Crime Junkie - MURDERED: Father Patrick Ryan

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

A Catholic priest is found savagely beaten to death in an Odessa, TX motel room in 1981. A man confessed to the crime -- but instead of closing the case, people are still left wondering: Was justice served in the murder of Father Patrick Ryan?  For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/murdered-father-patrick-ryan/ 

Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Brett. And today's story is one I kind of happened on while I was working on something completely different. And it's one of those cases that seems kind of open and shut. But it turns out it is anything but. This is the story of Father Patrick Ryan. Music plays It's late morning on December 22, 1981 in Odessa, Texas.

And a housekeeper from the Sand and Sage Motel is making her rounds. She knocks on the door of room 126. No answer. So she puts her key in the lock and pushes the door open. And what she sees as soon as that door swings open nearly knocks her off her feet. The room is completely trashed. There is blood everywhere. And most disturbing of all, there is a man, a dead man lying right in the middle of the room.

She runs to the manager's office screaming for him to call for help. And within minutes, officers are on the scene. Now, I'm not sure anything could have prepared these officers for the gruesome scene that they are about to walk into. Like I said, everything is covered in blood. I say everything. We're talking the walls, the floor, the furniture. It is everywhere. And the man is lying face down on the floor in a pool of blood. And his hands have been tightly bound behind his back, either with a sock or a pillowcase depending on the source material that you read.

Now, he's totally naked and he's been beaten so severely that his face is swollen and his features are distorted. When they look closely, they notice that he has scratches on his arms and another long slash across his buttocks. According to a piece by Jordan Smith, The Austin Chronicle, the room itself has been totally ransacked. So when I said it was trash, I mean, we're talking the TV is smashed, the phone has been ripped from the wall and is in pieces. Even the AC unit has been pulled out of the wall and is just like hanging there. The bed's broken, headboard frame, all of it. There are clothes and beer cans and cigarette butts everywhere. And get this, even the walls are damaged. And in some spots, the walls like are completely caved in to the point where like the drywall has crumbled and is in pieces on the floor.

So it's crystal clear that whatever happened here was extremely violent. Job one for investigators at this point is figuring out who their victim is. But there's no ID anywhere, no wallet, nothing that provides any kind of clues as to who their John Doe might be. But the one bright side is that this is a motel. So they figure there's a decent enough chance that he registered at the front desk when he checked in. They head to the office to check with the manager who tells them that the man in room 126 checked in sometime between 7.30 and 8 o'clock the night before, which would have been December 21st. Now, it's not clear if they just like know based on what the manager tells them or if they have to go on a little bit of an investigative fool's errand.

But it turns out that the man registered with a fake name and a fake address. So do we know what name he gave them? Like was it kind of like a Donald Duck Mickey Mouse situation or something that was like kind of close to something that could be real? Yeah, no, I wasn't able to find out exactly what name. That's what I'm saying. Like I don't know if it was Donald Duck right there. Yeah, this isn't it. Or if they had to actually kind of track it down and figure out that it wasn't working.

But police are able to find out what car their John Doe arrived in. It was a 1979 White and Maroon Chrysler Newport, which is this like big long boxy boat of a car. Like whenever you're picturing something when people talk about like the cars in the early 80s, like this is that. So I don't have to picture this. My first car was an 86 Lincoln town car. You got it. Exactly what this looks like. Yeah.

Now motel guests are supposed to provide their vehicle registration number, but that ended up also being fake, which means police can't just like plug in a number into the system and like bada bing bada boom find the owner. At this point, police decide to call in the state medical examiner who arrives at around noon. And based on his assessment in the room, he estimates that the man died sometime between 6pm and midnight the night before. Once an autopsy is complete, the ME confirms what has been obvious to police just by looking at the scene that this man has been beaten to death. According to a book on this case written by Scott Lomax, the ME finds that the man was beaten over the head with a blunt instrument. He's thinking something like a table leg and there was one of those broken off of a table in the motel room. Ultimately, the fatal blow was to the man's throat, but even without that blow to the throat, his head injuries alone would have caused his death eventually.

Now, I mentioned that there was one laceration across the man's butt, which the Austin Chronicle article describes as quote, a long superficial slice wound. The book also says that the victim had been sexually assaulted, but this detail wasn't shared publicly at the time to quote, provide some dignity to the dead man and despair the feelings of his relatives, end quote. Okay, so were there any defensive wounds on him? Like, imagining what a mess the scene was, I feel like the guy had to have put up some sort of fight, right? So that's what's weird. The autopsy does note scratches on the man's arms, remember, but they're not called defensive wounds in any of the material I've seen. And I have to think that if they were, like, surely that would have been noted somewhere, you know what I mean? Right.

