NMSU is my alumni university. I have fantastic memories of my time there and the fun, unique people I met. I also remember the ever-present threat of sexual assault and I try to avoid touching on the pulsing emotional wound of my own sexual assault.
One night, while hanging out with some friends in my dorm, Garcia Hall, we heard frantic female screams. We went hunting for the source but we couldn’t find her. That incident always haunted us. These screams were not playful; we often heard people screaming in the dorms playfully (or sometimes lustfully…). But this time, the screams were desperate, frantic, terrified, guttural.
We were never able to ensure the person screaming was OK, but we always worried that her sudden silence signaled the worst. When we called the campus police, they showed up over two hours later and briefly poked around for about ten minutes, took our statements with an air of nonchalance, and then left.
Women Don’t Ask For It…
Unfortunately, young women at universities are vulnerable. The drinking culture and hookup culture inherent to college life can unfortunately expose young women to the threat of sexual violence. Some young women in college get trapped in domestic violence situations that they do not escape from, as well. For most people, college is fun. But for some, it is horrible, traumatic, or even deadly. We can’t ignore them. We have to fight for their safety. One way to accomplish that is by sharing the stories of women who met tragic ends in college so that we can be aware.
I was sexually assaulted in college and both my sister and my mom believed I deserved it because I was in the company of a man I barely knew. When he date raped me, people acted like I must have led him on or that I was stupid for being alone with him. No one seemed to think he should be held accountable. I even heard “Why would you try to ruin this young man’s life?” from the campus police chief. My boyfriend at the time wouldn’t kiss me for weeks, as if I had deliberately cheated on him.
I may have been naïve, but that doesn’t mean I “asked for it,” as everyone else always implied. Campus police did not believe my story and let my sexual assault go without ever prosecuting my rapist. My own family made up their own version of events and tried to make me feel culpable for my own rape. The only people who showed me any empathy were the lovely volunteers at the SANE clinic.
Please don’t think of this blog entry as a smear on NMSU. I don’t think NMSU is any more dangerous than other colleges; in fact, it might be less so. If you look at nationwide campus crime statistics, NMSU ranks quite low. The campuses with the most sexual assaults are Brown University, University of Connecticut, and Dartmouth University. NMSU comes nowhere close to these campuses…but I think the sex crime rate at NMSU is still too high.
In 2019, there were seven rapes on campus; in 2020, there were 4; and in 2021, there were 3. That’s 14 sex crimes too many in the past few years. Plus who knows how many crimes didn’t get reported because the victims didn’t feel they would be taken seriously. I know I regret reporting my assault.
Think of this entry more as a cautionary tale about what can happen to women, as well as a wake-up call to the serious issues in how women are treated in this society. It is important to educate our girls to be cautious in college…and to educate our boys to respect the word no and to never put hands on a woman.
Here are a few stories of young women who met violence while attending NMSU. Please remember that these young women did nothing to deserve what happened to them. It doesn’t matter how they dressed, if they were drunk, if they were alone with men they barely knew, or if they dated someone who mistreated them. They did not deserve it. Period. Just like I didn’t deserve what happened to me.
Emilia Rueda
Emilia Rueda is the most recent victim as of this writing, so her story is still developing. But she is believed to have died as part of a murder-suicide. She was found stabbed in an apartment on Alamo Street, near campus. Her boyfriend, 19-year-old Carlos Esparza, lay shot next to her with a rifle at his side. They died on September 23, 2022. It is believed that Esparza murdered Emilia Rueda before taking his own life.
Emilia was only 20. She was in her junior year at NMSU and she was majoring in art. She was a member of the NMSU Clay Club. She also worked at the Paleta Bar. Paletas are a type of Mexican ice pop, made with fruit and cream. Emilia Rueda was “light to all who knew her” and she was excited about her future. All of that was cruelly taken from her far too soon.
Rueda’s funeral and rosary was in El Paso on September 29. Everyone wore pink, her favorite color.
