What the hell happened to Pete Lopez?
Lopez was found lying on his back next to his red Chevy Lumina outside of Socorro on March 29, 1997. He had been shot from a distance in the heart and legs and groin, then twice in the face at close range, all with a 9mm handgun. The medical examiner had difficulty determining just how many times Lopez had been shot due to the litany of entry and exit wounds all over his body, but it is believed to have been about 15 times. The gun used in the crime had jammed three times and the killer had expelled the bullets before carrying on with annihilating Lopez’s body. The crime spoke of brutality and hate. Lopez’s family can’t think of a motive for his killing, but his car was full of his belongings and he was not robbed, adding yet more mystification to this case.
The Iglesita
About five miles outside of Socorro on Hwy 60 toward Magdalena, there is a rocky, craggy area where the elevation begins to climb dramatically into the Magdalena Mountains. In this area, there is an iglesita, or miniature church, called the Santa Nino de Atocha Shrine, or St. Jude Shrine. It is a little church built by the Silva family, containing small idols and pictures honoring the Santa Nino de Atocha, or the patron saint of desperate causes. The Silvas wanted to honor this saint for bringing Nicanor Silva safely home from WWII and, later, Ernie Silva safely home from Vietnam. Ernie Silva continues to be the shrine’s caretaker and the rest of the family visits it frequently to pray and tend to the shrine with love. People from all walks of life and all parts of the US visit the shrine and sign their names in the spiral notebooks contained inside, leaving bits of their lives in this sacred place that protected a generation of Silvas in war.
While this place is charming and sacred, a dark shadow looms over it now. That shadow is the still-unsolved shooting death of Pete Lopez. Pete Lopez was found dead in the parking lot of the Iglesita at 9:00 am on March 29, 1997. Since he had been last seen at 5 that morning, he died sometime in that four-hour period. His body was discovered by a couple making a Holy Saturday pilgrimage from Magdalena (27 miles away, over treacherous high desert terrain). The state police showed up after the discovery and were floored by the sheer brutality of the crime. No one has ever been charged with his death.
Who Was Pete?
Pete Lopez was known as a quiet, hardworking, and intelligent man. His co-workers remember him for his sense of humor. He had been divorced twice and was married to Kathy Christensen at the time of his death. He also had an eighteen-year-old daughter named Amanda. His brother was Ron Lopez, the 7th Judicial District District Attorney in New Mexico at the time.
Pete worked for DynCorp, a company contracted by the military at White Sands Missile Range. He lived in Socorro on the weekends, and a rented trailer in Alamogordo on weekdays. Considering both towns border opposite edges of White Sands Missile Range, this living situation makes sense.
For those who don’t know, White Sands Missile Range is a massive military missile testing range in the Tularosa Basin, covering 3,200 square miles and sprawling into five counties. The range’s territory includes the Trinity Site, the site of the first nuclear bomb test; White Sands National Park, a national park of white gypsum sand dunes between Alamogordo and Las Cruces; Lake Lucero, the gypsum crystal bed believed to be the birthplace of the white sands; and Victorio Peak, a mountain fabled to be hollowed out and stuffed with Spanish gold bars and coins according to Doc Noss in the 1940s. The range is bordered by the Army Fort Bliss on the El Paso side and Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo, giving it ample land for testing and military combat practice activity.
Living in this area, one is prone to seeing strange lights in the sky and hearing sonic booms or explosions at all hours of the day and night, which tend to fuel outlandish rumors about the activities being conducted in the area. The entire area is a swath of black on satellite imagery and it is a cell phone dead zone. You cannot step foot past the palisades of this massive park without soon being met by armed guards on ATVs. All of this increases the fervor of these rumors of government secrecy and intrigue. You could say that White Sands Missile Range is the lesser-known twin sister of Area 51.
Employees of the missile range include engineers, mathematicians, and other scientists, and they often have high government security clearances. Pete Lopez’s role at the Missile Range was as an optical technician, probably creating binoculars, visors, and weapons sights. He had been there 27 years.
Where Was Pete Going?
On the morning of March 29, 1997, Lopez left home very early to commence the long drive to Alamogordo, or so the paper reported. I’m not sure who said that Lopez was headed to Alamogordo that day. Because it makes no sense why he was at the iglesita when Alamogordo is the opposite direction. He also was not due at work until the following Tuesday.
The drive between Alamogordo and Socorro is quite lengthy and desolate. A murder on the side of the road between the two towns would be tragic, but also somewhat unsurprising, given that witnesses would likely only be of the bovine and grasshopper varieties. Yet Lopez was not murdered on this route. Lopez should have taken Hwy 380 east through San Antonio to hit Hwy 54 in Carrizozo, which he then would have taken straight south into Alamogordo. Instead, he followed Hwy 60 West toward Magdalena. The Iglesita is located just off Hwy 60, between Socorro and Magdalena.
Frutoso Lopez, his father, echoes this sentiment. “If he was going to Alamogordo, why was he on the way to Magdalena, which is the opposite direction? And why at five in the morning?” The family feels the case is baffling. They can’t find any motive for their son’s killing. After all, Pete was well-liked at work, known to be funny, quiet, and kind. He had no known enemies and nothing was robbed from him.
Besides, Lopez lived in Alamogordo on the weekdays and Socorro on the weekends and wasn’t expected at work until Tuesday. So it definitely seems that he was heading somewhere else. I believe his wife may have been the one who reported he was going to Alamogordo. She was the last person he was seen alive with, early the morning he died. She never agreed to any newspaper interviews.
Perhaps the answer is as innocent as Pete was paying his respects to St. Jude that morning. He may have felt the need to honor the saint with Easter approaching. Perhaps he needed help with a desperate problem in his life, prompting him to visit the patron saint of desperate causes. Or perhaps someone chased him down and he pulled into the parking lot to talk to them. Another possibility is that he went there to meet someone.
