# The Twists In These Murder Cases Are Absolutely Insane | 220

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 2 May 2026, 42 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO9487226678.mp3

Don't forget to drop a comment saying what you're doing while you watch or listen to the podcast. Also don't forget to hit follow. Episode 220 of the true crime podcast btw. 👇 Youtube links: Lazy Chill History Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillHistory Lazy Chill Zone Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillZone 👇 Support My Work: ❤️ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lazychillzone 👇Social Media Links: https://www.instagram.com/lazychillzone/ 👇 Podcast links: ⚡History Video Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/7km5pLWpYWEj1mrPpEfRUr?si=0FHYnZf-Qs2FY1GyLevfig ⚡True Crime Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/0klIz08pAr7wR4we0Ia4sk?si=68qZxCeAQkysXzMZrHE0Iw 🍏 True Crime Podcast on Apple 🍎: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lazy-chill-true-crime/id1815534472 unsolved mysteries, true crime, cold cases, unsolved mysteries, missing persons, murder investigation, forensic evidence, serial killers, crime scene analysis, dark history, criminal psychology, real life horror, police investigations, DNA breakthroughs, forensic genealogy, crime documentaries, criminal profiling, mysterious disappearances, solved cases, justice system, law enforcement stories, cold case files, creepy mysteries, true crime storytelling, crime reconstruction, chilling cases, investigative reporting, modern forensics, victim advocacy, unidentified remains, crime scene forensics, cold cases, true crime, true crime solved, 5 true crime cases

## Transcript

[0:00] Around 3:00 in the morning on June 17th, 2019, a Lyft driver
[0:06] pulled into the empty parking lot of a small neighborhood park
[0:09] in North Salt Lake. In the back seat sat a 23 year
[0:13] old woman with her makeup done, her hair styled, and her bags
[0:18] packed. She'd flown in from Los Angeles
[0:21] less than an hour earlier. She didn't live in this
[0:24] neighborhood, and she had no close friends in the area.
[0:27] And yet, when the car stopped, she opened the door, walked
[0:32] across the grass toward a black vehicle idling in the dark, and
[0:36] climbed in. From that moment forward, every
[0:40] record of Mackenzie Luke's life was going to suddenly turn very
[0:43] dark. Mackenzie was 23 years old.
[0:48] She'd grown up in El Segundo, CA, a tidy beach suburb tucked
[0:53] just South of Los Angeles International Airport.
[0:56] She was a senior at the University of Utah, finishing a
[1:00] degree in kinesiology with the goal of going into nursing.
[1:05] She loved fashion, she loved travel, and she'd been a member
[1:09] of her sorority since her sophomore year.
[1:12] In early June of 2019, Mackenzie's grandmother passed
[1:16] away, and she flew home to California for the funeral.
[1:20] By all accounts, the visit was difficult but ordinary.
[1:24] She spent time with her parents, Greg and Diane, and her younger
[1:28] brother. She caught up with old friends.
[1:32] On June 16th, she boarded an Alaska Airlines flight bound for
[1:36] Salt Lake City. The plane touched down just
[1:39] after one in the morning. On June 17th, she texted her
[1:43] father from the gate to tell him she'd landed safely, the way she
[1:47] always did. That message ended up being the
[1:50] very last anyone in her family ever heard from her.
[1:55] Mackenzie ordered a lift from the airport at around 2:20 in
[1:58] the morning, entering A somewhat unusual destination into the
[2:02] map. It was Hatch Park in North Salt
[2:05] Lake, about a 15 minute drive from the terminal.
[2:10] I assume that anyone who knows the area would tell you that's a
[2:13] strange address to ask a rideshare driver to take you to
[2:16] at 3:00 in the morning. Hatch Park is a perfectly nice
[2:20] little neighborhood park in the daylight, complete with
[2:23] playgrounds, picnic tables and soccer fields.
[2:28] At 3 on a Monday morning in mid June, it's a black square of
[2:31] grass in the middle of a quiet residential St.
[2:36] The driver, who later cooperated fully with investigators, said
[2:40] the trip itself was uneventful, and Mackenzie spent most of it
[2:44] on her phone. They pulled into the park, he
[2:47] stopped, and he watched her get out, walk over to a vehicle that
[2:52] was already sitting in the lot, and climb inside.
[2:56] The vehicle was dark colored, and According to him, the meet
[3:00] up looked planned in advance. There was no struggle, no scene,
[3:05] no hesitation, nothing that screamed stranger danger to a
[3:09] guy who'd seen plenty of late night airport runs.
[3:12] To his eyes, it looked like a totally normal thing, a young
[3:17] woman keeping a private appointment she'd set up
[3:19] herself. And there was some truth to
[3:22] that. But unfortunately, the driver
[3:24] didn't know what sort of plans the man on the other side of
[3:27] that appointment had. The Lyft driver peeled off and
[3:30] went on with his knight, likely thinking that was the last he
[3:34] would ever hear of Mackenzie. Little did he know, that moment
[3:39] was the last documented sighting of Mackenzie alive.
