It was April 16th, 1968, and the Arellano family was taking a two-hundred-mile road trip from their home in Villa de Fuente, Mexico to the town of San Angelo, Texas, where a relative had just had a baby. The traveling clan consisted of twenty-six-year-old Juan Manuel, his twenty-five-year-old wife Maria, the couple’s three children—five-year-old Manuel Jr., two-and-a-half-year-old Leticia, and fifteen-month-old Eduardo—and Juan Manuel’s nineteen-year-old sister Rosa Elia.
The family had been to the United States on multiple occasions, and all spoke fluent English. Juan Manuel, in fact, often worked as a seasonal farmhand in Iowa, and had numerous relatives living within the U.S.
The trip seemed to be going well at first, as the six Arellanos rode along in Juan Manuel’s 1958 Buick, but at some point during the afternoon, the car got a flat tire.
Juan Manuel had a spare, and repaired the tire handily before continuing along the isolated road. But only a few more miles along, another tire blew out. Luckily for the family, or so they thought, another vehicle happened by and offered to give them a lift to the town of Sonora, about thirty miles away.
The individual who stopped to help drove the family to a service station in Sonora as promised, where the blown tire was repaired. But after the Arellanos and the good Samaritan left the service station, a brutal massacre ensued, whose details are still unclear five decades later.
The following morning, a ranch hand discovered the body of Juan Manuel Arellano near a barbed wire fence off Highway 277. He had been shot and beaten to death. His wife Maria, also shot, stabbed, and raped, was found in a ditch about a mile away, and Rosa Elia’s similarly brutalized remains were found nearby in some underbrush.
The children, who had all been shot in the head and stabbed, were discovered in the rocks not far from where their father’s body lay. Though both Leticia and Manuel Jr. were incredibly still alive, Leticia would die two days later from her injuries. Manuel Jr., after undergoing several surgeries, ultimately survived and was able to give a description of the killer to authorities.
The Arellanos’ 1958 Buick was discovered, still with one flat tire, along the side of the road roughly eight miles south of where the bodies were found.
According to Manuel Jr.’s statement, as well as that of the service station attendant who had repaired the flat tire, the man who had taken the family to Sonora was a large, sandy-haired white man in his mid-thirties who wore a straw cowboy hat and drove a pickup truck. Manuel Jr. confirmed that the man who had stopped on the road to help them was the same man who had killed his family.
Investigators had no idea why this individual, who had seemingly gone out of his way to give aid to a family in need, would then savagely murder them in cold blood, and as the years went by, the case simply grew colder and colder. In 1969, rumors circulated in Mexico that the killer had been arrested in Del Rio, Texas, but police were quick to dismiss this story as baseless.
Interest in the crime was rekindled in 1999 when authorities received an anonymous tip concerning the identity of the killer. Though this particular tip did not pan out, investigators announced in 2006 that further examination of the case had produced some promising leads, and that perhaps the baffling homicide would soon be solved.
As of this writing, though, there have been no further developments.
Crime Immemorial 