- A beloved grandmother and her boyfriend
Found slain in her own living room...
- This was an extremely, extremely violent event.
- The mortician had to use wax to put her face together
Because the knife wounds were so horrific.
- Everybody liked carmen. She was a lot of fun.
- We soon find out that the boyfriend is married.
So now the light bulbs go off in the head.
- Upstairs, lives a hauntingly familiar face...
- The ex-husband of carmen
Lived on the third floor of this building.
So that struck us as a little strange.
- While a tight east harlem block is up in arms...
- The neighborhood called the block sesame street.
It was just a shock because
Nothing ever happens on sesame street, right?
- A victim's stolen phone sparks a wild chase...
- The phone was moving so we knew it was in a car.
- Really quickly stopped that car as quickly as you could.
- And a confession gives way to a stunning revelation.
- I never would've thought that they'd be implicated
In this crime.
♪ ♪
[tense bassy music]
♪ ♪
[suspenseful music]
- East harlem is a thriving latin community
In upper manhattan.
As the neighborhood developed in the 1990s,
Homeowners saw their properties skyrocket in value.
One of those residents was 52-year-old carmen quinones,
A doting grandmother who moved to new york
From her native puerto rico.
Unfortunately, in 2001,
Tragedy found her at the end of a tragic year.
In the shadow of 9/11, it was a vivid reminder of all the evils
That hide right in our own backyards.
♪ ♪
- Amy de jesus, the daughter of carmen quinones,
Was the mother of three-year-old ashley.
She was up at canisius college in buffalo,
And carmen was watching ashley while she attended college.
- Amy became pregnant.
And carmen said, "I will take care of the child,
But you need to complete your college education."
Three years old, ashley lived with carmen 24/7.
- Amy and carmen speak to each other on the phone frequently.
However, when amy dials on December 1st, 2001,
She finds something amiss.
- Amy had called the night before
To say goodnight to her daughter,
But amy was not able to get through.
And then she called numerous times in the morning
And carmen still wasn't picking up the phone.
- Then, in the early evening, a little after 7:00,
She called the house again, and this time,
Her three-year-old daughter, ashley,
Was able to answer the phone.
And amy said, "where's grandma?"
And ashley said, "she's not moving."
♪ ♪
Amy said, "what do you mean she's not moving?"
Ashley just said, "she's not moving."
Amy became very concerned.
♪ ♪
- Carmen lived in the 23rd precinct.
And at that point, amy called the precinct directly.
And she conveyed what was going on.
So the precinct actually dispatched the sector car
To go check out the address at east 101st street.
It was a straight-up welfare check.
♪ ♪
- Officers pull up to the three-story brownstone
Where carmen lives.
But as they knock on the building's front door,
They're greeted by an unexpected sight.
- Uniformed members were actually
Able to look through the window
And saw this little girl, ashley,
Who had some pieces of duct tape around her body.
♪ ♪
- So they knew, obviously, there was a big problem.
They broke the window and they got in.
And then they discovered
She had duct tape hanging from her face.
But as far as physical condition, she wasn't hurt.
They secured the baby.
♪ ♪
And then they saw there was blood spatter
All over this apartment.
They saw carmen.
She was lying on the floor.
She was obviously dead.
And to her left was an adult male
Who we later determined was ruben frederick,
Who was her boyfriend.
And he was also stabbed numerous times.
♪ ♪
- Officers whisk young ashley away from the bloodshed
And radio for assistance.
- When you first open up the front door,
It opens up right into the living room.
It was a chaotic crime scene.
It looked like the two individuals that were stabbed
Had put up a pretty good fight.
The furniture looked like that it had been moved around.
There was no weapon recovered.
- We thought that the crime actually occurred
The day before because
There was coagulated blood on the floor.
♪ ♪
- Police notify amy of her mother's death
And she starts racing back to new york.
Meanwhile, the commotion from first responders
On the east harlem block
Awakens neighbors to a nightmare
Unfolding just a few doors down.
- In 2001, I lived three houses down from carmen.
The neighborhood called the block "sesame street"
Because there was the racial mixture
And there was kind of an innocence.
But that night, I was standing on my stoop
And looked in that direction.
