MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories - Fan Favorite - "Head for the Hills"

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

Today's story is a fan favorite that was previously published as Episode 291. In January of 2012, a police truck parked on a trail in Griffith Park in Los Angeles, California. A member of the K-9 Unit opened the door, and a police dog named Indiana Bones jumped out. Indy quickly caught a scent and led his handler to a mound of dirt just off the path. Indy pawed at the dirt and revealed the top of a plastic bag. The dog’s handler reached into the dirt with her gloved hands, pulled out the bag, looked inside, and saw two dismembered human feet and a hand. Indy’s discovery would launch an investigation that would lead two L.A. detectives into the most insane case they’d ever worked – a case that would involve everything from Mexican drug cartels to a Canadian cannibal.   You can WATCH all new & exclusive MrBallen podcast episodes on my YouTube channel, just called "MrBallen" - https://www.youtube.com/c/MrBallen If you want to reach out to me, contact me on Instagram, Twitter or any other major social media platform, my username on all of them is @mrballen Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Today's episode is a fan favorite. The audio and the story has been remastered for today's episode. In January of 2012, a police truck parked on a trail in Griffith Park in Los Angeles, California. A member of the canine unit opened the door, and a police dog named Indiana Bones jumped out. Indy quickly thought a scent and led his handler to a mound of dirt just off the path. Indy potted the dirt and suddenly revealed the top of a plastic bag. The dog's handler reached into the dirt and pulled out the bag, and when she looked inside, she saw two dismembered human feet and a hand.

Indy's discovery would launch an investigation that would lead two LA detectives into the most insane case they'd ever worked, a case that would involve everything from Mexican drug cartels to a Canadian cannibal. But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious, delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do, and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday. So, if that's of interest to you, the next time the follow button goes camping, wait for them to go to bed for the night, at which point light and then throw a yon-shakaduma firework onto their tent.

Okay, let's get into today's story. On Christmas Day 2011, 67-year-old Hervey Medellin turned off the oven in his apartment in Hollywood, California, opened up the oven door, and pulled out a casserole dish covered with foil. Hervey looked up at the clock and smiled, because his friend, who was coming over for a holiday visit, would be there any minute, and the food he was making had finished cooking at exactly the right time. He turned down the radio playing Christmas music in the kitchen and called out to his roommate, Gabriel Martinez, and told him lunch was almost ready. Gabriel had his eyes glued to his laptop, totally engrossed in whatever it was he was doing, and so he just gave Hervey a sort of

grunt of acknowledgement. Hervey responded with an irritated sigh. Gabriel, who was 30 years younger than Hervey, had been spending so much time online lately that he barely connected with the world around him. Hervey realized it was very likely a generational thing, but he didn't understand why anyone would want to spend so much time just staring at a computer screen. But Hervey refused to be bothered by Gabriel today. It was Christmas, and Christmas was a time for joy, friends, and good food. Hervey set down the hot casserole dish on the table in the small dining area, and he looked around with satisfaction at all the Christmas decorations he had spent hours hanging up.

Hervey's entire one-bedroom apartment now looked like it had been decorated by a professional interior designer. But perhaps the most impressive part of the decorations was not actually the Christmas stuff. It was the paintings that were hanging on the walls. These were not paintings that would be found in most small one-bedroom apartments. These were original works by famous artists. Just then, the doorbell rang, interrupting Hervey's thoughts, and Hervey removed his oven mitts and went to open the door. And when he did, he saw his friend Amelia standing there, holding several wrapped presents.

Hervey grinned and said Merry Christmas and gave Amelia a big hug. Then he let her inside and told her to put the presents down, because before they got to presents and to food, he had to show her something. Amelia put down the presents, said hello to Gavey, Gabriel, and then Hervey took her hand and led her across the front room. Then Hervey pointed to a painting hanging on the wall, and he could hear Amelia gasp. She turned to Hervey almost in disbelief and asked if it was an original. Hervey smiled and nodded.

He said the last time he'd gone down to Mexico, where he was originally from, he had acquired this painting, which was an original work of art by Diego Rivera, one of the most famous Mexican painters to have ever lived. After staring at this painting with his friend for several minutes, Hervey said it was time to go eat. He told Gabriel to put his computer away for a while and joined them, and then the three of them headed to the table and dug into the casserole Hervey had prepared. While they ate,

Hervey told Amelia more about his latest trip to Mexico and also about the travel plans he was making to destinations all over the world. Hervey said sometimes he still couldn't believe this was actually his real life. He'd worked so hard from the moment he came to the United States as a young man, with the hope that one day he'd be able to do whatever he wanted. And now, he felt like he'd accomplished that. He was retired and filling his days with adventure and art. Hervey, Amelia, and Gabriel spent the day eating, talking, laughing, and exchanging gifts.

