- 5 weeks ago
A young woman headed home after a Fourth of July party—but she never made it there. From the very first hours of the investigation, detectives began uncovering a series of troubling and downright bizarre clues. But none of them could’ve imagined the kind of horror they were about to face. And when the full truth finally came out, this case would go down as one of the most chilling in California’s histor
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00:00A young woman headed home after a 4th of July party, but she never made it there.
00:05From the very first hours of the investigation, detectives began uncovering a series of troubling
00:10and downright bizarre clues. But none of them could have imagined the kind of horror they were
00:16about to face. And when the full truth finally came out, this case would go down as one of the
00:22most chilling in California's history.
00:30Megan Barroso was born on March 15, 1981, in the American town of Camarillo, California.
00:37When she was just a little kid, her parents split up, and she ended up living with her
00:42mom. But her dad stayed in the picture, seeing her regularly. As a child, Megan got into dancing,
00:48and it quickly became her absolute passion. During her high school years, her mom lost her
00:53job at the local hospital, forcing them to pack up and move to this small town called Templeton
00:59about 3 hours away. It hit Megan hard. She had to leave behind her school and all of
01:04her friends. Right after graduating, she decided to head back closer to home. She rented a little
01:10apartment in a place called Moorpark, enrolled in the local community college, and landed
01:15a job as an assistant in the purchasing department at a clothing manufacturing company. Down the
01:20line, Megan planned to transfer to a university, but she hadn't decided what she wanted to study
01:25yet. She was excited to be spending time with her friends again. On top of that, her dad
01:30had just gotten remarried and had a newborn son, so Megan made it a point to drop by whenever
01:36she could.
01:36On July 4, 2001, when she was 20, Megan had plans to spend the whole day with her friends.
01:43It was Independence Day, and fireworks were set to go off everywhere in celebration. She started
01:49by heading over to her friend Lindsay's house, where her family was throwing a barbecue. Everyone
01:54was having a great time, and as evening came, they got invited to a beach party in a nearby town.
01:59Megan left her car at Lindsay's place, and their friends came by to pick them up. The party itself
02:04was pretty chill. They hung out and sighed for a while, then headed down to the beach to watch the
02:09fireworks. A few hours later, they stopped by another friend's house, and around 2 a.m.,
02:14they got dropped back off at Lindsay's. Lindsay offered to let Megan crash there for the night,
02:19since the drive back to her place would take a while, but Megan turned it down because she had
02:24to be up early for work the next morning. As Megan leaned in to hug Lindsay goodbye,
02:28she accidentally knocked her purse, and nearly everything spilled out onto the ground.
02:33They both crouched down to pick it all up, but in the mix, Megan accidentally grabbed Lindsay's
02:38phone. Neither of them noticed, and Megan hit the road. Just a few minutes later, Lindsay realized
02:44her phone was missing, and figured Megan must have grabbed it by accident. She called her own number
02:49house phone. Megan picked up, turned the car around, came back to drop it off, and then finally headed
02:55home for real. Around 4 a.m., a security guard was patrolling one of the streets in Moorpark,
03:01keeping an eye on the local business. At some point, he heard these popping sounds coming from
03:05a nearby street, and figured someone was setting off fireworks over there. He headed that way, and soon
03:11enough, he spotted an abandoned car right in the middle of the road. The car was sitting partly on the
03:17median, engine still running, driver's door wide open. The headlights and wipers were both on, but
03:24there was no sign of the driver anywhere. At first, the security guard figured maybe some drunk partier
03:29from the holiday had crashed and just taken off. But then, he noticed a woman's flip-flop on the
03:35asphalt, and the other one was tucked under the driver's seat. That struck him as weird. Would a woman
03:41really ditched the scene of an accident without her shoes? He stepped closer, peered inside the car,
03:47and saw red stains everywhere. Realizing it was blood, he quickly stepped back and called the police.
03:54The officers started examining the car and spotted a few bullet holes. Most were riddled across the
03:59windshield, and the driver's side window was completely shattered. With all that blood inside
04:04the cabin, at least one of those bullets had to have hit the driver. But the cops immediately picked
04:10up on something weird. There wasn't a single drop of blood outside the car. If she'd gotten out on her
04:16own, blood would have definitely spilled onto the pavement. So, they figured the shooter might have
04:22grabbed the woman who was in there and taken her with them. On the left side of the car, the officers
04:27noticed some deep scratches, like another vehicle had sideswiped it. Right by the driver's seat was a
04:34purse, splattered with blood. There were no documents or ID inside, but tucked underneath the
04:39seat where the purse had been sitting, they found a cell phone, also smeared with blood. While the
04:45forensics team combed through the car itself, the police scoured the area for any leads, and it didn't
04:51take long to find a few shell casings. Experts quickly determined they came from an AK-47 assault rifle.
