MURDERED: Marina Ramos

Hi, Crime Junkies, I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.

And I'm Britt.

And you know what I love more than a girls trip? Nothing. Literally nothing. There is something about being with your friends away from home base and routine. It can make even the most mundane things seem to have this like spark of adventure. Take, for instance, a lone tree in the middle of the Arizona desert. Back in December 1989, four friends from Ohio driving through the desert in search of some ghost town marked on their map, decided to stop and take a picture together in front of a tree.

Proof of their escapades, probably. Now they never found the ghost town that they were looking for. What they found instead, by sheer happenstance, would unlock layered, decades-long mysteries that get tossed around like loose pieces of a puzzle. Until one investigator finally came along and slowly started to put those pieces together, leading to a shocking discovery in 2025 that has her this close to solving the case. And you might have the remaining missing pieces to solve the mystery of who murdered Marina Ramos.

So buckle up, crime junkies, you are in for a wild ride. It's December 12th, 1989, when those four friends turned their car onto a dirt road east of Highway 93 in the very northern part of Arizona, like close to Nevada. 3 miles down is where they spot a yucca tree that they decide to take a picture in front of. They're the only ones out there, save for, like, this dead animal that they can see not far off.

So they snap their picture and hop back in their rental car in search of the ghost town marked on their map. But they're not having much luck actually finding this town. Wink wink, maybe that was intentional, I don't know, but not wanting to stray too far into, just like the vast desert, there is no mapquest like. This is hard. They decide just to turn around. And as they head back in the direction of that yucca tree, there's something that just like nags at them.

There was something about the dead animal that was bothering them. I don't know what, maybe the same mysterious force that pulled them to the tree to begin with. But they decide to go back and have another look. But it's no animal. It is a naked woman laying dead in the road, and it's likely only because of them that she was ever found. Now it looks like this woman hasn't been out there long, even though they don't see anyone coming or going from any direction.

They still don't wanna get out of their cars, as you can imagine. Now they know they need to notify authorities, but it's gonna be a hike to the nearest town of Kingman, Arizona. So they snap some pictures of the woman's body from the car, I assume, just in case, like, she's gone by the time they can get police back out there, or maybe as proof to police, like, so they would take them seriously. But deputies with the Mohave County Sheriff's Office don't brush them off.

Right after getting the report, they hop in their cars to follow the women back out to the body, which I can't reiterate enough is truly out in the middle of nowhere. I mean, today, the closest paved road is White Hills Road, and it's over 200 feet away. But even that was a dirt road back then, and the highway is miles off. Otherwise, there are just shrubs and trees nearby and mountains in the distance. But shockingly, at least to me, is that the detectives conclude that the woman wasn't just dumped there.

She was murdered right there where she was found and violently, just some six to 24 hours before being discovered. It was ultimately blood loss that killed her. There are blunt force injuries all over her body and slash marks at her neck. Whatever clothing she was likely wearing at some point is nowhere in sight, likely cut off her with the same kind of knife that was used to slash her throat. Because they did find one piece of a bra strap, which they collect, and there's nothing that could easily be used to identify this woman.

I mean, the only items that they find way out there are this empty coke bottle and a long piece of black yarn, and some used toilet paper near a spot where it looks like somebody like, did their business right in the sand. But the real clues were left behind in the desert sand itself tire marks, drag marks, and what they say are two sets of shoe prints. And Britt, I have to show you these pictures because these are some of the most well-defined crime scene shoe prints that I have ever seen in my entire life.

Um, and there's more than just this one picture, right? Like, you can almost see, like, what the brand is on some of these, not like,

almost. They could tell the one that you're looking at, they determined, says Nike. That one is a size ten and a half, and based on the stride and marks in the sand, trackers determined that the person who was wearing the Nike shoe was between 5'10 and 6'2. Now, the other shoe, that is a size seven, and the person who left that, they left a shorter stride, which makes them believe that they're in the range of like five, four, maybe like five, eight.

and size seven is that a men's seven or a woman's seven? Cause those are

Men's seven. like, different, Yeah,

okay? So I have to ask about the other shoe prints, like, who? uh, so So there's,

I'm not, I'm not losing my mind, right? Like there are distinctly, I mean, three or four different prints, right?

there's definitely, like, shoes that don't match either of these And even in, prints in here.

like the 3rd image I sent you, like, they only talk about two prints, like, ever, the the trackers only ID'd two people walking around. I don't know if the sand is like playing tricks on me or what, but like,

