Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Shattered Souls: Stacy Replogle

Episode Date: October 24, 2021

All of 'Shattered Souls' Season 1 is available now on your favorite podcast app! After Stacy Replogle's nearly decapitated body was found at a remote construction site in Jacksonville, Florida, Karen and her team set out to identify the killer. Exhausted and frustrated, they found a clear link between the victim and the perpetrator in the most unlikely of places. With irrefutable evidence in hand, the race was on to find the suspect. Forensics told a clear story, but what would the alleged killer have to say when the case finally got to court? Subscribe to the Shattered Souls podcast and catch up on all of Season 1 available now:Apple PodcastiHeartSpotify Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Like hell But it doesn't matter how you feel This is the new real This is the new real This is Shattered Souls. I'm your host, Karen Smith. This podcast contains graphic language that is not suitable for children. This is the new real. This is Chapter 2 of Shattered Souls.

When we left off from Chapter 1, I was in the warehouse processing a pickup truck that had been used in a hit-and-run crash near the scene of a murder of a young woman named Stacy Replogle in Jacksonville, Florida. When we left off, I was using an alternate light source, and I was shining it across the windshield of the pickup truck that had been shattered by someone in the passenger compartment during the crash. And as I shone the light across the glass, there was something there embedded within the shards that would break this case wide open. And as I looked closer, there were several long brown hairs dangling from the glass.

And I shined the light a little closer, and I looked in the center of those hairs, and in the middle was a small piece of skin holding them together. And my mind immediately flashed back to the autopsy suite. And as I saw Stacy's body on the gurney, I remembered the forehead abrasion that she had with the small amount of hair missing from her forehead. And I thought, oh my God, this is probably hers. She had to have been riding in this pickup truck. That's how she got to the construction site. That's how she got here. And I stopped what I was doing and I changed my gloves and I grabbed a clean pair of tweezers and I took photo after photo after photo of those hairs because if this

was going to go to a jury, I wanted no doubt in their mind as to what they were seeing. And I carefully plucked the hairs out from the glass and I placed it all into a glassine envelope and sealed it. And I immediately snapped my gloves off and threw them in a biohazard bag and I grabbed my phone and I called the lead homicide detective. And he picked up and he said, please tell me some good news. Because at that point we had nothing to go on. And I said, brother man, you owe me dinner. And he said, what have you got? I said, do you remember the autopsy where the hairs were missing from her forehead? And he goes, yeah. I said, I think I found them. And he went silent for a minute. And then he said, what? Where? And I told him it was from the windshield and the shattered glass. And I could hear on the other side of the phone,

this wave of relief come over him. And he said, I'm on my way. And about 10 minutes later, he got to the warehouse and I handed him the sealed envelope and a chain of custody card. And I said, buddy, you need to get this to the lab because I know it's gonna come back to Stacy. Now, the reason this was so important wasn't just because her hairs were found in the pickup truck.

We now had a timeline. We know what time that crash happened because it was reported to 911. We know what time the patrol officers responded to the crash. We know exactly what time they arrived. We know what time the truck was impounded. So now we had a timeline about when Stacy, if those hairs belonged to her, when Stacy was in that truck, when it crashed, how she got to the construction site, and why she was where she was. What we still didn't know was why she went from the crash site a hundred yards to the west, how she got down a dirt embankment, and to the wood line.

But the story was starting to come together. So I collected the hairs from the windshield. The detective took them straight to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to have DNA analysis completed with the samples that they took from Stacy's body at the autopsy. And I knew in my gut that it was going to be a match. I just knew it. So I worked my way around the rest of the truck. I took all of the evidence and all the trash from the truck, and I processed it and packaged it, and I left the truck there. And I put an additional hold on it through the National Crime Information Center. I didn't want to release it to anybody.

I wanted to hold on to it because it was now evidence of a murder, at least in my mind. When I finished with the truck, I had to write all of my reports, do all of my diagrams, and all of the tedium that comes along with crime scene stuff that you don't see on television. And that took a few days. It took me a while to write all those reports, do all of the diagrams, document all the photographs, and things like that. And I won't bore you with that tediousness. But after we finished all of that, I got with the homicide detectives and I said, tell me what's going on with the follow-up. Well, if you recall, that truck came back to a man named Benito Ramirez. And Benito Ramirez was an illegal immigrant. And soon after that crash, he didn't show up to his construction job. Yes, he worked construction. And he was nowhere to be found.

The homicide detectives tried to track him down. They went to his last known residence. They called his last known numbers. They tried to contact people at the construction site. They didn't know where he was. He had disappeared like the wind. They had no leads to go on. And unfortunately, at that point, the case didn't get closed.