[3:44] For the next few days, her family and friends kept trying
[3:47] to reach her and the texts kept landing in the void.
[3:51] Mackenzie was the kind of person who responded, and according to
[3:54] her friends and family, she was always on her phone.
[3:58] So when she didn't, her people noticed quickly and by June 20th
[4:03] her father had reported her missing to police, she missed a
[4:07] flight back to Los Angeles she'd booked for later that week, and
[4:11] she missed a final exam at the University of Utah.
[4:14] She didn't post on any of her social media accounts, which for
[4:18] a social media obsessed 23 year old senior, was a warning flare
[4:22] in and of itself. Salt Lake City police initially
[4:26] treated the case the way they have to treat any missing
[4:29] persons report involving an adult, which is cautiously and
[4:33] without over promising. After all, aside from her being
[4:37] out of contact with her loved ones, there initially didn't
[4:40] seem to be much more to this disappearance at all.
[4:44] But it didn't take long for detectives to realize this one
[4:47] was different and something had gone horribly wrong.
[4:51] Within days, dozens of officers, federal agents and trained
[4:56] civilian volunteers were combing through Mackenzie Luke's digital
[5:00] life. They pulled her phone records.
[5:04] They subpoenaed her rideshare data.
[5:06] They interviewed her professors, her sorority sisters, her
[5:10] neighbors and her landlord. National News picked Mackenzie's
[5:16] case up within 72 hours, and Greg and Diane Luke flew in from
[5:20] California to stand in front of a wall of microphones.
[5:25] By the end of the first week, the entire country was paying
[5:27] attention and a local case had become a national one.
[5:32] The volunteer effort that built up around the family was, by any
[5:35] measure, remarkable. Search teams on horseback combed
[5:39] the foothills behind the University of Utah campus, a
[5:43] nonprofit that specializes in missing persons.
[5:45] Cases flew in personnel and equipment from out of state.
[5:50] Strangers passed out Flyers and coffee shops and on apartment
[5:53] doors near Mackenzie's Place. Salt Lake essentially stopped
[5:58] what it was doing for a week and pointed itself in One Direction.
[6:03] The break in the case didn't come from a witness or a tip
[6:06] line. It came from the cold mechanical
[6:09] record of a cellular network. Investigators traced Mackenzie's
[6:13] phone in the days and hours leading up to her disappearance,
[6:17] and they reconstructed conversations.
[6:20] They pulled her chat history off third party platforms and one
[6:24] number kept jumping out at them. This number had been in heavy
[6:28] contact with her throughout the night of June 16th and into the
[6:32] early morning of June 17th, right up until the 2nd.
[6:36] Her phone went dark. That number belonged to a 31
[6:40] year old man named Iola Ajayi, a person who on paper didn't fit
[6:46] anyone's idea of a suspect. He was a Nigerian born man who'd
[6:51] lived in the United States for years.
[6:54] He worked as a contractor in information technology with a
[6:58] resume that included working with companies most people would
[7:01] recognize. Iola self published a rather
[7:04] bizarre true crime style book with mystical elements a few
[7:08] years earlier. The Amazon listing has been
[7:11] scrubbed from the Internet, but it's still up on good reads and
[7:16] it looks as though it had a couple dozen reviews.
[7:18] Prior to his crimes, he had a quiet social media presence that
[7:23] suggested a church going, slightly nerdy guy who liked
[7:28] mysticism, gadgets, and travel. He lived in a single story house
[7:33] in northwest Salt Lake City and none of his neighbors had a bad
[7:37] word to say about him. None of his Co workers had ever
[7:40] flagged anything alarming. He was, in the boring language
[7:45] of crime reporting, a man with no significant criminal history.
[7:50] Now, I was able to find unverified posts online by
[7:54] people who claim to have worked with him and thought he was a
[7:57] creep, but I don't put much weight on these for two reasons.
[8:02] First off, people just flat out make stuff up online with
[8:06] startling regularity, so there's that factor.
[8:10] The second is perhaps more important, assuming that at
[8:14] least some of the people did in fact know him.
[8:17] When you find out shocking information like this about
[8:20] someone, every single interaction with the individual
[8:23] becomes tainted by what they had done.
[8:26] For instance, the old reviews on his true crime novel mention it
[8:31] being kind of boring with pacing issues, but it only became
[8:35] disturbing in light of what he ended up doing.
[8:38] According to the eventual charging documents, Mackenzie
[8:42] and Iola had connected through an online platform for quote UN
[8:46] quote, sugar babies. That platform pairs older,
[8:50] wealthier men with typically younger women looking for
[8:53] financial support. That detail didn't define
[8:56] Mackenzie, and it didn't make her any less a victim.
[9:00] It just turned out to be the doorway through which the two of
[9:03] them had ever come into contact at all.
[9:07] By the time she landed at Salt Lake City International on June
[9:10] 17th, the two of them had been messaging on and off for weeks.
