You're listening to kf I AM sixty on demand, KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. On any given day in Southern California, hundreds of investigators are working more than ten thousand unsolved cases. That's thousands of friends and families who have lost loved ones, thousands of people who got away with a crime, and thousands of murderers who still walk the streets. Killers who may be your neighbor, go to your church, or could be dating a
close friend. For the next two hours will highlight cases that have gone cold, baffled investigators, or just needs that one witness to speak up. This is Solved with Steve Gregory. In this episode, we take a look at a tool that helps solve crimes, in this case Arson. It's part of our ongoing crime Fighter series that highlights the work behind the scenes that helps investigators find the piece of evidence they need to move a case forward or to finally
close it. The Los Angeles County Fire Department recently added a four legged firefighter to its ranks, an accelerant sniffing canine and a member of the Arson Unit. Her handlers, Captain Casey Flanders, so This is Julia. She's two years old. She just had a birthday on July seventh, and she is a Golden Door half Golden Retriever, half Labrador. And they basically use this breed for a couple of reasons. One, they're great family dogs. Off
duty. She comes home with me. She's great with the kids, great with the family. Another reason these dogs are in that sporting group of dogs. Their hunting drive is what they're after, and that's what we like to see him go in a room and the hunting drive gets their nose down to find that agmainable liquid. And we'll learn more about Julia in the next segment. But I wanted to offer some historical perspective, so I brought in Battalion
Chief Pete Finnerty, the head of the Arson unit. He explains the department had inherited and arson K nine twenty years ago, but that program fizzled out, but in twenty fourteen they created new policies to get a Key nine unit up and running, and now the chief says, the department is embracing all technologies old and new to tackle arson investigations. So you have to have in lay in many crimes as you would is you have to have witnesses that it
can identify people. You have to have evidence that supports the hypothesis of what we discover its seeing. You have to have security video of that person, or in many cases, you have to have a confession. So while cases
will we will work cases and they will stay open until they're done. We are getting cases back to back to back to back, So as a case would come up that maybe takes more or precedent because we have that evidence and something we're sitting on, Hey, let's we're gonna put this in the background and we're gonna wait and we're going to come back to this case afterward. I don't have an exact number of how many of those cases are. A
lot of cases don't sit open like that. But another thing that we have to deal with is in La County, as we're all aware, there's a lot of people experiencing homelessness. Those cases tend to be frequent for us, and there isn't a lot there because the county's looking at assisting people as long as there's no criminal intent involved in that. Well, let's go back historically, then, you know, when you're talking about solving these arsons and determining
cause and manner in origin. How many investigators do you have in your arson unit and how busy are they? So it's interesting. We have ten investigators, of which i'm one, and I am on the entire county. Yes, Sir, for the entire county. And if you look at the numbers, that's one hundred and seventy seven fire stations, that's twenty three hundred square miles, that's twenty one contract cities. And now we do split the county
with the sheriffs when it comes to the arson portion. If the sheriffs have patrolled duty for an area, they are the primary, so they do divide that with us. An interesting point that a lot of people don't consider is that we cover SRA land for brushfires state responsibility. So we have that contract with cal Fire that's five hundred thousand acres of land and in this time of the year, as you know, we're getting daily starts and with that come
having to know what the cause is. So yes, we have a pretty big area to cover with three on duty investigators, twenty four hours of captain and two investigators. But it's our mission that we have and we work diligently
to solve that. And that's kind of goes back to what I said, we kind of have to prioritize what we've been given, not because we're not going to investigate it, but when things come up that maybe take priority because we have that good evidence to actuate on or to act on right away,
that's going to come into play. So chief how many fires out there remain, like still up in the air or open, you know, I would say any one of my investigators probably has five cases that they're working simultaneously, something that we have concrete evidence on, something that's going to take a little longer, something that takes longer because we're waiting on security video from a company
or anything like that. I would say that there is a pretty good proportion of cases that's probably exaggerating a little that will go undetermined, and that simply is due to the fact that you narrow it down. And this is kind of arson, I would say. In a nutshell, you can say this, Hey, the fire started in this room. The room didn't have power to it, nobody was storing any chemicals in it, We didn't We don't have any indication that somebody walked in and threw a match on the ground.