There were ambulances.
The whole neighborhood was in turmoil.
And immediately, 18 police cars are at my door.
It was just a shock because
Nothing ever happens on sesame street, right?
- I came home between 10:00 and 11:00 at night.
Like, maybe 10, 15 minutes later, the phone rang
And a mutual friend and gave me the news.
I was shocked.
I met carmen in 1977.
♪ ♪
I was a development person
In a low-income housing complex in east harlem.
Carmen basically became my secretary.
She was very intelligent.
She was very responsible.
And she would laugh a lot.
I was aware that she had not completed
Her high school education.
But one day I was sitting at my desk.
She says, "I have something for you."
And it was her ged certificate.
I got up, I hugged her,
And I told her how proud I was of her.
And I said, "so now we gotta talk about college."
[laughs]
[mellow piano music]
She married justino.
He had a previous marriage.
- Justino de jesus worked at a local elevator manufacturer
And had long been a part of east harlem.
- Justino grew up in the neighborhood.
He was a nice guy, very charming.
She was a lot of fun but he was much quieter.
- Carmen had her daughter, amy, with justino.
And she really focused on being the best mom that she could be.
♪ ♪
- Around 1980, carmen purchases
An east harlem brownstone.
Due to new york's high crime rate,
She pays just a few tens of thousands of dollars.
- It was affordable
And those brownstones were pretty much in mint condition.
There were three apartments,
Two that she rented, and then there was hers.
- We were friendly.
They just seemed like normal, functioning parents.
- But in 1998,
Carmen and justino's relationship runs aground.
- There was a deterioration taking place
And then he lost his job.
So I think that that was the straw
That broke the camel's back.
Then they divorced.
But in an amicable way, they remained friends.
- I'd known her since the early '70s.
But in 2001, she really seemed to have come into her own.
♪ ♪
After the murders,
It wasn't anything that people could understand
Or make any sense of.
It was a horrific crime
With a violence that seems gratuitous.
Why? Why?
♪ ♪
- As neighbors grapple with the loss of their friend,
Police turned to the only known witness for help:
Carmen's three-year-old granddaughter, ashley.
- It was thought that potentially, ashley could
Let us know exactly what happened.
Detectives from special victims,
Especially from the child abuse area,
Have a special talent with interviewing young children.
- We assigned a female detective to speak to her.
And she's asking the questions in a way that
You would hope that
A three-year-old could understand,
Like how many people did you see in the apartment?
Did you hear anything?
Did you hear grandma say anything?
- But she was traumatized.
She couldn't tell us what had happened.
- Hopefully she was able to put this behind her and
She doesn't have memories of what she witnessed that day.
But we were a little confused why she was spared.
♪ ♪
- As detectives evaluate the evidence in front of them,
They begin to ponder motive.
- There was no sign of forced entry.
And there was no buzzer system.
And to get into the building, you needed two different keys.
How did they get in?
What our first thoughts were that maybe carmen
Had been walking home
And was followed into the building.
And it could have been a push-in robbery,
And it turns into a murder.
- Because the amount of violence that went on
Inside the apartment,
We thought there was more than one killer.
♪ ♪
- But as they inventory the scene,
Detectives make one intriguing discovery.
- In the bedroom, that's, you know, in total disarray,
With the drawers pulled out,
Underneath the mattress,
There's $16,000.
It's very uncommon for somebody
To hold on to that amount of cash.
- Where did that money come from?
Did someone know that carmen
Had this amount of money in her apartment?
Maybe that's one of the reasons they targeted her.
$16,000 is a lot of money.
People die for less than that.
♪ ♪
- Coming up...
- We thought maybe this is some kind of love triangle.
- So now the light bulbs go off in the head,
Say "wait a minute."
- He was actually covering up for the affair.
♪ ♪
[tense bassy music]
♪ ♪
[tense bassy music]
♪ ♪
[sirens blaring]
[indistinct radio chatter]
- As the nypd pores over the crime scene
At carmen quinones' apartment,
They're stunned to discover a hidden stack of cash;
$16,000 tucked under her mattress.
♪ ♪
- It didn't make sense why they would have
That amount of money in their apartment.
