Even Detectives Were Horrified by This Case. The Shocking Story of Norma Rodriguez

A mother of two was found dead inside her own home under horrifying circumstances. And detectives quickly found themselves looking at several possible explanations for what had happened. But every lead eventually went nowhere, and the case remained unsolved for the next 10 years. Then investigators finally got the breakthrough they had been waiting for, and it led them to a truth no one expected.

Norma Rodriguez was born on November 16th, 1960 in Texas. She grew up in a big family as one of eight children with six sisters and one brother. Norma was a pretty quiet, easygoing girl who rarely got into trouble, but she also wasn’t afraid to stand up for herself when she needed to.

 When Norma was around 12, her family moved to California and settled in a city called Oxnard. She finished high school there and later enrolled at a local college where she met a young man named Anthony. The two started dating and about 2 years later in March of 1982 they got married. Their first son Andrew was born later that same year and a few years after that they welcomed another boy, Austin.

 Over the next several years, Norma got a job at Kmart in Oxnard and eventually worked her way up to assistant manager. She put a lot of effort into building her career, but whenever she wasn’t working, she tried to spend as much time as possible with her boys. She was also very close with the people she worked with.

 And over the years, many of them came to feel more like a second family than just co-workers. By the early 1990s, though, Norma’s marriage to Anthony had started to fall apart. They were arguing more and more, and eventually they decided to separate, even though they were still legally married.

 Norma moved with the boys into a small house in Port Hanami, just a few minutes from Oxnard. Anthony still saw his sons regularly, so he and Norma stayed in touch even after they separated. As time went on, Norma gradually settled into her new routine. She kept working at the supermarket, raised the two boys, and remained very close with her large extended family.

 In early 1993, when Norma was 32, she started seeing a man named Daniel, who coached her older son’s baseball team. Daniel got along well with both boys, and things between him and Norma seemed to become serious pretty quickly. But only a few months into the relationship, Daniel suddenly told her that he wanted to end things and go back to his ex-girlfriend.

Norma was understandably hurt because from her point of view, the relationship had been going well. Still, she tried not to dwell on the breakup and focused on her kids, family, and friends. On Saturday, May 29th, during Memorial Day weekend, Norma decided to have a small barbecue outside her home and invited a few friends and co-workers from the supermarket.

 They spent the evening cooking, having some drinks, and just having a good time together. Norma spent the following day at home with four-year-old Austin while Andrew was staying with his father for the weekend and wasn’t expected back until Monday evening. She and Austin spent most of Sunday relaxing around the house and watching TV.

 At around 10:30 that night, one of Norma’s friends called and asked if she wanted to go to the beach the next day. Norma said yes, and the two women made plans to meet sometime after lunch, but that meeting would never happen. At around 7:30 on the morning of Tuesday, June 1st, Anthony called 911, and told the operator that he had just found his wife dead.

 He explained that he had come to Norma’s house that morning to take their older son to school and the younger one to daycare. Since the separation, Anthony had continued helping the boys on a regular basis, and that morning, it was his turn to drive them. His brother, Hector, had come along with him and stayed outside waiting in the car.

 When Anthony got to the house, he knocked on the door, but no one answered. It was also unusually quiet inside. Norma was normally awake by then, and Anthony would usually be able to hear the boys somewhere in the house. So, after knocking several more times and still getting no response, he began to feel that something wasn’t right.

 The door was locked and Anthony didn’t have a key of his own. So, he slid a plastic card between the door and the frame and managed to release the lock. Once inside, he called out for Norma, but there was still no answer. He then walked into the living room where he was met with a horrifying sight. Norma was lying on the floor near the coffee table, completely still with silver duct tape wrapped tightly around almost her entire head.

 At first, Anthony couldn’t fully process what he was looking at, so he immediately ran outside to get his brother. The two men went back into the house together, and at that point, the boys, who had been woken by the noise, came out of the bedroom to see what was happening. Anthony and Hector quickly sent them back into the room so they wouldn’t see their mother, and Hector then went over to check on Norma.

 Her body still felt warm to him, which made him think there might still be a chance to save her. He ran back to the car for a pair of scissors and cut away some of the tape around her mouth and nose, hoping she might be able to breathe. But Norma showed no signs of life. Within just a few minutes of the 911 call, the house was filled with police.