But let’s not forget that his red Chevy Lumina was packed full of belongings. He was also wearing his grandfather’s gold ring and a watch given to him commemorating his 25 years at White Sands Missile Range – items that mattered to him. People said he and Kathy fought terribly. So now a possible picture emerges of a man leaving his wife, maybe after a fight, and planning to go somewhere far away from his life.
Theories
Based on the possibility that Pete was leaving his third wife, some suspicion starts to rise in mind regarding her. Were they fighting? Did she know he was leaving her? Did she chase after him in a separate car and he pulled into the nearest parking lot to fight with her, and then she shot him? There is also the matter of her ex-husband, who had a criminal background and didn’t care for the Lopez family. Could he have been involved?
It is important to note that Pete had married Kathy in April 1996, less than a year before he died, and he had recently added her to his life insurance policy. She was due to get half of $251,700 upon his death. The other half was to go to Lopez’s daughter from a previous marriage, Amanda. Though Pete Lopez had two failed marriages behind him, he told people that he wanted Kathy to be his last and final wife. The DA investigating the case commented that the two did not bask in marital bliss, though. Apparently, they fought a lot, though Pete Lopez did not tell his family about their problems.
Kathy did not like to give interviews and contacted her attorney following newspaper calls for interviews. The attorney, John Gerbarcht, called the Albuquerque Tribune one time, demanding to know why they had an interest in Pete Lopez’s death and why the DA was commenting on the case. This seems rather defensive.
The autopsy revealed a small amount of alcohol in Lopez’s blood. The coroner said that alcohol could have come from natural decomposition. But there were also trace amounts of cocaine and valium in his blood, as well. This and local rumors of Pete Lopez’s drug use caused state police to theorize that Lopez’s death was drug-related. The theory enraged his brother, Ron Lopez, who declared the state cop incompetent and unprofessional. I don’t think partying on a long weekend indicates that Pete was heavily involved in drugs and got killed as a result. If he had had drugs on his person or a large amount of drugs in his system, the picture might appear different, but he only had trace amounts.
That’s another complication in the case. Since Pete was the brother of Ron Lopez, could that have contributed to his death? Did someone confuse the two brothers and kill Pete, believing he was Ron? Ron had actually prosecuted Kathy Lopez’s ex-husband in the past, as well as other people in Socorro who hated him as a result. He had even gone after his father-in-law without mercy.
Maybe Ron’s status had nothing to do with Pete’s death. Perhaps Pete’s death had more to do with his job at White Sands Missile Range. Did he possess trade secrets? Was he a traitor, about to sell weapons knowledge to the enemy before getting double-crossed and “handled”? Did he know too much about something he should not have? Could he have packed his car up to flee the state because he knew he was in danger?
The Iglesita in the early morning does seem like a fairly good spot for a top-secret meeting of this nature, but the fact it was Holy Saturday strains that theory. Would you really want to meet somebody about government secrets when you know lots of people are about to start showing up to the shrine soon? Besides, the Iglesita can be seen from the highway, so Pete could have been seen by anyone meeting up with someone. There are far more private places in the vicinity, such as Box Canyon near Magdalena, the ghost town of Kelly, or somewhere along Hwy 60 going toward the VLA. Finally, as an optical technician, it is doubtful he possessed too many deep government secrets.
The police checked the spiral notebook in the Iglesita for signatures to see who might have been there when Pete was killed. Now, pardon me, but you would have to be awfully dumb to sign the notebook just after shooting someone – or to shoot someone after you just signed that notebook. I am not too surprised that this did not generate any viable leads.
The iglesita is visible from Hwy 60. Maybe Pete was parked there, someone drove past, and then that person decided to take advantage of the opportunity and pull in and shoot him. But why? Pete was not robbed. There was still money in his pockets, a gold ring on his finger, and a nice watch on his wrist. He was shot in such a brutal way, with so many shots to his face and groin, that the killing seems very personal. Someone was enraged, someone hated him, and someone wanted to decimate him. This just doesn’t seem like a random crime. It seems to me that someone knew Pete was there at this hour.
The Aftermath
Ron Lopez says that he has never been able to recover from the murder. While he behaved professionally at work, the crime eats at him. In the grocery store, he looks at people walking past and wonders if one of them did this to his brother. Though he was not allowed to investigate the case himself, he advocated hard for his brother’s case to be solved and fought with people who tried to dismiss it as a drug-related killing. He says this case has given him incredible empathy for families of murder victims. Now he is a lawyer in Socorro, after serving two terms as the DA.
Pete’s father, Frutoso, also felt baffled and devastated by the crime. He passed away in 2002 without ever getting answers. Pete also left behind a child who surely wants answers and now there is a grandchild that will never get to meet him. His widow may want answers, too.
The Lopez family now considers the name Peter to be cursed. Frutoso’s brother was named Pete and he was killed far too young in a car accident. There were two other Peters in the family who also met tragic demises. They now refuse to give that name to any baby boys in the family.
I don’t know what happened to Pete or why. I don’t know if we ever will find out. Police don’t think that this case will be solved unless someone comes forward with a tip or a confession. Now that it has been 25 years, the case is cold, but not hopeless. Old cases are cracking wide open every day and Pete Lopez’s brother is in the right field to keep digging. I am sad that Pete had to meet his end this way, alone and in pain. I am also sad that this beautiful little iglesita had to be the site of something so ugly. Hopefully, Lopez found some peace as he was led home by St. Jude.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/82780421/frutoso-b-l_pez
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/115933668/pete-lopez/
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/115933556/the-albuquerque-tribune/
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/115933840/pete-lopez/
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/115933465/the-albuquerque-tribune/