Trial Set for New Mexico Murder-for-Hire Plot

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1:01on purchases of $999 or more. Labor Day deals are on now at lows, in store and online. Vela through 960, while supplies last. Selection various by location. C-Lows.com for more details. This is Ashley Akinati from the Almost Amos Podcast. You ever notice you and your spouse keep saying, we need to get away, but you never actually plan anything. That was us until we did something fun and spontaneous. We went to resortpass.com. There are hundreds of hotel resorts, pools and spots and private beaches that you can enjoy. You can spend the day at a luxury resort, pool, spa, massage, without booking an overnight stay. And listen, I may have only been like 15 minutes from home, but it felt like it was a whole different world. And I'm thinking, this is exactly what I needed. So just go to resortpass.com, choose your resort, choose your day, luxury, resort, day passes, start at just $1,500. Once you post your daycation, people are going to ask where you are.

2:03Go to resortpass.com, slash almost famous, and use the promo code almost famous to get $20 off when you spend $100. That's code almost famous at resortpass.com, slash almost famous. Imagine confessing to a double homicide, right? Yeah. Like detailing exactly how you pull the trigger, describing the specific weapon you used. And then, and this is the crazy part, standing in front of a judge the very next day, and pleading not guilty. Yeah, it sounds like absolute madness. It sounds like a glitch in the matrix. Like how does that even happen? I mean, to the average person, it makes zero sense. But in the American Justice System, it's actually standard operating procedure. Which is wild to think about. And you know, that's exactly what we were looking at today. We're diving into a case that perfectly illustrates this massive, often baffling gap between committing a brutal crime and actually proving that crime in a court of law. Right, because those are two very different things. Exactly. So for you listening, we were pulling our information from a really detailed news report.

3:03It was published on August 17th, 2026 by Jamie Birch. That's for ABC7 Newsroom. Yeah, ABC7, the local KBI affiliate covering Clovis, New Mexico. And you know, you might see a headline like, Teen Distant Trial and alleged murder for higher-flot and just scroll right past it. It happens all the time. We're so desensitized. We really are. It is incredibly easy to let these stories just kind of wash over you as like another piece of dark noise on the internet. Yeah. But our mission today is to do the exact opposite. I need to hit the brakes. Yes. Slow way down. We're going to dissect the specific anatomy of this crime, understand the timeline of the investigation, and decode the incredibly complex legal realities of a case where, and this is just heavy as sun allegedly plotted the execution of his own parents. And you know, the surface details of a news report like this, they're really just designed to give you the basic facts. Just the who, what, when, where? Exactly. But they leave out the actual mechanics of how a tragedy like this operates, you know,

4:04both practically and legally. Because when you dig into the sequence of events here, you realize this case is just this chaotic collision of modern technology, adolescent psychology, and rural infrastructure, honestly. OK, let's unpack this. We have to start by kind of grounding ourselves in the physical reality of what actually happened. Because examining the raw human cost, I think that's how we understand the sheer force of what the justice system is even attempting to address here. It's the foundation of the whole case. Right. So December 15, 2025, police respond to a home on York Drive in Clovis, New Mexico. And inside, they discover 58-year-old Oscar Steve Muaynos and 71-year-old Dina Muaynos. And the detail here is just horrific. It really is. They had been shot while lying in their own bed. And you know, just think of it the bedroom for a second. It is universally considered our ultimate sanctuary, right? Oh, absolutely. It's the one place you're supposed to be safe. You lock the doors, you turn off the lights, and your brain just finally downshifts

5:04into this state of total vulnerability. So to have violence breach that highly specific space, it completely shatters that baseline assumption of safety that we all rely on just to, you know, function as humans. Yeah, the location of the attack speaks volumes about the vulnerability of the victims. And then the immediate aftermath, while that speaks to the extreme physical devastation of the crime itself. Which was catastrophic. It was. And what's fascinating here is, and I mean, fascinating purely from the perspective of, like, medical logistics and forensic reality, how the geographical realities of Eastern New Mexico really dictated the response. Because it's pretty isolated out there, right? Very. So Dina Munoz was pronounced dead at the scene, and clinically, that tells us the trauma was instantly catastrophic. Meaning there was nothing paramedics could even attempt to do. Exactly. It likely involved the brainstem or just a massive disruption of the central nervous system. It renders any recessative efforts totally futile before the EMTs even walk through the door. Oh, wow. But Oscar was different.

