Family’s slaying remains Texas’ longest unsolved mass killing.

MICHAEL GRACZYK Feb. 3, 2006

Associated Press Writer

When the tire on their 10-year-old Buick went flat in this rugged, isolated stretch of West Texas about 40 miles north of the Mexican border, it seemed merely an inconvenience for Manuel Arellano and his family.

Arellano fixed the flat, but had another a few miles farther north. They relied on a Good Samaritan to take them another 30 miles up the lonely road to Sonora to get that tire repaired.

What happened next has baffled authorities for nearly 40 years.

A mile-long stretch of U.S. Highway 277 became a killing field, with family members shot, stabbed, raped and robbed. In all, five people died in what remains Texas’ oldest unsolved mass slaying.

But thanks to an anonymous tip that reinvigorated the stalled investigation, a Texas Ranger assigned the case now believes authorities are close to cracking it.

“I couldn’t give you a numerical value on our chances of solving it,” said Sgt. Brooks Long, who is responsible for a four-county area of vast West Texas. “But I can tell you this: In 1998, law enforcement wasn’t even in the ball park. And today we’re on third base.”

It was April 16, 1968, when the Arellano family piled into the blue four-door 1958 Buick Special for a 190-mile drive to San Angelo from Villa de Fuente, just inside the Mexican border south of Piedras Negras, to visit a relative who had just given birth.

Along with Arellano, 25, was his wife, Monica, 25; their children, Manuel Jr., 5, Leticia, 2 1/2, Eduardo, 15 months; and Arellano’s sister, Rosa Elia, 19.

It wasn’t expected to be a difficult journey. Arellano was familiar with the United States, spoke fluent English and had been a migrant farm worker in Iowa. The couple had other relatives in Texas, and their car carried Texas license plates and election stickers promoting a relative running for sheriff in Zavala County.

By daybreak, though, the family was dead. A ranchhand discovered the carnage _ Arellano’s body was found near a water trough, inside a barbed wire fence line not far from the highway. His wife’s body was in a ditch about a mile south. Her sister-in-law’s body was in some brush a few feet away. The children were nearer their father, in the rocks and shrubs usually occupied by goats, snakes and armadillos. The car was found about eight miles away, still with a flat tire.

Amazingly, Leticia, shot twice between the eyes, was alive. So was her brother, Manuel Jr., also shot in the head and stabbed. Leticia died two days later. Manuel Jr. survived, but underwent multiple brain surgeries.

Some two weeks after his attack, the boy was able to tell authorities about a white man, “a big cowboy,” who was helping them, then killed his father.

Based on information from a Sonora service station attendant who repaired the tire for the family, police distributed a sketch of a possible suspect _ a tall, sandy-haired man in his 30s, wearing a straw cowboy hat, who was accompanying them. He was driving a pickup truck.

Several people were brought in for questioning. The attendant couldn’t identify any of them as the man he saw. No charges ever were filed. The .22-caliber murder weapon never was found. Investigators weren’t even certain how many suspects to hunt.

By 1982, the investigation had turned cold after producing thousands of pages of documentation, Long said.

“It had been worked to exhaustion,” he said.

That’s how it stayed until 1999, when a caller told the Texas Department of Public Safety he knew the identity of the killer. Detectives traced the caller and eventually dismissed him as an unreliable source, but the tip renewed interest in the case.

“We had to go look, start digging things up, find reports and start piecing things together,” Long said. “We came to realize this is a case that needs to be looked at” again.

Rangers tracked down the ranchhand, an illegal immigrant, who found the bodies, but he had nothing new to add. Long looked for two years for the old Buick, finally convincing himself it was destroyed in a salvage yard.

The lead investigator at the time, Ranger A.Y. Allee Jr., died in January, but Long has a sworn statement from him that could be used in court.

The investigation has taken Long all over the country and to Mexico, where he found Manuel Jr. He was taken to Mexico after recovering from multiple brain surgeries and raised by his grandmother. He’s now about 42 years old, married, a father, and working in the financial industry.

Long said Manuel Jr. wasn’t sure what to make of authorities contacting him decades after he lost his family.

“You can only imagine what went through this gentleman’s mind,” Long said. “Initially he was skeptical. After I was able to meet him in person, I think he realized we were for real.”

But he could provide little help, even after questioning under hypnosis.

“His memory of the incident was basically nonexistent, except for what he has been told or read,” Long said.

He did, however, lift his shirt and show Long the five or six scars from stab wounds he suffered, Long said.

Long, who is about Manual Jr.’s age, has authorities did collect some physical evidence years ago, like pieces of the victims’ clothing. Some has been submitted for DNA testing that wasn’t available in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

Long believes more than one person was involved in the slayings, which differs from the beliefs of his peers decades ago.

“Back in ’68, I think with the information they had, probably they looked at a hate crime as the motive. Sexual assault was secondary, thirdly would have been theft,” said Long, referring to the rape of at least one of the women. “I think now we put that reversed. I think you have a robbery that kind of gets out of hand that leads to murder and sexual assault.”

Long said the attacker or attackers may have killed again.

“Experience is, definitely you don’t do this and stop,” he said. “And if it was just a one-time event in some individual’s life, that’s questionable how somebody rational could do something like this and just carry on with his normal routine in life.”

Few in the sparsely populated area remember the case, though it seems to have spawned a legend from Del Rio to Mexico.

Carol Finegan, who with her husband owns the nearly 80-year-old Loma Alta store where the Arellano family repaired their first flat, has heard talk about how Mexicans won’t stop there or travel the road.

“It seemed like a ghost thing they were talking about, or something like that,” said Finegan, whose store is the lone oasis on the winding 90-mile highway between Del Rio and Sonora.

A preacher once came in the store “to get rid of the Loma Alta devil or ghost,” she recalled. Another time she was questioned by a man who said he was a private investigator looking into some killings, she said.

The killings are among more than 900 mass slayings in the 20th century and several remain unsolved, according to Grant Duwe, a senior research analyst with the Minnesota Department of Corrections who has studied the subject. Among them is one that occurred only two months after the Arellano family slayings in 1968, when a vacationing family of six was killed in a Michigan cabin.

Long said he hopes one day to get answers to what happened that day in that West Texas field.

“If anything this case did do, it showed me the importance of how not to quit,” Long said. “There’s always something to follow.”

https://www.myplainview.com/news/article/Family-s-slaying-remains-Texas-longest-unsolved-8508932.php

If you have information about the brutal murder of the Arellano family, contact Texas Crime Stoppers at 1-800-252-8477. You could be eligible for a $3,000 reward. You can remain anonymous. https://www.p3tips.com/tipform.aspx?ID=650