Her Husband Was Arrested for Her Murder. His Own Brother Did It

For 37 years, a small sample of blood sat inside an evidence locker in Garland, Texas. It had a case number, a date, nothing else. Nobody knew whose it was. It had been collected in November 1986. The night a woman was found stabbed to death inside her own home. Her husband was arrested that same night. He said he found her.

 He said he heard her screaming. But when police tested the blood at the scene against his, it didn’t match. He was cleared. The case went cold. It sat in storage, waiting. In 2023, it finally got tested again. And what it found didn’t point to a stranger. It pointed to someone already inside the family. Someone nobody had even considered.

Her name was Barbara Car Villarreal. She grew up in the Indiana countryside. She was one of four kids, the youngest from her mother’s first marriage. By 27, she’d made her way to Garland, Texas, working at an oil consulting company in Dallas. She got married, too. To a man everyone around her believed they knew completely.

On the morning of November 7th, 1986, all of that came to a sudden stop. It was still early when a neighbor called the police. Something was wrong at a house on Cole Bath Street. Officers arrived to find Barbara dead inside. She had been stabbed multiple times. A large kitchen knife lay near her body. Her husband was the one who raised the alarm.

He told police he’d heard her screaming. He said he found her like that. He said he’d asked a neighbor to call for help. Police knew him as Domingo Diaz Villarreal. That same day, they arrested him. It made sense on paper. He was the one in the house. He was the one with a story that needed checking. Police searched the scene and collected what evidence they could.

Outside the home, they found drops of blood that didn’t appear to belong to Barbara. They ran it against her husband. It didn’t match. The blood didn’t match, and there was no other evidence tying him to the crime. Police cleared Domingo Diaz Villarreal. He was released. The investigation kept going, but it didn’t go far.

There were no witnesses, no suspects who fit. One by one, the leads dried up. Barbara had a younger brother named Mark. He was 19 when she died. Mark has said that over the years, things came out that made the family suspect people close to Barbara. He never said it as fact. He said it as a feeling that never fully went away.

The case officially went cold. Detectives assigned to Garland’s unsolved cases picked it up and put it down again over the decades that followed. Nothing ever changed. Whoever had left that blood outside the house was still out there. Nobody knew it yet. In 1988, two years after Barbara’s murder, her husband died.

He was killed in Mexico. At the time, nobody connected his death to the case. He’d already been cleared. As far as the investigation was concerned, he was simply a man who had lost his wife, and then lost his own life a few years later. Nobody looked any closer. The case stayed exactly as cold as it had been. Now, the one person who’d been closest to that night, the man who found her, was gone, too.

If there were answers only he could have given, they went with him. Years passed. The file sat in Garland Police Department storage, one of hundreds still open. Around 2019, a detective named Lucas Schupe started looking at Garland’s cold cases again. By then, DNA testing had changed. A method called investigative genetic genealogy could now take a single unidentified sample and trace it through an entire family tree, matching it not just to criminals, but to relatives who’d never been arrested for anything in their lives.

Schupe sent Barbara’s blood sample in for testing. In 2023, the results came back. They didn’t match anyone in a criminal database. They matched a family. The DNA pointed to a close relative of Barbara’s husband. There was a problem. As far as the original case file showed, nobody had ever looked into whether he had any siblings.

The initial detectives on the scene, they didn’t even know he had a brother. Schupe would later say, “Investigators started digging. They found him. His name was Laborio Canales. He was 85 years old. Canales split his time between two places. Most of the year, he lived in Mexico. But he was also known to stay from time to time at a home in Lovington, New Mexico, just across the border.

Investigators had a name. They had a location he sometimes visited. What they didn’t have yet was Canales himself. And no way to know when or if he would come back across that border again. In July 2023, Canales did come back. He’d spent most of that year in Mexico, but he crossed into New Mexico that month for one reason.

His birthday was coming up, and he wanted to celebrate with family in Lovington. Investigators were watching. On July 18th, officers from the Lovington Police Department, working with Garland detectives, arrested Laborio Canales without incident. He was booked into the Lea County Detention Center on a warrant for murder.

Bond was set at $1 million. After his arrest, Canales admitted to killing Barbara. He told detectives he had been angry with her over a family dispute. He didn’t go into detail about what that dispute was, and nothing further about it has ever been made public. He was extradited to Texas to face the charge. In March 2024, at 86 years old, Laborio Canales pleaded guilty to the murder of Barbara Villarreal.

Dallas County Lead Prosecutor Leighton D. Anthony explained why they took a plea instead of going to trial. The evidence was strong enough on its own, and given Canales’ age, 20 years was essentially a life sentence. It was also the first murder conviction in Dallas County history secured using investigative genetic genealogy.

Investigative genetic genealogy is no longer the future of solving violent crimes. It is very much the present. Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot said in a statement. In Dallas, we continue to be a national leader using IGG. Barbara’s family was in the courtroom that day. Her mother, 93 years old by then, had lived to see it.

Barbara’s sister-in-law, Jennifer Dunderman, stood and spoke directly to the man who had killed Barbara. You spent 37 years living your life as if nothing had happened, she told him. The life you lived should be considered a gift. You didn’t just kill Barb. You killed a little piece of everyone she knew. Canales was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Outside the courthouse, Mark Dunderman spoke to reporters. He was 56 years old. He had been waiting since he was 19. It doesn’t really change anything, though, he said. We still don’t have our sister. But it is nice to have closure. There was one more thing. For 37 years, everyone who knew Barbara’s husband knew him by one name.

Domingo Diaz Villarreal. That was the name on the 1986 police report. That was the name on record right up until his death in Mexico in 1988. It wasn’t his real name. Detectives later learned the truth. The man who married Barbara, the man who found her body and was arrested that same night, the man who turned out to be Liborio Canales’s own brother.

He had spent his adult life under a false identity. His real name was Jesus Canales. Nobody has ever explained why. And there’s something else that’s never been settled. Prosecutor Layton D’Antoni has said, on the record, that he personally believes Barbara’s husband may have played some role in her death, too.

Not the man who was convicted. The other one. The one who was arrested that first night, cleared when the blood didn’t match, and who died 2 years later without ever being asked again. There’s no way to prove that now. He’s been gone for almost four decades. So, the case is closed. And it isn’t. Was he involved? Did he know exactly what his brother had done? We’ll probably never know for certain.

But, we want to know what you think. Drop your answer in the comments.