With all the craze about Dahmer after the new Netflix feature dropped, I started to think about the Foxes Lounge Killer of Albuquerque.
He’s not actually called the Foxes Lounge Killer; in fact, he may not exist at all. But in the late 90s, 8 Albuquerque homicides bore striking similarities. The Albuquerque Journal picked up on the similarities between the slayings and was the first to suggest a possible serial killer. Police stated that there was no indication of an actual serial killer – but there also wasn’t any evidence to rule one out.
Originally, the 1990s deaths of six gay men came across my radar. I agreed that there were possible connections between these crimes. But with subsequent digging, I found even more potential victims of this killer. I’m open to the possibility that the cases were not related, but there are undeniable similarities between them.
The primary similarity? The victims had been at Foxes Lounge the same nights that they died, with the exception of one, who had been there in the past.
Foxes Lounge was a gay club in Albuquerque. The men who died after going there were all gay. Three of them were hairdressers. There was also a woman who was killed in the same manner as the gay men, and a man dressed in drag attempted to cash one of her checks the same day she was found dead.
To this day, the crimes remain unsolved. They have been largely forgotten, the men (and woman) robbed of justice. But there is still hope that these cases could be solved. With indoor stabbings and messy crime scenes, there is probably a lot of DNA evidence left behind. I hope the Albuquerque police properly collected and stored that evidence so it can be used with more modern DNA extraction techniques.
Harlan Begay: October 15, 1989
Harlan Begay had last been seen at Foxes. The next anyone heard about him, he was dead. He had been brutally beaten and stabbed to death. His body had been dumped at Bataan Park on 3401 Lomas, where it was discovered by a jogger.
Begay was a hairdresser. He was only 23. He came from Crownpoint and Begay is a common Native American surname, so I assume he was Native American. As you will see in the other victims below, many of them were gay hairdressers who frequented Foxes. They were also mostly in their 20s. Begay was the just the first of these crimes.
All these years later, Begay’s case has never been solved. Little information can be found about him. I only found one article about him in a 1989 issue of the El Paso Times; his death was not even mentioned in the Albuquerque papers until they later tried to draw parallels between his death and others in 1995. Intersectionality explains ways someone is disadvantaged and a gay Native American man would check two huge minority boxes. Maybe more attention to his case would have triggered someone to come forward with information, and maybe the suspect would not have been able to go on and kill so many others, if the killer was in fact the same person.
The one thing that sets Begay apart from the other men is that he was dumped in a park. Meanwhile, the others were stabbed in their homes and robbed. This difference suggests a totally different motive for those killings. It also suggests that the killer had a car; in the other crimes, which you will read about soon, the killer stole the victims’ cars and therefore probably didn’t have transportation of their own.
Larry Dean Baca: February 24, 1994
Baca was 28 years old and a hairstylist. When he called his mom to cancel their dinner plans, she became concerned, but he assured her he would see her Wednesday. But on Tuesday, he didn’t show up to work. His mom went by his place and found a key broken off in his door, so she called police.
Once they forced entry, they went through the apartment, finding it a total mess. Baca was normally neat as a pin. The phone cord had also been severed.
A few more days elapsed with no word from Baca. Police returned to his apartment and searched it a little more thoroughly. This time, they found Baca lying dead beneath a pile of laundry in his closet. He had received blunt trauma to the head and then had been stabbed to death.
His car was also stolen. He had possibly been robbed. The killer must have left the house in a hurry to snap the key off in the door.
It took detectives a good 8 months to locate his car. It was found just a few blocks from his house, abandoned. Detectives followed leads as far as Nevada apparently, yet have never made an arrest. I believe the Nevada lead would be Carol Walker’s son, who was the original suspect in her death before being cleared. More on her in a moment.
A co-worker described Baca as a reliable, giving, and loving. Berlinda Baca is Larry Baca’s sister. She told the Albuquerque Journal how much her family suffered. She begged people to come forward with information, but no one ever did come forward with the tip that would close the case. It’s now been 3 decades.
