Park Predators - The Forest

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

On Valentine’s Day in February 2020, the body of a young woman turned up dead in Olympic National Forest. The family man responsible for her death is quickly identified and leads authorities down a rabbit hole of lies that ended in horrific bloodshed. View source material and photos for this episode at: parkpredators.com/the-forest Park Predators is an audiochuck production. Connect with us on social media:Instagram: @audiochuckTwitter: @audiochuckFacebook: /audiochuckllcTikTok: @audiochuck

Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra, and the story I'm going to tell you about today is a tale as old as time. It's about the real-life consequences of what can happen when someone lives two separate lives. When a person chooses to lie to the people closest to them, and then try and get rid of the evidence of that lie and hope no one finds out. It takes place in Olympic National Forest in Washington State. This pristine landscape sits roughly two hours west of the city of Seattle and is full of unique geography and diverse species of wildlife and plants. It has everything from trails in the woods to lakes and meadows to massive glacial peaks to rainforest ecosystems and beaches with tide pools.

If you're lucky, you can even catch a glimpse of whales reaching the surface of the ocean, just off the shoreline if you visit during the right time of year. For a few months in early 2020, all these amazing features were overshadowed by a terrible crime. A horrific murder that left many people scratching their heads and asking the question, why? Why did a man with so much to lose choose to make so many terrible decisions? Why did he try and use the remote beauty of Olympic National Forest to cover up his crime? The answers to those questions still allude those closest to the killer and his victim. This is Park Predators. On Friday, February 14th, 2020, at around 11 a.m.,

a hiker who was just setting out for a walk down a remote dirt trail inside Olympic National Forest noticed something odd. A few yards downhill from the start of the trailhead, they spotted what looked like a person lying face down in some vegetation on a slope. The hiker called out to try and get the person on the ground's attention, but didn't get a response. They hollered again, but still nothing. The person on the ground didn't stir or show any signs that they'd heard the hiker calling for them. They just laid there motionless.

Worried that the person might need some help, the hiker inched closer to get a better look. But when they were just a few feet away, they stopped. The body, which was dressed in traditionally feminine clothing, wasn't moving. Red stains on the ground and disturbed areas of plant matter and debris around the person made the passerby sense that something was very wrong.

So that's when they decided to back away and report what they'd found. The source material isn't clear on how quickly this next part happened, but what I gathered from reading is that this hiker either went back to their car to contact authorities or left the area to find a way to call 911.

But either way, they did get through to the Clallam County Sheriff's Office and reported that deputies needed to get up to Olympic National Forest to investigate an unresponsive person in the woods off an old logging road known as U.S. Forest Service Road 28. Something that's important to note about Forest Service Road 28 is that it's not super easy to drive. The best way to describe it is ready, unpaved, and narrow. It literally takes you up and into the mountains of Olympic National Park. However, if you have the right kind of vehicle,

you can definitely make the drive with no problems. You just have to know where you're going. When you get to the end of the logging road, it dead ends into a large dirt parking lot that has just enough spaces for several cars to park side by side. It's not a designated area for camping or anything like that. It's mostly meant for people who are passing by or want to pull off to take a short hike. When the Clallam County Sheriff's deputies, responding to the 911 call, made their way up the mountain and got to the scene, they found exactly what the caller had described. After

following the trail about 10 to 15 yards down into the woods from the dirt parking scene, they found exactly what the caller had described. After following the trail about 10 to 15 yards down into the woods from the dirt parking lot, they found a woman's corpse lying on the side of the path. She was face down on the ground and her legs were positioned slightly downhill from the rest of her body. So basically she was on a slight incline with her head towards the top and her feet towards the bottom. All around her were trees and brush and disturbed vegetation. At first glance, it almost appeared as if she'd fallen down the slope. The position she'd landed in was extremely unnatural. The responding deputies noticed she was still fully clothed,

and the hood of her sweatshirt was pulled up and over the back of her head, obscuring her face. To get a better look, they shuffled downhill closer to the woman, and as soon as they did, they could immediately see signs that she had not merely fallen. She'd endured a horrific attack. Her head had been beaten with some kind of sharp object,

and there were also lots of cuts all over her face and neck. Right away, the deputies backed off and secured the crime scene and waited for forensic techs from the Washington State Patrol to arrive to process the area more thoroughly. The specific spot of woods where the woman was found sits squarely within the boundary of Olympic National Park.