For Hervey, who had spent most of his life far away from his family, this really felt like the perfect holiday. And other than maybe traveling, he couldn't imagine a better way to spend his time than eating delicious food and catching up with friends. By late afternoon, Amelia said, unfortunately, she had to go home, so Hervey walked her to the door. He gave her another big hug, wished her Merry Christmas again, and said he couldn't wait to get together with her in the new year. More than three weeks later, on the morning of Tuesday, January 17th, a dog walker named Lauren Cornberg, left her house with her mother, and nine dogs. They headed toward their usual hiking path, which cut through an area called Bronson Canyon.

Bronson Canyon is located inside of Griffith Park, which is basically L.A.'s equivalent to New York's Central Park, but it sits high above the city. It was the perfect winter morning in Los Angeles, which meant it was a crisp 50 degrees and the Hollywood Hills were bathed in soft orange sunlight. So Lauren and her mom took the dogs up a side path that branched out from the main hiking trail, and once they were far enough away from other hikers, they let the dogs off-leash. And as soon as that happened, the dogs instantly began playfully running around together, but one of them, a golden retriever, broke away from the pack and wandered over toward a bushy area next to a shallow ravine off the side of the path.

And this golden retriever began digging in this one area of the brush. Lauren watched as the retriever pulled out a plastic bag from the brush and then began sniffing it. And as the dog began to sort of vigorously paw at this bag, a large round object suddenly rolled out of it and began tumbling down into the ravine. Two other dogs from the group, a husky and a small terrier, ran down the ravine after this big round object. And Lauren's mom asked what had just rolled out of the bag. Lauren said she didn't know, but it sort of looked like a movie prop, which wouldn't actually be an unusual thing to find lying around,

because there were Hollywood special effects and prop houses not too far from here, and many movies and TV shows were filmed in this area. Lauren's mom walked over toward the ravine to try to get a better look at this movie prop, but as she got close to the edge, she looked down and saw that the dogs were no longer playing. In fact, the terrier was backing away from this object with its hair up like the dog was terrified. And so Lauren, she kind of leaned forward and looked as best as she could to see what this object was. And suddenly, when one of the dogs stepped out of the way, she had a clear line of sight onto this object. And when she saw what it was, she began backing away too.

Because the object was no prop. It was a real severed human head. About an hour later, helicopters loudly hovered over the canyon and police blocked access to the entire area as more than a dozen LAPD cruisers, CSI units, and news vans parked along the nearby scenic overlook. Detective Chuck Knowles and his partner, Detective Lisa Sanchez, walked up the trail and met with the uniformed officers who had cordoned off the area with police tape. By this point, crime scene investigators had retrieved the severed head from the ravine, and brought it onto the trail.

When Detective Sanchez walked over to them and saw the severed head, her stomach churned. She had investigated her fair share of murder cases, but this was the first time she dealt with any kind of dismemberment. As Sanchez began to study the head, one of the uniformed officers walked up to her and told her that the two women who actually found the head at first thought it was fake. They thought it was a movie prop. Detective Sanchez could understand why. Because there was very little decomposition, and the head was so fresh

pristine that it looked like it had just been removed. From the looks of it, Sanchez believed that had belonged to a man who could be in his 60s, but that was about all she could guess about the victim at this point. So police began fanning out and searching the area, hoping to find some more clues. More helicopters and search units began to pour into the area, and the search expanded to a seven-acre radius. Searchers began entering backyards of the homes in the area, and some of these homes were really expensive houses that belonged to famous movie stars, so the police knew this case was going to draw even more media attention. Around 4.30 p.m., the sun began to set, and despite an exhaustive search of the area, no further human remains turned up. So the searchers left their equipment,

kept the area cordoned off, and went home for the night. That evening, reports of the dismembered body found in Griffith Park were all over local news stations. And although violent crime in L.A. was far from rare, violent crime in this particular neighborhood in Bronson Canyon was almost unheard of. The people who lived in the neighborhood, who were willing to talk on camera, were shocked that something like this could happen just beyond their backyards. People who had been hiking and walking their dogs in Bronson Canyon for years told reporters they were now afraid to step foot on the hiking paths until the killer or killers were apprehended. The following day, LAPD returned to Bronson Canyon and performed a highly organized grid search, scouring the area where the head had turned up.