I mean, remember the man when they find him, he is bound with his hands behind his back. Yeah. So they're thinking that he was likely tied up first, which wouldn't give him much wiggle room to even defend himself. And that's the other thing. So their John Doe is not a small guy, like the descriptions of him say that he's like 200 pounds. So either the person they're looking for is big enough to overpower a man that size, or the other theory is that their John Doe consented to having his hands bound. You mean, like, as a part of a sexual encounter? Exactly. And because of the brutality of the crime and the damage to the room, they're confident that whoever did this was, in fact, a man. Like, one man, one person only, for sure not two?

Well, they're not ruling out, like, multiple people at this point, but there's an episode of American justice on this called Shamed Into Confession that aired in, like, April of 2003. And the law enforcement officials interviewed for that show say that they just had this sense right away from the moment that they walked into the room that they feel like they knew what happened. They're not ruling out robbery as a motive because, remember, this man's like, wallet is gone, his car is missing. But when they go in, they said that there were a bunch of things that suggested to them that the man was at the Sand and Sage Motel to meet another man for a sexual encounter. I mean, does it have to be? Or could he have maybe met someone there and then was assaulted? Which, I mean, it's pretty clear he was assaulted. Yes. I mean, that's totally possible, right? But when police are looking at the whole picture, this is what they think it's telling them. Because, first of all, because he was naked when his body is found, like, that's making them think potentially that's why he was there. Second, he gave a fake name and a fake address so they're thinking that he didn't want people to know where he was, right?

Like, if it's just a random night in a hotel and a stranger attacks you or whatever, you don't need to hide your identity. Like, there's a reason he didn't want people to know who he was or potentially why he was there. But third, and possibly most telling, the motel itself is known for being this kind of, like, drop in by the hour place that's often used for, like, different types of sexual encounters. Okay, gotcha. The good news is, even by looking around, investigators know that the crime scene itself has got a ton of physical evidence. And as they do a sweep of the room, they find that their suspect or suspects have left behind pretty much every kind of physical evidence possible. There's hair, there's fingerprints, semen, saliva from cigarette butts, all kinds of stuff that they can use to nail the monster responsible for all of this. But before they can start looking for a suspect to compare all of this to, they need to identify their victim.

Because, I mean, we know this, right? Like, nine times out of ten, that's what leads to a perp. Right. But that's proving to be a difficult task, until five days later, on December 26th, when Odessa police see a statewide missing person bulletin issued by police in Denver City, Texas, which is this little rural community about an hour and a half away. The Denver City cops are looking for a missing man, middle-aged, just like their John Doe, same size as their John Doe, same basic description as their John Doe. It just, it seems impossible, because the thing is, the guy Denver City is looking for is the very last person that the detectives would have ever considered. The missing person that the police in Denver City are looking for is a Catholic priest. Oh, okay. So not exactly the kind of person they would have expected back then to discover naked, bound, and beaten in a seedy motel nearly a hundred miles from home.

But the description is just, like, bang on. And the cops have been working in this business long enough to know that anything is possible. So the Odessa police bring up the guys in Denver City to get some more information. The Denver City officers tell them that the priest they're looking for is 49-year-old Father Patrick Ryan. Some of his parishioners reported him missing when he didn't show up for Mass on Christmas Day. And that was actually the second service he'd missed in a row. Initially, they were worried maybe something had happened to him, like some kind of accident, like, you know, he'd fallen ill, he needed some medical attention. I mean, because he lived alone, of course, out of celibacy and all.

But when they went to the rectory to check on Father Ryan, they found the door locked and his car was gone. One of the parishioners managed to get through a window, but there was no Father Ryan and no sign of where he might have gone. There was a fully cooked but totally untouched meal of steak and potatoes on the stove. And he could tell it looked like it had been there a while, like long enough that the fat in the pan had hardened and turned white, but literally nothing was out of place. No signs of a struggle, nothing remarkable at all. The cops in Denver City aren't sure exactly when Father Ryan went missing, because the last known sighting of him was by actually the same guy who climbed through the rectory window, who said that he saw Father Ryan late on the morning of December 21st, about 10 miles outside of town.

When he saw him, he said that the priest was driving and he had two other men in the car with him. According to that episode of American Justice, I mentioned Father Ryan's brother was asked to view the body, and he said he could barely recognize him, and he had to rely on this little round scar that the priest had on his forehead since childhood to even know that it was his brother. But it was, and now that they know who their victim is, the Yocum County Sheriff's deputies in Odessa start trying to piece together the puzzle about what happened to Father Ryan. How did he end up dead and beaten in this motel room? One of the detectives drives down to Denver City to search the church rectory, which would have been Father Ryan's house, and he notes that two things are missing, his accordion and his chalice.

