Sins & Survivors: A Las Vegas True Crime Podcast - The Murder of Megan Ruiz

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Starting point is 00:00:56 Starting at 299 a month, you'll also get access to our exclusive bonus content episodes when you join through Patreon or Apple subscriptions. Thanks for supporting the show. On July 3rd, 2024, two gunshots rang out inside the Crosswind's apartment in central Las Vegas. Metro officers responded and were told a story about a woman in the middle of a manic episode, a woman who had supposedly attacked her boyfriend with a fork. But as we've seen in so many cases, that version of events was not even close to the whole story. What really happened involved a long pattern of domestic violence calls to that same apartment. And once detectives started untangling Jimmy Ramirez's account of what happened, almost every piece of it started falling apart.

Starting point is 00:01:44 Hi, and welcome to Sins and Survivors, a Las Vegas true crime podcast, refocus on cases that deal with domestic violence, as well as missing persons and unsolved cases. I'm your host Sean. And I'm your Co-host John. Before we get to this week's main case, we have another missing person story from the Las Vegas Metro Cold Case database. William Sky Pilgrim has been missing for more than five years since March 12th, 2020. I don't know if you remember this was right before the COVID lockdown, but that day it poured rain in Las Vegas, enough to set a new record for rainfall. The previous record on March 12th was 0.24 inches, which was set back in 1973. But rainfall total for March 12th, 2020 reached 0.77 inches, shattering that previous record. And all of that rain fell in

Starting point is 00:02:42 only four hours, which caused massive flash flooding in the valley. Underneath the surface of Las Vegas, there is a network of storm drain tunnels. It's absolutely massive. It's 600 miles of tunnels and storm drains. And there are an estimated 1,500 individuals at any time living down there, making their homes down there within that tunnel system. Underground, it's shady and it's cooler and it protects people from the extreme heat and the sun. And as you all know, this is a desert and we don't get a lot of rain here.

Starting point is 00:03:20 But when we do, those storm drains flood and people get swept away. in the water. Sometimes people have enough notice to get out of the tunnels to safety, but on March 12th, 2020, the water rose too quickly. One resident said, it sounded like a freight train. Intersections were flooded, cars were stranded, and at least five people were swept away in that rushing water. That evening, William Sky Pilgrim, was in the tunnels near Flamingo and University Center Drive, with his partner of 20 years, Wendy Cox. Wendy said that they decided to quickly tie their arms together so they wouldn't get separated when the water carried them off. When the wall of water hit them, the current carried them out to the wash on Flamingo Road near the Cambridge Community Center.

Starting point is 00:04:09 Wendy felt the rope get caught and snap. She grabbed onto some wire fencing that makes up the retaining wall around the wash and she was able to pull herself out. But Sky was gone and he has not yet been found. The police searched the area that night and the next day with no sign of sky. I took a look at some of the storm drain maps, and I estimate that Wendy was carried about a half a mile, maybe three quarters of a mile in that rushing water. Two of their friends are confirmed to have died in the flood. Larry Walker, age 26, was found dead the next day. And Jeremy Hogg, he was 40 years old. he was found deceased on March 20th, 2020. Wendy told the Las Vegas Review Journal that the flood plays over and over in her mind.

Starting point is 00:04:58 She said that previous times it had rained, the flooding wasn't that bad in the tunnels. So she and Sky tried to wait out the March 12th storm, which of course is a decision she deeply regrets. She's made missing person flyers for Sky and she's walked the edges of the wash searching for him or any piece of his clothing or his jewelry. But that was back at the height of the pandemic and during lockdown. At that time, public officials were overwhelmed. The community was staying indoors and avoiding each other. And it was hard even then to feel that the search wasn't hopeless. And even the best of circumstances unhoused people get overlooked and ignored. So during the international crisis of the pandemic, no additional resources were directed toward finding sky.

Starting point is 00:05:48 William Sky Pilgrim disappeared when he was 44 years old. Today he would be 49. He's described as a black man, five feet eight inches tall, 210 pounds. He is bald. His ears are pierced and he has a tattoo of the phrase, we the people, on his arm. When the storm hit, he was wearing a black jacket, a gray Nike shirt, black echo jogging pants, earrings, and three silver rings on his fingers. If you have any information about Sky, please call Metro at 702, 828-2-2-1907, and the short link to his profile on Namus is going to be at Sinspod.co slash William Pilgrim. Our main case today concerns Megan Ruiz. Megan was born March 25th, 1992, right here in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her parents are named Shauna and Richard Goodney. She had three children, the year.

Starting point is 00:06:46 youngest being only a year old at the time she died, and she had two siblings named Christopher Goodney and Kirsten Andrea, and her grandparents are Nancy and James Franklin. She grew up here in Las Vegas, and she graduated from Basic High School in 2010. After that, she got a degree in cosmetology, and she was pursuing her passion in that field. Her favorite movie was The Nightmare Before Christmas, and she loved everything that Tim Burton ever made. She was She was incredibly kind to all her friends and made lasting impressions with so many people. She enjoyed many forms of artistic expression, including drawing, writing poetry, and engaging in terrible puns. Megan met Jimmy Ramirez on a dating app, and they moved in shortly thereafter, and they had been

Starting point is 00:07:34 together for about seven to eight years. They lived at the Crosswinds Apartments at 435 South Jones Boulevard, Apartment 29, just south of West Flamingo Road. It's not the best area in the world, and it's one of those. those places that advertises a $99 move in. I looked into the apartment complex a little bit, and if you look at the reviews, it's pretty clear that the people there are not super happy with the way it's maintained. And they say things like, the maintenance people never come. People are very critical of the apartment as a whole. Do people complain about safety?

