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Hi everyone and welcome back to Into the Dark with Peyton Moreland, formerly known as Benched. Again, if you missed last week's announcement, nothing is really changing on your end over here. More just revamping the artwork, revamping the name, and kind of diving into more murder and more spooky stuff. I hope you guys are all doing amazing. My 10 seconds this episode is
is I want to talk about the phenomenon of how when you're feeling low lows, your highs are so high. And I don't know if this happens to anyone else, but I'll be having just such a low low and it's a constant battle throughout the day with my anxiety. And then all of a sudden I'll get this high. And I know that there's biological reasons this happens, but those highs are so, I feel so grateful. I feel so
loved. I feel so loving. I connect with Garrett so much and I'm grateful that I get to feel the highs as well as the lows, even though this whole thing is hard. And so I kind of just wanted to touch on that. And if you can relate to that, go ahead and let me know in the comments. I hope that as things start to level out, that I can continue to keep those positive feelings and emotions, you
But that being said, let's get right into the episode. So when we think about criminal lawyers, it's easy to picture pop culture figures like Perry Mason or Law & Order's Jack McCoy. They're these fearless warriors for the side of good who will stop at nothing to see that justice is served.
But in reality, the legal field can be pitted with dangers and temptations. A corrupt attorney might accept a bribe or cut corners to get results. And in a New York Times article, reporter John Schwartz noted that it's rare for attorneys to be murdered, but not unheard of. A
A survey published by the American Bar Association noted that one in five practicing lawyers have received a death threat at least once, which makes a certain amount of cynical sense. Attorneys are responsible for putting dangerous people behind bars. It stands to reason that some of those people would lash out with violence. So when a federal prosecutor turned up dead in December 2003,
Police scrambled to review his past cases, hoping one clear suspect would emerge. And in the meanwhile, conspiracy theories blew.
That federal prosecutor's name was Jonathan Luna. He grew up poor in the South Bronx, the son of a black mother and a Filipino father who waited tables for a living. But even when he was a child, Jonathan wanted something bigger and better. He wore suits to class in high school and read everything he could get his hands on.
Then Jonathan attended law school through the late 80s, at one point taking a year-long break to care for his sick father. His dad recovered and Jonathan returned to campus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was one of the only black students at the law school, but he was sociable and made lots of friends and studied hard, worked out regularly and frequently cooked for his roommates. In a word,
Jonathan was a model student. He cared about his future and threw himself into making his dreams come true.
After his graduation, he served a few stints in firms with both the private and public sector, figuring out what he wanted his career to look like. In 1999, Jonathan finally got his big break. By this point, he decided he wanted to work for the state, and Baltimore's US Attorney's Office had an opening for a prosecutor. Jonathan applied and landed the job. And at first, the gig seemed like a perfect fit.
He was a star who handled tough cases involving drug dealers, sexual predators, and all sorts of other dangerous criminals. But things took a turn after two years when Jonathan got a new boss, attorney Thomas DiBasio. Apparently, Jonathan and DiBasio clashed over the plea bargains Jonathan offered. Jonathan made deals that DiBasio didn't think he should make. And DiBasio had a reputation.
People said it was almost impossible to succeed once he'd formed a bad first impression of you. In Jonathan's case, DiBasio wasn't a fan of the young up-and-coming prosecutor, and that's to put it mildly. Jonathan was genuinely worried that he'd get fired, and with good reason. At one point, DiBasio even tried to terminate Jonathan on the spot. He sent Jonathan home and told him not to come back.
But another attorney intervened on Jonathan's behalf, convincing DiBasio to keep Jonathan on at least just for a little while longer. A coworker named Mary Griffin later told the press that Jonathan was hanging onto his job by a thread at this point, and that he'd hired an employment attorney to handle his conflicts with his supervisor. Mary also implied that this was unfair, that DiBasio was pushing Jonathan out due to his unrealistic expectations and
maybe just some kind of personal vendetta. Not because Jonathan was actually underperforming,
But that wasn't the only issue Jonathan encountered at work. One of his cases involved some bank robbers who'd recently gone to trial. The thieves had stored a massive amount of cash in a personal safe, which the FBI seized as part of their investigation. During the hearing, an FBI agent who was serving as a witness actually wheeled that cash into the courtroom on a cart.
