Have you heard about the San Juan River murders? This double murder from 1982 is now very close to being solved, which lends hope to other decades-old cold cases from New Mexico. Identifying the victims of this double murder was the first step to identifying their killers.
The San Juan River Does
On September 19, 1982, a rancher named Frank Chavez was herding his livestock when he spotted a foot protruding from the soil of a tiny island on the San Juan River. At first he thought it was an old football, so he was horrified to realize it was a decomposing woman’s body. This decedent would be known as the San Juan River Jane Doe. For 32 years, she laid in an unmarked grave in an Espanola cemetery, though her skull was removed from her body and stored at the OMI in Albuquerque for potential identification in the future.
Jane Doe had been strangled to death. She was known only by the clothes she wore – a pair of blue jeans, a blue peasant-style jacket, a purple halter top, an Italian horn-shaped pendant necklace, a hollow heart necklace, and an illegible sales handwritten receipt in her pocket. The receipt was eventually traced to a Farmington woman named Marilyn Cobianco, who said she had written the receipt, but who did not recall the Jane Doe’s description. None of these things led to Jane Doe’s identification. Sketches of what she may have looked like circulated without success.
The second body was then found on October 22, 1982. A Grants man named Jerry Killough was strolling along the San Juan River with his two daughters when they found a corpse buried in the river soil about a mile from the Carracas Bridge. He was almost completely skeletonized, probably due to wildlife eating at his body. His autopsy revealed that he had been shot and suffered broken ribs from a beating about eight weeks before being found. Though he was found in Colorado, he was buried in Albuquerque, in a grave marked with only a number. He laid there without a name for 32 years. His skull was also removed from his body and stored with the OMI.
Again, the only details known about John Doe were his clothes – a pair of tan corduroy pants, a pair of low-top tennis shoes, and a shirt that bore the words “Lazy B Guest Ranch.” That guest ranch was a Nevada brothel. He had a reddish-brown beard and mustache, and brownish-blonde hair. He was believed to be white and in his twenties. Nothing led to his identification for 32 years, either.
Problems from the Beginning
Right from the start, territorial disputes between New Mexico and Colorado authorities complicated the case. Evidence was split between the jurisdictions and much of it was lost. Jane Doe’s grave was soon forgotten, and thus all of her remains except her skull became lost.
The murders were believed to be related, as witnesses spoke of a couple matching the Does’ descriptions, hitchhiking all over the area in the summer of 1982. The Chavez brothers, who owned the ranch where Jane Doe was found, believed the deaths to be caused by drugs or prostitution. Frank Chavez recalled that the area had been peaceful when he grew up, but that changed in the 70s and 80s, when hitchhikers brought drugs and prostitution to the area. They believed the bodies had been thrown off the Caracas Bridge into the river. The discoveries shook people up in the area.
All leads were quickly exhausted in 1982. Due to the fact New Mexico had a 15-year statute of limitations on murder, the New Mexico State Police let the case go. However, Colorado was not bound by such a statute. So when Deputy George Barter joined the Archuleta County Sheriff’s Office in 2009, he heard about this cold case and he felt terrible for these two young people, dumped in a river and never given a second thought. He reopened the case in 2009 and pursued it with vigor.
From the start, Barter faced a lot of hurdles. The file for this double homicide was lost but it was finally located in an unused office in Colorado. That file gave Barter a good start to accomplish lot of work with his team. They operated on the theory that either the couple was killed in a drug deal gone wrong, or Jane Doe was raped and John Doe was eliminated to get him out of the way. When Barter visited John Doe’s grave in Albuquerque, he discovered fresh flowers laid on it, while the many other numbered graves of unidentified people in the same section of the cemetery did not have flowers laid on them.
Stewart Simmons
In 2009, Barter got a court order to exhume John Doe for DNA analysis…only to dig up the wrong body. It was clearly the wrong body since it had its skull still. Three court orders and three exhumations later, the right John Doe was finally exhumed and DNA confirmed his identity. Barter thus identified John Doe as Stewart Eric Simmons, a twenty-year-old sailor who went AWOL in 1982.