So of the stuff that's in this room, based on the information we have, here's what it could have been, and you can give. You can give all the stuff that didn't cause it, and here's the couple of things that could have. But you just don't have that last piece of evidence that is the thing that points to directly to one thing. Conversely, you have
evidence on scene. You're looking at all this possibilities and then all of a sudden, somebody says, hey, I have a security footage and they bring something and you go, oh lo and behold, there's the person running in with a gas can, dousing the room and throwing a match, and you know exactly what started that. It's no different than a homicide investigation. It
is very similar with respect to police work. It is very similar these guys myself to say, is word detectives who focus solely on arson crime are you know fire? It's one of the hardest ones to solve, right. I don't know how arson investigators did it thirty years ago, because I will say what we get now is we do get a lot of help from the amount of camors that are out in the technology. I would think too, right, Absolutely, science and tech advancements absolutely so they had a lot of stuff,
but a lot of it they don't. They didn't have as much as we haven't. That's changing, you know, year over year, and Julia is kind of an example of something that's been around a long time, but something that can really bolster the case. I do want to talk a little bit about advancements in technology. When you talk about, you know, decades ago and this is the nation's largest fire department, you know, we're you as innovative with arson investigations that you know of back then as you were with
a lot of things in firefighting. You know, it's hard for me to answer that question without having the historical context of some of the folks that I do know that that worked in the unit as far back as right now, we don't have I would say a decade or a little bit more. Is
the is the investigator that has been the longest in the unit. I do know that one of the big things that I can answer looking at historical documentation is that the unit asked to have a fire administrative study done in ninety nine, and it outlined all the areas that the National Fire Administration would say, hey, if you really want to change what you're doing, here's the suggestions we have for how you can upgrade or become more efficient. And some of
that was scheduling. As I said, before they used to be on a forty hour schedule. They would be called in after hours. The department saw some of the suggestions, they moved to a fifty six hour, three investigator type shift works so they're on duty, ready to go at any moment. So that type of stuff advances in us working with the lab, Sheriff's, the county lab so we can get things looked at, and that's a lot
of a lot of the advancements are those things for everybody. What it's going to come in the format of is a better reporting or better use of technology. You know, in the past, you would take individual shots when you were putting together a photo array, which is something we still do to this day. You now have technology where you can say at a camera in the center of the room and it'll take three hundred and sixty degree photos, which
as I've been told by many people that are moving to that technology. When you go to court to try to bring this to a juror that doesn't understand arson when you're able to give that. Hey, here's the room we were looking at. Now, let me take you over to this corner. You can see this corner is unburned, but see where all the damage is over here. And people relate to that versus single shot like, they get disoriented,
they don't understand what you're really referencing. So I would say things like that, drones are a big one, you know, especially like with brush fires. You know, we used to have to bring ladders out and climb the ladder and shoot these, you know. Now we have that you know us program you know on MANARIL, and we can ask for that assistance from our own department because we have that technology, which is just simply more efficient.
It allows us to move on file the case and get to work on either something else or move on to what that next portion of the case might be. We'll talk more about the Kenaine Arsen in it, but first this is unsolved with Steve Gregory on kf I AM six forty. You're listening to kf I AM six forty on demand, kf I AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. I'm Steve Gregory and this is unsolved. Welcome back.
We're at the La County Fire Department's headquarters in training center in Monterey Park, where we've been talking about Julia, the department's accelerant sniffing canine, or simply put, an arson dog. Captain Casey Flanders is Julia's handler. I asked him more about Julia's training. So the training takes place mostly in New Hampshire, back on the east coast. We spend some time in Massachusetts to the south and Maine to the north. But it's a program called Maine Specialty
Dogs, and it was a month long program. We were there for the entire month of April, also known as the muddy season out there. State Farm, the insurance company, actually sponsors this program. They hooked up with Main Specialty Dogs back in nineteen ninety three, and State Farm sponsors each student through this program at the cost of about twenty five to thirty grand per student.
They pay for food and lodging and airfare, all that stuff. I believe since nineteen ninety three, State Farm has actually put four hundred and fifty k nine teams into the field throughout the country. Right now, I believe there's about ninety seven active teams after my class had graduated back in April.
Has Julia already been working? She has. In fact, just before I came here, we were working a fire on the east end of the county and she was working an exterior patio fire and she actually had a hit. When I say a hit, I mean she gave me an alert for an ignitable liquid that she detected. Do you have arrest powers? I don't know, are you guys peace officers? Yes, sir, we do. How
frequently do you make arrests for our cimulated crime? So based on arson, so we're based out of the La Basin, so we cover the county, so we're not able to get on scene, you know, always right away. Sometimes it takes us twenty thirty hour and a half, depending if we get called up to the high desert. So a lot of the times the arrests take place by the local police agency and then we follow up with the
case documentation and pressing and filing the charges with the local DA. I would imagine that the training is ongoing, and you know, you're constantly always challenged out in the field because you don't know what you're running into, right. Yeah, the training is ongoing, like you said, So the purpose of the K nine team is to assist the investigation by attaining by obtaining a sample
with the higher probability of coming back positive from the lab. So, as an arson investigator, we can walk in a scene and go, okay, we like this corner for our origin. This is where that fire started. We could be off by six inches a foot three feet. The purpose of the dog is to come in and narrow that down, make that size really small, so we can dig that sample, send it to the lab. If the lab confirms it for an ignitable liquid or an accelerant, now we've
got an extra piece of evidence for our arson case. That arson case also needs to be made with or without the dog. That ignitable liquid is similar to what a gun would be in a murder case. Okay, we still have to have a suspect. We still have to place that suspect at the scene. We still have to look at motive, other things to establish a case for arson, not just that accelerant. So that dog helps us narrow down that evidence for our case. We use the dogs there for three things.
Really for their olfactory capabilities right in their sense of smell, the ability to set discriminate, to tell the difference between sense between burnt wood, burnt paper, burnt plastic, and that accelerant. And these dogs are always unbiased. They don't care what neighborhood they're in, who lives there. They either detect something or they don't. As far as the dog's olfactory capabilities, the
average human has five to six million olfactory receptors in our nose. The dogs have between two hundred and twenty five to three hundred million, so about fifty times greater a sense of smell than we do. One eighth of the excuse me, one eighth of their brain is dedicated to that odor processing. Half fifty percent of their nose is dedicated to that scent processing. As far as her training aid during our training, I have a I can show it to
you right now. I actually have it in my popular ad. It's gonna smell like gasoline to you. It's gasoline based, but it's not pure gasoline. It's actually produced by a local chemist here at our sheriff LA County Sheriff's Crime Lab. And this is the only thing we use. This is what I drop on floors, This is what I drop on evidence through all the different evolutions that I run her through. This is the only thing that she
sniffs during training. But through this training medium, she's able to recognize accelerants spanning the full spectrum. Again talking about those light, medium, and heavy disolates and those examples. I gave you the gasoline, the acid tone, the nail polished remover, the lamp oil, light or fluid, etc.