Carly Martinez
Carly Martinez was from El Paso. She was living out of the house for the first time in her life as she attended New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. She had just returned from winter break when she was abducted, raped, and murdered by two men on January 14, 1998. She was only 18 with so much to live for and that was robbed from her just because she didn’t want to “put out.”
Carly was acquainted with a young man named Jesse Avalos, Jr., from the computer lab on campus where they would both browse the Internet. Avalos often asked Carly out, but she always said no. Shortly after winter break, however, Avalos asked her to the skating rink on January 14 and joked that he wasn’t an ax murderer. Carly relented and went with him. He picked her up around 6:00 pm and they went to the skating rink, where they met up with Jesse Avalos’s friend, Jason Desnoyers. Both men were slightly older than Carly at the time.
The trio left the skating rink to go to various bars around Las Cruces for drinks. People spotted the trio throughout the night. Desnoyers was aggressive with people, even threatening someone for looking at Carly.
Carly’s roommate at the dorms noticed that Carly had not returned home in the morning of the 15th. She soon reported her concern to Carly’s parents. Carly’s parents reported her missing to the campus police and people began to search for her everywhere.
Her family didn’t know what had happened to Carly for two months. They frantically searched for her with no luck. Many community members in Las Cruces joined in the search as well.
Investigators interviewed both Avalos and Desnoyers and collected hair, saliva, and blood samples from them. Both young men corroborated each other’s stories – they had dropped Carly off at a payphone near the NMSU campus the night of the 14th. But cops didn’t believe them and they soon found remnants of cleaned-up blood in the middle backseat of Desnoyers’s pickup. They also found blood spots on a parka belonging to Desnoyers and on the shower curtain in Avalos’s apartment, presumably from when he showered after killing Carly.
Now the disappearance turned into a homicide investigation. Both young men were held and interrogated rigorously. Jesse Avalos claimed that he thought Jason Desnoyers was interested in Carly, so he backed off. He went to sleep in his apartment and woke up to find that Desnoyers had murdered Carly. Meanwhile, Jason Desnoyers told the same story, except he claimed that the murderer was Jesse Avalos and Avalos had killed Carly while Desnoyers slept over at Avalos’s apartment.
At some point, one or both men revealed where Carly could be found. Investigators went to a spot in the desert near Las Cruces and found Carly’s charred remains. She was nearly nude and had been stabbed over 30 times with a knife and a pair of pliers.
During trial, the two young men stuck to their guns, blaming the other. A witness testified that Jesse Avalos heard someone scream and he joked, “Carly screamed like that.” Avalos had also threatened to make someone disappear “like Carly Martinez.” A different witness testified that Jason Desnoyers had admitted to getting Carly drunk and then getting upset that Carly wouldn’t put out. It was surmised that the two men had taken Carly out to the desert to have sex and then raped her when she refused and killed her so she wouldn’t turn them in.
Jesse Avalos received life plus 62 years for first-degree murder, kidnapping, rape, and tampering with evidence. Jason Desnoyers received life plus 34 years on the same charges. Avalos tried to apologize to Carly’s family, saying that his actions were that of a coward and not a man, and that he wished he had come forward earlier. Why didn’t he wish that he had just not raped and murdered Carly?
The Martinez family hosts an annual run in Las Cruces to raise money for victims of sexual violence. Her father, Carlos Martinez, says that he wants to remember Carly this way and create a legacy for her. Her family shows such commendable graciousness after something so senseless and horrible was done to their daughter.
