Getting away with murder in California

September 8, 2018 2:37 PM

“Awaiting his day in court, Martinez, who has a round, friendly face and a frequent smile, remains courteous and solicitous. The guards assigned to him in jail say he is a model inmate. He listens to people when they talk, and nods and laughs at all the right moments. Moreover — as many cops have noted with appreciation — he is funny, a witty, wry observer of the world around him. Sitting in his cell, he writes to his beloved granddaughters and other family members, dispensing advice and showering praise. He has also written his life story, twice. He suggests headlines for this article, including, in one letter over the summer: “True Evil has a face you know and a voice you trust. El Mano Negra.”” - “I Killed Them All.” The Life Of One Of America’s Bloodiest Hitmen [SLBuzzfeed]

“Police in the Central Valley say they failed to catch Martinez because he is a smart and remorseless sociopath, expertly dispatching victims he had little connection to and leaving behind little in the way of witnesses or evidence. Kavin Brewer, a homicide detective in Kern County, California, calls him “the best I ever heard of, in my 35 years of law enforcement.”

Some in the small California towns where Martinez lived and committed so many of his murders offered an additional explanation: Life is cheap here, and the people Martinez murdered and the communities where they came from, with their transient populations of impoverished, often undocumented farmworkers, didn’t count. Drugs and money pound through this part of California in ceaseless, violent streams, but many towns don’t even have police stations. Patrols, when they do come through, don’t tend to develop deep ties to communities.

That he killed so many for so long suggests a dark truth about law enforcement in the US: Kill the right people — in his case, farmworkers and drug dealers, few of whom had anyone to speak on their behalf — and you just might find there’s no one to stop you.“

posted by supercrayon (8 comments total)

America in 2018 is a hell of a place...
posted by Windopaene at 2:56 PM on September 8, 2018 [2 favorites]

Interesting article. Thanks for posting it.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 3:20 PM on September 8, 2018

America in 2018 is a hell of a place...

Counter-argument, America as always been a hell of a place.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 6:41 PM on September 8, 2018 [19 favorites]

Counter-argument, America as always been a hell of a place.

counter-counter-argument: for poor people, everywhere has always been a hell of a place.
posted by wibari at 9:56 PM on September 8, 2018 [7 favorites]

This part made me laugh. I hope that doesn't make me psychopathic.

Martinez sometimes combined acts of violence with small gestures of empathy. He shot a man, Domingo Perez, merely for repeatedly parking in Martinez’s mother’s driveway. But Martinez knew the man’s family would need the car, so after the killing, he secretly returned it to their home. After a few days, no one had found Perez’s body, and Martinez said he heard that Perez’s mother “was going crazy” from worry. “I said to myself: Damn, I have a mother too.” So she could get some peace of mind, Martinez retrieved the corpse from where he’d left it, and he moved it to a more visible spot in an orange orchard, where it was soon found.

Mr Considerate.
posted by pracowity at 7:30 AM on September 9, 2018 [23 favorites]

The really infuriating thing is that seemingly nobody has bothered to work on him and try to uncover other (presumably less polite) murders-for-hire. He seems to have a certain amount of ego, plus his relationship with his family — it seems like in exchange for a step-down from the death penalty he could be encouraged to roll over on a few more hit men. But nope, doesn't seem like anybody is too interested; it's like he's a curiosity rather than a potential lead.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:04 AM on September 10, 2018

See, if you're the sensitive volatile type, liable to kill people over a parking spot, then others are afraid to give you feedback. If he were more open to criticism, someone would surely have told him that it should be LA mano negra.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:38 AM on September 10, 2018 [3 favorites]

he could be encouraged to roll over on a few more hit men.

That would be the death penalty for his family.
posted by pracowity at 10:24 PM on September 10, 2018