So are these like super valuable items? Because to me, at least they seem kind of random. Right, yeah. So I thought the same thing, but apparently Father Ryan always took those two things with him when he left, or when he was going anywhere for any length of time. You know, like the things you need, but you leave home like accordion check, chalice check. Like, do you ever leave without your accordion? I guess I just don't get it, because the man who reported the priest missing said there was a fully cooked meal on the stove. Like, that says to me that he wasn't planning to leave for that long at all. That's true. But again, we know Father Ryan's car is still missing. So the only thing that I can think is that maybe those things were like in the trunk from a trip that he took before,

or maybe after dinner he was planning on going somewhere, and like, again, had to have his things. I honestly don't know. The only other thing the detective notices in his search of Father Ryan's place is this backpack sitting on a chair. When he opens it up, he sees a couple of cassette tapes and an album of family photos. But here's the thing, it's not Father Ryan's family photos, it's someone else's. Someone named James Harry Rayos. At least according to the high school diploma Scott Lomax writes is tucked inside the album. Police don't have to go far to find James Harry Rayos, who is 25 and goes by Harry,

because he lives right there in Denver City, just three blocks from St. William's Church and Father Ryan's house. So the detective scoops up the backpack and heads straight to Harry's place to take a look around and talk to him. Now he doesn't find the missing chalice or accordion, nor does he find Father Ryan's keys, but he does find Harry and he brings him in for questioning anyway. Harry tells the officer he did see Father Ryan on the night of December 20th, and then again the next day on December 21st. He says the two had only just met in early December when Harry was hitchhiking along the road and Father Ryan picked him up. They spent five hours talking and drinking in this small New Mexico town called Hobbs, which is like 35 to 40 minutes away. And that whole time, Harry only knew this guy as John.

He didn't even know he was a priest until much later in the night when Father Ryan dropped Harry off in front of the rectory. He said he didn't even know the priest's real name even until he heard it on the news after his death. I would love to know if John was the fake name that Father Ryan used at that motel registration. Same, same, same, same. Anyway, Harry tells investigators that on the night of December 20th, Father Ryan, or John as he knew him then, had invited Harry over for a few drinks so he could look through an album of pictures from Harry's childhood growing up on the New Mexico Apache Reservation. Hold up, he invited this guy over to have some drinks and look at a family photo album? Yes, yes.

I guess he just met this person. I could see if it was just the album. Then he's a church leader using it as an entry point to minister, but the fact that they were drinking to... Well, he doesn't even know he's a priest, right? Right, and then Harry was invited into the rectory. I don't know, all these things together are just major, major, major red flags. Yeah, I have all of the questions about this as well. The source material for this case doesn't actually spend a lot of time on this point.

Again, I don't know why because my crime-junkie brain is just going... Yeah, it's all I can think about? Yeah, and I've never met anyone, much less someone in a position of power who's like, hey, come to my house, show me your family photo album like five minutes after meeting them. And even after five hours of meeting, I legit have not seen my husband's photo album from like his childhood. So either I'm like a terrible wife, which actually might be the case, or this is like you're saying a huge red flag. Yeah, I'm picking up some really sketchy vibes here.

Here's the one thing I will say that Father Patrick Ryan was from Ireland. And as far as I can tell, his first assignment in the U.S. was this one in Denver City starting in 1979. So again, if you're going to say this is normal, like maybe there is some genuine interest there. Like it's possible he didn't have like a ton of exposure to like the Native American culture. But to your point, like when you look at the whole scenario, like it feels odd. And you know what? It was a red flag because Harry tells the officer that he and Father Ryan drank some beer at first. And when that ran out, they switched to vodka and orange juice.

And then it happened. Harry says that Father Ryan grabbed him by the shirt collar and pushed Harry to perform oral sex on him. Oh my God. In the American Justice episode, Harry said quote, I struggled to get away from him. I tried to push him away and I did. I walked all the way back to my apartment thinking to myself that did not happen. And I just kept telling myself that could not have happened.

End quote. Harry says that he was in such a hurry to get out of there that he left all of his stuff, his backpack, everything behind. But the next morning, so this is now December 21st, Harry tells police that he found himself in need of a ride to Hobbes. That's that New Mexico town that I mentioned that's like 35, 40 minutes away from Denver City. He needed to go get his truck back from a bail bondsman who was holding it for collateral. Wait, so Harry has a criminal history? He's definitely not a stranger to police.

But all of his prior arrests have been alcohol related like nothing violent. Like the Yolkham County Sheriff told American Justice that even though Harry was new in town and had only been there for eight months, there were times when he was spending up to like three nights a week in jail for public intoxication. Like Harry is deep into an alcohol addiction at this point in his life. And despite a really promising start, like I mean, he'd been a strong student. He graduated high school and went off to university to study engineering. It all fell apart once he was living on his own. So when he met Father Ryan earlier that month, Harry had no job, no money and no friends.

So he is literally the perfect prey for a predator like someone who was clearly vulnerable to begin with considering his alcohol use. But he has no money, no connections or family and friends nearby. Like this is predator behavior 101 targeting people who have no choice but to just continue to come back to their abuser again and again. Absolutely. I mean, and Harry was really struggling at the time, which is why he found himself back on Father Ryan's doorstep the day after the assault on the morning of December 21st. Harry tells police that he didn't have any other options. He needed a ride to Hobbes and Father Ryan was literally the only person he could think of who might be willing to do it.