It looks like, and maybe they've, I mean, uh, my like, hopeful heart is like, maybe they've, like, ruled them off as an investigator's prints or something. But like,

but I don't know. So, like, if you go to the other picture, there's some, um, where I'm like, okay. The pattern looks distinctly different, it still looks like sneakers, but distinctly different. And then look at the top of that I was like, one.

this one looks like it has a proper heel on it, like, not a sneaker What at all.

is that? Now? I am pretty convinced that the Nike shoe is either an Air Jordan or a Nike Dunk. Now, some of our crime junkies out there, I know, are sneaker heads, so maybe they'll know. I'm actually gonna post these pictures on social media so people can see and analyze them with us. But the tire tracks and the drag marks also tell an interesting story all on their own. And I actually have a picture of the tire marks, too, that's included in with one of the the shoe prints.

this one here, Hm, and I have some of the original crime scene diagrams, which show that the killers drove eastbound into the crime scene, stopped, dragged this woman from the car, got back in the car and then ran her over. Then they say that they got back out of the car after they had run her over, and that is when they slashed her throat. And they didn't get out in a hurry after they killed her. That is when one of them walks a little ways away and proceeds to go to the bathroom out there in the desert.

And then they leave heading westbound, which is the same way that they came. So it's not like they're passing through this area.

yeah. So they didn't just like drop her on the way to somewhere, they came there specifically just to kill and leave her body.

yes, now investigators lose the tire tracks at the main road, so it's unfortunately impossible to tell if they headed toward Kingman, Arizona, or to Las Vegas, Nevada. Basically, those are the two cities that you would head to from here, even if you were going beyond them

right, cause this is in the middle of

of nowhere. nowhere. Yes, but this scene, however rural, is only about an hour from Vegas. So detectives in Mohave County, Arizona, are quite accustomed to homicide victims being left in their jurisdiction. Actually, according to reporting from the Arizona Republic, this is like the fourth body that they have found in their county in as many months. So, as much evidence as they might have that seems promising, they know from the jump that solving this case, even IDing their victim, is going to be no easy feat.

And the truth is, some assumptions are probably being made off the jump about who this woman is and how she ended up there. They thought that she could be what they called a Vegas girl, who basically got caught up in something bad. But the autopsy ends up throwing that into question, cause there are no drugs or alcohol in her system. What she has is milk in her ducts, meaning that she must have given birth somewhat recently, and they can tell that she had had other kids too.

So surely someone has to be missing this woman,

yeah. And there's probably a breastfed baby out there somewhere, like missing their mom,

you would think. But there are no missing persons reports in the surrounding areas that match this 20-something female with dark hair and medium complexion. Without knowing who this woman is, the motive for the crime is as perplexing as anything else. I mean, this was so over the top violent that it feels personal.

I mean, was it sexually motivated?

I mean, it could have been, because, I mean, she's found naked, right? But they don't find clear evidence of sexual assault. I mean, they checked an autopsy and 1st, they think that they did find semen, but later, whatever it is is tested, they don't get a male profile out of it, so no one is sure what that is. And today, that is listed as unknown biological fluids that they got via abdominal scrapings.

And were they able to run prints for her to try to ID her that way, like her fingerprints,

Yeah, more of a manual process back then, no like national system, but they had them run against databases in Arizona and the surrounding states, including Nevada. Don't get any hits,

Which kind of contradicts the Vegas girl thing even more.

and her prints do give them another small clue. There were some partial prints that they lifted off the coke bottle that they found at the scene. Not enough to, like, send off, uh, like, out of state, or even put into their database, but they're good enough to do direct comparisons with. So they find out right away that the prints do not belong to their victim, meaning that they might be useful in putting a suspect at the scene someday.

Unfortunately, as wonderful as those shoe and tire impressions were at the scene, that can't get them much like. It's a common shoe in a common size, a common car. Maybe helpful again if they ever find a suspect to compare all this to, but But without one, it's so useless. So over the next year, investigators put their focus on trying to identify their victim. At least they have a description. A young Hispanic woman, short dark hair, who has had children before and was still making milk for a baby when she was murdered.

They distribute that description through teletypes to agencies all around the West, hoping to get a hit. But, surprisingly, this woman hasn't been reported missing, whoever she is. So not being able to ID her, they try to build a picture of their killer by asking the FBI for a criminal profile. Now they don't end up getting one. I don't know why, like the details they had might not have been enough, but the FBI does have one. Takeaway After reviewing the information that they sent, they think that the Mojave Desert case sounds a lot like some other cases that they just solved up in Washington.

Today, in 2026, Joseph Michael Nielsen is 75 years old, but he was only 38 back in 1990, when the FBI was making a possible connection between crimes that he committed in Washington and California and the details of the crime committed out in Arizona. Now we couldn't find his older mugshot photos, but we have one from 2014 from the California Department of Corrections. That year, he'd been charged with two murders that make him pretty interesting to investigators.

