Hitmen (5 page)

Elizabeth decided it would be better to hire someone else to do the dirty deed on her behalf so she began chatting up drifters in local lowlife bars and then offering them money to murder her daughter-in-law. Most of the men she approached thought she was high on drink or drugs and took little notice. Then Elizabeth remembered a woman called Diane Romero, whose husband Rudolph had been successfully defended on a drugs charge by her beloved son Frank. Elizabeth located Mrs Romero and pointed out that her and her son were owed a favour. She spun a yarn that Olga was blackmailing Frank and offered Mrs Romero $1,500 to visit Olga’s apartment at 1114 Garden Street, Santa Barbara, and kill her. Mrs Romero reluctantly agreed to the hit. But the next day she knocked on Olga’s door and was horrified to discover she’d once been a patient of Olga’s back in British Columbia.

Mrs Romero made an excuse and retreated to the nearest payphone where she called Elizabeth and cancelled the hit. Then Mrs Romero’s husband, Rudolph Romero, was approached by Elizabeth who offered him $2,000. He declined her kind offer and even ignored her threats to have
him thrown back in jail. But he didn’t bother telling the police about his strange encounter with Elizabeth Duncan.

On 12 November 1958, Elizabeth Duncan set off – with the demented Mrs Emma Short in tow – to the seedy side of Santa Barbara and a grubby beer house with the unlikely name of the Cafe Tropical. She’d heard of the tavern when Frank had defended owners Esperanza Esquivel and her husband Marciano on charges of receiving stolen goods. The case against Mrs Esquivel, an illegal Mexican immigrant, had been dismissed but Marciano had pleaded guilty and was awaiting sentencing at the time.

Elizabeth and her friend Mrs Emma Short strolled into the Cafe Tropical and ordered coffees as if they were sitting down to breakfast in a family diner. Elizabeth immediately introduced herself to Mrs Esquivel and told her she was Frank’s mother. She claimed that Olga was blackmailing her and threatening to throw acid in her beloved Frank’s face if he didn’t give her money.

‘You got any friends who’d help me get rid of her, perhaps get her out of the way?’ Elizabeth asked in much the same way that most people would ask if they could have sugar in their coffee.

Mrs Esquivel’s brows arched and she gave the question some thought. ‘I know some boys, but I don’t know if they’d talk to you or not.’

‘Maybe I could meet them,’ suggested Elizabeth in her finest sugary sweet tones.

‘Come here tomorrow afternoon and they’ll be here.’

At 2.45pm the following day, Elizabeth and her doddery
old friend Mrs Emma Short were introduced to two young Mexicans, 21-year-old Luis Moya Jnr and his best friend,
26-year
-old Augustine Baldonado, known to all as Gus. Both were unemployed labourers who occasionally swept the floors of the Cafe Tropical in exchange for meals. Baldonado also lived with the Esquivels.

Moya, from the Mexican town of San Angelo, was a convicted burglar and desperate for money to feed his drug habit. Baldonaldo was similarly inclined, but neither had ever expressed a desire to kill someone for a fee.

As the quartet sat down, Mrs Esquivel did the introductions. ‘This is Mrs Duncan. She wants to talk to you,’ she said. Uneasy smiles were exchanged before the extremely nervous Mrs Emma Short was dispatched to a back table away from the negotiations.

‘How much?’ asked Moya.

‘$3,000,’ ventured Elizabeth as calmly as ever.

‘Make it $6,000,’ snapped Moya.

‘You got a deal,’ said Elizabeth. ‘$3,000 up front and the remainder after the job’s done.’

‘We need a car, weapons and gloves,’ added Moya, who’d taken the role of official spokesman for the two would-be killers. ‘We ain’t got much dough so can we have somethin’ right now?’

Elizabeth didn’t trust them an inch but threw them a $100 bill before providing a list of other ‘props’ that might come in useful such as rope, sleeping pills and acid, which she already had from all those previous unsuccessful attempts on her daughter-in-law’s life. Elizabeth also supplied the precise location of Olga’s apartment and her work routine since Olga had returned to nursing at the nearby St Francis Hospital.

As Moya later explained: ‘We all agreed that if we saw her coming or going from work and if there was nobody around, we’d kidnap her off the street, or go up to the apartment and have the door opened for us and force our way inside and perhaps knock her out or somethin’ and then tie her up, get rid of all her clothes or part of her clothes and make it look like she was on vacation or something. Then we’d take her to San Diego and get her across the border into Mexico and do away with her in Tijuana.’

