Jerene Matta (Queen of Spades, Washington)

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Our card this week is Jareen Mata, the queen of spades from Washington.

During the Yakima Police Department's annual Christmas party, the news of 62-year-old Jareen's murder shocked every officer and their plus ones.

Doreen's house was known for its security security cameras.

There were so many that you basically couldn't enter the property without being filmed.

So, why was Doreen targeted and who was she watching on her cameras?

Or maybe the better question is: was someone watching Jareen?

I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck.

It was December 7th, 2013, and Detective Drew Shaw was all ready for his department's annual Christmas celebration.

Despite it being an unusually cold day in Yakima, Washington, the department was ready to throw down.

But right as everyone was about to dig into the food and drink, Detective Shaw saw one of his colleagues trying to get his attention.

And in an instant, he knew something was wrong.

We were just sitting down at our department's annual Christmas party when Lieutenant Nolan Wentz waved me out and told me that there was a suspected homicide at a residence on Greenway.

So

my wife and I left.

I went home and changed and responded to the scene.

Detective Shaw arrived at Greenway Avenue just before 7 p.m.

As he approached the house, number 1809, his heart sank.

The residence was home to someone who he and many other Yakima officers knew of well, 62-year-old Jareen Mata.

Jareen was an eccentric lady who lived alone, and she called the police a number of times over the years, mostly to report petty crimes.

She actually had multiple security cameras lining the doorway of her house.

Police said it was almost impossible not to get caught on film when approaching the property.

She was the one that would yell at the kids if they got too close or yell at you if you're parking in front of her house.

That was just who she was.

She was kind of the neighborhood busybody.

In the dark of Greenway Avenue, Detective Shaw saw the red glow of a fire truck.

So the initial first responders was the Acoma Fire Department to what they believed to just be some sort of fire in a residence.

The people that had called 911 to report that didn't know exactly where it was coming from, so the fire department just kind of responded to the general vicinity.

and then narrowed down the

fire coming from Dreen Mata's house on the Greenway.

When they found where it was coming from, they entered forcefully into the residence to combat the fire and discovered Jareen deceased inside.

As he walked through the hallway of the house, which was black with soot, he braced himself.

I knew she was in the hallway, so I basically went straight into the hallway and saw Jareen laying on the floor of

the hallway near a bathroom.

Her cat was just inside the bathroom next to the toilet, deceased as well.

The state of Jareen's body was horrifying.

Her throat was slashed.

Her ankles and wrists were bound.

She was lying almost twisted up on her back.

What was used to bind her?

Duct tape.

Way more than you would ever need to accomplish.

restraining a 62 or 63 year old woman.

They used the entire roll.

And were her hands in front of her body behind?

Behind her back.

Behind her back.

And what about the position of her legs?

Were they straight?

Yeah, they were relatively straight and significantly bound at the ankles, again, way more than you would ever need to restrain her.

Standing in the hallway, looking down at Jareen, Detective Shaw gathered himself.

He had no choice but to continue the investigation into what happened, though quickly, the when was coming into focus.

Police learned that Jareen's house alarm had initially gone off at 3.09 p.m.

before going off a second time at 5.12 p.m.

But the police's policy was that unless the homeowner confirmed with the alarm company that they were in danger, the police wouldn't be alerted.

Now, the fire department hadn't arrived until around 5.35 p.m., more than two hours after that first house alarm went off, meaning that Joreen had potentially been assaulted for hours by her attacker.

Detective Shaw learned that the fire in Jareen's house had originated in a spare room opposite the laundry room.

According to police, it had been poorly lit, probably with gasoline, and it was clearly a case of arson, likely in an attempt to destroy any evidence, as well as Joreen's body.

As Detective Shaw gathered more information from his colleagues, he also learned that Joreen's pickup truck was gone.

But something else was also missing from Jareen's home.

Something very specific and unusual.

She had multiple big screen TVs on her wall, kind of had almost like a little command center of surveillance.

Why she was so interested in that or felt that she needed that level of surveillance and security, I don't know.

But we learned that she should have several TVs, a bank of televisions that were not there.

So we believed that not only was she murdered and that they'd set the house on fire, but they'd also taken electronics from the residents.

The assailant also took the thing that would have been far more valuable to investigators.

the hard drives linked up to Doreen's security system.

