MURDERED: Marina Ramos

In 1989, a woman is found brutally murdered in Mohave County, Arizona. Decades later, a detective identifies her as Marina Ramos, and discovers that her two young children disappeared with her. Several pieces of this tangled mystery have since been solved, but the biggest question remains: Who murdered Marina Ramos?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. BetterHelp is one of the world's leading online therapy services. Now, insurance options may be available nationwide with average copays of just $23 per session for eligible members. But cost isn't the only thing holding people back. Most of us weren't taught stress management. Therapy gives you tools to keep stress from building. BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plans, making it easy to get started with low-cost sessions. Don't have eligible insurance? Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/crimejunkie. Cost and coverage may vary. Discount cannot be combined with insurance.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  If you know me, you know I love stories that make me go, wait, what? The kind that stop you in your tracks and send you straight down a rabbit hole. And my friend Delia Diambra tells stories just like that on Park Predators. Every Tuesday, Delia investigates true crime cases that unfold in the world's most beautiful places, from national parks to hiking trails. She reveals the shocking crimes, mysterious disappearances, and unsettling encounters hidden beneath the postcard-perfect scenery. If you're ready to discover what's beyond the trailhead, listen to Park Predators wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:06Ashley Flowers?

  Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  And I'm Britt.

• 1:09Ashley Flowers?

  And you know what I love more than a girl's trip?

• 1:11Speaker 00

  Nothing.

• 1:11Ashley Flowers?

  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

• 1:52Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 2:57Ashley Flowers?

  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. Three 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.

• 3:40Ashley Flowers?

  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 want to get out of their cars, as you can imagine. Now, they know they need to notify authorities, but it's going to be a hike to the nearest

• 4:23Ashley Flowers?

  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 woman 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.

• 5:08Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 5:52Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 6:28Speaker 00

  Oh, and there's more than just this one picture, right?

• 6:31Ashley Flowers?

  Yeah.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  Like, you can almost see like what the brand is on some of these.

• 6:34Ashley Flowers?

  Not almost, they could tell. The one that you're looking at, they determined says Nike. That one is a size 10 and 1/2, 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 7, and the person who left that, they left a shorter stride, which makes them believe that they're in the range of like 5'4", maybe like 5'8".

• 7:00Speaker 00

  And size 7, is that a men's 7 or a woman's 7? Because those are like different.

• 7:05Ashley Flowers?

  Men's 7, yeah.

• 7:05Speaker 00

  Okay, so I have to ask about the other shoe prints, like.

• 7:10Ashley Flowers?

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

• 7:16Speaker 00

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

• 7:20Ashley Flowers?

  And even in like the third image I sent you, like, they only talk about two prints, like ever, 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.

• 7:32Speaker 00

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

• 7:41Ashley Flowers?

  But I don't know, so like, if you go to the other picture, there are some 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 one.

• 7:52Speaker 00

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

• 7:55Ashley Flowers?

  What 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 going to 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.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  This one here?

• 8:25Ashley Flowers?

  Mm-hmm. 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.

• 9:04Speaker 00

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

• 9:11Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  Right, because this is in the middle of nowhere.

• 9:29Ashley Flowers?

  Of 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

• 10:14Ashley Flowers?

  up in something bad. But the autopsy ends up throwing that into question. Because 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.

• 10:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, and there's probably a breastfed baby out there somewhere, like, missing their mom.

• 10:42Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 11:04Speaker 00

  I mean, was it sexually motivated?

• 11:05Ashley Flowers?

  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 at autopsy, and first, 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.

• 11:29Speaker 00

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

• 11:33Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  Which kind of contradicts the Vegas girl thing even more.

• 11:47Ashley Flowers?

  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, 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 it's so useless.

• 12:32Ashley Flowers?

  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 her 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.

• 13:15Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 13:32Speaker 00

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• 14:16Speaker 00

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• 15:42Ashley Flowers?

  Today in 2026, Joseph Michael Neesonson 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 second murder in August,

• 16:23Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  Uh, two sets of footprints.

• 16:53Ashley Flowers?