So like you said, Harry goes back to the rectory, back to the person who just abused him to ask for a favor. He says that when he went back, Father Ryan apologized for what had happened the night before and he agreed to take him to Hobbes to pick up his truck. Somewhere along the way, Harry tells police that Father Ryan pulled over to pick up a hitchhiker who continued on with them. So those were probably who the eyewitness saw in the car that day, Father Ryan, Harry and then this random hitchhiker. Yep. Harry tells the detective that they arrive at the Bale Bondsman's place at around 11.30 that morning. And even though he asked Father Ryan to wait a few minutes while he talked to the Bale Bondsman, by the time he came out of the house, Father Ryan was gone. And was the hitchhiker still with them at this point?

As far as I know, yes, I think so. So you'd think police would at least be a little interested in this hitchhiker as a potential suspect or at least a person of interest like wanting to find him. But they are more interested in Harry because they're thinking like what if this was Harry's retaliation for the sexual assault that happened prior? I mean, that could be a really strong motive. Except Harry says that he wasn't anywhere near Odessa on the night Father Ryan was murdered and he can prove it. He has a pile of receipts from December 21st and 22nd and on top of all of that, a speeding ticket that can prove without a doubt that he was 200 miles away in New Mexico during that time. Police check Harry over anyway thinking, you know, surely whoever did that in the hotel room to Father Ryan would have at least some kind of injury to show for it. But Father Ryan was bound, right?

And he was beaten with a table leg. What exactly are they even looking for? I don't know because I agree, right? They say he didn't have defensive wounds, but I assume they're looking for like bruised knuckles, cuts. I mean, again, that place was destroyed. Someone was like going after the walls or whatever. I don't know exactly what they were looking for, but whatever they were looking for, they don't find it. All they have on him is there's like this one small scratch on his hand, but otherwise nothing.

So how big is Harry? Like, is this something that he could do and just walk away completely unscathed? Not in my opinion because this guy, he's like 125 pounds, which means Father Ryan had like 75 pounds on the guy right. Yeah. Now, Harry even agrees to give them fingerprints, hair samples, saliva samples. I mean, again, we have so much physical evidence to test against and none of it matches the samples taken from the crime scene. And not only that, he actually offers to take a polygraph breaking every crime junkie role in the book, but he passes, so police let him go.

At this point, the investigation is pretty much back where it started. Sure, they know the identity of their victim, but if his killer was a stranger that he was meeting for a one time sexual encounter, then they're looking for a needle in a haystack. They need something that will help point them in the right direction. And the very next day, they get it. On December 27th, the Odessa police get a call. It's unclear from the source material who makes the call, but they get this call telling them Father Patrick Ryan's car has been found 40 minutes away parked outside the moose lodge in Hobbs. There are differing accounts of how long the car had been parked there.

Like in his book, Scott Lomax says that it was abandoned on December 24th, which is three days after the murder. But Jordan Smith's piece for the Chronicle says that witnesses put the car there beginning like on the 22nd, which is just the morning after the murder. So the police head to Hobbs to search the car, hoping that this is going to give them the break that they need to start tracking down a viable suspect. They find some cash in the trunk, but there is no sign of the things that they know had been missing from the rectory, which remembers that chalice in the Secordian. Just like in the motel room, the killer left behind plenty of fingerprints, which police collect as well. But fingerprints are only useful if you have something to compare them against, and they don't at this point. Police start trying to look into Father Ryan's history, but even that is kind of a mystery. Like, they know that he was in Ireland until 1956, before spending 12 years doing missionary work in Tanzania.

But then there's just like nothing until 1979 when he showed up in Texas. Scott Lomax writes in his book, quote, Those who have researched Father Ryan's life have not been able to piece together his life story for most of the 1970s and those who know him have not assisted in providing any useful information. End quote. Okay, that seems bizarre. Yeah, the guy didn't even have a driver's license, though he did have a car, so I don't know, I just have a lot of questions about who he was and where he was. But anyway, police don't come out of their own investigation into his background with anything useful that might guide them to a suspect. And somehow, despite the outright brawl that happened in that motel room, somehow there are no witnesses either.

Okay, so I was actually thinking about this since you first mentioned how destroyed the room was. Like, to that degree, someone had to have heard something, like walls were caved in. Yeah, like, I get annoyed when people next to me are playing music too loudly at like a hotel, so breaking TVs and smashing walls, it had to have been so noisy. Right, so I assume that it's not that there wasn't anything to see or hear, just maybe there weren't people in the rooms nearby? Not really, so there was actually a guy who stayed in the room right next to the one Father Ryan died in. That man says he checked in around 9pm, just an hour or a little more than an hour after Father Ryan. And he says that he didn't hear anything at all. Okay, Ashley, do you remember the time that we were staying a floor apart and could talk to each other through the toilet?