The police were already feeling pressure from the media, city leaders, and local residents to find the people or person who had committed this horrific crime. But detectives, Knowles, and Sanchez knew there was still so much physical area to cover and search, and they still had no idea who the victim even was. So this just didn't seem like a case they could just wrap up in a couple of days. And by late morning, the searchers had still found nothing new when a police truck pulled up and a dog handler stepped out with her cadaver dog, a German shepherd named Indiana Bones, who was famous for being the first four-legged detective on L.A. County Coroner's team. After getting out of the car, Indy's handler began leading the dog up a nearby hill.

And almost immediately, as they began to walk, Indy pulled the handler in the direction of this nearby dirt mound. The handler walked over to the mound and, with a gloved hand, began pushing the dirt aside, revealing what looked like a shallow grave. And in this shallow grave was a plastic bag. The handler reached her hands down and carefully cut them beneath the bag and gently pulled it out of the ground. Then she took a pair of scissors out of her pocket, cut the bag open, and looked inside. And inside, she saw a pair of human feet and a hand. The next morning, Detective Knowles and Sanchez sat at their computers sifting through recent missing person reports. The victim's torso, or any more of his body, still had not been found.

But the detectives hoped that the feet and hand that were found also belonged to their victim, and that with these new body parts, they might be able to connect their victim to somebody who went missing in the area. Just then, the sound of a fax machine broke their focus. Knowles stood up, tore the paper off the machine, and saw that the medical examiner had completed his examination on the severed hand, feet, and head. Knowles scanned the whole report and then read aloud the important parts to Sanchez. The medical examiner had confirmed that all those body parts belonged to the same victim.

Also, they said that after the victim was dead, his killer carefully cut apart the man's body, right at the joints in a very precise manner, so whoever cut the body up seemed to really know what they were doing. But what was even more intriguing was that the body parts had been refrigeration, before they were dumped, which explained why the head had looked so fresh when it was found. But this made it difficult for the medical examiner to pin down exactly when the victim was killed. However, because the parts were so fresh, the examiner was able to lift very clear fingerprints from the man's fingers. And when he ran those prints through a system, he got a hit.

The dismembered man was Hervey Medellin. Nolz sat down at his computer and ran Hervey's name through every database he had access to. And he quickly learned that Hervey had been reported missing just a day before his head was found. The missing person's report had been filed by a man named Gabriel Martinez who said he was Hervey's roommate. So Detective Noles and Sanchez got into their car and began driving towards Hervey's apartment, which happened to be just two blocks away from the Hollywood police station. While they were in the car, Noles and Sanchez discussed

their game plan for when they talked to this roommate. And their plan was simple, reveal nothing. Although news of the Grizzly Discovery was already all over town, that victim's identity had not yet been released by the media. Only the police knew that information. And so they wanted to feel out what Herbie's roommate knew and didn't know. He was not a suspect yet, but he was definitely a person of interest. The detectives parked at the curb and walked up to Herbie's building. It was this elegantly plain, narrow building constructed in the 1920s that felt totally vintage and old Hollywood. The detectives walked up the stairs to the third floor to apartment 319 and rang the doorbell. A few seconds later, the door opened and a dark-haired man in his 30s greeted the detectives.

They introduced themselves and asked if he was Gabriel Martinez. Gabriel said yes and then asked immediately if they had news about Hervey. Had they found him? Was he okay? The detectives exchanged a quick glance, and then Sanchez said they were still investigating Hervey's disappearance. And for now, they just needed to speak to Gabriel to try to help with that case. Gabriel suddenly went from being sort of hopeful to looking pretty concerned, but then told them he was glad to tell them anything they wanted, and he asked them to come inside.

Once inside, they all sat down at the table in the small dining area. Detective Knowles asked Gabriel when he'd last seen Hervey, and Gabriel said, not since shortly after Christmas on December 27th. That's when Hervey had gone to Mexico. It was where he grew up and where he still had friends and family. Gabriel said that Hervey traveled internationally a lot, and sometimes he would go on these open-ended trips, so Gabriel was not always exactly sure when Hervey was going to come home again. But Hervey had been calling pretty regularly just to check in, and then suddenly the call stopped, so Gabriel started to get really worried and then eventually filed the missing person report.