Now, the murders were from May and August of 1989, so same year as our Arizona case. And after that 2nd murder in August, he apparently took off from Washington and headed south, working as a truck driver. So this man was all over the place. But the interesting thing is that, even though he was a suspect in other homicides as well, he got charged in Washington. Because his wife said that she witnessed both crimes, she was there in one instance as Joseph got the victim into their van for sadistic sex acts and then killed her.

uh, two sets of footprints,

Yes, that is what I think is so interesting. Now it is not a smoking gun.

okay, but like, when you don't have much else,

True, and again, I go back to, like, those were two like male footprints. I don't know, but yes, when we have nothing else, let's try this. Now. What I also find interesting about Joseph is that he has ties to Mohave County, Arizona. Not only do they find a prior criminal charge on his record from 1987, but they hear that he used to live there with this guy named Henry Staub. So they track down Henry, who, interestingly, had been arrested in Nevada just a week after the Jane Doe was found.

He got nabbed for using this like cheating device.

what is that?

It, um, they think he was working at a casino and it was like this 1980s method of stealing money, like in the industry. But Henry lived in Mojave Valley in 1987, so he's like, familiar with the area we're talking about. And he tells police that his buddy Joseph lived with him for two months back then, but he says he hasn't seen him since,

Still means that Joseph could have known the area, though.

But the thing is, they show him a picture of their Jane Doe, and, no surprise, Henry says that he doesn't recognize her. Now they do some due diligence and try comparing Joseph's prints to the blurry partial ones that they lifted from the crime scene. Coke bottle, which, like, by the way, may or may not even be connected, but his prints weren't a match, neither were Henry's. They try his too, and since there was nothing else, like really solid, linking him to the crime.

And again, there are like, oh, two people, him and his wife were at this one, maybe two people at this one. Like, it's, it's a loose connection. They basically just like, let the lead end there.

Did they go talk to him?

Not back then, no, though. I can't say why. What I can say, for reasons that we'll get into later, is that investigators today have totally ruled him out. He is still sitting in a California prison for those two other murders and more that they have since connected him to. And we tried to reach him for this episode, did not hear back. Now, by September 1991, the Jane Doe case has gone cold in every sense of the word.

No victim name, no killer's name. The case got shelved, collecting 30 years worth of dust until 2019, when Mohave County forms this special investigations unit, basically a cold case squad. And investigator Lori Miller and her partner get assigned the glamorous but deeply necessary task of reading and digitizing all 395 case files that are labeled as cold within the department. Which, as you can imagine, takes significant time, like years.

yeah. I'm like imagining, like the movie montage of two detectives, like, holed up in a dark room, yes, that, slowly, like hundreds of pages of papers and yes. So files,

two years later, by the time that they have sorted through all the non-murders, like the accidental deaths, the suicides, they end up with 66 actual cold case homicides to rework. which is still a Significant,

a significant number.

I told you, like this area, it was a kind of a body dump. But the 1989 Jane Doe case from the desert is one of them, and it's 2021 by now. So to bring the case into the modern era, Lori enters it into Namus and to NCIC.

wait, so that was never done.

No, when I I'm serious when I say that, like nothing happened on this case from 1991 to 2021. Once her victim has been entered, then she starts going through the physical evidence and calling crime labs to see what she could send, how quickly she could get evidence tested. And her jackpot is on the victim's fingerprints, which she was able to get entered in some of the new databases. Just like that, Desert Jane Doe has a name, Maria Ortiz, and the only thing that Lori could find on this Maria is a June 1989 arrest for shoplifting in Bakersfield, California.

And how far away from that is?

From, like, Mojave, it's like, it's like five or six hours. So she calls up Bakersfield PD and they tell her that the report for the shoplifting arrest has been purged. But authorities in California are able to see the name of a relative in their old files. This like cousin of Maria's named Esther, who lives in Tennessee. So after some help from, like, other agencies, Lori is relieved to find out that Esther is still alive. And she's like holding her breath when she gets Esther on the phone, hoping that she has some information on her cousin.

But Esther's response is not at all what Lori expects because she says, I don't know a Maria Ortiz. oh, oh, do But

you have a relative?

but in the next breath, Esther says, But I do have a cousin who went MIA in 1989. Her name was Marina Ramos, and Marina did sometimes go by different names, including Maria. Esther explains that in August of 89, they were all living in Bakersfield, like in that area of California. And one day, Marina leaves with a man and just like that, poof, never seen again.