It was a striking visual demonstration of just how much money the thieves stole, but it was also wildly out of step with how courtroom proceedings are supposed to go, especially because the cart full of money wasn't well secured. Someone close to the case even said that at times the dollars were left unattended.
It would have been very easy for just about anyone to help themselves to the bills. And as a matter of fact, about $36,000 went missing from the stash. An anonymous source told the Washington Post that around that same time, Jonathan apparently suddenly came into a lot of money, roughly $10,000 that he couldn't account for. Other rumors suggested he was drowning in credit card debt and had lots of motive to help himself to the missing cash.
Now, before I move on from this point, I do want to highlight that detail about the sudden influx of cash Jonathan had access to comes from an anonymous source. We don't know who shared this information with the Post or even how credible they are. And it's unclear where the gossip about Jonathan's credit card debt originated. The people who knew Jonathan well insisted these allegations weren't true. He'd never steal money. He was too scrupulous. So we may have to take those particular reports with a grain of salt.
But it's clear that suspicion was falling heavily on Jonathan at this point. Things were just not going good at work. He was even encouraged to take a lie detector test. Five other officials also submitted to polygraph interrogation, so he wasn't alone. He agreed to the test but delayed setting a date for it because he was so busy with work. And I've got to imagine, if he was already on his boss's bad side, this whole debacle with the missing $36,000 from this case probably didn't help his professional standing.
Now, we don't know what exactly went through Jonathan's mind during all of this. Some of his co-workers thought he was checked out at work, just filling his hours until he could quit and find a position somewhere better or maybe open his own law firm. But it's also possible that Jonathan actually began pushing himself harder than ever before, trying to prove to DiBasio that he was a good lawyer and deserved his job.
We do know that on December 3rd, 2003, Jonathan was working on a plea deal in a heroin dealer's case. This is a big part of a federal prosecutor's job, deciding what sorts of deals they're willing to offer and what trade-offs they're willing to accept in return. Now, Jonathan had to finish his work that day. Just a few days ago, he'd missed a deadline for a different plea deal and had to pay a $25 fine for the delay.
Of course, $25 isn't a huge amount of money, but Jonathan had to know the tardiness didn't look good.
Given that he was already on thin ice, he didn't want to make that mistake again. Plus, Jonathan had already made a pretty major misstep in this case too. He'd failed to share some information with the defense attorneys, which he was ethically obligated to do, so now he had to make up for the earlier errors. He stayed late, putting the finishing touches on his paperwork, but by 9pm, Jonathan still hadn't finished the plea bargain. He called the case's defense attorneys, who'd already gone home for the night, and when
When they didn't pick up, Jonathan left a voicemail. He said that he was still working on the deal, but he'd send it over by the next morning. He may have also indicated that he'd be leaving the office soon and would wrap up his work from home.
But then, that's not what he did. He stayed at his desk, continuing to toil away over his paperwork, and he still wasn't done by approximately 11.30 p.m. But around that time, he stepped away from his desk anyway. It's unclear why he chose to leave at that particular hour, but it wasn't because he was planning to just finish his work from home. He left that time-sensitive and unfinished plea bargain paperwork at his desk.
Beside it were his glasses and his cell phone. It's possible he forgot those important items because he was in a rush, but again, it's unclear why. We do know that at 11:38, his car, a 2003 Honda Accord, exited his office's parking garage. No one knows for sure exactly where Jonathan went after that.
Police, reporters, and private investigators have expended countless hours trying to recreate the rest of his night, and there are still open questions.
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Here's what we do know. Jonathan didn't go home.
When he left the office, he headed northeast, the opposite direction from his house. Again, this is without his important paperwork, without his cell phone.
He drove to Delaware, where his debit card was used to withdraw $200 cash at around 1:00 AM. At roughly 2:30, his car swung through New Jersey. Then later, toll booth security cameras captured his Accord driving through Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. And at 3:20 in the morning, his debit card was used again to buy gas at a Pennsylvania gas station.
So it seems his car and his bank cards were together, meaning either Jonathan was making these purchases or someone else had taken control of both his wallet and his vehicle. Either way, his route through Pennsylvania took him northwest of Delaware, meaning Jonathan made a roughly 40-mile detour to visit the ATM before changing direction to head toward Philadelphia.
