The FBI is the most sophisticated law enforcement agency in the world, pursuing the most dangerous criminals.
When vulnerable women are brutalized in their own homes, there are degrees of sadism, there’s degrees of cruelty. I mean, this person had crossed that line. The bureau mobilizes.
All of their behavior points to obviously violent criminals who had no regard for the law, no regard for women.
We had a predator, we had a vicious animal out there who was going to raise again if we didn’t catch him.
It’s 3:00 a.m. in Nashville, Tennessee, when Kelly Quinn arrives home from a nice date. Her roommate is out of town and her 10-year-old son is sleeping at a friend’s house. Kelly is looking forward to some rare alone time.
The 32-year-old single mom has lived in Nashville for three years, pursuing her dream of becoming a star.
“Music was my thing. I grew up in Big Rapids, Michigan, small town. My folks had a music store there and really, music surrounded my whole life.”
Kelly works as a paralegal while she waits for her big break. She and her son share their apartment with a coworker.
“It was a three-bedroom ground floor apartment, and the woods in the back were just beautiful, just gorgeous and quiet. I always thought it would be safe, you know. I felt peaceful, but it wasn’t.”
As Kelly unlocks her front door, she is surprised to find both the deadbolt and doorknob locks engaged.
“I usually only locked the doorknob when I left. I never lock both locks.”
She steps inside, calling out for her roommate, Melissa.
“I noticed that all the lights were on in the house, every single one of them, and I thought, ‘That is really weird,’ but then I quickly dismissed it, thinking that maintenance had came. I didn’t sense anything.”
“Hey Kelly, it’s Mom, just calling to see how you’re doing. Give me a call when you get a chance.”
“I’ve listened to all my answering machine messages and made an omelette.”
After 20 minutes, she’s ready for bed.
“I noticed that my door was almost all the way closed, but it was cracked open just a little bit, enough for me to see that the light was on, and I could see the light under the door. And put my hand up, and then I felt this god-awful sense of fear just go right through me. I knew in an instant that somebody was in there.”
Two men jump out. One of them has a knife.
“They grabbed me and said, ‘Don’t scream,’ and put the knife up to my throat, and I thought I was going to die right then.”
“What do you want? What do you want? What do you want?”
“Do you want money? I have money.”
“Never mind. We just, we just want to, we just want to kill you.”
Kelly makes a sudden break for the door, but the shorter man chases her down.
“We wrestled to the floor, and they started to cut my clothes off of me, holding the knife up to me and saying, ‘Don’t see, don’t see.'”
“They kept wanting me to just keep my eyes closed. If you move, I’ll cut you,” and broken English, you know, and speaking a lot of Spanish between the two of them, just laughing like they’re having a good time.
Afraid for her life, Kelly stops fighting.
“So for the next hour, hour and a half, maybe longer, maybe it was 2 hours, they raped me, sodomized me, just taunted me.”
As the men take turns, Kelly steals glances at them. Both appear to be Hispanic. The taller one, who seems to be the leader, has a goatee.
“It was like they hadn’t bathed in days, and they were like clammy, and could smell the alcohol, like old alcohol, like they’d been drinking a lot.”
Despite her repulsion, Kelly tries to win over the leader by appearing to cooperate.
“I thought that if I could stay a step ahead of them psychologically, I would buy some time. I wanted him to maybe like me and not hurt me, so he wouldn’t kill me.”
Her efforts only partially work.
“He would tell me that I was beautiful a lot, beautiful hair, beautiful eyes. It was almost as though one minute he hated me and was threatening me with the knife, and then like the next second later, ‘That was beautiful.'”
Then, the leader reveals something chilling.
“I watched you last weekend.”
Kelly suddenly remembers seeing a man spying on her a few days earlier in her backyard.
“My son and I were standing outside on the patio, watching the rain about to come in, and I could see out of my peripheral vision that there was someone standing there. And my son even asked me, ‘Who is that? What’s he doing here?'”
Kelly quickly hustled her son inside.
“I saw a man running away from me. I came back into the apartment, locked the doors up.”
Kelly considered calling the police, but shrugged off the incident. Now, she is face to face with the same man.
“There were two or three times that I tried to get away and I couldn’t. The shorter guy was really, really strong and ended up fracturing my left arm through this ordeal, left a lot of bruises.”
Putting a knife to her throat, the taller man begins assaulting her again.
“The whole time he was raping me, he always kept the blade like right here, and you don’t have a choice. I just prayed the whole time. I prayed and hoped that it would end and that I would live.”
Then, the shorter man does something strange.