So by just this one based on historical use of the dogs. And again they've got you know, four hundred and fifty teams since nineteen ninety three and all the lab confirmations that they've gotten with all those the wide spectrum of accelerants, So this is usual. This is kind of a way to calibrate Julia, right, yes, sir, exactly. Yeah, this gets imprinted on her brain and through this she's able to recognize several different accelerants on scenes.
Yeah. So with that said, she's a food reward dog, which means she doesn't eat unless she smells gas. That's not to say she only eats when we get a fire. It's to say that on and off duty, morning, noon and night throughout the day, I have to set up evolutions and training for her to go through. Fine gas so that I can get some food on board. So first thing in the morning, throughout the day, and then at night and then sometimes in the middle of the night if
she gets a call. Right, we're we're setting up stuff. The kids have to help out at home, they have to help me set up stuff. They like doing it. And also, you know, forms a good bond with the dog. So um, yeah, it's it's a team effort. Well, and you're right, it's and it's a lot of maintenance, a lot of maintenance. Yeah, there's there's stuff that kind of goes, you know, unnoticed. You know, you gotta take them for walks. You got to clean up after the dog. You got to bathe the dog.
Every scene she gets she gets into, she comes out pretty dirty. So we got to keep an eye on. And yeah, that's the other thing to you we're talking about how you know she's jumping and raring to go when you get to a scene. I mean, I assume that the firefighters before you, the ones who have extinguished the fire, have determined that it's safe to enter. Um, are you worried about like the heat of the floor or has it dissipated enough to where the pads of her feet aren't impacted.
Things like that. Usually by the time we get there, because we don't get there with the the first on scene cruise. Usually we're thirty minutes to an hour, sometimes an hour and a half behind the first on scene units, based on when we receive the notification for a need. By then the floor is cooled off a little bit. I always perform a safety walk through through the building. I mean, I'm looking for nails, I'm looking
for sharp objects, broken glass, things to injure the dog. I'm trying to get that out of her way, move some things, maybe give her a clear path so she can hit all portions of the interior that building. We were really good about decontaminating that dog. They're walking through you know water, sometimes it's got all kinds of chemicals, you know, foam, whatever, what have you. So we have to clean these dogs after every fire,
and we're always checking them. As we're cleaning them, we're checking them for injuries too. So then, and I don't know if you mentioned this, and I might have forgotten. So it's Julia on a leash the whole time you're in a building, or do you unleash her and let her go, she'll be on lead the entire time. Okay, yeah, through when when we're working a scene, she's always on lead, yes sir, yeah.
And then what about the time after a fire has been extinguished? Is it like in a homicide Sometimes the longer you wait to go in and accumulate evidence that maybe evidence dissipates, evidence degrades. I mean that is that the same in an arts and investigation. Absolutely, the two biggest foes we go up against our fire and water. So sometimes whatever accelerant is used does get completely consumed and there's no traces for her to find. The other thing we
go up against is water. When we have these big two alarmed, three alarm fires, we're flowing you know, at the end of the day millions of gallons of water through this building, that those trace amounts of accelerants get washed away. Or in a smaller example, like a smaller residential structure, let's say the accelerant is on the west side of the room. Well,
sometimes that water will push it to the east side of the room. She'll get a hit on the east side of the room where that accelerant has been pushed to. Even though the fire pattern, the poor pattern of accelerant is on the west side, so it gets confusing to some of the guys who are looking from behind, saying, Hey, the patterns over to the right, but your dog's hitting over to the left. Your dog's broken, and
my job is just to trust that dog. She knows. Hey, I don't know what's over there, but the accelerant's over here, and it got pushed by the by the water over here. So yeah, between between fire and water, we're always up against variables on scene trying to locate that evidence. Coming up a horrific double execution of two teenage boys in Linwood. But first, this is Unsolved with Steve Gregory on kf I AM six forty. You're listening to kf I AM sixty on demand kf I AM six forty live
everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. I'm Steve Gregory, and this is unsolved. To reach the Unsolved team through the iHeartRadio app, press the red microphone and leave us a story, idea tip, or comment, or simply press pound two fifty on your cell phone and say the keyword unsolved. Los Angeles County Sheriff's Homicide case number zero nine two zero three five zero eight Dash two five one seven Dash zero one one the executions of nineteen year old Jose Merlos and
thirteen year old Miguel Cuts. We're talking now with Detective Sean McCarthy. He's with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's Cold Case Unit within the Homicide Bureau. We're inside Homicide Bureau headquarters in Monterey Park. We're talking about a case going back to March eighth, nineteen ninety two, the death of a thirteen year old and nineteen year old. Let's get started with a quick overview of the case. Okay, This homicide a curve in the city of Lynnwood at Long
Beach Boulevard and Cedar Avenue. It's it's your typical coin operated laundromat self serve. It's open most of the day, but generally it closed around seven thirty. In this particular night, it was a Sunday night. The business closed. Two employees by the name of Miguel Perez and Jose Merlos. They began
their shift after the business closed. They worked as clean up people, janitors if you will, and generally speaking, they would lock the front door sometime around seven thirty, but they would allow custom to remain who were still doing their wash. They would leave the back door open most of the time to
give those customers access an access point to leave once they were finished. On this particular night, I can only assume that's what happened based on my review of the case file, because I was not one of the original investigators. Sometime after seven thirty, and I'm assuming the regular customers left, someone entered the business or were led inside the business, and at some point they produced firearms. They led both Miguel and Jose at gunpoint into a rear office,
