One Decorative Rock From Murder

Decorative rock Montrose, Colorado
We’re gonna start this story out with big negative vibes. It’s 2003 and Irene Trujillo and her husband, Rick are in the middle of a bitter divorce. The pair own a decorative rock business together, and they have 3 daughters so their lives are fully entwined. So, untangling their lives from one another is messy and stressful to say the least. The pair separated while their girls are still pretty young. The girls remember constant fighting and a nasty custody battle. In the end, Rick got main custody of the girls and they stayed with him during the week while their mom got custody on the weekends. Once the pair split, Irene stayed on at the rock quarry in Montrose and Rick started a stone company 100 miles away in Carbondale. Irene’s attorney was setting up a settlement where Irene would get the Montrose quarry and 120 acres of land while Rick would get the Carbondale quarry along with 40 acres in Montrose and another 40 acres in Olathe - a gorgeous town about 15 miles from Montrose. They were all set to sign the agreement. However, on April 9 of 2003, one of Irene’s girls gets a voicemail from her mom. Irene’s voice sounds shaky and she’s telling her daughter how much she loves her and hangs up. This daughter is the oldest of the 3 at 16 years old. She tries calling Irene back, but didn’t get an answer and in true teen fashion, she doesn’t give it much thought and leaves it at that. Two days after that call, another of Irene’s daughters has been trying to call her mom all week but her mom hasn’t called her back. This is super unusual. She’s an involved mom and returns calls from her kids. When she doesn’t hear back, she calls a man named Lionel that works at the rock quarry in Montrose. Lionel and the daughter start looking for Irene. She’s not at her house, she’s not at the hospital and they haven’t had any recent records of her. The kids are getting pretty worried, so Rick, her estranged husband, files a missing person’s report with the police in Montrose. The sheriffs went out to the quarry to look for any sign of Irene and to gather info. The crew that worked with Irene said they hadn’t seen her for 2 to 3 days which wasn’t that unusual. Her employees were a well-oiled machine that ran the day-to-day operations and Irene handled the managerial tasks and took her days off as she wanted. The Montrose Stone company employees were a tight crew. They, along with Irene, were like a family and looked out for one another. Irene made sure everyone was paid well and treated them like she would her family, so they all really seemed to love Irene. Police were a little suspicious when work went on as usual at the rock quarry. Like, no operations stopped, checks were being written, orders were filled – investigators were a little surprised that the quarry could go on working so well with the owner gone. But for the crew, they knew what was expected of them and kept working. So police start grabbing phone records and Irene’s financials but there was no action on her accounts since she had gone missing. They also check her house where there were no signs of a struggle and nothing seemed to be missing. As for Rick, Irene’s estranged husband, he agreed that Irene did need to be found, but he wasn’t really grieving it didn’t seem like. But, that could be because they’d been going through an awful divorce and apparently Irene had been refusing to sign a lot of the divorce agreements and such so he was probably over her completely by this time. Irene’s divorce attorney did say the divorce was bitter and had been going on for more than 3 years. He also said Irene was happy the divorce was being finalized and had been upbeat the day before she went missing, looking forward to the future without Rick. The attorney really believed there was no reason for her to leave and felt like she must not be alive. A month after Irene’s disappearance, someone broke into her house. The burglar trashed her house, emptying drawers all over, breaking things and stole all electronics they could get their hands on. Her laptop was one of the items stolen which would have had information about her divorce and particularly Rick, so townspeople speculated about Rick’s involvement. Fortunately, police get a call from someone claiming they witnessed someone with specific items that were stolen from her home. That person with the stolen items was Lionel Lopez, the man who worked at the rock quarry for Irene. Lionel wasn’t just any worker, he was in fact Irene’s right-hand man at the stone shop. He helped with everything from moving rocks to making business deals and everything in between. Lionel was a family friend as well and acted as a kind of uncle to Irene’s kids. Police grab Lionel and do find that he had some of the stolen items. A friend of Lionel’s didn’t believe he did it. He said that shortly before her disappearance, Irene had given Lionel a TV and that’s the item police thought he stole from her. He went on to describe Montrose as a conservative area and that Lionel would make a convenient fall guy. I don’t know if he was meaning that because Lionel is Mexican or a blue-collar worker or what but he felt like Lionel was being set up. So, police are holding Lionel for the burglary and as a potential murder suspect. Meanwhile, 2 months after her disappearance, Irene’s ex, Rick and his silent partner Bob take over the Montrose quarry. The business was in substantial debt and if they didn’t take it over, the business would crumble and they would stand to lose a lot of money. Bob, the silent partner was going to live on the quarry grounds in a camper. To make it more comfortable, they decide to run a water line to it. Rick knew there was a water tap in that area, so they began digging around where he thought the tap might be. In the way was one of the large decorative boulders, so they grab a forklift and move it aside. They dig in that spot, trying to find the water line, but instead of the water line, they come across concrete under the dirt. They start chipping that away and they find what looks like a human finger under the concrete. They stop and call the cops to come check, knowing it could be Irene. The human remains had been dismembered, burned. Under the body was a pile of tax record and the remains were covered with concrete and rock shale. A dog had been killed and laid on top of the pile along with trash. Sure enough, the remains were what was left of Irene