- So we're just like, "oh, this gotta be numbers,
It's gotta be drugs."
♪ ♪
We do a check to see if the location
Has any history of crime.
But there was no history of any of that at all.
They were just good people.
What we did find is we found some rent receipts,
Which led us to believe that $16,000
Was rent that was paid over the years
From the tenants on the second floor.
It turned out that it was legit.
- Later on in investigation, we talked to amy.
She said that her mom was old school.
She's one of those people that didn't trust the banks.
- Perhaps the killer or killers knew about this money.
- While one team scours the apartment,
Another canvasses the building.
- I was checking the backyard myself, the exterior,
See if there was any forced entry,
But there was nothing.
Also, there's apartments on
The second floor and the third floor.
There was two tenants living on the second-floor apartment.
They were spoken to at length.
Everything checked out with them--
Alibis, their backgrounds--
And they were quickly eliminated as suspects.
- But the second-floor renters do share with police
That they lived in the middle of a unique family dynamic.
- The interesting thing we found out was that
Justino de jesus,
Who was the ex-husband of carmen,
Lived on the third floor of this building.
So that struck us as a little strange.
It's a significant little thing that we made note of.
- We learned the ex-husband was the super of the building.
Carmen wasn't charging him any rent
As long as he did maintenance in the building.
- It was all carmen's money that bought that brownstone.
And it was under her name.
When they divorced, he did not have the resources
To move out and get an apartment.
She allowed him to remain living in that brownstone
With the understanding that he would be the superintendent,
That if anything broke, that he would fix it.
- He was living up there with his third wife.
Her name was maria de jesus.
- People liked her because she looked out for the block.
I remember somebody had their trash out illegally
And she went and put it away
So they wouldn't get fined and things like that.
- And we brought them over to the 23,
Where they were interviewed in the interview room
With the detective squad.
♪ ♪
- We had interview rooms. We called it the box.
You separate people when you interview them.
So he was in the box getting interviewed
And she was outside.
- Justino was grilled all night.
He was shocked that carmen was murdered.
Justino's alibi for the time that this occurred was
That he was home.
But he didn't hear anything.
- Justino was crying.
He was upset about what happened.
That was his granddaughter at the crime scene.
Thank god they didn't harm her, you know?
- When someone's killed with a knife,
Usually the perpetrator cuts himself.
Justino allowed the detectives to see if
He had any wounds on his body.
But he had no cuts.
- And then we spoke to maria de jesus.
- She was around 60 years old.
She was a little frail woman,
Like grandma-feel, you know?
- She did say that she was home with justino
And they didn't hear or see anything.
- She was in shock that something like that happened
In her building.
We conducted a criminal background check
And it was squeaky clean.
We didn't have anything on them and they were released.
♪ ♪
- Then investigators received the results of
The victims' autopsies.
- Both of them had multiple, multiple stab wounds--
Upper body, abdomen, shoulders--
Around 20 stabs each.
Definitely overkill.
That kind of threw us off a little bit
With the push-in robbery theory.
- It's not common in a robbery that
Someone is stabbed that many times.
That usually indicates some type of rage.
- At that point, we said, this person went in there
With a premeditated motive,
Like, "I'm gonna kill these two people."
♪ ♪
- With the notion that the victims were
Personally targeted, detectives begin to
Dig deeper into their backgrounds.
- We started developing carmen
And her boyfriend, ruben frederick.
We didn't know much about him at that point.
We soon find out that ruben is married.
So now the light bulbs go off in the head.
♪ ♪
- When we found out ruben was married,
Living in brooklyn with his wife,
We thought maybe this is some kind of love triangle.
- Could his wife know that he was cheating?
We're like, could this be a revenge killing?
♪ ♪
[tense bassy music]
♪ ♪
[tense bassy music]
♪ ♪
- In the double murder of carmen quinones
And her boyfriend, ruben frederick,
East harlem detectives have just discovered
Ruben was married.
They head to his brooklyn apartment
To interview his wife.
♪ ♪
- Ruben's wife was talked to at length.
She was very upset that her husband was dead.
- One of the reasons detectives go to interview them personally
Is to get that feel.