Yes, I'd like to talk into my toilet for you to hear me, yes. And I could hear you in the vent above my toilet, there is no way this guy didn't hear anything, I'm sorry. Yeah, especially a motel, this isn't like some like giant brand new building with like concrete walls. We're talking about a little bit of plaster between two beds, I know. So if you think about that, that means that, again, we're assuming that this is like the manager of the motel, his timeline is correct, and the guy, the neighbors like have an accurate story, but if you believe all of that, then the window for this murder is down to an hour. Like between 8pm when Father Ryan arrived and 9pm when the guy next door checked into the room. Could the guy in the neighboring room just have been like passed out or just a really deep sleeper?

Like how credible is this guy's story? I mean, again, I don't know the guy, but it's not like he got there and crashed. He says that from the time that he checked in at 9, that he ended up like staying awake until the wee hours of the morning watching TV. And it's not like it could have happened after he fell asleep in the wee hours of the morning watching TV, because we know that the medical examiner said that Father Ryan had to have died between 6pm and midnight. So yeah, we just have this one hour, one hour for the killer to meet Father Ryan in that room, drink a bunch of cans of beer, smoke a bunch of cigarettes and then beat him to death and then leave. I mean, or maybe he didn't leave.

Like did the guy in the next room say anything about whether Father Ryan's car was there when he got to his own room? There's nothing that talks about whether the neighbor reported the car or not actually. And I don't even know if he would have known, right? Like he's not paying attention to that stuff. Right, you're just like checking into your hotel room. Yeah. So I guess the alternative is that the killer kills Father Ryan and then just hangs out in this completely destroyed room, sitting on the broken bed, the floor, like everything is destroyed with the body of this guy he killed,

smoking and drinking. I mean, I guess it's possible, but it's pretty cold. Oh, I mean, it's really cold, but anyone who can beat a man to death with a table leg is cold. So it's not impossible. True. With no more information from this witness and no other witnesses who can provide anything, the case goes cold pretty quickly. Months go by with no new leads.

But then in November 1982, this is almost a year after Father Ryan's death, the Yocum County Sheriff's find out about another crime, a shockingly similar crime. On November 10th, a housekeeper making her rounds at the El Rancho Motel in Yuma, Arizona, which is a solid days drive from Odessa, opens the door to room 32 and is shocked to find that the guest hadn't checked out on time. Now, he seems to be asleep still. He's lying face down in the pillow with the blanket pulled up around his shoulders. So she calls out to the man a couple of times, but he's not responding and he doesn't even move. So she goes to tell the manager and the manager comes down to see what's going on and he confirms what they've both been dreading all along.

This man in the bed is actually dead. Depending on the source material, the man is either nude or wearing just a pair of pants and his hands and feet are both bound with electrical tape. His wallet is missing and his vehicle is gone too. It's not clear just by looking at the man how he died, like there are no obvious signs of him being shot or stabbed or beaten like we saw in Father Patrick Ryan's case. And there's nothing obvious about the room either. So this one isn't trashed like the last one? No, not at all. It's actually pristine really. Because the investigators don't find any ID for the man in the room, they make that same trek to the manager's office at the cops in Odessa did a year before.

They ask for the registration details for room 32 and when the manager hands it over, the man's name is Benjamin Carrier. Father Benjamin Carrier, a Catholic priest from Discanso, California just outside of San Diego. So another Catholic priest. Yep. Police in Yuma are off to a running start compared to their counterparts in Odessa. And so the investigation into Father Carrier's death seems to start off really strong. I mean, the hotel managers remembered him checking in the day before and witnesses reported seeing him around the pool that afternoon with two men. So you mentioned that there were no obvious signs of trauma on the body while investigators were in the room, but did the autopsy give them any more information? It does, yet the cause of death was asphyxiation and the manner of death, no surprise given the bound hands and feet, is a homicide.

It's worth noting that this man is also very small. He's often described in the media coverage as slight and frail and the Emmy finds that he had died when he was in poor health. So were there any signs of sexual assault this time? There was no evidence of sexual assault. And actually, pretty much from the start, police feel like Father Carrier's death was likely part of a robbery. And when they speak to his friends and family and parishioners, right away, they get a lead on another suspect. Two, actually. It turns out Father Carrier left Discanso Monday night, two days before his body was found, with two hitchhikers.

Okay, this feels like a recurring theme, right? And I had to keep checking myself. Like, why are these guys picking up all these hitchhikers? But again, this was the 80s, very different time, not to mention the stories about priests. And it is literally their job to help the less fortunate. And when police speak to Father Carrier's friends and family, they describe him as a genuinely good guy. Like, they said he was super generous. He was always going out of his way to help people, always picking up hitchhikers, always giving them a place to stay, a meal, whatever they needed.

Paula Parker reported on this story for the LA Times back in 1982 and said that Father Carrier was so trusting that he was even kidnapped at one point by a stranger that he befriended. Yeah, and the guy he was trying to help. So the prevailing thought among most people who knew him is that he probably just trusted the wrong person or the wrong people. Okay, but people said all that same stuff about Father Ryan, too. That, you know, he was always lending a helping hand, always stopped to pick up hitchhikers, all of that. And based on what we know, his motives weren't always pure as a driven snow, you know? Like, I feel like a ton of people would have vouched for him, too. Yeah, it's hard to decipher what the real motives were behind helping the less fortunate.

