ARIZONA 1976 Cold Case Solved — The Killer Was The Detective Who Worked Her Case

She was 22 years old. She was 5’2 and she was wearing the turquoise earrings her grandmother had given her on her 18th birthday, the ones she never took off. On the evening of Friday, November 5th, 1976, Lorraine Castillo locked the teller drawer at Copper State Savings in Cottonwood Springs, Arizona, waved good night to the branch manager, and drove toward home in a green Ford Maverick.

She never got there. That is not a story about a young woman who crossed paths with a stranger on a desert road. That is a story about a man with a badge who sat at her parents’ kitchen table for the next 20 years, promising them he would never stop looking while the answer was in the mirror. And it would take 47 years, a duplicate slide that a county coroner tucked away in 1976 without telling anyone.

 a state detective who was not yet born when the case went cold and a single turquoise earring found in a shoe box to finally name him. But before we get to any of that, we have to go back to that November. Because to understand what was lost, you first have to understand who Lorraine Castillo was.

 Cottonwood Springs sits in Mariposa County in the high desert between Phoenix and Tucson where the Saguaros stand like centuries along the two-lane highway and the copper mine on the ridge has been the town’s heartbeat for a century. In 1976, the population was 4,100. That fall, the country had just celebrated its bicesentennial, and the red, white, and blue bunting was still hanging from the courthouse.

Jimmy Carter had won the election two days before Lorraine disappeared. Men drove pickup trucks with CB radios and talked to each other across the desert at night. The Dairy Queen on Main Street was the place teenagers went on Friday nights. The air smelled like creassissot after rain and mosquite smoke in the evenings.

 And in November, the light turned gold at 5:00 and the mountains went purple by 6. Nobody in Cottonwood Springs locked a door. The deputies knew every family by name, and the families trusted them the way they trusted the church. Lorraine Castillo, called Rainey by everyone who knew her, was the oldest of five children.

 Her father, Hector, ran the body shop on Copper Street and had fixed every dented fender in town. Her mother, Yolanda, cleaned the church on Saturdays and cooked for the whole block on Sundays. Rainey had been a teller at Copper State Savings since she was 19, and the old miners who came in on payday would wait in her line even when the other windows were open because she remembered their grandchildren’s names.

She was saving every paycheck to open a flower shop in the empty storefront next to the Dairy Queen. She had already picked the name. She drove a green 1972 Ford Maverick with a St. Christopher medal on the rear view mirror, and she had a habit, her brother Ruben remembered, of tapping the metal twice before she started the engine.

 Everyone in Cottonwood Springs knew the sheriff’s deputies, and everyone knew Frank Howerin. He was 33, a former Army MP and the sharpest investigator the Mariposa County Sheriff’s Office had. He had made detective at 29. He coached the Pop Warner team. He came into the bank every other Friday to cash his check and he always came to Rainey’s window.

 On the morning of November 5, Alma Ruiz would later remember he had been there at 9 and he had asked Rainey what time the bank closed on Fridays. Now, as if he did not already know. On November 5, Rainey worked until the bank closed at 6:00 p.m. She counted her drawer, balanced it to the penny the way she always did, and left at 6:20.

 The branch manager, Alma Ruiz, watched her tap the metal on the mirror and pull out of the lot. At 6:40, she stopped at the Circle K on the highway and bought a Coca-Cola and a pack of gum. The clerk remembered her earrings and he remembered that she was humming. Home was 11 minutes away. She never arrived. At 7:15 p.m.

, Yolanda had dinner on the table. At 7:45, Hector called the bank. No answer. At 8:30, he called the sheriff’s office. The dispatcher sent the onduty detective. At 8:55, Frank Howerin’s unmarked Plymouth pulled into the Castillos’s driveway. He sat at the kitchen table. He took notes. He told Yolanda that girls Rainey’s age sometimes drove to Phoenix on a Friday night without telling anyone.

 Yolanda told him her daughter had never done that in her life. Howerin said he would put out a bulletin on the Maverick. At 7:10 Saturday morning, a rancher named Bud Kesler found the Green Maverick on a dirt track off Salt Creek Wash, 9 miles east of town, in the opposite direction from the Castillo House. The keys were in it.

 The Coca-Cola was on the seat, unopened. The St. Christopher Metal was gone from the mirror. There were tire tracks in the sand beside the car that did not belong to the Maverick, and a deputy named Joe Padilla photographed them and poured a plaster cast before the wind could take them. Two days passed. On Sunday, November 7th, at 9:30 in the morning, a quail hunter found Rainey in a ravine a half mile from the car.

 The county coroner, Dr. Samuel Whitmore, ruled it a homicide. She had been strangled. She had fought. He scraped beneath her fingernails and sealed the material in an envelope for the sheriff’s office. And then, because Dr. Whitmore was a careful man who had once seen evidence lost in a courthouse fire, he made a second slide and filed it in his own cabinet at the state medical examiner’s office in Phoenix.