and her dog. The medical examiner was able to determine that Irene had died of a gunshot wound to the head. Once the news gets out in town, people start calling in saying they had bought rock from the quarry after Irene had disappeared and when they had asked where she was, employees would just claim she was on vacation. So, customers were starting to suspect the employees had something to do with her disappearance especially since her body was found at the rock quarry. Police bring in all the employees of Montrose Stone in to question but still aren’t getting any further into finding concrete evidence of who had killed Irene. It’s now been 6 months after Irene’s murder and police are fielding tons of tips from the public. They got things like the Mexican mafia had ordered Irene’s murder because of a bad drug deal. Another rumor was that there was an illegal pot grow in the barn on the quarry property, but police searched it and found no evidence of that. One employee came forward and told police that she believed that Lionel had been stealing from the stone business. She said that Lionel was taking quarry business calls on his personal cell instead of the office phone and he’d sell rock and pocket the money. Since Lionel helped with all aspects of Irene’s business, he certainly had access and the means to steal from the business. Irene’s daughters couldn’t imagine Lionel doing anything to hurt their mom, having known him since they were little. But, police put him higher on their list of possible suspects. Lionel hired an attorney and clammed up, not helping with the investigation at all. Interestingly, Irene’s father was a retired police officer and he was doing his own investigation into Irene’s murder. He believed investigators needed to dig into Rick’s life more especially because the day of the murder was the day they had filed their final divorce papers. The timing was suspicious, so police take dad’s advice and focus more on Rick. 7 months after the murder, police dig up a new lead. Someone came forward to report that she had a conversation with a former employee of Irene’s that said Rick had bragged that he had said would get that rock yard back and he did. Police couldn’t rule out Rick or Lionel at this point. Investigators find out from others that Irene’s former marriage had been volatile and that often the couple would get violent with each other. During one fight, Rick put Irene through a glass table. Irene had voiced her concern to friends that she was worried that Rick might kill her one day. She was worried enough that she had gotten a restraining order on him and he wasn’t allowed on the rock quarry property at one point. This info is making Rick look better to police. In an attempt to clear his name, Rick agreed to a polygraph. The polygraph examiner said that Rick did show some indicators of deception with questions about the fights with Irene, but when asked if he had anything to do with her murder, it seemed he was truthful about not being involved. On September 14, 2004, a confidential informant gives new info to police. She said she had been around Lionel Lopez after Irene’s disappearance. He had a book of poetry he had written and several of the poems referenced Irene romantically. She thought that might mean the pair was closer than most realized. She wanted to stay anonymous because she was afraid Lionel would come after her. A month later, a man named Greg Haines came forward saying that Lionel had told him multiple times that he had killed Irene. Greg knew Lionel from working at a landscaping company Lionel provided rock for. He validated the claim another person had made saying that Lionel had been stealing rocks from Irene’s quarry and selling them to the landscaping company Greg worked for. Furthermore, Lionel and Irene were seen at a discount store the day before she went missing. Witnesses thought they saw the pair buying ammunition there. When police were finally able to get Lionel into the station for an interview about it, they asked him about the trip to the discount store. Lionel claimed that Irene had owed him money for work he hadn’t been paid for, so she paid for ammo he needed for a hunting trip he was going on. Police had heard from witnesses that Lionel and Irene were seen arguing in the store before leaving. Police think he drove Irene east of Montrose, shot her in the head and took her back to the quarry. He tried to disfigure and dismember the body to make it hard to identify or find pieces of her. They think he ran her through a rock breaking machine on the property but it didn’t do the amount of damage he expected it would. So he dumped her in a hole he dug, tried to burn the body, which also didn’t work well, then he gets cement out, fills in the hole with cement, gets a forklift and moves a boulder over the grave to conceal it. It sounds like a plausible scenario, but proving it without evidence would be hard. They feel that with the witness, Greg Haines, who would testify that Lionel had told him that he had murdered Irene, they would be able to successfully prosecute Lionel for Irene’s murder. For a year, the police build their case against Lionel, but the case hits a major snag when Greg Haines, their witness dies. The information Greg had provided is now invalid since he won’t be able to testify in trial. Even without Greg, though, a grand jury decides to move forward with first and 2nd degree murder charges against Lionel. No one else was willing to step forward to testify against Lionel so the defense was able to claim the witness statements were nothing more than hearsay which made it all less credible. The defense argued that Rick may have paid Lionel to murder Irene so he could take back over the business, but Rick wasn’t the one on trial. Other witnesses unwilling to come forward at court had said that Rick had put him up to the murder and paid him. On March 29, 2009, Lionel accepts an alford plea for 2 counts of accessory to murder and is sentenced to 10 years in prison. Alford plea – when the accused agrees that the jury has enough evidence to convict him, but he doesn’t want to admit guilt. Many were unhappy with the plea. If he was an accessory, who was he helping, and if he was the only culprit, why was he allowed the alford plea? In 2015, Rick passed away never having been charged with anything, but his daughters are certain he wouldn’t ever do that to them. As for Lionel, he was out of jail within 5 years and deported to Mexico.