 Calls like these were extremely rare in the small city of Port Hanami, which hadn’t seen a murder in more than 3 years. So, several detectives and crime scene investigators were sent out right away. When they began looking over the living room, they found a pretty unusual scene. Norma was lying on her back near the coffee table, wearing a t-shirt and jean shorts that had been unbuttoned.

 Her arms were resting at her sides while duct tape had been wrapped around her head from her forehead almost all the way down to her chin, completely covering her face. What made the scene even stranger was that everything else in the house looked completely normal. There was no blood, no overturned furniture, and nothing that clearly suggested there had been a struggle.

 Investigators also found no sign that anyone had forced their way inside other than the front door Anthony himself had opened with a plastic card just minutes earlier. Norma’s bedroom was neat and the bed had been made. Her purse was there as well, and although it was open, her ID, bank cards, and cash were all still inside.

 As far as her family could tell, nothing valuable was missing from the house either, which made robbery seem unlikely almost from the beginning. There were, however, a few details that stood out. Near Norma’s body, detectives found a set of keys and quickly confirmed that they belonged to her house.

 The fact that they were lying there seemed odd, and investigators wondered if the killer might have dropped or tossed them there before leaving. The amount of duct tape was also difficult to explain. Hector had already cut through part of it, but what remained was wrapped so tightly and so extensively around Norma’s head that detectives couldn’t understand why anyone would have gone to such lengths.

One of the first possibilities they considered was that Norma had been killed during a sexual assault. Her shorts had been unbuttoned, which pointed them in that direction, although there was nothing else at the scene that clearly showed an assault had taken place. Investigators also had to consider another possibility that the killer had unbuttoned her shorts after she was already dead specifically to make the crime look sexual and send police in the wrong direction.

 While the crime scene team stayed behind to collect possible fingerprints and biological evidence, Anthony and Hector were taken to the police station for questioning. Detectives had already found part of their story strange, especially Hector’s explanation for cutting the tape away from Norma’s face. He said her body had felt warm to the touch and he thought there might still be a chance to save her.

 But by the time the police examined her, it was clear that wasn’t the case at all. Norma’s body was cold and was already beginning to show early signs of decomposition, which meant she had been dead for many hours before anyone called 911. There was another obvious reason investigators wanted to take a closer look at Anthony.

He and Norma were still legally married, even though they had been separated for several years, and detectives quickly learned from her family that the marriage had been troubled. Because of that, Anthony naturally became one of the first people they focused on. He told them that their older son had spent the entire holiday weekend with him.

 On the evening of May 31st, he and Hector had taken the boy to a baseball game and then dropped him off at Norma’s house at around 8:45. Both men said they never went inside and drove straight back to Oxnard, where they spent the rest of the evening with relatives. Police spoke with several people who had seen Anthony and Hector that night, and their accounts backed up what the brothers had told them.

 Both men also agreed to take polygraphs, and neither showed any signs of deception. Even so, detectives weren’t ready to clear them just yet because at that point, they still didn’t know exactly when Norma had been killed. While they waited for the medical examiner’s report, investigators began trying to narrow down the last time anyone could say for sure that Norma was still alive.

As we know, late on the night of May 30th, she had spoken with a friend on the phone, and the two of them had made plans to meet the following day. When police spoke with that friend, they learned that she had in fact gone to Norma’s house at around 2:30 p.m. on May 31st, but no one came to the door. She assumed Norma had either changed her plans or gone out somewhere, so she didn’t think much of it at the time and simply left.

 The day after Norma’s body was found, the medical examiner performed an autopsy. Once all of the duct tape had been removed from her head, investigators learned just how much of it had been used. The killer had wrapped it around her roughly 14 times, using about 20 ft of tape altogether. Despite the fact that Norma’s shorts had been unbuttoned, the examiner also found no evidence that she had been sexually assaulted.

 The cause of death was asphixxiation. But there was another detail that made the duct tape even harder to explain. Norma had already died before the killer began wrapping it around her head, which meant the tape hadn’t been used to stop her from breathing. For some reason, whoever killed her had stayed there after she was dead and spent a considerable amount of time completely covering her face.