And I know I've also been saying Olympic National Forest, but in general, these two areas are both very close and colloquially considered the same thing. And because of jurisdiction, that meant the investigation was going to be handed over to the FBI as soon as possible. The next morning, February 15th, forensic techs from WSP arrived at the park along with a female special agent from the FBI's Seattle field office. The task of getting to the body wasn't easy. In fact, according to Eric Wilkinson's reporting for King 5 News, the woods in that part of the park

were so thick and the roads were so untraversed that forensic teams had to tie bright colored ribbons to the trees along the way just so that personnel could get in and out of the crime scene without getting lost. At that point, the victim's body was still lying in the woods, untouched. And because the responding law enforcement officers who'd initially found her had done such a good job of making sure no one disturbed her, the scene was as preserved as well as it could be. Once investigators got to work searching for clues and collecting evidence,

they removed the woman's body from the woods and laid her on a more leveled area of the dirt parking lot. The FBI agent in charge of the investigation examined the victim right away, and the first thing she noticed was that the dead woman didn't have any ID on her. The second thing she observed was that the extent of the victim's injuries was even worse than the responding deputies had initially reported. The agent noted that there were three deep cuts on the victim's head, one of which had essentially shaved off part of her scalp. The other cuts on her body included a long one that ran down her jawline and another that slashed deep across her neck and throat. The agent also noticed a bunch of bruises and scrapes on the

woman's torso and side, as well as several cuts on her fingers and wrists, all signs that she tried to fight off her attacker and been severely beaten either before or during the attack. The Squim Gazette reported that the victim was fully clothed in a hoodie with the word love printed on the hood of it and had sweatpants and pink tennis shoes on. She was also wearing a heavy winter jacket. Historical weather reports for Olympic National Park for February 2020 show that the low of that time of year was around 39 degrees, so it made sense that the victim would have on this type of clothing, including a warm winter jacket.

One upside for investigators was that locating the possible murder weapon wasn't difficult. Sitting in the woods right next to where the victim's right hand had been prior to her being removed was a red Milwaukee brand folding knife. But that wasn't the only sharp object that investigators believed the killer or killers had used in the crime. Near the start of the trail, so like several yards back uphill closer to the parking lot, forensic techs had found a blue folding box cutter knife. That knife had blood on it and several long strands of dark hair caught on the blade.

Those hairs were a near-perfect match to the dead woman's hair color. Also in the same area where the body had been, forensic techs discovered a large piece of broken glass from a liquor bottle and more blood. A short distance away from that stuff, they from a liquor bottle and more blood. A short distance away from that stuff, they'd found even more glass and blood. The FBI agent in charge quickly determined that all the glass shards had likely come from the same liquor bottle, and the traces

of blood most likely belonged to the victim. But there was a good chance not all the blood was hers. You see, the authorities surmised that some of it might have belonged to the killer or killers, especially considering the fact that multiple sharp weapons had been used to commit the murder. The FBI figured it was unlikely the attacker had gotten away with the crime uninjured. So with that in mind, the investigators collected everything as evidence, just in case some of the forensic evidence came back as belonging to another person. While bagging the broken bottle, they noticed it still had the manufacturer's label on it,

which indicated it was a container for 1.75 liters of Hornitos brand tequila. I imagine this discovery caused the lead investigator to wonder if perhaps the victim had come to the secluded spot willingly with a romantic partner or maybe a close friend to have a drink. But then at some point, things had gone terribly wrong. Theorizing was only going to get the case so far, though. So finding out where that liquor bottle

