Quemado is a tiny village in the middle of windswept plains and knobby pink rock formations in western New Mexico. It is about 125 miles south of Albuquerque and an hour east from Springerville, AZ on Highway 60. Not much is there, beyond some decrepit adobes and trailers, a dingy mechanic’s garage, a gas station, and a motel and restaurant with disappointing green chile cheeseburgers. There is a local school that has combined kindergarten through twelfth grade in one building, serving ranch kids from as far away as Datil. Quemado Peak towers over the town; Black Peak looms in the distance. It is a desolate area, but also a pretty one, populated mostly by ranchers, homesteaders, and old, retired hippies. It’s also a popular elk hunting destination.
With this picture in mind, you can probably imagine the crime rate in this town. Most people leave their front doors unlocked so their friends and family can pop in as they please. Locking car doors is unheard of. Everybody knows everybody. People offer languid waves as they pass you on the road and they will say hi in stores even if they don’t know you. There is a sense of being in the Wild West in this empty landscape, dotted by cattle and horses. It’s certainly not unusual for people to be heavily armed here, but it’s usually to protect themselves from the black bears that rifle through trashcans, the mountain lions that scream chillingly at night, and the Mexican wolves that stalk calves. In the grocery store, the post office, and the gas station, local ranchers gather to sip coffee and talk about branding, the weather, and memories from long ago.
But what people don’t talk about is the multitude of mid-1990s homicides that shocked and terrified this village. The killings happened between 1995 and 1998. Over that three-year span, six people were murdered – two couples and two men. There were fears of a serial killer and people thought they knew who it might be. Neighbors began to suspect neighbors. Finally, two of these homicides were officially solved, and there is a strong suspect in another one of the cases. Turns out there wasn’t a serial killer after all. But questions still remain about these murders, and the illusion of safety in the small village has been forever tainted.
When I first learned of these crimes, it was 2004 and I was ten. My family was homesteading a very remote hundred-acre property in Catron County. The killers hadn’t been caught in several of the cases at that time, so many people still believed that the murders were all connected. My mom carried a pistol on her at all times and made me hide whenever someone unknown approached our remote property.
Now I can’t deny the memories of a dark melancholy that hung over the town, now that the veneer of childhood is gone. I can’t deny the horrible stories I heard and the tragic way things turned out for some of the people I knew there. Overdoses and suicides claimed many people I had once laughed and joked around with. A woman I knew nearly beat her stepson to death and is now serving 40 years in the Hobby Pod for violent criminals in Huntsville, TX. A teenage girl tried to cut her own breasts off to stop unwanted advances from her stepdad.
There are also stories of horrific happenings here that cannot be found in the papers. The early-2000s hanging suicide of a Pie Town man was believed to really be a murder over an amorous love triangle; people claim that there was a bite mark on the victim’s face that police conveniently ignored. The Heberer and Lorius bodies are thought to be buried somewhere within 25 miles of the town, and their 1937 quadruple homicide may be related to a shot-up car found near Largo Creek on the way to Quemado Lake. A woman I used to babysit for owned an extremely haunted house that many people thought was creepy. When I saw the ghost of a young girl with long blonde hair in her bathroom, she told me that a man had lived on her plot of land in the 80s and had murdered his two children there. However, I have never been able to substantiate this story.
There is definitely more going on in this quiet village than meets the eye. It is peaceful on the surface but that is only an illusion. The late 1990s disturbed that peace in such a way that people started locking their doors (at least for a while) and word reached newspapers as far as Tulsa and LA about the many unsolved Quemado slayings.
Judy Pringle and Gary Wilson
The killings all started with Judy Pringle and Gary Wilson. They were a ranching couple that lived near Quemado in a modest trailer home. They went missing in 1995 without a trace.
Shortly after they went missing, Dale Aldeghi was arrested for stealing saddles, tools, guns, and other things from their home. The couple lived on the Antelope Run subdivision near Quemado, which Dale and his mother managed. Dale Aldeghi also made comments to people that he had killed the couple.