6:06Right. Oscar Munoz actually survived the initial impact. The report notes he was transported to a hospital in Lubbock, Texas, where he ultimately succumbed to his injuries. And wait, Clovis to Lubbock, that's roughly 100 miles across the state line, right? Right around there, yes. So if someone is suffering from a gunshot wound to the head, they do not just throw them in the back of an ambulance for a two hour drive down the highway. That's not how that works. No, absolutely not. That requires an entirely different level of medical mobilization. And it requires an aeromedical launch. A helicopter mid-evec. Exactly. In trauma medicine, there is this concept called the golden hour. It's that critical window of time right after a traumatic injury where prompt surgical treatment offers the highest likelihood of actually preventing death. And Clovis just didn't have the facilities for that. Well, Clovis is a smaller community. Local hospitals and rural areas, they are equipped to stabilize patients, sure. But they generally do not have level one trauma designations.

7:06Right, they don't have a team of brain surgeons just sitting around at 3am. Exactly. They do not have dedicated neurosurgical teams scrubbing in on a 247 basis. And a gunshot wound to the head causes secondary injuries. Like what? Like massive swelling of the brain tissue. Intracranial hematomas bleeding inside the skull. That will kill a patient just as surely as the bullet itself if the pressure isn't relieved surgically fast. So the local medics get on scene, they assess Oscar. Yeah. And as instantly, they can't handle this in house. Yep, they recognize Oscar needs a neurosurgeon immediately. And that triggers the request for the Medevac helicopter. But flying a patient with a traumatic brain injury, that introduces its own mechanical nightmare. Really, because of the altitude. Yes, exactly. Changes an altitude affect barometric pressure. And when you change the pressure around a body that already has massive swelling inside a closed skull, it can severely exacerbate that intracranial pressure. Oh, man, that is incredibly tense.

8:07It's a chaos environment. The flight medics are managing a portable ventilator. They're administering hyper-osmolar therapy like Manitol to literally draw fluid out of the brain. All while flying. All while strapped into the back of the helicopter, traveling at 150 miles per hour toward Texas. The sheer volume of human effort, burning jet fuel, and massive medical resources deployed in those early morning hours just to try and outrun the damage inflicted by a single bullet is staggering. It really is, it's this massive chaotic struggle for survival sprawling across two states. And it violently contrasts with the alleged motive behind the whole thing. It does. It's a very jarring pivot. Right, because this chaotic reality of the medical response naturally forces us to look at the people who allegedly set that chaos in motion. The suspects. The suspects. So the report names Darren Munoz, the son and step son of the victims, and his friend Julio Zamora. The report states Darren orchestrated this plot because he believed he would receive a large inheritance upon his parents' deaths.

9:08And Zamora was the hired gun? Yes, Zamora agreed to carry out the shootings for a cut of that money. So what does this all mean? When I see a teenager jump from wanting an inheritance to actually ordering a hit on his own parents, my first thought is just clinical psychopathy. That's a very common assumption. Right, you just assume they must lack the empathy gene entirely. That their brain is structurally incapable of feeling for another human being. It is tempting to label it psychopathy, because it gives us a clean clinical box to put the horror into. But the psychology of a murder for hire plot, especially one orchestrated by adolescents, it often operates on a completely different mechanism. Really? If it's not psychopathy, what is it? Well, true psychopathy is actually relatively rare. What we are likely seeing here is profound compartmentalization combined with the notoriously underdeveloped risk assessment centers of the adolescent brain. Break that down for me. How does compartmentalization turn into a literal murder plot? Think about a standard domestic homicide.