 That immediately struck detectives as unusual. And one possibility they began to consider was that the killer knew Norma personally and simply didn’t want to look at her face after what he had done. Other details at the scene seemed to point in the same direction. There had been no forced entry. Nothing appeared to have been stolen.

 and there were no obvious signs of a serious struggle, making it seem possible that Norma had let this person into her house herself and hadn’t initially seen them as a threat. After the autopsy, investigators examined the duct tape, hair, and blood samples, as well as material collected from underneath Norma’s fingernails. There was biological material on the surface of the tape, but DNA testing in the early 1990s was still limited.

 So, none of the evidence produced a profile detailed enough to help identify the killer. The medical examiner was, however, able to give detectives something extremely important, a much narrower time of death. Based on the condition of Norma’s body, they believed she had died sometime between about 10:30 p.m.

 on May 30th and 5:00 a.m. on May 31st, the night after the barbecue. That completely changed the way police had initially understood the timeline. It now appeared that when Anthony and Hector brought 11-year-old Andrew back to the house on the evening of May 31st, Norma had already been dead for many hours.

 4-year-old Austin had been inside the house that entire time, which meant he may have spent almost a full day alone there with his mother’s body. With that in mind, investigators decided to speak very carefully with both boys and see if either of them could remember anything about what had happened inside the house before their father arrived.

Andrew told investigators that after the baseball game, his father and uncle had dropped him off outside Norma’s house at around 8:45 that evening. When he walked up to the front door, he noticed that the house was dark and the door was locked. That was unusual because Norma would usually leave it unlocked when she knew her son was coming home.

 Andrew knocked several times, but when his mother didn’t answer, he walked around the house and noticed that the window to the bedroom he shared with his brother was slightly open. With no other way inside, he eventually climbed in through the window. 4-year-old Austin was in the bedroom, and even though it was already late, he was still awake, sitting on the floor in the dark and playing with his toy cars.

 Andrew asked him where their mom was, and Austin said he thought she was sick. Then he added something that sounded strange at the time. Mommy has a band-aid on her face. Andrew had no idea what his little brother meant. He assumed Norma had fallen asleep in the living room, which she sometimes did while watching television, and decided not to wake her.

 The two boys eventually got into their beds and went to sleep. It wasn’t until Norma’s body was discovered the next morning that Austin’s comment began to make sense. Apparently, he had already seen his mother lying on the living room floor with duct tape covering her face. But at 4 years old, he simply didn’t understand what he was looking at.

 That meant Austin had spent more than a full day inside the house with his mother’s body. Even more importantly, based on the estimated time of death, he would have also been there when Norma was killed. Suddenly, police realized they might have a witness to what happened. So, they brought in a child psychologist to help speak with Austin in a way that might give them as much reliable information as possible.

 At first, the boy seemed unsure of himself and had trouble explaining what he remembered. But little by little, he began describing pieces of that night. According to Austin, Norma had opened the door for a man at some point. He said the man came inside and then started arguing loudly with his mother. Austin also claimed that the man wrapped something around Norma’s head that looked like a bandage or a band-aid and then unbuttoned her shorts.

 But the detail that immediately caught investigators attention was that Austin gave them a name. He said the man was called Cory. For police, this was the first real lead they had since the investigation began. Now, they needed to find out whether Norma actually knew anyone named Cory. And it didn’t take long before they learned about a man named Cory Davis.

 Cory worked with Norma at the supermarket. And another part of Austin’s description seemed to fit as well. In addition to giving police the name, the boy had said that the man who came to the house that night was black. Detectives immediately brought Cory in for questioning. From the beginning, he appeared extremely nervous, barely made eye contact, and clearly seemed uncomfortable talking to them.

 Given what Austin had already told police, that behavior only made Cory look more suspicious. Cory, however, insisted that he and Norma barely interacted outside of work. They knew each other and would occasionally talk at the store, but according to him, there was nothing more between them. He also said that on the night Norma was killed, he had been at his parents’ house and hadn’t been anywhere near her home.

 Cory agreed to take a polygraph, and the examiner found no indication that he was being deceptive. Detectives also had no physical evidence placing him inside Norma’s house, and his parents backed up his account that he had been home with them. So despite the initial suspicion, police eventually stopped treating Cory as their primary suspect.

 Austin’s account, however, continued to leave investigators with more questions than answers. The 4-year-old was essentially the only person who might have actually seen the killer. But detectives also knew that memories from a child that young had to be handled with extreme care. It soon became clear just how difficult that was going to be.