[9:15] The texts on the night of the 17th showed her arranging the
[9:18] meeting, agreeing to the unusual drop off location and asking him
[9:23] to confirm, which he did. What investigators built up over
[9:27] the next few days was a damning paper trail in real time.
[9:32] Phone records showed Iola had been texting Mackenzie back and
[9:35] forth in the hour before she landed.
[9:38] They showed his phone pinging cellular towers along the exact
[9:41] route a dark SUV would have taken from his house to Hatch
[9:44] Park and back. They showed his phone going
[9:47] completely dark inside that house for a long stretch the
[9:50] next afternoon, the kind of intentional silence detectives
[9:54] immediately read as suspicious. And when officers compared his
[9:58] cellular movement to the data the rideshare networks had
[10:01] retained for that morning, the two patterns matched up like
[10:04] puzzle pieces. On June 26th, 9 days after
[10:09] Mackenzie was last seen, investigators showed up at
[10:12] Ayoli's house with a search warrant.
[10:14] What they found set the tone for everything that followed.
[10:18] In the backyard, beneath a few inches of soil, was a freshly
[10:23] burned patch of ground roughly the size of a fire pit.
[10:27] Neighbors had reported a foul smell coming from the property a
[10:31] week and a half earlier, on the morning of the 17th.
[10:35] They'd assumed it was a BBQ gone wrong, but it hadn't been at
[10:39] all. Forensic technicians dug into
[10:42] that scorched earth and pulled out charred fragments of bone
[10:46] clothing fabric and burnt personal effects.
[10:50] The fragments were small enough that the medical examiner had to
[10:53] use genetics to confirm what investigators already strongly
[10:56] suspected. The remains belong to Mackenzie
[11:00] Luke. Inside, the team kept finding
[11:03] things, items belonging to Mackenzie, a length of rope and
[11:08] forensic traces and places those traces should never be.
[11:13] The picture that started to emerge was nightmarish in the
[11:16] most specific sense of the word. A picture filled in not by
[11:20] speculation but by physical evidence, catalogued and bagged
[11:24] piece by piece. Iola was clapped in cuffs at the
[11:28] property that same week and charged with a stack of
[11:31] felonies. While the forensic teams worked
[11:34] the property, other detectives were chasing down everyone who'd
[11:38] had contact with Iola over the past month.
[11:42] Co workers said he'd been a little quieter than usual that
[11:45] week, but nothing memorable. A handyman recalled being asked,
[11:50] oddly, to help dig in the backyard not long before
[11:53] Mackenzie disappeared, which strongly suggested a degree of
[11:58] premeditation, to say the least. A neighbor mentioned the smoke
[12:02] she'd seen drifting over the fence on the morning of the
[12:04] 17th. Another neighbor said he'd
[12:07] noticed aioli loading something into the back of his vehicle the
[12:10] next day. None of those details on their
[12:13] own would have meant anything definitively, but strung
[12:17] together with what was being lifted out of the ground, they
[12:20] painted a clear timeline. Mackenzie had been brought back
[12:24] to that house in the early hours of the 17th, and Iola had spent
[12:29] the morning trying to make her disappear forever.
[12:32] Thankfully, though, as I often say, criminals tend to think
[12:36] they're much smarter than they actually are.
[12:40] Even after the discovery in the backyard, investigators knew
[12:44] they didn't have all of her remains.
[12:46] The chemistry of the burn site indicated that what was left of
[12:50] Mackenzie at that site was only a portion of the story.
[12:55] The predator, predictably, wasn't telling them anything
[12:58] useful. So they did the slow, brutal
[13:01] work of putting together where else he'd been in the days after
[13:05] the 17th. They pulled his phone records,
[13:09] his vehicle data, and his card transactions, and they mapped
[13:13] his cellular pings against his work schedule.
[13:16] They looked for trips out of town, anywhere isolated enough
[13:20] to bury a body. Their attention ultimately
[13:24] landed on Logan Canyon, a steep, forested gorge in the Bear River
[13:28] Range about 90 miles north of Salt Lake.
[13:32] On July 3rd, more than two weeks after Mackenzie had vanished, a
[13:36] search team working a remote stretch of that Canyon found
[13:39] her. She was buried in a shallow
[13:41] grave. Her arms had been bound, and the
[13:44] medical examiner concluded she'd passed from blunt force trauma
[13:48] to the head. By the time the case was
[13:51] charged, prosecutors in Salt Lake County had assembled a
[13:55] timeline that told them almost exactly what had happened to
[13:58] Mackenzie. Iola had been the man behind the
[14:02] wheel of the dark vehicle at Hatch Park, and he'd driven her
[14:05] the short distance from the park back to his house in northwest
[14:08] Salt Lake City. At some point in the early
[14:12] morning of June 17th, in the basement of that home, he'd
[14:16] struck her in the head with such force that she didn't survive.
