Highlighting cold case homicides & disappearances in Southwestern New Mexico.
Silver City, New Mexico.
A beautiful place. But these hills hold secrets.
Cold Case Homicides
John Timothy “Tim” Edwards
December 30, 2005
Tim Edwards was a retired Arizona educator and athlete and New Mexico rancher who was found brutally murdered on the road to his ranch on his way home from town with a load of hay and groceries for a New Year’s Eve get together. His case has been highlighted on America’s Most Wanted, and in newspapers in New Mexico and Arizona.
Joey Moreno
September 22, 2008
Joe Louis “Joey” Moreno was found shot in the head three times execution style on a remote stretch of highway near the Arizona border. Car lights on, engine running, radio playing, private driveway, mile post 3, Highway 78. No arrests have ever been made.
Roberto Benavidez Garcia
April 20, 2012
Roberto Benavidez was a 22-year-old college student at Western New Mexico University in the spring of 2012, when he was found beaten in the head and unconscious in the middle of Aztec Street in Hurley, New Mexico. No one has ever been charged in his death.
Suspicious Undetermined Deaths
Lorraine Ramirez
June 28, 2014
Lorraine Ramirez went missing in April or May 2014. Her car was found parked at the Lower Gallinas Campground on Highway 152 in the Black Range of the Gila National Forest. Grant County Search and Rescue conducted a search but turned up nothing.
Her remains were located 1.6 miles past the Lower Gallinas Campground outhouses on June 28, 2014. Lorraine was on oxygen and it is unlikely she was able to get to where her remains were found in a very remote part of the campground on her own. Her death was listed as undetermined by the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator. No one has ever been charged in her death.
Maria Raquel Grijalva
November 14, 2014
Maria Raquel Grijalva went missing Aug. 3, 2014. It was reported she went for a swim in the swollen Mimbres River. Her remains were discovered by a rancher in the dry riverbed in the Mimbres Valley on Nov. 14, 2014. Her death is listed as undetermined by the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator. No one has ever been charged in her death.
Missing
Antonia Annette “Toni” Padilla
July 3, 2020
Toni Padilla went missing on July 3, 2020. She was last seen when she was dropped off at a “friend’s” house in the Silver Acres neighborhood in Silver City. She allegedly left the home on Broken Arrow around 3 p.m. that afternoon and has not been seen since. Foul play is suspected in her disappearance.
David Ortiz Jr.
October 31, 2010
David Ortiz Jr. was just 18 years old when he went missing on Halloween night in 2010, just days after he went to court to seek visitation with his infant son, Joshua. His body has never been found, and no one has ever been charged in his death or disappearance. Two years later, his younger sister, Nichole Marie Leon Ortiz was shot in the head while holding her infant son in her arms on September 29, 2012. No one was ever convicted of her murder. It has now been 12 years since David Jr. went missing. This family has lost two children to violence and no one has ever been held accountable. They deserves answers and justice.