Episode 202 - Who Killed Jennifer? - Part 2 of 4 - The Investigation
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The following series is based on extensive research conducted over a two-year period, reviewing various sources including police reports, interviews and newspaper articles. Throughout our research, individuals involved in the case were attempted to be contacted in order to share their experiences and perspectives. The opinions expressed in this series do not necessarily reflect those of the Minds of Madness podcast. Listener discretion is advised.

Previously, in part one of Who Killed Jennifer, you were introduced to Andy, Jennifer Lynn Sherm's son, who's lived practically his whole life without his mother, not knowing who killed her or why. You also learned about Jennifer's traumatic childhood experience with a former sheriff's captain who may have triggered a tragic chain of events, pushing Jennifer into a dangerous life, working the streets of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Unlike many of the cases we've covered, Jennifer's case wasn't one we went looking for. Instead, it was a case that in a way found us. You can't ever forget something like this, but you can definitely fold it up real nice and put it in a cute little box in the corner of your mind. And so that's kind of where I was.

In 2020, we interviewed Andy Sherm for another case we were covering, a quadruple homicide in Farmville, Virginia. That's when we first heard about Jennifer, who'd been murdered back in 1985, when Andy was just 15 months old. A case that's remained unsolved ever since. I never thought anything was going to come of this case, ever. I just thought it was going to remain a cold case for forever.

knows how long, you know what I mean? It's been like a culture shock to me. It really has. I've learned more about my mom since you guys took an interest in this.

Join me now as we take you through our two-year investigation into the murder of Jennifer Lynn Sherm. You'll hear about the perils she faced and how at the time of her murder, several serial killers and dangerous individuals were targeting a very specific type of woman in Albuquerque, leading police on a challenging and complex investigation trying to determine who killed Jennifer.

As our head writer Ryan started looking into Jennifer's case, he did what he always does and that was trying to gain an understanding of the backdrop of what was happening at the time of the murder. One of the things that I get to do with every case we work on is obviously just get to know as much about the environment of the case as I possibly can.

And once I started looking into Albuquerque and specifically East Central Avenue, immediately what you start to find is that this is a notorious area of Albuquerque. If you were to Google Albuquerque, you'd see that it's referred to by locals as the war zone. And that's because of the violent crime that goes on in this area. But it wasn't always that way.

Once upon a time, East Central Avenue was actually a part of Route 66 that went from Chicago out to LA. And in Albuquerque, it was kind of an oasis along that journey that everybody would stop at and spend the night. So on East Central Avenue, over a hundred motels sprung up to cater to these travelers that were going through. And for a time in the 50s and 60s, East Central Avenue was a happening place.

But that all began to change in the 70s when I-40 was completed, the interstate that goes through Albuquerque out to Los Angeles. Now all the motorists could just go across the interstate, with less and less of them going down East Central Avenue. So all the motels along East Central Avenue got less and less customers, so they received less and less money, and that area went into a slow and inevitable economic decline.

And one way of coping with this economic decline was that the motels started becoming hotbeds for seedier and seedier activities. Many of them started renting out rooms by the hour. It didn't take long for East Central Avenue to begin to develop a reputation. First it was known as The Strip, and then The Stroll, and by the 80s it became The Cruise, and would eventually be called The War Zone.

But all these nicknames was just kind of this increasing level of vice that the area was known for. By the 80s, it's where all the porn theaters are. It's where all the sex workers are. It's where the drug dealers are. It's where robberies happen, petty crimes. And early in the 80s, it wasn't exactly dangerous. It was just seedy. But that really started to change about the mid-80s.

The criminal element on East Central Avenue had become a mixture of deviant subcultures. Drug traffickers, dealers and users, bikers, sex workers, pimps and johns, with the lines often becoming blurred.

For decades, Albuquerque police had managed to keep a tap on all these various subcultures. But an unprecedented level of violence was about to infiltrate Albuquerque's underworld, marking a dark turning point in the city's history.

So there's definitely only so much you can learn about a place by reading about it, by looking at the newspapers. So one of the really great things that happened was Shane reached out to a journalist named Mike Gallagher, who was based out there in Albuquerque, who saw this in real time. What I learned was that around 1983, in the beginning of the 80s, gangs from California mostly came into Albuquerque bringing crack cocaine.

