floor.
17:11So this is getting really, really crazy.
17:15In my time on the police department, over 5,000 different homicide investigations, I've never seen someone who has a knife shoved through their throat and actually pinned that person to the floor.
17:29So why pin her to the floor?
17:32What does that mean?
17:33I believe that that was just done like a coup de gras.
17:37I like to look.
17:38Look what I just did, you know?
17:40It's a message.
17:41This person's enraged, and they want to demonstrate that rage.
17:46So in order to cut through someone's neck, you've got to go through muscle, skin, which has a tensile strength of its own, and it's all the tendons and the ligaments of the neck.
17:59So it's really, it's tough to get through there.
18:02That's really hard.
18:04And then you've got to do the same thing coming out through the other side.
18:09But she'd be fighting, moving, and in order to get that knife through her neck with that kind of force, she's got to be dead.
18:17She's in substantial amount of rigor mortis.
18:20So how long has it been since she was killed?
18:23Maybe 10 hours.
18:24I can tell you she was definitely killed before Evelyn was.
18:28Is this a huge coincidence that these two sisters were murdered blocks apart, hours apart?
18:38There must be some connection.
18:40The police department goes on really high alert, and they try to find every single sibling of the Santos family.
18:49There's got to be a reason that this family was being targeted.
18:54And police are instantly concerned.
18:58Irving Aguilar, Denise's husband, was still missing.
19:01They also haven't heard from Eduardo, who was Denise and Evelyn's brother.
19:06And Eduardo was minutes away living in a temporary apartment.
19:13It was daytime.
19:16It's 6 o'clock in the morning.
19:18And the detectives respond to that housing location.
19:22And over the air, they transmit to Central that the door that they're at is unlocked.
19:28But they can't get in, because there's a body at the door blocking their way.
19:35The detectives are swarming multiple crime scenes in the midst of an unfolding tragedy.
19:54Two sisters have been found murdered, and a targeted family massacre has become a real probability.
20:01I just, I didn't know what to take.
20:05I just know that we have to get to Eduardo Santos, Denise and Evelyn's brother live there, and see if he's okay.
20:11Police officers get to Eduardo's home, and when they try to open the door, which is unlocked, they can't get it all the way open.
20:20Why?
20:22There's a body right behind the door.
20:27When they go in, what they find is a complete bloodbath.
20:37Three more family members have been killed.
20:40I was, like, again shocked.
20:42I can't believe this is happening.
20:45So now we've got five people in a family, all killed, and we need help.
20:53So I send in three of my guys there, three death investigators.
20:58Joe Savino from the first case, Rob Yee, and Dennis Gabali.
21:04I'd handled homicides.
21:07I've had double homicides before, but I'd never had a whole family that was killed.
21:13And this was something which was really complex.
21:16The person whose body was blocking the door was 34-year-old Irvin Aguilar.
21:22Irvin was the partner of Denise and the father of four-year-old Gabi.
21:28Irvin Aguilar was lying face down on the floor.
21:34A knife was impaled in his neck.
21:37It's the exact same way Denise was found at her residence.
21:42In addition, Irvin was shot three times, twice in the head, once in the chest.
21:47And he's been stabbed 16 times.
21:50If someone is stabbed repeatedly over and over again, that's really a lot of rage.
21:56Are they trying to send a message?
21:58Or is it they just want to make sure that the person is dead because they were a witness?
22:03There was a blueprint that's obviously a very important finding.
22:08Three feet away, they find a second victim, also in the hallway, was Eduardo Santos.
22:17Eduardo is shot only once in the head.
22:20There's no stab wounds, no throat cutting, no mutilation.
22:25We had to find out, why did the wounds on Irvin show overkill?
22:30But they used measured restraint against Eduardo.
22:34What springs to my mind is, killing Irvin, it was personal.
22:38But Eduardo's murder, it was business.
22:41There was a lot of blood.
22:43Some of it was coagulated, dried up.
22:46Obviously this had happened hours previously.
22:49Legron then sees bloody footprints going from the living room and towards the bedroom area.
22:56As police make their way to the background, what they originally thought was loud music was actually cartoons.
23:02And in this horrific story, I think what they find behind there is perhaps the worst of the worst of this case.
23:11On the bed, face down, is Ishmael Santos, the nephew of the family who was staying with Eduardo, 14 years old.
23:28And he is wearing his little SpongeBob backpack from school.
23:33And he's been shot in the head.
23:38The TV was on.
23:39Eduardo walked in there, turned on the TV, and was getting ready to take his school bag off.