04:58All of this painted a pretty grim picture for the police. According to the investigators,
05:03the woman behind the wheel had probably stopped at a traffic light when the perp pulled up next to her.
05:09He rammed her car, and she tried to speed away from him, but the guy pulled out an assault rifle
05:13and unloaded on her vehicle. It looked like one or more bullets hit her, causing her to lose control
05:19and veer onto the median. What happened next was still a total mystery, but the detectives figured
05:25the attacker might have grabbed her and hauled her off in his own car. They also realized her wounds
05:30probably weren't fatal, given the relatively small amount of blood in the cabin. While investigators
05:36were piecing everything together, the cops ran the plates and discovered the car was a rental.
05:41They contacted the company, and that's when they learned it had been rented by Megan.
05:46The detectives called around to every hospital in the area, but she hadn't shown up at any of them.
05:52That only made their theory about her being kidnapped even stronger,
05:55but they still had zero leads to point them in the right direction. There were no foreign
06:00fingerprints in the car, no surveillance cameras on the road, and at the time it all went down,
06:05not a single witness strove by. The detectives headed out to speak with Megan's friends and
06:10family. Everyone told them the same thing. They had no clue who could have wanted to hurt her.
06:15She wasn't the type to get into fights with anyone. She didn't have a boyfriend or any messy exes,
06:20and honestly, she'd never made any enemies in her life. The cops also spoke with Lindsay,
06:26who filled them in on everything that happened that day. According to her, she and Megan had a
06:31great time. Nothing weird or out of the ordinary happened at all. The only thing that really stuck
06:36out to her was this guy named John, whose house by the beach was hosting the party. Lindsay knew him,
06:42but it was Megan's first time meeting him. Throughout the night, John kept coming up to Lindsay,
06:47asking her to introduce him to Megan, but she kept shutting him down. She told him Megan wasn't the
06:53kind of girl who'd be into a quick fling, and that was exactly what John was after. The police
06:58questioned him, but the guy swore he never left the party, and everyone there backed him up,
07:04saying he was at the house until the early morning. So investigators crossed him off their list
07:09and shifted focus back to finding Megan. Police brought in search dogs to check the car,
07:14but they only followed her scent a few yards before stopping cold, as if it just disappeared
07:20right there. That only fueled detectives' theory that some unknown attacker had grabbed Megan,
07:26tossed her into his car, and taken off. Even with all that, police still launched a search around the
07:31area where the car was found. Officers hit the streets, combed through the nearby mountains,
07:36and checked along the banks of a small river. They even brought in helicopters with infrared sensors to
07:41scan from above, but none of it turned up a single lead. Meanwhile, the detectives discovered that
07:47Megan's car had this device, kind of like a black box, which logged everything that happened with the
07:52vehicle. The cops dove into that data, and also brought in ballistic experts to map out the trajectories
07:58of all the bullets based on the holes in the car. Putting it all together, they came up with a
08:03clearer picture of what happened with Megan. Someone sideswiped her car on the driver's side,
08:08and she floored the gas pedal to get away. It seemed like the attacker sped ahead and disappeared
08:13out of sight, because Megan ended up stopping at a traffic light. Maybe she figured the guy was long
08:18gone, but apparently, he was lying in wait just up ahead, not far from that light. When she pulled to a
08:26stop, he started firing at her car. From what the ballistic experts said, those initial shots missed her,
08:32so she hit the gas again. But as Megan drove past the shooter, he fired one more time, and that bullet
08:39hit her in the stomach. That's when she lost control and veered onto the median. After that,
08:45Megan reached for her phone, which was in her purse. That's what the blood traces suggested.
08:50But right then, the attacker walked up to her car, and whatever happened next remained a total mystery.
08:56As soon as the details of what happened hit the media, this case blew up as one of the biggest
09:02topics in the whole county. People were terrified that some unknown psycho was out there blasting
09:07cars with an assault rifle, and they were demanding the police catch him immediately.
09:13Officers set up roadblocks to question as many drivers as possible. They were hoping to track
09:18down at least one person who'd driven through that morning, but all they found were a handful of
09:23folks who'd spotted Megan's car abandoned in the middle of the road. All of them just assumed some
09:28drunk had crashed and then ditched the scene, so none of these people bothered calling the cops.
09:34The detectives also launched a tip hotline, which got flooded with a few hundred calls.
09:39Most led straight to dead ends, but pretty soon, the police got this pretty bizarre lead.