 On June 14th, about 2 weeks after the murder, investigators spoke with Austin again, and this time his story was very different. He now said that a white man named Warren had come into the house through the kitchen door, and that Cory had been there as well. That was a major change from his original account in which he had only described one man.

Police soon learned that during the days between those interviews, Norma’s relatives had repeatedly asked Austin what he remembered seeing. The family was desperate to help and had been discussing possible suspects around him, but without meaning to, they may have influenced the way a 4-year-old child remembered the night.

 From that point on, detectives could no longer treat every new detail Austin gave them as reliable on its own. They still believed there might be something important buried in what he had said early on, but separating his actual memories from things he may have picked up from the adults around him was becoming almost impossible.

At the same time, police continued interviewing Norma’s friends and co-workers, paying particular attention to the people who had been at the barbecue a few days before her body was found. During one of those conversations, her coworker told detectives something that suddenly made one of the details from the crime scene much more interesting.

 As we know, a set of Norma’s house keys had been found lying near her body. Detectives had already thought it was strange to find them there, but now they learned that those same keys had mysteriously disappeared during the barbecue. At some point that evening, Norma realized she couldn’t find them, and several of her guests even helped her look.

 They searched around the house and outside, but the keys were nowhere to be found. Investigators began to wonder if someone at the barbecue had deliberately taken the keys and then come back later to get into Norma’s house and kill her. This could also explain why there had been no sign of forced entry.

 There was another detail that seemed to fit that possibility. By the time Andrew came home on the evening of May 31st, the front door was locked while Norma’s keys were lying beside her body. Detectives believed that the killer could have dropped the keys inside after the murder and then locked the door before pulling it shut behind him.

 With that in mind, police began taking a much closer look at everyone who had attended the barbecue. And one name immediately stood out. In Austin’s second version of what happened, he had mentioned a man named Warren. And there happened to be a former co-orker of Norma’s at the party named Warren Mackey. Police learned that even after Warren left the supermarket, he and Norma had stayed in touch.

 He would occasionally come over to her house and help with things that needed fixing around the place. So, he was already familiar with the home and had been there many times before. Norma’s family and friends also told detectives that Warren’s feelings for her may have gone beyond friendship. According to them, he wanted to date Norma and had made it clear more than once that he was interested in having a relationship with her.

 Norma didn’t feel the same way and had turned down his attempts to get closer, but she still considered Warren a good friend and continued spending time with him. That was more than enough for detectives to bring him in for questioning. Warren denied ever being romantically interested in Norma and insisted that the two of them had only been friends, which directly contradicted what several people close to her had told police.

 Investigators began considering whether Warren could have taken Norma’s keys during the barbecue and used them to come back later. Maybe they thought he had planned to make another attempt to pursue her. Or perhaps he intended to assault her. and whatever happened inside the house eventually ended in murder. Then Warren gave them another detail that made him look even more suspicious.

 During the barbecue, Norma had asked him to repair her son’s basketball hoop, and Warren said he had used the same kind of duct tape for the repair that the killer would later use to cover Norma’s head. Detectives found that especially interesting, but there was still more they wanted to know. When they asked Warren where he had been on the night Norma was killed, he said he had gone to a nightclub with his roommate and his roommate’s girlfriend.

 He also casually admitted that while they were out, he had been drinking heavily and had used drugs. Detectives were a little surprised by how open Warren was. He was voluntarily telling them things that made him look bad, yet he remained completely calm and didn’t seem worried about the questions at all. He also agreed to provide a DNA sample and take a polygraph without hesitation.

Just like Anthony and Cory, he showed no signs of deception. Investigators then contacted the people Warren said he was with that night. His roommate and his roommate’s girlfriend confirmed that they had been with him at the nightclub, giving Warren an alibi for the night of the murder.

 By that point, detectives had even more reason to question how much they could rely on Austin’s changing stories. Some of what the four-year-old remembered may have been heavily distorted, and other parts may not have reflected what actually happened at all, leaving police with very little they could confidently use to narrow down the list of suspects.

 DNA wasn’t going to solve that problem either. Investigators still had biological material from Norma’s body and from the duct tape, but the samples were simply too small for the technology available at the time to produce a useful DNA profile. Over the next several weeks, detectives continued looking into Norma’s friends, relatives, and co-workers, but no new lead gave them anything substantial to work with.