It was Cuban gangs from Miami that actually controlled the powder cocaine that was used to make a crack. There was also another deadly group that emerged, the Memphis group. They were from east of the Mississippi, Tennessee area.

And they really took over the sex work trade in that area. And what they did is they would force their sex workers to also sell prescription amphetamines on the side to their customers, to their johns. And so just within the span of a year, you've got three different organized gangs come to the cruise and the landscape entirely changed dramatically.

In 1984, at 21 years old, Jennifer found herself back in Albuquerque trying to provide for a baby. It was also around that time that Jennifer got into a new relationship with a man named Alex, the same man interviewed as the boogeyman whose photos sent him straight into a panic attack.

In the 80s, Alex was one of the most prominent meth cooks in Albuquerque, which was actually a relatively new drug to the area, increasing in popularity and problems for the city as the years went on.

Another meth bust in Albuquerque. Police have taken down two meth houses just a few blocks apart, and they believe the two are connected. They found a meth lab in an Albuquerque motel. In this case, it was one bus that led to another, showing a trend of meth labs operating on a near 24-7 basis. Millions of dollars of meth, along with 19 guns, in a former city employee's home.

Sam Candelaria remembers Alex from his days working narcotic investigations for the Albuquerque Police Department. Every time we ever had any encounters with him, he was always on. One of the largest ones that I was ever involved with him was actually my search warrant. It was a trailer. He had a full-blown meth lab going on, and it was a pretty good-sized one. I mean, it was massive. Pretty much just the entire mobile home was a meth lab.

20 rifles in their firearms. If you'd ever watched any episodes of Breaking Bad when he's in the motorhome and he's got all the glass apparatus, and then, of course, any of the episodes where they've got the large methamphetamine lab underneath the laundry, that's exactly what you would see with this. Sam remembers busting Alex on at least three or four different occasions. Alex has always cooperated with us. He never fought us. You know, it was like one of those things, okay, you got me.

We did him at another hotel and he opens the door and he goes, "Oh, it's you again." He was always, like I said, he was always compliant. He never fought us. We never had any issues with him. Alex was just kind of, "Oh, they got me this time." You know, and it was, we never had any violence with him or anything else. Though, you know, like I said, every time we encountered him or the meth labs we had with him, there was always firearms there.

The Alex Sam was describing was the same Alex Andy had been terrified of as a child. And although he'd eventually be able to come face to face with this fear when he was 21, until that day, he'd continue to have disturbing visions of him.

Whenever my grandmother would bring up Alex, she'd spell out A-L-E-X. I'm sure that was kind of their way of trying to shield me. This guy was the boogeyman. You look at this picture of him, I think of it as a famous photo, you know, because it's the number one image that's been burnt into my head of this guy. You look at this picture of him, he looks like a nut.

He looks absolutely insane. And growing up, he was literally like a boogeyman to me. I swear, like, he'd be waiting for me sometimes. I'd visually see this guy. He wasn't actually there, but I'd see him waiting across the street from school. I'd see he would just stand there and look at me. That's how scared I was of this dude. That's how he was built up in my mind. That bad.

For Jennifer, being involved with Alex meant she was even more exposed to the deadly scene unfolding on East Central Avenue at the time. The other aspect that made life especially dangerous for her was the fact she'd chosen not to have a pimp. Although that meant she had the benefit of keeping all the money-sharing to herself, it also meant she had no protection on the streets.

Up until 1984, the cruise was known to be a hotbed of vice. What it was not known for was murder. That all changed. It's believed to be the first unsolved homicide of a sex worker from East Central Avenue.

And that happened in August of 1984. The victim in that case was a 21-year-old sex worker named Danessa Howard. And she was found in the laundry room of an apartment. She'd been strangled with an extension cord around her neck. And they really had no idea who did this. And the case went unsolved. At the time, Danessa's unsolved homicide just seemed like a one-off. It had never happened before, and they were kind of hoping it would never happen again. But nine months later, in May 1985...

Less than 100 feet away from where Danessa was found, the body of Jennifer Sherm was discovered. And they realized pretty quickly that it was very possible that both of these murders might be linked. It was while our friend Shane Waters was digging through archive news articles that he first stumbled on this information about Danessa Howard. One of the things I started doing initially was I was searching through newspaper archives relating to Jennifer's case.

