It was around 9.30 in the morning on March 7, 2019, about 20 miles from the Las Vegas

strip in the Lake Mead National Recreation area near Mile Marker 14 in eastern Clark County.

A caller saw a car on the side of the road with a window broken out, so they called

911 to report a suspicious vehicle parked way out there in the desert. The car was a blue

Mercedes-Benz C-300 with California plates. It looked like it had been abandoned. When police

arrived on the scene, they looked inside that car, and right away they saw signs

that something bad had happened in that vehicle.

They could see blood on the driver's side headrest and some traces of blood on the back

seat.

They could also see several pairs of latex gloves that were sitting there on the

passenger seat, along with evidence that someone had lit a small fire there that looked like it had

gone out. There was also a baseball bat in the car. The officers opened the trunk and that's when it

hit them, the unmistakable smell of death. Underneath a bunch of clothes

and bedding back there, they found the body of an elderly white man. It was unclear how long the

body had been lying out there in the sun, but it was obvious that something horrible had happened to

this man. The medical examination would later reveal that he had been beaten to death.

He was bruised and he had cuts everywhere, and part of his ear, was missing.

A coroner's report would conclude that the man had died of blunt force trauma

after being struck in the head multiple times with an

unidentified object.

Detectives believed that the baseball bat was a murder weapon, and they found two sets of fingerprints

on that baseball bat.

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