It stayed on top of the pile, but until they could find Benito Ramirez, or somebody that knew something about this murder, there was nothing else to go on. A few months later, the homicide detectives got a lead that Benito Ramirez had a brother, Chabalo. And they found Chabalo, and they contacted him and said, hey, buddy, where's your brother? And he was reluctant to talk to the police because Chabalo was also an illegal immigrant. But detectives can be pretty persuasive when they want to be. And he decided it would be better if he came down and had a nice little chat in the box with the detectives about where he was the night of the crash and what he knew. And long story short, Chabalo said that Benito had called him the night of the crash. And he said that he

had gotten into a bar fight. And he said that a woman had died in the crash, and he carried her body to the woods. And Chavalo went to pick him up about a half mile from the crash site, and he said that Benito had blood on his clothes, and he chalked it up to the bar fight, like Benito said. And he also said that Benito had fled the country back to Mexico. So now we were in a quandary. We had to get Benito Ramirez back across state lines to arrest him. Well, Chabalo was their best bet. So what the homicide detectives did is they had Chabalo contact Benito by phone and tell him basically that he was going to be taking the

rat for this murder unless Benito got his butt back across the U.S. territory line. And in December of 2005, almost 10 months after this murder was committed, Benito Ramirez did just that. He was arrested after he disembarked a Greyhound bus in downtown Jacksonville, and he was booked for first-degree murder. During the follow-up investigation, the homicide detectives interviewed a lot of Stacey's friends. They didn't stop. Just because the case was on the top of the pile doesn't mean you stop working on it. Other cases come in, they take precedent because the timeline is tight on new cases. You have to work them as they come in. But in Jacksonville, there are six teams of detectives. And as long as there's some idle time, you'll work the cases that you can work.

So what they did is they interviewed Stacey's friends, her ex-boyfriend, other acquaintances that she knew. And they found out through an ex-boyfriend that Stacy had been sort of seeing Benito Ramirez, but not really. He had warned Stacy against seeing Benito because he didn't like him. He didn't trust him. And we found out that Stacy had been accepting gifts from Benito, and he expected a physical relationship in return. And she wasn't willing to give that to him. So one night, they had gone out on a pseudo date to shoot some pool and have some drinks at a local bar. And interviewing the waitress, the patrons, and other people who were there that night, they found out that Benito was making advances towards Stacey, and she was rebuffing him. She was pushing his arm away,

and some people said that she looked uncomfortable when he tried to kiss her, and she would turn her head, and she just didn't seem like she wanted anything to do with him. Well, the bill arrived, and when the bill arrived, Benito and Stacey got into a loud verbal argument about who was going to pay for it. And everybody there said that it was a little bit of a scene. And Benito stormed out of the restaurant, and Stacey followed him close behind. And they both got into the pickup truck that was later at the scene of the hit-and-run accident. So now we have eyewitnesses placing Benito Ramirez in the driver's seat of the pickup truck,

placing Stacy in the passenger seat, along with the DNA and hair evidence that was found in the windshield, and the rest of the story started to unfold. What happened was the crash occurred at the intersection. Benito, being an illegal immigrant, being drunk, and now being guilty of a hit-and-run crash, ran from the truck, and Stacey ran too. And we found out through Stacey's cell phone records that she fumbled with her cell phone and she tried to dial 911, but in her panic, she dialed 311 instead. And she did tumble down that dirt embankment, and she was trying to get away because Benito Ramirez was angry. He was mad that she had rebuffed his advances. How dare she rebuff his advances when he was paying for her gifts and paying for her drinks and paying for her food. And she ran. And she tumbled down the dirt embankment and he followed close behind. And Benito's brother

Chabalo said that Benito carried a folding pocket knife all the time. And he took that knife out and unfolded it. And he caught her. And the first thing that he did was he caught her in the back and he raked that knife across her back. And she tumbled to the ground. And she fought for her life against a man with a knife. And as she was kneeling in the mud, he grabbed her by the hair,

and he cut her neck, and he stabbed her in the chest, and he left her there to die. And then Benito Ramirez called his brother several times to come get him, and Chabalo picked him up a half mile from the crash site. The detectives brought Benito Ramirez downtown to the homicide office to interview him. They read him his rights. He said he understood through an interpreter, and they started questioning him about the night of the crash and the night of the murder, and he didn't have a whole lot to say. They showed him the photographs, my overhead photographs from the ladder bucket. They showed him the photographs of her body, photographs from the autopsy, and he was nonplussed. When Benito Ramirez learned that his own brother sold him out,

he didn't have anything to say. But no matter. He was still booked on first-degree murder, and he was placed into pre-trial detention to await trial. The state attorney's office filed the information and brought the case before a grand jury, and they didn't take long to come back with a true bill of indictment for first-degree murder for Benito Ramirez. He sat in pretrial detention for five years. When the case was shuffled from defense attorney to defense attorney, and depositions were taken, more interviews were done, discovery was exchanged between the prosecution and defense. And in August of 2010, the case went to trial, and I looked very forward to detailing the forensic evidence for that jury. It had been a very long and arduous road, and it was finally time for the truth to out to the 12

people who would make the decision on Benito Ramirez's fate, and I had no doubt about a guilty verdict once the jury saw everything that our team had done. On August 11th, I took the stand and the prosecuting attorney introduced me as an expert witness and the judge allowed my testimony. The defense had no objection and I started off by describing the primary scene and the prosecutor went very quickly to the bloodstain evidence on Stacy's jeans. The prosecuting attorney asked me what those patterns told me. And I described to the jury about the void patterns in the creases of her jeans and how that meant that she was likely on her knees or in some kind of a seated position when the injury to her neck occurred. And I looked over to some of the jurors as I was giving my testimony and I could see nods and a