Carol Walker: March 8, 1994
Now Carol Walker varies from the other victims in that she was not a gay male. She was actually a retired 66-year-old woman with grandchildren that often visited her. But she was found stabbed to death in her closet, just like Baca, on March 8, 1994. And she was found about two weeks after Baca was. Her car was also missing.
The same day she was found dead, a man dressed as a woman (so probably either a drag queen or a transgender woman) pulled up to a bank in a white sedan matching Walker’s car. They tried to cash a check in Walker’s name for $2300. They produced Carol Walker’s ID but appeared to be much younger and of a different sex than the picture on the ID. The teller grew suspicious and asked for additional identification. The person then said “I’ll be right back” and went out to the sedan and drove away.
The bank then called police to do a welfare check on Walker. Police found her body in the closet. She had been bound with duct tape before being stabbed in the upper back. She had been dead for a while, possibly a few days. Two bloody knives were found in the kitchen sink and blood was smeared on the counter.
Walker had lived in Albuquerque since 1978. She had graduated from Stanford and later received her Master’s of Public Administration at UNM. People remember her as cheerful, friendly, and polite, always the first to smile and say hello. She was survived by two sons, a daughter, and multiple grandchildren.
The first suspect was one of Walker’s sons. He lived in Nevada but he matched the description of the man at the bank trying to cash the check. However, police soon learned that the son had been working when the murder took place and his employer confirmed this. He was subsequently cleared.
Police thought Walker might have been targeted by the same person as Baca. In a later article written in the Journal on April 30, 1994, Johanna King reports that police no longer thought the cases were connected. But it is interesting that this person trying to cash Walker’s check appeared to be in the LGBTQ community. We already have another murder of a gay man who was killed in the same manner as Walker.
Could Carol Walker have been at Foxes, too? Women often like to go to gay clubs because they don’t get hit on as much. Maybe she visited the club and thus came onto the killer’s radar. However, she doesn’t seem like the clubbing type. She did like to volunteer; perhaps these activities put her in contact with the killer. Maybe the killer lived nearby and noticed that she was an easy target due to her age and the fact she lived alone.
Another possibility is that this suspicious person wasn’t a drag queen or trans woman at all. It was a man, trying to disguise himself. He may have even been wearing Carol Walker’s clothes. I just think the ties to the deaths of gay men makes it more likely that the person was a member of the LGBTQ community.
Anthony Maes: October 26, 1994
Anthony Maes was 29 when he was found dead in his home. He had been dead more than a day, so cops didn’t immediately realize that he had been shot. Once they figured that out, they began investigating the death as a homicide. Apparently the gun wasn’t in the home or the nature of the shooting indicate it wasn’t suicide.
Maes lived in Old Town. There was no sign of forced entry and his house wasn’t in shambles from a struggle. The last time he had been seen alive was at Foxes Lounge. Not much information is available about who he was as a person or if he had been seen leaving the bar with someone. It also doesn’t appear he was robbed or his car was stolen like Lueras and Walker and Baca. These differences make some people think that his death was unrelated to the Foxes Lounge Killer.
Maes was buried on Halloween. He was survived by his parents and two brothers and four sisters.
Jerry Lueras: June 16, 1995
Jerry Lueras was 36 years old and he worked as a hairstylist in Albuquerque. He lived in the Southeast Heights with a white woman who identified as lesbian. He had been raised in Espanola and moved to Albuquerque for better opportunities and a more open lifestyle.
When Lueras didn’t show up for work for two days, his employer called his apartment manager. The manager entered his apartment on June 17, 1995. That’s where he found a crime scene that police described as “one of the most violent ones we’ve seen in a while.”
Lueras was lying on the bedroom floor. He had been stabbed many, many times. His apartment was a mess, indicating some type of fight. Many things were missing, suggesting a robbery. Some of the items missing included a VCR, stereo, TV, meat from his freezer, and pictures of his aunt and sister. His brownish-gold Ford Escort was missing from the apartment complex parking lot.
The security guard at his complex came forward and stated that he had seen two men loading property from Lueras’s apartment into a burgundy 1989 Chrysler New Yorker. Police followed this lead, apparently to no avail.
A few days later, Lueras’s car was found at the Sunport. It was in short-term parking. Apparently not much evidence was gleaned from it.