Detective Shaw knew Doreen was vigilant about security, but he had no idea why Jareen had dedicated an entire room in her house to surveillance.

Had she become paranoid living alone?

Or was there something specific that she was trying to protect herself against?

There was no evidence that we're aware of that suggested that she was being targeted, harassed, watched, surveilled.

Despite the stolen surveillance equipment, there was still plenty in and around the house for police to look at in the meantime.

The first of which was something they'd been alerted to outside of the house that made absolutely no sense.

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One thing that was odd that we learned about when we arrived was that there were

three Afghan-type blankets that were kind of laid on top of each other flat.

And those were laying in the middle of Greenway, the fire department.

And, you know, again, it's wintertime, so, you know, 5, 5.30, it's dark.

When they arrived, they ran over these blankets that were in the street.

There also appeared to be vomit on the blankets.

And so we obviously photographed those and took those.

later learning through family that identified those blankets as coming from her home.

The blankets were potentially used to cover either themselves or items that were being taken from the home.

The vomit was obviously interesting.

We speculated on whether that would possibly be from Jareen during the, you know, the assault, that maybe she became so upset that she vomited.

5.15 is prime time in a lot of neighborhoods.

People getting off work, traveling to pick up kids.

So detectives were hopeful that someone had seen the suspect or suspects.

And though a canvas of the area didn't reveal anyone who'd witnessed someone vomiting on large blankets in the middle of the street, they did get a number of stories from neighbors who had seen some stuff that was strange.

The woman who called 911 about the fire at Jareen's house, her name's Denise Lynn-Mendez, she said that after the fire truck arrived, she saw a man sweating and wearing no coat under the street lights on a street called Prash Avenue, less than a five-minute drive from Doreen's house.

Denise reckoned the man was between 18 and 19 years old.

And it's weird, right?

Given the freezing temperatures that this man was seen sweating and not wearing a coat, it makes you wonder what temperature he was coming from.

Denise said she saw a second man running towards this sweating coatless guy.

And as he approached him, this guy yelled, keep running.

Then there was another neighbor, Krista Hopdowitt, who told police that earlier that day, just before 11 a.m., she saw an older-looking green or teal Grand Prix parked in front of Jareen's house.

She saw the same type of car again at around 4:30 p.m., but she couldn't say if it was the exact same car she'd seen earlier that day or not.

At around 5 p.m., Krista saw it disappear down Greenway around 30 minutes before the fire department arrived.

All of this was only mildly helpful.

None of the sightings really pointed them in any one direction.

You know, sometimes eyewitnesses hit it out of the park and other times

they don't.

As the night of December 7th dragged on, Detective Shaw couldn't stop asking himself one question.

Why?

Surely stealing a few monitors and a hard drive from Doreen's command center hadn't been the only reason for this, especially when there was such a high chance of them getting caught.

The more he sat with it, Detective Shaw came up with a theory.

She had, you know, suffered a pretty significant beating to her face.

It indicated to me that for some reason they had to,

for lack of a better term, torture her.

And so I believed that it was a possibility that they had beaten her in order to attempt to get her financial information.

It was just a hunch, but Detective Shaw knew he had to act fast.

So he headed down to Jareen's bank to see if they could confirm his suspicions.

So I went to the financial institution,

met with the manager, and basically told him this is what I'm investigating.

And

I believe that there's a possibility that her account was accessed.

And I'd like to, basically, I'd like to know.

And of course, with any financial institution, they don't give you any information without court order or a subpoena or a search warrant.

So he, although he was cooperative, he said, you know, I can't really give you anything unless you've got a warrant.

And so I told him, I kind of

begged for his help and said,

you know, if you were me, would a search warrant be worth the time and energy to get

and he at least was kind enough to go back look on the computer and came back out and said if i were you i'd get a search warrant and so i as soon as he said that i just immediately got chills and i remember driving straight back to the office and our sergeant at the time was sitting there and i walked in and i said we got him and

you know of course he perks up and he's like what are you talking about and i said they they attempted at least to access her bank account.

And so I immediately got started on the search warrant.

Detective Shaw wrote up a warrant to get access to Jareen's bank account and the bank's security camera.

Now he just had to wait for them to respond.

And while he did,

something else happened.

The morning after Jareen's murder, another Yakima police officer spotted a pickup truck that, if she was right, looked a lot like the one her colleagues said they were looking for.