Stewart Simmons had previously told his family he had met a woman named Margo, who was a waitress twenty years his senior. When his parents last heard from him, he had been facing charges with the Navy for taking a friend’s car for a joy ride after finishing basic training in Chicago. In the summer of 1982, he called his mother, Joanne Simmons, who lived in Roswell, GA, and he said he would call her back soon with the results of his Navy trial. She became nervous when he never did call back, which was unusual for him. Finally, she called the base where he was stationed, only to learn from the jailer that his charges had been dropped and he had recently been given permission to leave on his motorcycle, after which he never returned to the base. Since a head injury in his youth, Simmons had been impulsive and rash, but he always called his family. Joanne Simmons knew something was wrong when she didn’t hear from him for a whole day. She attempted to report her son as a missing person, but the Navy told her that he was now a fugitive, and could not be reported missing. Then she tried to report him to Georgia authorities, but they also refused to label him a missing person since he was an adult with the right to disappear.
Hence, Simmons was never reported missing. Joanne Simmons searched for him relentlessly for years. She jumped whenever the phone rang and hurried home from errands just in case he called. At one point, the Simmons did hire a private investigator, but the Navy “stonewalled” him and thus no progress was made.
Over the years, Simmons tried to investigate her son’s disappearance herself, even calling authorities for dental comparisons whenever a skull was found around the States. Joanne and her husband, Bill, even traveled the West Coast and Southwest in search of their son. They checked restaurants and bars, thinking he may have taken a job in the service industry alongside his older waitress girlfriend.
After three decades, they finally received a call from George Barter, with the news their son had been dead all along. They were deeply saddened, but also relieved to finally have answers. Joanne Simmons had always hoped she would see her son’s face again. Heartbreakingly, that was not to be.
Margo Walden
Barter then found out the identity of the woman, thanks to a tip from an anonymous websleuth who emailed him. The websleuth was able to give solid evidence of how they arrived at Walden as a possible match. Barter could not deny the possibility and collected DNA from Walden’s surviving family.
Margo, or Margaret, Walden had also been reported missing from San Diego in 1982. She had told her family she was leaving with Simmons to go camping, but she didn’t provide many details. Her family didn’t even know her boyfriend’s name and thought it might be “Steve.” The last time they heard from Margo, she called them from Colorado, asking for money to return home. Then they never heard from her again and they finally reported her missing.
Barter obtained DNA samples from the missing woman’s mother and sister for comparisons to DNA extracted from her skull, which proved to be a challenge due to the fact that the skull had been boiled prior to being shelved in the OMI museum. The New Mexico OMI initially refused to conduct mitochondrial DNA testing, but finally they agreed to do it, and the samples returned a 98.27% chance of the family and the Jane Doe being related. On top of that, Margo’s sister recognized the jacket and jewelry that Jane Doe had been wearing. Hence Barter tentatively declared that Walden was likely the Jane Doe.
But he needed a more solid source of DNA for an official ID. He tried to exhume Walden’s body from the Espanola cemetery where she had been buried, but he couldn’t find the grave after several attempts. Finally, in 2014, he called Espanola police and got a hold of Chris Valdez to inquire about where the grave might be. Interestingly, Valdez knew exactly where it was, as some years before he had been digging a grave for his grandmother when he accidentally busted open a body bag and an arm sprang out. Valdez realized he had stumbled upon an unmarked grave, so he relocated his grandmother’s grave farther away. He generously volunteered to lead Barter to the unmarked grave. NM State Police helped Barter break ground and locate the body.
Now in possession of her remains, he was able to conduct another DNA comparison with her surviving family, and thus he confirmed her identity as Margo Walden.
The Love Story
Simmons had been a 20-year-old Navy sailor when he fell in love with Margo Walden, a 39-year-old waitress. Walden had once been married to a sailor before and she told her family that she was dating a new young sailor in 1982. She and this young sailor decided to go on a camping trip, and Simmons even rented camping equipment from a Navy store. They never returned home. Simmons was declared AWOL and Walden was reported missing by her family that summer.
Walden and Simmons ended up in Durango, CO, not far from where they were eventually found murdered. Witnesses saw the pair together at the Iron Horse Inn in Durango, where Margo worked briefly as a waitress. Simmons worked for a traveling carnival. Margo also may have driven a 1978 Ford Thunderbird, which she then sold to a woman named Diamond Smith. Other witnesses claimed to have spotted the couple in Pagosa Springs CO, Farmington NM, and Dulce NM. Someone saw Margo at the Bondad Hill Saloon in Durango one time, too. The two were known to hitchhike around the area and they didn’t have many earthly possessions, making robbery an unlikely motive in their double murder.