23:44But he never got the chance.
23:47The bullet obviously entered on the left part of his head and came out the right side.
23:51And there was a bullet that was found in his hand.
23:57This is telling me that Ishmael heard the previous gunshots.
24:03He put his hands over his ears to block what he was hearing, knowing he was probably next.
24:10And so when they shot him, it went through his hand.
24:14The scene at Eduardo's house, it was grisome.
24:18The apartment was ransacked.
24:21We don't know whether they were looking for jewelry, cash, drugs.
24:26Crime scene unit has numerous shell casings from this scene of the three people killed and from Evelyn Santos.
24:36They're 9mm.
24:39Could be the same gun.
24:41They were bagged up to go to the lab for comparison.
24:45But you don't have to be Dick Tracy to figure out that this is all related.
24:50In a 24-hour period, five people are killed.
24:55And now investigators from my team compare data from all three crime scenes.
25:02It's evident by the rigor mortis, as well as body temperature, that the three people in Eduardo's house were killed first.
25:10Time of death, it had definitely been eight to 12 hours around that time.
25:16From there, the killers go to Denise's house.
25:20I know this because her degree of rigor mortis is lesser.
25:26Then finally, Evelyn Santos was killed.
25:29It was a very, very short time before she was discovered.
25:33Evelyn, she was the last one that was murdered.
25:37But she was the first one that we found.
25:39Why were these people killed in this order?
25:42And who was the primary target?
25:44I mean, obviously, it's all hands for the entire homicide squad, plus other squads in the Bronx.
25:52I saw my brother coming in to the precinct.
25:58And I said, is Denise, Eduardo, Irving, and Ishmael missing?
26:04What is going on?
26:07And Detective O'Toole, he said, I'm sorry.
26:13I can hear my cousin screaming, Irma.
26:19But at the same time, I felt like I can only describe it as being in, like, a twilight zone.
26:27This is literally a nightmare, and I'm going to wake up.
26:30And I just felt at that moment that my world was gone.
26:37So, you look at all the victims that try to figure out what causes the homicide victim.
26:42We're going to turn your life inside out.
26:46Evelyn really had no background.
26:48Denise had a job, was working.
26:50But Irving had a pass.
26:51He had a pass for drugs.
26:54He had federal drug time.
26:56It wasn't for a marijuana cigarette.
26:58He went to jail for, you know, kilos of drugs.
27:01As police begin to put the pieces of this puzzle together, they're wondering, is Irving the only person with a criminal pass?
27:09Was he the target?
27:10I just thought, oh, my God, please don't tell me this is something related to what Irving used to do.
27:20What on earth would make someone so brutally kill five family members, including a kid?
27:37Irving had a conviction for drugs.
27:41Was this a result of a drug deal gone bad?
27:43Or was it something else?
27:45Maybe someone from his past was looking to get even.
27:47Money old, drugs old.
27:49Also, running everybody, you know, connections in the drug trade.
27:55But we couldn't really find any new connections.
27:57There was the old stuff, nothing new.
28:01There was no drug paraphernalia at the crime scenes.
28:06There was no weapons found.
28:08I didn't see any indication that it was drug related.
28:11We told the detectives, when Irving came out of prison, there was a wake-up call.
28:18He basically dedicated himself to Denise, to Gabrielle, and building that life together.
28:26So, the police continue to run down potential leads.
28:33Of course, we have to look at people in the circle of the family.
28:37Police ask Evelyn's daughter, Teresa, again, if she has any information about who her mother was speaking to that day.
28:44Anything that can help them begin to put the pieces of this puzzle together.
28:47Evelyn's daughter tells us, when she came home from school, Evelyn told her that she saw her ex-boyfriend from Florida in the neighborhood.
28:55And he was going to come and take her out to dinner.
29:00Speaking to the family members, they knew the name of Evelyn's ex-boyfriend, Luis Garcia.
29:07Evelyn and Luis had dated five years prior for about a year.
29:13After Luis and Evelyn broke up, he was dating someone else, but they had remained friends.
29:20And he became good friends with Eduardo.
29:25And would often come to visit.
29:29As police try and track down Luis Garcia, Evelyn's ex, they continue digging into the victim's backgrounds.
29:39They make what could be a game-changing discovery.
29:42It turns out, Eduardo had come into a large sum of money through a lawsuit.
29:48He got a brain injury and didn't get good care at the hospital.
29:53And won a settlement of $3 million.
29:58That's an attractive amount of money for someone with bad intent.