His route just doesn't make sense. It doesn't make any sense. And no one knows what he was doing during this time. At 4:04 AM, Jonathan's car exited the freeway in Pennsylvania and whoever was driving paid a toll before they pulled off. Their toll ticket had blood on it.
Now, sometime in the morning of December 4th, 2003, Jonathan's wife noticed that he hadn't come home and she reported him missing to police. I don't know exactly what time she filed the report, but I do know it didn't take the authorities long to find him. Around 5 or 5.30 a.m., a team of drill workers assembled at a remote Pennsylvania work site. One of those employees spotted a red light shining from a wooded area close to their office.
when they investigated the glow they found a 2003 honda accord idling near a river it was still running it was in neutral
Now, this river's banks were pretty high and the car's front tires had nearly cleared them. It looked like someone might have veered off the road and come just this close to plunging the car into the water. The workers initially figured they might have stumbled onto the scene of a drunk driving accident, but the driver was nowhere to be seen. Eerily, there was blood splashed across the front seat and about $200 in cash was scattered through the cab.
The workers called the cops who responded to the scene quickly. They had to. A blizzard was rolling in and they had a limited amount of time to investigate before snow and wind buried the crime scene. They recruited roughly 100 cadets from the Pennsylvania Police Academy, a massive team to work against the clock.
As 10 inches of snow piled up, the investigators uncovered clue after clue. There was blood in the backseat of the car, on the driver's side door, and on a fender. Reportedly, the police never bothered to test the blood to confirm whose it was. And then they found the driver dead face down in the river. It was Jonathan Luna. It seemed clear his demise was no accident.
His body had 36 stab wounds to his back, his hands, his throat, and genitals. The slash in his neck had opened his carotid artery.
Ordinarily, with this kind of wound, he'd bleed out in a matter of minutes, but Jonathan also had water in his lungs, meaning his cause of death was a drowning, not the stabbing. It seemed someone had slashed his throat and then just immediately thrown the choking attorney into the river. There, he inhaled water, which killed him before blood loss could.
The police believed that whoever murdered Jonathan may have tried to push the car into the creek after him, but when it got stuck on the river's banks, they must have just given up.
It was clear that Jonathan had died under suspicious circumstances, but there were some strange, confusing details about the crime scene. First of all, most of the stab wounds on Jonathan's body were shallow. And when police located and identified the murder weapon, it was a small pen knife or pocket knife that had belonged to Jonathan. Investigators were rightly baffled by this. If you want to kill someone, why wouldn't you bring your own weapon?
Why assume the victim will have a blade on them that you can use? Plus there are much easier and quicker ways to murder someone than with a pocket knife. To add to the frustration, police were stumped about who could have done this. As a federal prosecutor, Jonathan was responsible for putting a lot of people behind bars, but no one stood out as an obvious suspect. So investigators weren't sure where to even begin their investigation.
Now at this point, you'd think Jonathan Luna's murder case would be priority number one for authorities. You don't murder a federal official and get away with it, right? But after that initial investigation, the police's leads dried up almost immediately. Even after the FBI got involved, nobody ever named a suspect or made an arrest.
They reviewed 100 of the cases Jonathan had overseen and collected 10 gigabytes of electronic files. None of this produced any clear leads. The next spring, on March 13th, 2004, officials even issued a public call for tips and offered a reward of $100,000.
In 2007, the FBI also announced a separate $100,000 reward of their own for any information related to Jonathan's death. Presumably, nobody came forward with any usable tips because Jonathan's case remained unsolved. And since the officials couldn't identify any clear suspects in Jonathan's work life, they eventually began investigating his personal life.
As they were digging into his private business, some anonymous investigators leaked alarming details to the press.
and seemed to suggest that Jonathan had somehow brought his murder on himself. They said, among other things, that Jonathan had a secret credit card his wife wasn't aware of, and that he'd visited websites where he could solicit sex workers. It seems that they were implying Jonathan may have been murdered due to some personal indiscretion that had nothing to do with his career. It was a classic case of victim blaming. But Jonathan's friends and colleagues just didn't believe any of these claims.
William Kiesling, an investigative reporter who wrote a book on Jonathan Luna's death, described these leaks as, quote, a well-timed hit job on Luna's reputation, which raises a lot of questions. Namely, why would crime scene investigators even want to destroy Jonathan's reputation? He's the victim. And what would they gain from that?
