Did Seth Winder Kill Richard Hernandez After a Gay Tryst?

September 29, 2008

According to Dallas, Texas police, 38-year-old Richard Hernandez was a creature of habit who "lived a life of consistency."  He had lived in the same northwest Dallas apartment since 1994, and had held the same job for the past eight years at a local Wal-Mart.  When Hernandez failed to show up for work on Thursday, September 4, 2008, his coworkers naturally became worried and called the police.  It was not like him to not show up for work, particularly without calling in and notifying his supervisor.

Shortly after one of Hernandez' friends called the Dallas Police Department and explained how out of character Hernandez' unexplained absence was, an officer responded to Hernandez' apartment, located in the 3900 block of Rosemeade Parkway, to conduct a routine welfare check.  The manager opened the locked apartment for the officer.  When he went inside and saw the massive amount of blood on the living room floor and walls, the officer immediately backed out of the apartment and notified the department's homicide unit.  Detective D.A. Thompson and a crime scene team were at once dispatched to the apartment.

Like the responding officer, Thompson and his team also noted the large amounts of blood on the living room floor and the blood spatter on the walls.  The sofa was also soaked with blood.  When Thompson went into the bathroom, he observed that the bathtub also contained significant amounts of blood along with what Thompson believed to be tissue from someone's internal organs.  It appeared to Thompson that the bathtub had been used to dismember someone, likely the apartment's resident—experience has shown that that's how these cases typically turned out.  Nonetheless, blood and tissue samples were taken from the various locations inside the apartment and sent to the Dallas County Medical Examiner's Office.

As Thompson conducted a background investigation on the missing man, he learned that Hernandez had no family in the area, and none of his friends could tell the detective anything about his possible whereabouts.  Since the blood and tissue from Hernandez' apartment had not been identified yet, it was possible, though doubtful, that Hernandez might still be alive and that someone else had been killed inside his apartment.  The background probe showed that Hernandez' paycheck had been deposited into his bank account a day earlier, and his debit card had been used late on the afternoon of September 4, 2008, at 5:29 p.m., to make a purchase at a Starbucks in Plano, Texas, a few miles due north of the Dallas/Fort Worth area.  Thompson also learned that the card had been used a little more than an hour later at a Target store, also in Plano.

Nichole Yegge's Killers Mutilated Her Body to Conceal Her Identity

September 16, 2008

Nichole Elizabeth Yegge, 17, was buried in a shallow grave in the Mojave Desert just outside Las Vegas in late July, less than a month before her eighteenth birthday, allegedly by a man and a young woman who feared being exposed for purportedly pimping out the runaway underage teenager who suffered bipolar disorder.  The couple, Anne Osburn, 21, and Gabriel Yates, 31, were arrested last month for the teen's brutal murder.  According to Las Vegas Metropolitan Police reports, the cops surreptitiously followed Yates when he returned to Yegge's desert gravesite after police received an early morning tipoff on July 28, 2008 from an acquaintance of Osburn's who resides in another state.

The tipster's friends, Gabriel Yates and Anne, were involved in the murder of a 17-year-old prostitute named 'Nikki,' whom Yates had allegedly been pimping out on Craig's List, according to the police report about the tipoff.  The report stated that Yegge had been killed three days before police received the tip, which would have placed the date of Yegge's slaying on or about July 24th or July 25th.  However, police later said that they had determined that the killing had occurred on Wednesday, July 23, 2008, following additional investigation.  Yegge's killing was purportedly the result of a love triangle with the suspects, and had occurred after Yegge had threatened to tell the cops about what Yates and Osburn had been doing to her.

After the police secretly followed Yates north on U.S. 95 to the gravesite, near the turnoff to Kyle Canyon in an area east of Snow Mountain Golf Course on Saturday, August 2, 2008, they discovered Yegge's body at about 8:00 p.m., after Yates had left.  Yates, perhaps sensing that he was being followed, had remained inside his car for a while upon arrival at the remote site, and then had driven away.  Police then searched the area, and found the young girl's buried body.  Yegge's body had been placed inside a hockey bag before being dumped in the shallow desert grave.  Later, at the Clark County Coroner's Office, investigators discovered that Yegge's teeth had been knocked out and her tattoos sliced off.  The cause of death was listed as asphyxiation.

"Their intent, as far as we know based on the type of damage to her body, was to prevent her from being identified if found," Homicide Sgt. Russell Shoemaker said.

Yegge had been in the Clark County foster care system until the end of May 2008, when she was declared a runaway.  It was not clear when she hooked up with Yates and Osburn, parents of a newborn child.

Further investigation revealed that a Craig's List ad that had been placed under "Erotic Services" for the Las Vegas area included a contact number that turned out to belong to a cellular telephone that Yegge had been using.  One of the advertisements also included Yegge's and Yates' photos.

"We do believe there was a relationship between the three of them," Shoemaker said, who declined to go into detail.

Adam Leroy Lane Case Update

September 10, 2008

Last month, 43-year-old trucker Adam Leroy Lane had another murder charge added to his list of crimes as he made his way through the northeast during the summer of 2007.  This time Lane faces a murder charge in Pennsylvania for the death of Darlene Ewalt, who authorities say he stabbed to death as she was talking on the telephone on the patio in the back yard of her Harrisburg home at 2:00 a.m. on July 13, 2007.  While languishing in a Massachusetts prison on a 30-year sentence for the Chelmsford home invasion involving an attack on a 15-year-old girl who he attempted to rape and kidnap, Lane had also been charged with murdering 38-year-old Monica Massaro in her Bloomsbury, New Jersey home on July 30, 2007.  He has since been transferred to a jail in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, where he awaits trial for Massaro's murder, to which he has pleaded not guilty.  It seems that the adding of charges against Lane is not yet finished as additional allegations continue to mount.

Just last month Lane was charged with attempted homicide, along with several other related charges, in an attack on a Pennsylvania woman, Patricia Brooks, who was awakened inside her rural home at 2:00 a.m. on July 17, 2007 by a man dressed in black who had plunged a knife into her shoulder as she slept on her couch.  Brooks was also slashed across the neck by the man, who fled when Brooks began screaming.  Police have alleged that the attacker was Adam Leroy Lane, and have linked him to the vicinity of Brooks' home through DNA analysis.

"When something like this happens in a rural community, I think people are (going to be) upset," said Chief Carl Segatti, Northern York County Regional Police Department.  "Ordinary Pennsylvanians who never expect a criminal act of this magnitude go to bed worried."