A Web site helped Bernalillo County cold case detectives piece together a 7-year-old slaying case that spread through three states. This week a warrant was issued for a Texas man who police believe killed his neighbor in 1999 in Amarillo and dumped her body in Albuquerque while en route to California.
Investigators said they believe Narciso Teodoro Cuellar Jr. killed Jacqueline Ann Wunch for her car so he could move his family to California.
"We got lucky with this one," said Bill Peters, a cold case detective with the Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office. "I am pretty amazed how it all came together."
In October 1999, a fisherman found Wunch's body in a ditch at the end of Second Street in the South Valley. The case quickly turned cold because investigators couldn't determine the identity of the body, which had been in the ditch for about 10 days.
Bernalillo County Sheriff's cold case detectives reopened the case about a year ago, still not knowing the victim's name.
A forensic artist reconstructed the victim's face and detectives put a profile of the victim on the Doe Network , an Internet site established in 1999 that uses volunteers to try to match missing person cases to unidentified bodies. The site has helped law enforcement solve 36 cases around the country.
Several months after the profile was posted, a representative from the Web site notified detectives that they thought the body matched a missing person from Texas.
DNA eventually confirmed their suspicions.
Investigators immediately started looking for Wunch's car. They were able to determine that the car was pulled over in Sacramento and that her former neighbor was in the area at the same time.
So, Bernalillo County cold case detectives flew to California looking for Cuellar. They never could find him. However, they found his former girlfriend and her son, who was 14 years old at the time of the killing.
While meeting with cold case detectives, the son told them that he wanted to "get something off his chest."
He told detectives that in 1999 while he, his mother and Cuellar were spending the night at Joy Junction, Cuellar asked him to help him "clean out the car."
He told detectives that Cuellar drove him to the end of Second Street, opened the truck and asked him to help carry something that was very heavy, wrapped in a tarp and covered in blood.
"He was so happy to get that off his chest that he gave me a big hug when I left," Peters said. "He was carrying that with him for a long time."
After the boy, who is now 21 years old, told police his story, Bernalillo County detectives presented the information to prosecutors in Texas because they believed the killing occurred there. A warrant was issued soon after.
Late Friday, police were still looking for Cuellar. Investigators ask anyone with information on his whereabout to call police at 242-COPS.