I'll come back to that question later, but for now, I have to note that it's possible that Jonathan's loved ones were just mistaken. If he really was leading some kind of double life, he could have easily been very good at covering his tracks. So, so good, no one suspected a thing. And in light of these alleged discoveries about Jonathan's web of lies and his struggles in the workplace, including that missing $36,000, which still hasn't been recovered to this day,
The FBI and other anonymous federal sources publicly suggested that Jonathan's killer may have been Jonathan himself. They based this in part on the presence of so-called hesitation wounds that the coroner identified during his autopsy.
These are very shallow cuts that barely penetrate the skin. They're often associated with suicide, as a person may not initially realize how painful a stab wound can be or how forceful a cut has to be in order to be deadly. Often in a suicide by stabbing, a person will leave some hesitation wounds before they make the fatal blow. If Jonathan had hesitation wounds, this suggested some or all of his injuries could have been self-inflicted.
But the coroner who identified the hesitation wounds didn't see them as evidence that Jonathan had killed himself. When he filed his report after the post-mortem examination, he listed the cause of death as homicide. Hesitation wounds are not. He found it very unlikely that Jonathan could have inflicted all of his injuries, all 36 of them, on himself. Remember, he was stabbed in the back.
And the injuries to his genitals in particular would have been extremely painful. It's hard to imagine anyone subjecting themselves to that kind of torture. The coroner also told the press that Jonathan had defensive wounds on his hands. These were cuts consistent with trying to fight off an attacker. There were so many slashes on his hands, one investigator described them as looking as if they'd been shredded.
Now, the coroner believed Jonathan's killers may have tortured him in the backseat of his car, where large amounts of blood were found. Maybe the shallow hesitation wounds weren't evidence of self-harm, but that the murderer was drawing out their kill, or that they didn't initially intend to kill Jonathan. They may have just wanted to keep him alive long enough to get information from him.
And remember, he was likely already bleeding before he pulled over by the river as evidenced by the blood on that toll ticket. It's hard to make that detail fit with the suicide narrative. And moving beyond the coroner reports and autopsy results, it's unclear why Jonathan would withdraw $200 cash from an ATM if he wasn't even planning to survive that night.
But FBI representatives still pressured the county coroner to update the ruling to a suicide in 2006. Don't worry, the coroner refused. And today, Jonathan's official cause of death is still listed as a homicide. But that hasn't stopped some federal officials from telling the press that they believe he killed himself.
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Now, it could be that the FBI and the coroner just interpreted the evidence differently. Maybe the former genuinely thought Jonathan took his own life while the latter didn't. At one point, federal investigators tweaked their story. They still maintained that Jonathan had killed himself, but now they claimed he did it on accident. Their theory was wild to say the least, but here's the gist of it.
Jonathan may have wanted to make his boss feel sorry for him in the hopes that DiBaggio would go easier on him at work. So in order to manipulate DiBaggio, Jonathan decided to stage his own kidnapping.
This narrative is already bizarre, but it only gets more ridiculous from here. The investigators claim that Jonathan's mysterious multi-hour drive through various states was all an attempt to fake an abduction. The ATM withdrawals may have been part of that plan. Maybe he hoped it would look like he'd been held up or robbed.
when he pulled over by that river he stabbed himself to make it look like he'd been attacked allegedly jonathan didn't mean to hurt himself seriously but he accidentally nicked his carotid artery and then died of his injuries of course this theory has a lot of the same problems that the suicide explanation did namely how did jonathan stab himself in the back and create those defensive wounds on his own hands
Needless to say, many people were doubtful when they heard this narrative, and many of Jonathan's loved ones wondered why the authorities would propose an explanation that was so ridiculous. It seemed like the only reason you'd make up such a wild story would be to muddy or confuse the narrative. Some believed the government didn't want the public to know the truth about what really happened to Jonathan.
Now again, this question becomes, why? What would the authorities gain from covering up the truth about Jonathan's murder? That's impossible to answer, in part because we still don't know who the killer was. His murder case is still unsolved today. And once the formal investigation stalled out, the general public began making their own guesses about the solution. It was only a matter of time before wild conspiracy theories appeared in the newspapers.