Starting point is 00:08:06 They do, actually. Yeah. One of the things people often complain about is their cars and apartments being broken into. That's a big problem. People move there. Because it's affordable. but it's not a safe place to live. So it seemed like Megan and Jimmy had a really troubled relationship, too. Police have been called out to their apartment several times, according to detectives in the past, because of disputes.

Starting point is 00:08:27 And I dug in a little bit, and it seemed like most of those were domestic battery, according to the records. Jimmy Ramirez was never arrested, but there were definitely a lot of times when they were called out. And that reminds me about what we're going to mention at the end,

Starting point is 00:08:40 about how these cases seem to be treated as just a family matter, kind of the way they were 30 or 40 years ago. But that's still happening. It's only after something horrific happens that the authorities start to take these things seriously. So you said Jimmy was never arrested. Was Megan ever arrested for anything involving the two of them? No.

Starting point is 00:09:00 So no arrests at all? Nope, none that I could find. Okay. The only information I found about Jimmy's background was the fact that he was married previously. He was married for about nine years previously. I found his divorce decree and child custody case and also a child support case. The other thing that I will mention, but I don't have any proof of, this was just in the record. It was alleged that Megan told Jimmy at some point that she had some form of mental illness.

Starting point is 00:09:28 We can't really verify that. We don't know if she actually did have a mental illness, what it was, or if she told him that, or if that's just something he said as a part of his conversation with the police. It started with Ramirez calling 911 at about 4.30 p.m. He told Metro that he had shot his girlfriend Megan twice. Police responded and detained Ramirez. Megan had been shot twice in the upstairs landing of her home. She was transported to the University Medical Center and was unfortunately pronounced dead about an hour later. They also discovered that Megan's one-year-old was in a playpen downstairs. Initially, Ramirez told police that he shot his girlfriend because she attacked him with a fork

Starting point is 00:10:10 By the time he got to the actual interview, his story had changed quite a bit. Ramirez told police that he got home around 3.30 p.m. from Albertsons, where he worked in the meat department, and that Megan had wanted to be intimate with him, and that he told her no and went upstairs to take a shower. He is claiming that when he told her that she got enraged and started yelling about their relationship and started following him upstairs. He claims that She broke their baby gate and picked up one of the sharp pieces of the baby gate and was banging it against the wall and stabbing it into the wall and being violent with it. He claimed that he ran into the bedroom, grabbed his gun, a 357 magnum, told her to stop twice, and when she kept coming at him, he shot her twice. She was coming at him with the baby gate.

Starting point is 00:11:02 First he said it was a fork. Now he's saying it was a baby gate. Right. Like a broken piece. In the official interview, he said that there was a broken piece of baby gate. It was a wooden baby gate. So it was like a sharp broken off. Like a stick.

Starting point is 00:11:15 And he said that she was coming after him with it and that he told her to stop. And she did not. And then he shot her because he feared for his life. And you said that he ran upstairs? Yes. The whole thing is a little bit confusing because they lived in a two-story apartment. And he claimed that he ran past her into the bedroom and then got his gun and then came out. But he could not explain to the police why he ran upstairs into the bedroom when he could have also just left the apartment.

Starting point is 00:11:44 He also didn't explain why they didn't call the police for help because they had called the police a couple of times before for their domestic disturbances. He also said that he didn't call the police because he couldn't find his phone, but it turned out his phone was in his pocket. When police later asked him if he remembered mentioning the fork attack, he said in the official interview that he didn't remember saying that, and he also claimed at that time that Ruiz had not. no weapon, although he was claiming she had pieces of the broken baby gate. So it's really unclear exactly what happened in the moment. Was he hurt in any way? Did they fight? Did she hit him or? You would expect that if this is what went down, that he would have some injuries on his body, but it turns out that he had no injuries except a small scratch. And he also never claimed that Megan had hit him in any way. He said that he was just afraid for his life. And he wasn't afraid

Starting point is 00:12:33 about the little kids being in the house? He didn't have anything to say about the baby. He didn't have anything to say about that. He was charged with voluntary manslaughter and use of a deadly weapon. And he was also charged with child abuse, neglect, or endangerment because he discharged his weapon

Starting point is 00:12:49 with the one-year-old in the house, obviously. In the preliminary hearing, which took place July 24th, 2012, this is how they got to the open murder charge from the hearing document. And what they said was, the state believes that this is first-degree murder, that it was premeditated, willful, and deliberate because the defendant left his one-year-old child downstairs, ran up the stairs into the danger zone, decided to run past the danger, grabbed a firearm, and nothing else, didn't close the door, didn't call 911, didn't do anything else other than grab a lethal weapon. And then when he's more than an arm's length away, instead of running back down the stairs, he made the willful premeditated.