10:10The violence is usually proximate and emotional. Like a heat of the moment thing. Yes, it is born of rage, jealousy, or just a sudden loss of control. The perpetrator is directly engaging with the victim physically and emotionally, but a murder for hire is inherently transactional. Oh, I see. It's like a business deal. Exactly. By outsourcing the physical act of pulling the trigger to a third party, in this case, his friends Amora Daron creates a massive psychological buffer for himself. He doesn't have to get his hands dirty. He doesn't have to look his parents in the eye. He doesn't have to hold the weapon. He effectively reduces his parents from flesh and blood human beings into abstract obstacle standing between him and a financial payout. It is treating real life exactly like a video game. You assign a mission to an NPC. Someone else eliminates the target. And you just claim the loot at the end. That's a really apt comparison. Right. Because the physical reality of the blood, the trauma, the mid-evac helicopters we just talked about, that is entirely disconnected from the cold, abstract

11:12negotiation they had beforehand. And the video game analogy is highly functional here because it highlights a massive failure of consequence mapping. What do you mean by consequence mapping? So the prefrontal cortex of the human brain, which is responsible for understanding long-term consequences, impulse control, complex decision making, that part of the brain isn't fully developed until the mid-20s. All right. Teenagers basically walking around with half finished brains. In a sense, yes. When you combine an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex with the intense psychological distance of a transactional plot, you get teenagers who are capable of discussing the murder of family members as if they are negotiating the price of a used car. It's terrifying. And for Zamora, the psychological distance is already built in. Because they aren't his parents. Exactly. These are not his parents. The victims are presented to him purely as a commodity. It's a job that comes with a paycheck. OK. But the terrifying part is that this wasn't just some sudden fleeting impulse.

12:13Like they didn't just get mad one night and do this. According to the arrest affidavit, this compartmentalized fantasy went on for a really long time. The timeline of the planning is one of the most chilling aspects. Yeah. The investigators noted that Darren and get this. Two friends had been discussing killing the couple for several weeks or months. Weeks or months? That is a massive window of time. Right. They had an extended runway to just back out, to wake up, and realize the sheer magnitude of what they were discussing. And instead, they moved forward into actual operational planning. They crossed the line from fantasy to logistics. Yeah. And the blueprint they landed on was for Zamora to enter the house through the garage and shoot the couple while they slept. And the garage entry is a highly critical detail here. Because it means they didn't have to break a window or anything. It signifies the exploitation of insider knowledge, a home security relies entirely on the perimeter holding. When the architect of the plot actually lives inside the home, they can bypass that perimeter effortlessly.

13:15So Darren probably just gave him the code. Darren likely provided a keypad code, left a specific door unlocked, or disabled the security system from the inside. He weaponized his intimate knowledge of his parents' habits and the physical layout of their sanctuary. Wow. And they didn't just plan the entry. They micromanaged the execution in real time, like the affidavit revealed messages between Darren and Zamora, showing Darren actively updating his hired gunman on exactly when his parents would be returning home. Hey, it's Tories Spelling. Actress, podcast host, and mom. Back to school may add another layer of busy, but I don't cut corners when it comes to my family and nutrition. Good nutrition is necessary for learning activity and development and nutrient dense foods like protein packed lean beef provide key nutrients to fuel the whole family. Visit backtoschoolcalifornia.com for money saving offers on beef, delicious recipes, and more. Back to school nutrition starts with backtoschoolcalifornia.com.