Is there any possibility
That they could be involved in this?
She kept her nerves about her.
Ruben actually had told his wife
He was gonna work a triple shift.
But he was with carmen.
He was actually covering up for the affair.
- But, to our surprise,
She was very aware that her husband
Liked to play the field a little bit, as we say.
So she knew that there was other women
In her husband's life.
- His wife knew it and accepted it in some way.
- She had an alibi and we did corroborate it
And she was eliminated.
- Ruben frederick's family was not involved.
We were pretty confident in that.
But now we didn't have any really solid leads.
We felt helpless and hopeless.
- But ruben's wife gave us something that could help us.
She said that he was a bus driver
And she gave us the location where he worked.
That was important to us.
We needed more information on ruben.
♪ ♪
- Detectives went to his job and interviewed his employer.
And one of the things they said, almost offhandedly, was,
"could you give us the phone back?"
And the detectives were like, "what phone?"
- Ruben actually had a company cell phone.
We did not recover any phone from the crime scene.
So his job, they provide us with the cell phone number.
- Ruben's employers also furnished police
With the make, model, and color of his mobile phone.
♪ ♪
- We started doing the work on the cell phone.
And we subpoena the carrier.
They give us the subscriber information.
There's so much, it might lead to anywhere.
We find out that four calls were made
After the homicide had occurred.
So right then and there, we felt that this cell phone
Was taken from the crime scene
And that whoever has that phone is the killer.
♪ ♪
- To figure out who has ruben's phone,
Detectives drop in on the caller's contacts.
- We know the phone numbers that were called.
And we had the addresses for these four phone numbers.
Three of the locations were in new york city.
One was in new jersey.
We needed to speak to them.
We wanted to hit all four locations at the same time
'cause we didn't want one person
Calling the other person, saying,
"oh, the police were just here."
So then we tacked up and hit each location.
Asked them, "all right, this number called you.
Who'd you speak to?"
And at that point,
Everybody told us the same person had called them,
Angel rodriguez.
They gave us some more information on him,
Like where he lived, possibly in the bronx.
We quickly got up on angel as quick as possible.
Angel was in the system. He had a criminal background.
He had some, you know, petty crimes in there,
But nothing with violence.
- In hopes of tracking down rodriguez immediately,
Detectives turned to their tech for the phone's location.
- We were, like, extremely excited
'cause we knew that this would be
A tremendous lead for us.
What we want is cell site information.
Where is that cell phone?
We get a search warrant to track the phone.
The phone was moving,
So we knew it was in a car.
And it led us to a vehicle in the bronx.
♪ ♪
- Sergeant cannon and lieutenant churns race to
The bronx to intercept the car.
- We pull out all the stops and track this guy down.
And billy quickly stopped that car as quickly as you could.
It was angel rodriguez.
- We pulled the car over, guns drawn.
And right there, we're like, "wow."
He has the phone.
That's not the smoking gun.
That's the smoking phone.
♪ ♪
We pull him out of the car and we cuff him up immediately.
Then we bring them back into the 23 precinct
From the bronx.
- We put him in our interview room.
We start talking about the double homicide.
♪ ♪
He said, "double homicide?"
He goes, "I don't know what you're talking about.
"I'm not involved in a double homicide.
I'm just a phone cloner."
♪ ♪
- We were surprised.
It was ruben frederick's phone, absolutely.
But in 2001, that was the day and age of cell phone cloning.
These guys were getting stolen phones
And they were able to transfer the sim information
To another phone and they bang it out
For thousands of dollars of free calls
And then just throw the phone out.
So that's why this guy had the phone.
- Then we ask who gave him the phone,
And he tells us that he got the phone from raymond mundo.
- Mundo wanted the phone cloned.
That's the first time we ever heard
The name of raymond mundo.
♪ ♪
- Rodriguez was telling us that
He was so afraid of raymond mundo
That he wasn't even gonna charge him to clone the phone.
- Our guys release rodriguez and dig in on this new lead.
- So we ran raymond mundo's name
And, lo and behold,
He's got a home invasion in his criminal history
With a stabbing.
And he did six years for it.
