Episode 4 - Another Death in Compton

Time is precious and so are our pets. So time with our pets is extra precious.

That's why we started Dutch. Dutch provides 24-7 access to licensed vets with unlimited virtual visits and follow-ups for up to five pets.

You can message a vet at any time and schedule a video visit the same day.

Our vets can even prescribe medication for many ailments and shipping is always free.

With Dutch, you'll get more time with your pets and year-round peace of mind when it comes to their vet care. Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1.
Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy

Scott and the son he'd never known.

At the end of the day, I'm literally a son

of a killer. Listen to new

episodes of Bone Valley Season 2

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts.

The news of Daisy's murder

rattled everyone at her apartment complex.

There was no making sense of what had happened there.

So much of it just didn't add up.

It was hard.

Like, how can it happen and nobody saw nothing, nobody heard anything?

That's Wendy Valdivia.

She used to live in Daisy's apartment complex,

and her mother actually still lived there at the time of Daisy's death.

She rented the unit right below Daisy's family.

Wendy was deeply invested in getting justice for Daisy.

It wasn't just because she'd known Daisy since Daisy was a little girl,

or because her son Jeffrey, who was 13 at the time, had been the one to identify Daisy's body to the police. It was also because one of Wendy's belongings ended up becoming a key piece of evidence.
The blue patterned carpet that had been placed over Daisy's body. It was Wendy's.
I had two and I took one home and I left one for my mom and then my mom said she didn't want it that's why I threw it out

that's so wild

yeah and then wait

and then my neighbor she was moving out at the time

and she said she was

she threw a lot of knives

like a lot of stuff out in the trash

so she's like oh my god imagine if they said it was me

because obviously the

the knives that she threw away had her fingerprints

it was her knife that she threw away

Thank you. out in the trash.
So she's like, oh my God, imagine if they said it was me because obviously the knives that she threw away had her fingerprints. It was her knife that she threw away.
Okay. I'll just say it is unclear whether the knives she threw away were in fact the murder weapon.
Because we were all thinking about like all that stuff. We were having conversations and she was like, imagine if they come and they say it was us because it has our fingerprints.

I'm like, well, they'll probably say it was us too because we have the carpet.

The carpet was ours.

You know, we were all trying to come into conclusions.

Right.

Because you don't know what's going on and no one's giving you information.

No.

And obviously the content sheriffs didn't come to us and be like, oh, look, we found this knife.

We found this carpet or anything like that.

No, we didn't know anything. The murder and the absence of information around it,

it created this void, this panic, this paranoia.

A fear that everyone was a suspect.

Including maybe even Wendy and her neighbor.

But this idea that just anybody was a suspect, it wasn't something that Daisy's mother or her friends subscribed to. They were pretty sure they knew exactly who had committed this murder.
The question was, why hadn't he been arrested yet? I'm Jen Swan from London Audio, iHeart Radio, and executive producer Paris Hilton.

This is My Friend Daisy, episode four, another death in Compton.

The night that Daisy slipped out of the house and never came home,

her mother, Susie, noticed something that concerned her. It was a message on Daisy's phone from her ex-boyfriend, Victor Sosa.
Normally, Susie told me, she would never read her daughter's text messages. But she happened to see it pop up while she was looking in Daisy's direction.
It contained just five words. I've got something for you.
After Daisy got this message, she got up, she hugged her mother and her grandmother, and she told them she'd be right back. She opened the screen door and walked down the steps of the second floor apartment.
Susie wasn't happy about it, but she felt she couldn't say anything. Daisy was technically an adult, even if she was also still a teenager.

And if Susie's past experiences had taught her anything,

it was that the more you tell a teenager not to do something,

the more they want to do it.

Besides, Susie had no reason to suspect

that Daisy wasn't going to come right back.

She'd left her phone and her wallet inside the house.

When Daisy didn't come right back, Susie figured she'd spent the night with Victor. It was disappointing, but maybe not surprising.
Old habits are hard to break. When Susie identified her daughter's body the next day, the detectives asked her a series of questions.
Who did she hang out with?

Did she have a boyfriend?

That's when Susie told them about Victor.

She told me that she called the lead detective, Ray Lugo, nearly every single day to ask for updates.