30:05Knowing about Eduardo's windfall, police have to ask, was money the motive here?
30:13I learned that Eduardo liked to take care of his family and his friends.
30:18So he bought his sister Denise a house.
30:21He took care of Evelyn.
30:23He took care of everyone.
30:26And Eduardo's settlement was kind of like winning the lottery for him.
30:30And when people win the lottery, the best advice is, don't tell anyone you've won the lottery.
30:35People know in the neighborhood when you have money.
30:39And he was lending it out because people were asking.
30:43Eduardo was so generous, but he was naive in a sense, or I would say too trusting.
30:54His family and friends thought people were always trying to squeeze money out of him.
30:59Eduardo was generous, but he had one condition.
31:02I'm going to lend you money, but you need to pay it back with interest.
31:06The police do a very, very wide net of interviews.
31:11Interviewing people who might have information about the victims.
31:16As police dig deeper into Eduardo's background, they find that he's made loans to several people,
31:22including someone who was close to home.
31:25Eduardo lent $80,000 to Luis Garcia, Evelyn's ex-boyfriend.
31:32The same man she was going to have a date with the night she was killed.
31:38Investigators find out the clock was ticking on that loan.
31:43Eduardo was demanding his money back, and was angry with Luis because he wasn't paying the money back.
31:50So now the focus went more narrow, and we find out a lot of information.
31:56Lisa's partner, Irving, was very protective of Eduardo.
32:00He would look out for Eduardo to make sure that he doesn't get swindled anymore.
32:06The pieces of the puzzle are starting to come together, but they are still in for a big surprise.
32:12Irving's friends told me that earlier that week, Irving got into an argument with Luis Garcia about the money.
32:19He punched Luis in the head and knocked him out.
32:32Luis Garcia is now in the crosshairs of police after they discover that Irving beat him up a week earlier over his unpaid loan.
32:41That was the motive because of an argument over the payment back of a loan.
32:50I've seen this before with Mafia and other gang-related murders.
32:54The rage and ferocity of these killings speaks to someone who was settling a score and sending a message.
33:02Luis Garcia is a common name. Obviously, we needed a little more.
33:08The police, they didn't have a photograph. They didn't have anything.
33:13Now that detectives were walking in and out of buildings, they knocked on every door in the neighborhood.
33:19Sergeant O'Toole was probably the best lieutenant there was at NYPD, in my opinion.
33:23One thing he always said is that I don't sleep on a case like this.
33:28A case like this goes, I'm not gonna sleep. That means you're not gonna sleep either.
33:31Until we solve this case.
33:34They had a hard time getting people to come forward with any kind of information because people are scared.
33:40Then they start talking.
33:42The next day, we find all these witnesses who put Luis Garcia and another unknown male at all three homicide scenes.
33:52And they were driving a sports car. A purple Trans Am or a Camaro.
33:59As detectives work around the clock hunting for Luis Garcia and the purple sports car, they don't know if the Santos family is still in danger.
34:09At the time, we didn't know who the rest of the targets were. And when the grandparents of Ishmael flew in from Puerto Rico, we sent the SWAT team to meet the grandparents and take them off the plane under armed guard.
34:26And take them to a safe location because we were worried for their safety.
34:30What they had to go through learning that their children and grandchild were murdered and then not know if they were also targets.
34:38I can't even put myself in their shoes.
34:44Soon, investigators get a break in their search for Luis Garcia and his accomplice.
34:49The police department found Eduardo's electronic organizer and one of the family members told the police, I can get you in.
34:59Eduardo Santos's electronic organizer had Luis's address in Florida.
35:08We take that information. We start to run it.
35:12We now know what Luis looks like, but we still don't know who his accomplice is.
35:17Police have issued a bolo, but there's good reason to suspect that they may have already left town.
35:24We reached out to Detective Fiscus in Miami.
35:30We had worked with Detective Fiscus the year before, a couple of times on other cases.
35:35I explained to him what's going on. We shared information.
35:40Detective Fiscus told me he would check it.
35:42Bill Fiscus goes out to the scene, doesn't see the purple firebird, doesn't see Luis Garcia, and he goes home.
35:55Wakes up the next morning.
35:56He drove out in his unmarked car and Fiscus pulls into the gate and behind him pulls a purple Pontiac firebird.
36:07And he looks in his mirror and he goes, oh my God.
36:1110 o'clock in the morning on March 4th, I get a phone call from him saying, hey, the car just arrived.