But in Father Carrier's case, police don't find anything to suggest that he was a bad dude. Anyway, police start looking for the hitchhiker's Father Carrier was seen with when he left Escanso, and those two other guys that he was seen with at the motel pool, but their search comes up empty. So the hitchhikers and the guys at the pool, they're not the same people? Well, in Paula Parker's LA Times piece, she just says that it's unclear whether they were the same or different. But they get descriptions from witnesses that suggest they're looking for, like, completely different guys. And even though they have these descriptions, like, they blast that out to the media thinking that maybe they'll get a lead, but even that doesn't help them track them down.

And I want to say that the trail just kind of goes cold, except I'm not even sure there was ever a trail to begin with. And then three days later, Father Carrier's truck turns up in Las Vegas. Police are able to lift a ton of fingerprints, but until they track down either the men at the pool or the hitchhikers or both, they're kind of stuck. I wish I could tell you more about the investigation into Father Carrier's murder, but at that point, after they find his truck, it pretty much falls out of the news and honestly kind of stays out of the news. Like, there are no follow-ups. Now, no one is willing to rule out a connection between these two murders, but they're just, like, way too similar.

Both men, both priests, both found in motel rooms, bound, lying face down, both robbed of their wallets and vehicles, and then the vehicles get found, abandoned days later in neighboring states. Like, yes, there were definitely differences. Don't get me wrong, like, the difference in the MO being a big one. Right, but MO evolves over time anyway, and we usually hear that as, like, an escalation or about serial killers who just get better at certain things as they go, or even adapt to different situations. Like, in my opinion, these were clearly different situations. Like, you said Father Ryan was a pretty big dude.

Like, maybe that murder was completely unplanned. And in a different situation, maybe the person who did it would have strangled him, but he's too big. It wasn't even possible. Whereas Father Carrier was small, kind of frail. You said that, I mean, he said maybe even in poor health. It wouldn't have taken nearly the same force to strangle him. Yeah, good point. You wouldn't need to, like, break the room down trying to, like...

Right. I don't know. Well, at this point, the only lead police in Yuma have is the one about these guys who were seen at the motel with Father Carrier that day. And police in Odessa, almost a year after Father Ryan's death, have made no good headway. So what they need is a break. And lucky for them, what comes next is more than just a break. On November 18th, just over a week after Father Carrier was found dead in Arizona, a 911 call comes into dispatch in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

According to a 1993 Newsweek article, the man on the other end of the line says that he wants to talk about, quote, the killing of a Catholic priest in Odessa, Texas. End quote. What? The dispatcher asked the man to identify himself, and he just says, quote, you're talking to the killer. The dispatcher sends police to where this man is calling from.

Bo and Arrow Lodge, which is this like rundown motel where the guy on the line has been living. They arrest him and bring him down to the station and then ring up law enforcement in Odessa. Okay, but who is this guy? Well, here's the twist for it. This guy on the other end of the phone is James Harry Raios, who was, remember, pretty much the police's only suspect in Father Ryan's case from the get-go. But didn't they clear him as a suspect? They did, but clearly they missed something a year ago because here he was calling to confess.

And this truly out of the blue confession is the kind of break in the case investigators can only dream about in a cold case like this one. But you know what they say, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. And pretty much from the moment Harry is in police custody, he starts walking it back, recanting his confession, saying, I'm not the killer, I just like to make trouble for law enforcement. Wait, so this is just some kind of prank or something? Not so much a prank as in like a momentary lapse of judgment? Harry says that he wasn't in his right mind when he called 911 that day. He said he was drunk and high after taking some random pills that someone had handed him in a bar.

In the Austin Chronicles story, Jordan Smith writes that Harry was too messed up to even answer questions from his own lawyer. And he just kept repeating over and over, quote, in the name of God, I didn't do this. And if he hadn't been a person that police suspected early on anyway, like if he had just been a total rando like drunk AF who called in, like they might have been able to write off this as just some like attention seeking guy and just move on. Remember, I mean, they knew Harry was with Father Ryan on the day that he was murdered. And since he claimed to be sexually assaulted by the priest, he had the best motive by far of anyone they'd come across. So the whole thing together means motive confession is enough for authorities to charge Harry with Father Ryan's murder. Harry's case goes to trial the next year in June of 1983.

And over the course of a four day trial, the state presents a case based on Harry's connection to the victim and his confession. OK, but what does his defense team say about why Harry confessed just that he was drunk and high and wanted to be a pest? Drunk and high, yes, but they know that this isn't going to be a strong enough argument on its own. They know that they need to be able to really make the jury understand why this guy would confess to a crime if he isn't in fact guilty of the crime, especially considering Harry picked up the phone on his own to confess to the murder. There's not like a hoarse confession or police pressure or anything else involved, but they do say that they have a rationale for this. And it's one that surprises everyone.