“I had a silver ring I used to wear, and he put it on my left ring finger and put the taller one’s hand on top of my hand and said, ‘He likes you. You marry him.'”
It was so psychologically off. Kelly’s reprieve is short-lived. The taller man says he has friends outside who want to see her. He forces Kelly to stand naked at her patio door.
“They were laughing and I felt like they were showing me to someone. It was just kind of the way the laughter was carrying on and the comments about the fact that I was going to have to have sex with their friends.”
By now, it’s been more than 2 hours since the attack began. Kelly has no idea whether the men will spare her life or kill her. The leader tells his accomplice to clean up the apartment, then he forces Kelly back toward the bathroom.
“Bathe for something.”
He puts her in the shower and scrubs her body under hot water.
“I just got really angry, and then I said, ‘I will pray for you.'”
You would have thought that those words stung him.
“I saw like this flash of remorse in his face, like he was very sorry for just a second.”
Suddenly, an alarm goes off.
“My smoke alarm started blaring and I knew that it had to have been divine intervention. I felt like my father, who had passed away all those years ago, was watching over me.”
The rapists flee into the dark night and Kelly calls 911.
Kelly doesn’t know it, but the lead attacker is one of the most wanted men in Nashville. He’s been terrorizing a string of vulnerable women and his level of violence is escalating with each attack. Before Kelly’s nightmare is over, the FBI will have to utilize their most powerful resources to bring this rapist to justice, and they’ll only be able to do it with her help.
“He’s out there on the street. He can do it again. We need to go after them and find them, and we need to do it quickly before any other victims are assaulted.”
Kelly Quinn waits for police after being brutalized for more than an hour by two rapists.
“They were calculated, they were cold. Two males attacking a single woman simultaneously, very, very heinous, very vicious, and multiple repeated attacks by these subjects on the same victim. It was very much psychological as well as a physical.”
Detectives and crime scene investigators from the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department arrive quickly. They begin to process the crime scene and determine that the attackers had entered the apartment by slicing open Kelly’s bedroom window screen and forcing the window up.
Detective Rita Baker, a 10-year veteran of the sex crime investigation unit, gently begins interviewing Kelly.
“I, my keys are first down, and then I, we are asking our victims to relive the event because every time there’s a penetration it’s another count of rape, and so every penetration becomes important for us to be able to later prosecute every count of rape. During the interview, she literally walked us through step by step where she was during what parts of the crime, things that the perpetrators touched so that we know what to process, what to look for, fingerprints, what to look for body fluids.”
Kelly is able to give a description of her two attackers. As she bravely recounts her ordeal, she remembers some important details, such as how the shorter rapist took a drink from her refrigerator.
“At one point, he walked out with a grape juice bottle and held it right up to my face and said, ‘Can I have some of this?’ And it was another instance where I thought, ‘Why are you asking my permission to have some grape juice when you just broke into my apartment and sodomized me and raped me, and you’re asking me for the grape juice? How does that work?’ They were both just very twisted.”
Now, investigators can get his fingerprints from the bottle. Kelly also remembers some personal information the taller one revealed about himself.
“I asked the taller one if he was married. He said that he was, and that he had a daughter named Kelly.”
Then, she remembers one graphic detail about the shorter assailant.
“I didn’t remember any tattoos or anything. I was trying to think of something, and then it dawned on me that the shorter one had a misshapen penis.”
Detective Baker reacts strongly to Kelly’s revelation. She’s already heard this description of an attacker from another female victim.
“You’re lucky that you’re alive, because these men have been progressively getting more and more aggressive in their attacks, and these men have been in southern Nashville raping women since 1997.”
Detective Baker suspects that this is the fourth home invasion committed by these two rapists, and a clear pattern is emerging. The rapists are becoming more violent and ruthless with each assault.
“The brazenness of the attacks and the fact that these individuals took no steps to hide their identity, they felt like they were invincible and that these women they could control and victimize at will. They reveled in it. It went on for hours. It was a form of torture; it was beyond rape.”
Kelly is taken to the hospital where she submits to a rape kit. Though her rapists forced her to shower after the attack, Kelly was composed enough to preserve DNA evidence on her face.
“Earlier, when they were still raping me, the shorter one was ejaculating next to me, like on my face and neck, and I remembered that that was there. Maybe it was because I’ve been in the legal field for so long, I know that eventually I’m going to need this.”
Sure enough, the DNA links Kelly’s attack to the serial rapists, but there is no match in the database with any known criminal. Police release details of the case to the media. The terrified public floods investigators with hundreds of tips. Police diligently follow up on every lead but get nowhere.