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

• 16:58Speaker 00

  Okay, but like, when you don't have much else.

• 17:00Ashley Flowers?

  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 records 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.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  What is that?

• 17:37Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 17:58Speaker 00

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

• 18:01Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  Did they go talk to him?

• 18:41Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 19:25Ashley Flowers?

  An 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.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm, like, imagining, like, the movie montage of two detectives, like, holed up in a dark room, scrolling through, like, hundreds of pages of papers and files.

• 19:52Ashley Flowers?

  So two years later, by the time that they've sorted through all the non-murders, like, the accidental deaths, the suicides, they end up with 66 actual cold case homicides to rework.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  Which is still a

• 20:05Ashley Flowers?

  Significant.

• 20:06Speaker 00

  A significant number.

• 20:07Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  Wait, so that was never done?

• 20:24Ashley Flowers?

  No, 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.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  And how far away from that is?

• 21:06Ashley Flowers?

  From like Mojave? It's like, it's like five or six hours.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 21:09Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 21:49Speaker 00

  Oh, your relative?

• 21:50Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  And there were no missing person reports?

• 22:23Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 22:35Speaker 00

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

• 22:40Ashley Flowers?

  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

• 23:24Ashley Flowers?

  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 going to take the girls away from her, like they did her first 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 second. 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

• 24:09Ashley Flowers?

  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, it 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 want to 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, encouraged Marina to visit her daughter anytime. So at that

• 24:53Ashley Flowers?

  time, Marina goes to California to live with her aunt and her cousin Esther. And 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 kind of 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.

• 25:32Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 26:14Speaker 00

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

• 26:18Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 26:53Speaker 00

  So she's last seen in August?

• 26:56Ashley Flowers?

  Right.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  So where was she between August and December then of that year?

• 27:01Ashley Flowers?

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

• 27:11Speaker 00

  Okay, but like, what are the odds?

• 27:13Ashley Flowers?

  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. 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.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  Right.

• 27:57Ashley Flowers?

  And if she is found dead in the desert, 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.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  Do they have the same dads, though?

• 28:25Ashley Flowers?

  Well, that's still a big question mark. But if not, it's not really going to interfere with finding the DNA, since they all, we know, have the same mother.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  Same mom.

• 28:33Ashley Flowers?

  Right. So in December 2022, that is when the first 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.

• 29:14Ashley Flowers?

  I mean, she rereads 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, 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 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 daughter's social security numbers have never been used. And when she gets confirmation

• 29:57Ashley Flowers?

  that they haven't, she gets official missing persons reports with age progression images filed for Elizabeth and Jasmine via Nickmec. And going off Esther's description, the Mojave 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 Mojave 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.

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• 32:37Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:55Ashley Flowers?

  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 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.

• 33:36Speaker 00

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

• 33:39Ashley Flowers?

  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,

• 34:24Ashley Flowers?

  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."

• 34:48Speaker 00

  And he didn't report them missing either?

• 34:50Ashley Flowers?

  No.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  Why?

• 34:52Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  Do we believe him?

• 35:22Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 35:32Speaker 00

  Doesn't sound like Fernando David in his suit, though.

• 35:36Ashley Flowers?

  No, no.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  Because that was like fancy.

• 35:38Ashley Flowers?

  Lori even shows him the composite sketch of Fernando David, and he's like, "Dope, 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.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 36:17Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  Okay, and like, check and check.

• 36:31Ashley Flowers?

  But 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.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  But, okay, sure. Doesn't answer why Fernando Dad is telling two different stories.

• 36:48Ashley Flowers?

  I have no idea why. I have no idea why he would be covering for William 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 low 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.

• 37:29Speaker 00

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

• 37:33Ashley Flowers?

  So, I mean, he had an 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 records, 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.

• 38:03Speaker 00

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

• 38:08Ashley Flowers?

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

• 38:12Speaker 00

  Because they're just like partial and like...

• 38:14Ashley Flowers?

  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 said it's...

• 38:28Speaker 00

  There's nothing else out there.