14:16This is Ashley Akinetti from the Almost Amos Podcast. You ever notice you and your spouse keep saying, we need to get away, but you never actually plan anything. That was us until we did something fun and spontaneous. We went to resortpass.com. There are hundreds of hotel resorts, pools and spots and private beaches that you can enjoy. You can spend the day at a luxury resort, pool, spa, massage, without booking an overnight stay. And listen, I may have only been 15 minutes from home, but it felt like it was a whole different world. And I'm thinking this is exactly what I needed. So just go to resortpass.com, choose your resort, choose your day, luxury resort day passes, start at just $1,500. Once you post your daycation, people are gonna ask where you are. Go to resortpass.com slash almost famous and use the promo code almost famous to get $20 off when you spend $100. That's code almost famous at resortpass.com slash almost famous.

15:16I'm Cassandra, a licensed Ralph's pharmacist passionate about helping patients navigate their GOP1 journeys. Whether you're just getting started and need help finding ways to save money on your GOP1 prescription or are looking for daily support for side effects, we're here to help you because your health journey continues beyond the prescription. And so does our care. At Ralph's Pharmacy, you can expect real people with real answers for your GOP1 journey, restrictions and exclusions apply, seaside or the pharmacy for details. And if we connect this to the bigger picture of modern criminal investigations, the digital footprint left by these suspects is astounding. Astounding is one word for it. It's also just unbelievably stupid. While we are looking at the juxtaposition of mundane everyday technology being used to facilitate a profoundly brutal act. Right, and here's where it gets really interesting, or rather where the sheer hubris becomes unbelievable to me. They are plotting literally the most serious crime on the books and they leave a literal timestamps text message

16:19trail on cellular networks. It defies logic. Going back to that video game mentality, it's as if they genuinely believed the digital world didn't actually intersect with physical reality. Yeah. Or maybe they thought that deleting a text thread actually makes it vanish forever. It exposes a massive fundamental gap in their understanding of digital permanence. Because nothing is ever really deleted, is it? No, almost never. Most people, especially digital natives who grew up with disappearing messages on apps like Snapchat, they operate under this intense illusion of impermanence. They truly believe their digital communications are ephemeral. Here today, gone in 10 seconds. Exactly. But the forensic reality is the exact opposite. When you send a text message, it doesn't just travel magically from your phone to your friend's phone through the air. Right. It goes to a tower first. It pings a local cell tower. It routes through servers owned by your telecommunications provider. It gets logged with highly specific metadata, including time, date, and geolocation.

17:20And only then does it transmit to the receiver. So even if you delete the message off your own phone, the provider still has the receipts. Absolutely. The metadata remains on the provider's servers. And even on the physical phone itself, hitting delete doesn't actually wipe the data from the hard drive, does it? Almost never. When you delete a file on a smartphone, the operating system doesn't erase the actual zeros and ones that make up that text message. What does it do that? It simply deletes the directory pathway that tells the phone's processor where to find that file. It basically marks that specific sector of the flash memory as, quote, available to be overwritten. Oh, I see. So it's basically taking the label off the file folder, but leaving the papers inside. That is a perfect analogy. Until you download enough new data to physically overwrite that exact sector of memory, the original text message is still sitting there in what forensic analysts call Slackspace. And cops can get into that Slackspace easily. Very easily. Law enforcement uses physical extraction devices like celebrate machines.

18:21These devices bypass the phone's operating system entirely and read the raw flash memory of the device, basically resurrecting those, quote, unquote, deleted messages with absolute ease. So by texting these real time updates about when his parents were getting home, they were meticulously documenting their own conspiracy for the police. They were handing the prosecution a step-by-step guide to the crime. They were essentially live tweeting their own murder plot. And because they provided law enforcement with this perfectly documented roadmap, the fallout was remarkably swift. It usually is when the digital evidence is that loud. Right. So the crime occurred in the early hours of December 15. And Zamora was arrested later that very same day while leaving his own home. Like he didn't even make it 24 hours. The speed of that arrest implies that the investigative pivot from analyzing the crime scene to hunting down the suspects was nearly instantaneous. They didn't waste any time. No. The police likely secured the victim's phones right away, or they found Darren's phone, saw the incoming or outgoing