And there were no missing person reports.

They never filed one, because Esther says that Marina actually kind of was the type to leave and start a new life. Esther says that she loved her cousin, but she has no doubt that she was a bit of a wild card.

So this whole time, her family thought that she just left and started a new life.

Pretty much, yeah. And it's not like they weren't worried about her, but they mistakenly thought that no news was good news, but it turned out to be the worst news, just delayed. So Lori begins, like peppering Esther with questions about Marina and her life. Does she have any ties to Arizona? The answer's no, but Esther has some questions for Lori, too. Her main one being, If you found Marina, did you find her missing daughters? to which Lori responds, What daughters?

So Esther went on to fill in so many blanks about Marina's life, but in doing so, it just deepened the mystery. She tells Lori that in 1989, Marina was somewhat estranged from her immediate family. In fact, Esther was the one helping watch Marina's two youngest daughters. Because Marina was worried that her immediate family were gonna take the girls away from her, like they did her 1st and oldest daughter, Maria, who stayed actually to live with her grandparents in Puerto Rico.

You see, Marina's family never really approved of her lifestyle, which I'll explain in a 2nd. Our reporter Emily interviewed Marina's younger sister, Margarita, for this episode, and she confirmed some of the things that Lori was learning on the phone that day from Esther. Margarita says that their family is from Puerto Rico and from Bakersfield, California, and they all kind of moved back and forth between those two places throughout their lives. And their parents took custody of Marina's oldest daughter because Marina was really young when she was born, and she wasn't equipped to care for a newborn.

And it's a bit muddy why Marina's family disapproved of her lifestyle, but basically sounds like she dated a lot of different men. And she wanted to go live in California when her family was still in Puerto Rico, and she apparently had no job, no plan to support a baby, so her family wanted to keep the baby. And Margarita says it wasn't like a big legal fight or anything, it was more like, Hey, if you wanna run off and do whatever you want, whenever, do it, but you're not taking the baby with you.

Like, she needs more stability. So she says their parents still, though, encourage Marina to visit her daughter anytime. So at that time, Marina goes to California to live with her aunt and her cousin Esther. Now we don't know a ton about Marina's daily life in Bakersfield. She holds a few jobs, but for the most part, she's kinda hopping around from relationship to relationship, and she ends up having two more children. One of which was born while she was behind bars for that aforementioned shoplifting arrest in June of 89.

This is how we got to her from her prints. Well, when Esther last saw Marina and her two youngest, it was August of 1989. Elizabeth was just about one years old, and Jasmine was just two months old. And Esther says that Marina and the girls drove away with a man named Fernando. And while she doesn't know much about this guy, she does remember what he looked like. She's even able to give enough of a description for an artist's rendering of him to be made.

He has dark hair, like it's like swooped to the side, glasses, full face. And she said he spoke with some sort of accent, which made her think that he was either from Ecuador or maybe Costa Rica. And she'd seen Marina with him before, which is how she had one more tidbit to give Lori. She said that he always wore a suit, always like, even if it was 108 degrees outside, this dude is in a suit.

Did he happen to like to wear Nikes with his suits?

She didn't know anything about what kind of shoes he wore or even his height, but she remembers the four of them leaving in a black SUV, headed for Ontario, California, which is just east of LA. where she thinks Fernando lived at the time. But after that, she never saw or heard from Marina again. Margarita told us it's not like they never wondered what happened to Marina. She says they even went out driving, searching for her in Bakersfield way back when.

But she was just hoping that her sister was okay, wherever she ended up,

So she's last seen in August, so w- where was she between August and December then of that year?

Well, that is making the assumption that Marina Ramos is really the Mojave Desert Jane Doe. Remember, fingerprints came back to another name.

Okay, but like, what are the odds?

I know, and you have to be sure in a situation like this. So she asked Esther to send her some photos of Marina from the late 80s, just to compare to the photos of the victim at the crime scene. And we actually have the photos that Esther sent. And these pictures do give Lori enough of a gut feeling to move full steam ahead, which will mean doing DNA testing to compare and be 100 sure. But the truth of the matter is, even if Marina turns out not to be her Jane Doe, Lori, by that point, was so invested.

And she, just as much as anything, wanted to figure out what happened to this Marina woman and to her two babies, who, by all accounts, went missing around the same time as their mother. And if she is found dead in the desert, if it turns out to be her, Lord only knows what that means for her baby girls. Now, luckily, Marina's oldest daughter, the one that stayed back in Puerto Rico, Maria, she is still safe and sound and accounted for.