Detective Sanchez asked Gabriel if he had called or texted Hervey after Hervey stopped calling, just to see if maybe he was staying in Mexico longer. Gabriel said he hadn't, but he explained that Hervey had actually left his cell phone behind at the apartment because he didn't get service in Mexico. Now, Gabriel knew there were ways around that, but he said discussing technology with Hervey was usually a losing cause. Hervey just preferred to use a landline and an international calling card whenever he was in Mexico. Sanchez asked if there was a record of these calls from Herbie, and Gabriel said yes,

and he grabbed his phone and showed the detectives the calls he'd received from Hervey in January. The detectives saw that these calls were from an international calling card number, which meant they didn't actually know who placed those calls, but it did corroborate what Gabriel had told them. The detectives would talk to Gabriel for a bit longer, but the whole time they stuck to their original plan. They didn't reveal anything about Herbie's murder. Back at the station, Detective Knowles and Sanchez went over what they had so far,

and they agreed it was not very much. And what little they did have didn't quite add up. And it really had to do with this trip to Mexico they had just learned about. Did Hervey really go to Mexico and then get murdered and dismembered there? And then what, his body parts were shipped back to L.A. and dumped in L.A.? Or did Hervey come back from Mexico in one piece and then somehow get intercepted before he got home by somebody who then murdered, dismembered, and dumped him, both these theories just seemed like they were missing something.

Like, did Hervey really even go to Mexico? They didn't know. I mean, regardless of what Hervey's roommate Gabriel had told them, the detectives thought it actually made a whole lot more sense that somebody would have killed and dismembered Hervey right there in his own apartment and disposed of him in nearby Griffith Park, which certainly made Gabriel seem very suspicious. The following day, which is now three days after,

Hervey's head had been found, the detectives returned to Hervey's apartment, and this time they showed up with a search warrant, a team of police, and cadaver dogs. Once inside, they let the dogs loose, and the dogs began frantically sniffing around the floorboards, the furniture, and the corners of every room. Meanwhile, Gabriel sat at the table and watched in silence as the investigators practically tore up the tiny one-bedroom apartment. The search team rifled through drawers and closets, they confiscated computers and phones, and they photographed every item inside the apartment. But at the end of the search, they realized they had found absolutely nothing. There was no blood, no hidden torso, no bone saws or other dismemberment tools, and so this apartment just didn't

appear to be the place where the murder or dismemberment or both took place. As the search team began to leave the apartment, detectives Knowles and Sanchez sat down at the table, with Gabriel. And Gabriel didn't look angry or raise his voice, but he wanted to know, like, what had changed since they spoke a day earlier that made the detectives feel like they could come into his and Hervey's home and tear it apart like this. Sanchez whispered something to Knowles, and then she finally broke the news to Gabriel. Those body parts that were found in the canyon that were all over the news belonged to Hervey. Hervey was deceased, and so now Hervey's death was being investigated as a homicide. Immediately, all the color drained.

from Gabriel's face. He said he couldn't believe it. This didn't seem real. Now, the detectives understood how upsetting this was for Gabriel, but they needed more information. So they pressed Gabriel for more details about Hervey's trip to Mexico. And so for the next half hour, Gabriel, despite being in shock, was cooperative and answered every question and tried to give detectives any information at all that could be useful. Later that day, the two detectives returned to the station and went into an evidence room where everything collected from Herbie's apartment was laid out on a table. One of the evidence technicians in the room told the detectives that he happened to look at the photos taken of the apartment

and some of the victim's artwork hung on the walls was worth a ton of money. The Diego Rivera painting alone was likely worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, this struck the detectives as being really odd. According to the information Gabriel had provided, and based on what the detectives had learned from their databases, Hervey was a retiree, living on a small pension in a small one-bedroom apartment. So how was he also a serious art collector able to acquire paintings that were potentially worth a small fortune?

The following day, so now four days after Herbie's head was discovered, a call came through to Noles's desk. The man on the other end introduced himself as a retired LAPD narcotics detective, and this retired detective said he'd been reading the newspaper that morning and happened to see that the dismembered victim from Griffith Park had been identified. And when he saw the name, Hervey Medellin, it immediately rang a bell. He said back in the early 1990s, when he was investigating a Mexican drug cartel, Hervey's name had come up in the investigation. And in fact, he had interviewed Hervey a couple of times.