19:22communications, and moved immediately to secure Zamora before any physical evidence could be destroyed, or he could flee the jurisdiction. OK. So upon his arrest, the case escalated immediately. The report states that police said Zamora outright confessed to the crime, specifically admitting to shooting both victims in the head. A full, detailed confession. Yes. But there is a glaring contradiction here that I really need your help making sense of, because it's breaking my brain a little bit. When Zamora was taken into custody, officers found he was carrying a privately manufactured handgun without a serial number. We usually call those ghost guns, right? Yes. That is the colloquial term for them, ghost guns. OK. So if Zamora went through the immense trouble of acquiring a highly specific, completely untraceable weapon to ensure he couldn't be linked to the crime, why would he immediately confess to the police the moment they put handcuffs on him? It's a fascinating paradox. Right. We have this high-level operational security

20:23with the untraceable weapon, and it completely clashes with zero-level operational security, with a text messages, and the immediate confession. It just doesn't track for me. The contradiction you're pointing out, it's actually the absolute hallmark of an amateur stepping into the reality of severe violence. Let's look at the mechanics of the weapon first, because that highlights the level of premeditation. OK. Let's do it. What exactly goes into getting a ghost gun? Well, a ghost gun is not something you just pick up at a local sporting goods store. They are typically assembled from kids purchased online. The buyer receives what is known in the industry as an 80% lower receiver. 80%. Meaning it's not finished. Correct. Under federal law, the lower receiver is the actual part of the firearm that is legally regulated and serialized. It's the chassis of the gun. But if it is only 80% complete, meaning it still requires the buyer to use a drill press or a CNC mill to hollow out the trigger pocket and drill the pinholes themselves. The ATF does not classify it as a firearm. Wait, really? Really?

21:24Legally, it is classified simply as a piece of metal or polymer. So anyone can just buy this 80% block of metal without a background check? Precisely. You buy the 80% receiver online. You buy the jig and the drill bits, and you manufacture the rest of the weapon yourself in your garage. And because you manufactured it for personal use, you are not legally required to stamp a serial number on it. That is a massive loophole. It is. This means if you leave that weapon at a crime scene, law enforcement cannot run the serial number through the ATF's National Tracing Center to find out who originally purchased it from a dealer. There's no paper trail. So acquiring and building one of these ghost guns requires research, mechanical effort, and a very deliberate intent to bypass law enforcement tracking. It is a highly sophisticated premeditated act. It takes work, which makes the confession even more baffling to me. You build an untraceable gun to get away with it, and you just tell the cops everything anyway. You are looking at the exact moment, the psychological compartmentalization we discussed earlier shatters completely.

22:26The video game reality broke. Exactly. Building a gun from a kit in your garage and sending text messages about a plan, that all happens in the abstract. It feels like a movie. It doesn't feel real. Right, it's just logistic. But the physiological response to actually pulling a trigger is entirely different. The sheer volume of a gunshot in an enclosed bedroom, the visual reality of catastrophic head trauma, the smell of the gunpowder. It floods the human nervous system with massive amounts of cortisol and adrenaline. It's a century overload. Complete overload. When Zamora was arrested hours later, he wasn't the cold, calculating hitman from the text messages anymore. He was a teenager, crashing from a massive adrenaline spike, likely profoundly traumatized by his own actions. This is probably terrified. Absolutely. So when he's placed in a tiny interrogation room with experienced hardened detectives applying pressure, the psychological burden of holding that secret simply crushes him. The fantasy evaporates, and the confession just spills out as a release valve