That went on for about a month until one of Norma’s sisters told detectives about something else that seemed worth mentioning. It was a small detail she hadn’t thought could possibly have anything to do with the murder. But with the investigation going nowhere, she decided it was better to tell police and let them decide for themselves.

According to Norma’s sister, one of her friends, Beatatrice, who had been at the barbecue, was having an affair. Norma knew about it and had even given Beatatrice an extra set of keys to her house so she could meet the other man there in private. Given everything investigators already knew about Norma’s missing keys, that immediately caught their attention.

 They also realized that during their earlier conversations with Beatatrice, she had never mentioned the fact that she had her own set of keys to Norma’s home. Detectives brought her back in and asked why she had kept something like that from them. Beatatrice admitted she was having an affair and explained that she had been embarrassed to tell strangers about it.

But more than anything, she was terrified that her husband would find out. That left investigators wondering whether the affair could somehow be connected to Norma’s murder. If Beatatric’s husband had learned what was going on, he might have been angry not only with his wife, but also with Norma for letting the couple use her house.

There was also the possibility that he could have gotten access to the spare keys by secretly taking them from Beatatrice. Police began considering whether he might have gone to Norma’s house to confront her, only for the situation to get out of control. When detectives brought him in and started asking about his wife’s affair, though his reaction was not what they expected, he appeared completely stunned and insisted that this was the first time he had ever heard that Beatrice was seeing someone else. To the detectives, he

seemed so genuinely shocked that he was hard to believe he had known about the affair beforehand. They still followed up on the possibility just to be sure, but ultimately they found nothing connecting him to Norma’s murder. By the end of the first two months, police had spoken with around 50 people and had looked closely at several possible suspects, but they still couldn’t prove that any of them had been involved.

 Norma’s family, meanwhile, was doing everything they could to keep the case in the public eye. They spoke with local newspapers and handed out flyers, asking anyone with information to come forward. In a single day, the family distributed around 900 of them, hoping someone might remember seeing a person near Norma’s house, a suspicious car, or anything else that seemed out of place.

But despite all that effort, no meaningful new leads came in. And while Norma’s family and investigators were still trying to figure out what happened inside her home, something unexpected began happening elsewhere in Port Hanami. Just a few weeks after Norma’s murder, on June 27th, an 87year-old woman was found dead inside her apartment at a senior apartment complex.

Someone had entered her home, stabbed her to death, and then fled. Then on August 5th, another woman was killed. This time, firefighters were called to an apartment building that was on fire. And while searching the property, they found the body of a 44year-old woman in the bathroom.

 The autopsy showed that she hadn’t died in the fire. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled. And investigators believed the fire was started afterward in an attempt to destroy evidence. For Portinami, all of this was completely unprecedented. Before Norma’s death, the city had gone years without dealing with a murder. And now, in a little over 2 months, three women had been killed, all of them inside their own homes.

The local police department had only about 19 officers, so dealing with three unsolved murders at once put enormous pressure on such a small force. Over the next several months, investigators interviewed more than 200 people and worked almost non-stop, worried they might be dealing with a serial killer. The circumstances of the three murders were very different in many ways, but there were still a few similarities that police couldn’t ignore.

 All three women had been living alone. each had been killed inside her home, and in none of the cases was there any obvious sign of forced entry. By the fall of 1993, the department had turned over information from all three cases to the FBI because it simply didn’t have the resources to handle everything on its own.

 Agents reviewed crime scene photos, reports, and other evidence to see whether the murders could be connected, but they never found enough to suggest that one specific person was responsible for all three. For a while, police set the serial killer theory aside. A few years later, though, it came up again. In 1995, police across the country were searching for Glenn Rogers, a suspected serial killer who was believed to have murdered at least five people in several different states.

 Some of his victims had been strangled, others had been stabbed, and in a few cases, bodies were left in bathrooms or fires were set afterward. Investigators also knew that Rogers had spent some time living in the Los Angeles area and could have traveled around Southern California. After he was arrested, detectives in Port Hanami decided to take another look at the 1993 murders and see whether Rogers could have been responsible for any of them.

Some of the details did look similar, especially in the case of the woman who had been strangled, left in a bathroom, and whose home was then set on fire. But when detectives compared Rogers to Norma’s case, there was much less that seemed to fit. Many of his known victims were women he had met in bars, while police found nothing suggesting that he had ever known Norma at all.