Nine months later, a coyote unearthed some bones in the woods, five miles from the Wilson home and near some Native American ruins. The coyote scattered the bones around like any old well-decomposed deer carcass. When they were identified as human bones, investigators searched the area and discovered the couple had been buried in shallow graves after being shot. There was some hair caught in a tree near the graves which was taken for DNA analysis.
Police got DNA from Aldeghi to compare to the hair – but apparently there was no conclusive match because no arrest has been made in the murders to this day. Aldeghi passed away ten days after his 58th birthday in Pie Town on December 21, 2004. He was never convicted of the murders but he seems like the most likely suspect.
Gilbert Stark
Next, Gilbert Stark was murdered in 1996. He was 71 and lived alone near Quemado. He was robbed and his killers pushed into his well and shut the lid. His son and neighbor found him dead in a puddle of water at the bottom.
This cruel death seems very cold and very personal to me. Like someone jilted. So the fact it was a robbery really turned my stomach. Was there really any need to murder this man, especially in such a heinous way?
The murder went unsolved for 9 years but finally two men were convicted of his murder in 2005. I had heard about this murder when I lived in the area, but I did not know it was ever solved. That news brought me a little happiness. I perused some court documents to learn about what had happened.
Apparently, Lopez and Sedler worked at a Salvation Army in Albuquerque together. They didn’t have much money but they had a taste for crack. Lopez and Sedler borrowed a truck and went camping in Catron County on September 7. That same day or the next day, they went to a restaurant in Datil (I’m assuming the Eagle’s Nest), where they met Stark. He invited them to his property for some reason for a social visit and they left without harming him. On September 9, however, they decided to return to Stark’s and rob and murder him to get crack money.
They returned to Albuquerque on September 11 and left the borrowed truck in a church parking lot, so the owner reported it stolen. Ed Sedler pawned one of Stark’s pistols at a pawn shop in Albuquerque. Through the pistol’s serial number, police were able to identify Sedler and they uncovered the report of the stolen vehicle which mentioned Philip Lopez. This is how the two men were caught.
Stark’s neighbor, Robert Nelson, checked on him on September 11. He became disturbed when he saw Stark’s broken glasses on the ground and various items and beer cans strewn around. A search ensued and Stark’s son and Robert Nelson eventually found the old man dead in the well. He apparently had suffered blunt force trauma from either being attacked or from falling down the well, and that led to a thickening of his arteries that ultimately did him in. There is a possibility that he had been alive in the well for some time. He may have succumbed to a heart attack before or after being thrown in.
According to Philip Lopez’s jury testimony, he had feared for his life and had simply followed along with what Ed Sedler wanted to do. Sedler was the one who first attacked Stark and broke his neck, though the autopsy determined Stark’s neck had not been broken. Lopez claimed that Sedler then stole five hundred dollars out of Stark’s pocket. Lopez asked, “Am I next?” in terror and Sedler barked at him to help. So Lopez assisted Sedler in stuffing Stark into the well; Lopez claimed that Stark was already dead at that point. The well had a ladder leading out of it, so the men chained and padlocked the well lid shut and stacked firewood on top of it. You know, just in case the victim who Lopez said was already dead came back to life and climbed out.
With the victim thus taken care of, the two men stole guns from his house. Lopez threw the rifles into the woods near the Stark property, and later he led police to the location and they recovered the guns. Lopez also testified that Sedler pawned a pistol in Albuquerque and traded another pistol for crack; both of those pistols had already been recovered by law enforcement and this part of his testimony was confirmed.
Ultimately, the jury didn’t buy Lopez’s testimony of fearing for his life and they found him guilty. Lopez was sentenced to life. In New Mexico, that is 30 years. Sedler got 40 years. He will be out in 2045 unless he gets paroled out earlier. It’s a scary thought that someone with no conscience will be walking among us again. Lopez will probably get out before 30 years – good behavior and time served could easily reduce his sentence to half.
It makes me so sad that Gilbert Stark was murdered by these men for crack and that he suffered and died alone in a place he knew he couldn’t escape from. He didn’t get to live out his golden years because of these two vicious crackheads.