23:26for the immense internal pressure he's feeling. Wow, that makes it chilling kind of sense, honestly. The physical reality of the violence destroyed the illusion they had built to protect themselves from their own conscience. It always does. Now, in a television show, the confession is the climax, right? The suspect admits it, the handcuffs click, and the credits roll. Job done. But in reality, the confession is just the opening bell for the actual legal process. Yeah. And this brings us to the slow grinding wheels the justice system. Let's look at the supersonic charges here, because they reveal exactly how the law dissect a conspiracy like this. The charges tell the story of who did what? Right. So Zamora, the alleged gunman, is charged with two counts of first degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder. But Darren Munoz, the alleged architect who didn't even pull the trigger, is facing two counts of first degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, A&D criminal solicitation. That extra charge is key. Yeah, why does Darren get hit with an extra charge of criminal solicitation when they were both in

24:28on the plot together? It comes down to identifying the absolute genesis of the crime. The law wants to punish not just the act of murder, but the specific acts of bringing that murder into existence in the first place. OK, so what exactly is solicitation then? Criminal solicitation is the legal term for the ask. It is the explicit act of requesting, encouraging, or hiring another person to commit a felony. Darren is charged with solicitation because he is the one who allegedly originated the concept and approached Zamora, introducing the financial incentive. He sparked the whole thing and the conspiracy charge. That's the agreement that follows the ask. Correct. The solicitation happens. The moment Darren says, I will pay you to kill my parents. The conspiracy happens. The moment Zamora says, yes, I will do it. Got it. So they both get conspiracy because they both agreed? Yes, but furthermore, conspiracy requires an overt act in furtherance of the plan. Just talking about it isn't always enough. You have to take a step toward doing it. Like milling the 80% lower receiver to build a ghost gun.

25:31Exactly. Or sending the text messages, coordinating the arrival times. And once that conspiracy is formed and acted upon, the law applies the principle of vicarious liability. Meaning what? Meaning, if you solicit a murder and enter into a conspiracy to see it through, you are held equally responsible for the ultimate outcome, even if you weren't in the room. Darren is facing two counts of first degree murder because the law views his planning as the direct, proximate cause of the deaths. It doesn't matter who physically held the weapon. OK, here's the detail that truly made me stop reading the report and do a double take. The article clearly states that police have a full confession from Zamora. He admitted to shooting them in the head. Yet a few paragraphs down, it notes that both defendants have pleaded not guilty. Yes, that always confuses people. If I am the listener, I am screaming at my steering wheel right now. How does a person provide a highly detailed confession to the police, get caught with a murder weapon, and then stand up in a courtroom and plead not guilty?

26:31It is easily the most common point of friction for people observing the justice system from the outside. But it is deeply embedded in the mechanics of constitutional law. You really have to separate factual reality from a legal procedure. OK, help me separate them. A not guilty plea at an initial arrangement is very rarely a claim of factual innocence. It is not Zamora standing there saying, I wasn't there and I didn't shoot them. I always think of a not guilty plea as putting a heavy deadbolt on your front door. Hey, it's Tories Spelling. Actress, podcast host, and mom. Back to school may add another layer of busy, but I don't cut corners when it comes to my family and nutrition. Good nutrition is necessary for learning activity and development and nutrient dense foods like protein packed lean beef provide key nutrients to fuel the whole family. Visit backtoschoolcalifornia.com for money saving offers on beef, delicious recipes, and more. Back to school nutrition starts with back to schoolcalifornia.com.

27:31This is Ashley Akinetti from the Almost Amos Podcast. You ever notice you and your spouse keep saying, we need to get away, but you never actually plan anything. That was us until we did something fun and spontaneous. We went to resortpass.com. There are hundreds of hotel resorts, pools and spots and private beaches that you can enjoy. You can spend the day at a luxury resort, pool, spa, massage, without booking an overnight stay. Listen, I may have only been 15 minutes from home, but it felt like it was a whole different world. I'm thinking this is exactly what I needed. So just go to resortpass.com, choose your resort, choose your day, luxury resort day passes, start at just $1,500. Once you post your daycation, people are going to ask where you are. Go to resortpass.com, slash almost famous, and use the promo code almost famous to get $20 off when you spend $100. That's code almost famous at resortpass.com slash almost famous.