[14:21] He'd then attempted to destroy her body with fire in the
[14:24] backyard, but when that didn't work the way he wanted, he'd
[14:28] loaded what was left of her into a vehicle and buried her in the
[14:32] mountains. What Iola did in the hours after
[14:36] Mackenzie passed is almost as revealing as what he did to her,
[14:40] because it really speaks to the absolutely sick nature of this
[14:43] predator. He went to work, he sent
[14:46] unremarkable texts to a handful of people, he answered emails,
[14:51] and he sat through some meetings just living his life as if
[14:54] nothing had happened. He kept his social media
[14:58] accounts running on their usual rhythm, posting the same kind of
[15:02] bland, inspirational slop he'd been posting for years.
[15:06] To anyone watching. From the outside, he looked like
[15:09] a man having an unremarkable Monday in June.
[15:13] While he was performing all of that, the body of a 23 year old
[15:17] college senior was waiting in the basement of his house.
[15:21] Obviously, we can't know what exactly was going on in his
[15:24] head, but the fact that he didn't deviate from his usual
[15:27] pattern is bizarrely chilling. Prosecutors filed a long list of
[15:33] charges in a capital trial loomed for more than a year.
[15:38] Iola maintained his innocence in court filings, as defendants
[15:42] almost always do. The case lurched through the
[15:45] slow Gears of the Utah court system, paused and complicated
[15:50] further by the early months of the lockdowns.
[15:54] In October of 2020, Iola changed his plea.
[15:57] Standing in a Salt Lake County courtroom, he admitted to the
[16:01] aggravated slaying of Mackenzie Luke, he admitted to kidnapping
[16:05] her, and he fully admitted to desecrating her remains.
[16:09] The plea deal took the death penalty off the table in
[16:12] exchange for a life sentence with no possibility of parole,
[16:16] plus additional consecutive prison time tacked on for the
[16:20] related charges. He confirmed details that until
[16:24] that point had only ever been described in the dry forensic
[16:28] language of charging documents. Mackenzie's mother, father, and
[16:33] brother addressed him directly at the sentencing hearing.
[16:37] They talked about who their daughter and sister had actually
[16:39] been, and they made sure the man in the orange jumpsuit had to
[16:43] listen to all of it. He was led out of the courtroom
[16:47] and into the Utah Department of Corrections, where he'll remain
[16:51] until he dies. Also, if you needed any more
[16:55] reason to absolutely hate this guy, well, let's just say his
[17:00] seized hard drives contain the most objectionable material
[17:03] known to humanity. He was charged in relation to
[17:07] this, but for reasons that remain unclear to me, the
[17:11] charges were eventually dropped. If I had to guess, I would say
[17:16] that may have been because he was already locked up for life,
[17:20] though that's just speculative on my part.
[17:24] A few details from the Mackenzie Luke case have stuck out to me
[17:27] more than the rest, and they aren't the usual more lurid ones
[17:31] I've seen in other coverage of this case.
[17:34] The first is the sheer stubborn ordinariness of Iola's life
[17:37] before and after, and honestly, that part bothers me.
[17:42] There was no obvious unraveling and no flag in any direction
[17:45] that he was a man with a basement full of dark and
[17:48] disturbing secrets. The 2nd, and more significant,
[17:52] is the role of the digital trail, which honestly, I just
[17:56] find to be nothing short of wizardry.
[17:59] Almost everything investigators eventually used to convict him
[18:02] existed because he'd left it behind in plain electronic
[18:06] sight. For a guy working in the IT
[18:09] field, I have to say again, we're blessed by the fact these
[18:13] predators aren't that smart. The phone records, the messages
[18:18] on various social media apps, the rideshare data, the cellular
[18:23] pings, and even the exact timing of his trips up the Canyon all
[18:27] right there on a platter. 10 or 15 years earlier, a case like
[18:32] this might have stayed open for years, but in 2019, it took 11
[18:38] days from disappearance to arrest.
[18:41] I've often been asked if I have a theory about why we just don't
[18:44] have serial predators popping up that often anymore, and I think
[18:48] digital evidence like this is one of the factors.
[18:51] I don't think Iola would have stopped at McKenzie.
[18:55] And of course, this is just speculative, but I consider him
[18:58] an aspiring serial killer, so to speak.
[19:02] This goes back to my first point about how unbothered he seemed
[19:05] by the whole event. Had the digital forensic
[19:08] evidence not been so quick to shut him down, who knows how
[19:12] many other young women would have fallen victim to his evil
[19:15] acts. In the months that followed the
[19:18] plea, Mackenzie's family channeled their grief into a
[19:21] small set of very deliberate things.
[19:24] They established a memorial scholarship at the University of
[19:28] Utah aimed at students pursuing the same kind of career
[19:32] Mackenzie had been chasing. They worked with university
[19:36] administrators on conversations around campus safety, online
[19:40] platforms, and the specific risks of meeting strangers in
[19:44] unfamiliar places. They guarded her memory with a
[19:47] fierceness that came through in every public sentence they ever
[19:50] gave on the subject. Salt Lake City police, for their
[19:54] part, were widely praised for the speed and competence of the
[19:58] investigation, which honestly is extremely refreshing.
[20:06] Hey everyone, it's Jimmy here with my usual reminder to hit
[20:09] the notification bell and turn on all notifications.