And when that didn't come up with much information, I started looking at cases that could have been related from the same year.

I found an article about a different victim. And this victim had been murdered nine months before Jennifer. She was found on the same street that Jennifer was found. And so I started wondering, could these cases be related? Could these women have been murdered by the same person or people? And that's how I actually came across an expose called Death on the Cruise. And it was written by an investigative reporter named Mike Gallagher.

In that article, Mike had identified a total of seven unsolved murders of sex workers off East Central Avenue between the years of 1984 and 1988.

All of these cases shared a number of similarities. None of these victims were killed with guns. Almost all of the bodies have been dumped somewhere other than where they were killed. And it was so shocking to read through his article because he mentions both victims and he lays out a theory that was sort of matching up to mine.

And it was so strange for me reading someone's theory and article from 1990 to see that he had the same theory that I had currently. Back in the 80s, Mike Gallagher was a crime beat reporter for the Albuquerque Journal when he first thought there might be a connection between the seven unsolved homicides.

After reading the article, I decided I would love if I could find Mike Gallagher. I realized that the article was written in 1990 and there's a thought, is this guy still even alive? So I end up writing to the Albuquerque Journal and they respond and they tell me that he had actually just retired six months before I contacted them.

I asked them if I could give them my information and if they would mind passing it along to Mike to see if he would mind reaching out to me to talk.

And so that's what they did. The current person in his position reached out to Mike. And before I knew it, I had an email from Mike Gallagher and the subject of his email was death on the cruise. And lo and behold, Mike Gallagher. And I knew here is the first connection I can make to someone who was on the ground investigating at the time of all of this.

He remembered the case so well, like from 1990. And he was just like, oh yeah, I remember talking to so-and-so. And I'm just thinking, I don't know that I would remember that. Although Mike no longer had his original notes on the cases, he still remembered Jennifer's and the type of danger she'd been facing at the time of her murder. You had two different cultures working out on the proofs. The heroin and the meth and ketamine drugs.

Jennifer, at that time, was sort of caught in the middle. Her boyfriend at the time was Alex. He was a biker with a lot of methamphetamine connection. He was a biker with a capital B. And the bikers in 1985 in New Mexico and pretty much the whole country controlled the methamphetamine trade. They were the cooks. Heroin in Albuquerque was a little different. It tended to be controlled by a

these long-established networks of heroin dealers who had connections to Mexico. But right about this time, crack begins to show up. And so do transient gangs.

Along with the gang showing up on East Central in the 80s, there had also been another type of group that had made its way into Albuquerque, and that was the Memphis group. A very loosely organized gang of pimps trafficking women into Albuquerque, as well as aggressively and violently recruiting sex workers in the area to work for them.

On the streets, they were known as guerrilla pimps. Pimps who used excessive physical violence to control their girls, drugging them to the point of passivity. The I-40 corridor had always been part of the traveling pimps. They'd move from Oklahoma City to Albuquerque, out to Bakersfield. You know, there was sort of a route that they followed. Jennifer was not part of it.

And because Jennifer didn't have a pimp, she became a target for this group who wanted her to work for them. And so there were things happening to people that didn't happen in the past. There was a level of fear among the sex workers about who they could trust and who they could talk to. And what was typically a fairly rough trade became a deadly trade.

This transition from rough to deadly happened over the span of just a few years, and in 1985, Jennifer would have quite literally been surrounded by danger from every angle. Dangerous pimps following her and harassing her, shady clients who might get violent. Even at home, Jennifer's relationship with Alex would turn out to be volatile at times, with them even breaking up because of it.

In fact, the last time they broke up was just two months before Jennifer was found murdered. But it was an incident after this breakup that would place Alex's name on the police suspect list in Jennifer's murder investigation. But before looking more into Alex, APD had someone else they had to rule out.

So one of the things that police quickly realized when they began looking into Jennifer's murder was that she had been the victim in this high profile case that had dominated headlines 10 years earlier. And that was when Frank Turkle, sheriff's captain, was accused of raping a minor. And because of this connection, actually, it's very possible that because she was this victim in this high profile case years earlier, they

They actually might have done a little more investigation into her murder than they might have for another victim of her demographic. For reasons unknown, police were able to quickly rule out Frank Turkle as a suspect in Jennifer's murder. And although we couldn't find an explanation for why that happened, we had a theory.