She is almost 40 when Lori gets in touch with her and asks her for a DNA sample, which she tells her will help in both the ID of her mother and the search for her missing sisters.

Do they have the same dad, though?

Well, that's still a big question mark, but if not, it's not really gonna interfere with finding them via DNA, since they all, we know, have the The same same mother, right?

mom?

So in December 2022, that is when the 1st domino falls. The Arizona State Crime Lab calls Lori to share that they have confirmed Jane Doe is Marina Ramos. By this point, Lori has already been working with all the other available DNA databases, trying to locate her two daughters. But this confirmation gives Lori the full authority to own this case. I mean, this is hers, her jurisdiction. So she launches a brand new homicide investigation in early 2023, coming at it totally fresh now that she can put a name to her victim.

I mean, she re-reads the whole case file with this new lens, and she also sends off several items of evidence for new testing. Things like the coke bottle to see if they can get higher quality fingerprints, and that unknown biological material that was found during Marina's autopsy, which reveals now a mixed DNA profile. Half of which is male and good enough for CODIS, but, of course, there are no

No hits.

hits in CODIS. No, that would be too easy. No matches for now. So Lori then checks with social security officers to make sure that the daughters' social security numbers have never been used. And when she gets confirmation that they haven't, she gets official missing persons reports with age progression images filed for Elizabeth and Jasmine via NICMIC. And going off Esther's description, the Mohave County Sheriff's Office blasts out the artist's rendering of the Fernando guide to local media and on social media.

And that spreads outside of the Kingman Mohave area. Within weeks, a tip comes into dispatch over in Phoenix, Arizona, and the tipster says that they not only know who killed Marina, but they also know where Marina's daughters were taken after her murder. The anonymous tipster says that a man named Fernando Coronel killed Marina, and then her daughters were taken to LA. and left in a park. Now, the fact that in this tip, this guy's name is Fernando, makes Lori feel like there has to be something to this.

Except she quickly learns that there probably is no Fernando Coronel, at least not one that she can find anywhere who would be the right age. Like, it's a fake name. So Lori follows up with cousin Esther, seeing if she recognizes the last name or remembers anything more. And listen, she never knew Fernando's last name. But, like I said, it very well could have been a fake name. Because she tells her that one time when they were, like, you know, together or with him, she did hear somebody call Fernando David.

Now, the only other thing she knew is that this Fernando David has ties to both Bakersfield and Phoenix.

I mean, there's the Arizona tie she's been searching for.

Yes, even with that information, Lori has not been able to confirm Fernando, aka David, his identity or his location. And I am just gonna start calling him Fernando David because this is about the time that another Fernando enters the picture. So Marina's sister, Margarita, calls Lori and says that she has started hearing from family members that the father of the youngest baby, Jasmine, is a man named Fernando, but not Fernando David. This Fernando does not match that sketch, and he has a different last name, one that I agree that we wouldn't use.

So instead, I'm gonna call this Fernando Fernando Dad, because Lori tracks him down and he says that, yes, he and Marina were together for some time. In fact, he thinks that he was probably the father of both of her younger two children, and they were all living together in the summer of 1989. He says everything was great until Marina and her daughters vanished.

And and he didn't report them missing either. W Why

I wish I knew. And his story is strange, for sure. But he said that sometime around August or September, he had to go to Mexico for a death in the family. And then when he got back, Marina was packing up to leave because she said that there had been a disaster in Puerto Rico, an earthquake, he thinks, and she and the girls had to go. He says that two men in a red car came to pick them up, and then he just never sees them again.

do we believe him?

Maybe, I mean, he describes one of the men as being 5'10 with short hair and looking like he just got out of the joint, he says.

Doesn't sound like Fernando David in his suit, though, like, because that was and like, fancy,

Lori even shows him the composite sketch of Fernando David, and he's like, Nope, that's not the guy that Marina left with in the red car. But he also says that he didn't get a good look at the other guy because the other guy stayed in the car. But here is a weird twist that we uncovered in our reporting. While he told Lori that he didn't know who picked up Marina, Fernando Dad told Marina's family something completely different.

He tells them that the person who picked up Marina was her cousin, William Canones, and William, by the way, is in prison for murder. Now, before you get too excited, Lori looked into William, and yes, he is in prison for the murder of his mother-in-law, and yes, he did leave his mother-in-law on a dirt road.

okay, and like, check and Yeah, but check,

he was in jail in 1989, so it probably wasn't him who picked her up, Marina, I mean, and it certainly wasn't William who left her body in the desert.

but okay, sure, doesn't answer why Fernando Dad is telling two different stories I have no idea to like,

why, I have no idea why he would be covering for William or or making it up about William. But Fernando Dad's stories might not all be lies or misdirection or whatever. Because investigators looked up natural disasters that happened in August or September of 1989 in Puerto Rico. And lo and behold, on September 18th of that year, Hurricane Hugo made landing. So if this story is true, that would put Marina still in the Bakersfield area in September, which now that would be the last sighting of her, instead of when Esther saw her leave in August.

