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An innocent young woman meets a brutal end.
It was very violent.
There was blood all over the place.
You could tell Elizabeth fought hard to get away.
Small town neighbors fear a killer lives among them.
It was awful. It was tragic.
It kind of rocked the whole community.
I was scared.
At first, a few prints in the dirt are the only evidence.
Without the tire impressions and the shoe impressions,
we had nothing.
And that lack of clues
has police bracing for another murder.
He was on this path to being a serial killer.
Located on a high plain just over the border with West Texas,
the city of Hobbs is known as the "oil capital of New Mexico."
Oil and gas has been a big part of the economy here
for as long as Hobbs has been here.
It's probably what put Hobbs on the map.
More than 8,000 people--
nearly 20% of the city's population--
work in energy production.
It's really like a small town.
The population has grown primarily
due to the oil and gas industry.
On a January afternoon in 2002,
two men were driving on a dirt road
a few miles out of town
when they came across the body of a young woman.
She was laying on her back.
Her sweatshirt was up around her neck.
Her throat was cut.
She had stabs in her abdomen,
her chest, her head, her arms, her back.
Some of the blows to this victim were so forceful
they'd broken bones.
She'd been dead for hours.
It's such a violent scene.
It tends to connect that you would think
that she knew who she was with.
Investigators got an early break.
Since at least part of the murder happened
on a dirt road,
some evidence became apparent immediately.
We saw tire tracks.
And it looked like the vehicle
had pulled up off the main road, and stopped.
Right outside where the passenger's front door
would've been, we located a clump of hair.
Evidence in the dirt showed the victim
had been dragged from the passenger's seat
to where she was ultimately killed.
She had been scratching, trying to get away,
and close to those scratch marks would be pools of blood.
She was clearly trying to get away from her attacker,
and fought for her life out there.
Since the victim was fully clothed,
detectives couldn't determine on sight
if this was a sexually motivated crime.
The question now was, who was she?
A tattoo on her stomach helped provide the answer.
Her name was Elizabeth Garcia, a 26 year-old single mother.
Elizabeth Garcia was a young woman
who was really trying to make a better life for herself.
She had been married, and had three kids.
And she was going back to school,
attending classes at New Mexico Junior College.
But she had to work.
And that meant working nights
at a convenience store called Allsup's
so she could go to school during the day.
This created a possible connection to the murder.
Elizabeth was working her shift, at night,
at the Allsup's,
and her boyfriend had to go to work early.
He had to be at work at 3:00 a.m.
And he was gonna stop by,
and just see her for, you know, a couple minutes on his way.
But when Elizabeth's boyfriend, Jaime Pachecho,
got to the convenience store, Elizabeth was gone.
In fact, the store was wide open,
and apparently abandoned.
He could not find Elizabeth.
Her car was in the parking lot, but she was nowhere to be found.
Police were called to the store.
10 hours later, Elizabeth was found,
brutally murdered, on the outskirts of town.
How were the store and crime scene connected?
Or were they connected?
At first, police had no idea,
and turned to impressions in the dirt for answers.
Following the breakup of Elizabeth Garcia's
first marriage, the single mother was determined
to make a better life for herself
and her three young children.
Elizabeth got pregnant in high school,
and then had two other children to follow.
And so, she was a devoted mom,
but it definitely changed her path
for probably what her plans were.
Detectives at the store from where Elizabeth disappeared
were immediately dealt a bad break.
There were surveillance cameras,
but they weren't working at the time.
There was no sign of a struggle in the store.
It looked as if Elizabeth either left voluntarily
or was forced out with some kind of weapon.
It was as if she just disappeared.
Her car was there, her books were there on the countertop,
her coat was there in the store.
There was no money in the cash register,
but there was a potential clue.
The last transaction was at 2:24 a.m.
Elizabeth had written down on a piece of paper
that whoever had came in at that particular time
didn't have enough money to pay
for what they were trying to purchase.
She wrote down on the receipt that it was a rude customer,
or a mad customer.
And that's the last contact they had showing her,
was at 2:24 a.m.
With no surveillance video and no witnesses,
there wasn't a way to identify this customer.
Detectives now turned to tire tracks and impressions
from two different shoes at the scene of the murder.
One of those impressions matched back
to Elizabeth Garcia's shoes.
The other shoe prints, and the tire tracks,
were presumably from the killer and his vehicle.
But analysts had to work fast.
Dirt roads do not hold shoe impressions well.
They don't hold tire impressions well.
The wind blows here a lot.
Analysts used dental stone--
the material used to create
permanent casts of patient's teeth and dentures--
to make casts of the impressions in the dirt.
This produced high-quality casts,
but detectives were unable to definitively identify
the brand of tires or shoes.
There are many, many treads on shoes, as we found out.
Tires are the same way.
So, it was hard to narrow it down.
However, if detectives could identify a suspect,
and could get their hands on their tires and shoes,
the casts could be matched to a particular brand,
and then back to their suspect.
Detectives were looking at the boyfriend of Elizabeth
as a potential suspect.