[20:13] Also, don't forget to hit that share button and send this video
[20:17] to your friends and family members who enjoy true crime
[20:20] content. Anyway, with that said, let's
[20:23] get back to business. On a quiet Friday evening in May
[20:30] 2011, a young woman walked toward the third floor parking
[20:34] deck of a Bay Area hospital and never came back out.
[20:38] The cameras caught her going in, but nothing recorded her
[20:41] leaving. By the next morning, her car was
[20:45] sitting half a mile away on a sleepy residential St., doors
[20:49] locked with evidence of foul play inside.
[20:53] And Michelle Lee, a 26 year old nursing student with a bright
[20:57] future and a family who adored her, was simply gone.
[21:02] What investigators would eventually piece together is the
[21:06] kind of story that makes you reread the text your old high
[21:09] school friends used to send you. Michelle was born in October of
[21:14] 1984 to Vietnamese parents who had come to the United States as
[21:18] refugees. She grew up in the Rancho
[21:21] Penasquidos neighborhood of San Diego with a younger brother,
[21:26] and she was the kind of older sister who took her role
[21:29] seriously. By every account from people who
[21:32] knew her, Michelle was warm, determined, and a little
[21:37] stubborn. She first attended San Jose
[21:40] State before eventually enrolling in the accelerated
[21:43] nursing program at Samuel Merritt University in Oakland.
[21:47] The choice of nursing wasn't random.
[21:50] Michelle's mother had been a nurse practitioner, and she'd
[21:53] passed away about a decade earlier, when Michelle was still
[21:57] a teenager. Friends and family said Michelle
[22:00] wanted to pick up the thread her mother had laid down tending to
[22:04] those who were in need. By spring of 2011, she was
[22:08] rotating through Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in
[22:11] Hayward, on the eastern edge of the Bay Area.
[22:15] She was doing the unglamorous, exhausting shift work that turns
[22:19] a student into a nurse, and she was just weeks away from
[22:22] finishing the program. On the evening of May 27th,
[22:26] 2011, Michelle was working at the Hayward Kaiser Hospital on
[22:30] Sleepy Hollow Ave. As usual, it was a Friday and
[22:35] she had plans. She told a friend she'd meet up
[22:38] with her later for dinner. Around 7:00, she stepped away
[22:43] from her shift to grab something to eat from her car.
[22:47] Security cameras at the hospital captured her walking toward the
[22:50] third floor parking garage, which was attached to the
[22:53] Medical Center. That image is the last confirmed
[22:57] record of Michelle Lee alive. She walked into that garage and
[23:02] the cameras never recorded her leaving on her own.
[23:05] When she didn't come back, the friend she was supposed to meet
[23:08] got worried and started calling. Her brother started calling as
[23:13] well, as did her family members all the way down in San Diego.
[23:18] Anyone who knew Michelle understood that disappearing for
[23:21] a few hours wasn't something she did.
[23:24] She had midterms, clinical evaluations, and a personality
[23:29] that organized other people's chaos.
[23:32] By the next morning, Saturday, May 28th, she was officially
[23:36] missing, and Hayward police were already trying to make sense of
[23:40] the disappearance. Unfortunately, it got worse
[23:44] fast, and Michelle's white Honda CRV, the same car she'd taken
[23:49] into that garage, turned up around 9:00 in the morning on
[23:52] Ponderosa Court. This was a residential St. about
[23:56] half a mile from the hospital. The vehicle was locked, and
[24:00] there were obvious signs that something terrible had happened
[24:03] inside, from blood spatter on the interior to strands of hair.
[24:08] If investigators were considering the potential that
[24:11] she may have walked away on her own, this discovery ended that
[24:15] line of questioning immediately. The placement of the car raised
[24:19] more questions than it answered. Since whoever had moved it
[24:22] didn't drive far, they knew the area well enough to choose a
[24:26] residential block where a parked Honda wouldn't immediately stand
[24:29] out. It was the kind of small,
[24:32] calculated choice that detectives don't see often in
[24:34] panicked, impulsive crimes. It looked from the start like
[24:39] something someone had thought through.
[24:43] The parking garage at Kaiser Hayward was a heavily monitored
[24:46] space, and there were cameras, timestamps and access logs.
[24:51] It should have been one of the easier places in the world to
[24:54] figure out what had happened to a woman who entered it, but it
[24:57] wasn't. Investigators combing through
[25:01] the surveillance discovered a pool of blood on one of the
[25:03] levels of the garage. Police later described the stain
[25:07] as roughly the size of a dinner plate, along with strands of
[25:11] hair that matched Michelle. There was clearly an attack and
[25:16] clearly a struggle. But the cameras, working from
[25:19] awkward angles and broken sight lines, didn't capture the moment
[25:23] itself. They caught Michelle going in,
[25:27] and they caught another figure moving with deliberate purpose.
[25:32] But they didn't catch the violence in the middle, which is
[25:35] the part you'd think would be impossible to hide in a building
[25:38] designed around monitoring people.