William and Pearl Clark and Sharron Hudson
Fast forward to March 29, 1997. This was when the elderly Clark couple, William Wesley and Pearl Florene, and their daughter, Sharron Hudson, were shot in their home in Mangas by a .357 snub nose pistol, likely stolen from Wesley Clark. The bodies were in the living room, bedroom, and kitchen. Pearl had been shot twice in the head; Wesley and Sharron had both been shot once.
I was told by a family member that Sharron Hudson pulled up to the house, realized something was terribly wrong, and took off in her truck. The killer(s) took off after her, caught up to her a little ways down the dirt road, and gunned her down. However, the news states that Sharron was also found in the house. The killer must have moved through the home to ensure there were no survivors, or two of the victims fled through the home and the killer chased them down. There were signs of a struggle as if the victims had fought for their lives. Besides the gun, nothing was stolen; money and valuables were still inside the home where they were supposed to be.
Sharron’s boyfriend, Jimmy Leyba, came to the house later and found the bodies. He called the police in a panic. The Catron County sheriffs, Game and Fish, and the Forest Service searched along the dirt road by the Clark home for days but never found the gun. The crime scene was not investigated properly, with no proper forensic team sent out to gather evidence. That is probably at least partially why no one has been arrested all these years later.
Family thinks someone the Clarks knew the person who committed the murder. After all, Pearl was a suspicious woman and William carried a gun in his overalls all the time. Whenever someone pulled up to the ranch, Pearl would observe them through the kitchen window. If they didn’t recognize the vehicle, Pearl would send William out to meet them with a gun and she would grab a shotgun from the bedroom. Yet on March 29, 1997, Pearl and William had allowed this killer into their home. There was even a tea kettle on the woodstove as Pearl prepared her guests something to drink. All three victims were shot with the gun William usually carried in his pocket, as if he had casually set it on the table while chatting with a trusted family member or friend. Furthermore, their homestead was at the end of a long dirt road 25 miles from Quemado – not a place where random people are likely to go. It turns out that the Clarks didn’t need to fear strangers pulling up to their home as much as they needed to fear those closest to them.
The surviving Clarks got the house back after a very brief investigation. They had to clean up the crime scene themselves. Since a proper forensic team had never been sent out, there could have been evidence left in the house that is now gone forever. The couple’s son, James “Ace” Clark, his wife Evelyn Elaine, and their three kids continued to live in that house for years before they could afford to tear it down. They moved into Quemado after that and the Mangas homestead now sits vacant. One of James’s children still talks about the horrors of growing up in that home, in between generous swigs of vodka. Ace died a few years later and substance abuse got the better of all 3 children, with two of them succumbing to overdoses. That whole family was still very broken by the trauma that devastated them.
While no one has been charged in the crime, it seems that the killer had a feud of some type with this family. It is interesting that Pearl was shot twice while the other two victims were shot once; was she the intended victim, and the others were just witnesses? Or did she just put up the greatest fight? No one can think of a motive for the crimes or someone who hated the couple. Several witnesses were questioned as suspects, but nothing came of it.
Pearl liked to quilt and William was a WWII veteran who had homesteaded the area since the 1930s. William had recently started a sawmill on his property. They were well-known people who liked to help others out. In an area like Quemado and Mangas, the population is so low that you are wise to be friends with your neighbors, in case you ever need their help. Life out there is hard, even now, and it can get lonely. The elderly Clark couple were quite friendly with their neighbors and well-integrated with the town.
An eerie coincidence is that Pete Lopez of Socorro was shot 15 times the morning of March 29, 1997, in between Socorro and Magdalena. It’s weird to me that his murder took place just 108 miles from Mangas on the same day, off the same highway. One hundred and eight miles may seem far, but if you have been to Catron County, you would know there is practically nothing between Magdalena and Mangas. The only towns are Datil and Pie Town, and they are not particularly bustling places. People make the journey from Quemado to Socorro using Highway 60 all the time; it is nothing to drive that far every day for groceries, a doctor’s visit, or even a social call in rural New Mexico where everything is spread so far apart. Pete Lopez was killed between 5 am and 9 am that day, while the Clarks were killed between 1 pm and 4 pm – leaving generous time between the crimes for someone to travel from Socorro to Mangas. In a big city, several homicides occurring in one day would not be any indication of a pattern. But in this area of New Mexico, murders are usually quite far and few between. Two on the same day a few hours and a short distance apart on the same highway is quite an interesting coincidence.
