Today, we have two stories about people who have near-death experiences. And then, after the initial trauma of the experience has passed, they’re like, “Okay, I’m good now. I’m safe. Everything’s fine.” But, no. They were not okay, as they would soon learn.
On the morning of April 29th, 1963, a woman named Sofia Perez was riding in the passenger seat of her car. Her husband, Julian, was driving, and they were traveling down a narrow city street in Sevilla, Spain. It was a Monday, but Julian, who was the primary breadwinner, he didn’t have work that day. And so, the couple had decided, since it was such a beautiful spring day as well, that they would get out and go on a nice drive and just spend some time together.
And for Sofia, I mean, this was like a perfect day. She adored her husband, and she really loved the city of Sevilla, you know, all the people there were so nice and friendly, and it was such a beautiful place that like this was shaping up to be really a tremendous day. And so, Sofia and her husband, they are all smiles as they continue driving down this road.
You know, Sofia, she’s looking out, taking in the sights and the sounds, and then at some point, she just has this inclination to pull out her lipstick and, you know, apply her lipstick. And so, she reaches down and she grabs her purse, which she brought with her everywhere. She was a very organized person, and she opened it up and she’s rifling through it, and she finds her lipstick, and then she grabs the rearview mirror, and she turns it, and she uses it to apply the lipstick. And as she’s doing this, she begins asking Julian like, “Hey, you know, what should we do for the rest of the day? Like, beyond this drive, what else should we do?”
And as she’s sort of half looking at the mirror and half looking at Julian, she sees a blur of motion out in front of the car. And then she turns and she realizes there’s someone in the intersection that they’re going to hit. It’s a guy on a motorcycle, and before she could say anything, Julian is swerving hard to the right to try to avoid this guy. It’s like absolute madness, and then the motorcyclist he tips over and he goes into a slide, and then Julian and Sophia they ram off the road onto the sidewalk and smash into this huge pole.
And pretty much right away, Sophia, after the car had come to a stop in front of this huge, you know, metal pole, Sophia began like patting herself down to sort of assess the damage to make sure she was okay. And then she looked over at her husband, Julian, who was sort of doing the same thing, and they realized that, you know, obviously despite the horribleness of this crash, that they were okay. But then their attention turned to the motorcyclist, because even though Julian didn’t hit him, they narrowly missed him, you know, he swerved away and they crashed into this pole. Despite that, one of the last things Sophia saw before they swerved is the motorcyclist had tipped over and gone into a skid, so they had no idea if he was okay or not.
And so, Sophia and Julian they carefully climbed out of their pretty wrecked vehicle, and again, they stood and kind of checked to make sure they really were okay, cuz now they’re standing for the first time, but, you know, they’re okay. And they walked a little ways, you know, across the street to this other sort of side street where the motorcyclist had skidded off to. And right over there, he was standing, the man who was on the motorcycle, he was standing next to his bike. And you know, obviously his bike had had some damage done to it, but the man, the motorcyclist, he looked unhurt as well. So, this was like an enormous, in some ways, stroke of luck.
Obviously, it was bad to get into the accident, but all three of them appeared to be okay. And so, Sophia and Julian, they walk over to the motorcyclist and, you know, the three of them were really amicable. I mean, the motorcyclist understood that, you know, accidents happen. You know, thank goodness nobody was hurt. And just for a few minutes, the three of them just, you know, just chatted and sort of just talked about how lucky they really were here, and they exchanged information, you know, so they could cover the damages if they needed to of the respective vehicles.
And as they’re just sitting there having this, you know, relatively calm and just normal conversation here, Sophia looks over at Julian, and she realizes, you know, he was basically unhurt, but not entirely unhurt. He had this scratch on his face that was bleeding a fair amount that very likely was from the crash. And even though, by no means is this like life-threatening or anything like that, Sophia was not, at the moment, talking to the motorcyclist, and so she figured she would just go back over to the car and grab her purse, cuz she’s, you know, very organized, and she has something in that purse for every situation. She figured she very likely had like a bandage or something she could use to clean up her husband’s cut.
And so, she told her husband and the motorcyclist she was going to, you know, go get her purse and go grab a bandage or something. She goes over to the car, which is still, you know, smashed up on the side of the road, of course, and there’s a little bit of a crowd of people sort of, you know, relatively nearby, kind of assessing the scene. She makes her way around towards the passenger side, because her purse was still in the car in the passenger seat.