“We had a lot of suspects that we had DNA tested for comparison, and none of them came out to be our suspect.”
Desperate, police asked Kelly to go looking for her attackers with a female detective by her side.
“It was a little unnerving for me. I mean, I felt like I was undercover with her, which I was, because we knew these were both male Hispanic. Spanish was clearly their first language. We knew that there were several areas in a part of town where we may have more Spanish speaking people than others.”
“So Kelly rode with one of the other detectives looking in construction sites or shopping areas. It was needle in a haystack, but we had to try everything we could to find this person.”
Kelly can’t identify anyone for certain, and the effort is a dead end. In 1998, a series of four home invasions and rapes has terrified the women of Nashville, Tennessee.
“The likelihood of this happening again and again if we didn’t catch this perpetrator was pretty high. It was just a matter of when.”
With no solid leads, detectives review all of the cases, hoping to find clues. In the first home invasion, the lead rapist acted alone. That same rapist, whom victims describe as tall with dark curly hair, was involved in the next three attacks, but victim accounts suggest he had a different partner in the second attack than in the third and fourth.
“The idea that he needs to have multiple people participating in this kind of behavior suggests that his power and control needs are off the charts.”
The assaults are among the most horrific Nashville police have ever investigated.
“In the first instance, the woman was home alone. She was in a ground floor apartment and she was in bed asleep when our suspect came in and attacked her.”
As the man attempted to rape her, the quick-thinking victim came up with a defense. She pointed to some medicine that she happened to have and was able to successfully convince him that she had some type of sexually transmitted disease. The rapist masturbated by the victim before leaving the scene.
The next assault took place three nights later in a neighboring apartment building. This time, the attacker wasn’t alone. The victim once again was single. She had a ground floor apartment that had proximity to the woods. She also was asleep in her bed when she was awakened to find a male Hispanic standing next to her bed. Before she could scream, the taller man covered her face with a pillow. He told her he had a gun. A second man joined the assault. As with Kelly Quinn, the taller man revealed that they had been spying on her for days.
“The main suspect, he told her that he had been watching her have sex with her boyfriend, and it was very clear that he knew who would be in the apartment.”
The rapist spied on his third victim as well. 20-year-old Trinity Melik, the single mother of a six-month-old baby, had only lived in Nashville for a few months when she saw a peeping tom at her window.
“I called the police, and they came and looked around the grounds and didn’t see anything.”
Two weeks later, on March 29th, 1998, Trinity put her baby boy to bed, then went to sleep. At 1:00 a.m., she awakened to a man standing over her bed. The man held the sharp blade of a putty knife, the kind used by construction workers, to her throat.
“I could tell right away by the accent that he was Hispanic, and I asked him like, ‘What are you doing here?’ He said he had a gun and he would use it if I screamed or did anything.”
The man raped her. During the assault, she realized a second man was roaming in the shadows of the dark room.
“The man assaulting me was the leader. He was calling shots. I was afraid for my life, and then my son cried, and it was reality that I wasn’t by myself, that my baby was in the room, and I couldn’t just think of myself and try to fight back.”
Trinity begged the men to bring her crying infant to her.
“He did say, ‘You have a beautiful baby,’ and I think, if I remember correctly, I said, ‘Don’t you, you have no right to even talk about my baby or look at my baby.’ I got hysterical when I said, ‘Give me my son,’ and they gave him to me, and I actually was nursing him as the man continued to attack me.”
Finally, the men placed a pillowcase over Trinity’s head. She was certain they were about to execute her. Instead, they told her not to call the police, then they left. Two months later, Kelly Quinn was brutalized.
Investigators notice several patterns in the cases, including the location of the victims.
“All these women lived on ground floor apartments. These ground floor apartments also had their back doors opening up into wooded areas, and so we believe that he was able from that vantage point to watch them and also have an escape route.”
And there’s something else. The rapists are getting bolder and more aggressive with every assault.
“Our suspects were clearly escalating these crimes. The very first one there isn’t even a rape, and by the end one, they’re spending hours there and they’re toying with her at her expense. The question is, how long will it take before they move to the ultimate level of domination? The thought was that they would kill or maim someone next.”
“Absolutely, I think it was expected outcome.”
In May 1998, Nashville, Tennessee investigators are on the hunt for a team of serial rapists who have attacked four women in their own homes. So far, the rapists have left their victims alive, but they’re becoming more aggressive, and police know they’re running out of time.
“There was a feeling of dread for everybody in the sex crimes unit. We all went to bed wondering if this was the night we’re going to get called for the next one. Every time there would be another one, we would feel the pressure to be able to solve it before somebody else gets hurt.”