Another reason that they may have been so eager to rule Frank Turkle out as a suspect is they already had quite a list of other potential suspects they could look into. Jennifer lived a very dangerous lifestyle around many dangerous people. On June 5th, 1985, at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in Albuquerque, the autopsy of Jennifer Lynn Sherm was conducted. One week after her murder...

The beginning of her autopsy report states: "The body is that of an adequately nourished, well-developed adult wife female. The body weighs 114 pounds and is 66 inches in height and appears consistent with the reported age of 22."

Reading an autopsy report from almost 40 years ago isn't all that different from reading one written today. It's written in the same calculated medical language, delivered with precision, cold formality, and chilling finality. An extensive examination of the human body, detached from the human being.

The part of Jennifer's chest where she'd held her newborn baby boy against her skin becomes the upper midclavicular. The finger where she wore the ring her ex-boyfriend gave her becomes the proximal phalanx of the right fourth digit. Highly descriptive, yet revealing so little. There's nothing in the medical examiner's report that could tell anyone about Jennifer's emotional scars.

There's also nothing that could tell us about her personality, like how she wouldn't hesitate to give her last dollar to a friend in need and refuse to let them pay her back, and that she was a fighter to the very end. All that's in there are clues of what might have happened in her final moments.

Jennifer's autopsy concludes by stating four deadly blows from an unknown object was Jennifer's official cause of death, but it would be what the medical examiner noted about the position of Jennifer's body that would provide the biggest clue as to how Jennifer wound up at 187 Montelago Drive.

One of the real benefits of having the actual police reports actual case file is you can see in real time what the officers were discovering and writing down in their reports. And so looking at the crime scene, you can see it from several officers' perspective of what they found.

They noticed that her body was lying in a position that did not indicate that that's where she had been killed. In fact, it looked like she must have been placed into a rather cramped area for a while before her body was dumped where it was found. Because her body had gone into rigor mortis and it was not laying in a way that would suggest that that's where she'd been killed.

The most obvious and first thought police had was she'd obviously been put into the trunk of a car and then dropped off here. And they were actually able to corroborate this theory with some of the evidence they found at the scene. Jennifer was laying on the curb and her hand was actually falling over the curb above the road. And under that hand was a puddle of blood.

And then what they saw was the trail of blood drops leading away from Jennifer's body going down the road. Just small dots, but every one of those dots was exactly the same distance apart. And every dot was slightly less prevalent than the one before it. So what they realized is that most likely what had happened is that

A car tire had driven over a drop of her blood. And as it went down the street, every time that wheel hit the ground again, it left a blood transfer. So that's why it disappears slowly as it goes away. And every single one of those drops is exactly the same distance from the one before it.

They did some math and they figured out some wheel and rim and tire sizes and were able to determine that there was plenty of makes and models of cars and tires that would have left this exact pattern. And so they basically determined that this was the most likely possibility, that Jennifer had been placed into a trunk of a car, been dumped on the side of the road, and then the car drove away with one of the tires driving through a pool of her blood and leaving marks as it went away.

It wasn't much to go on, but was about as much as they were going to get from a crime scene that only seemed to raise a series of questions. For starters, why had Jennifer been left in that particular location? A residential street where someone could have easily been spotted disposing of a body. Was it possible the address itself held some significance? 187 Montelago Drive.

After all, 187 was, and still is, popular gang slang for murderer. Had Jennifer's body been left there to send a message to someone? Or perhaps the location meant nothing at all, just random and convenient? For investigators to solve this puzzle, all ideas needed to be on the table. But there was one elephant in the room that couldn't be ignored.

And that was how close Jennifer's body had been found to where Denessa Howard's body had been discovered, only about 100 feet away. The most likely scenario was that the two cases were linked. At the crime scene itself, the detectives basically didn't have much other than believing that she'd been transported to that location in the trunk of a car and then dumped.

that's all they had but one of the things that actually really surprised me looking into this case file was how much evidence they actually did collect from this crime scene especially considering her victim status which would usually indicate that maybe they wouldn't do a very thorough investigation instead they actually investigated this quite thoroughly and they collected a lot of evidence all the trace evidence from jennifer's body they collected fingernail clippings they collected

I think 25 different strands of hair from her body. They swabbed different parts of her body and they took fiber samples from various parts of her body.