And to his credit, he always answered, she said. When he didn't, he called back right away.
This is Ray Lugo. Please leave a message.
But even when she got him on the line, Susie said, Lugo didn't give her much information. He was empathetic, but evasive.
The investigation was ongoing, and he couldn't say much. All he could say was that he and his partner, Sanchez, were working the case, following leads, conducting interviews, and that they couldn't just arrest someone without evidence.
Susie tried to be patient, to stay positive, which meant staying busy. A week after Daisy's murder, she went back to work.
She needed to be away from the apartment that had become indistinguishable from the crime scene. And she didn't want to deal with running into her neighbors, with being gossiped about, or worse in her eyes, being pitied.
She knew everybody probably had a million questions. I thought about Susie.
I'm like, how does she not know her daughter was gone if she was living with her, you know? That's Wendy again. When I met with Wendy outside of a grocery store near Compton, almost exactly three years had gone by since Daisy's murder.
A lot had happened in Wendy's life in those three years. Now I think about it and I'm like, you can't judge people because you don't know, you know, what can happen and stuff like that.
Her oldest daughter had recently turned 18, which meant that Wendy now had this new knowledge, this new experience of how difficult it is to raise a daughter that age. And it gave her this new perspective on what Susie was going through.
It's like they don't know how to live, even though they're 18. And thinking they're an adult, like they're not.
So you were saying before you had teenage kids, you were thinking like, why wasn't she watching her kids? How did she not know? Yeah, I thought about that. That was my first thought.
Like, how did she not know her daughter was gone like the whole night and the whole morning, you know? But like I'm saying, now I realize it. And I'm like, oh, well, we have no control over them, you know? They're going to do what they want.
And she had just thought that she had went back to her ex-boyfriend. That's what Daisy's grandfather thought, too.
That Daisy had gone to see Victor the night she left the apartment. The night of February 22nd, 2021.
Daisy and her mother and her grandmother had been in the living room. They were sitting on the couch watching television.
Juan was sitting in a chair across from them, and he was the only one with a view of the window. And around 10.30 p.m., he saw something that nobody else saw.

It was something moving outside.

It was dark out, and he wasn't totally sure what he saw.

Like, maybe it was a shadow, or maybe it was nothing.

So he decided not to say anything.

Everyone was having a good time, and he didn't want to ruin the mood.

But then he saw it again. And the second time he saw it, he said, it was clear.
There was a person outside the window. He couldn't tell who it was, because they were wearing a beanie and a hood and a mask over their face.
The only thing is that the only thing is that the only thing is that the only thing is that the only thing is that the only thing is that the only thing is that the only thing is that the only thing is that the only thing is that the only thing is that the only thing is that the only thing is that the only thing is that the only thing is that the only thing is that

the only thing is that the only thing is that the only thing is that the only thing is that

the only thing is that the only thing is that mask over their face. The only thing that he could make out was their eyes.
And for a brief moment, he stared directly into them. And then almost as soon as they made eye contact, this person vanished.
When the detectives questioned Juan, he told this story to them and and they asked him to come down to the station. They wanted him to look at some photographs, to tell them if he recognized the person he saw in the window that night.
Juan remembered being nervous. He'd never done anything like this before, but if it would help the investigation, then he was willing to do it.
He showed up to the Homicide Bureau, and he was instructed to sit down at a table and look at six photographs. Each photograph showed a different man's face, and each of these men looked a little like the suspect, which was Victor.
Victor's photo was included among these six. The other five were what's

known as fillers. So these are people that the police know were not at the crime scene.

Often that's because these fillers are photos of incarcerated people. They're the booking photos,

and they're now in a police database. So this method is what cops call a six-pack.

It's basically a modern-day version of a police lineup. You've probably seen this in movies or TV shows where, you know, the suspect and a bunch of people who sort of resemble the suspect are put in a room and the witness has to say, like, that's the guy.
Well, that kind of thing never really happens anymore, at least not in person. Now it's all done through photographs.
And there's a lot of debate about whether this is actually effective or ethical. Some critics say that it can lead to false arrests and convictions.
That's actually one of the reasons why in California, detectives are not allowed to do six-packs on their own cases. They're typically presented by detectives who aren't involved in the investigation.
It's intended to prevent them from pressuring a witness, even inadvertently, to select the person they know is the suspect. It's a really imperfect process, to say the least, but detectives sometimes rely on it when they don't have much else to go off.
It can help them get an arrest warrant. So here was Juan.
He's sitting in this room. There's probably a fluorescent light buzzing overhead, and he's staring down at these six photographs in front of him.
He recognized Victor's photo. He pointed him out to detectives, and he told them, this is Daisy's ex-boyfriend.
This is the person who killed her.

But here's the thing.

Juan was not brought into the station to identify Daisy's ex.

He was asked something really specific.

He was asked, who was the person you'd seen outside the window that night?

Juan had always assumed that this person was Victor.