Starting point is 00:13:32 decision to shoot miseries, not once, but twice as she was sliding down the bedroom door. So they looked at the fact that she had no deadly weapon, and nothing that could have hit him from any kind of distance, nothing that could have broken through a closed door. He had access to his phone. He could have gone right back out the door to call for help, but instead he chose to go past her when she was in this agitated state that he's claiming, right? into their bedroom to get this weapon and didn't just point it, close the door, tell her to go downstairs, not even like threaten her with the gun, just went ahead and shot her twice right there on the stairs on the landing.

Starting point is 00:14:13 And that's where they got the first degree murder charge. Because he had a lot of time to think about what he was doing. Yes. And they had already called the police several times, too. So it wasn't like they were unfamiliar with the process of how to call the police when there was a domestic disturbance. And he said she didn't have a weapon. So he wasn't afraid that there was another gun in the house that he could have got.

Starting point is 00:14:31 she could have gotten. That's right. And there was nothing that you saw in the record in the history, because you said she was never arrested, but also he was never arrested anytime the police came out to the house. But there was nothing about her ever pointing a gun at him in the past or stabbing him or something like that. There's nothing about the gun in the past before that. Like there was never an incident with a gun before this. Okay. Possible they just had the gun for protection because they lived in not the sages area, so that makes sense. The trial took place in September of 2025. And, And Ramirez ended up taking a plea agreement on September 29, 2025.

Starting point is 00:15:06 He pled guilty to one count of voluntary manslaughter, which carried a sentence of between four and ten years. And then he got a deadly weapon enhancement for an additional four to ten years consecutive. So we're at eight to twenty years. And then another count for child endangerment, which was two to six years concurrent with count one. So, the total effective sentence is somewhere between eight and 20 years. And he has 499 days of credit for time served. He was given that sentence on November 13, 2025, just a few weeks after the hearing started with the plea agreement.

Starting point is 00:15:47 For all that happened, he got somewhere between eight and 20 years. He was at CCDC for a while. But as you and I noticed, when we were researching this, we were wondering why he hadn't been transferred to prison yet. But really, it wasn't that long ago. It was only about a month ago that he was sentenced. And it took, I guess, several weeks for the transfer to come through. But just two weeks ago, he was sentenced to High Desert State Prison in November. But there was nothing that was ever alleged about him being actually afraid of her. There was nothing about that. He didn't allege that. But there was nothing that you read that his attorney was saying that they didn't try and make

Starting point is 00:16:25 much of a case for self-defense. It doesn't sound like. No, it didn't look like they were going to be able to do that. So I'm guessing that's why he took the play. We'll continue the discussion about that in the swing shift episode. But at the end of the day, Jimmy Ramirez received a sentence of somewhere between eight and 20 years for killing Megan Ruiz and endangering their one-year-old child. Realistically, with credit for time served and good behavior, he's likely to serve far closer to the lower end of that range. And that's for taking the life of a 32-year-old mother of three, someone with a family, a future, a creative spirit, a community that loved her. And it's a sentence to me that feels incredibly light. And like I said, we'll go into more about that

Starting point is 00:17:07 in the swing shift about some other cases that we were reminded of with this. And I know our listeners, you know this, we talk about this way too often. This isn't unusual. We see it over and over again in these domestic violence homicides. There are warning signs. There's repeated disputes. The arguments are escalating. There's attempts by the victim to try and keep the peace. But until the violence becomes fatal, like you said, it's being treated as this private matter or something that the two people can work out among themselves, despite all the evidence to the contrary. And afterward, after the unthinkable, horrible things happen, the system tries to fit that tragedy into whatever charge they can negotiate. Voluntary manslaughter.

Starting point is 00:17:56 these plea deals. None of it captures the years of danger that someone was living in. Someone like Megan was living in danger. She deserved much more than the justice she received. Her children deserve more. Her family deserved more. And stories like hers are a reminder of how urgently we need better recognition of that intimate partner violence, that domestic violence, better intervention, better protection long before someone loses their life because what happens here? Happens everywhere. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and threads at Sins and Survivors. If you're enjoying the podcast, please leave us a review on your podcast platform of choice.

Starting point is 00:19:05 You can contact us at Questions at Sins and Survivors.com. If you or someone you know is affected by domestic violence or needs support, please reach out to local resources or the National Domestic Violence Hotline. A list of resources is available on our website, Sins and Survivors.com. Sins and Survivors, a Las Vegas true crime podcast, is researched written and produced. by your hosts, Sean and John. The information shared in this podcast is accurate at the time of recording. If you have questions, concerns, or corrections, please email us.

Starting point is 00:19:35 Links to source material for this episode can be found on our website, sins and survivors.com. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast creators, hosts, and their guests. All individuals are innocent until proven guilty. This content does not constitute legal advice. listeners are encouraged to consult with legal professionals for guidance.

Sins & Survivors: A Las Vegas True Crime Podcast - The Murder of Megan Ruiz

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