My mom claimed that she read about this case in the Las Cruces Sun while living in Las Cruces at the time of Carly’s murder. Just looking at Carly’s picture, she got a psychic message from beyond that Carly was buried on the East Mesa. She called the cops with her tip and apparently they found Carly exactly where my mom told them shortly after. But this is just another one of my mom’s many narcissistic ramblings – Carly’s body was actually found when her attackers led cops to her. This is just part of the reason why I completely dismiss psychics in murder cases and why I feel psychics cause more harm than good.
https://veritycreates.medium.com/killed-in-the-desert-the-murder-of-carly-martinez-2800281583bf
https://apnews.com/article/90a5e5f7f84601fab4c7ecd3ebccafb1
Katie Sepich
Katie Sepich was an NMSU student living in a small rented house near campus with a roommate named Tracee Waters. She was 22, with a boyfriend, a loving family, and a part-time job waiting tables at El Sombrero Patio Cafe. People said she “lit up the room.”
On August 31, 2003, Sepich left a party in the early hours of the morning. Her boyfriend saw her leave. She went for a walk and ultimately returned to her house. But on August 31, Tracee Waters noticed that Sepich was missing. That wasn’t like Sepich, so Waters reported her missing.
On September 1, authorities got a call about a body in an old landfill outside of Las Cruces. She had been raped and strangled to death. Police quickly identified her as the missing Katie Sepich. They began to follow leads and discovered signs of a struggle under Sepich’s bedroom window. Suspicion immediately turned to her boyfriend, Joe Bischoff, who had been one of the last people to see her alive and who knew her address. It looked pretty bad for him when investigators learned he and Sepich had had a bad fight at the party, triggering her to storm off into the night.
But when Gabriel Avila was arrested for burglary and refusing to return leased property, he had to submit a DNA sample while being booked into state prison. That DNA was a hit to the DNA found on Sepich’s body. Avila soon confessed. He said that he almost accidentally hit Sepich with his truck in the early morning hours of August 31. He decided to be a “nice guy” and give her a lift home. When they got to her house, however, he said he lost control. She went into the house and Avila broke in through her window, drug her out of her room, and raped and strangled her. He dumped her in the landfill, thinking she would never be found. In 2007, he was convicted and got 69 years to life in prison.
While living in Las Cruces, I met a woman whose daughter had stayed in Katie Sepich’s old house. The daughter said the house was extremely haunted with a malevolent shadow spirit. The imprint of the evil that claimed Sepich’s life remained in that house.
Katie’s murder led to the creation of Katie’s Law, which required all violent felony offenders to give DNA samples upon their arrests. The DNA is then entered into a database to match it to other crimes. It is stored for matches to future crimes, as well. In 2011, New Mexico representatives voted unanimously to expand Katie’s Law to all people convicted of felonies, not just violent ones. Katie’s Law has led to the solving of over 500 cases.
One such case was the 2002 murder of Sasha Hedgecock in Carlsbad, who was found in an alfalfa field on Christmas Day, shot over seven times. Her killer, Jeremy Melendrez, was found to be a match when he was arrested for an unrelated crime. It took seven years to build a case against him, which happened just in time, because he was about to get out of prison in Carlsbad. He was convicted of Sasha Hedgecock’s murder in 2009.
Liette Martinez
Liette Martinez actually was not murdered in Las Cruces. But I felt she deserves mentioning because she was an NMSU student, staying in Indiana for an exchange program. Her murder highlights the fact that not all female college students are targeted for sex. Sometimes, they are victims of other motives for violent crimes. You have to be careful of everyone, not just men you don’t know well.
Liette Martinez was 22 and staying in student housing at Purdue University. She was a graphic design student, and part of an exchange program. She lived with a girl named Tanzania Morris. Tanzania Morris’s mom, Tina Morris, started staying with the girls, without campus authorities’ awareness. On April 18, 2008, some sort of domestic dispute occurred between Liette, Tanzania, and Tina. Tina Morris stabbed Liette Martinez to death for “being rude to her daughter” the previous evening. Tina Morris pleaded guilty and received 60 years for murder.