He told no one. He noted only that one of Rainey’s turquoise earrings was missing. The case was assigned to Detective Frank Howerin. He worked it hard. Everyone said so. He was at the Castillo house every other day. He organized the search of the wash. He drove to Phoenix and Tucson chasing leads.

 He held Yolanda’s hand and told Hector he would find the man who did this if it took the rest of his career. The first suspect was a ranch hand named Leroy Dabney, 38, who had a record for assault in New Mexico and had been drinking at the Copper Pit Tavern that Friday night. Howerin held him for 3 days. Dabney had been thrown out of the tavern at 6:15 p.m.

 and had spent the night in a friend’s trailer in Florence, 40 miles away, and four people swore to it. He was released on November 12th. The second suspect was a longhaul trucker who had stopped at the Circle K after rainy. Howerin tracked him to Texas, interviewed him by phone, and cleared him in December. By January, Howerin told the Casa Grande paper that the killer was almost certainly a drifter, someone who had used the highway, and moved on.

The evidence went sideways in ways that no one questioned at the time. The plaster tire cast that Deputy Padilla had poured was logged into the evidence room on November 6th. In March 1977, it was listed as damaged in storage and discarded. The fingernail envelope from Dr. Whitmore was logged in on November 8 and according to a 1979 inventory could not be located.

Howerin signed the inventory. He wrote that the loss was regrettable. Nobody asked how a sealed envelope walked out of a locked room. Deputy Padilla asked once in a memo whether the tire tracks should be compared to the county’s own fleet. The memo is in the file. There is no reply. While the sheriff’s office chased a drifter who did not exist, the Castillos tried to survive.

 Yolanda kept setting six plates at the table, then five, then six again. Hector closed the body shop for a month, and then reopened it because the bills did not stop. Reuben, who was 17, started riding his bicycle out to Salt Creek Wash on weekends and walking the ravine, looking for the earring. He never found it.

 And on Sunday afternoons, Frank Howerin came by with a box of pastries from the bakery on Main Street and sat at the kitchen table and told them he was still working it. Then the years came. By 1980, Hector had sold the Maverick to a family in Tucson. In 1982, the storefront next to the Dairy Queen became a video rental shop.

By 1986, 10 years had passed. 10 years. Yolanda said the words at mass on the anniversary and Father Ooa read Rainey’s name aloud and Frank Howerin sitting in the fourth pew bowed his head with everyone else. Every November 5, the family drove to the wash and left a bundle of maragolds where the maverick had been found.

Reuben became a paramedic and moved back to Cottonwood Springs so he could keep going. Howerin was promoted to lieutenant in 1988. In 1996, on the 20th anniversary, the Arizona Republic ran a story about the case, and Howerin was quoted in it. He said, “I have never stopped looking for the man who did this. I never will.

” Yolanda cut the article out and kept it in her Bible. Howerin retired in 1998 with a plaque in the lobby of the sheriff’s office. When he left, records show he checked out the Castillo case file for personal review and did not return it for 11 months. Hector died in 2004. The copper mine closed in 2009 and half the families on Copper Street moved to Tucson.

 The Dairy Queen became a takeria and the video store became nothing at all. Yolanda died in 2015 at 81. The article still in her Bible. Reuben, by then 56, kept driving to the wash. He kept calling the sheriff’s office every November. Some years a detective called back. Some years no one did. He called anyway. Every case on this channel represents weeks of digging through records, verifying facts, and piecing together real lives that deserved better.

If you want us to keep uncovering the truth behind stories like this one, please take a second to like this video, subscribe, and let us know in the comments where in the world you’re watching from. Now, let’s get back to Rainey. The case had been cold for 46 years when a detective who was born in 1988 found a slide that no one knew existed.

 Her name was Detective Sophia Reyes and in 2022 she was assigned to the Arizona Department of Public Safety’s new cold case unit. Her first assignment was Mariposa County. She read the Castillo file in a weekend. She noticed the lost cast. She noticed the lost envelope. She noticed that the same name had signed both loss reports.

 And she noticed that the file had spent 11 months in a retired lieutenant’s house. She did not draw a conclusion, but she wrote the name on a legal pad and underlined it. Then she did what any good investigator does with a 46-year-old homicide. She went to the medical examiner’s office in Phoenix and asked if anything from 1976 had survived.

 A records clerk led her to a cabinet in the basement that had belonged to Dr. Samuel Whitmore. Dead since 1991. In the third drawer, in a glassine sleeve, was a slide labeled Castillo L 11776. Fingernail duplicate. She sent it to a private laboratory in Texas that specializes in recovering DNA from tiny decades old samples. In January 2023, the lab reported a full male profile, no match in the national database.