She happened by a parking lot four or five blocks from the scene.

The property here, the parking lot, actually belonged to the college that is near Jareen's residence.

She saw it sitting there, obviously flips around, comes back, confirms with the license plate that it's our truck.

I think what was probably most significant is that the truck was dumped four blocks from where this occurred.

It's not like it was burned up in an orchard, you know, in the lower valley or something.

It was, you know, four or five blocks away from where this occurred.

That's when Detective Shaw realized something.

It wasn't about where the truck had been left, it was about who lived nearby.

Around 60 feet from where Jareen's pickup truck was recovered was the residence of a man well known to police, a guy who had 35 arrests under his belt.

His name was

Lloyd Calvert.

Detective Shaw wasn't one to believe in coincidences.

But when the police spoke with Lloyd, he gave them nothing.

He said he knew nothing about Jareen's death.

Learning where her truck was found and how weird of a coincidence Detective Shaw found that to be didn't change anything.

He knew nothing the end.

But Detective Shaw wasn't buying it.

So a few days later, he paid a visit to Lloyd's apartment himself.

And that gut feeling he had was was right.

Because it turns out Lloyd did know a lot more.

And this time, he was willing to talk.

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So I went out to his house and knocked on his door and kind of had a coming to Jesus talk with him.

Basically, said, it's 20 yards from your front door.

I just don't believe that that's just a coincidence.

He said,

I was sitting here minding my own business on Saturday evening and somebody knocked at my door.

It was these two people that I know.

And those people, we were obviously, as the police, very familiar with and he said that they had stopped by unannounced and had made it sound like they were on foot which he felt was suspicious because they are such prolific thieves.

I think he even made the comment that they don't walk anywhere.

They would steal a car to drive two blocks.

He said that he let them in and they didn't really have a reason for being there, but that they were looking for a ride and

asked to get a ride to one of their mother's residences, which happened to be on the north side of the city.

And this is on the south side of the city.

So he said, okay, I'll give you a ride.

And he thought it was odd, but he gave them a ride.

Detective Shaw couldn't share with us the names of these two individuals.

It might compromise the investigation.

But he said that when Lloyd left the apartment complex with these two people in his vehicle, Lloyd didn't notice Jareen's truck in the parking lot.

When he got back to the complex, he said he did see the truck.

And then that is all Lloyd would say.

But this was just super suspicious.

And it's not that these guys were necessarily violent.

They were high-profile property crimes guys and drug users.

But could they have crossed over into, you know, violence?

Sure.

That was was a really hot lead for us.

Very suspicious.

What about Lloyd himself?

Like, was there any suspicion that he was leaving himself out?

Of course.

Yeah, bottom line.

Absolutely.

Detective Shaw now had three individuals, Lloyd and the two people he gave a ride to, on his radar.

From that day onwards, police considered all three of them suspects in Jareen's murder.

Now, by this point, the bank was finally playing ball with police.

It turned out that Detective Shaw's hunch had been right.

Doreen's bank account was accessed by a suspect the night of her murder.

It was a bittersweet accomplishment for Detective Shaw.

Basically, while we were processing the crime scene, that they had accessed her bank account via ATM and made multiple attempts.

to access it and ended up going to another bank across the street where they were successful in withdrawing a small amount of cash out of her account.

It was under a thousand bucks.

Certainly not worth the life of another human.

The footage from the Wheatland Bank downtown showed the suspect approaching the ATM machine to get money from Jareen's account.

We'll post a picture of this on the blog post and on social if you want to see for yourself.

But it shows a person in a hooded coat, balaclava, and black-rimmed glasses.

Even though it appears at one point, they stare fixatedly towards the camera, because of the person's clothing, there's so much we still don't know about their identity.

I mean, you can't tell their sex, skin tone, age, nothing.

So after police got this image, there wasn't much else that they could do with it.

And there wasn't much else they could do in the investigation, but wait for the forensics to come back.

They'd gotten scrapings from Doreen's fingernails because Detective Shaw was certain that she would have fought back if she'd been able to during the assault.

They tested some of the vomit on the blankets, because duh, and they found a screwdriver in her abandoned truck.

They also tested the tape used to bind Jareen.

Police felt that any or all of these items could hold forensic clues.

But it wouldn't be until late summer of 2014 that the lab got back to them.