36:18And Fiscus tells me that they'll be able to conduct a surveillance there, but they're not going to be able to catch this car if it gets out on the main road.
36:25He pulls past the address and stops. The Pontiac firebird pulls up. He sees two males. One he identifies right away from the picture we sent them of Luis Garcia and another male get out of the car and enter the residence.
36:42Luis Garcia and another man, also Hispanic, maybe in his mid-40s, come back out of the home and they start scrubbing the rear and the inside of the firebird.
36:59And at that point he was watching them cleaning the inside of the car, moving items out of the house and throwing them into a dumpster outside.
37:07It looks like they're trying to clean up evidence and destroy evidence. Fiscus calls Sean O'Toole in New York, describes what he's watching, and Sean O'Toole says, we're on the way. The cavalry is coming.
37:21And he and fire the detectives jump on a plane and come straight to Miami.
37:25This was a massacre of an entire family. And two days after the discovery of the bodies, the Bronx homicide team is on their way to Miami.
37:44Miami police send detectives and police officers to where Luis Garcia is known to stay.
37:50And they wait.
37:54Then Luis and the other man both get in the car and they pull out.
37:59Fiscus has a decision to make, and he decided to stop them.
38:05The detectives pen the car in right before it leaves the complex and stop the car at gunpoint.
38:11He asked Luis for his driver's license, and outside his wallet stuck together were four credit cards that belonged to Denise Santos.
38:21Fiscus knows at that moment, this is the guy.
38:24The other man in the car with Luis Garcia is identified as Jose Pizarro, his suspected accomplice.
38:33Both men are apprehended and are awaiting questioning from Bronx detectives.
38:38Once we got to Florida, they got a search warrant.
38:42We searched the apartment, and we found tons of evidence.
38:46We found money that still had blood dripping on it, thousands of dollars.
38:55A blueprint was found in Eduardo's apartment in the Bronx, and now they find that boot in his home in Miami, and it's a match.
39:04We recovered the safe, a gun, which had been cut up with a sore sore.
39:11But they made a crucial mistake.
39:13When they cut up the barrel, they cut it up lengthwise.
39:18What that meant is you had little one-inch pieces of the barrel.
39:22So the test bullet was microscopically compared to the bullets found at the murder scenes.
39:29They were microscopically identical.
39:34Basically, they deny everything.
39:37But eventually, Luis begins to talk and say,
39:41Hey, I just went up there to New York.
39:44Pizarro told me that he had kilos to sell, and he killed the whole family.
39:51Pizarro, he had all these jailhouse tattoos.
39:55Some of the tattoos mean that you're a killer.
39:58It was obvious to me that he had done time in Puerto Rico at Oso Blanco, or White Bear.
40:03It's the worst jail there is in the whole Caribbean.
40:07Pizarro stood in the car, and Garcia killed everybody.
40:11It wasn't me. It was him.
40:13Pizarro now was getting excited.
40:16He kind of like jumped in the chair.
40:18I see something like hanging down here.
40:20He had a very thin gold chain on.
40:23Around his neck was a ring with the letter G.
40:29Well, Irvin Aguilar and Denise's daughter's name was Gabby.
40:34And that was her ring, that Denise wore around her neck.
40:37The arrest of Jose Pizarro and Luis Garcia reveals that we were right about the fact that there were two.
40:49One clearly wielded the knives, and the other one did the shooting.
40:52This whole story revolved around one thing.
40:58Luis Garcia didn't want to pay back the loan.
41:02Jose Pizarro and Luis Garcia, they go kill Eduardo and eliminate any potential witnesses.
41:11Including Evelyn, whose chance encounter with Luis in the neighborhood that day sealed her fate.
41:17She was a witness. She had to die.
41:20They were arrested and extradited back to New York.
41:30It was a relief.
41:33When five people are killed, and you're able to make an arrest within four days, it was great teamwork.
41:40And it felt real good, you know, when we finally got some sleep.
41:50You know, the trial, everything was just a lot, because they killed them brutally.
41:55Nobody on this planet deserves to die like that.
42:00Luis Garcia was convicted of first-degree murder.
42:04And then Jose Pizarro was convicted of three counts of murder in the second degree.
42:10Both men are serving life sentences now.
42:15You're going to spend the rest of your life in jail, and that's not even enough time for you.
42:20See me, I will leave you in isolation for the rest of your life, so you can see nothing but darkness.
42:27Because you took the sunshine out of my friend.
42:33It's a huge void.
42:35It's a void that no amount of time could ever, ever, ever fill.
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