little bit of concentration on their part. They were taking notes and when you're in the witness stand and you see that happen, it's a good thing. They were hearing the evidence. They were hearing what happened to Stacey Replogle that night and after I got through with the jeans, the prosecuting attorney went over to the evidence table, and he picked up the envelope that had the skin and hairs from the windshield in it. And he brought it over to the witness stand, and he asked the judge for permission to present that envelope to the jury. And he passed it over to the first juror who took it in his hands. And he looked at it and he winced. And I watched that envelope go hand to hand through every single juror.

And I watched their faces. The expressions went from disbelief to anger to indignance. And every one of them looked past me and past the prosecutor to the man who had murdered Stacey Replogle sitting at the defense table. And I knew at that moment that there would be a guilty verdict. But I had to wait because I was not the last person to give testimony. And my testimony was not over, because although the prosecution had finished their questions with me after about two hours on the witness stand, going through everything from the autopsy, the cuts on her hand, her jeans, her sweater, all of the information that I had to provide, the defense had their cross-examination of me.

And it really wasn't that complicated. They asked me about the weather and how it had ruined a lot of the shoe prints that were at the crime scene. They asked me if I had found a murder weapon and honestly I had to answer no, we hadn't found a murder weapon. I don't know whatever happened to it. They asked me about the truck and whether or not it was drivable and I said no, it was demolished in the crash. They asked me about the truck and whether or not it was drivable, and I said no, it was demolished in the crash. They asked me if all of the collection and photographs were by me, and I said yes. And after about five or six minutes of cross-examination, my testimony was over. The medical examiner testified. The homicide investigators testified.

All of the people from the bar that night gave their testimony. The medical examiner testified. The homicide investigators testified. All of the people from the bar that night gave their testimony. And once we were finished, to everyone's surprise, Benito Ramirez thought it would be a great idea to take the stand in his own defense. I can't say I wasn't dumbfounded. I did go to the court records because I wanted to hear what this piece of shit had to say in his own defense

and he was led to the witness stand in shackles and chains and he sat down and the bailiff adjusted his microphone and his interpreter stood to his right and the prosecutor sat at the table, and the defense attorney just told him to tell his story. And the judge looked at him and said, do you still want to testify, or have you changed your mind? Giving him one more out. And through the interpreter, Benito Ramirez, said, yes, I'm going to testify. And the judge said, all right,

you're under oath, so go ahead. And he leaned back in his chair and wanted to hear what this man had to say. And this is Benito Ramirez's verbatim testimony. The day that everything happened, I was in my apartment. She called me to go out with her to drink. After we went out to drink, we were drinking and playing pool. After that, I noticed that she was using drugs because she would go to the bathroom and come in and come out. The discussion we had at the bar was about money because I didn't want to give her money to buy drugs. After that, I paid the bill and then I left the bar and went to my car. I told her I was leaving and that I did not

want to fight with her. After I was in my car, she followed me and she got into the car through the other door without telling me anything. And then I left in my car and I went to my apartment. In the car, she was arguing with me and pulling on my shirt. When I was driving, I looked at the stoplight. I put the brake on, but the car did not respond because it was raining. The wheels just slid, and since there was a car in front of us, I crashed into that car. After that, I told her why she had provoked the accident. And at that moment, the judge interrupted and said,

why she had done what? Provoked the accident, the interpreter repeated. Provoked the accident, the judge scowled. And Benito continued. She pulled out a pocket knife and cut my hand. When she cut my hand, we started to fight. We had both, both of us had drunk a lot. While we were fighting, I grabbed the pocket knife that she had cut me with, and while we were struggling, and the judge interrupted again. I'm sorry, I'm having trouble hearing. Ramirez didn't flinch, and he just continued. While we were struggling, if I had not defended myself, I would have been the one that had died. After that, I went to Texas because I was afraid I didn't have papers here. I went to a cousin's house in Texas. After that was when I was arrested. My brother accused

me with the police. That's the testimony from my case, and I'm telling the truth. And he got down, and the bailiff escorted him back to the defense table, and he sat down. The prosecutor refused cross-examination because his bullshit story was so contemptible on its face. The defense attorneys had absolutely no witnesses to call on his behalf, and the judge excused the jurors into the back room. It only took them 40 minutes to come to a unanimous verdict of guilty on a charge of first-degree murder. And Benito Ramirez is now rightfully serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole. Stacy still visits my dreams on occasion, and I don't know why, but the anxiety that comes with it is manageable now. And I need to tell you that at the time of her murder, she had an 11-year-old

daughter. And I truly hope that her daughter and the rest of her family are now able to find some semblance of peace, knowing that her killer is behind bars forever. And I hope that Stacey's soul is finally able to rest. This is the new real. Opening music by Sam Johnson at samjohnsonlive.com. Underscore music by Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com. All rights reserved by Angel Heart Productions. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.