and they executed both of them. And I'm saying this with not a lot of certainty, but there was some evidence to indicate that the motive was robbery, because some of the washing machines had been tampered with in the area where money would be inserted, and there was some coins apparently missing. But I'm not going to sit here and tell you that that definitively was the motive in
this case. Okay, I got to ask you something. It just kind of struck me when you said they took these two young men, this boy and this young man to the back and executed them. Would you please describe your definition in this case, and I don't mean to be flipping about it, but as opposed to just going in and robbing a place and just shooting these folks, what in your mind defines this as an execution? The the way that they were murdered, they were both shot in the chest and the
left left side of the chest we call we would call it. It's referred to in law enforcements as the ten ring on on on a target at a at a range. That's that's the area where where the ten the tenure uh is located. Um, that was just a random these two kids, and I referred to them as kids because one was nineteen, one was thirteen. They didn't just shoot them as they were running out of the business, try
to trying to escape from from whatever crime was being committed. They were led back there into that into that office, and they were shot in an area of the body that clearly indicates, in my opinion, execution. And you provided a few moments ago, and we're not going to be posting these photos online, but you you are showing me photos from the file. And obviously it's a very sad sight when you got these two young people behind and it looks like in this you say office area, But um, what would be
the purpose of this? I mean, why, detective, do you take a thirteen year old and a nineteen year old to a back room execute them in the commission of a robbery? I mean, why do you do that? My opinion only, Okay, if you look at the front of the business, there's there's large windows, right if they would, if they would, if they were to kill them, there potentially people on the street, and Long Beach Boulevard is a very busy street in Lynnwood. They would be
seen, they and somebody would call the police. The gunshots would be heard, would be more likely be heard if you if you lead them into a back office, it's more secure, included, it's more insulated from the noise of the gunshots in that room, and it would eliminate anybody witnessing the shooting and potentially identifying this suspect. Being that this is in nineteen ninety two,
you were not the original investigator on the case. To you kind of have to piece this together like you do all cold cases that you did not have a hand in originally. But you have to take the notes of previous investigators. You have to put this together in your mind, and do you go through these different scenarios on what you think might have happened based on your experience and what you know that's in front of you. Do you have enough to
connect some dots or do you have to take some leaps. I don't know if you and I have had this discussion before, but early in my investigative career, especially my investigative career homicide Bureau, I had a part I was being trained by a more a much more experienced investigator, and we had a case that had a lot of suspects and had a lot of theories. And I asked my mentor, is it wrong to theorize in a criminal investigation? And his answer was no, We we all theorize. We're all human beings.
We look at a particular incident and we ultimately theorized in some ways as it relates to the case, right, And some theories sound really great, but he says, the bottom line is you have to have evidence to back up that theory. So to answer your question is, yeah, I looked at this case and I immediately started theorizing based on the pictures that I'm looking at, based on my experienced but it's all meaningless unless you have evidence to back it up, and right now, in this case, we have very
minimal evidence to point at anybody in particular. When we come back, let's talk about some of those theories and let's take a little deeper on what could been the motive and maybe based on some of those theories in your experience, maybe some possible suspects. But first, this is Unsolved with Steve Gregory on kf I AM six forty. You're listening to kf I AM sixty on demand kf I AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. I'm Steve Gregory,
and this is Unsolved. You can reach the Unsolved team on email. Just send us a message Unsolved at iHeartMedia dot com. That's Unsolved at iHeartMedia dot com. Welcome backworth the Los Angeles County sheriffs Department's Homicide Bureau in Monterey Park, and we're in a conference room speaking with cold case Detective Sean McCarthy. Before the breakdo, Detective, we were talking a lot about theories and about some of your experience when you crack open one of these cold case files
and sometimes and I know I can't imagine. You don't know what's on the other side of that folder. When you open that folder, you have no idea what you're going to be looking at. You may have stacks and stacks of information, and you may just have a few pages. So you have to take whatever's in front of you and try to put fresh eyes on an old case. In this particular case, we're talking about the shooting deaths of Miguel Perez, who was thirteen years old and Jose Merlos, who was nineteen
years old. They were cleaning up a laundromat on March eighth, nineteen ninety two, just after ten o'clock on twelve o five oh Long Beach Boulevard in Lynnwood. And I've seen photos of the crime scene you showed me where these two young men were shot execution style. You said, so, theory when you look at this in this particular case, what dots did you connect as
a theory? Okay, the most as we spoken in the previous segment, the most obvious theory, based on minimal evidence, is that the motive was robbery. In this case, there were some washing machines that had been tampered with. They were they were self served. But the reality is it wasn't like they ransacked the whole place, emptied every washing machine in the place, and there was a lot of washing machines in this place, like there are
in most self served. There was only a few that were tampered with. So the obvious theory or motive is robbery. But based on my experience, I find it hard to believe that they led these two young I look him as children, a thirteen year old, into a back room and shot him execution style. I have to look deeper into that, and I refused to just accept robbery for a few quarters in this type of a murder, I just I got to look at other options and could it be robbery? Yes,
And I'll tell you why if we haven't discussed this. This area of Lynnwood extremely high crime rate with vastly different types of criminals. You have high prostitution on Long Beach Boulevard, high narcotics use, narcotics sales, you have. It's saturated with street gangs both Hispanic and Black, a high vagrant population.