Elizabeth Duncan even pointed out at the time, ‘You’d better watch out. She’s a pretty strong girl. She might put up quite a fight.’

The two men looked blankly at Elizabeth. The strength of a mere woman was not something they’d lose any sleep over. Moya then blandly announced: ‘I know where to get hold of a gun.’

He turned down Elizabeth’s kind suggestion that they use her car to transport Olga to her grave. Even these two drifters knew it was better to make sure there were as few links to their employer as possible.

Shortly afterwards, Elizabeth left the Cafe Tropical and headed to the nearest pawn shop to raise the cash for the hitmen’s first proper down payment. She traded in two rings for $175, which she gave to Moya in the kitchen of the cafe a few minutes later.

Elizabeth and the two young Mexicans even agreed on a code word – ‘Dorothy’ – to be used at all times. Elizabeth also mentioned she’d already wasted $1,000 on another hitman who’d let her down. Moya and Baldonado knew she meant business.

As Elizabeth and Mrs Emma Short tottered back out of the cafe, she turned to her elderly friend and said, ‘I think we got a real bargain with those two.’ But then Elizabeth had absolutely no intention of paying the two Mexican drifters another penny.

Moya never even suspected she’d renege on the deal. He later explained: ‘We trusted Mrs Duncan. We reckoned her word was good, as we made good ours.’ And Moya and Baldonado certainly kept to their side of the bargain. They hired a cream-coloured Chevrolet and borrowed a .22 pistol from a pal.

At 11.00pm on the evening of 17 November, Baldonado arrived at the cramped apartment of Moya’s girlfriend Virginia Fierro and picked up his accomplice before they headed off to carry out the hit.

That evening Elizabeth’s daughter-in-law Olga was entertaining two old nursing colleagues from the Cottage Hospital where she’d once worked. They left the apartment at around 11.10pm. Twenty minutes later the Mexican’s
cream-coloured
Chevy rolled quietly up near the neat two-storey apartment block on Garden Street. Moya slipped silently up the stairs alone, leaving Baldonado slumped in the back seat.

When Luis Moya knocked on the door of number 1114, Olga answered wearing a skimpy pink dressing gown over her seven-months-pregnant belly. ‘I brought your husband home, Señora,’ he said in broken English. ‘I met him in a bar and he’s pretty drunk. He got a lotta money on him and told me to bring him home. He’s downstairs in the car but I need help getting him up here.’ 

Although Frank rarely drank alcohol, Olga didn’t question Moya any further. ‘Sure, let’s go get him,’ she said.

She walked down to the pavement with Moya and saw what she thought was Frank slumped in the back seat.

‘Frank?’ she called quietly, not wishing to wake up the neighbours.

As she leaned in to take a closer look, Moya pulled out his gun and smashed it over the back of her head before bundling her into the back of the car, screaming. Just then the man in the back seat – Baldonado – sprang to life. As Moya raced round to the driver’s seat, Baldonado held Olga down. But she continued screaming and struggling and even made a grab for the door handle. Baldonado tried to throttle her but she just wouldn’t be silenced. At a set of traffic lights, Moya leaned back and smashed the gun butt into her head until she finally crumpled to the floor with blood pouring from her head. Soon they were heading out of town and south towards the Mexican border.

But then the ancient, rusting Chevy started shuddering and both men wondered if it would make the 250-mile trip to Mexico. The two hitmen decided to divert and head for the mountains just 30 miles south of Santa Barbara. As Moya later explained: ‘We’d find a nice little spot to bury her in.’

That ‘nice little spot’ turned out to be a ditch just off Highway 150. But as the drifters pulled Olga’s body out of the back of the Chevy she recovered consciousness. They couldn’t shoot her because the gun had been broken during that earlier ferocious assault. So both men took it in turns to strangle Olga before grabbing a nearby rock to make
absolutely sure she was dead this time. Baldonado even leaned down to check her pulse.

They intended to bury her, but had forgotten to bring a spade, so both of the hitmen began digging with their bare hands. It took almost four hours, but finally Olga’s corpse was dumped in the hole. On the short drive back to Santa Barbara Baldonado blurted out the six-million dollar question: ‘Let’s hope the old lady pays up.’

‘No problem, hombre,’ replied Moya. ‘She’ll pay.’