He left after talking to law enforcement,
went on to work, knowing she was missing.
And so, for law enforcement, that was a lot of red flags.
But Jaime's story held up.
He was seen at work, by numerous co-workers,
around the period when Elizabeth had been killed.
There was not enough time for him to kill her,
and then be at his job by three o'clock.
Elizabeth's autopsy showed she'd been stabbed 56 times,
and was sexually assaulted.
DNA recovered from her clothing was tested,
but, in 2002, this took time.
With Elizabeth's boyfriend apparently eliminated
as a suspect, detectives turned to her ex-husband,
Jesus Mendoza.
He wasn't paying child support.
He wasn't supporting her in any way.
So, there was tension between Elizabeth and her ex-husband.
Their relationship had fallen apart.
Obviously, when you've got children with someone,
there's always a chance that, somehow, something has come up,
and something has triggered
some of that reactive violence that happens.
Mendoza, who did not have an airtight alibi
for the time of the murder, was brought in for questioning.
And his behavior did nothing to allay detectives' suspicions.
I thought he was probably our guy.
He made several statements that just didn't sound right.
He told me, at one time,
"You guys don't have enough yet."
He goes, "I know you're gonna be looking at me for this."
So, early on, I thought he was probably gonna be our guy.
Police arrested Mendoza on an unrelated charge,
and, in a jailhouse phone call,
he appeared to implicate himself in his ex-wife's murder.
We were monitoring his phone calls.
He called a friend, and asked them
to get rid of some of his clothing and his cellphone.
And clearly, we thought we had him--
"We're gonna find the bloody clothes.
We're gonna find the shoes. We're gonna find the tires.
We're gonna find everything we need to solve this case."
And that's not what happened.
The unusual level of violence in Elizabeth Garcia's murder
had investigators convinced she knew her killer.
And Jesus Mendoza-- her ex-husband--
was acting like he might be involved.
When they talked to him, instead of him just being,
"I'm devastated by this happening.
I can't believe she's gone. What can I do to help?"
He was giving them odd replies, and saying things like,
"I know they probably think I did it."
You know, "You're probably gonna find a way
to put my DNA at the scene."
A search of Mendoza's home turned up no shoes
that matched the impressions from the crime scene.
The same held true for his car tires.
While detectives waited to see if his DNA matched DNA
from the crime scene, they got a fresh tip,
about a man named Stephen DeMoss.
Steven DeMoss and another person had been claiming
they were gonna rob an Allsup's store.
They needed money.
They were both on methamphetamine.
Police combed Hobbs City, and the surrounding area,
and couldn't find Demoss.
They contacted his, Shelley Lovett.
She and her husband, Paul,
were once quite close to Stephen.
I remember them coming to my house,
and them asking me about my brother,
you know, that, possibly,
they needed to question him regarding this.
And of course, I just felt like,
"There's no way. Not my brother.
He couldn't have possibly had something to do with this."
Shelley told detectives she had no idea
where her brother was, but was convinced
he had a serious drug problem.
I do remember, he would stay up for maybe two or three days.
So, there were plenty of signs of it.
I did suspect it pretty early, and I knew.
And now, police learned of a weird connection
between Demoss and Elizabeth Garcia.
Demoss' father, randy,
was apparently infatuated with Elizabeth.
While trying to understand Elizabeth Garcia,
and who she was,
we learned that she worked at a parts store for a while,
and that a man had sent her roses, or some flowers.
And that man was Randy DeMoss.
Detectives tracked down Randy Demoss.
While he admitted an infatuation with Elizabeth,
he denied any involvement in her murder.
And he had an alibi to back it up.
But the more police learned about his son, Stephen,
the more concerned they became.
Stephen DeMoss, I don't know if he would be called
a "collector" of knives, but he had knives.
He'd had some odd behavior.
He had shaved his head somewhere after,
they believe, that the offense had happened--
somewhere around that night.
When Demoss was finally tracked down,
he was not cooperative.
He would twist the questions around.
You could tell he was toying with us,
and trying to be evasive at the same time.
He said they may have talked about
robbing an Allsup's store, but they didn't do it.
He said he knew Elizabeth,
said his dad knew who Elizabeth was,
but he said he didn't do it.
Detectives took Stephen Demoss' DNA,
and searched his home and car.
Once again, no shoes or tires
matched the casts taken from the crime scene.
Even worse for the investigation,
the DNA results
on all the potential suspects finally came in--
and none of the suspects matched.
They couldn't connect any of those individuals to her
or to this crime.
It was absolutely devastating.
We've still got somebody out there that killed this woman,
and we have no idea who it is.
Police and the general public
feared an arrest would never be made.
Then, 16 months after Elizabeth's murder,
there was an odd development--
one that turned out to have a surprise connection to the case.
Two guys are driving down West County Road, here in Hobbs,
and they see a guy walking down the road,
at the edge of the road.
He's got a lot of scratches on him, got some blood on him.