But now, sitting in that room, he realized he wasn't sure. Juan said that whenever Victor came around, he always waited for Daisy downstairs on the ground floor of the apartment building.
He never climbed the stairs and walked up the landing of the second floor unit. He never peered in the window.
It was like he wanted to avoid all contact with Daisy's family. And in the moment, this made Juan doubt himself.
He studied the photos in front of him. He looked at Victor's photo, and then he looked at all the others.
He scanned each of the men's faces, one after the other. He looked into their eyes and studied their bone structure.
He noticed their blemishes, the shapes of their scars, the length of their eyelashes. And he wondered, did one of these men kill my granddaughter? Eventually, after what felt like hours of staring, of searching, trying to access some deep part of his memory, he decided that one of the faces staring back at him did look like the person he saw in the window that night.
The eyes he saw peeking out from above the mask. He told detectives that this was him.
This was the killer. But that couldn't have been true.
Because the man that Juan picked was a filler. There was one other person who reported seeing the suspect at the apartment complex the night of February 22nd.
And that person was Jeffrey, Wendy's son. He'd been walking home from his cousin's apartment on the other side of the complex.
That's when he saw Daisy. She was laying down between two buildings, and there was someone standing over her, pacing back and forth.
Jeffrey had assumed that this person was Victor, because, you know, he'd seen Victor hanging around with Daisy before at the apartment complex. But when Jeffrey was asked to look at the six photos, the photo of Victor and the five fillers, he, like Juan, chose a photo that was not Victor's.
Time is precious and so are our pets. So time with our pets is extra precious.

That's why we started Dutch.

Dutch provides 24-7 access to licensed vets with unlimited virtual visits and follow-ups for up to five pets.

You can message a vet at any time and schedule a video visit the same day.

Our vets can even prescribe medication for many ailments and shipping is always free.

With Dutch, you'll get more time with your pets and year-round peace of mind when it comes to their vet care. Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1.
I just knew him as a kid. Long, silent voices from his past came forward.
And he was just staring at me. And they had secrets of their own to share.
Gilbert King, I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott. I was no longer just telling the story.
I was part of it. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer.
He's just straight evil. I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known.
If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail. I would have never existed.
I never expected to find myself in this place. Now, I need to tell you how I got here.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.

Bone Valley, Season 2.

Jeremy.

Jeremy, I want to tell you something.

Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley, Season 2,

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content,

subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Detectives had struck out on the six-pack.
Neither of their witnesses had been able to identify the suspect, which to them either meant that Victor hadn't done it or that it would be that much harder to arrest him if he had. That must have been frustrating.
Yeah. Could you talk about that? Yeah, it was really frustrating.
It was frustrating going home. Like, even if we catch him, we don't have, unless he confesses, we don't have Jack.
That's Ray Lugo. He works for the L.A.
County Sheriff's Department, and he was the lead detective on this case. At that point, Lugo told me, he and his partner, Leo Sanchez, were still waiting for the DNA from the crime scene to be processed.
Here's how Sanchez put it. A lot of it, a lot of it depended on the DNA evidence that was, that we recovered.
Because there was a knife recovered close to her body, which we believed was the murder weapon. And the big deal with that was try to determine whose DNA was left on that knife.
So, you know, this DNA testing takes a little bit of time. It doesn't happen like on the TV shows.
It doesn't happen overnight, right? It doesn't happen like on the TV shows. It's something I've heard a lot from both Sanchez and Lugo.
I know everybody watches TV and thinks these type of cases are very easy. But if you can't prove it, it doesn't matter.
They may not have had a witness, but they did have what they thought would be a vital piece of evidence. Surveillance footage from the crime scene.
Yeah, I just heard about it. Let me actually, let me call my brother in the way.
Come up, see if you can get your guys' footage. All right, cool.
That'd be cool, man. So remember how this neighbor said he'd call his brother-in-law to get a hold of the security footage? Well, he did.
And that guy ended up handing over the video to detectives. So what I'm going to do is I'll look at it through the cloud on the big screen because on the phone you really can't see anything.
So I'm going to download the clips for you guys. Thank you.
You guys need them. The detectives had told me that getting surveillance video like this one, it wasn't always easy.
Especially in places like Compton, where residents didn't always see the benefit of handing over evidence to the police. Here's what Sanchez told me.
You know, a lot of it is they're afraid, you know, people are afraid to speak to law enforcement. They think we're going to, you know, they think that they're in trouble.
Or a lot of them don't want to go to court and testify, right? You've been in courtrooms, it's scary. The one gentleman that we had asked for, he was forthcoming and said, yeah, you know, you can download it.
He didn't require much convincing. He'd just say, listen, I need your help, right? But when detectives reviewed the video, they discovered it did not reveal much.
The grainy black and white footage had been captured from a distance. It showed the shadowy figure of a person out by the alley where the garbage bins were.
They were dragging something in the corner of the frame. But it wasn't enough to prove that it was Victor.
It wasn't enough to make an arrest. Here's Sanchez again.
One, it was dark. There were no lights out.
There was shadowy images, but it's hard to make out a definitive individual and say, hey, that's the individual. You know, we were trying to locate Victor.
And I think at one point we did a search warrant. We wrote a search warrant to get his cell phone data to see if he was still, you know, see where he was at.
I don't think we got anything out of that. What do you mean you don't, like what did you actually get the warrant? I don't remember if we got, I don't know if we did, let me double check.
Yeah, we did write a search warrant for his, for somebody, let me double check, but I'm not certain it's... Yeah, that was a phone number that we...
That Daisy's mom provided us that belonged to Victor. Okay.
So did you actually... Were you actually tracking his cell phone or was it not approved? No, the warrant was approved, but I don't remember if he had shut the phone off or he had just dumped it and we never found it.
But yeah,