And did Fernando Dad have any sort of, like, violent or criminal history?

So, I mean, he had a assault with a deadly weapon charge from 1989. He told Lori, our detective, that it stemmed from a night out when he hit a friend for making a disparaging comment about his mom. But Lori says that the Charging County had purged the court record, so by the time she's learning about all of this, she couldn't go back and confirm his story. Now, before leaving, after Lori talks to Fernando Dad, she gets his DNA and his prints, and fast forward, it does not match their evidence.

and they still can't use any like databases because of the print quality, right?

For, yeah, for DNA, we've got, like, CODIS and stuff, but for the prints, we can't use AFIS or anything.

Cause they're just like partial and like,

Yeah, and Lori had even tried getting better prints lifted. In June of 2025, she called an FBI agent in Phoenix trying to enhance the prints. Because, like, she is fairly confident that the coke bottle is related, probably just because, I mean, I, I said,

there's nothing else out there.

exactly. So, anyways, this agent ends up like tapping somebody in the Secret Service, like with this task, because they're better equipped for fingerprint enhancing. They get her some pretty decent prints to work with, like good enough that she is able to put them into AFIS. But it's not like luck that she's making breakthroughs in this case that was dormant for 30 years. She is putting in the work, pulling out every stop, using every resource that she, like, has available to her.

I mean, she is so persistent, in fact, that Lori jokes that the analysts at the crime labs probably roll their eyes when she calls. But, like, it keeps paying off, so she keeps doing it. But even when the prints go to AFIS, there is still no match in the system. Now, this whole time behind the scenes, she has been working with every DNA database as well that she can think of to get Marina's oldest daughter's swabs entered and tested.

And in August 2025, she gets her 1st hit for one of the missing daughters. The match is to a woman named Tina Mangum, who is alive, who looks to be a half sister. Lori looks her up and sees that she is the correct age range and she can barely contain her excitement. Like, there are six phone numbers listed for Tina, and, of course, she goes one by one. One is bad, two is bad, three is, she goes through all five, and on the 6th try, a woman picks up.

And this woman confirms that she and her older sister, Melissa, were adopted at a really young age, so young that they have no memory of their birth parents. And the story she tells about how they came to be adopted is wild. And it gives validity to that tip that they had gotten out of Phoenix, the one that said Fernando Coronel killed Marina and left her two girls in an LA. park. Because what Lori ends up learning is that Tina and Melissa were found on December 14, 1989, by an employee at Colonia Park in Oxnard, California.

Now, this is some like six or seven hours away from the area where Marina's body was found, and it's just two days after she was discovered. But clearly, nobody was making the connection. So the story goes like this. At 2:15 PM. That park employee, his name is Larry. He hears kids crying in the women's restroom, and he sees a woman walking by and he asks her to go in and have a look. And the woman reports that there are two children on the bathroom floor, laying in puddles of water and urine, and there are no adults with them.

So Larry takes custody of the girls, calls police. He also reaches out to other park employees, can't find any trace of the parents, and word gets through the neighborhood grapevine. And apparently, police soon get a call from a woman named Mary Lou, who her house, like, overlooks the park. Mary Lou reports that just 15 minutes before the kids were found, she saw this small black pickup with two men and a woman inside. Now, she described all of them as Latin.

She says they park and one of the men and the woman get out. The woman's carrying a small baby in a yellow blanket, the man is carrying the bigger child, who has a dress on, and they walk toward the park out of her sight. Mary Lou says that she only noticed them because the woman was wearing this like knee-length red skirt with bright white boots, which like, caught her eye. And Mary Lou thinks that she would probably recognize the woman if she saw her again.

And I had to, like, I don't know why, but when I was like researching this case, I had to stop myself 25 times from thinking, like, Oh, is there any world where this was Marina? But I had to keep reminding myself, It's No, this is two days

two days after.

after she's been found dead, correct? So the girls get taken to the police station and they are unharmed and healthy, but they're too little to know their own names. The police try they make up posters, of course, to try and find their parents, but when they can't, the girls eventually go through the system and they end up getting adopted. And the girls actually didn't even know that they were adopted until they were almost done with high school.

Like, that's when they had found some newspaper clippings at their parents with, like, old stories about them being found at a park.

we had this happen before.