Lueras identified as gay and had been at Foxes Lounge the same night of his death. There are no details about where his roommate was at the time of his death or in the days after.
Richard Brodbeck: May 23, 1996
Richard Brodbeck died in the same manner as Jerry Lueras, Carol Walker, and Larry Dean Baca on May 23, 1996. Police noticed the undeniable similarities with the previous cases. Brodbeck had been stabbed to death and his home had been left in disarray. The killer had apparently fled the scene in Brodbeck’s silver 1986 Buick. Some of his things were also missing.
Brodbeck had gone to Foxes Lounge the same night he died. Now a picture is emerging of a drag queen or transgender woman at that club who liked to rob and kill victims in their homes and then abscond with their cars. It had now been two years since the last similar deaths of Carol Walker and Jerry Lueras.
Brodbeck had worked at the Lovelace Bio Medical and Environmental Research Institute for 21 years. He was also a Vietnam vet and his interests included nature and photography. He was only 44 years old. He was survived by two sisters and his mother, as well as many other family members who dearly miss him.
Herman Rodriguez: July 29, 1998
Herman Rodriguez had been the Republican Santa Fe County Commissioner. He lost to a Democrat in 1996. He was last seen alive at the Drama Club in Santa Fe. When he didn’t report to his sales job at a printing shop in July 1998, his boss reported him missing. His charcoal gray Oldsmobile had also disappeared.
His body was found near Council Bluffs, Iowa several days later. He was nude and he had died of a gunshot wound to the head. His vehicle was still missing when he was found. His credit card had been used for $5000 of purchases in five cities between Memphis, TN, and Oshkosh, WI. Police noted his phone had also been used but he hadn’t called home, suggesting someone else had been using it.
In 1999, a Georgia attorney named Prentiss Ivory Davis (born Pjdeh Khnjeususa Ennubi) pleaded guilty to killing Rodriguez in a carjacking. He said that Rodriguez had willingly accompanied him to Colorado for an unknown business arrangement. The arrangement didn’t work out, so Davis killed Rodriguez for his car and credit card. Davis suffered from AIDS and was sentenced to 2 decades in prison. He said he hoped to outlive his sentence. But there is an obituary for someone of that same name and also from Georgia passing away in 2004.
Davis was seen talking to Rodriguez in the Drama Club (a Santa Fe night club) on July 29. That was the last time that Rodriguez was seen. Police caught up with him when he and a friend from Chicago, Daryl Hutto, tried to rent an apartment in South Carolina with a stolen credit card. They were driving Rodriguez’s missing car.
This story is just bizarre. If the two men were going to Colorado, then why did Davis dump Rodriguez in Iowa? And why are credit card purchases traced from Tennessee to Wisconsin? Why would Davis drive from Colorado to Memphis, then up to Iowa, with a body in a stolen car? Then he apparently went to Chicago and met up with his accomplice Hutto, and then the two ended up in South Carolina? Davis practically traversed the whole country!
In October 1996, Herman had reported that his brother Noah, an esteemed teacher, was missing. Noah Rodriguez was found stabbed to death in Santa Fe. His killer, Arthur “Bozo” Lopez, is serving life for that murder and other gang-related crimes he committed in 1996. Lopez was sentenced in May, 1998, a few months before Herman’s disappearance.
I highly doubt this case is related to the others. But is it possible that Prentiss Davis was responsible for the stabbing deaths and robberies in Albuquerque? Was he in the area at the time, despite being from Georgia?
Barry Scott Brewster: July 15, 1998
Barry Scott Brewster (commonly known as “Scott”) was found in a flood control channel under a bridge at Snow Park in Albuquerque. A jogger came across his battered and lifeless body on July 16, 1998. He had been beaten to death so violently that bits of his brains were on the concrete of the bridge over the channel and blood had pooled on the concrete underneath his head. He was also completely naked, and his clothes have never been found. It is not explicitly stated that he had been raped, though. The amount of blood and brain matter at the crime scene suggest that he had been killed in that location. The autopsy found that he had been quite drunk and he had Valium, Benadryl, and marijuana in his blood.