So we're like, "oh."
So we start doing more computer checks
And we run associates arrested with mundo.
And in one of his arrests,
He was arrested with rafael rios, a.K.A. Dog.
♪ ♪
And they lived in the same building in the bronx.
We just figured they liked to do crimes together.
- But as detectives connect the dots,
One aspect of mundo and rios' lives leaves them puzzled.
- From what I could gather,
They had no connection to the victims.
So that put a question mark on our end.
We need to find out what's going on.
♪ ♪
- We tacked up at about 4:00 in the morning at the 23.
♪ ♪
We're gonna head up there and grab these two characters.
When we got to the location,
We split up into two different teams.
Everybody's got a game plan.
And we hit the apartments at the same time.
[tense bassy music]
♪ ♪
[tense bassy music]
♪ ♪
- East harlem detectives set their sights on
The bronx apartment building of their top suspects,
Raymond mundo
And his associate, rafael rios.
- We went up the stairs.
[knocking]
Raymond mundo, we knock on his door.
His father answered the door.
And his father was quite a dirtbag himself.
We knew he had done time for murder.
And I could feel the hatred seething from his skin at us.
And I looked to my left,
And he had a huge butcher knife
Stuck in the wall.
Yeah, like that's a common thing
For most good families to have,
To have a knife right near the door
In case you gotta stab someone
That comes to your door, you know?
We asked, "have you seen raymond?"
"no."
We asked more uncomfortable questions.
"what was your relationship like with mundo?"
But he gave no information that was of any value.
- Mundo was in the wind.
But rafael rios, a.K.A. Doggy, he was home.
We told him that we had to talk to him
About something that happened over in the 23.
And he was saying, "what do you want me for?
I didn't do nothing."
Then we found he had a crossbow, which is illegal,
So we grabbed that as leverage.
He knew he could have been arrested for that
So then he agreed to come.
♪ ♪
- Rios came back to the 23 squad.
He was in the box getting interviewed for many hours.
And he was not giving up the crime at all.
But I think rios wasn't being straightforward with us.
- As rios puts up a brick wall,
The team pulls in a spanish-speaking detective
To work on him,
While detectives cannon and porteus
Turn their focus to mundo, whose location is a mystery.
- When we read raymond mundo's criminal history,
We were able to get his cell phone number.
And so, again, we got a search warrant
And we get up on his phone.
Now, it turned out that his phone was pinging
In a town called willimantic, connecticut,
Which is three hours away.
Further investigation, we find out that
Mundo's sister lives in willimantic
And we knew he had been calling her
'cause we had the cell phone records.
So we got the location of mundo's sister's house.
♪ ♪
We knocked on her door.
And she says, "oh, I haven't seen him in ages."
She has no relationship with him.
We know all of that was bull.
We knew his phone was calling her.
- There was a detective with us
And he was standing outside on the sidewalk
And he looked over.
And he saw mundo walking down the sidewalk.
And he goes, "yo, mundo."
And mundo turned around.
He jetted down the sidewalk.
[suspenseful music]
- We start running. We put it over the air.
And mundo tries to carjack a car.
But there's a pregnant woman driving the car.
And he tries to pull her out of the car,
But he couldn't budge her out of the car.
- But billy was hitting the steering wheel.
- And by that point, we were all on top of him.
He was placed under arrest and took him into
The willimantic police station house.
♪ ♪
- We put him in an interview room.
Myself and another detective interviewed him
For five or six hours.
He was denying the whole thing.
Also he was, like, getting sick,
Throwing up in the bucket on the floor.
I asked him about it and he said that he was--
He was dopesick. He was a heroin user.
So we were like, "you hungry? You want something to eat?"
So we gave him some soda, a pizza,
A couple of packs of newports,
Just trying to warm him up and develop a rapport with the guy.
- And mundo is, like, a chain smoker.
The room is like--like a cloud.
- But he kept denying everything.
- But detectives have received word from colleagues in harlem
That they've broken doggy with good old-fashioned
Interrogation skills.
- He starts singing like a parakeet.
And he gave a ten page written confession.
- Rios confesses the whole crime
And gave us a lengthy confession.
