Cold case: The murder of Eleanor Bryand Aguirre

 

By Maria Eugenia Guerra

 

On the afternoon of April 19, 1993, Eleanor Bryand Aguirre packed up a plate of carne asada, covered it with foil, and drove from her home at the 1900 block of Musser Street to the rented room of her boyfriend, Ruben Montemayor, a handyman who lived at 1003 Sanchez.

Aguirre, a single parent and the mother of four, was never again seen alive. She was found strangled and beaten about the face in Montemayor's room. Montemayor, also known as Rafael Villegas, was never again seen in Laredo . Aguirre's gray Buick Regal was later recovered in San Antonio , where Montemayor presumably abandoned it.

At the time of her death Aguirre, a receptionist for the Texas Workmen's Compensation office, was enrolled in criminal justice classes at Laredo Community College .

“I remember thinking when Eleanor met him that he was not her type,” recalled Aguirre's friend Oralia Martinez. “You could tell right off. He always wore dark glasses and never made eye contact. Eleanor was getting over a heartbreak in California , and she said she had sworn off handsome men. It gave me chills when I met him because I did not think he was a very good person. He left a very bad impression,” continued Martinez , adding, “As it turns out, he had a bunch of aliases, and something to hide.”

Aguirre befriended Montemayor when she saw him working at her office. Over their brief relationship he worked on repairs at Aguirre's home. “She tried to help him get a Social Security number so that he could get a better job, and when she did a background check on him, she couldn't find him in the system,” recalled Martinez . “She may have come across the information that he had killed his wife or maybe he told her that. He'd also told her his parents lived in Cincinnati and that he had a sister who lived in Dallas .” Martinez characterized the relationship between Aguirre and Montemayor as short and tempestuous. “He had become very possessive of Eleanor and walked into her office without calling,” she said.

On the Friday before Aguirre was murdered she had told Martinez that if anything happened to her, Montemayor was responsible because she “knew too much” about Montemayor's past. “I told her that she and the children could stay at our house with my mother, and she said she would, but she did not,” continued Martinez , adding, “When Eleanor's daughter called me Monday morning to say that her mother had not come home, I knew the worst had happened.”

“I knew she was in that house,” recalled Aguirre's mother Elena Bryand of the afternoon she came to look for her daughter. “That house had the presence of death all around it. I took my 14-year-old grandson with me, but we couldn't get in. I came back with my husband, and he found her in there. It was a horrible shock,” she continued.

“Eleanor was the oldest of our six children. She was a good mother and a woman who had a great deal of faith. She never asked us for help. She was not afraid to take risks, and she always moved ahead,” said Bryand of her daughter.

Of Montemayor, Bryand recalled that he worked at a tire shop near the intersection of Saunders and San Dario and that he was paid in cash. “She had brought him to our house to work on a sink, and she brought him to our church. He said he was looking for peace, but he was repugnant like someone who is not at peace,” said Bryand, adding that Montemayor had confessed to Aguirre that he had been in trouble with the law before. “I think he planned this, right down to washing the car and gassing up before he killed her. Era un demonio. My grandchildren were afraid of him.”

Bryand described Montemayor as “Black, five-foot-eight, and about 160 pounds.” Martinez recalled that he was in his mid-forties, a man with salt and pepper hair and who wore denim pants, ribbed under shirts, plaid shirts, and steel toed boots. “He had a deep voice. He wasn't Mexican, but he had some kind of Latin accent that told you he could have been Puerto Rican or Dominican,” said Martinez .

Though the trail has grown cold in the search for Ruben Montemayor, aka Rafael Villegas, the case folder for the 1993 murder of Eleanor Bryand Aguirre remains on the desktop of Sgt. Felipe Granada of the Laredo Police Department's Crimes Against Persons (CAPERS) unit.

Besides overseeing 10 detectives in the CAPERS unit, Granada, a 20-year veteran of the Laredo PD, is chief detective for the department's one-man Cold Case unit, which at this time is working a roster of 45 unsolved homicides that date back to 1993. Granada 's list includes 29 cold cases from 1993 to 2001, two from 2002, and 14 from 2003. While the City recorded only five homicides in 2002, that statistic spiked to 29 in 2003, of which half remain unsolved. There is no statute of limitation for murder cases.

“Time is the enemy of a new homicide,” Granada said. According to the web site of the Department of Justice (DOJ) Bureau of Justice Assistance, the first 72 hours after a homicide are the most critical for finding witnesses, recovering evidence that will lead to the perpetrator, solving the crime, and pointing justice to its rightful resolution in the judicial system.

Should the case grow cold, however, Granada asserted, time eventually becomes an ally. “Witnesses who wouldn't come forward before become less afraid, and are more willing to talk and more willing to get involved. Friends become enemies. A witness may need help with his or her own problems within the criminal justice system,” he said.

Among the types of cases that most often end up as cold cases, according to the DOJ web site, are gang and drug-related deaths and cases involving immigrants, transients, and homeless or unidentified people.

“And homosexuals,” added Granada . “In drug cases, witnesses think they will be arrested or that there could be retaliation. In cases involving a homosexual victim, you would be surprised how reluctant friends are to come forward because they don't want to be involved, or outed.”