Knowles kept listening, but right away his mind began to race. A connection to Mexican cartels and drug trafficking could maybe explain how Hervey had enough cash to buy those famous paintings. The retired detective explained that Hervey had worked as a ticket taker for Mexicana Airlines. At that time, that airline was believed to have been used for drug smuggling. And Hervey had become a kind of personal concierge for the wives and girlfriends of drug cartel members. When these women would visit L.A., Hervey would book their hotel rooms, arrange shopping trips,

and give them dining recommendations. Now, none of that was illegal, so the narcotics detective had, had no reason to pursue Hervey. He ultimately just kind of became a minor character and a much bigger investigation. But now that this former detective found out that Hervey had turned up dead and dismembered, he wondered if maybe Hervey's connection to the drug cartels had gone much deeper than he realized. As Knowles listened, he was having the same type of thoughts. Was Hervey a drug meal? Were those paintings a form of payment from the cartels? Did Hervey fail to repay a debt? and did the cartel brutally murder him for it?

After all, some Mexican cartels were known to behead and dismember some of their victims. Knowles thanked the retired detective for reaching out to him. He hung up and passed this new information along to his partner Sanchez. The detectives now realized they could be in over their heads. Poking the Hornets Nest with a Mexican drug cartel is the kind of thing that gets people killed, even cops. Over the next week, Knowles and Sanchez started to pursue. sued this new lead, but they quickly discovered that a potential run-in with a violent Mexican drug

cartel was actually not the biggest issue they were facing. Instead, the big issue that kept setting them back was just old-fashioned bureaucracy. Getting Mexican law enforcement agencies to cooperate in any investigation was never really easy, but when the investigation involved the cartels, it seemed almost impossible. Mexican authorities weren't eager to anger the cartels, or possibly jeopardize their own investigations into the drug trade just to assist LA cops on a homicide case. And when Knowles and Sanchez turned to federal law enforcement agencies in the United States, they ran into similar problems. The DEA and the FBI were running multiple investigations involving the cartels, and they could not put those at risk just because Hervey had been interviewed

by a narcotics cop over 20 years ago. But the FBI did at least tell Noles and Sanchez that they would dig into Hervey's financial records to see if he had a clear connection to the cartels before he was killed. In the meantime, the feds told the LA detectives to go ahead and stay away from the cartel stuff and just let them handle that. They should just focus on leads that were in the United States. Now, Knowles and Sanchez understood why the feds reacted that way, but they still felt like a huge lead, i.e. going after the cartels, had just been yanked out from under them. On top of that, the FBI had no reason to expedite finding these financial records because this was not their case, so there was no telling how long it would actually take the feds

to provide them with any information. Feeling frustrated and a bit lost on what to do next, Knowles and Sanchez turned their focus back to the victim. The detectives reached out to Hervey's L.A. friends to learn more about who Hervey was. And the picture that began to emerge of Hervey was of a warm, friendly guy who had moved to L.A. from Mexico as a young man who had worked hard and was now enjoying his retirement and living the American dream that he had always believed in. Now, Nolz and Sanchez didn't think any of this information really helped their case, and none of it seemed to make Hervey look like a guy who had deep ties to the drug trafficking world. The detectives would still need to hear back from the FBI,

but if Hervey had been working with a cartel, he'd managed to keep it pretty secret. So the detectives just kept pushing forward, talking to everyone they could who knew Hervey. And finally, just when they felt like they were running out of people to interview, the detectives did learn something very interesting. Hervey's roommate, Gabriel, was not just his roommate. Gabriel was Hervey's boyfriend. Now, Gabriel had not told the detectives this, and they couldn't believe that he had kept this secret across the two interviews they had done with him.

Having an intimate relationship with the victim immediately put Gabriel at the top of the suspect list and the fact that he had lied about the relationship made him look even more suspicious. So Knowles and Sanchez called Gabriel into the station for another interview. But when they confronted him, instead of him getting defensive or trying to deny it, Gabriel readily admitted that he and Hervey were indeed in a relationship. He told the detectives he was just a very private person and felt uncomfortable sharing those kinds of details. Sanchez and Knowles did not believe Gabriel, and they told him that because he had hid this information, they felt like he could be hiding something else. But Gabriel insisted he wasn't hiding anything.