The reason it was remarkable was because at the time, there was little police could do with that kind of evidence. In fact, it would be two more years before DNA technology would ever be used to solve a crime anywhere in the world. The first case came from England in 1987, reported on by BBC News in 2020.

Now, it's 35 years since DNA fingerprinting was first discovered. Since then, it's been used in millions of police investigations across the world. But it was first used in 1987 to convict the killer of two teenage girls in Leicestershire, preventing a grave miscarriage of justice.

While police in Jennifer's case waited for a time in the future to test the forensic evidence they'd collected, the samples were placed securely into plastic bags, carefully filed away into evidence. In the meantime, they did what any good cop would do and began working the investigation from the inside out, starting with those closest to the victim.

After delivering the devastating news to Jennifer's family, police discovered the last time they'd seen her alive was six days before her murder, when she'd gone back to her childhood home to spend some time with her son Andy.

One of the things that the detectives learned from talking to Jennifer's mother was that Jennifer had actually started seeing another guy fairly recently, and this was a man named Ralph. And Jennifer and Ralph had been staying in various motels, including the Sundowner Motel on East Central. And this was in the wake of Alex and Jennifer breaking up.

So Ralph was a 28 year old with a history of check forgery and in the month before her murder he'd been living with Jennifer. And they bounced around from hotel to hotel, whatever they could afford. Ralph didn't have a dime to his name and he basically relied on Jennifer to make all the money. Jennifer would go out and work the streets, make some money, bring it home. Now even though Ralph seems like he wasn't bringing anything at all to the table,

One theory is that Jennifer may have sidled up to this guy Ralph while Alex was in jail because he might have offered her a little bit of protection. We do know that in the weeks before she started dating Ralph...

She'd actually had some run-ins with some known violent pimps who were trying to recruit her to work for them. And these were pimps from the Memphis group. They'd even kicked down her door at one point and they were trying to basically strong arm her into working for them, which is something she didn't want to do. So maybe just having a bigger, stronger guy living with her might have been, you know, just a little added layer of protection for what she was doing.

On the same day Jennifer's body was discovered, four detectives from the APD tracked down Ralph at the Sundowner. It was the first time he said he'd heard about Jennifer being murdered. According to Ralph, on Tuesday, May 28, the day before Jennifer's body had been found, she'd gone out to work earlier in the day, returning with about $130.

Around 4:30 p.m., Ralph said they went out to a restaurant. At around 9 p.m., he said Jennifer headed out to work again, but then returned about 15 minutes later, saying the cops had stopped her. Immediately, Ralph said Jennifer left again. He then claimed he threw on a shirt and followed after her. But by the time he left the motel room, Jennifer was already gone.

After looking for her for about 10 minutes along Central, Ralph said he headed back to the room. But when Jennifer didn't return after a while, he said he started to worry because whenever Jennifer went out to work, she was never gone for very long.

Detectives interviewed a very close friend of Jennifer's and through her, they learned that it wasn't really like Jennifer to wander very far away from where she was staying at the time. She didn't walk down the cruise for miles in order to get jobs. She basically just hung out in the area that she was living in at the time.

So, later on the night she disappeared, Jennifer had gone out and she didn't return. And after a while, Ralph thought it most likely that she'd been picked up by the cops. So he picks up the phone and he calls the jail to see if she's there, and she wasn't. He goes to sleep, and the next morning, he calls the jail two more times, checking to see if Jennifer had been brought in, thinking clearly that's what must have happened to her.

And not long after making that second phone call is when police showed up to the motel he was in and they broke the news to him that Jennifer had been murdered.

From reading the transcripts of Ralph's interview with police, it seemed they believed he was being truthful. At the end of his interview, police asked Ralph if he knew anyone who might want to kill Jennifer. He responded by saying it could have been either pimps or tricks. But then he added another possibility when he told them she'd burn her ex-boyfriend Alex.

Before police even got the chance to interview Alex, they actually received a tip from a guy named Antonio Valdez. Antonio told police that he'd actually seen Jennifer the night before at 3.30 in the morning on May 29th. So this was just a few hours before her body would be discovered.