28:33I'm Ben. As a licensed Ralph's pharmacist, I'm committed to helping you choose the right vaccines for you and your family. Whether you have questions about the flu, RSV, or COVID vaccines, our team is ready to go above and beyond for you when it comes to providing personalized care and seasonal vaccine education. No appointment needed. At Ralph's, we're here to look out for you. Restrictions and exclusions may apply, seasite, or pharmacy for details. It doesn't mean the police can't eventually get inside your house. It just means you are forcing them to go get a warrant, bring the breaching tools, and legally prove they have the right to cross the threshold. You aren't just leaving the door wide open for them. That is a brilliant way to frame it. Pleading not guilty is a procedural mechanism that invokes the defendant's constitutional rights. It forces the state to prove every single element of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt. Because if you just plead guilty on day one. If a defense attorney allows their client to plead guilty at the very first hearing,

29:33they surrender absolutely all their leverage before they have even seen the state's evidence against them, it would be malpractice. But what leverage do they actually have if there is a taped confession? The leverage to investigate the investigation itself. The defense attorney's job isn't necessarily to prove their client is an innocent angel. It is to ensure the state played by the rules when they gathered their evidence. I like checking for loopholes. Exactly. How has that confession obtained? Was Amora properly read his Miranda warnings? Was he under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time he waived his rights? Did the police use coercive interrogation tactics that violate the due process clause? And if they did. If the defense can file a motion to suppress the confession and win that motion, that confession cannot be used at trial. It vanishes from the record. The not guilty plea buys the defense team the time they desperately need to scrutinize the state's work. And buying time seems to be the operative phrase here. Let's look at the timeline. The crime happened in December of 2025. Both suspects were indicted by a grand jury shortly after,

30:36and a judge ordered Amora held without bond, deeming him a danger to the community. Standard procedure for a double homicide. But the trial date. The report notes the trial is scheduled for June 21, 2027. That is an 18-month gap between the arrests and the actual trial. If they have text messages, a ghost gun, and a confession, what on earth are the lawyers doing for a year and a half? They're waiting through the discovery phase. And the sheer volume of data generated by a modern homicide investigation is staggering. 18 months might seem glacial to the public, but in the context of a double homicide with multiple defendants, it is actually a remarkably standard pace. Walk me through what takes so long. Is it just court bureaucracy? It's part bureaucracy, but mostly it is forensic science and constitutional due process. Let's start with the digital evidence we talked about earlier. The text messages. Right. We talked about celebrate machines, extracting data from phones. Law enforcement doesn't just pull the five text messages related to the murder. They pull the entire forensic image of the phone.

31:38Every single thing on the device. Everything. We are talking about tens of thousands of text messages, terabytes of video data, years of internet search histories, and low-patient services data going back months. And someone has to read all of that. The defense has the constitutional right to review every single bite of that data, to see if there is exculpatory evidence, evidence that might point to an alternate suspect, or mitigate their client's culpability in some way. Reviewing that data takes teams of paralegals and attorneys hundreds of hours. OK, that makes sense. And what about the ghost gun? Is that slow things down? Massively. The ballistics testing on a privately manufactured firearm is particularly complex. Because there is no serial number, the prosecution has to rely entirely on two-mark analysis to link the gun to the bullets. How does that work? When a bullet travels down the barrel of a gun, the microscopic imperfections in the metal scratch unique striations onto the bullet. It's like a fingerprint. The climb lab has to test fire the recovered ghost gun,

32:39recover those pristine bullets from a water tank, and put them under a comparison microscope next to the deformed bullets pulled from the victims or the drywall at the scene. They're looking to match those microscopic scratches, exactly. Yes. In the defense isn't just going to take the state's word for it, they will hire their own ballistics expert to review the state's findings, which requires scheduling independent lab time and generating competing reports. That takes months. And then you have to factor in the psychological evaluations, too. Precisely. In a case involving young defendants facing life sentences, deep psychiatric evaluations are practically mandatory. Forensic psychologists will conduct days of interviews, administer standardized personality tests, and review educational and medical records. To see if there are even competence to stand trial. Exactly. And to evaluate their state of mind at the time of the offense. If the defense plans to argue diminished capacity or leverage the adolescent brain development research we discussed earlier to avoid a maximum sentence, those expert reports take months to generate and litigate.