had come from and how their victim had ended up in the park were two critically important things the FBI needed to determine for sure. And the answers they sought were wading down the mountain in the town of Squim. Because investigators with the FBI didn't know who their victim was, and there was no missing person reports coming up in Washington state that matched her description, it was difficult to trace the victim's last movements without some place to start, like an ID or last known sighting. The fact that nobody knew who she was frustrated investigators early on. One Clallam County Sheriff's Sergeant told King 5 News,

quote, But it wasn't like the authorities were blasting the woman's description or circumstances of her death to the public to try and get answers about who she was. In fact, the opposite was happening. Investigators initially released very few details about the crime to the public. After word got out that a body had been found,

the FBI and Sheriff's Office only confirmed the basic details of the investigation. Basically, a woman's body had been found in a remote section of the park off Forest Road 28. Foul play was suspected, but that was about it. They didn't make a public plea for information that could help them find out who she was, and they were especially careful not to reveal anything about how the victim had died or when she was believed to have been killed.

The woman's autopsy was scheduled for February 21st, which meant gleaning any further clues about her identity would have to wait until then. In the meantime, the FBI made a copy of her fingerprints and started comparing them to women in Washington's missing person database and Department of Motor Vehicles. They struck out, but held on to Hope and the prints while they waited for the rest of her remains to be examined. On February 18th, four days into the investigation, detectives caught a lucky break.

They learned about a missing woman from California who might be their Jane Doe. According to reporting by KONP News Radio, 12 and a half hours south of Olympic National Park in San Pablo, California, authorities were looking for a 21-year-old woman named Dianeth Lopez. One of Dianeth's friends had reported her missing to San Pablo police on February 15th after she failed to contact her family. When the FBI decided on February 18th to look into DMV databases outside of Washington state, they ran their Jane Doe's fingerprints through California's DMV system. And because San Pablo police

had entered Dianeth's missing person report into their database on the 15th, her name and fingerprints came back as a match for the deceased Jane Doe from Olympic National Park. With the idea of their victim in hand, investigators working the murder case in Washington used that information to pivot

and find out as much as they could about Dianeth Lopez. Most importantly, how and why she'd ended up so far away from where she lived in California. The FBI's first stop was to speak with Dianeth's family and friends in San Pablo. However, they also dispatched agents and detectives with the Clallam County Sheriff's Office to pound the pavement in the towns surrounding the entrance to Olympic National Park. Luckily, those teams hit pay dirt while scouring several businesses for surveillance video. Squim and Blinn, Washington, were the nearest towns to the section of the park where Dianeth had been killed. There were several stores that investigators visited to try and find security cameras. One store in particular, the Longhouse Market, had captured footage of Dianeth on February 10th, four days before her body was found. According to the Squim Gazette, the store's

surveillance cameras showed Dianeth in the parking lot and going in and out of the market with a man who looked to be about her same age. So, early 20s. The video showed that she and this guy had spent roughly seven hours on the store's property, and during most of that time, they'd sat together inside a red 1999 Chevy Silverado pickup truck that the man had been driving. Thankfully, the cameras at the market were good enough quality that they'd captured the license plate number for the truck, which the FBI ran and learned the vehicle belonged to 23-year-old Alejandro Jesse Aguilera Rojas, a resident of nearby Renton, Washington, who was a husband

and father of two young children. After getting the surveillance video and identifying Alejandro as the man with Dianeth at the store, investigators delved into both of their social media profiles and learned that the pair had been in a romantic relationship for a while. A relationship that Alejandro's wife and family didn't know anything about. Dianeth's friends and family in California did know about the affair though. Dianeth's mother told the authorities that her daughter and Alejandro had met through Facebook, and that's where their relationship had started. Dyneth's friends in San Pablo told the FBI that around the time Dyneth left in early February 2020 to go visit Alejandro in Washington, she'd mentioned wanting to tell Alejandro's wife about their affair

and was prepared to do so if Alejandro bailed on their plans together. Dyneth's mom said the last time she'd heard from her daughter was on February 10th, when Dianeth contacted her to tell her that Alejandro had picked her up from the airport in Seattle. After a few days went by, though, and nobody had heard from Dianeth, her family got in touch with Alejandro online, and he told them that Dianeth had made plans to meet up with some friends in the town of Blinn and go hiking. He said he hadn't seen her after that.