Cold cases, Granada said, are prioritized as to likelihood of solvability based on physical evidence, suspects, witnesses, and the amount of time since the murder was committed.

Much o f Granada 's cold case work involves reading and re-reading police reports, witness statements, and reports of forensic and evidentiary findings. “There are clues here, too, just like there were at the crime scene,” said Granada , who as a detective has enjoyed a 100 per cent clearance rate for cases. “This is very different,” he said. “Luck plays a large role in solving a cold case. In a homicide investigation, you have five or six detectives -- one at the crime scene, a lead detective, two who track suspects, a primary interviewer. On a cold case, I am every one of them, conducting the entire investigation all over again and long after it happened,” he said, adding that if investigative and evidence collecting efforts at the crime scene were sloppy, he has to work harder to reconstruct the case.

“There is a lot of new technology available to us to try to extract clues from old evidence,” Granada said of CODIS, the computerized national DNA database that stores over a million DNA profiles of known felons, and new fingerprint identification systems that can lift prints from leather, cloth, and latex. Through CODIS, investigators can positively identify a suspect in as little as a few hours and can also help investigators more easily link a series of crimes to one person.

Undaunted by the decade that has passed since Eleanor Aguirre's murder, Granada submitted her clothing to the Bexar Medical Examiner's office to search for fibers that might yield a clue to the identity of her murderer.

“There are also organizations of retired law enforcement officers, sheriffs, Rangers, Texas Department of Public Safety(DPS) investigators who offer their expertise. They give us checklists for cases and angles we hadn't considered,” Granada said. A San Antonio-based cold case unit of the Texas Rangers, an Unsolved Crimes Investigation Team, also assists other agencies and has had its own successes solving cold cases.

Granada has resubmitted the knife used in the September 23, 1997 murder of Armando Guerra to a vacuum metal deposition lab in San Diego that uses gold dust instead of black powder for prints. “We have submitted other evidence in the Guerra case to DPS for review,” said Granada , adding that in addition to having a suspect named José Miguel Matute-Rivera, an additional suspect has surfaced. Matute, a Honduran national who was also known as “Mike el Hondureño,” is thought to have left the murder scene in Guerra's maroon and white Town Car. Matute, INS records show, was voluntarily deported with the assistance of the Mexican consul's office. He was described as six feet tall and weighing 150 pounds and having light brown eyes and black hair.

Initially ruled a death by natural causes, the Guerra case quickly grew cold in the days before family members discovered the murder weapon and asked the Laredo Police Department for the exhumation of his body and an autopsy. The autopsy, which was performed in San Antonio , revealed that Guerra had died of multiple stab wounds to the chest.

“We have had our successes and our near successes,” said Granada . “We solved the August 2001 gun shot murder of José Raul (Raulito) Valdez , a well-liked young man. Witnesses led us to a suspect who was in jail in Mexico , a companion of Raulito's who became angry when Raulito made fun of him. I interviewed the suspect in Mexico and authorities agreed to deport him but never did,” he said.

“We are very close to solving the 1995 murder of Martin Gomez, who was shot with a gun that was used a month later to kill another man. A Texas Department of Corrections inmate gave us the information we needed to get to the bottom of the murders,” he continued.

“We are also close to putting closure on the April 2000 shooting of Alejandro Quintanilla,” said Granada . Quintanilla, who was a student at the Lara Academy at the time of his death, was shot April 11, 2000 at the southwest corner of Maryland and Frost. He had been arrested the day before for a fight with gang members. After his release on the 11th, he had lunch with his girlfriend and then went to his home. He was “called out” and went into the street in front of his house, walking north to south on Maryland . He was killed by shots to the head. According to Granada , there are two primary suspects in the case and witnesses.

“We came very close to solving the shooting of Dolores McKenzie, a homeless woman who was shot in the chin August 27, 1994 near San Jorge and Park. In fact, we had what we believed was the gun that shot her,” he said. When McKenzie died later in a nursing home in Lubbock as a result of complications from the shooting, the case was upgraded from attempted murder to murder. “Had we been given the slug that was recovered in the autopsy, we could have matched it to one of five or six weapons confiscated from a nearby residence,” said Granada , adding that investigators in Lubbock lost the slug. “We could have tied the gun and the murder to those responsible,” he said.

McKenzie, who lost her ability to speak after the shooting, was found at 4:15 a.m. by police officers near the San Jorge Avenue home where she sometimes stayed.

Asked if he was working the high profile murder of Laredo realtor Hector X. Gutierrez, Granada said, “That case is nowhere. I am waiting to get my hands on it.”

Austin, Dallas, San Antonio, and Harris County have cold case units in operation, as do Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Des Moines, Detroit, Los Angeles, Memphis, Miami, New Orleans, Oakland, Omaha, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, San Diego, Tulsa, Washington, D.C., and the states of Alaska, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin.

(Among the cold case resources the DOJ web site offers is the Vidocq Society in Philadelphia , an international nonprofit organization of forensic experts, criminalists, pathologists, investigators, and attorneys who meet regularly to solve unsolved cases. The Society can be reached at www.vidocq.org. The DOJ site is at www.ojp.usdoj.gov/BJA. You can reach Sgt. Felipe Granada at (956) 795-2812 or 763-5195.)