• 38:29Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 38:44Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 38:45Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 39:25Ashley Flowers?

  And in August 2025, she gets her first 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 sixth try, a woman picks up. And this woman confirms that she and her older sister, Melissa, were adopted at a really young age.

• 40:07Ashley Flowers?

  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 14th, 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.

• 40:51Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 41:36Ashley Flowers?

  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,

• 42:19Ashley Flowers?

  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, no.

• 42:26Speaker 00

  It's two days after.

• 42:27Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  Right.

• 42:38Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  We had this happen before.

• 42:59Ashley Flowers?

  We've done an episode like this before. I don't know why, like people are like, if you're not going to tell them they're adopted, at least like, don't keep the newspaper clippings in the house. 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.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 43:31Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Well, and like, not just murdered, but murdered and found around the same time, like,

• 43:49Ashley Flowers?

  Right.

• 43:49Speaker 00

  like this all happened together. You were essentially, the only reason you were adopted was because your mom was murdered.

• 43:55Ashley Flowers?

  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 going to 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.

• 44:37Speaker 00

  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.

• 44:47Ashley Flowers?

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

• 45:13Speaker 00

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

• 45:21Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 45:45Speaker 00

  So who is Melissa's biological dad then?

• 45:49Ashley Flowers?

  So here is where the mystery takes one final twist and where listeners might be able to help.

• 45:59Speaker 00

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• 46:44Speaker 00

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• 47:58Ashley Flowers?

  So obviously, Melissa's bio dad would be someone that Lori would want to 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.

• 48:17Speaker 00

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

• 48:20Ashley Flowers?

  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 could spook, could spook the average person.

• 48:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:50Ashley Flowers?

  But then Victoria blocks Melissa too. Everybody agrees this is suspicious behavior.

• 48:57Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, because like, what is this person hiding? You're on Ancestry.

• 49:02Ashley Flowers?

  Right.

• 49:02Speaker 00

  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 block one that reaches out?

• 49:11Ashley Flowers?

  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 means 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.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  Like this, this is what also she's trying.

• 49:35Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 49:58Speaker 00

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

• 50:07Ashley Flowers?

  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,

• 50:27Ashley Flowers?

  That tip carries a lot of weight now that we know that her girls really were

• 50:31Speaker 00

  Left in a park.

• 50:32Ashley Flowers?

  Near LA, yes.

• 50:34Speaker 00

  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.

• 50:54Ashley Flowers?

  Oxnard, which is like two 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.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  I mean, I could see that.

• 51:22Ashley Flowers?

  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?

• 51:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:55Ashley Flowers?

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

• 52:02Speaker 00

  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 didn't-

• 52:14Ashley Flowers?

  Maybe three if she'd been dead 24 hours.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, since you had last heard from Marina before you're like, gotta get these kids off my hands.

• 52:20Ashley Flowers?

  But like, you're assuming that like she dropped them off right before she went with them?

• 52:23Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 52:24Ashley Flowers?

  We've got like missing months here.

• 52:25Speaker 00

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

• 52:30Ashley Flowers?

  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 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-

• 53:00Speaker 00

  The woman was wearing white boots.

• 53:02Ashley Flowers?

  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.

• 53:28Speaker 00

  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 what happened between then? I mean, to your point, I'm still wondering where they were for the months before the murder.

• 53:47Ashley Flowers?

  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 going to 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.

• 54:32Ashley Flowers?

  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 eighties and nineties. So anyone with information about these people or Marina's murder, please contact the Mojave County Sheriff's Office Special Investigation Unit in Kingman, Arizona.

• 55:14Ashley Flowers?

  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

• 55:57Ashley Flowers?

  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've 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 AudioChuck production. I think Chuck would approve.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  When the nights grow longer, the shadows start to stir and that can only mean one thing. Full Body Chills is back. This season, step inside original tales where every doorway leads somewhere darker, every stranger carries a secret, and nothing is ever quite what it seems. Each story takes you somewhere new, but be careful. You never know what might follow you home. So gather around, listen close, and stream Full Body Chills wherever you get your podcasts.