So, the lab used forensic genetic genealogy, a method that uploads the unknown dina to public ancestry websites and works backward from distant cousins through birth records until the family tree narrows to one person. On Tuesday, March 14th, 2023, at 7:50 in the morning, Sophia Reyes opened the genealogologist’s report at her kitchen table.

The profile belonged to a man descended from the Howerin family of Kyhoga County, Ohio. Two brothers, one had died in 1999. The other was born in 1943, had served as an Army military policeman, and had moved to Arizona in 1970 to join the Mariposa County Sheriff’s Office. She looked at the legal pad.

 She looked at the report. Then she called her supervisor and said, “It’s the detective.” She called Reuben Castillo that afternoon. She did not say the name. She said there was a match and that it was going to be very hard to hear. Reuben was 64. He asked her one question. Had this person been to his mother’s house? Reyes said yes.

 He put the phone down for a full minute. When he picked it up again, he said the pastries. Frank Howerin was 79 years old in 2023. He lived in a retirement community in Oro Valley, north of Tucson. Played golf on Tuesdays. and was a regular at the VFW post where he was known as lieutenant. His plaque still hung in the sheriff’s office lobby.

 He had spoken at Hector Castillo’s funeral in 2004. In hindsight, there had been signs. The bulletin on the Maverick had not gone out until 6 Saturday morning, 9 hours after he sat at the kitchen table. A gas receipt in his own expense report placed him at a station on the East Highway at 7:05 p.m. on November 5 on the road to Salt Creek Wash at a time he had told the sheriff he was at home.

 And Deputy Joe Padilla, who was 80 and had retired to Yuma, told Reyes he had always wondered why the tire cast looked like a match for the county’s Plymouths and why nobody had wanted to hear it. Reyes needed a confirming sample. On March 28, a Dpace agent watched Howerin finish a bottle of water at the VFW bar and drop it in the recycling bin. They collected it.

 On April 11, the lab confirmed it. The knob beneath Lorraine Castillo’s fingernails belonged to Frank Howerin. On the morning of Thursday, April 20th, 2023, at 6:45 a.m., Frank Howerin answered his door in a golf shirt. Sophia Reyes stood on the step with six agents behind her. Reuben Castillo was in a car at the curb. He had asked to be there and Reyes had let him.

Howerin looked at the warrant. He looked at Reyes. According to the arrest report, he said, “I worked that case harder than anyone alive.” Reyes said, “I know.” When agents searched his home that afternoon, they found a shoe box on the top shelf of the bedroom closet. Inside was a St. Christopher medal on a broken chain and a single turquoise earring.

 In Cottonwood Springs, the news landed like a rock slide. The sheriff took the plaque down that afternoon. Deputies who had trained under Howerin sat in their cars in the parking lot and did not go in. Alma Ruiz, the old branch manager, was 88, and she told the Kasa Grande paper she remembered him coming to Rainey’s window every other Friday and that she had thought it was sweet.

 Then the shock became rage. People remembered the pastries. They remembered the article in the Republic. They remembered him at Hector’s funeral. Howerin pleaded not guilty. Court documents show that in October 2023, a Mariposa County jury took 4 hours to convict him of firstdegree murder. On November 3rd, 2 days before the 47th anniversary, he was sentenced to natural life without parole. He was 80.

 Reuben Castillo stood at the podium and told him that his mother had kept his words in her Bible for 27 years and that she had died believing them. Howerin stared at the table. Joe Padilla, 80, sat in the second row. Lorraine Castillo, was 22 years old. She balanced her drawer to the penny, remembered the miner’s grandchildren’s names, and tapped a metal twice for luck before every drive.

She had a flower shop picked out and a name for it, and a whole life in front of her that belonged to her by Wright, and it was taken by the man her town had trusted to find the truth. After the sentencing, Reuben drove to Salt Creek Wash with a bundle of Maragolds and for the first time in 47 years.

 The earring, he told reporters, I looked for that earring on this ground for 10 years. It was in his closet the whole time. The Castillo case was the first of eight Mariposa County cold cases reopened by the DPS unit, and every file Frank Howerin ever touched is now being reviewed. The years have a way of burying things, but they do not destroy them.

 A careful coroner’s duplicate slide, a deputy’s memory of a tire track, a gas receipt, and an expense report. These things wait. The truth is patient in a way that people are not. What seemed settled in Cottonwood Springs in 1976 was never truly closed. It was only waiting for someone who was not afraid of where it led.

So, we want to hear from you. Do you believe natural life at 80 is justice? Or did Frank Howerin get 47 years he never deserved? What detail in this case stays with you most? the lost envelope, the pastries, or the shoe box. And how many other cold cases are cold because the person assigned to solve them had every reason not to? Justice came for Lorraine Castillo after 47 years.

 Stories like hers remind us that truth, however late, always finds its way to the light. If you believe that, too, subscribe so you don’t miss the next case. And if you want more solved cold cases, the links are waiting in the description. Thank you for watching.