I know that's a big topic in twenty twenty two. Trust me in nineteen ninety two because I worked that area when Firestone Station and Linwood Station merged in nine Two years later, in nineteen ninety four, I was at Firestone Station and this is in Linwood, but when we merged, it became one big station. So for the next few years, before I went to Homicide
Bureau, I worked this area. I know this area well and it is an extreme it's even today, it's an extremely high crime area with vastly different types of criminals. So is it possible that somebody who was whacked out on drugs or whatever went in there just just to rob the place to steal a few coins to go get a a small amount of cocaine. It's possible, but I don't think that's the likely motive. It's a possible motive, but
I don't think it's the likely motive. Now, if you're asking me, do I have a motive that I'm leaning that I'm leaning heavily on, the answer is no. Um, okay, then let me let me pose a couple of things. So, first of all, you told me that the laundromat, based on the notes, the only door, the only entrance exit was backdoor, and that was that was generally what would happen. The two employees, the victims in this case would begin their shift at seven thirty.
They would lock the front door. That was regular and for obvious reasons, is the high crime area. And I would like to note too that this, you know, with these photos you showed me at the front, these all these windows have a lot of very heavy bars onto them, so that already indicates it's an area that's that's of concern in terms of robbery and burglary. So what I'm getting at is the front door was already closed. The
backdoor was the only door open. Do you believe that? Again, and only based on your experience and whatever you might have seen in the notes the shooter or shooters, did they come into the laundromat or were they among those that were allowed to stay in there? And sort of were they lingering in there or do you think or do you think they came in there? I
honestly believe either as a possible responsibility. And do you think again, with an execution style murders and the fact that there was very little money taken actually taken in it's all in quarters planned or spontaneous, I think there was there was some planning and what I mean by that and I'll reveal a little bit about the original investigation. There was two male black adults that were seen by
a witness shortly before the learning murder that were loitering near the business. That witness said they they honed in on these two and watched them for several minutes, and at one point they walked up to the window and they peered inside. And is that a form of casing the place could be? I think I think this was done by somebody who lived in the in the general area
of the laundromatt, who knew the workings out of the business. I don't think it would take a whole lot of casing to figure out they close at seven thirty. There's no real supervision there, or generally there's there's two young employees that come in and clean up, and with very little UH casing, they would realize pretty quickly that they allow customers that haven't finished or washed to
stay and exit to the back door. So and take much planning to figure out that we can get inside this place very easily, very easily by just going through the backdoor. Because I'm sure some of those customers who use that regularly they've verbalized it to their friends, and so I'm sure a lot of the community knew that they were nice enough to leave the business open for them to finish their laundry and exit through the backdoor. We're talking with Sean McCarthy.
He's a detective in the cold case unit of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's Homicide Bureau. When we come back, more of the case of the two murders inside the laundromatt in Lynnwood. But first, this is unsolved with Steve Gregory on kf I AM six forty. You're listening to kf I AM sixty on demand kf I AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
I'm Steve Gregory, and this is unsolved for inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's Homicide Bureau in Monterey Park at a conference room talking with cold case detective Sean McCarthy about the murders of Miguel Perez, thirteen year old Hispanic Jose Merlos, a nineteen year old Hispanic. Both were cleaning up a laundromat in the twelve hundred block of Long Beach Boulevard in Lynnwood. The date March eighth,
nineteen ninety two, just after ten pm. Detective, I know in these cold cases you deal with so many of them, and I know in La County you have a ton of different cold cases, and you know you're only so many people. I know that you have to maybe some criteria might have to crop up in order for you to reopen a case. Was there something about this case after all this time that jumped out at you that said we
need to revisit it? Yes, what was that? I received a telephone call from I won't identify this person, but it's a very credible and reliable source that both me and my partner, rich Tomlin have a friendship with. This person told us that they have a friend through their wife, who actually grew up on inland Wood in relatively close proximity to the laundromat, and they were very They were of elementary school age at the time of the murder.
We were directed to this witness. We interviewed, interviewed the witness and they told us a story, And basically the story is is that they were a young child. They were at a gathering, a small gathering. They overheard three people, actually four people talking about the murder it was relatively soon after the murder, so it was a topic. It wasn't unusual that that topic came up because everybody in the neighborhood knew about the murder. But the conversation
is what takeued their interest. And basically, in the conversation, and I'm not going to reveal any more than this, the statement was made that both both victims pled for their lives prior to being executed, and that became an important statement to me as an investigator to indicate that that person who was in that conversation and made that statement either was a participant in the murder, or had conversation with somebody who was a participant and made that statement to them,
or could have been just rumor could have been could have been you're grinning, yes, because there's more to this story. And the more that I can reveal is is the statement was made in the setting where a person, a very strong person of interest was identified in nineteen ninety two, and I would say he bordered on being a viable suspect. So that person of interest who was interviewed and identified by investigators in nineteen ninety two was also the person in
this conversation that was overheard by this elementary school witness. Okay, so why was that person of interest never pursued beyond that he is being pursued today. And what I mean by that is he's still a person of interest. I can't speak for the investigators in nineteen ninety two, there's nothing in the case file. The person of interest was interviewed. The person of interest made some denials about being inside the business at around the time of the murder, and
then recanted and admitted that he wasn't side. But his alibi was I was just helping a woman out that he didn't know her last name, so apparently they contract this woman out to verify his story, and that was and he lived in the area, and he basically said, yeah, I was in there after he denied it, but I was helping this woman out with their laundry, and I exited the back door like all the customer late customers did and at that point, for whatever reason, the interest in him seemed to
stop. Now, I'm not going to criticize the original investigators for stopping the investigation on him. Maybe there was some other things that were said that were never documented that convinced them that he was not to the point of being a Bible suspect yet. But when I interviewed this with this thirty years later and has told me this person of interest was part of this conversation that they overheard,
he immediately jumped back to being a very strong person of interest. And we're in the process of continuing the investigation with him as a focal point. How old would this person of interest be now in his fifties and you know for a fact that he's still alive. I do is he in La County?