And then without any further prompting, he opened up about his and Hervey's relationship. Gabriel told them all about how he and Hervey had met, how at first they were good friends, and then they fell in love and moved in together. And after several minutes of this, when the detectives were finally able to steer the conversation, back to the weeks leading up to the murder, Gabriel's story about Hervey's trip to Mexico and the phone calls he got didn't change at all. By the end of the interview, Knowles and Sanchez really didn't know what to think.

Gabriel had clearly held back information from them about the relationship with Hervey, but when confronted, he told them all about it and then hadn't changed or embellished his story at all from that point forward. And also, they had already searched the apartment and there was no evidence that connected Gabriel to the crime. Not long after this meeting, things only seemed to get worse for the two detectives.

The FBI came back to them and told them that after doing some digging, they found that Hervey's financial records did not show any connection to any drug cartels, or any other known criminals, for that matter. Now, they still couldn't completely rule out the cartel's involvement in this murder, but for now at least, this lead felt like a dead end. By mid-April, so three months after Hervey's head had been found, the LAPD finally released Hervey's remains to his family so they could have a proper funeral. Knowles and Sanchez couldn't help but feel like they had let Hervey and his family down.

They were no closer to finding the killer or killers than they had been on day one of the investigation. And in the weeks following the funeral, Knowles and Sanchez started to get assigned new cases that required immediate action. Hervey's murder was slowly becoming a cold case. Until one day in June, so now five months after Hervey's head had been found, Detective Knowles' phone rang, and he had one of the most bizarre conversations he'd had in all his time working in homicide. The caller introduced himself as an investigator with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. For a second, Nolz thought somebody might be prank calling him, because it was not every day an L.A. detective gets a call from a Canadian Mountie. But the Mountie quickly told Noles that he'd

been made aware of the case from back in January with the severed head and limbs. And the Mountie said they had actually just had a very similar case up in Quebec. A video had been uploaded to the internet that showed this naked man tied to a bed and another individual dressed all in black repeatedly stabbing him with an ice pick. And then once the man was dead, the killer dismembered the body before sexually abusing the body and cannibalizing some parts of it. And as if that wasn't brutal enough, the killer then sent other parts of the body to members of Canadian Parliament and several different elementary schools. Detective Knowles just sat there on the phone in silence. I mean, this was a totally brutal and horrible story, but he couldn't see any real

connection to Hervey's murder, aside from both victims having been dismembered. But the Mountie continued and said they had actually already arrested this internet killer. And this man, who was a Canadian citizen named Luca Magnata was obsessed with Hollywood. He had recently lived in Los Angeles, not far from where Herbie lived, where he acted in porn movies and worked as a male escort before going back to Canada. But the big thing, the real reason the Mountie had called Knowles in the first place, was that while Luca was living in Los Angeles, he kept a blog in which he wrote about his exploits. And one of the things he wrote about was the dismembered body found in Bronson Canyon, Hervey's body.

After the call with the Mountie, Noels quickly met with Sanchez, and the detectives decided the first thing they needed to do was figure out exactly when Luca had been in the United States to see if maybe he could have actually crossed paths with Hervey in late December or January, the time they believed Hervey was killed. They reached out to the agencies in the U.S. and Canada that maintained customs data, and they were able to find out when Luca actually crossed the border into the U.S. and when he went back into Canada. Then they dug into Hervey's customs data to try to nail down the exact time he traveled to Mexico and if and when he came back to the States in order to see if he and Luca had been in L.A. at the same time. But while they were looking into this, they discovered something that totally shocked them and made them rethink everything about this investigation. They came to realize that the reason the case had stalled out was because they had been operating under a false assumption the whole time.

And after making this huge discovery, Knowles and Sanchez believed they had finally cracked the case. Based on all the evidence gathered throughout the investigation, the following is a reconstruction of what police believe happened to Hervey Medellin. At around 3 a.m. on December 27, 2011, the killer crept through Hervey's apartment to the bedroom. The door was cracked open, and the killer looked in and saw Hervey sleeping inside. The killer threw the door open, rushed the bed and jumped on top of him. Hervey immediately woke up and began yelling as the killer tried to cup their hands over Hervey's mouth to muffle his screams. Hervey kept fighting back, but the killer wrapped their hands around his throat and began to squeeze.