That said, Lopez was shot 15 times with a 9 mm, while the Clarks were shot with a different gun stolen from them one time each (twice for Pearl). The nature of the crimes seem different, suggesting entirely different motives, and therefore probably entirely different perpetrators. But even if the crimes are not connected, I wonder what it was about that day before Easter that made so much evil occur in an area where murder is normally rare. For Holy Saturday, the day was actually quite unholy for quite a few people.
In 2013, I heard that the police had two suspects who were living in Illinois. What came of that, I don’t know. There have been no arrests. But the trauma of the crime still haunts the land and the town. I wish we had someone like Mark in the Cotton and Judy McKnight case, who can investigate this with tools and resources I don’t have. This case does bear some resemblance to the McKnight case.
James Carroll
Lastly, there was 58-year-old James Carrol. In 1998, he was standing observing his horses in a corral on his ranch north of Quemado, when he was shot in the heart at close range with a .38-caliber handgun. His wife, Phylis Carroll, called police and claimed she had found him in front of the barn. She believed he had dropped dead of a heart attack. Police thought she acted suspiciously but his killing was unsolved for nine more years.
Cold case detectives finally sent Phyllis’s sweater in for forensic testing (why wasn’t this done in 1998?). And, sure enough, it came back positive for gunpowder residue. Hence, Phylis Carroll was charged with her husband’s murder in 2005. Unfortunately, she died on February 19, 2006, before she served any time. She was only 57 at the time of her death. I wonder if she committed suicide?
Phyllis and James Carroll did not have a happy marriage (obviously). They fought like cats and dogs, police say. James even had scars on his arm from fending off a knife attack by Phyllis a few years before she killed him. I’m not sure what made her kill her husband instead of just leaving him. But I’m sorry it had to come to that. This goes to show that domestic violence can and does happen to men as well as women, and it can escalate to murder.
Conclusion
Now, all of these crimes have been solved save for the Clarks’ and the Wilsons’. The culprit in the Wilsons’ case does seem pretty obvious, but there will never be charges. I hope that their homicides are all solved one day. The murders were all committed by different people for different motives. It’s just a terrible coincidence that they all occurred in the same time period, and they were all gun homicides. This goes to show that patterns don’t always indicate a serial killer.
I’m not sure what made the 90s such a violent time in Quemado, but before this time period, ten years had passed without a single homicide in Catron County. The county has been relatively peaceful since, as well.
Well, on the surface, at least. There is undoubtedly a darkness haunting that area, a palpable heaviness when you visit. The dark side of human nature just can’t hide as well in small rural towns, where everybody knows everybody else’s business. Stick around any town long enough and you start to hear stories that will make your skin crawl. Stories that even don’t make it into the newspaper sometimes.
The next time you drive through a place and you think, “What a nice, quiet town. Look, people even wave!”, remember that something sinister undoubtedly lurks beneath the surface, and that horrible things can and do happen anywhere. Safety is but an illusion. So keep your eyes open and trust no one.
Sources
Unsolved Slayings Have Small N.M. Town Living in Fear – Los Angeles Times.
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/115932878/quemado-homicides/
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/29436966/gary-wilson
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/29436757/pearl-florene-clark
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/29436685/gilbert-bruce-stark
https://law.justia.com/cases/new-mexico/supreme-court/2005/7946.html
https://www.newspapers.com/image/485004872/?terms=James%20Carroll&match=1
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/115929195/phylis-carroll-charged-with-1998-james/
https://www.tributes.com/obituary/show/Phyllis-D.-Carroll-76997286
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/115933023/clark-murders-in-quemado/
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/115933130/clark-murders-1997-mangas/
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/115933023/clark-murders-in-quemado/