- We told mundo that we have doggy back at the 23.
"doggy's flipping on you."
Mundo thought we were (bleep) about rios.
So we called the 23,
And we had rios's statement faxed up.
And we went in and we threw the statement in front of him.
I go, "here, read this."
He started to read it a little bit
And he was like, "(bleep) that.
I'll tell you right now what happened."
And he started giving it up.
♪ ♪
[tense bassy music]
♪ ♪
[tense bassy music]
♪ ♪
[sirens blaring]
- After a week of searching for the killers of
Carmen quinones and ruben frederick,
The nypd has suspect raymond mundo in custody.
- So we show him the confession of rafael rios
And that loosened him up a little bit.
He says, "I'm ready to tell the whole story."
♪ ♪
- He gave basically the same story that rios told us.
- He says they were paid to kill carmen quinones,
That this was a murder for hire.
They were given two keys to the building.
That explains the non-forced entry.
♪ ♪
They also dressed like detectives. They wore suits.
Raymond mundo and rafael rios got into the building,
And they knocked on carmen's door.
♪ ♪
Carmen opens the door...
♪ ♪
And mundo immediately stabs her in the chest
And enters the apartment and just keeps stabbing her.
As he does that, the door slams shut.
♪ ♪
And rafael rios is left in the vestibule,
Locked out.
So now mundo is in there now with
Carmen and ruben frederick.
Mundo was told he was only there to kill carmen.
He didn't know ruben would be there.
♪ ♪
So ruben comes to carmen's assistance
And almost gets the better of mundo.
He was surprised.
But raymond mundo reaches back and opens the door,
Lets rafael rios into the apartment,
And he starts stabbing ruben frederick.
♪ ♪
These guys were savages,
What they did in there, you know?
It's really sickening.
- Then they saw the little girl.
And then, he told us they had to decide
What they're gonna do with ashley.
They discussed killing her,
Maybe slash her throat.
But rios kind of talked him out of it,
And that's when they decide to tape her up.
♪ ♪
- They put her in the bed and gave her the tv remote
And said, "watch tv."
♪ ♪
And they left.
♪ ♪
Sometimes hardened criminals have, like,
A soft spot for children.
However, in both interviews
With rafael rios and raymond mundo,
Neither one offered up
What they did with the murder weapon.
They wouldn't give that up.
We never were able to recover it.
♪ ♪
- Police now have two confessions
To the double murder,
But one large question remains:
Who hired them to kill?
- Mundo told us that, in the past,
Him and rafael lived in the same building in the bronx
As maria de jesus, the new wife of justino,
Who was carmen's former husband.
♪ ♪
And she had approached them
And asked them if they would kill somebody for her.
♪ ♪
He said maria chose them because
She knew them to be bad guys.
And they said she had given them $15,000.
She said, "look, this is how you do it.
I'm gonna give you keys to the door."
- We're like, "oh, man, this is huge."
We were all shocked because she seemed like
A nice little old lady when we interviewed her.
- Maria was in our squad for
The better part of a day and a half
And gave off the impression that she wouldn't hurt a fly.
And I never would have thought that
She would be implicated in this crime.
But we did not know why she wanted to kill carmen.
We tried to learn as much as we can about that.
♪ ♪
- Police announce the arrest of mundo and rios,
But they don't pick up maria
And keep their intel on her a secret.
♪ ♪
- I heard that two men had been arrested.
It was a relief,
But we expected to feel, like, a sense of closure,
And it wasn't like that.
The names were totally unfamiliar to
Anybody on the block.
- The nypd's only evidence against maria
Is the word of two confessed killers.
When they present the case to the da,
He's underwhelmed by it.
- The district attorney,
He goes, "we have probable cause to arrest her,
"but she'll beat the case.
I need more time to put this case together."
- Before he moves forward on maria,
The da faces an unpleasant prospect,
The possibility of offering leniency to both hitmen
In return for their testimony against her.
But as he examines the situation,
He decides they only need one.
♪ ♪
- It was determined by the da's office
That the lesser of two evils was rafael rios.
- The da offers rafael rios
A slightly reduced sentence of 23 years to life
If he pleads guilty to first-degree murder
And testifies against maria.