Hervey continued to yell so the killer squeezed harder and harder, and after about five minutes of this, Hervey stopped struggling. His face was blue and his eyes were empty. He was dead. The killer remained in Hervey's apartment. And a bit later that morning, they opened up Gabriel's computer and did a son. search. They pulled up an article titled Butchering the Human Carcass for Consumption. This article provided detailed instructions on how to dismember a human body for the purpose of cooking and consuming it. Once the killer felt like they had a clear understanding of what to do, they went back to Hervey's bedroom and used a saw they had recently purchased to separate Hervey's head and limbs from his body.

The killer then refrigerated those body parts for three weeks, but for reasons no one fully understands, the killer never actually consumed any of it. There was no cannibalism, despite clearly there being some level of interest based on that search that was done on Gabriel's computer on the night of the murder. And so three weeks after the murderer, the killer walked through Bronson Canyon in the dark with Hervey's body parts and dug shallow graves at various spots and buried them. And soon after that, with Hervey now officially out of the picture, the killer was able to transfer all the money from Hervey's personal bank account into the joint bank account they had opened after they had moved in together. Gabriel Martinez murdered his boyfriend

Hervey in the apartment they shared. It turned out that before Christmas of 2011, Gabriel and Hervey's relationship had started to completely fall apart. In fact, things had gotten so bad that Hervey told Gabriel he wanted to end things and he said Gabriel should start looking for another place to live. Gabriel knew he would not be able to afford a Los Angeles apartment or lead the life he'd grown accustomed to on his own because he didn't have a steady income. He had become financially dependent on Hervey, and so in his desperation, he had decided to kill Hervey and steal his money. On Christmas Day, when Hervey's friend Amelia came over, Gabriel sat on the couch with his

laptop, Googling what tools to use to cut up a human body. Being Hervey's significant other and failing to disclose, their relationship to police had made Gabriel a leading suspect early on, but police had found no clear evidence pointing to Gabriel or anyone else, so the case had gone cold. But it was the customs data that detectives obtained while following the lead on the Canadian internet killer, Luca Magnata, that helped lead them back to Gabriel. Customs data showed that Luca had been in Canada at the time Hervey went missing, which ruled Luca out as the killer.

But more importantly, this custom had been in Canada. systems data made it clear that Hervey had never actually traveled or even booked a flight to Mexico at any time in late December or January. Gabriel had crafted this intricate lie about Hervey's trip, even providing phone records showing all the times Hervey had called him from Mexico. But once investigators knew Gabriel was lying, they dug deeper into his phone records and discovered the calls had actually come from Hervey's friend, who was calling Gabriel from Mexico, but they were doing so to find out why they had suddenly stopped hearing from Hervey. At this point, the detectives were sure Gabriel was the killer,

but the final piece of evidence they would need to convince the district attorney would not be discovered until 2014, over two years after the murder. At that time, a city worker was digging in the ground not too far from where Hervey's head had been discovered, and he found a plastic bag containing pieces of decaying human flesh. A DNA sample of this flesh matched Hervey's DNA, but it was actually the bag itself that sealed Hervey's case, because this was a very specific type of bag, one that was used to protect and transport expensive paintings, and it matched those same types of bags that had been found in Hervey and Gabriel's apartment.

Los Angeles detectives tracked Gabriel down in San Antonio, Texas, where he had married a wealthy woman who was supporting him, and with the help of local police, they were. arrested him. Gabriel was eventually found guilty of murder and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. A quick note about our stories, they are all based on true events, but we sometimes use pseudonyms to protect the people involved, and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes. The Mr. Ballin podcast, Strange, Dark, and Mysterious Stories, is hosted and executive produced by me, Mr. Ballin. Our head of writing is Evan Allen, produced by Jeremy Bone and Cole Lacasio. This episode was written by Kate Murdoch. Research and fact-checking by

Shoeh, Samantha Van Hoose, Evan Beamer, Abigail Shumway, Camille Callahan, Alex Paul, Ben Fasiano. Research and fact-checking supervision by Stephen Ear. Audio editing and post-produced by Whitel and Jordan Stidham. Production support by Antonio Monata and Delana Corley. Artwork by Jessica Clogston Kiner, theme song, Something Wicked, by Ross Bugden. Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin podcast. And just a reminder, every new and exclusive episode we put out on the Mr. Ballin podcast, you can also now watch on the Mr. Ballin YouTube channel that very same day. And trust me, some of these stories you truly have to see to believe. Again, my YouTube channel is just called Mr. Ballin. If you want to listen to

listen to episodes one week early and ad free, you can subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit seriousxm.com slash podcast plus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice. So that's going to do it. I really appreciate your support. Until next time, see you.