09:45An anonymous caller tipped them off, saying that on the morning of July 5th, he'd seen some guy
09:51stuffing what looked like Megan's body into the trunk of a burgundy sedan.
09:55Moreover, it all went down near these mountains with a seriously bad reputation, where bodies
10:01turned up way too often. The detectives rushed out to search that spot right away, and they even
10:07released information about the burgundy sedan, hoping to find more witnesses. But in the end,
10:13it all came up empty. In the days that followed, investigators hit a total wall. They were starting
10:19to seriously doubt they'd ever find Megan alive. Still, they didn't let up. They poured everything
10:25they had into the case, chasing down every possible lead. With nothing solid to go on,
10:31police went back to Megan's closest friends and family, digging deeper to see if any suspect might
10:37have been hiding in plain sight. They even brought in handwriting experts to analyze her work documents,
10:43looking for any signs that she might have been stressed or anxious in the days leading up to
10:47her disappearance. Even with the dead ends piling up, the cops kept pushing forward with the search,
10:53and at one point, they stumbled across a human skull up in the mountains. Experts jumped on it,
10:59and quickly figured out it belonged to a man who'd vanished the year before.
11:03A few weeks after Megan went missing, the police put out a $25,000 reward for information,
11:09and later, they rolled out a website dedicated to the case, complete with details and a form for
11:15submitting tips. A little while later, investigators brought in a well-known profiler named Sharon
11:21Hagen. She'd later go on to help create the movie Zodiac and several true crime shows about killers.
11:27After digging through every detail of the case, she concluded that the perpetrator most likely had a
11:33sexual motive. But the detectives didn't agree with it. They were convinced it was some kind of road
11:38rage incident that just spiraled out of control. Sharon, though, was positive the guy had kidnapped
11:44Megan to sexually assault her. What's more, she believed this wasn't his first time pulling something
11:50like this, and she even dug up a few other cases that could tie back to the same criminal.
11:56Two years before this all went down, a woman named Joanna was just chilling in her bed when a man in a
12:02mask, armed with a knife, burst into her room. He claimed he was a cop and ordered her to strip down
12:08completely. Then he grabbed her car keys, shoved her into the passenger seat, and drove her to a park
12:13where a blanket was already spread out on the grass. There, he assaulted her, and afterward, he just drove
12:20the poor woman back home like nothing happened. Then there was another incident just a few days before
12:26Megan vanished. A 22-year-old woman named Donna was walking down the street when out of nowhere,
12:32a man dressed head-to-toe in black jumped out from the bushes. Knife in hand, he forced her to toss her
12:38phone into the bushes and get into his car. Right there in the vehicle, he sexually assaulted her,
12:44then blindfolded her and took her to some house, where he continued assaulting her. After he was done,
12:50he actually started comforting her. He promised he'd let her go in time for her morning shift at work,
12:55and even offered her a soda. Eventually, he drove her back to the spot where he'd grabbed her and
13:00even helped her find her phone in the bushes. As soon as she was safe, Donna called the cops and
13:05gave them a full description of the guy, but they never tracked him down. Still, the detectives weren't
13:11quick to link this to Megan's disappearance, so they kept chasing down any fresh leads they could find,
13:17but all their efforts just kept hitting dead ends. Things dragged on like that for a few more days,
13:23until the case took this totally unexpected twist. On July 26th, a man from a nearby town called the
13:30cops and reported that his neighbor had burglarized his house. Officers arrested 31-year-old Vincent
13:36Sanchez and found out he was living with two roommates, one of whom owned an AK-47, and Sanchez
13:43had easy access to it. That said, the police in this town had no idea about Megan's case,
13:50so the fact that he had this kind of rare weapon, something most regular folks don't just have
13:55lying around, barely raised an eyebrow. They hauled Sanchez off to jail, where he made a call to one of
14:01his roommates and asked for a huge favor. Get rid of this bag he'd tossed into a dumpster near the house.
14:08The roommate figured the bag must have had the stolen stuff from the neighbor's place,
14:12since the cops still hadn't recovered any of it. So, he fished out the bag and peeked inside.
14:17But what he found was nothing like what he expected. It was packed with a bunch of videotapes.
14:25Curiosity got the best of him. He wanted to know why Sanchez was so freaked out about the
14:29cops finding these tapes, so he took them home and popped one in. To his absolute horror,
14:35the footage showed tied-up women being assaulted by a guy in a ski mask. The man was talking to his
14:41victims, and right away, the roommate recognized Sanchez's voice. Some of those videos were even
14:48filmed right in the house they shared. The roommate realized Sanchez had been bringing his victims
14:53there, and he'd had no clue the whole time. Then, he noticed the bag wasn't just tapes. There were
15:00several pairs of women's underwear in there, plus a ton of photos of women in explicit poses.