Brewster suffered debilitating depression but he had been doing well prior to the murders. He had even gotten sober, after a long struggle with alcohol. He was about to get his old job back at Burger King. Then he had a bad spot and couldn’t get out of bed for several days. His roommate, Williams, stayed home with him out of concern. On the evening of July 15, Brewster announced he felt better and was going for a walk. He never came home again.
Police announced they had a strong suspect in the case but that person has never been charged. They also released a sketch of a dark-haired man who had been seen with Brewster shortly before he died, only to later clear this man. They seized a wooden club and knife from a home near the park, but also didn’t manage to tie them to the murder. Brewster’s case has remained cold to his family’s deep grief, and it has been largely forgotten by Albuquerque.
Now the only reminders are a memorial plaque in Snow Park and the memories cherished by his parents. His parents paid for a memorial sycamore tree and the plaque at its roots near where he had been found dead. Though his father, Charles or CJ, can’t talk about the case without straining his weak heart, his mother, Linda Brewster, still visits the park frequently. Brewster’s nieces and nephews were deeply traumatized by the horrific death of their beloved uncle and they required therapy for years after he died. The family fondly remembers his last words, when he called his family to tell them about a rainbow he had seen.
In the days after the killing, police asked Charles Brewster if he knew his son had been gay. Brewster was shocked. He hadn’t had a clue. As far as he knew, his son was very involved with women. His son’s roommate, John Williams, claimed that Brewster was not gay and just liked to go to Foxes Lounge because men would buy him free drinks. Then a journalist at the Albuquerque Journal dug up four domestic violence reports between the two men filed over the span of 1996 to 1998. Each of the reports stated they were actually not roommates but lovers. Williams tried to say that Brewster lied to cops about them being lovers so that the cops would go easier on him legally, but I don’t think I buy this. It sounds like Brewster and Williams were both closeted. Because why would you keep living with a roommate who beats you up if you aren’t in a deeper relationship?
The domestic violence reports are pretty shocking. They paint Brewster as a very violent drunk. When intoxicated, he ripped a door off its hinges, threw Williams around by the nose, and threw Williams to the floor and kicked him. Williams made excuses for Brewster’s behavior, saying he was sweet “99% of the time” and that he just got violent when he was drunk. Williams said that Brewster only drank due to his bouts of severe depression.
His family also noticed his depression and seemingly insurmountable life problems. His mother said that shelves would fall and doorknobs would break whenever Brewster walked by, leading to an inside joke within the family. When his name was misspelled on his memorial plaque, his mother figured that fit with the rest of Brewster’s life, and she knew he would have laughed about it.
Brewster had had a lot of life problems. He had been through a no-fault divorce and struggled with alcohol. He had drunk driving charges as well as a felony charge for drunkenly banging on a drug store door in Mississippi shortly after his divorce. He returned to Albuquerque after that to live with his parents and struggled with employment due to his felony, until he finally got a job at Burger King. The manager there wanted to make him an assistant manager, but Brewster blew it with his unreliability. His mom noted that her pain medication also went missing, which is what prompted them to ask him to move out. That’s when he became homeless, living on friends’ couches and in transient camps. In August 1996, he moved in with John Williams near Snow Park. The drinking and unemployment continued, as well as domestic violence with Williams. Linda Brewster remembers hugging Barry and warning him to clean up his act because his luck was running out, just days before he was murdered. She said she had had a premonition that something bad would happen to him.
I wonder if his depression and his divorce had to do with his closeted and repressed homosexuality?
This is one of the crimes that I think is probably unrelated to the others. His connection to the Foxes Lounge may have been due simply to the small size of Albuquerque and the fact that Foxes Lounge was one of the few openly gay bars there at the time. Police also “felt very strongly” that Brewster’s death was unrelated to the others.
Williams claimed that Brewster was overly trusting and tended to go with anybody he could for a spontaneous adventure. So he may have gone with a stranger he met at the park and that stranger killed him. But the brutality of the crime suggests something personal, fueled by rage and hatred. Brewster could have been the victim of a hate crime. His death reminds me of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming.