Rios agrees and must also testify against
His alleged co-conspirator as well.
♪ ♪
- Raymond mundo was convicted of murder in the first degree
And he received a life sentence without parole.
[cell door clinking]
- This was a horrific crime.
♪ ♪
They deserved to get what they got.
♪ ♪
- But the already confessed mundo
Was an easier target than maria
And getting rios to testify against her is challenging.
- Rafael rios was a difficult witness.
Rios did some horrendous amount of drugs every day,
Like, you know, snorted heroin,
Smoked about 10 joints a day, half a bottle of vodka.
I was like, how does this guy have
A clear moment in his life?
♪ ♪
It took years for the district attorney
To try to prep rafael rios as a witness
In order to get a clear vision as to what actually occurred.
♪ ♪
- However, in 2004,
Nearly three years after the murders,
Nypd detectives finally receive
What they've desperately sought.
- I got a call from the district attorney.
And he said,
"we're ready to arrest maria today."
Rafael rios was ready to be a witness.
So we went to the brownstone
That was owned by carmen.
We went up to the apartment.
We knocked.
And we saw a shadow at the door.
♪ ♪
[tense bassy music]
♪ ♪
[tense bassy music]
♪ ♪
- In 2004, after nearly a three-year investigation,
Police finally make their move on
Suspected double-murder mastermind maria de jesus.
♪ ♪
- So we knocked on the door.
And who comes to the door? Maria.
She walked outside of the apartment,
Put the handcuffs on her.
It was great.
♪ ♪
- Finally, they were able to go forward.
When carmen's family found out that
Maria de jesus allegedly orchestrated
This senseless crime,
They were stunned. They couldn't believe it.
♪ ♪
- The arrest is a triumph for police,
Who fully hand the case over to the da.
They charged maria with multiple counts,
Including first-degree murder
And conspiracy.
In January 2006,
Four years after carmen and ruben were killed,
Her trial begins.
The district attorney finally reveals
Why maria commissioned the crime.
♪ ♪
- Justino, the ex-husband, was living on the third floor.
He was in charge of being the super of the building.
Carmen was the owner of the building
And she wasn't charging him any rent
As long as he did maintenance in the building.
But he was slacking on doing any maintenance
And she was in the process of getting him evicted.
So then maria came up with this brainstorm
Of having carmen quinones murdered
And then they thought they would wind up
With the building.
This case is all about that brownstone.
♪ ♪
- But the problem with that plan
Was that justino would not inherit the brownstone.
It was gonna go to carmen's family.
Maria's plan makes no sense.
- As part of their case,
The prosecution puts forward their key witness,
Who is serving 23 to life.
- The most powerful evidence against maria de jesus was
The testimony of rafael rios.
♪ ♪
- Connecting the dots,
Maria gave them keys to the building and $15,000 in cash.
And we discovered maria has a withdrawal
Of $15,000 from her bank account.
That was an important piece of evidence.
♪ ♪
- As the trial comes to a close,
The jury reaches verdicts on all counts
And delivers maria's fate.
- Then boom,
She got convicted and she got life without parole,
Which was the best possible ending we could have for her.
The district attorney, he did a hell of a job.
- How she could've ever thought
She was gonna get away with this.
This was just purely about greed.
♪ ♪
- After maria's sent to prison,
Carmen's old neighborhood reflects
On the name that went conspicuously untarnished
In court.
- Nothing pointed to justino, the ex-husband,
Having any knowledge of this crime.
Maria had put this whole crime together,
Not involving justino at all.
♪ ♪
- He would never have wanted carmen harmed.
He wasn't a brutal person.
- Had justino become aware that there was a plot,
I think that he would have put a stop to it.
Absolutely.
He's a decent guy
And, certainly, he was going to protect his granddaughter.
♪ ♪
[somber music]
- It still doesn't feel over.
In some ways, I mean,
It still affects the people on the block.
I'm sure it affects ashley and amy.
♪ ♪
- Carmen had a pretty smile every time I saw her
And I miss it.
I think about her often.
Breaks my heart.
It's a very haunting feeling to have to live with.
♪ ♪