A young girl, strangled and discarded on the banks of the Rio Ruidoso. A young boy from her class named Matt Surratt, wandering on the side of the road in wet pants, crying. A rural community, torn apart and scared. A pair of Katina’s basketball shoes, cast aside and never worn again.
This is the story of a long-forgotten 1988 cold case in Hondo, NM, a remote agricultural community in the beautiful Hondo River Valley, which has seen a disproportionately large number of murders per capita compared to other towns of its size. In the 80s, Hondo was tiny, and its citizens felt safe, though probably erroneously so. They certainly didn’t expect anything to happen to Katina, a popular high schooler on her way to state for basketball. Katina was thought to have a bright future ahead of her. Who would want to take that away from her, and why?
It was a chilly day in February, 1988 when Katina’s basketball coach showed up at her house to take her to Cloudcroft to collect an award. The door was ajar, and a single basketball shoe was in the hall, with no sign of Katina. A reliable sports fanatic and athlete, it was not like Katina to stand anyone up. Her coach was immediately alarmed.
Search parties discovered her dead on the banks of the nearby Rio Ruidoso a day later. There were signs of a long, drawn-out fight.
Five days after her discovery in the Rio Ruidoso, the Lincoln County News reported her death had been ruled a homicide. Her autopsy revealed she had been killed by strangulation and drowning. In June 1988, Matt Surratt stood trial for her murder…and was found not guilty. After all, he had grown up with her and even lived down the street from her. He had assisted in her search the night she was missing.
People all over Hondo stood up for Matt, claiming that he and Katina had been friends since they could walk and he would never do such a thing. But the evidence against him is concerning. The day Katina died, Matt was spotted on the side of the road, crying, his pants soaked past the knee as if he had been in the river. His neighbors asked if he wanted to ride with them into nearby Ruidoso and he said no. He said he had animals to feed on his family’s farm.
Finding information on this case is not easy. There is scarcely anything online. Ruidoso Insider archives offer some information as does the book The Enchantment of New Mexico by Dixie Boyle. Boyle had been Katina’s teacher, and frequently visits her grave, though she misspells her former student’s name as Katrina in the book. Boyle shares that Matt Surratt was found with soaking pants not far from the river the night Katina was killed and police believed he knew more than he would admit.
Another suspect that is not so easy to find in archived papers, but that Boyle discusses, is a teacher at Hondo High School who taught everyone a self-defense class, which included the very stranglehold used to kill Katina. Maybe this teacher did it. Or maybe he taught Matt Surratt how to kill Katina. Or maybe someone else entirely killed her, but this person has managed to escape detection for nearly three decades now.
So where is Matt Surratt now? He goes by Charles Alfonso Soto and lives in Alamogordo. He has been in and out of a drug rehab program. Before coming into the program, he spent some time homeless in the mountains, eating rats and squirrels and earning the nickname Squirrel. People in the program with him state he had been on drugs since he was a teenager, but he keeps his involvement with the homicide case secret. He is married to the president of a humane animal control shelter.
It would appear that Matt Surratt could not live without changing his name – either because of harassment or because of guilt. If he is innocent, then I sincerely hope that he has managed to recover from his addiction and live without too much flack over his dark past in Hondo. But if he is guilty, I can only hope that he regrets ending a sixteen-year-old girl’s life every day.
But OK, what about this teacher? Why did he quit and move to another state after Katina died? Could it be a sign of guilt? Or could it be that he was being harassed by the locals, even though he was innocent of the crime? Hondo is a small, tightknit town and outsiders are not always welcome. An outsider who may have murdered a beloved local teen girl would be crucified. I have not been able to locate his name or where he is.
The thing is, from the very little evidence available online, I don’t see anything tying this teacher to the scene. There is more tying Matt to the scene – wet pants, he was in the vicinity of the river, weird behavior, etc. The chokehold used to kill Katina was taught by this teacher to students recently for self-defense purposes, meaning that Matt knew it just as well as the teacher did. So that chokehold is not a sign the teacher is guilty. Moving away looks bad, sure, but I know how unwelcoming people can be in these small towns. A lot of teachers tend to teach in rural towns and then move on after a few years, too.
Sources
https://www.facebook.com/charles.soto.773
https://www.whitepages.com/name/Matt-Surratt
http://newmexicomercury.com/cgi-sys/suspendedpage.cgi
https://newspaperarchive.com/carrizozo-lincoln-county-news-aug-18-1988-p-1/