Hi, it's Phoebe. This is a special bonus episode of Criminal, made possible by TNT's new

limited series, The Alienest, based on the best-selling novel by Caleb Carr.

When a series of gruesome murders grips New York in 1896, Dr. Lazlo Chrysler and his team

must investigate, analyze, and capture the killer. The Alienest premieres January 22,

and will have a preview after the show, to learn more, visit TheAlienest.com.

There's a small fishing village called Necochea, and it's a little bit south of Buenos

Aires along the coast, along the Atlantic coast, and there's a murder that happens there.

Or a couple murders. This is Eric Ray, a forensic scientist, and he's telling the story

of a murder that happened in Argentina in 1892, a murder that was gruesome and horrible,

but that's not why we remember it today.

The police go to this house, and a woman and her two kids have been attacked. The woman's

name is Francisco Rojas, and her two kids, Ponceano and Teresa, have been killed, and

Francisco had had her neck cut, her throat slashed, but it wasn't deep enough to kill

her. She survived the attack.

When Francisco Rojas recovered enough to speak, she told the police that a man named Pedro

Ramón Velasquez was the one who attacked her, killed her children, and left her to die,

because she would not marry him.

So the police go, and they arrest Velasquez, and they take him in, and they try to get

him to confess, to match up with the statement of the victim here at this crime, and he won't

confess. They beat him, and over multiple days they haven't tied up, and they repeatedly

try to get him to confess to killing these two little kids, and he just won't do it.

At one point, they physically tie Velasquez to the bodies of the two dead children overnight,

...