I can imagine the couple, feeling wild and free. They were in love and everything seemed possible. Margo was nearing her forties and Simmons made her feel young again. They had no idea what evil awaited them. Or maybe Margo did have an idea – that’s why she called home, asking for money to return to San Diego. But she was too late.
Sometime in July or August 1982, the pair ended up in the Carracas area, where Simmons began renting a bus from a woman named Antoinette Palmer. Palmer denied being involved in the murders, but she did confirm that Simmons lived in her bus for about a month, though she knew him as Richard Miller. Around this same time, witnesses report that Simmons fell in with a bad crowd.
The 1982 Murder and the 2009 Investigation
On an unknown date, Simmons was shot twice with a .22 caliber gun and Walden was strangled. Their bodies were then dumped in the San Juan River, where they subsequently washed to shore a few miles apart. They were found within a month of each other. Witnesses stated that they had been part of a drug deal gone bad in Palmer’s bus and Palmer had openly bragged about committing the murders, yet for some reason, police never searched the bus or interrogated Palmer more closely.
Barter read witness interviews from 1982, identifying that bus as a location of a fight with a man who might have been Simmons. He finally located the bus in 2009, which had been abandoned in a field in New Mexico for over three decades. It was a disaster inside, with broken glass and refuse everywhere. Barter found a strip of carpet with bloodstains and four .22 shell casings, which he collected as evidence. No crime lab in Colorado wanted to test the evidence due to the risk of hantavirus, a serious virus spread by rodents in the Southwest. Finally, an FBI lab agreed to do the testing and confirmed that the blood was human, though it was too old for viable DNA testing. Furthermore, the shell casing were likely matches for the murder weapon used to kill Stewart Simmons.
There was also an old car that had been buried for erosion control, which was somehow related to the case. This car was excavated and searched, yielding personal belongings of the victims. Somehow, these vehicles had been completely overlooked in 1982.
Based on this information, Barter identified Antoinette Palmer as a likely suspect and he believed that her cousin Martin Martinez was her accomplice. Barter says he did not have to sleuth this; the information came to him easily, because Palmer liked to tell people “Don’t mess with me or I’ll dump you in the river like I did that couple.” Plenty of witnesses stepped forward and said these two were guilty. Barter figured Palmer had killed them either in a drug deal gone wrong, or in a fit of jealousy over Simmons being with Walden.
Though George Barter knew who had killed the couple, he didn’t have enough to prosecute them at first. He attempted to build a prosecutable case by tracking down an undercover officer who may have had knowledge of the case due to work on a separate case. When he contacted her for an interview, however, he learned she had died of cancer recently. He faced many setbacks from the beginning but he persevered with commendable tenacity.
In 2016, Barter was finally able to convince the DA in New Mexico to issue warrants for Antoinette Palmer and Martin Martinez. Palmer also went by the alias Tina Madrid. She was 58 and had relocated to Mesa, AZ, where she was booked into the Maricopa County Jail on two counts of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Martin Martinez was 70 and still lived near where the bodies had been found. He was charged with conspiracy to commit murder.
Unfortunately, these charges did not amount to anything. Both Palmer and Martinez were released from jail and were not convicted. This is because the DA did not feel that they had enough solid evidence to take these two to trial. The cases against them are still open, however. Maybe one day justice will be served.
The Simmons family finally got their son’s body back. They had a memorial for Stewart with George Barter and his wife in attendance. Stewart Simmons was placed in the ocean floor in a burial wreath since he loved the water. I am not sure if Margo Walden was given a memorial by her family.
Palmer and Martinez have gotten away with murder. But thanks to George Barter’s tireless efforts, these two murder victims got their names back and their families got some semblance of closure. They ran off together for a whirlwind romance and died together. Maybe not my idea of romance, but some might find that romantic.
https://www.abqjournal.com/804552/33yearold-cold-case-finally-leads-to-two-arrests.html
https://www.abqjournal.com/807414/woman-accused-of-murder-in-1982-cold-case-released-from-jail.html
https://pagosasun.com/2014/08/21/second-victim-in-1982-double-homicide-identified
https://stillunsolved.wordpress.com/tag/san-juan-river/
https://thedeckpodcast.com/stewart-eric-simmons-margaret-walden/