Now, Antonio said he didn't know Jennifer very well. In fact, he didn't even know her name. He'd just seen her around, kind of knew who she was. And that night, according to his statement he gave, he and Jennifer had just kind of hung around chatting for about 15 minutes near his motel, which was actually about three miles away from where Jennifer was staying. While they were just out chatting, a white Cadillac pulled up, according to him,

When we mentioned this report of a white Cadillac to Andy, Jennifer's son, he remembered something his grandmother told him long ago. Later on down the road, I started hearing about this white Cadillac. The thing was is that grandma used to always say, well, they put her in the back of that goddamn white Cadillac and they just, they went and dumped her like a piece of garbage, you know?

Later, we'd find other reports about a mysterious white Cadillac lurking around East Central Avenue. Interestingly, mention of a white Cadillac would come up a year later in another murder investigation on Central.

While police are getting these different stories of what may or may not have happened to Jennifer, trying to piece together a timeline that happened the night before, through all of this, there was one person based on the rumor mill at the time that actually might have had the most motive to murder Jennifer, and that was her ex-boyfriend, Alex.

So, the vast majority of what we know about Alex and Jennifer's relationship actually comes from witness statements that were provided to police. This is close friends, this is motel managers who knew both of them, and it comes from an interview that police did with Alex himself. It was while reading through the witness statements in Jennifer's case file that we learned that Jennifer had started dating Alex when she moved from Colorado back to Albuquerque in the summer of '84. And this is from Alex.

Over the next nine months, they dated on and off. They had kind of a tumultuous relationship. It was often physically violent. And sometimes that violence went both ways. They broke up. They got back together again. And one of the things that Alex mentions in his statement is that one of the causes of a lot of their arguments was the fact that Jennifer would go out and work the streets. Alex did not like that. And he didn't want her to do that.

So this relationship continued having their ups and downs until around April of 1985 when it seemed like they'd split up for good. But according to Alex, even though they'd broken up romantically, they still remained friends. But after they broke up, an incident happened that would turn Alex from just being an ex-boyfriend into a possible suspect in Jennifer's murder.

About a month before Jennifer was murdered, Alex went to jail on drug charges. And believing he could still rely on Jennifer, he called her up from jail asking for a favor. What happened next varies depending on who you ask. Andy tells the version that was the rumor on the streets. I was always told that Alex went to jail. He got caught for drugs or larceny or something. He went to jail. My mom was on the outside.

They were dating on and off. And he had a stashed dope. He was one of the biggest dealers at the time. So he told her, hey, like, hey, go here, get this dope. You flip it and then get me out of jail. And what ended up happening, what I was told was that she did the deal, but she got burned. She didn't get the money. And so Alex ended up having to get bailed out by someone else.

The version Ralph gave to police would be very similar to the story Alex would later give to law enforcement when he was busted on new drug charges on June 12th, 1985. But which of these versions was actually closest to the truth could never be verified.

After being read his rights, Alex was asked if he'd be willing to be interviewed about Jennifer's murder. Unable to reach his lawyer, Alex agreed, as long as he wasn't questioned about his pending drug charges. Alex also gave them permission to search his vehicle, telling them to help themselves.

So it's actually very interesting reading the transcription of the police interview with Alex. And although we can't hear his voice, we don't have the audio for it, we do have the transcription. And even just reading it, one thing really comes through pretty obviously. And that's his forthrightness about everything that had happened between him and Jennifer. On the day of this interview, Alex told police he felt bad about his breakup with Jennifer and that he'd actually gone out looking for her the night before she was murdered.

He says that he wished he'd found her that night because if he did, then maybe she'd still be alive. Another thing that Alex says during the interview is he actually asks detectives if Jennifer was still wearing a specific ring he'd given her when they found her body. Later on in the interview, the transcription even makes note of the fact that Alex starts crying. And when he starts crying, it's because he's telling police how Jennifer's family was so upset with him for not coming to her funeral.

But, according to Alex, the reason he hadn't gone to her funeral was because he didn't even know she was dead at the time.