He is? Have you made contact? No? And there's reasons for that because, as I said before, there's multiple people involved in this conversation that was overheard, and we have to be very delicate about how we approached this. So if we interview one, he doesn't run back to the other ones and say don't talk to the police. They're inquired about that, so we have to show you. So you're basically implying that there is more than one person involved in this crime. I feel strongly about that, and I
can't get into why. When we come back, we'll see if we can squeeze any more information out of Detective McCarthy. But first, this is Unsolved with Steve Gregory on kf I AM six forty. You're listening to kf I AM six forty on demand KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. I'm Steve Gregory and this is Unsolved. To learn more about this case and others, go to our website at KFI AM six forty dot com slash unsolved. That's KFI AM six forty dot com slash unsolved. Welcome back.
We're inside Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's Homicide Bureau, the Cold Case Unit, talking with Detective Sean McCarthy about a case going back to nineteen ninety two. March eighth, just a little after ten pm, thirteen year old Miguel Perez nineteen year old Josie Merlos both shot execution style and the back of a laundromat. They were there to clean up. That was their job, and this was in the twelve thousand block of Long Beach Boulevard and Lynnwood. Detective,
First of all, is the laundromats still there? Yes, it is still there after all these years. My knowledge, Now, this was just after ten o'clock at night. What's around that laundromt were there any witnesses? I mean, when you hear gunfire and how many shots were fired total? I don't know that anybody heard the gun shots. I will say this, the victims victims were shot one time each. I don't want to get any further am So then did anyone see anybody run out of the building or leave the
area? I know I didn't mention this in the earlier segments, but both victims lived in an apartment complex that adjacent to the laundryman, so they only had to walk a short distance to work. They lived with other family members. One of the other family members was interviewed after the murder and and just for information purposes, the Miguel's I believe it was Miguel's father discovered the bodies.
He was the one who discovered the bodies. He walked. I believe he tried to get ahold of one of the victims, one of them, one of them was married to the other one's sister. So both victims were living in this apartment with other relatives with Miguel's family, okay, Jose was married to one of the sisters. Got it okay, So during the interview with one of the family members. They said that around the time of the
murder, they heard some some noise. They they went out in the balconire, looked out of an upper floor window, and they saw two male black adults climbing over the wall behind the laundromat and enter a small, dark compact vehicle. Prior to entering the vehicle, one of the mails dropped a handgun
onto the pavement and frantically grabbed it and got into the vehicle. The only other thing of interest would be is that this witness was certain that there was young children in that car because they could hear crying from children as they entered the car. And that's the vehicle left southbound on Long Beach Boulevard. And based on my review of the case file was never found with the timeline fit. Yes, so that the witness saw it well, presumably moments after it
happened in that ten o'clock area or that ten o'clock timeframe. Yes, So before the break we were talking about a person of interest, possibly persons of interest, and you said there's someone you're focusing in on now. Is that person African American? Yes, So at least you have that part to go
with let me say this, the person of interest is African American. Other people involved in the conversation that we spoke in the other segment where the statement was made, there was there was at least one that was of another race, a different race other than African American. Okay, yes, not Caucasian. Not Caucasian, okay. But because you know, if the witness said that she saw two African Americans leaving, presumably there might have been someone else
in the vehicle or just the children. I'm not going to dispute what a what a witness said. Well, are have you talked to that witness lately? The witness to the one that saw the two people leave the building? No, okay, I was just curious if that person is still around.
Have you spoken to any of the family of perezer Merlos. So you're very good at your job, Steve. But I said, there was a conversation that was overheard and the group in the conversation, the person of interest was part of that, and there was another person in that conversation that was not
African American. But what I didn't say was if I believe that that person was a co conspirator, because I do not believe that that person was a goal conspirator, and I cannot get into it, so that would lend credibility
to the witnesses statement of the two male blacks. It's possible that the person of interest is one of those, is one of those male blacks, and then somebody, another African American, is also involved, and we're pursuing that avenue and we are looking at another person of interest that may have been the second person. But the person that was not African America involved in the conversation.
We don't believe he had any role in the murder, but we believe his role would be able to provide us information on what he knows based on that conversation in that group. Isn't it frustrating to have to dance around all this without just telling us what you're really thinking. Yeah? Yeah, So that said, I know you're trying to unpack this and still preserve the integrity of the investigation. I appreciate your position, So I'm gonna move on.
