In April 2010, one of the worst murders in Las Cruces history occurred: the Delisle Triple Murder. Three respectable people, Gilles Delisle, Helga Delisle, and Peter J. Weith, were shot inside a home in Mesilla Hills. The motive? Money.
Gilles Delisle was a 69-year-old inventor and businessman. He had received a heart transplant from an eighteen-year-old girl from Artesia. Helga Delisle was 72 and a respected linguistics professor. She had served as the New Mexico State University linguistics department head prior to her retirement. Their business partner, Peter J. Weith, was 68. He had founded the US division of the Hegla Glass Company in the 1990s. These people were respected, prominent, and affluent.
Shortly before his death, Gilles Delisle started telling people that several of his business partners had died mysteriously and he was worried he might meet the same fate. While he did meet the same fate, it was not due to whatever his business partners were involved in. Instead, he, Helga, and Weith were murdered by the contractor who had built their luxury home in Mesilla Hills on the outskirts of Las Cruces.
This contractor’s name is Eugene Ferri, though he is called “Gino” by friends. Gino had built the Delisle house in 2003. Delisle also managed his mother Carol Ferri’s money. In 2010, Gilles Delisle represented Peter Weith’s interests in Carol Ferri’s bankruptcy case. Carol Ferri owed Peter Weith $1.3 million for three investment properties. A court auction for Ferri’s assets was scheduled shortly after the murders to help Weith recoup his losses. Perhaps to protect his mother’s interests, Gino Ferri became deeply invested in spying on Gilles Delisle and paid off a Verizon employee for Delisle’s phone records. For some reason, on April 14, 2010, Ferri decided that killing the Delisles would be the ideal solution to his mother’s bankruptcy.
On April 14, 2010, Ricky Huckabay gave Feri a ride to the Delisle house, and then took off. Later on, Delisle came to see him; he was driving the Delisle’s white Pathfinder. Delisle told him, “I fucked up and it felt good.” He had Huckabay follow him to the sheriff’s office, where he parked the Pathfinder before riding back with Huckabay.
The next day, the Delisles failed to appear for a court hearing in the civil suit against Feri. Their attorney requested a welfare check, which resulted in the triple homicide being discovered. Gilles Delisle was lying facedown in the kitchen with several gunshot wounds. His wife lay five feet away from him, with a gunshot wound to the head. Peter Weith was found in a bathroom in the south end of the home, also dead with a gunshot wound to the head. They had been murdered with a gun like an Uzi.
The investigation took a long time. Ricky Madrid and Ralph Rios, the Las Cruces Police detectives assigned to the case were abruptly fired for an unknown reason in November 2010. Investigators with the Dona Ana Sheriffs Office continued to investigate the case. Madrid stated that a task force should have been assembled the day the murders were discovered.
Ricky Huckabay kept what he knew to himself until investigators identified him on convenience store surveillance footage in the vicinity of the murders. He told them that Ferri had committed the murders and he led them to where Ferri had stashed the gun, in a septic tank under La Llorona Park, near the Rio Grande in Las Cruces off Picacho Ave. Ferri had dropped the gun down a toilet in the park bathroom. Huckabay was also the key witness at Ferri’s trial.
In May 2013, Feri took the stand and claimed that he had been with his accountant and his mother that day and had nothing to do with the murders. He had texts, phone records, and receipts to prove where he was. His mother and accountant both testified that he had been with them. I understand his mother lying to protect him, but his accountant was more than likely telling the truth. Ferri must have committed the murders between his alibis, meaning he had thought this out. What he didn’t bank on was his accomplice betraying him.
Meanwhile, Huckabay testified that he and Ferri had become good friends since Huckabay started renting from Ferri months prior to the murders. He testified that he had given Ferri a ride to the Delisle house in Mesilla Hills on April 14 and that Ferri bragged about killing the three people.
Ultimately, Gino Ferri was convicted of the triple homicide. He received a life term for each murder, or 90 years. He’s currently in Northeast New Mexico Correctional Facility. Looks he will die in prison. Peter Weith’s widow is now trying to collect the $1.3 million from Gino.
Somewhere around November 7, 2016, a murder-suicide occurred in a house almost directly across the street from the Delisle property in Mesilla Hills. Everts Moulton (77) shot the family dog and his live-in partner, Suzanne New (78), before shooting himself. The couple were found lying in the master bedroom by New’s daughter, who had not heard from her mom since Sunday night and who had driven from California just to check on her. Moulton and New had been together 30 years but had never legally married. New told her daughter on the phone that Moulton was displaying signs of dementia and talking about harming himself, so that is thought to have played a role in the murder-suicide.
https://everipedia.org/Delisle_triple_murder
https://www.abqjournal.com/539965/las-cruces-triple-murder-convictions-upheld.html