After telling police who his alibis were for the night of Jennifer's murder, investigators started asking pointed questions, specifically about drugs Jennifer had allegedly stolen from Alex a month prior to her murder. But just as Alex began to talk more about the situation, the interview was interrupted by Alex's lawyer, and it doesn't appear he was ever questioned again.

Sometimes when we're looking at these police interviews, you got to read between the lines a little bit. And one of the things that becomes really clear while reading a separate interview with an acquaintance of Jennifer and Alex's, the detective indicates that he really believes Alex's version of the story. Despite the fact that everybody on the streets and all the rumors, everybody pointing their fingers at Alex,

Police thoroughly investigate Alex. They've searched his vehicle. They've really done their work trying to see if they can't find anything to pin Alex to this murder. And they find absolutely nothing that can. After police discovered they had no evidence to connect Alex to Jennifer's murder, they realized they were back at square one in their investigation. So after looking into Alex, police start to expand their search a little bit. And they start looking further and further into Jennifer's personal life.

And they find out that she had a former boyfriend, a guy named Bill Duran, in Colorado who'd been physically abusive to her. Immediately they think, well, maybe he's a suspect now, and they looked into him. But it turned out that that was a complete dead end because Bill had been sitting in jail on the very day that Jennifer was murdered. Bill Duran was Andy's biological father, who he wouldn't get the chance to meet until he was 18.

the little bit of time I had with my dad. He told me about my mom. I have a better understanding about some of my traits, characteristics. My dad told me my mom used to burn herself with cigarettes. You know, that was like, that was her release. And whenever I was younger, a teenager, you know, I cut, I was a cutter.

Sadly, Andy's father passed away just a year after meeting him, and with the death of his father meant the death of memories he carried of Jennifer.

Since I've known you guys and since this whole thing started, I've literally learned more about my mom in this last year or two I have in my whole life. And to my family's credit, I think they had good intentions trying to shelter me. But in the grand scheme of things, it kind of me up in this way that they probably didn't anticipate.

And so learning all this stuff, I had to question, and I still do question, like, you know, why was so much of this hidden from me? I only had, like, one member of my family that was kind of

the most transparent. That was my Aunt Jessie. And she was the closest to Jenny. But still, like, there was still stuff that she didn't sell me. And I'll always kind of wonder why. Especially as I got older. Like, I can understand as a little kid. I think the intention was good. I think they just wanted to try and save me some heartache. But...

There was always a side of me that wondered about a lot of this stuff, you know, and as much as this thing has hurt me, it's enabled me, I think, to heal too in ways that I never would have been able to heal before. I mean, the autopsy thing f***ed me up, I can't lie. I still haven't brought myself to read the whole thing.

Police spent an entire month chasing down all the leads they could, but soon realized their investigation seemed to be going nowhere. That changed about a month later in July, when a witness named Benita Godden came to police. And she told police that she didn't just know who killed Jennifer, but how she was killed and exactly where she was killed. And the reason she claimed she knew all this was because she said that she was there when it happened.

We first learned about this witness when Shane Waters actually started digging into all the newspaper archives and digging up all the little random bits here and there. But we found out the whole story about this witness when we received the case file. And in that case file is a long, detailed interview with Benita Godden.

Benita is a 23-year-old sex worker on East Central Avenue at this time. And she comes forward to say that she was with Jennifer the night that Jennifer was murdered.

According to Benita, she and Jennifer had been picked up at 7pm by two pimps, who then drove them out to the mesa near the airport. There in the desert, Benita said the pimps brutally beat Jennifer with some kind of stick or bat, kicking her repeatedly until her body went completely limp. After throwing Jennifer in the trunk, she said the pimps drove to a spot off Central and opened up the trunk again.

Benita says that these men assumed that Jennifer was going to be still alive when they opened the trunk. So they go back, they open the trunk, and that's when they discover that Jennifer died because of her wounds.

Benita then told police the pimps drove off with Jennifer still inside the trunk. The next morning, around 10.30 a.m., she claimed the same two men found her, picked her up, and then drove her to a motel and forced her to clean Jennifer's blood out of the trunk.

So Benita shares a lot of information that was accurate to the police's understanding of the case. She says that there were multiple people, at least two people that were present that matches up with what police believed. She shared that Jennifer was hit with a blunt object that matched.