Based on their physical descriptions and use of a putty knife as a weapon, police have a profile of the rapists.
“We knew the subjects were either construction workers or posing as construction workers, and so their ability to blend in the community, not just in Nashville but outside of Nashville, in any community, and then go on the attack was a big concern.”
Detectives have one other lead: the fingerprints taken from Kelly Quinn’s window sill and a juice bottle at her apartment. They run the prints through AFIS, the FBI’s national fingerprint database, and finally get a match. The prints belonged to an ex-con named Luis Castanon. Castanon has a criminal history and is a dead ringer for the description of the shorter suspect.
“We knew we had definitely one of the guys. The other guy was the uncertain factor, and if we didn’t have the right person, we still had a predator out there who was going to rape again if we didn’t catch him.”
Detectives begin following Castanon at his home and favorite haunts. They hope Castanon will lead them right to his partner.
“We didn’t want to catch him and not catch the primary, more dominant aggressor. Luis would have been the shorter person. We wanted to be sure and catch the taller one. We watched Luis for days. We kept 24 surveillance. We put a tracking device on his car.”
“I need a marked unit. I think I have a sighting on Castanon.”
Finally, they hit pay dirt. Castanon gets into a vehicle driven by another Hispanic male. He is a strong match for the description of the taller rapist. The two men are obviously drunk, weaving on the road. Police quickly pull them over.
“Out of the car, let’s go. Back up, back up, turn around, turn around.”
The driver is identified as Ruben Martinez. He’s taken in for questioning but denies any knowledge of the rapes.
“Luis Martinez was quite adamant that he was not a rapist, so he voluntarily submitted to a DNA sample.”
The lab expedites the DNA testing. The results come back and shock investigators. Luis Martinez is not the rapist, but his DNA is a direct link to the man they want.
“The lab was able to show that it is a close relative of Luis Martinez.”
Martinez and Castanon both refuse to assist law enforcement any further. Luis Castanon is formally charged in two of the rapes. The main rapist, he’s still on the loose.
“They had captured Luis Castanon, but the other guy, he was the ringleader. I mean, he was the one that was making it all happen. He was dangerous.”
But the lead rapist’s identity isn’t unknown to everyone. Shortly after Castanon’s arrest, a woman in Texas sees the sketch of the fugitive suspect. She’s shocked to see who it is—her husband, Ruben Martinez.
“I get a phone call from Reuben Martinez’s wife. She was able to tell me things that were not in the media. I think this incident in the television and the news that I saw, I think it’s my husband.”
She was able to tell me that they had three children, which is something that Reuben had told Kelly.
“She doesn’t look anything like you.”
That’s not all she reveals: one of their daughters is named Kelly, and Reuben is a frequent drinking buddy of Luis Castanon. Just after Castanon’s arrest, Reuben immediately moved his wife and children to Texas. His wife did not know why they were leaving. As soon as he deposited her in Texas, he hightailed it to Mexico.
Reuben’s wife tells detectives that he is a legal resident but not a US citizen. He has a drinking problem and works odd jobs as a house painter and landscaper, and that allowed Metro Police to execute search warrants and actually retrieve Kelly Quinn’s stereo from Ruben Martinez’s home.
“That was verified because Kelly Quinn’s fingerprint was on her CD and her CD player in Ruben Martinez’s home.”
Ruben Martinez is clearly the man detectives have been looking for, but he’s crossed the border and is hiding in Mexico. Nashville detectives have no authority to get to him, but they do know who has that kind of reach: The FBI.
“FBI becomes involved in these cases whenever a particular violent fugitive flees. In this case, left Nashville to avoid prosecution for the charges.”
Special Agent Keith Briars wastes no time going after Martinez. The FBI obtained what’s known as an unlawful flight to avoid prosecution warrant.
“This is a federal warrant that allows the FBI to actually go across the country and globally around the world and other countries if necessary to pursue violent fugitives.”
Agents are well aware that some of Martinez’s attacks were weeks apart, some only days. There’s no telling how long before he’s overwhelmed with the urge to rape again.
“The case was going cold. We had run down numerous leads to Texas, Mexico, the border area, but we were very concerned that Martinez was still out there on the loose. He might be out there victimizing other women, so there was a sense of urgency to this.”
October 1998, with one of her attackers in jail and the other hiding out in Mexico, Kelly Quinn moves to Las Vegas to be near her family. She stays in constant contact with Nashville police and returns almost two years later to testify at Luis Castanon’s trial.