When I was a student at NMSU, there were many people who would come and go from the dorms, even though they weren’t students. There were more than a few people who lived with friends or girlfriends/boyfriends in the dorms without even being enrolled in college. Residence assistants tried to crack down, but it was impossible for them to monitor every single person who entered and exited the dorms. Though there were cameras trained on the doors and people had to use their student ID cards to gain access to the building, nothing stopped people from holding the door open for others or from letting their friends and acquaintances in. Most students would happily hold the door open for anyone – even if they didn’t know the person. Thus, there were a lot of people in and out of the residence halls, and not all of them were trustworthy people. I remember a drug dealer called “Fresh” who was notorious for squatting at the dorms with friends or sleeping with different girls when he needed a place to stay. The problem with these random people coming in and out is that any one of them could have committed a crime against a student, and investigators may not be able to identify everyone present in the hall at the time of the crime to narrow down a suspect list.
Angela Autumn Castilleja
Angela Castilleja was a 20-year-old NMSU student from Clayton, NM. She had just recently switched her major from nursing to mortuary science. In 2004, she had spent the night of her June 5 birthday partying with a friend in Juarez. On June 6, 2004, her friend dropped her off at her apartment. Then she disappeared.
She was eventually discovered in the desert near Mesquite on June 13, 2004. She had been strangled and dumped in the desert.
Her boyfriend is the number one suspect. He had a violent temper. There are many reports that he had been abusive to Castijella. Castijella planned to leave him before she died. In fact, she may have been murdered in the process of leaving him, as that is the most dangerous time for women in abusive relationships.
The night she died, her boyfriend claimed that he had given her a ride. After he dropped her off, his car broke down and he got a ride home from a Native American couple. Cops have never been able to confirm his story or track down the couple who supposedly assisted him. He said he never saw Angela Castijella after that night but authorities think he knows more than he is revealing.
Castilleja left behind a son, Omar Munoz. Omar is now a father and graduated from El Paso High School. It is tragic that he had to grow up without his mother and his children have to grow up with their grandmother.
Edyth Warner and Nicholas Smith
Edyth Warner (nee Deewees) was an art and metalsmithing student at NMSU. She had had back surgery in June 1990 and used an electronic pain belt and took pain medication. Her husband, Henry Warner, was studying engineering after leaving a job at Los Alamos Labs. They lived in student family housing at 714 Standley Dr., Las Cruces, with twelve-year-old Nicholas Smith, Edyth’s son by a previous marriage, and 3-year-old Andrew, Edyth’s son with Henry. All appeared happy on the outside.
But then Edyth disappeared on February 22 or 23, 1991. She was in an art class on February 22 when she put some metal in acid and told her professor she would return in a few hours, but she never did. Nicholas was in school that but did not return the next day – or ever again. The two were supposedly last seen leaving 714 Standley Dr. on foot on February 23, though who reportedly saw them leaving on foot is unclear.
Her parents called every day and her husband always told them Edyth was not there or had just gone out for a walk. Finally, he revealed she had gone to stay with a friend due to their marital issues. It wasn’t until March 2 that he reported her missing to campus police. The police did not think a crime had occurred and no investigation was done.
On the surface, it appeared that Edyth had just taken her son and left. She had pulled $1000 out of an account she shared with her husband and over $10000 in gold and silver before leaving. There was no body, and no blood. Neighbors reported seeing Edyth loading cardboard boxes into her car a few days before she left.
But Edyth’s family knew something was wrong when 31 days passed and Edyth never called them. Edyth was close to them and always called. Nicholas had a close relationship with his bio father in Texas and he had a plane ticket to go see him over spring break, departing El Paso on March 9. He never boarded the plane. Edyth also had tickets to visit her family in California for spring break, but never did. She had left everything behind at the house, even her car and her clothes. Her family also felt it was uncharacteristic of her to abandon Andrew and never call to check on him.
On March 7, 1991, Her father, Randle Dewees, and Nicholas’s father, Ron Smith, came to Las Cruces to search for her. Henry Warner refused to talk to them or join the search efforts, claiming he was too busy studying for finals. That is odd, since spring semester finals at NMSU are not until May. Apparently, his relationship with the Deweeses had always been rocky.