I'm going to ask you something else about the laundromat itself. You said that you don't think robbery was a motive, and these poor too young. I stand correct that I believe robbery is a possible motive, but I don't know that. You were leaning somewhere else. Yeah, I'm leaning that. And this is just my own compassionate nature. Is I've dealt with a lot of
pretty hardened criminals. And when you march two young kids back into a room and execute them for apparently a handful of quarters, that's frowned on in the criminal community. You just don't do that unless you're mentally ill, whacked down on drugs, or there's a motive that we don't know about, you know, So I refused just buy robbery as a motive in this case, unless it's somebody who was mentally ill, was really wacked on on drugs, or
just it was some sort of a thrill kill. You just don't murder young kids like that. And and criminals, hardened criminals, you know, they have their limits too, And I believe this based on my experience, it's really teetering on being off limits. We're gonna talk more with Detective Sean McCarthy from the ol County Sheriff's Department's Homicide Bureau, but first this is unsolved with Steve Gregory on CAMF I AM six forty. You're listening to kf I AM
sixty on demand. O hey if I AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. I'm Steve Gregory and this is unsolved. To leave us a comment, hit pound two fifty on your cell phone and say the keyword or press the red microphone button on the iHeartRadio app. Welcome back. We're inside the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department's Humicide Bureau in Monterey Park in a conference room talking with cold case Detective Sean McCarthy about the tragic shooting deaths of Miguel Perez,
thirteen years old and nineteen year old Jose Merlos. They were both cleaning up a laundromat on March eighth, nineteen ninety two, just after ten pm in the city of Lynnwood on Long Beach Boulevard. Detective you said that the laundromat still exists. This address is twelve zero five zero Long Beach Boulevard, and we're looking at photos of it and it has a lot of bars on it. The wrought iron bars are all over the front part of it,
the side windows. And at the beginning of this case, you were talking a little bit about the fact that the front door would have been locked at this time because the boys were cleaning up, they were allowing customers to stay in there. They left the backdoor open so customers could come and go as they were finished for the night. And somewhere along the way, one possibly more people came in, brought the nineteen year old and the thirteen year old
to a back room, executed them, and then took some quarters. You said it looked like there had been some quarters missing. You've also mentioned that robbery, while a possible motive, is not where you were leaning. So I want to ask you something. You got to unpack these cases, and you said gang activity. Who was an all time high down there a number of both black and Hispanic gangs. Who was the owner of this property? And does the owner play any role in this? And the owner of the
business or the owner of the property. I'm just going to be honest with you. We haven't touched on that in our investigation yet. And what I mean by that is is that we're pursuing the person of interest and and invest trying to determine the context of the statement that was made in and I know you're you're you're focused on who pulled the trigger. I'm focused on why. I'm kind of going down the why since since you said that robbery is a
possible but not likely motive, I'm wondering who owned the business? Was there a property dispute or was there a business dispute? Um? Do you know anything about who owned the business? Okay, I'm gonna fall on this sort of a little bit here and give you. I know you're aware of this, but your audiences aren't aware of this. You've you've aired several of these, and you've made it clear that the cold case unit is made of what I think. We're down to ten people, huh um. And we're all
part time employees. We're all retired homicide investigators from the Sheriff's or who are back on yearly contracts. So we have ten investigators. We have nineteen thousand cases in our libraries and one hundred year history of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, nineteen thousand homicides and of those nineteen thousands, over four thousand our coal
cases. So we have plenty of work right right, and each investigator is investigating in the area of twenty cases and those are twenty cases that we believe can be solved that you know, you've got a tree hash in this business. That's just the reality of it. We're a very large department where we're not a department that handles two murders a year, and we can focus all
of our attention. So we have to go with the cases that are most solvable and the leads that are that are most prevalent in that case file based on the review of the case file right now, and we have multiple other cases that are either have been filed and are in the adjudication process or on the verge of being filed, and we have to dedicate as much as we can equal time to each case. So on the surface, you might say, well, why in this case haven't you talked to the to the owner
of the manager to see if there's another possible motive. We would love to do that, Steve, but right now we have to focus on the leads that we have, exhaust those leads, and then maybe at some point determine is this case it are we out of leads and we have to move on, or do we go into a different area and look for a different motive.
We're not there yet, So the short answer is, after I just gave you a long answer, is is that we haven't had the time to look in the possibility of a different motive or a different reason in this case. And I want your audience to understand that that it's very frustrating for us too. I wish we only had one or two unsolved cases and we could focus all of our time on that. You know, So no, I totally understand that. I just it just as I sit and listen to you,
because you provide, as you've done many times. You provide these synopsis for us to read and look at it, and I'm I'm formulating questions, and you know it's it's I guess it's part of the investigator geek in me, investigative reporter geek in me. But I'm trying to I'm trying to figure out things along the way. And that's when you told me that the robbery
was a possible motive, but not a likely motive. I kept thinking, well, what the hell would somebody walk in there and shoot a thirteen year old boy and a nineteen year old young man execution style in a back room? To me, that seems like that was a could be a message too that maybe this was some sort of a I'm going to give you a complete hypothetical here, and I want to make a clear it's a hypothetical. Sure. One of the most frustrating things about investigating homicide cases. You never get
to talk to your victim. You know nothing about your victims, right right you. You gather information on your victims based on what other people tell you. We don't know what's going on in their lives because we can't. We can't interview them, so we have to We have to use other avenues to find out about our victims. Complicated with where this murder happened in an extremely high crime area with vastly different types of criminals, prostitution, narcotics sale.
Is it hypothetically possible that one of these kids got themselves into a mess with the drug dealer over narcotics. We have no evidence to indicate that, but it's a possibility because of the different types of criminal and the area that this occurred at, and what complicates a case like this more this is your classical like and I'll give you an example, high profile cases. Everybody wants to
help you out. People come out of the woodwork, to help you out a case like this, nobody wants to help you out because of fear, because of not being I want to be portrayed as a snitch because it's in a quote unquote ghetto area. No one don't. I don't want to say nobody cares. But the willingness to help out an investigation is much less in a case like this, and then complicate it with all the possibilities here.