And as she was coming around, getting ready to reach through the open door to grab her purse, which was sitting right there on the seat, something happened. Like, she was close enough to the car where like suddenly she felt this intense pain all through her body and then it was like she couldn’t even move and she found herself falling towards the ground looking up at the sky and like her muscles are beginning to spasm and the last thing she saw was her husband and the motorcyclist running over to her and then to her horror as she’s laying there looking up at them they too began to sort of seize up and spasm and fall to the ground right next to her.
It would turn out that when Julian swerved to avoid that motorcyclist and crashed into that pole neither he nor Sophia realized that that pole was actually connected to a power line that held up electrical lines carrying a huge amount of electrical voltage and during the crash a few of those lines from the pole had been knocked down to the ground and they fell around Sophia and Julian’s car. When the couple first got out of the vehicle they sort of miraculously avoided stepping on those lines. And if they had just stayed over there, you know, with the motorcyclist and just hadn’t gone back to the vehicle they would have been fine. But Sophia whose purse always had exactly what she needed was in the car and she wanted to get it and get that bandage and so when she went back she stepped on one of those lines and she was electrocuted. And so she’s on the ground, she can’t move and her husband and the motorcyclist they see this happening, they hear it happening and they run over unaware of the danger and they too are hit by those electrical lines, they fall to the ground and all three were electrocuted to death.
2018, around 10:00 a.m. 55-year-old Ray Wright saw it through a wooden board inside of his workshop, which was located about 20 minutes outside of Rockland, California. Now, Ray had only just begun his work day, but he was already covered in sawdust. However, he barely noticed because this was just a normal part of his job as a carpenter, something he absolutely loved. He loved his career. In fact, Ray really just sort of loved everything about his life and sort of how it was going these days. And that had not always been the case.
So, about 6 years earlier, Ray was in a very different and much worse place in his life. He’d been recently divorced and had started drinking a lot, and he’d spiraled, you know, further and further out of control until one night he’d gotten really drunk and then hopped behind the wheel, and he caused a terrible accident when he crashed head-on into another vehicle. Now, Ray was more or less okay after that crash, but he’d actually severely injured the people in the car that he had hit. And so, Ray had been arrested and sentenced to 18 months in prison, and he was ordered to pay a huge monetary settlement to the victims of this crash. And so, really, this had been like the true rock-bottom moment of Ray’s life.
But, by the time Ray actually got out of jail, he was determined to really turn his life around and become a better person. He’d stopped drinking and he had joined Alcoholics Anonymous, which is a very well-known support group that helps keep people sober. He’d started spending way more time with his three kids and also his brother Dean, and he’d been renting this particular workshop that he was in right now to revamp his carpentry business, Ray Wright Design. And then also, like in addition to these specific behavioral changes, overall, Ray had made this huge effort to really shift his thinking about like the way he approached life. He decided he was going to really try hard to just have a much more positive attitude in general and just try to be happier. Like he believed it was more of a mindset and he really was trying hard to stay in that positive happy mindset.
However, despite these wholesale changes in Ray’s behavior and his mindset which were definitely all good, the one thing he was up against that was very difficult to change, you know, since coming out of prison was his financial situation. I mean, he really just didn’t make a whole lot of money, you know, despite working really hard as a carpenter now. He just didn’t make a lot of money. And this really didn’t just affect his life. It affected other people’s lives as well because, you know, he needed to make those huge settlement payments to the victims of the crash which he intended to do. But so far, you know, he had not made enough money to make those payments and it was definitely stressing him out.
You know, he knew he needed to make those payments, but Ray was sort of determined that he would just continue to work really hard, continue to build up his business, continue to stay positive, stay happy, you know, be a good person, and eventually he was sure to make these payments and everything would be okay. So, in essence, Ray still had problems, but he was working really hard to just stay on the straight and narrow and do the right thing.
Now, Ray blew some of the sawdust off the board that he had just cut and he set it aside. And then, as he was about to start on the next thing, he realized one of the tools that he needed was out in his truck. So, he walked through the shop’s big warehouse-style doors that opened out onto a dirt driveway. So, the workshop where Ray worked was in a fairly rural area with only one immediate neighbor who lived in a trailer right next door on the same property. And the person who owned the trailer was a woman named Katie. But, you know, despite there only being Katie next door, there were still a fair amount of people just sort of coming and going around the place, like Katie’s friends and Ray’s clients. So, the area was actually usually pretty lively. But this morning, as he stepped onto the driveway, it was pretty quiet. So, Ray just made his way out to his truck and grabbed what he needed from inside, and then he turned and began walking back towards the shop. However, before he actually got to the shop, he heard footsteps on the driveway right behind him.