15:06He didn't recognize most of them, but one stood out. It was Sanchez's girlfriend, the one he'd been
15:12dating for three years. In the end, the roommate called the police, and officers showed up to grab
15:18the bag. They also searched Sanchez's room, turning up even more photos of women, plus a few pairs of
15:25women's underwear, and all sorts of female belongings. And that wasn't all. There were knives,
15:30a shotgun, handcuffs, and a video camera. So, what started out as a simple theft investigation
15:37snowballed into something far darker and much bigger. The cops realized that all the women in
15:44those videos were Sanchez's victims, and now they had the grim task of figuring out who they were.
15:51As the full scale of it sank in, they called in Sharon, the profiler we mentioned earlier.
15:56Turns out, she'd already been tracking a serial predator who'd been assaulting women across the
16:01city for years, and she'd been studying every one of his victims in detail. There were over ten of
16:07them, and Sharon spotted them instantly on those tapes. She was convinced Sanchez was the guy behind
16:13it all, but him wearing a mask in every recording threw a major wrench in the police's work.
16:19As she poured over the footage, Sharon caught another creepy red flag. It looked like the attacker had
16:24been stalking his victims for a while before striking. He'd casually drop personal details
16:30about their lives, like what school they'd gone to, who they were seeing, or where they worked.
16:35In trying to connect Sanchez to all these crimes, Sharon thought back to Donna's kidnapping,
16:40which went down just a few days before Megan disappeared. Donna had told the cops the guy wasn't
16:46wearing any mask at all and gave them a solid description of his looks. Sharon was convinced it
16:52was the same creep behind it, so she reached out to Donna and had her come down to the station.
16:57There, they set up a lineup with a few men, Sanchez among them. Without a second of hesitation,
17:03Donna pointed straight at him and said he was the one who grabbed her. By that point, Sanchez was
17:09already staring down a serious prison sentence, but Sharon wasn't done yet. She wanted to prove he was
17:15behind every single attack. Then, she learned he had access to an AK-47, and since all his crimes
17:22revolved around sexual assault, she immediately started to suspect he might also be behind Megan's
17:28kidnapping. She tipped off the detectives about this, and they went to Sanchez's place to take a
17:33look at the rifle. His roommate, the one who actually owned it, showed it to them, and right away,
17:39they noticed it was missing the cleaning rod, that thin metal piece that clips under the barrel.
17:44The roommate said it had just gone missing, and that's when the investigators realized Sanchez
17:49might really be tied to Megan's case, because a matching cleaning rod had been found near her car,
17:55and it even helped prove that her vehicle had been hit with the rounds from an AK-47.
18:01From there, the detectives asked the roommate if they could take a look around Sanchez's room.
18:05They didn't have a warrant yet, but since one of the housemates gave them permission,
18:10they were clear to check it out. Their colleagues had already picked up anything that seemed
18:14suspicious, but there was one thing they'd clearly missed. A woman's jacket lying right there on the
18:20floor. It matched the one Megan was wearing the night she disappeared, so the officers quickly
18:25got a warrant and rushed that jacket straight to the lab. While the investigators waited on those lab
18:31results, they sat down with Sanchez's roommates and asked them about his whereabouts on July 4th.
18:36According to them, a bunch of friends swung by that evening, and they celebrated Independence Day
18:41until around 10pm. After that, the guests started heading out, but Sanchez kept knocking back drinks
18:47with one of the roommates. Before long, that guy called it a night and went to bed, leaving Sanchez
18:53to crash on the living room floor, since one of the guests had already taken his room. But when the
18:58roommate woke up around 2am to use the bathroom, Sanchez was nowhere to be seen in the living room.
19:04Two hours later, he got up again, and Sanchez was still gone.
19:08That's when he heard some strange noises coming from outside, and looked out the window.
19:13To his surprise, there was Sanchez, scrubbing down his pickup truck. It just fell off. Who
19:19washes their car at 4 in the morning? The other roommate rolled out of bed around 5.30,
19:25and Sanchez was still at it, cleaning his car. Later on, he commented that the truck looked
19:31way fresher, especially after he'd shampooed the seats. One roommate's girlfriend noticed a fresh,
19:36long scratch on the pickup and asked Sanchez what happened. He brushed it off, saying he'd been
19:42caught in traffic and someone had bumped into him. On top of that, detectives talked to Sanchez's best
19:47friend, who said that on July 4th, he'd been really down because things with his girlfriend were
19:52falling apart. That night, he kept calling her over and over, but she just wouldn't pick up.