Some suggested that Jonathan was the victim of a mafia hit. Maybe the FBI was helping them cover up the murder rather than cross a dangerous organized crime operation. Or possibly the FBI had killed Jonathan themselves for some reason.
And two years after Jonathan's death, another attorney mysteriously went missing. And a few people suggested he might've been connected to Jonathan in some way. Others argued Jonathan was just the latest victim of racial bias, that investigators weren't taking his homicide as seriously as they would if Jonathan was white. The more time passed without any real break in the case, the more conspiracy theories flew. But one common refrain ran through all of them.
Whoever the real killer was, state and federal officials may have been covering for them. Meanwhile, the official investigation made minimal progress. In 2007, four years after Jonathan's homicide, his father filed a request for a formal inquest into his death, but the state refused it. The authorities said they had to reject the request as Jonathan's father wasn't his next of kin, and therefore he wasn't the appropriate person to file for an inquest.
This minor technicality became yet another roadblock in the path to justice. Then, in or before 2013, the FBI Baltimore office administratively closed the file on Jonathan Luna. This means, basically, the agency was no longer actively investigating even though they hadn't solved the murder. If any new evidence were to come to light, they'd reopen the case then, but it doesn't appear that ever happened.
As the years ticked by and the police failed to make any progress, Jonathan's family grew even more frustrated, and rightfully so. They hired multiple private detectives to look into Jonathan's case. One of those PIs, Bill Buckingham, was a retired police officer, so he knew his way around criminal investigations.
Now, Buckingham claims that he did a lot of digging and he figured out exactly who killed Jonathan. He also believes he knows why they did it and even how. Buckingham says they kidnapped the prosecutor from his office, drove around with him for hours, then finally stabbed him in the backseat of his own car. But he's never publicly named the alleged killer or their motive. He said he didn't have proof to back up his deductions.
Once he found hard evidence, he'd reveal what he knew. So Buckingham searched and poked and prodded, and he finally made a major discovery in the case in early 2020, just over 16 years after Jonathan's homicide.
See, Buckingham was trying to get his hands on the coroner's report from Jonathan's autopsy. When he requested it, the county coroner said they didn't have those records. Apparently, they'd turned them over to the FBI soon after Jonathan's death, but when the coroner's office double-checked, they found, oh, actually, they did have that paperwork?
When they tried to hand it over to Buckingham, a district attorney intervened. The DA sealed those records and everything else related to Jonathan's homicide. Their argument was that publicly releasing the information might interfere with the active investigation. They didn't want to tip off Jonathan's killers about what they did or didn't know about them, which makes a certain amount of sense, except again, it had been over 16 years. The investigation wasn't active anymore.
And it seemed unlikely that Jonathan would ever see justice without support from third parties like William Buckingham. The frustrated private detective told reporters with LNP Always Lancaster, if the authorities really wanted it solved, it would be solved. In another interview, he accused the investigators of actively covering up Jonathan's murder. Sadly, there haven't been any new breaks since then.
As of this recording, it's been over 20 years since Jonathan was found dead and his killer hasn't been identified or charged. As for the reward, the $100,000 the FBI offered for useful tips, it's unclear if it's still possible for tipsters to claim it. When a reporter with Baltimore's NBC News affiliate asked a spokesperson with the agency if the reward was still on offer, they avoided giving a straightforward answer.
It's unclear why they'd be so evasive about the question unless, as some have speculated, the authorities don't want Jonathan's murder to be solved. Sadly, after a lifetime of hard work, intense personal discipline, and ambition, Jonathan's accomplishments have been overshadowed by his mysterious death. He left behind a wife and two young sons, and his spouse has constantly declined requests to give interviews to the press.
if any of his family members have theories about what really happened to jonathan they're keeping them to themselves and since we haven't solved his murder in over two decades it's looking increasingly likely that we never will even if we do eventually find a culprit it's possible that the conspiracy theories surrounding his death might never die down sadly jonathan luna's legacy may always be synonymous with suspicion and uncertainty
And that is the case of Jonathan Luna. I always feel really heartbroken by these cases because there's a family out there that has no answers and a family who feels like everyone who's supposed to be helping is working against them. Thank you so, so much for listening to today's episode and I will see you next week as we continue to go into the dark.