Another theory I have is that Williams may have finally fought back. The brutality would jibe with a lover who snapped after being abused and mistreated for years. Snow Park was only two blocks from Brewster’s home, so Williams could have followed him there. Williams was the last person to see Brewster alive, so he automatically falls under suspicion for that alone.
Foxes Lounge
The eeriest thing about these murders is that they seemed to center around Foxes Lounge. Foxes Lounge was located at 8521 Central NE, Albuquerque. It is now abandoned, but in the 90s, it catered to a motley collection of LGBTQ patrons. A Yelp review described it as a place to get cheap beer and mingle with “bearded trannies, closeted businessmen, drag queens, Mexican cowboys, and punk rockers.”
Police acknowledged the similarity of the crimes. Detective Rick Foley said that a serial killer had not been ruled out. The police even sent the cases to Quantico to be profiled by the FBI. The results were inconclusive, failing to yield a definitive declaration of “We have a serial killer.”
Now Albuquerque is a very small city and the gay night scene is not necessarily huge. It could be coincidence that these men all went to the same gay bar before meeting grisly fates and before Walker was killed by a man in drag. But Foxes certainly is one of many threads between several murders, four of which had strikingly similar characteristics. There could have been a predator at that club that preys on victims – maybe a frequent patron, maybe a bartender, maybe a bouncer. This person may have gone home with the victims, probably riding in their car, with the intention of robbing them, killing them, and absconding with their cars. Sexual sadism didn’t appear to be a motive.
Now people think that some of the murders are unrelated because different killing methods were used. In three of the deaths (Brewster, Rodriguez, Maes), the circumstances did not match the MO of robbing and stabbing the victims in their homes in Albuquerque. Rodriguez’s death especially seems unrelated. People also tend to rule out the similarities with Carol Walker due to the fact she was a woman in her 60s, completely unlike the other victims.
However, I think there are connections that just can’t be discounted. The cases of Walker, Lueras, Baca, and Brodbeck were so eerily similar that it would be weirder to me if they weren’t connected than if they were. Maes may also have been the victim of the same killer who varied his MO from stabbing to shooting. Serial killers in the past have varied their modus operandi to escape detection. Some examples include Henry Lee Lucas and Ted Bundy. Maes’s case does resemble the others in that he was home and he had been at Foxes earlier that night.
Albuquerque seems to have had its fair share of serial killers. A serial killer of gay men is certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. The motives appeared to be robbery. But if you’re going to rob somebody, why kill them? Robberies go wrong all the time, but the fact each of these victims were killed definitely begs the question why. The answer is that the Foxes Lounge Killer may have just liked killing people. The first time may have been unintended, then they got a taste for it. That’s why they covered Carol Walker and Larry Dean Baca with clothes in 1994, as if they were ashamed of their crimes. But later in the 90s, they didn’t bother to cover Lueras and Brodbeck with clothes or stuff them in the closet, as if they had grown bolder and less ashamed.
Gay men are often the targets of hate crimes and this could be what is happening here, as well. Someone who hated gay men – likely because of his own repressed homosexuality – may have been going after these guys, using the gay bar as his hunting ground. The person then robbed them as a final act of disrespect and an attempt to profit from the crimes. The man who attempted to cash Walker’s check while wearing drag dashes that theory, if he was in fact the killer of Carol Walker, and he sure seems suspicious.
Prentiss Ivory Davis could be a good suspect. He clearly hung out at clubs; he may have been gay due to having AIDS, though anyone can get AIDS; and he didn’t mind killing and robbing people. The murders stopped with his arrest in August, 1998. I wonder if police looked into his whereabouts between 1989 to 1998.
At this point, it’s really all speculation. The murders have not been solved so we don’t know for sure what happened or why. Since it has been close to 30 years, the killer may be dead or in a different city or even in prison for different crimes. There’s still a slim chance that he could be caught and convicted, though. This case certainly isn’t as cold as other cases that have been solved. Starting at Foxes Lounge and interviewing people to find out who the drag queens were might be a good start to finding this serial killer.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/augustachronicle/name/prentiss-davis-obituary?id=29791062
http://nmsoh.org/lueras_jerry_us.htm