19:58The detectives then found out that the house of his girlfriend's sister, where a holiday party had
20:03been held, was just a stone's throw away from Megan's friend's place. They started piecing
20:08together a theory. Sanchez might have headed there, planning to confront his girlfriend,
20:13but by the time he showed up, the party was already over. As for the AK-47, they knew he'd thrown around
20:20death threats to her family members who'd tried to talk her out of dating him, so it's possible he
20:25grabbed the rifle to scare them. But when he got there, everyone in the house was already asleep.
20:30Left alone on that dark, empty street, Sanchez could have spotted Megan saying goodbye to her
20:35friend and decided to tail her, leading to the attack. As detectives were piecing everything
20:41together, Sanchez, cornered and out of options, finally confessed to assaulting multiple women.
20:48With a mountain of evidence stacked against him, he knew there was no escaping it. He admitted to
20:54stalking his victims, digging into their personal lives, and even sneaking into their homes to study
20:59the layout before abducting them. But when it came to Megan, he flat-out refused to admit
21:05any involvement. The detectives, though, were almost certain she was dead by this point,
21:09and after talking to Sanchez's best friend, they had a hunch about where her body might be.
21:15Apparently, Sanchez had once taken his buddy to a canyon and casually mentioned it'd be a great
21:20spot to hide bodies. The police rallied volunteers and headed out to search the area. Around 3,000 people
21:28pitched in, but the rough terrain made the whole thing a slow grind. Meanwhile, the lab came back
21:34with results. They found tiny specks of blood on the jacket from Sanchez's apartment, and DNA analysis
21:40confirmed it was Megan's. Using luminol, they also uncovered massive bloodstains in Sanchez's van,
21:47but he'd scrubbed it so thoroughly that no DNA could be pulled from it. While they kept hunting for more
21:53evidence, the cops brought search dogs to the canyon, and it paid off. One of the dogs zeroed in on a
21:59small ravine off the beaten path, and the officers found human remains at the bottom. The body was too
22:05decomposed to identify by sight, but they spotted a ring on the victim's hand, identical to the one
22:12Megan wore. Later, medical examiners confirmed the victim's identity. It was indeed Megan. They determined
22:19she'd been hit by a single bullet that didn't strike any vital organs, but due to the advanced
22:24decomposition, they couldn't tell if she'd been sexually assaulted, though they did uncover one
22:30chilling detail. She was wearing someone else's underwear. Knowing Sanchez had forced some of his
22:36victims to wear underwear he provided, the detectives figured he likely did the same to Megan, and probably
22:42assaulted her too. At that point, the detectives had enough evidence to take this case to court, but the
22:48forensic team dug up even more. While examining the interior of Sanchez's pickup, they found a few
22:54specks of glitter. Similar glitter was found in the victim's hair and on her jacket. One of Megan's
23:00friends had brought some to the party, and they'd all put it in their hair for fun. The experts studied
23:05the glitter under a microscope and found it was pretty rare, hexagonal in shape, with a color that
23:11shifted depending on the angle. And here's the kicker. They found an identical piece of glitter on the
23:17AK-47 Sanchez had access to. With that, the prosecutor's case got even tighter, linking him
23:23directly to the murder. On August 10th, Sanchez was hit with 62 charges, including the assaults on 13 other
23:31women. And those were just the cases where the police had solid evidence against him. A few months later,
23:37on October 4th, Sanchez tried to plead guilty to Megan's murder, but the judge rejected it over a
23:42technicality. Sanchez wouldn't admit to a specific degree of murder or acknowledge any aggravating
23:49factors, which was a big deal since the prosecution was pushing for the death penalty. Those details
23:55were critical, so he still had to face a full trial. His lawyer argued there was no way the court could
24:01sentence Sanchez to death, claiming the prosecution couldn't prove Megan was alive during any assault, which
24:07meant they lacked the extra circumstances needed for a death sentence. Even so, the charges stuck,
24:13and the trial started in 2003. The defense didn't even try to argue his innocence, they just pushed
24:19the idea that Sanchez didn't plan to kill her. But the prosecution's evidence was airtight, and the jury
24:27wasn't buying it. So eventually, they found him guilty of first-degree murder. Sanchez got the death penalty,
24:34but just three years later, California slapped a moratorium on executions. So, he ended up stuck in
24:40prison, serving a life sentence where he's been ever since. He's 55 now, and odds are he'll spend the
24:48rest of his days behind bars. In the end, this twisted case was finally solved, but investigators still
24:55haven't ruled out the possibility that Sanchez had more victims. Megan was likely the only one he killed,
25:02but when it comes to the sexual assaults, that question still hangs in the air to this day.
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