 They also couldn’t place him anywhere near Port Hanami during the summer of 1993. In the end, that theory went nowhere, and Norma’s case once again came to a standstill. Months passed and then years. Police would occasionally go back through the case, follow up on new tips, and compare Norma’s murder with other crimes, but none of it brought them any closer to identifying her killer.

 For lead detective Dennis Fitzgerald, the case gradually became personal. He stayed in touch with Norma’s family and promised her sisters that he would keep working on it until the person responsible was finally found. By the mid 1990s, though, police had almost nowhere left to go. The most obvious suspects had all been investigated.

 The account from the only possible eyewitness was far too unreliable to build a case around, and the technology available at the time simply wasn’t good enough to get much more from the most important physical evidence. Over the next several years, the investigation remained largely at a standstill. Fitzgerald would still pull the file from time to time, check new tips as they came in, and stay in contact with Norma’s family, but nothing ever seemed to move the case forward.

 That finally began to change around the turn of the century. DNA testing had improved dramatically since 1993, and labs could now work with much smaller samples than before. In fact, those advances had already helped solve one of the three murders that had shaken poor Hanami that summer.

 In 1999, DNA evidence identified the man who had killed the woman in her apartment and then set the building on fire, making it clear once and for all that at least that murder had nothing to do with Norma’s case. For Fitzgerald, that gave him another reason to take a fresh look at the evidence they had saved.

 In 2002, 9 years after Norma’s murder, investigators sent several items from the case back to the lab, including the duct tape that had been wrapped around her head and biological samples collected during the autopsy. Back in 1993, there simply hadn’t been enough material to properly test those samples. This time, however, the lab was able to develop a male DNA profile from the material found underneath Norma’s fingernails, raising the possibility that she had scratched her attacker while trying to fight him off.

 The profile didn’t match anyone in the FBI database, so detectives went back to the people they had investigated years earlier and asked for their samples to compare against it. As we know, there had been five main suspects police had looked at over the years. Norma’s husband, Anthony, his brother Hector, Cory Davis, Beatatric’s husband, and Warren Mackey.

 All five had alibis for the time of the murder. All of them had been questioned and passed polygraph tests, and all agreed to provide DNA. At that point, investigators had no idea whether the killer was actually among them, or whether every one of those samples would come back clean. Soon, Fitzgerald received a call from the lab. They had finished comparing all five samples, and one of them matched the male DNA found underneath Norma’s fingernails. It was Warren Mackey.

 The DNA results came as a complete surprise to investigators. They remembered Warren well from the original investigation because he had seemed completely calm, answered all of their questions, provided an alibi that two other people confirmed, and passed a polygraph test without any problems. One detective later said that out of anyone they had dealt with, Warren had been the most calm and relaxed.

 During questioning, he barely seemed nervous at all and certainly didn’t come across like someone trying to hide the fact he had committed a murder. But now, the DNA was pointing them in a very different direction. Even so, detectives knew that finding Warren’s DNA underneath Norma’s fingernails might not be enough by itself to secure a conviction, especially since the two had known each other.

 So, they asked the lab to take a much closer look at the physical evidence, particularly the section of duct tape the killer would have had to handle while pulling it from the roll. Technicians were able to recover DNA from that area as well, and once again, it matched Warren Mackey. With that second match, detectives went back over all of the details that seemed strange about Warren in 1993, and suddenly many of them looked very different.

 Warren had been at the barbecue shortly before Norma was killed, which was also when her house keys mysteriously disappeared. He was one of the last guests to leave, and he knew the layout of the house well because he had been there many times before to help Norma with things that needed fixing. Warren himself had also told detectives that during the barbecue he had repaired the basketball hoop outside the house using duct tape, the same kind of material that would later be wrapped around Norma’s head.

 But investigators believed the most important piece was a possible motive. As we know, Norma’s friends had told police that Warren wanted to date her while Norma simply didn’t feel the same way. She continued to treat him as a friend and still invited him over, but she had made it clear more than once that there was never going to be a romantic relationship between them.

Warren had always denied having those kinds of feelings for Norma, but detectives now believed that her rejection may have been what ultimately led to the murder. Their theory was that Warren quietly took Norma’s keys during the barbecue so he could return later without having to break into the house. At some point that night, they believed he used those keys to get inside and found Norma in the living room.