we couldn't find him with his phone number. Detectives could not locate Victor.
He was gone.

I mean, had Victor been there that day, most definitely he would have been interviewed,

right? Hey, where were you at last night? What were you doing? Stuff like that. And it wouldn't

have eliminated him as a potential suspect at that point.

But, you know, anybody's a suspect until they get eliminated. I think at one point, somebody ran him on a computer and got an address.
and we sent either a gang detective or a station individual detective to check the house out to see if he was in the area or not.

And they were unable to locate him.

Even Victor's own mother couldn't find him.

The same week that Daisy's body was found, Victor's mom filed a missing persons report for her son.

It was all deeply distressing to Susie. She continued to call Detective Lugo every day, asking for updates.
And each time, she hoped to hear the words, we've got him, we've made an arrest. But the weeks continued to slip by, and those words never came.
Suzy's sadness turned to anger

Her biggest fear, she said

Was to be a big fan But the weeks continued to slip by, and those words never came. Susie's sadness turned to anger.
Her biggest fear, she said, was that Daisy's case wouldn't be taken seriously, because she wasn't white. If you're white, she remembered thinking, then you get the spotlight.
And there's plenty of research to suggest that Susie's fears aren't wrong. Academic studies have found that white homicide victims generally garner the most news coverage,

and federal data shows that these cases are also the most likely to be solved.

To Daisy's mother and to some of Daisy's friends, it felt like detectives had simply moved on, given up.

They keep us in the dark, Susie told me.

They keep the victim's family in the dark.

It's a feeling that Wendy knows intimately.

So in the time between Daisy's murder

and when I interviewed Wendy about three years later,

something horrific had happened to her, Something that completely shattered her life, which is that she had lost her own child to murder. An investigation is underway in Compton after a 16-year-old was shot and killed.
When deputies arrived, they found the teen with a gunshot wound to the upper torso. He was rushed to the hospital where he later died.

A man was also found...

Wendy's son, Jeffrey,

the boy who grew up with Daisy and later identified her body,

was fatally shot the day after Christmas, 2023.

Wendy and I met up four months after that.

Everything was still raw and still completely unresolved.

Because at that point, she still had no idea who killed her son. I don't have any news of anything of any kind from, like, the homicide detectives.
Nothing like that. I reached out to them in the beginning.
They never reached out to me. And I don't know.
I don't know anything. The L.A.
County Sheriff's Department wouldn't tell me anything either. They said they couldn't give me any information about an ongoing investigation.
Wendy felt that the sheriffs were giving her the runaround, even treating her as a suspect. When she got to the hospital the night that Jeffrey had been shot, she said the sheriffs were standing outside his room and wouldn't let her inside.
At some point, a doctor informed Wendy that her son didn't make it. But even then, she said, the sheriffs wouldn't allow her into the room to see his body.
She wasn't even allowed to go to her car. I had to call somebody to pick me up.
I didn't have a car. They took my car for about three days.
I'm like, you guys are not going to find anything in my car. I was not the one who dropped them off.
I don't know what they were looking for because they owed my car for evidence. For evidence of what? My son's killing? Like, really? Wendy said she tried calling the detective assigned to the case.
She said that he told her she wouldn't have to pay the $80 to get her car released. But the call went straight to voicemail, and Wendy paid the bill.
In the absence of information about her son's murder, her mind just started racing, trying to imagine what might have happened that night. Obviously, I don't know anything.
I'm giving my own self, my own little conclusions. Trying to keep my own self busy without me, like, having to reach out to the homicide detectives because they seem to not to care.
After that, Wendy retreated. She felt alienated by the police, abandoned by them.
She was grieving, and she didn't have the energy to keep calling the detectives to demand answers. Answers they didn't seem to have anyway.
So it's like, how can I say it? I think like, I feel like Compton sheriffs are just like, oh, another death. It's okay.
Oh, another death. Who cares? You know, stuff like that.
That's what I think. I don't know.
Another death in Compton. Who cares? That was the impression Wendy got from the sheriff's department.
Basically, that's how I took it. I took it like a slap to the face.
Like, okay. No, he's dead.
Oh, well. I'm going to come back to Jeffrey's story later in this series.
But when I interview Daisy's friends and relatives in the months following her murder, they often expressed some variation of that sentiment, that anger, that grief that Wendy was now feeling. There was this feeling that the authorities had collectively shrugged in the face of murder.
Some of Daisy's friends did not want to be interviewed again for this podcast.