One thing that Benita said that really convinced police that she was telling the truth was when she said that Jennifer was thrown into a trunk. And then they asked her to show them the position that she saw Jennifer in the trunk.

And sure enough, Benita gets down and she's laying in the same position that they end up finding Jennifer's body in. Benita says that these men assumed that Jennifer was going to be still alive when they opened the trunk. So they go back, they open the trunk, and that's when they discover that Jennifer died because of her wounds.

Surely, this couldn't all be coincidental. But who were these men?

Police end up showing Benita a stack of photos of known pimps that are in the area. She says that she recognizes pretty much all of them. And then they show her a picture of a guy named Gene Autry Hill. And then she says that this is the man who killed Jennifer. The DA then secured an indictment against Gene on an open count of murder. And he voluntarily turned himself in, entering a plea of not guilty.

So just by reading the newspaper articles about Benita, it seems that she's able to corroborate a lot of things that police already know about Jennifer's murder and that her story seems valid.

As I dug further, I realized that at some point, the police and the DA dismissed her as a witness. And I thought, of course they did, because Benita was a sex worker. They surely dismissed her because they probably didn't think that she would make a good person to put up on a stand because of her past.

It wouldn't be until we got Jennifer's case file, reading through the transcripts of Benita's interview, that we'd realize there was actually more to it.

Although there were some things that did match, there were a significant amount of discrepancies. Where Bonita's story starts to unravel is when she's describing what Jennifer was wearing that night. And there's also the timeline of her story. She's talking about that they were picked up at seven o'clock that night. If that were true, that would mean two other eyewitnesses, two other men, rivaled.

Ralph and Antonio were either lying or they were mistaken. But then she starts saying that Jennifer's real last name was Hardin, and she was a runaway from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and she ran away at the age of 14 or 15. Although Benita had gotten a lot of these kinds of details about Jennifer wrong, the details she'd given about Jennifer's actual murder had matched up, which got us wondering...

One thing about Bonita is that where her statements falls apart, it's not about Jennifer's murder. All of that seems to be completely accurate.

It's about the backstory of Jennifer, about how she knows Jennifer. And I can't help but wonder, is it because of her drug usage? We know that drug usage affects your brain and it affects your long-term memory. And so was she just creating this part of how she knows Jennifer because of an absence in her memory because of that drug usage?

I still wonder, was Bonita there that night that Jennifer was murdered? Because all of the details that she gave about how Jennifer was in the trunk, the object that was used, that's all accurate. And if I was to make something up about how someone was murdered, there's no way that I would make up all of those accurate details.

After looking through Jennifer's case file, there were also other sex workers who told police about similar experiences with Pimms that sounded strangely similar to Benita's account.

These sex workers were talking about similar situations where they were forced into cars by these pimps and they were driven out to the desert. They were then beaten with these sticks, these baton type of sticks. Then they were driven back, dropped off. Had Benita in fact witnessed Jennifer's murder or was she just retelling a story she'd heard from other sex workers?

At the end of the day, there are just simply way too many holes in Benita's statements for her account to be trusted really at all. Definitely too many holes in her statements for it to be the only thing that police could rely on to secure a conviction. Any skilled defense attorney

would be easily able to discredit her testimony. And they wouldn't even have to use any ad hominem attacks based on her profession. They could just do it simply by disproving so many of the things that she told police, so many simple facts about Jennifer, who she was, her name, what had happened, too many facts that she simply got wrong.

Because her testimony was so weak and because it was the only thing police had, eventually the district attorney had to drop all the murder charges against Jean Hill and Jennifer's murder was left unsolved or at least what they believed was just unprosecuted.

In our next episode of Who Killed Jennifer, we'll take a look at several extremely dangerous and violent men, and how a series of coincidences revealed new possible suspects in not only Jennifer's murder investigation, but in a case that's captured the residents of Albuquerque for the past 14 years. Stay tuned for part three.

I remember my grandmother, that was over at her house one day and her phone was blowing up. She had a house line obviously, there's four cell phones and all that. And I could just tell something was going on, you know, and she was really elated, upset, thousand different emotions. And then I don't know who it was that really this information to her, but she basically said, "Hey, you know, they finally found Alex. They're bringing him back from North Carolina.

And not only that, they're going to officially charge him with the murder of Jenny.

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