The two men then screeched to a halt on the edge of town to rip the blood-splattered seat covers out of the car before returning it to the rental office. They told the company they’d got drunk the previous night and accidently started a fire with a cigarette. Then it was off to celebrate their big windfall by having a party with their few friends.

By early next day, Frank and Olga’s friends were so worried by her disappearance that they called the police. And back on the sleazy side of Santa Barbara, Moya and Baldonado were expecting their payment. Moya called Elizabeth at her home and announced, ‘We’ve done the job. When do we meet to collect the dough?’

Elizabeth played for time. ‘I can’t get all the money right now because the police have already been round to see me about Olga.’ It was a classic Elizabeth lie. ‘If I start taking that kind of money out of the bank they’d get real suspicious.’

‘You gotta have
some
dough for us?’ asked Moya.

‘Sure,’ agreed Elizabeth.

So a meeting was set up for the following day at the Blue Onion restaurant. Mrs Esquivel acted as the go-between
because Moya and Elizabeth did not want to be seen meeting together in public. Moya had earlier warned Mrs Esquivel. ‘I’ll get real angry if she doesn’t come up with the dough.’

Elizabeth offered the two drifters a cheque worth $200 and promised the rest of the money would follow ‘very soon’. The cheque had actually been given to Elizabeth by her beloved son Frank to buy a typewriter. Little did he know his own money was being used to pay off the killers of his young, pregnant wife.

Naturally, Moya turned nasty and demanded cash. Another rendezvous was fixed up for a couple of hours later that day. This time Elizabeth handed Moya an envelope. When he opened it in his car a couple of minutes later it turned out to contain just $150. Over the next few days, Moya hounded Elizabeth for money but none appeared, except for a miserly $10 which she left for him in an envelope marked ‘Dorothy’ at the Blue Onion restaurant.

Meanwhile police enquiries prompted by Olga’s disappearance had uncovered the full depth of anger that Elizabeth felt towards her daughter-in-law. When she was hauled in for questioning, she deflected attention by claiming she was being blackmailed by two Mexicans who’d threatened to kill her beloved son Frank. She even gave detectives descriptions of Moya and Baldonado – a curious move considering they both held the key to the actual crime that had been committed. The police then set up a
phone-monitoring
system to record any future calls from the supposed blackmailers. Elizabeth pulled the plug out of the recorder in her home to ensure she was not caught making her own incriminating statements.

On 4 December 1958, police picked up Moya and charged him with suspected blackmail. He was placed in an identity parade but Elizabeth failed to pick him out. Then the tormented Frank finally cracked and confronted his evil mother for the first time in his life. He accused her of covering up the truth. But she still refused to admit her role in Olga’s disappearance. Meanwhile Moya was released and on his way out of the police station, he encountered Elizabeth and whispered to her, ‘I think everythin’ is goin’ to be OK.’

Investigators then uncovered the truth about Elizabeth’s involvement in the bogus attempt to annul Frank’s marriage. Detectives also located Elizabeth’s dotty old friend Mrs Emma Short, who suffered from the early signs of senile dementia. However, when the police called round at her home she poured out the entire story about the murder plot and how Olga was to be killed in Mexico. Mrs Short said she was terrified of Elizabeth Duncan and felt an undercurrent of violence every time the two women met. She told police she’d been too scared to report anything earlier, but now she knew it was time to speak up or be accused of conspiring with her friend in the murder of Olga.

Police obtained confirmation of Mrs Short’s bizarre claims from the equally scared Mrs Esquivel. Baldonado was immediately hauled in for questioning, but refused to talk so he was jailed on a holding charge of failing to support his children. Moya was then re-arrested for violating his parole on an earlier conviction.

But there was still no sign of Olga’s body and Elizabeth Duncan’s lips remained sealed even though she was arrested and thrown in prison on a holding charge. In jail, she
immediately began planning her escape and even offered bribes to other inmates to help her. Detectives knew they stood little chance of convicting anyone on the word of Mrs Short and Mrs Esquivel. They needed a confession from one of the main players or else they’d all walk free.

Eventually it was Baldonado who cracked. He knew that Elizabeth had conned both him and Moya and refused to let her get away with it. So he led them to Olga’s battered remains – on condition that he didn’t have to watch them dig her up. Shortly afterwards, Moya also confessed. With Mrs Short and Mrs Esquivel both granted immunity from prosecution, would Elizabeth finally confess? Not on your life: she carried on spinning her web of lies.