We've done an update like this before. I don't know why, like, people are like, if you're not gonna tell them they're adopted, at least, like, don't keep the you're just gonna newspaper clippings hide the newspaper in the house. clippings. Anyways, when Lori tells Tina what she's working on, right, like, this is why I called you, and she's telling Tina that I actually believe you're Jasmine. Tina says she has to pull over her car, she's like driving and she's just like in such shock, she can't handle it.

I mean, part of her submitting her DNA to a public database was to get answers about her birth family. of course, But never in a million years did she expect a detective to call her and tell her that the mother she never got to meet had been murdered. Like, I can't imagine the complex feelings that she had to contend with,

well, and like, not just murdered, but murdered and found around the same time, like, like this all happened together. You were essentially the only what did you reason you were adopted

say?

was because your mom was murdered.

Yes, and these are all the complicated feelings that, like, her sister Melissa is about to be hit with when Lori reaches out to her. And by the way, just from here on out, I'm gonna call the sisters by their adoptive names, which is what they go by Melissa and Tina. So, unlike her sister Tina, Melissa, who is the older of the two, is hesitant to learn more about their past. Like, she knew Tina had put her DNA into online databases, hoping to find their biological parents.

But Melissa, who we also interviewed for this episode, says that part of her is still scared of what she will learn. Plus, she and Tina, she said, had this wonderful upbringing with their adoptive family. I mean, she describes it as idyllic,

yeah. And like, speaking from experience, like that can open like a whole just treasure trove of stuff. So she's probably like, just don't burst my bubble, like we had a good life, let it be that.

right. Ever since she was a teenager, when they found out they were adopted, she just figured her parents abandoned them. So saying that this information is a lot to process is the understatement of the century. When you talk about, like, the complicated feelings, one of the things I keep thinking about is there's probably, like, I imagine there's probably been resentment for all these years, right? Like, Oh, we were just abandoned in this park.

for sure.

And to know, to your point, this is why this is like, I ca, I cannot imagine,

Yeah, you have to, like, reorganize all of your thoughts around what you had kind of believed your whole life about everything,

but here's the thing. Whether she wants answers or not, some are going to come. Because using DNA, Lori soon confirms that Fernando Dad is actually the biological father of just one of the girls. He is the biological father of Tina, but not Melissa. When she met with him, he thought he was the father of both of them.

So who is Melissa's biological dad then?

So here is where the mystery takes one final twist and where listeners might be able to help. So obviously, Melissa's bio dad would be someone that Lori would wanna talk to, right? Well, when Lori puts Melissa's DNA into Ancestry, what do you know? Ding, ding, ding, like, they get a hit. Now it's not directly to a father, but it's a match to someone who doesn't come up on Tina's profile,

which means it has to be connected to the dad's side.

correct? The woman that pops up, her name is Victoria Garcia. So Lori messages Victoria, thinking she's just like a conversation away from her next big lead. But then something shocking happens. Not only does Victoria Garcia not respond, she blocks Lori. So Melissa also tries messaging this woman on Ancestry. Because, you know, they're thinking, Okay, you know, a homicide detective sliding into your DMs like that

not chill.

could spook, could spook the average person, but then Victoria blocks Melissa, too. Everybody agrees this is suspicious behavior,

well, yeah, because, like, what is this person hiding? You're on Ancestry, you're on. Like, there's no other reason to do that if you don't want to find like biological relatives, and then you So block one that reaches out.

well, and here's the thing, too, is Lori thinks that it's very possible the woman might even be using a fake name on Ancestry, though she can't say for sure. So she is currently trying every mean she can think of to find this woman and get to the bottom of what is going on here. And when I say she's trying everything, that is including asking for help from Crime Junkies,

I was like, this, this is what also she's trying.

right? And so, along with trying to track down the real woman behind this Victoria Garcia name on Ancestry, she is also looking for Crime Junkies help in IDing Fernando David, the man in the sketch, who was the one who picked up Marina and the girls in August from Esther's place. And who is also likely the same person that that Phoenix tip was about.

But aren't we saying that the Fernando David sighting now, at least, isn't actually the last sighting of Marina?

I mean, it's not as if we completely believe Fernando Dad, but even if everything he's saying is completely true, Fernando David is still somebody who was clearly in Marina's life at the time. And if Fernando David is Fernando Coronel, who the Phoenix tip was about, that tip carries a lot of weight. Now that we know that her girls really were left left in in a park

a park? near LA. Yes, So in all of this, what does Lori think happened? Because we have Marina and her daughters maybe leaving Bakersfield in September, then months later, Marina is found in Arizona. Then two days later, her daughters are left in a park. But back in California, but not Bakersfield, where they took off, like they're in a different city altogether.