Two days later, Ray’s brother Dean drove his car through some back roads as he made his way towards Ray’s house in Rocklin, California. Dean had just been to Ray’s workshop, and now he was making the 20-minute drive back to Ray’s home yet again. And the reason he was doing that is because Dean was really worried. He hadn’t heard from his brother in 2 days, and neither had Ray’s kids or any of Ray’s friends. And this was like very unusual. Dean, you know, himself talked to Ray every single day. And he also knew that Ray was a very involved and responsive dad who would definitely not just disappear on his kids, and he was also definitely in touch with other friends. I mean, this was just very unusual for Ray.
So, over the past 48 hours, Dean had been increasingly getting more and more worried about Ray. He’d been talking to anyone he could to try to figure out like why his brother was just suddenly gone. He’d already gone to Ray’s workshop and his house repeatedly, and he hadn’t found Ray or any sign of Ray or any sign of where he might have gone. And also, Ray’s truck was nowhere to be found, either. And that was actually particularly concerning because, you know, deep down, Dean was worried that, you know, despite the changes Ray had made in his life to be a better person and to do right by people, he was worried that, you know, maybe Ray had fallen off the wagon and was drinking again.
Like, maybe that’s why he’s gone. He’s on a bender somewhere. Now, Dean really didn’t want to face that reality. That would be like devastating for so many reasons, not to mention, you know, if Ray was off drinking somewhere, who knows what trouble he could be in. Like, he could be in a lot of trouble or hurt or something. And so, Dean, by this point, 48 hours into his brother’s disappearance, he’s just doing his best to kind of push down this growing concern that maybe that’s what happened. And in fact, it was actually that sort of nagging fear that Dean had that had kept him from going to the police and reporting Ray missing. There was just this fear that if he did that, it would sort of expose Ray if he was, you know, not doing what he was supposed to be doing.
And so, by this point, you know, Dean had held off. Now, Dean parked his car outside of Ray’s house again and he got out and, you know, Ray’s truck was not back yet. But, Dean was determined that he would just go back inside and take another look around to see if maybe he had missed something. You know, maybe there was some clue as to where, you know, Ray went or what he was up to. So, Dean walked up to his brother’s front door and he let himself inside and immediately Dean stopped because he smelled something. It smelled like marijuana smoke inside the house, which was really, really odd. I mean, one, because the last time he was here, he definitely did not smell marijuana smoke. But, more than that, Ray, his brother, had definitely once been a very heavy drinker. That was true. But, he had always hated marijuana. Like, he did not smoke marijuana.
And so, Dean’s standing in the doorway trying to make sense of this, when from the other side of the room, he hears somebody shouting at him to leave. And he sees on the other side of the room this man has suddenly popped up who Dean did not know, who was looking right at him, basically gesturing for Dean to get out of the house.
But, Dean, he’s sort of like, “What’s going on here?” He looks at this guy and he’s like, “Who are you? Like, what are you doing in here?”
And the guy went very quickly from being sort of demanding to Dean to very spooked, turning and sprinting out the door, out of sight. Within the hour, a police officer with the Rockland Police Department pulled his cruiser up outside of a small one-story home in Rockland and parked. He saw a man waiting outside the garage, and as the officer got out of his car, the man rushed up and introduced himself as Dean, the person who had called 911. Dean explained to the officer that he had just seen an intruder here inside of his brother’s home and that his brother was also missing.
And so, the officer took down some notes both about the intruder and also about, you know, Dean’s brother’s absence and why him being gone for 2 days was really out of character. And so, after the officer finished speaking to Dean, he went inside of Ray’s house to take a look around and see if you know, there was any evidence left behind by the intruder to indicate who they were or if there was any evidence about, you know, where Ray was and maybe that this intruder had something to do with Ray’s absence. But, once inside the home, the officer saw there was no sign of forced entry or any kind of mess or violence. So, it didn’t immediately seem like the intruder had robbed the place or gotten into some kind of physical fight with its owner. But still, the officer left the property and went back to his cruiser and called it in.
And so, over the next few days, the Rockland Police Department sort of led two parallel investigations. There was the investigation into this intruder inside of Ray’s home, which really wasn’t going very far. They had very little evidence. There was barely a description of the sky from Dean, who did not get a good look at him. And the other investigation was into Ray’s disappearance. And there was definitely some thinking that the intruder and Ray’s disappearance could be connected, but as of right now, they didn’t know. But, with regards to Ray’s disappearance, after the police had spoken to Ray’s family and friends, they determined that no one had seen or spoken to him since January 11th. That was like the first sort of hard date and hard fact that they had. They also checked into Ray’s bank account and phone activity, and they learned he hadn’t used them since January 11th, when apparently he went missing. But, beyond those details, like as the weeks went on, really nothing else came in. Not about the intruder or about Ray.