Investigators believed the two then got into some kind of confrontation and at some point Warren attacked Norma and strangled her with his hands. After she was dead, detectives believed he unbuttoned her shorts, either because he intended to sexually assault her or because he wanted the scene to look as though that had been his motive.

 He then wrapped her face completely in duct tape. Investigators believed that last part may have had a psychological meaning as well. From the beginning of the case, there had been speculation that whoever killed Norma knew her personally, and after what he had done, simply couldn’t bring himself to look at her face.

 According to the police theory, Warren then left the keys beside Norma’s body, locked the house, and walked away. There was still one major problem, though. his alibi. As we know, two people had confirmed that Warren was with them at the club late that night. So, detectives went back and looked at the timeline much more carefully, and that was when they noticed there was actually a pretty large gap in it.

According to Warren’s friends, they had driven to a club in nearby Santa Barbara at around 10:30 p.m. and stayed there until about 2:00 in the morning. The drive back home should have taken less than an hour, which meant Warren and his roommate could have been back by around 3.

 Warren had said that he had been drinking heavily and using drugs that night, so went straight to sleep once he got home. But there was no one who could actually confirm that part of his story. His roommate was asleep and had no way of knowing whether Warren stayed home or left again sometime later. And because the medical examiner had placed Norma’s death sometime between about 10:30 p.m.

and 5:00 a.m., that left Warren with as much as 2 hours after returning home to make the short drive or walk to Norma’s house and kill her. On August 27th, 2003, detectives contacted 39-year-old Warren and asked him to come to the district attorney’s office. They didn’t tell him about the DNA matches and instead said they simply had a few more questions about Norma’s case.

 Warren agreed to come in and during the interview, detectives finally laid everything out and told him that his DNA had been found in two separate places on evidence connected to Norma’s body. Even then, Warren continued to deny any involvement. He insisted that he had not killed Norma and said he had no idea how his DNA could have possibly ended up at the crime scene.

 But detectives no longer needed a confession. They believed they had enough evidence to move forward with the case. So Warren was arrested and taken to jail where a judge later set his bail at $500,000. Norma’s family had been told about the arrest ahead of time and asked to keep the news quiet until police were ready to make it public.

 By then, her younger son was already 14 years old, while Andrew was already 21. There was also something especially unsettling about the fact that Austin had mentioned Warren’s name when he was only four. Because relatives had questioned him so many times after the murder, investigators had good reason to consider his statements unreliable.

 But 10 years later, it turned out that somewhere among those confused and changing memories, the little boy had actually given the police the name of the man who killed his mother. On September 18th, Warren appeared in court and formally pleaded not guilty. His attorneys prepared to fight the charges, but the DNA remained the biggest problem for the defense.

 Back in 1993, police had mostly been working with suspicious circumstances and possible connections. Now, prosecutors had physical evidence directly linking Warren to evidence from the murder. After nearly 11 years, Norma’s case was finally headed toward a jury trial. But that trial would never happen.

 Warren remained in custody for about another year while the case moved through the courts and in the spring of 2005, he agreed to a plea deal. Under the agreement, he would plead guilty to seconddegree murder in exchange for a less severe sentence than he could have faced if the case went to trial. The deal did not require Warren to give a full confession or explain exactly what happened inside Norma’s house that night.

 Because of that, some parts of the murder have never been known for certain, and the sequence of events described by investigators remained a reconstruction based on the physical evidence and the circumstances surrounding the case. In late March of 2005, 41-year-old Warren was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison. As of today, he remains behind bars, even though he has already served the minimum 15-year term.

 At sentencing, one of Norma’s sisters told Warren that by killing Norma, he had not only taken her life, but in many ways had destroyed the entire family along with her. And in the end, one of the strangest things about this case was just how close police had been to Warren from the very beginning. For 10 years, Norma’s killer had been right there among the people they had already looked at.

 He had calmly answered their questions, provided an alibi, passed a polygraph, and even voluntarily gave them a DNA sample. Norma’s 4-year-old son, who may have seen at least part of the attack and later saw his mother’s body, had even mentioned Warren by name. But at the time, none of it was enough to prove that he was the killer.

 By the time evidence finally caught up with him, more than a decade had passed. Warren was sent to prison, but because his sentence was 15 years to life rather than life without the possibility of parole, there’s still a real chance that he could be released someday. Let me know what you think in the comments, and don’t forget to leave a like if you appreciated the video.

 Thanks for watching.