[25:41] What the cameras did show, when investigators stitched together
[25:44] hours of footage, was a second person who shouldn't have been
[25:48] there. There was a young woman about
[25:51] Michelle's age that was wandering through the garage in
[25:55] the loading areas in the minutes before and after Michelle
[25:58] disappeared. She wasn't a patient or an
[26:01] employee, and she had no obvious reason to be in that part of the
[26:05] building, and she would later become the entire center of the
[26:08] case. Hayward police treated
[26:11] Michelle's disappearance as a possible slaying almost
[26:14] immediately, which is faster than most missing persons cases
[26:18] ever escalate. Search efforts started within
[26:22] days, with volunteers walking the hills, parks and rural
[26:27] canyons within driving distance of Hayward.
[26:30] Family members flew up from San Diego and stayed to help in the
[26:33] effort. Michelle's brother became the
[26:36] calm, controlled voice of the family in front of the cameras,
[26:40] a young man trying to push the case forward without losing the
[26:43] person at the center of it. An organization that helps
[26:47] coordinate civilian searches in cases like this one joined the
[26:51] effort. By summer, organized civilian
[26:55] searches had stretched out across remote stretches of
[26:58] Alameda County, especially the brushy canyons and back roads
[27:02] east of the Bay. Meanwhile, investigators were
[27:06] looking inward at the people in Michelle's life.
[27:10] Her boyfriend was an immediate person of interest, for reasons
[27:13] obvious to anyone familiar with crime cases.
[27:17] But he was checked and absolutely cleared.
[27:20] Her phone records were combed line by line, every call and
[27:24] text mapped against a timeline. Inside that web of contacts, one
[27:29] name kept resurfacing in a way that didn't fit.
[27:33] This was a former friend from Michelle's San Diego high school
[27:36] days and someone who hadn't really been part of Michelle's
[27:39] adult life. She turned out to have a phone
[27:42] that in a strange quote UN quote coincidence, had traveled along
[27:48] a similar path on the night of the disappearance.
[27:52] The 2 cell phones side by side told a story that the alleged
[27:55] friend hadn't told the police. That friend's name was Giselle
[28:00] Esteban. And you're going to want to
[28:02] remember it because the detectives weren't going to soon
[28:05] forget this so-called coincidental movement.
[28:09] By June, Hayward police were publicly identifying Esteban as
[28:13] a person of interest. She and Michelle had attended
[28:17] Mount Carmel High School together.
[28:19] They had been part of the same circle of teenage friends in the
[28:23] early 2000s. Anyone looking at their
[28:26] relationship through the lens of a yearbook would have called
[28:28] them friends, and probably close ones.
[28:32] But what looked from the outside like ordinary ancient history
[28:36] was, by 2011, something else entirely.
[28:41] The reason had a name of its own, Scott Marassigan, and he
[28:45] had also been part of that San Diego friend group.
[28:48] She'd at some point been romantically involved with
[28:50] Marisigan, and the two had a daughter together.
[28:54] The relationship between them was unstable for years, on and
[28:58] off, sometimes hostile, sometimes reconciled, sometimes
[29:03] a pure custody dispute. By 2011, Marisigan had been
[29:08] awarded custody of their daughter, and the relationship
[29:11] between him and Esteban had collapsed into something
[29:14] corrosive. Inside that wreckage, Esteban
[29:18] had built a fixed and entirely false belief, and she'd
[29:22] convinced herself that her ex was secretly involved with
[29:25] Michelle Lee. There was no actual romantic
[29:29] relationship between Marisigan and Michelle at any material
[29:32] time in question. They knew each other from the
[29:35] same San Diego friend group, but Michelle wasn't entangled with
[29:39] him in any of the ways that would have given Esteban
[29:41] suspicion a rational foundation. Notably, the two had reportedly
[29:46] dated briefly in 2003, but that was the extent of their
[29:50] relationship with one another. The story was something Esteban
[29:54] had seated in her own delusional mind for years, and then watered
[29:58] until it was tall enough to throw a shadow.
[30:02] By the time investigators started actually pulling apart
[30:05] Giselle Esteban's digital trail, the shape of that obsession was
[30:09] hard to miss. Forensic experts examining her
[30:13] computer found hundreds of Internet searches related to
[30:16] Michelle, searches for her name, her workplace and the streets
[30:20] around the Hayward hospital. There were also queries that
[30:24] didn't belong on the laptop of a person who simply wanted to know
[30:27] what an old classmate was up to. There were searches questioning
[30:31] how to induce a heart attack or to breakdown locked doors or
[30:35] just pick the locks. This is the kind of search
[30:39] history a prosecutor dreams about because it does the work
[30:43] of motive and premeditation in a way few other things can match.
[30:48] Investigators also began assembling a picture of
[30:51] Esteban's behavior in the weeks before the disappearance.
[30:56] She'd reportedly been positioning herself in places
[30:59] where she might run into Michelle or learn more about her
[31:03] routine. She'd allegedly turned up around
[31:06] Michelle's San Francisco apartment and around the orbit
[31:09] of the Hayward hospital, at least according to witnesses.