The two men searched everywhere they could think of and plastered missing person flyers on every business and bus stop that allowed them to. They visited Nicholas’s school and were informed he had not been in class since February 22. They also demanded that the campus PD take the case more seriously, though their pleas seemed to fall on deaf ears.
Two weeks after that, Randle Dewees returned to Las Cruces. He questioned other people in family housing at NMSU. When he heard about Edyth loading up cardboard boxes in her car, he started inquiring at storage facilities around Las Cruces, thinking she may have been storing her items for later. But he never found evidence she was renting a unit anywhere local.
The family then hired a private investigator. The PI found unlisted numbers for all of Edyth’s friends, but none of them had information. Remember how Henry Warner claimed Edyth was staying with a friend? It appears she hadn’t been. The family fired the PI thereafter and persisted in trying to find her.
Ron Smith also tried to locate Edyth and his son. He traveled to Los Alamos, where Edyth and Henry had lived with the boys prior to starting school at NMSU. There, they had their first break, when two travel agents said Edyth had been in the office inquiring about flights in March. Smith also spoke to a Greyhound bus driver in las Cruces, who allegedly said he recognized Nicholas Smith, and the woman accompanying him resembled Edyth Warner. They had ridden on his bus leaving Las Cruces in mid-March.
The Dewees family and Ron Smith hated how the campus police brushed them off. The campus police refused to acknowledge the possibility of foul play. They changed their tune in 2008, when they released a statement that Edyth Ann Warner and Nicholas Vincent Smith are probably victims of foul play and likely dead. Edyth Dewees, Edyth’s mom, also feels they are dead and she believes police could have played a role in saving them but they chose to mishandle the case instead.
After all, it’s been over 30 years, with no word and no activity on either of their social security numbers. Most people in Las Cruces believe that Henry Warner killed them, probably when Edyth was attempting to leave him, and buried them in the desert. There have been searches near Tortugas Mountain and in the desert, to no avail. People think that as development pushes further east into the desert, their remains might be uncovered.
Keep Safe
Because of my horrible experience, I want to advocate for other young women out there. I also want to warn women about how dangerous people can be at college and how the friendliest guys can be the most insidious. I want to remind girls of a fact that I learned the hard way: not everyone has your best interests at heart, not everyone will go out of their way to protect you, and not everyone will believe your story. So you have to take care of yourself.
People think that it is victim blaming to tell girls to be careful. The truth is, women are targeted by evil all the time and society turns a blind eye, so we have no choice but to be careful. Advice for how women can avoid sexual assault is not intended to shame the victims or blame them for anything. It is simply, and unfortunately, necessary for women to look out for themselves in a world that does not look out for them.
As part of this advocacy, I can’t stress the importance of being safe enough. Carry Mace, a knife, and/or a taser. Learn self-defense. Don’t leave your drink unattended and don’t accept drugs from people you don’t know. Don’t leave a bar or party with a strange man – or a group of men. Always tell your friends where you’re going and who you are with. If you see something weird happening to another girl, intervene and ask her if she’s OK. The main thing is to trust your gut and use common sense and lean on your loved ones to help you stay safe. So many women meet violent ends they don’t deserve, so we have to be vigilant and watch out for ourselves and other women.
Angela Castilleja:
https://www.forevermissed.com/angela-claudette-autumn-castilleja/about
https://www.hassfuneralhome.com/obituary/807291
https://www.nmsupolice.com/safety/2022-Annual-Security-Report—Final-Updated-10-11-22.pdf
Liette Martinez:
https://www.abqjournal.com/21428/updated-at-1210pm-nmsu-students-killer-gets-60-years.html
Katie Sepich:
https://thecinemaholic.com/katie-sepich-murder/
Emilia Ruida:
https://people.com/crime/emilia-rueda-college-student-killed-by-boyfriend-murder-suicide/