Then, on January 21st, so 10 days after Ray went missing, the Rockland Police Department got their first, you know, big new lead. And that was Ray’s truck had been found. He was not in it. It had been found totally abandoned in this apartment complex that was not far from his workshop. A couple of months later, on an afternoon in late March, Rockland Police Sergeant Zach Lewis sat at his desk at the station going over Ray’s case file for what he felt like was the millionth time. So, since finding Ray’s truck, basically no new leads had come in. And even that, the finding of Ray’s truck, really had not been the break that the police had really hoped it would be. The truck was basically in decent working condition. The only thing that really stood out was the plates had been taken off of it. But, after they searched the truck extensively, they basically didn’t find anything. Nothing that gave away what happened to Ray or where he was or, you know, whether or not this intruder had something to do with Ray. Like, it just really didn’t go anywhere. So, Sergeant Lewis was feeling pretty stuck when it came to this case. And so, right now, he was just looking through the information they already had on this case to see if maybe he had missed something.
However, as he began doing this, another officer ran through the station towards his desk waving around some sheets of paper. And this officer ran right up to Lewis, and he slammed the papers down on his desk and explained that the California Highway Patrol had just sent a report over because they thought it might contain a lead in Ray’s case. And here was the lead. And so, Lewis is really excited. He grabs the document and he sees it’s a report. And it’s about this van that had gotten in an accident at the end of January, a few miles south of Rockland in Sacramento. The driver of this van had been extremely drunk and was going over 100 miles an hour when he crashed. And somewhat miraculously, nobody got hurt, including the driver. And so, the driver, he survives and now he’s facing like all these charges of drunk driving and reckless driving. But, the reason this report was sent over to Rockland was because the driver was a man named Victor Gray. That’s what his license said.
So, after the crash, the police discovered that the license plate on the van that Victor had been driving was definitely the right license plate. However, the registration stickers that were on the license plates were not the right ones. Basically, you know, Victor or somebody had taken stickers from some other vehicle and put them on this van’s plates to give the impression that their vehicle, this van, was registered. But, when they tracked those registration stickers, they discovered those stickers actually belonged to Ray Wright’s abandoned truck. Now, Rockland’s police department knew this was a huge lead and they could not screw it up. And so, they wanted to make sure that they handled, you know, whatever they did next exactly right and they leveraged whatever resources they could get.
So, over the next few weeks, Lewis and his team reached out to the FBI to help them process Victor’s van and collect any potential evidence that was associated with Ray’s disappearance. And a little over a month later, on May 8th, 2018, Lewis stood with a few of his other officers in a parking lot not far from Rockland, watching as a team of FBI agents searched Victor’s van. Now, by this point, they had discovered that this van not only had Ray’s registration stickers on it, but also, inside of the van was a lot of Ray’s stuff. They had found Ray’s glasses, which were smashed. They had found Ray’s cell phone, which was also smashed. They found his wallet. They found a hat that said Ray Wright Design on it. And, critically, they found Ray’s rain jacket, and it was covered in blood and partially charred, like it had been burned.
And so, at this point, it seemed fairly obvious to investigators that Ray was not just missing. You know, he didn’t just, you know, go off the wagon and start drinking again and go disappear somewhere. No. He very likely had been killed. And very likely, this guy, Victor Gray, had something to do with it. But, the problem was there was no obvious connection between Victor Gray and Ray Wright. Like, they were total strangers. And when they tried to speak to Victor, to interrogate him, to try to get him to open up and explain if he had something to do with this, if he knew who Ray was, Victor was not talking. So, that was a total dead end. And so, now investigators were just hoping that, you know, whatever evidence they found in this van, that once it was, you know, sent off and analyzed, that hopefully that would sort of maybe begin to explain what actually happened here. You know, was this just a random robbery gone wrong? You know, Victor was just robbing Ray and it got violent? Or was it something else? Or who knows what? They just didn’t know.
Now, Lewis watched as the FBI agents wrapped up the search of the van and you know, they began packing things up. So, it was clear they had sort of pulled all the evidence they were going to pull. And, you know, Sergeant Lewis and his team, they were about to leave when suddenly one of the FBI agents who was searching the front of the van, in the front two seats, he began waving his arm like he had found something. And so, Lewis and the others, they go running over and they look inside the van, and this agent is pointing down to like the center of the front of this van, basically near the center console. And there was this little space underneath the center console that apparently nobody had looked in yet. And inside of this little space was another cell phone.