“It was a very tough day to see him again, to face him. Anger was building up in me. I was feeling a lot more dysfunctional and sometimes paralyzed and unable to lead the life that I planned to lead.”
“I mean, she told it all blow by blow. She was a strong victim, she was a clear victim, she was a loud victim. She never wanted her identity hid, and she just came out and said, ‘This is what happened to me, and I want justice.'”
Castanon takes the stand and puts the blame on Ruben Martinez.
“Whenever you have two people and only one is on trial, their best defense is to make the other person the boogie monster. In this case, that wasn’t hard to do with Ruben Martinez.”
Castanon claims he never touched Kelly and only watched the rapes. He had no explanation whatsoever for how his semen was all over Miss Quinn’s neck.
“It was nonsensical. The jury, it took him an hour and a half to convict him of all counts.”
Luis Castanon is found guilty of burglary, kidnapping, and aggravated sexual assault. He is sentenced to 60 years in prison. Investigators are pleased but keenly aware that Ruben Martinez has now evaded justice for years and is no closer to being found.
“We were concerned that we might never locate him. We really needed something to sort of give us that extra edge to locate Martinez.”
In the spring of 2002, four years after Kelly Quinn was attacked, a spot opens up on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list.
“We reserved the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list for really the worst of the worst. We hope that that would get more attention to this case and the fact that we had a dangerous fugitive on the loose.”
His mug shot was right next to Osama bin Laden’s.
“My first thought was, ‘Oh my God, Osama bin Laden is the most wanted man in the world.’ And the man’s picture that’s next to him had his hands all over me. He was in my apartment. He invaded every part of me. It was scary.”
The announcement includes a $50,000 reward. The day after it is posted, someone in Martinez’s hometown of Rio Bravo, Mexico, recognizes his photo on the news. Within hours, Martinez is apprehended.
“We had heard rumors that the Mexican police had gone into his house with baseball bats and their faces covered with black masks and by force took him out.”
“There was certainly a lot of justice in that, we all thought.”
“I was thrilled, really, to get him into custody in such a short amount of time after he’d been a fugitive for so many years was a good feeling.”
Finally, Kelly Quinn gets the news she’s been waiting to hear.
“I cried. I was jumping up and down. I was joyful. I just couldn’t believe it because it had been so many years and he wasn’t hurting anybody anymore.”
Martinez is in custody in Mexico, but he is still a long way from any courtroom in Tennessee.
“At the time in Nashville, we had never extradited anybody from another country. It hadn’t happened yet. The FBI, through their expertise and knowledge in other states, they were able to help guide us. It was a big deal.”
Finally, in July 2006, an agreement is reached.
“Once we knew we could bring Martinez back, we flew an FBI plane down to Mexico to actually retrieve him and bring him back, and I saw him in chains and shackles being led off of the FBI airplane.”
“When Reuben was walking across the pavement, there was a certain amount of satisfaction for me. It was a long time waiting.”
When Martinez is delivered to the Nashville police, Detective Rita Baker personally takes the DNA swab of his cheek.
“I was going to make sure that I completed this case because this case was something that was near and dear to my heart and I cared about every one of these victims.”
Martinez’s DNA is a match for the evidence gathered in all four cases. Martinez pleads guilty to five counts of aggravated rape. At the sentencing phase, Kelly Quinn, Trinity Malik, and the other two women Martinez raped all testify against him. So does his wife.
“The police were after her husband for raping all of these women, and she was sitting on the bench with all of the victims. I mean, how brave is that?”
“It was hard to see him again. He kept his face down. I just wanted him to look up. I wanted to be able to say that that I wasn’t letting him, you know, bring me down.”
It was a complete switch of roles; the victims were empowered and the sadists were weak and immobilized. Ruben Martinez is sentenced to 88 years in prison.
“There’s a clear sense of accomplishment when you know that you’ve taken a dangerous person off the streets. A lot of detectives slept much easier once he was in jail.”
Sleep hasn’t been as easy to come by for Trinity Melik.
“It took me years to get myself back together again. I still have fear occasionally, still wake up in fear, and just have to remind myself that that was then and this is now, and I’m okay, and my kids are okay.”
Kelly Quinn still dreams of being a country singer. She has written a book about her experience and has moved on with her life. After the sentencing hearing, it was this release of all of this darkness.
“This cloud, this thing that had attached itself to me, had just dissolved, it dissipated, and was gone.”
“Probably the biggest mistake that these perpetrators made was choosing the women that they chose. These women were able to get details. They were coherent, cooperative, rational, strong. The victims in this case truly are the heroes. They live through these circumstances and live to fight another day.”