And they pull over, to ask the guy, "Hey, you okay?"
He goes, "You know, I got in an altercation last night,
I woke up in a ditch."
He said, "I got beat up pretty bad.
Can you take me home?"
In the spring of 2003, another woman from Hobbs,
New Mexico-- 35-year-old Patty Simon--
was found brutally murdered and sexually assaulted
on the outskirts of the city.
She was found laying on her back,
with her legs open,
and there was a shirt covering her face.
She had injuries to her face, and her head,
and her throat had also been cut.
Very bloody, very gruesome crime scene,
much like Elizabeth Garcia's crime scene.
Patty Simon and Elizabeth Garcia did not know each other,
but there was a connection between the cases.
It concerned a story about a videotape,
allegedly made by Elizabeth's killer,
just after her murder.
Rumor got around, through the meth community,
that there was a videotape.
People swore they saw the videotape
of the murder of Elizabeth Garcia.
They could never give it to the police,
but they swore they saw it.
Ultimately, this video was supposed to have ended up
in the possession of Patty Simon.
On the morning Patty's body was found, a man--
shirtless and bloody--
was walking along a remote highway
when two oil workers drove by, and stopped to talk to him.
The man said he got beaten up after defending a woman
at a nearby bowling alley the night before.
He said he staggered away, and woke up in a ditch.
The men who found him dropped him off at his house.
A short time later, they heard of the Patty Simon murder,
and called the sheriff,
who rushed to get this man in custody.
They go to his house.
At that time, when they get there,
he's running the bath water, but he hadn't showered yet.
He's scratched up, he's sunburned,
he's got blood on his pants.
And they say, "You're not getting into the bathtub."
They detain him, take him to the sheriff's office,
and began interviewing him.
The man was 23-year-old Paul Lovett.
Detectives investigating the Garcia murder
had seen him before.
He was the husband of Shelley Lovett,
sister of one-time suspect Stephen Demoss.
Paul Lovett made a distinct impression on detectives
the night they interviewed his wife
while trying to find who killed Elizabeth Garcia.
I remember myself and the other detective
were there, in Shelley's house.
Paul Lovett, he sat on the couch, kept his head down,
didn't say anything.
I thought, "You know, this guy understands
how bad this situation is."
Lovett said he didn't even know Elizabeth Garcia,
and didn't murder Patty Simon-- who, he said, was a friend.
His story was that he was driving around with Patty,
and she let a man she knew, but he'd never seen,
into the car, and that this stranger was her killer.
Lovett's wife, Shelley,
said her marriage to Paul had been falling apart,
and he left her shortly after the Garcia murder.
He stopped at the house one night,
and told me, "I'm leaving. I'm moving to Alabama."
He got in the car with some girl,
and her baby, and left.
A search of the Lovetts' home revealed no shoes or tires
that matched the Garcia crime scene.
Detectives asked Paul's wife, Shelley,
if she had any photographs of Paul
from around the time Elizabeth Garcia was killed.
We happened to have some photos of a recent family event
that we had had, and the way that he was sitting,
part of the bottom of his shoe, you could see it in the photo.
So, from that, they were able to find out a shoe model,
a shoe brand-- Nike Air Integrity.
It was the same kind of Nike shoe
that was consistent with the tracks
that was found at the scene of the Garcia homicide.
As for the tires,
Shelley Lovett told police Paul's car had been sold.
But she still had the receipt for tires purchased
months before the murder.
And now, analysts finally had had another brand
to check against their crime scene.
And it was the same brand.
This combination of evidence tied Paul Lovett
to the Garcia murder.
There is no evidence he knew her.
Investigators don't know how he got her into his car.
But the evidence indicates that, once he got her out of town,
he sexually assaulted her, and then dragged her out of the car.
A vicious fight followed,
with Elizabeth dying after dozens of stab wounds.
Unknown to Lovett, he left shoe prints, tire impressions,
and his DNA at the scene.
He did know Patty Simon through their connection
with local methamphetamine users.
There was no truth to the rumor
there was any videotape of the Garcia murder.
Why Paul Lovett killed Patty Simon no one knows.
But prosecutors say her blood on his clothing,
and his on hers,
leaves no doubt that he was responsible.
Paul Lovett was ultimately found guilty of both murders,
and is serving life without parole.
I was just shocked.
It was embarrassing to me,
that that was part of my past, that I was married to him.
Someone that can commit the crimes that he committed
is evil.
That's a monster.
Investigators think Lovett could've been
a serial killer in the making,
and say he might have killed again if not for the forensics
that finally took him off the streets.
I think, after he killed Elizabeth,
he didn't have any problems with killing Patty Simon.
My opinion is, he would have kept killing
if we wouldn't have caught him.
Thank God that they caught him before there was another victim,
and that, hopefully, these two were the only two.
Hobbs has a lot of murders,
but they don't have a lot of murders like this.
It happened on my watch, and I took it very personal.
And it stands out because it was through the forensics--
the DNA, the shoe impressions, and the tire impressions.
That's what made the case.