However, some of Dianeth's close friends had also messaged Alejandro online during the time that Dianeth was unaccounted for and he told them a completely different story than what he told her mom. According to court documents filed in the case, Alejandro told Dianeth's friends that he had not seen her since November 2019 after she'd gone on a trip to Mexico.

So, clearly, this guy is peddling two very different stories to Dianeth's relatives and friends who are living nearly 800 miles away from where he is. According to the article by the Squim Gazette I mentioned earlier, investigators did find corroborating surveillance video from the airport that confirmed some of what Alejandra had told Dianeth's mother. He was seen on video outside the airport picking up Dianeth in his red Chevy pickup truck on the morning of February 10th. In the footage investigators reviewed, they saw that Dianeth was wearing the exact same outfit her body was later found in, the hoodie with the word love written on it, the sweatpants and the pink tennis shoes.

That detail told authorities that more than likely, something had happened to her not long after getting into Alejandro's truck. Because they knew the security footage from Longhouse Market showed the couple together, with Dianeth still very much alive for several hours on February 10th in that same outfit, investigators surmised that most likely she died sometime on the morning of February 11th. If she'd been alive much longer than that, or say been killed on the 13th or 14th, it would be unlikely that she kept the same clothes on the entire time. With all this in mind, the FBI and Clallam County detectives knew their prime suspect was Alejandro Aguilera Rojas.

But they still wanted to gather more information and evidence to build a case against him before making an arrest. They needed to figure out what in the world had happened between him and Dianeth after they left the Longhouse Market on February 10th, and if they'd been together inside Olympic National Park at any point after that. To help determine those facts, they put a surveillance team on Alejandro to track his every move and got a search warrant for his and Dianeth's cell phone records. Something interesting about his pickup truck that stuck out to investigators is that when it was seen on video parked at the market on February 10th, it appeared to be really dirty with mud and dirt caked on it. However, when the surveillance team watching Alejandro's house saw it parked at his home,

they noticed that it looked like it had been detailed recently, like there was no dirt or anything on it, which was a sign to investigators that he'd washed it or had someone wash it to possibly remove evidence of where he and Dianeth had been. Detectives also checked Alejandro's criminal history and ran a search for any recent arrests or traffic stops. Turns out, on the morning of February 10th, shortly after leaving the airport with Dianeth, a Washington State Patrol trooper had pulled Alejandro over for an expired license tag and driving with a suspended license. had pulled Alejandro over for an expired license tag and driving with a suspended license. The trooper who'd conducted the stop

remembered seeing a young woman matching Dianeth's description in the passenger seat of the pickup. Other than that traffic infraction, though, investigators looking into the murder didn't find anything else in Alejandro's background that pointed to him being a killer. He didn't have any prior arrests for violent crimes

or domestic disputes, nothing. But despite that seeming like a dead end, data from Alejandro and Diana's cell phones renewed energy into the investigation. According to court documents and reporting by the Squim Gazette, the FBI was able to determine that between February 1st and February 11th, the pair exchanged more than 2,500 messages. Now, it's unclear if these were all text messages or if there were some email, voicemail, or social media messages thrown in that amount too. But either way, they were most likely communicating

to coordinate their visit together and work out where they would be going and who they'd be spending time with. Capturing the cell data and records also allowed authorities to pinpoint the whereabouts of Alejandro and Dianeth's phones on the dates in question. After reviewing the information, authorities figured out that on February 11th, Alejandro's phone had been in the specific area

of the park where Dianeth had been murdered. Both of their devices were active and pinging in the remote spot of Olympic National Park during a 10-minute window from 8.34 a.m. to 8.44 a.m. The phones then followed the same path out of the forest and around Renton for the rest of the day on February 11th. This discovery confirmed a lot of suspicions the FBI and local detectives already had about Alejandro, which was that he was likely involved in Dianeth's murder. Investigators' next move was to speak with Alejandro.