Oxnard, which is like 2 hours away, so I don't know. Listen, Lori has thought of, like, every scenario possible. She says she is open to many possibilities, one of which is maybe Marina left the girls with somebody while she hooked up with some shady characters. Meaning maybe whoever killed her and whoever abandoned the girls could be, like, completely different and maybe even unrelated parties.

I mean, I could see that.

But here's the thing I'll say. Melissa told us that she thinks it's likely for the best that she and Tina were left in that women's restroom. She says that she chooses to believe that her mom knew she was in danger and put them in the care of somebody who would get them to safety, rather than putting the girls in any harm's way, too. I can't help but wonder, though, if the people who abandoned the kids at the park had nothing to do with Marina's murder, why not take them to police or a fire station or something like that instead?

Like, even if you didn't want contact with police, like, you know, there's different communities who, like, don't want even that, but there there are other even like, places you could drop a baby that's not a bathroom,

yeah. And I was even thinking, like, kind of along those lines, the timing of it feels weird. Like, if they are completely unrelated, you only waited like two days after you Maybe three didn't.

if she'd been dead 24 hours.

Yeah, since you had last heard from Marina before, you're like, gotta get these kids Well, out of my hands. but that's But like,

you're assuming that, like, she dropped them off right before she went with that's true, them. We've got, like, missing months that's true, that's, here.

that's very true. But then again, then then the timing becomes coincidence.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's just as likely that the person or people who killed Marina are the same ones who left the girls at the park. We know we have multiple shoe prints at the crime scene indicating a couple of people are involved. Then we know, like, a car drives back west, then we've got witnesses at the park who see again

multiple people.

multiple people dropping off the girls. Like, it feels similar, especially because, like, again, I don't know why they're discounting the other prints that I showed you. But, like, the one print to me looks like a boot print, and when we know the The woman one

was wearing white boots.

at the park again, maybe that belonged to a police officer, and that's why they're so willing to, like, write it off. It's just something that has been, like, nagging at me. The thing that doesn't line up with this being the same group of people, though, are the cars. Because detectives think that the tracks at the crime scene are from a mid-sized, four-door sedan. But we know that it is a small pickup that is seen at the park.

yes, but it's not like they would have had to have driven straight there. Like, if it's six or seven hours away, like you said, the girls are found two days after. That's still like time in between, like, who knows That's true, what happened between that's true, then? I mean, to your point, I'm still wondering where they were for the months before the murder.

I think answering that could be the key to this case. Lori is actively working all angles of this case today, from DNA testing and genetic genealogy to, like, boots on the ground investigative work. Like, even remember that used piece of toilet paper found at the crime scene that got preserved, and she resubmitted that for testing. Unfortunately, there wasn't any identifiable DNA still intact on it. So this really is where we're gonna need our crime junkies to, like, step up.

Lori has homework for all of us. She is still trying to identify the man and woman seen in Colonia Park in Oxnard, California, the ones who left Marina's daughters there in December 1989. She's also trying to identify and locate the woman, Victoria Garcia, who matched with Melissa on Ancestry, who blocked them both, and she's trying to identify who we're calling Fernando David, who may be Fernando Coronel. She thinks David is his real name, and that he works in maintenance at a hospital in the Phoenix area, and again, sometimes goes by Fernando Coronel.

Now, this man had ties to Bakersfield, California, in the 80s and 90s. So anyone with information about these people or Marina's murder, please contact the Mohave County Sheriff's Office Special Investigation Unit in Kingman, Arizona. The number is 928-753-0753, the extension is 4408. Britt. All of the case developments have been received differently by, like, all of Marina's different family members. Melissa was reluctant to learn more about her past, but she has gone on to meet her newfound relatives.

She even flew to Puerto Rico to meet her grandma, her aunt Margarita and her oldest sister Maria, who actually just passed away this summer while we were reporting on this case. Esther, who was such a wealth of information to Lori in the beginning of this, too, has also since passed. Margarita says that she is eager to get to know her nieces, and she still feels like it is a miracle that they have been found. So, for all the mysteries in this case still remaining, I do want to celebrate the answers that have come.

In June, Margarita, Melissa and other family members met with Lori in Arizona, and they visited Marina's gravesite together. For three decades, her grave marker just read Jane Doe. Might have stayed that way forever, but because of Lori, Marina Ramos got her name back. And who knows, maybe it will be one of our crime junkies who helps solve this case once and for all. Crime Junkie is an audio Chuck production. I think Chuck would approve.

oh.