The defense says that Harry confessed to murder that night on the phone, not because he was guilty, but because he felt guilty. OK, care to clear that up for me? To Harry, Father Ryan's death was kind of his fault. Like maybe if he hadn't asked Father Ryan to drive to Hobbes that day, he might still be alive. So Harry felt some kind of responsibility for his death, even though he says that he wasn't actually responsible for his death. And he says that some part of his brain thought that confessing to the killing might help assuage some of that guilt.

I mean, that's actually not hard to believe really, especially when you layer in not just the fact that he was really messed up on drugs and alcohol that night, but also his life seemed to be so off the rails at the time anyway from his ongoing alcohol use. Right. And actually, it's even more nuanced than that because Harry was gay. He knew that he was gay and he was having a really hard time coming to terms with that. He didn't just feel guilty about what he thought was alluring Father Ryan to his death. He also felt so much shame about his own sexuality. I mean, this is again early 80s and not to say that there isn't still a lot of complicated feelings in our society

around anything other than like heterosexual cisgender persons and their relationships. Like there definitely are. But there were just so few examples out there for Harry to point to that he could like see himself in. Right. And we're also talking about something that could be deeply seated in his culture. And if he can barely admit this fact about himself to himself, it would be almost impossible for him to be able to verbalize this to anybody else. Totally. Now, because he was so evasive about his own sexuality,

the jury read that as some kind of guilt and they felt like he was shifty. I mean, I get that, but I also get how tough it would be to overcome a confession. But I mean, there's still zero physical evidence tying him to the scene, correct? Oh, nothing. No, not a single hair, not a drop of saliva, not one fingerprint in that motel room or even in Father Ryan's car belonged to Harry. And he also said he couldn't have been there. Like he was hundreds of miles away at the time and had time stamp receipts to prove it. Like how was the prosecution able to refute those?

This is what I can't wrap my head around because not only do we have time stamp paper receipts, but remember we have that speeding ticket to where he's like engaging with a law enforcement officer that puts him in Roswell, New Mexico, 200 miles away during the time period that Father Ryan was murdered. And the defense even has a witness, this old college friend of Harry's, who was with Harry in Roswell until at least 8 p.m. Texas time on the night of the murder. And again, he got his signature on the speeding ticket issued by a New Mexico Highway Patrol just over four hours later just outside of Roswell. So let me lay this out for you.

If Harry murdered Father Ryan, he would have had a window of just over four hours to drive from Roswell to Odessa, murder the priest, drive Father Ryan's car 70 miles away and park it, find his way back to the sand and sage to pick up his own truck. And still have to drive back to Roswell. And what's that trip even like? Oh, it's like three, three and a half hours drive, like just one way. Like, I guess you can't say it's impossible.

I don't know, but it is certainly a stretch. It's a stretch with a perfect driver and a perfect car on a perfect day with no traffic. But this is pretty much the opposite of that scenario. Harry wasn't just an imperfect driver. He was hammered and his car wasn't just imperfect. It had to be gassed up like all the time, multiple times a day. And driving conditions were definitely not perfect. In the American Justice episode I mentioned,

they say that in order to be in Odessa that night, Harry would have had to average, quote, a hundred eleven miles an hour round trip on narrow country roads. End quote. Okay, so let me let me just recap this really quickly. There's no physical evidence putting him at the scene. Check. He has honestly an incredibly solid alibi putting him hundreds of miles away

during the window of time that the murder had to have happened. Check. He was drunk and high when he confessed. Speaking of that confession, he almost immediately recanted it. Yes. I'm honestly surprised the prosecutor felt like there was even enough to go to trial with this. But it did. And after seven and a half hours of deliberation,

the jury agrees with the prosecution. They find Harry Rayos guilty of murder. What? Mm-hmm. Based on what? Based on this confession? Jordan Smith actually quotes a juror in his Austin Chronicle piece saying, they convicted Harry, quote,

based on his confession and characteristics. End quote. What do you mean, characteristics? I mean, he's a gay man. He's a gay indigenous man with an alcohol use disorder on trial for killing a beloved priest. I mean, take your pick, really. The jury actually does the sentencing in Harry's trial.

So after he was found guilty, he was sentenced to 38 years, which given the options in Texas at the time is a really interesting choice. Yeah. I mean, I would have at least expected life in prison for a murder or even the death penalty. Well, luckily for Harry, he missed out on the death penalty by a couple of years. Given the sentence, Harry's defense attorney thinks that there was at least a few people on that jury who had doubts about his guilt.

I mean, clearly not enough doubt to find him not guilty, but enough to give him what amounts to a pretty light sentence for murder. Mm-hmm. So Harry heads off to prison. He does appeal the jury's ruling a year later in 1984, but the judge upholds the original conviction. And that's probably where Harry's story would have ended, except that years later in the early 90s,

the same prosecutor who argued against Harry's 1984 appeal decided pretty randomly to take another look at the records. Like something about this case just like never made sense to him and he figures, what the heck? According to Newsweek, he had never thoroughly examined the trial transcripts even back in 84 during the appeal, to be his bonkers, but he decides to do that now. And the more he reads, the more he realizes something isn't right there.