So, on February 19th, five days after Dianeth's body was found, the FBI and deputies with Clallam County Sheriff's Office brought him in for questioning. They'd approached him while he was at work power-washing a deck for a client in King County, Washington. During his interview, Alejandro was confronted with the mountain of circumstantial evidence the investigators had gathered so far and admitted to carrying on an extramarital affair with Dianeth for nearly two years. He also admitted to being with her in the days and hours leading up to her death and sending her money to buy a plane ticket to come see him. He told investigators that after

picking her up from the airport on February 10th, they drove together to the town of Squim, where he said she'd made plans to meet up with some of her friends inside Olympic National Park. But when investigators confronted him with everything they'd gathered so far, including the surveillance video of he and Dianeth together for seven hours in his truck at the Longhouse Market, not far from the park's entrance. He admitted that after spending the night of February 10th in the store's parking lot with Dianeth, he'd driven her to the dirt parking lot off Forest Road 28 on the morning of February 11th. He claimed that Dianeth had two different cell phones, one that she used to communicate with him and another from Mexico. He said that the phone from Mexico was the device she'd used to set up the rendezvous for hiking with her friends in the park.

But that ended up being a lie. There was never going to be any group of friends she was meeting. According to Alejandro, while they were waiting for these people to show up, he said that Dianeth started threatening to reveal their affair to his wife and expressed that she wanted to kill his family. He claimed that during a heated part of their fight, Dianeth had lunged at him with a folding knife and tried to stab him, but she missed. Their fight continued and Alejandro said he reacted to Dianeth trying to stab him by hitting her over the head with a tequila bottle he grabbed from his truck. He claimed that after that happened, Dianeth appeared to be knocked out, and he panicked, pushed her into the woods, and drove away.

When authorities asked him why neither of Dianeth's cell phones were found with her body, he said he didn't know where they were. But after detectives showed him the cell phone data that proved at least one of the phones had left the park after their altercation, he changed his tune and admitted to throwing away the cell phones on his way home from the park. He also said he took a duffel bag full of her clothing and put it in the trash at his house. Unfortunately, investigators couldn't confirm that, though, or find the evidence because waste services trucks had hauled off Alejandra's trash to the landfill on February 12th, just one day after the crime and two days before anyone even knew Dianeth was dead. Now, I don't know about you, but I'm side-eyeing the heck out of Alejandro's version of events.

So much of his story just doesn't make sense, and it sucks that some of the important key details and straight-up evidence can't be corroborated. And I imagine that's how investigators were feeling back in 2020. They were frustrated. They weren't buying what Alejandro was telling them, at least not in its entirety. So they pushed him for more information. However, Alejandro responded in a way few people saw coming. He insisted he was not a murderer.

At least, not technically. From the moment he first sat down with investigators, Alejandro said that when he left Dianeth in the park, she was injured, but he believed she was still breathing. He claimed that he had not murdered her or intended to murder her. It had been an accident, which we all know that kind of claim can shake out so many ways in court. And Alejandro would get his day in court because on the night of February 19th, after making his statements to investigators, local deputies arrested him for Dianeth's murder and booked him in the Clallam County Jail. His official charge was second-degree murder,

and at his court hearing the next day, February 20th, a judge set his bail at $1 million. A few days later, on February 24th, the court added an enhancement to his charge for using a deadly weapon during the attack. Peninsula Daily News reported that he entered a plea of not guilty at his arraignment, and initially the case was handled by the county's superior court, but then eventually was dismissed in favor of moving it to federal court

for the Western District of Washington. When that happened, the enhancement for using a deadly weapon was dropped. Shortly after that, a medical examiner in King County conducted Dianeth's full autopsy, and those findings contradicted Alejandro's claim that Dianeth had been struck only by the tequila bottle. I'll spare you all the gruesome details because I want to make sure I'm showing respect to this victim and her family members who may hear this episode. But all you need to know is that there were so many severe cuts and impact wounds to Dyneth's head, face, and body that the examiner concluded there was no way her injuries were a result of falling or being hit just once with a blunt object.