They were still trying to process their grief, to move on from it.

Some had recently become mothers.

They were 20-somethings who were living their adult lives like Daisy should have been.

But one of Daisy's friends from high school told me something that really stuck with me.

I remembered the anger, the matter of factness in her voice.

The cause of the death But one of Daisy's friends from high school told me something that really stuck with me I remembered the anger the matter of factness in her voice The cops, she said half-ass everything in our communities especially in Compton They become so desensitized to violence that they forget it's someone's daughter on the floor stabbed to death, she said Three months after Daisy's murder there had been no significant updates in the case. There were no press conferences, no news of a possible DNA match.
There were no rewards offered for information leading to an arrest. And the police had yet to announce that there was even a suspect.
They hadn't released Victor's name or his photo to the public.

It made one of Daisy's friends start to wonder if maybe the police really did have some other intel that she didn't know about.

Like, maybe the DNA at the crime scene matched with someone who wasn't Victor.

Maybe the detectives were looking into a different suspect.

But the longer she waited, the more she became convinced that her instincts had been right all along.

There was no way Victor hadn't done this, she remembered thinking.

It just didn't make sense otherwise.

There was no one else who would have wanted to hurt Daisy.

She and her friends considered looking for Victor on their own.

They had a few ideas about where he might be hiding.

Like the motel that he sometimes rented for him and Daisy, or somewhere in the bushes along the LA River. Because even before he went on the run, they told me, it wasn't unusual for him to spend the night on the streets.
Daisy sometimes came with him just to keep him company. That's just the kind of person she was, her friends told me.
Ultimately, though, Daisy's friends thought better of their search party. Because what if they did find Victor? What were they going to do then? Or worse, what was he going to do? That's when they began talking about ways to spread the word.
Maybe if other people knew to look out for this guy, then someone would be able to spot him. And if detectives weren't going to put his name and photo out, they thought,

then fine, we'll do it ourselves.

They told Susie about their plan, and she gave them her blessing.

She told them, do whatever it takes to find him.

Next time on My Friend Daisy. I would tell other people too, like, hey, you want to meet up and look for him i'd be so down i don't know that's like really scary to have someone that does does something so fucked up to someone else hi everyone this is paris thanks for listening to my friend Daisy.
If you or someone you love is experiencing

abuse, you are not alone. Help is available 24-7.
Contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline for free confidential support. Call 800-799-7233.
Text START to 88788 or visit thehotline.org. Your safety matters.
Reach out today. My Friend Daisy is a production of London Audio with support from Sony Music Entertainment.
It's reported, written, and executive produced by me, Jen Swan. I'm also your host.
Our executive producers for London Audio are Paris Hilton, Bruce Gersh, Bruce Robertson, and Joanna Studebaker. Our executive producer for Sony Music Entertainment is Jonathan Hirsch.
Our associate producer is Zoe Kolkin. Production assistance and translations by Miguel Contreras.
Sound design, composing, and mixing by Hans Dale Shi. Our fact checker is Fendel Fulton.
Our head of production is Sammy Allison. And our production manager is Tamika Balance-Kolasny.
Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rosick, and Jamie Myers at Sony, Ben Goldberg and Orly Greenberg at UTA, and Jen Ortiz at The Cut. This episode cites two different studies.
One of them is called Whose Lives Matter, which appeared in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. It was published by sociologists at University of Chicago and Stanford University, and it was previously reported on by the Marshall Project.
You can go read more about that on their website.

And the federal clearance rate data that I mentioned, which breaks down homicide clearance rates by race, was based on a CBS News analysis of the FBI's data. You can read more about it

on CBS News' website. Thanks so much for listening.