The prosecutor, who at the time was a 19-year veteran named Dennis Sodra, told American Justice that he stayed up basically all night charting out timelines and checking them against the evidence. And by the time he's done, he is 100% convinced, and a shadow of a doubt that Harry Rayos is innocent. So in December 1991, Dennis writes an eight-page letter to the governor of Texas outlining what he found in the evidence that Harry couldn't possibly have committed the crime,

and he is advocating for a full pardon. I mean, is this the thing that prosecutors just do? Well, it wasn't a thing that Dennis had ever done before, more since, at least as of 2003, when he spoke to American Justice. And it certainly shocks his colleagues. It's certainly something I've only seen one other time. So the governor hands the letter over to the Texas Board of Paroles and Pardons, who ruled in a 16-to-nothing vote to deny Harry's petition for a pardon.

It's not until December 2003 that Harry is finally released on parole. And as far as I can tell, he's been out ever since, on parole, I mean. I mean, this case, to me, just highlights how freaking backwards our legal system is. Like, even in the face of a top prosecutor saying, hey, we messed this up, we think a pardon is in order, they keep this guy in prison, and when he is finally released, he's not even really released, he's on parole. I think that's so backwards, too.

Like, I don't understand. It's almost like our legal system has no way for you to acknowledge you messed up, right? Like, we got it wrong the first time, we're going back, and the people who are in charge of putting him in prison are now saying he shouldn't be there, but like, that's not allowed? Right, it's not even like someone else is questioning it. They're questioning themselves and finding themselves in error. Which is how it should work, right?

Like, I feel like we can talk all day long to our blue-in-the-face about cases where it's so clear that the prosecution messed up and they're just like sticking to one side to like keep their conviction and it becomes about winning and losing and not about like real justice. But you actually get good people who are trying to do the right thing and like, even they can't get anything through, like their hands are tied. Right. Okay, so what about now?

Like, we've had so many advances in technology since Harry was convicted. For sure, in forensic evidence, like genetic material specifically, could any of that be tested again or checked against like what now must be like a much more robust database? Like, I mean, even Golden State Killer style with a genealogy database. So, theoretically, yes, all of those things would be possible, except that the Odessa police destroyed all of the crime scene evidence in Father Ryan's murder back in 1994.

So, when you say destroyed, you mean like, not a street flooding or a fire? No, no, no, no. They like ordered it to be destroyed. On purpose, on purpose. Okay. On purpose. Is that like an agency policy? It doesn't seem that way.

No, like, based on the source material I have, they actually acted against policy, but everything I have, there's no explanation as to why. So, without an answer to the real question in this case, the question of who killed Father Patrick Ryan, reporter Jordan Smith says it's going to be pretty tough for Harry to ever clear his name. So, the other priest you mentioned in this case, Father Carrier, did that ever come back to Harry?

It didn't. Like, I'm sure the Yuma police considered him as a suspect after they got that 911 confession, but again, I couldn't find anything in the source material to say that Harry was looked at or ruled out as a suspect in Father Carrier's murder. I like to believe they like checked his prints since they had always been kind of, like, linked together, but it never comes back around.

Remember, there's, like, never any additional reporting about Father Carrier. I have no idea what happens as far as I know. That case is just sitting unsolved somewhere as well, with or without evidence. And there's still, like, a whole group of people out there who think that these murders really still are connected. And, like, potentially Harry going to prison for Father Ryan kind of just, like, confused this whole thing and got it super messy. And the real killer of one or both of these men

is potentially still out there. You know, there was one theory that emerged in, like, the mid-90s about a man who, at least some law enforcement and journalists thought might have been connected to both of the cases. They thought maybe he was even responsible for the murders. And they thought this because in early December of 1982, this would have been just after Harry's confession. This guy walked into a Catholic church in Boise, Idaho, for confession.

But then he ended up dying by suicide before he ever was able to speak to a priest. So there's kind of this off-the-wall theory that, you know, he saw what was happening to Harry. He knew Harry was innocent, so he was going to, like, go in and confess. But, like, had taken cyanide pills and, like, died before he could actually get the confession out. Like, he was trying to clear Harry's name,

but it all just kind of got, like, washed away. And ultimately, that is never, like, officially connected to the case. There's a lot of really interesting details about that. We're actually going to do a little bit of an audio extra mini-episode in the fan club if you're in there. We're going to drop that at the same time as this episode. But ultimately, he's never officially connected to the case. And ultimately, Father Carrier and Father Ryan's cases

are never officially connected either. So that's it. Father Carrier's murder remains unsolved. And depending on what side of the fence you find yourself on, Father Ryan's is still unsolved, too. And Harry Rayos, he is still out there, still fighting to clear his name. And that's it for today's episode.

Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Crime Junkie is an audio chuck production.