[31:13] The cell tower data eventually confirmed what witnesses had
[31:17] been pretty sure they'd seen, confirming that her obsession
[31:20] had developed into stalking. On the evening of May 27th,
[31:26] Esteban's phone had moved through the same corridor of
[31:29] streets and roads as Michelle's at the same time. 2 phones, 1
[31:35] route. No plausible explanation that
[31:37] didn't involve them being in the same place at the same moment.
[31:43] There were also recorded phone conversations captured during
[31:46] the on and off custody battles between Esteban and Marasigan
[31:50] that the prosecution would later use to brutal effect.
[31:54] In one of those calls from late 2010, Esteban told Marassigan
[32:00] that he deserved to perish for his lies and that the woman he
[32:04] was involved with deserved the same fate.
[32:09] The woman she was talking about was Michelle, who I just have to
[32:13] stress here was in a relationship with another man
[32:16] and not at all involved with Marassigan.
[32:20] On September 7th, 2011, more than three months after
[32:24] Michelle's disappearance, Hayward police arrested Giselle
[32:29] as she left her home in Union City.
[32:33] By that point they had blood, hair, surveillance, phone
[32:36] records and search histories. What they didn't have at the
[32:41] moment of arrest was Michelle, which would make prosecution
[32:45] much more difficult, though not impossible.
[32:49] Throughout the summer of 2011, the volunteer searches continued
[32:54] and Michelle's family refused to let the case be forgotten.
[32:57] They organized, fundraised, traveled, and kept showing up to
[33:02] canyons and back roads where Esteban's cell phone had pinged
[33:06] on the night of the disappearance.
[33:08] The searches went out repeatedly, often coordinated
[33:11] through volunteer networks and missing persons groups.
[33:15] On September 17th, 2011, a sniffer dog LED its handler to
[33:20] human remains in a remote brushy area of Alameda County.
[33:26] The location, in the rugged terrain near Niles Canyon
[33:29] between Sunol and Pleasanton, was the sort of place that's
[33:33] almost designed to hide things. There's steep slopes, heavy
[33:38] underbrush, easy access from a road.
[33:41] But the location was invisible from the road once you stepped
[33:44] off the asphalt. Two days later, on September
[33:48] 19th, the Alameda County Coroner's office confirmed that
[33:51] the remains were Michelle's. The condition of the body, after
[33:56] roughly four months exposed to the elements, made certain
[33:59] forensic questions essentially impossible to answer.
[34:03] The medical examiner couldn't determine exactly what happened
[34:07] since there was no clean story to be read off the bones after
[34:11] the elements did their work. What investigators believed it
[34:14] happened in the garage on the evening of May 27th had to be
[34:18] reconstructed from everything else I mentioned earlier.
[34:22] That ambiguity around how she actually met her end would
[34:26] become one of the central battles inside the courtroom a
[34:29] year later. The prosecution would argue that
[34:32] the blood loss alone was consistent with a fatal attack
[34:35] inside the garage, but the defense would try to make a
[34:38] different story stick. For Michelle's family, though,
[34:42] the recovery of her remains was devastating and clarifying at
[34:47] once, the extremely faint hope of finding her alive finally
[34:52] completely collapsed under the weight of this new evidence.
[34:56] But the case against the woman already in custody also
[34:59] tightened because investigators could now match the geography of
[35:03] the burial site to the cell tower data.
[35:07] This showed where Esteban's phone had traveled on the night
[35:10] of the disappearance, and it was what the searchers themselves
[35:13] had used to narrow down their operation.
[35:17] Having her body as well removed the inherent difficulties of
[35:22] making out the elements of the offense while Michelle was still
[35:25] only officially a missing person.
[35:29] Esteban's trial in Alameda County Superior Court began in
[35:33] the autumn of 2012. By then, prosecutors had been
[35:37] organizing the evidence for over a year, and the state's case had
[35:41] become very specific about how it intended to tell the story.
[35:45] The deputy District Attorney leading the prosecution was a
[35:48] veteran named Butch Ford, and his theory was straightforward.
[35:53] This was not a confrontation that had spun out of control.
[35:57] It was a planned slaying, weeks or months in the making, fueled
[36:02] by an obsession that Giselle had nursed for years.
[36:06] The physical evidence Ford put in front of the jury was hard
[36:09] for the defense to wave away. Michelle's blood was found on a
[36:13] pair of Esteban shoes, something that had no apparent innocent
[36:17] explanation. Giselle's DNA was found on the
[36:21] CRV's steering wheel, again, a place that it had absolutely no
[36:25] right to be. Surveillance footage placed
[36:28] Esteban inside the parking garage at Kaiser Hayward in the
[36:32] windows before and after Michelle vanished.
[36:36] Her phone had moved along almost the same path that Michelle's
[36:39] phone had moved along during the abduction.
[36:42] Cell tower records and digital location data stitched together
[36:47] map the ride from the Hayward garage out toward the Canyon
[36:50] area where Michelle's remains were eventually found.