33:43Add in the fact there are two separate defense teams, the prosecution team and a single judge, and just finding days where all four parties are available for pretrial motion hearings becomes a total scheduling nightmare. It's a logistical gridlock. It really reframes our expectation of swift justice. Like the violence itself takes seconds. The digital text takes milliseconds to send. The arrest takes few hours. But the legal reckoning requires years of microscopic analysis. It is a massive heavy machine. It really is. So as we wrap up our analysis of this report, let's just trace the tragic arc we have uncovered today. We started in what should have been the absolute safety of a quiet bedroom on York Drive in Clovis, New Mexico. And we saw it suddenly transformed into a chaotic trauma scene requiring high altitude medevacs. A complete violation of sanctuary. We looked into the terrifying compartmentalization of a son motivated by an inheritance and a friend who viewed human life as a simple financial transaction. We saw the contradiction of teenagers sophisticated enough

34:45to build untraceable ghost guns in a garage, but arrogant enough to leave a permanent digital trail on their cell phones. The amateur meeting the professional. And now we see them locked in this legal holding pattern, just waiting for a courtroom in the summer of 2027, where the ultimate consequences will finally be weighed. It is a devastating sequence of events. It highlights the fragility of our personal sanctuaries and the heavy methodical machinery required to seek justice once those sanctuaries are breached. It's a lot to process. It is. But before we close, there is one subtle detail buried in the text of the arrest affidavit summary that I really think requires our final attention. Oh, what's that? It leaves a deeply unsettling thread hanging loose in this entire narrative. What detail is that? It is a single sentence regarding the pre-meditation phase. The article notes that Darren Munoz and TWA friends had discussed killing the couple for several weeks or months. Wait, two friends. I completely bypassed that when we were talking about the timeline earlier. So there was a third person sitting in on these conversations.

35:45According to the police summary of the affidavit, yes. There was a third party involved in the digital discussions leading up to the crime. Yet, as we look at the grand jury indictments and the upcoming trial docket, only Julio Zamora and Darren Munoz are facing charges. It raises a profound question about culpability. What happened to that second frame? That is genuinely haunting. Because we talked earlier about the expectation of safety in your own home, it turns out the fatal threat wasn't a stranger breaking down the front door in the middle of the night. The threat was a conversation happening over text messages for months, involving multiple teenagers, slowly dismantling the foundation of that fortress from the inside out. Exactly. So for you, the listener, the fate of that third friend is something to ponder long after this deep dive ends. Where exactly is the legal and moral line between participating in a dark hypothetical conversation for months and actually being culpable when your friends finally decide to load a weapon and pull the trigger?

36:46Did they think it was a joke? Right. Did the second friend think it was just morbid, edgy joking? Did they get terrified and walk away when the ghost gun was actually purchased? Or did they just get incredibly lucky that they weren't the specific friend Darren formally offered the money to? It's a chilling thought. It leaves you wondering how many dark conversations are happening on phones right now, hovering just one bad decision away from a tragedy. Thank you for joining us as we unpacked this incredible case. We appreciate you slowing down and taking the time to truly understand the mechanics behind the headlines. Stay curious, stay informed, and we will catch you on the next deep dive. Hey, it's Tories Spelling, actress, podcast host, and mom. Back to school may add another layer of busy, but I don't cut corners when it comes to my family and nutrition. Good nutrition is necessary for learning activity and development and nutrient dense foods like protein pack, lean beef, provide key nutrients to fuel the whole family. Visit back to schoolcalifornia.com for money saving offers on beef, delicious recipes, and more.

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