Her wounds proved she'd been viciously attacked with multiple sharp objects and tried hard to fight off her killer. From April until June, the federal government convened a grand jury to review the evidence in the case against Alejandro, and by late June, he was officially indicted for second-degree murder. In a statement to the press, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington said, I commend the Clallam County Sheriff's Office and the FBI for their quick and thorough work on this case. The victim's family has lost their loved one forever, and we will work hard to ensure that the defendant is held accountable for taking her life, end quote. Shortly before

Alejandro was indicted, there had been a preliminary hearing where the FBI agents involved in the case testified about their probable cause affidavit. I read the transcript of that hearing where Alejandro's defense lawyer tried to probe as to whether it was possible a voluntary manslaughter option was on the table, or maybe even perhaps Dianeth had stabbed herself, you know, because that Milwaukee brand folding knife had been found close to one of her hands when she'd been discovered. But that tactic quickly fell apart, because again, the medical examiner's report clearly showed most of her fatal injuries had been inflicted by someone else. And I guess trying to fight the inevitable was not the course of action Alejandro wanted to take in the end. Because on December 16th, 2021, one year and 10 months after killing Dianeth, he agreed to plead

guilty to her murder. What's interesting though, is that despite admitting he beat her and left her for dead, Alejandro still claimed his actions had come from a place of self-defense. I mean, don't get me wrong, he took full responsibility for beating her to death, but remained adamant that what had initially caused him to attack her in the first place was the fact that he claimed she'd threatened him and his family. According to him, he'd used cocaine and drank with Dianeth during those several hours at Longhouse Market, and by the time they got to the trail in Olympic National Forest, Dianeth had asked him several times to leave his wife for her. Alejandro said he refused,

and that's what sparked their verbal argument that turned physical. In May 2022, more than two years after Dianeth's murder, he was sentenced to 16 and a half years in prison. After researching this case and writing this episode, I find myself asking a question so many people closest to Daineth and Alejandro have. Why? Why did this happen? According to court documents Alejandro's lawyer filed on his behalf before his sentencing, According to court documents Alejandro's lawyer filed on his behalf before his sentencing, Alejandro was a young man who'd spent most of his early life living in poverty in Mexico before immigrating to the United States with his mother. He'd grown up without a strong father figure and had a strained relationship with his biological dad.

While still in high school, he and his girlfriend realized they were expecting a baby, but ultimately lost the child. The couple experienced two more miscarriages, but then eventually had a son together. Alejandro ended up marrying his high school girlfriend, and they had another son together. During all that time, he tried to connect with his own father, but learned that his dad might have had a second family in Mexico, and wanted nothing to do with him, his kids, or his mother. Alejandro's relatives, including his wife and in-laws, couldn't wrap their heads around why he decided to essentially

follow in his father's footsteps and have an affair. In letters submitted to the court before Alejandro's sentencing, his family members and friends begged the court for leniency, stating that his actions were extremely out of character and it was unlike him to do something like this. But I question that. I mean, clearly Alejandro was struggling with demons, yet he was detached enough from his wife and kids

to lead a separate secret life that took a lot of coordination and balancing deceitful behaviors. He lied to the people he was supposed to love the most. And then when conflict with Dianeth arose, he killed her in one of the most brutal ways imaginable. A quote from Alejandro's lawyer at his sentencing that will forever stick with me when I think about this case is, quote, he made a series of horrible decisions in a matter of seconds that changed the outcome of Dianeth

Lopez's life and his own, end quote. And that's so true. Maybe it's a reminder to us all to remember that the dark secrets we keep can become our undoing. If you or anyone you know is experiencing intimate partner violence, help is available. You can call the National Domestic violence hotline at 800-799-7233 or text START to 88788. Park Predators is an Audiochuck original show. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?