I don't know how many murders that I've handled in the past where you have a theory, you have some evidence to back it up, not enough to go to the district attorney, and then when you ultimately solve it, it's it's completely different from the theory that you that you were working on. And that's why you know, and this may sound corny, is our job is corny as it sound, but it's the truth. It's to get to the truth, right, whether it exonerates the person we're looking at or whether it
focuses more more guilt on them. But the last thing I want to do as an investigator is prosecute an innocent person. Okay, hold that thought. When we come back, we'll wrap up with final thoughts. It's Detective Sean McCarthy at the La County Sheriff's Department Thumicide Bureau. This is unsolved with Steve Gregory on kf I AM six forty. You're listening to kf I AM sixty on demand kf I AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. I'm
Steve Gregory and this is unsolved. You can always contact the team on the iHeartRadio app through the talk back feature. Just press the red microphone and record your message, tip or show idea Welcome back. We're wrapping up the case of the murders of Miguel Perez, a thirteen year old Hispanic boy, and Jose Merlos, a nineteen year old young Hispanic man, both gunned down execution style in the back of a laundromat in the twelve thousand block of Long Beach
Boulevard in Lynnwood. It happened March eighth, nineteen ninety two, just after ten pm. And we're talking now with the cold case detective who has reopened the case, Sean McCarthy with the La County Sheriffs Department SUMASI Bureau, and
we're inside headquarters there in Monterey Park. Detective before the break, you're explaining the fact that you know, these cold cases are incredibly frustrating because you know, you can't talk to the victim anymore, you can't find out what happened, and you've got sometimes very limited information to go off of inside of a case file. In this particular case, you do have some interesting photos, you've got the notes, you actually got a person of interest. You're farther
along today then investigators were back in nineteen ninety two. Right, I believe we're a little farther along. It's bringing us back to particular people that were persons of interest in nineteen ninety Now, let's clarify because when you were presenting that before, a couple segments back on the person of interest. Let's see
if we can break that down and tighten it up a little bit. So you were called recently by someone that is a friend of you and another of your colleagues, your partner, Rich Tomlin, also a cold case detective. That person said that there was a conversation at a party, and what was overheard is that these two young people, before they were executed, had pled for their lives. Correct. That was a statement made during that conversation.
Between those individuals, which tells you as an investigator that that individual has to have some sort of intimate knowledge of this, and that can only happen one or two ways. They were there, or they know who was there and got firsthand information. And then there's the random possibility it was a rumor. You're operating on the first two that it's either someone who was in the room
or someone who knows someone who was in the room right right. And the reason I'm have a stronger feeling about that is is because one of the persons involved in the conversation was a person of interest in the original in the original case or the original investigation. Correct. Is that unusual when you've got someone that was a person of interest long time ago and now they're a person of
interest again. No, And let me explain. I would say seventy five percent of the cases re review, there's a there's a person of interest or persons of interests or in a lot of cases, viable suspects. But they just couldn't produce enough evidence to take it that. This took attorney or they did take it to the distric atorney into the district attorney didn't feel that there was enough to proceed with prosecution. So that person of interest is just glaring
you right in the face when you open the case file. And a lot of times when you reopen a case file, you're like, why didn't they pursue a little bit harder and dig harder. But each investigator in this room out here, almost ninety active investigators that's not the cold case detectives are handling around ten cases a year. And I remember when I was out there on
that floor. You have that case where that person of interest is staring you in the face, but you don't have enough to go to the district attorney, and you hang onto that case. You don't send it back to the cold case unit because you're gonna get back to it and you're going to solve that case. And then all of a sudden, fifteen years go by and you haven't really had a chance to go back to the case, and then
it goes back to the cold case unit. And I completely understand why you hang onto that case, but the reality is, sometimes maybe it would have been better to take that case to the cold case knowing that you weren't going to be able to get back to it because you're handling the new cases every every two weeks or so, that maybe the cold case detectives who may have had the time to work it when it was much more fresh and solvable, if you will. But I'm not a big believer in that old theory.
If you don't solve it in forty eight hours, they odds go way down. Sometimes, I believe in a lot of cases, time is your ally. And if you want me to explain why times your ally, I will, But I know you're running. That's another conversation for another day. But that's certainly interesting to me considering their TV shows called forty YEA and those shows
frustrate me because time is in many cases your ally. Well, you know, what is the threshold now that you have this person of interest and you seem pretty confident that this person can lead you somewhere, just based on your facial expression in the way talk about it, What threshold do you have to meet to get something like a wire tap for this person? Well, the threshold is that you exhaust all other investigative options because it's very intrusive when you're
you're listening to somebody's phone calls. So when you go to a judge with a wire tap after David, there is a list of things that he's going to ask you if you've done in your investigation that could have mitigated an intrusive wire tap. So the threshold is very high to get to get a wire tap, and that's that's why we're doing all these things in these cases. So if we do feel a wire tap is the next logical step, we can go to that judge and say, and we've done all these other investigative
options, got it well, Detective, Always a pleasure. Always appreciate your time and we're happy to help. I hope that this shakes some trees and gets you some information and helps you put this one to bed. Thanks, always a pleasure. Sean McCarthy, Detective, Ella County Sheriff's Departments, Thomas Sibereau Coldcase Unit, Thank you for your time, and that's going to do it unsolved as a production of the KFI News Department for iHeartMedia, Los Angeles.
Robin Bertolucci Program Director Chris Little, news Director. The program is produced by Steve Gregory and Jacob Gonzalez. Our field engineer is Tony Sorrentino. Our technical director is David Callaway. Our digital producer for this episode is Michelle Cube. Our social media producer for this episode is Lena Chappelle. Coming up, it's Coast to Coast, But first, this is kf I AM six forty time Now for a news update. Kf I AM sixty on demand