[36:54] Then Ford put Esteban's own digital life in front of the
[36:57] jury, walking through the hundreds of searches related to
[37:01] Michelle. He showed them the queries about
[37:04] how to induce a heart attack, the searches on how to defeat
[37:08] locked doors, and the recorded calls in which she threatened
[37:12] Michelle. He used these to argue that
[37:15] Esteban hadn't been someone who lost control in a moment of
[37:18] provocation, but rather that she had been on the hunt.
[37:23] According to the prosecution, she had attacked Michelle in the
[37:27] garage, loaded her into Michelle's own vehicle and
[37:31] driven the car a short distance to a quiet residential block.
[37:35] At some point afterward, she moved the body to a makeshift
[37:39] grave out near the Canyon roads east of town.
[37:42] The defense, led by attorney Andrea Our, faced an evidentiary
[37:46] mountain and chose a route that defense attorneys often pick
[37:50] when the physical evidence is overwhelming.
[37:54] Our didn't deny that Giselle had been involved in Michelle's
[37:57] death. Instead, she argued that what
[38:00] had happened was a terrible loss of control rather than a planned
[38:03] event. According to the defense,
[38:06] Giselle had snapped under what OUR called extreme provocation
[38:11] and the heat of passion. If accurate, this would take
[38:15] this from a premeditated act that carries the harshest
[38:19] penalty possible to something slightly lesser.
[38:23] The problem with that theory was the calendar.
[38:25] And as Ford pointed out, whatever offense Giselle
[38:29] believed Scott, Marassigan and Michelle had committed allegedly
[38:33] happened in 2005. By 2011, there'd been ample time
[38:38] for any reasonable person to cool down, and six years, he
[38:43] told the jury, was clearly long enough for that.
[38:47] The search history, the recorded threats and the geography of the
[38:51] night of the disappearance didn't look anything like a
[38:54] moment of impulse. They looked like a plan that had
[38:58] simply waited for an opening, with Giselle choosing to serve
[39:01] her delusional revenge plot cold.
[39:05] Esteban herself didn't take the stand, which isn't unusual in
[39:09] these cases since it would open her up to cross examination by
[39:12] the prosecution. The trial itself spanned several
[39:16] weeks of testimony from detectives, forensic analysts,
[39:20] computer experts, and witnesses from Esteban's own life,
[39:24] including Marassigan. He was questioned in detail
[39:28] about the relationship that had supposedly given Esteban her
[39:31] motive. The jury heard the recorded
[39:34] threats from 2010 that Giselle had made to Marassigan, which
[39:39] likely caused the jury to seriously question this being a
[39:42] heat of the moment thing. By the time both sides had
[39:46] rested, the question wasn't whether Esteban had been
[39:49] involved, but what kind of involvement the law would call
[39:52] it. On October 29th, 2012, after 4
[39:58] 1/2 days of deliberation, the Alameda County jury delivered
[40:02] its verdict. Esteban was guilty in the first
[40:05] degree. The lesser theory the defense
[40:08] had tried to install in the jury's minds was rejected,
[40:11] presumably because the evidence strongly suggested
[40:14] premeditation. The jury concluded, in essence,
[40:18] that Giselle had planned what she did.
[40:21] That she had the time and the awareness to choose differently
[40:24] and that she didn't. On December 10th, 2012, the
[40:29] judge handed down the sentence 25 years to life in state
[40:33] prison, the standard term for this offense under California
[40:37] law. The sentencing hearing was by
[40:41] all reporting a brutal afternoon with Michelle's family reading
[40:45] victim impact statements. Her brother, who had spent more
[40:49] than a year being the public face of the search for his
[40:51] sister, spoke about a person whose absence wasn't an abstract
[40:55] idea to anyone who had loved her.
[40:59] Esteban herself reportedly remained without visible
[41:02] remorse, a fact that observers noted would matter when the
[41:06] question of parole eligibility came around.
[41:09] However, this lack of apparent remorse may have been tactical,
[41:14] as she had an appeal in the works already.
[41:17] The California Court of Appeal, for its part, reviewed the trial
[41:21] record and rejected the defense's challenges, leaving
[41:25] the original verdict and sentence in place.
[41:28] Esteban remains in custody in the California State prison
[41:31] system, serving out a sentence that won't become eligible for
[41:35] parole for decades. Michelle had been only weeks
[41:39] away from her nursing diploma at Samuel Merritt University when
[41:43] her life was stolen from her by this deranged predator.
[41:47] That's another thing about this case that really hits me hard.
[41:51] Michelle was someone who was about to go into a life of
[41:54] service, saving people's lives. Over the course of her career,
[41:59] she would have been involved in ensuring the health and
[42:01] well-being of countless thousands of people.
[42:05] Instead, because of Giselle Esteban's disturbing obsession
[42:08] over a perceived romantic rival, Michelle would never be able to
[42:12] share her gifts and talents tending to the sick over a long
[42:16] career. Esteban was fully aware of this
[42:19] fact too, which makes what she did even more depraved.

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