Five months later, on an afternoon in October, Lewis pulled his cruiser into the dirt driveway right outside of Ray’s workshop. But when Lewis and the other detective that he was with got out of their car, they ran past Ray’s workshop and went to the trailer next door, where Lewis knew a woman named Katie Barnard and so Lewis stood back as the other detective knocked on the door of the trailer, and a few seconds later, a very timid-looking woman, Katie, came to the door and she asked what was going on. And when Lewis explained to her why they were there, Katie went from looking timid to looking downright terrified, and she just began to shake like she clearly understood why they were here. So, they took her down to the station and pretty much as soon as she was sitting inside of an interrogation room and they began asking her questions, Katie just completely broke and told them everything she knew.
So, ever since Ray got out of prison for that drunk driving accident, he really had been single-mindedly focused on trying to be a better person and not letting his rock-bottom moment sort of ruin his life. And he’d done a great job doing that. He’d gotten sober, he’d begun, you know, spending much more time with his family. He was like a very present father now. He was very well-liked in the community. However, even though Ray, you know, had good intentions here, the reality was is he was just sort of focusing on rebuilding his own life. He wasn’t really trying to help other people. Like his post-jail efforts were sort of all about him. And his self-improvement journey had really not been beneficial for everyone because Ray had really not truly atoned or done right by the person he had hurt the most. One of the victims of his drunk driving accident, a man named Bob Manor.
Bob had been absolutely furious with Ray after the accident because the accident had severely injured him, Bob, to the point where Bob had a permanent limp. And then Ray had stopped making those court-mandated settlement payments to Bob. He was supposed to, but he just wasn’t making them. And so Bob is like incensed. It’s like, how dare you? You hurt me. You hurt my family, and you’re not even paying for it. Like jail isn’t enough. And so for Bob, it became like an obsession that he really wanted to get his revenge on Ray. And it just so happened that Bob was not just a guy with a grudge. Bob was a very violent drug dealer, as well. So, this was a really big deal for him. So, basically, after Ray got out of prison, Bob began obsessing over where Ray was. Like he wanted to literally discover his address so he could physically go and take his revenge, but he couldn’t find Ray. He could not find the information. No one was going to give it to him, you know, for this reason exactly. And so he was just furious all the time. He wants to find Ray, but he has no way of knowing where he lives.
Then, just by pure happenstance, Bob ends up dating a woman named Katie Barnard, who just so happens to live in the trailer right next door to the shop in Rockland, California, where Ray worked. And, you know, Bob had no idea. He’s just over visiting with Katie all the time. And one day he looks out the window, and who does he see walking out of the doors of that shop? Ray Wright. After that, and you have to understand that some of this stuff actually was never fully explained, Bob hired a man named Victor Gray to kidnap Ray for him because he wasn’t going to do it himself. He needed to catch Ray off guard. And so, Victor Gray kidnaps Ray, and he apparently brings Ray to Bob so that Bob can exact his revenge on Ray.
Now, we don’t know exactly what happened once Bob potentially received Ray. We don’t know if Ray ever actually made it to Bob, but we do know at some point Victor did kidnap Ray, and there was definitely revenge, you know, on the agenda. But, what Bob ultimately failed to do that got him caught and got Victor caught and got this whole thing blown up was he didn’t pay Victor for the kidnapping. So, the very thing that Bob was so mad about really was like, “How dare Ray do this to me and then not pay me?” Well, Bob did the same thing to Victor. He didn’t pay him. And Victor was also a violent person. He’s a convicted felon, and he didn’t take that lightly. And so, what did he do? He wrote a letter to Bob basically being like, “Hey, I kidnapped this guy for you, and I handed him to you. Like, I handed him over, and you haven’t paid me yet.”
And then he took pictures of this letter, and those pictures were on that phone that was found underneath the center console of Victor Gray’s van. Those pictures of this letter are what connected Victor to Bob, and then the connection from Bob to Ray was already known. And then also critically, because Victor hadn’t been paid by Bob for this kidnapping, he took the liberty of not only kidnapping Ray, but he went back and stole the registration stickers off of Ray’s truck, and he put them on his own van. And then ultimately, it was that that led to Victor getting caught and this whole, you know, con being exposed.
Now, we actually don’t know specifically what happened to Ray Wright. All we know is that he definitely was kidnapped and that Bob ordered the kidnapping and that realistically, you know, Bob is a pretty violent guy, Victor’s a violent guy, there’s blood found all over, you know, Ray’s stuff. It seemed pretty apparent that the revenge that was exacted on Ray involved his murder. But Ray’s body was never found. And so we don’t really know what happened to him. However, using overwhelming circumstantial evidence, both Bob Manor and Victor Gray were both convicted of first-degree murder and kidnapping and they were sentenced to life in prison without parole.