And the results were, for me at least, surprising.

When they tested the vomit and swabs that they had taken from her truck's steering wheel and door handles, they weren't able to pull any DNA that was good enough to be used for comparison.

However, under the fingernails from Jareen's left hand, police found female DNA, not Jareen's.

And luckily, it was good enough for CODIS.

It is a good sample.

It's a CODIS-worthy sample, and it is spinning around in CODIS as we sit here today.

We've never had a hit, which was a little surprising, to be honest, that we haven't had a CODIS hit on that.

On the tape used to bind Jareen was a male DNA profile.

It wasn't a great sample, so it wasn't eligible to be entered into CODIS.

But police were still able to see if it was a match to the one guy Detective Shaw thought it would be a match to.

You said you collected Lloyd's DNA.

Was he excluded?

His DNA did not match anything that we later got.

Did he have an alibi?

No, other than these other two guys coming to his house.

He didn't have, you know, there was nobody else that lived there with him without giving up too much information on how it happened or in what capacity.

We did surreptitiously take known DNA samples from the two individuals that Lloyd had mentioned.

And it obviously putting plans like that into motion and trying to surreptitiously do that, try to find these people who their whole life is running from the police,

trying to pin them down, put eyes on them, and wait for an opportunity to take a surreptitious sample from them took a long time to do.

But bad news for investigators, those samples haven't matched with the male DNA found on the tape or the female DNA from under Jareen's fingernails.

As for the screwdriver, the one that they found in Jareen's truck, it showed a second male DNA profile, but actually one that they would kind of expect to see in the truck.

Turns out it belonged to Jareen's son, Chris, who police knew spent time at his mother's house.

This wasn't suspicious to detectives, but our reporter, Jennifer Amel, asked more about Chris nonetheless.

Do we know what Chris was doing on the day of this incident?

So we wrestled with that theory, which is where I'm sure you're probably headed.

We did go out to Chris's apartment that night looking for him to provide a death notification.

He was not home.

I don't believe anybody was home.

So we weren't able to do that that night.

The following day, which would have been a Sunday,

He showed up to the house, saw what happened, basically was breaking down down in the street.

Somebody called the police.

Kevin and I and the rest of the team were here working on the case and we responded out there and brought Chris down and

talked to him.

He was obviously upset.

There was certainly nothing that suggested at that time that he was involved.

I'm sure we verified whatever alibi he might have had.

But again, Chris was

the death of his mother did not benefit him in any way that we could show.

He was living a better life with her here and actually went downhill fast after that.

Our reporter Laura Frader reached out to Chris for comment, but he didn't respond.

Today, Detective Shaw believes that Jareen was the victim of a robbery gone wrong.

He thinks there were multiple people involved.

And he thinks the assailants were probably looking to steal things that they could sell for drug money.

His three three suspects, including Lloyd, who's now deceased, are still at the top of his list.

And even though Jareen was clearly keeping watch in her command center, Detective Shaw doesn't think Jareen was targeted by someone she knew.

My gut tells me that it's not really personal, that it was the motivation is robbery, and she appeared to either be in possession of something that was worth the risk or felt that because she was older and alone that she'd be an easy mark.

I don't know.

I don't believe that it was

somebody that just,

you know, was in the neighborhood that said, you know, I'm just so tired of that old woman.

Here's what we're going to do.

I don't see that, but I've, I can sit here and tell you stories about how we've been so wrong about what we think happened.

And then you go through the case and you end up going down a path you never even begin to see coming.

So it's, it's possible, but we've we've had cases where, you know, it's the attack is

personal, but this one, it just

doesn't seem that somebody just has rage against Jareen.

I think that their motivation was, you know, financial.

The greatest tragedy in Jareen's case was that despite the physical beating she endured, Her injuries didn't kill her that cold December night.

It was the smoke inhalation.

Detective Shaw seemed quietly moved when he spoke to our reporters about the way Jareen suffered, especially given the fact that her house alarm was going off multiple times as she was assaulted.

It was clear to our reporters that he wants nothing more than to hold Jareen's killers accountable.

It's a cold case.

It's inactive pending new information,

but it will always be active to me, and it will be one of those cases that, along with some others that were very personal to me, that it will never, I won't stop working on it until the day I can't do this job anymore.

If you have any information regarding the murder of Jareen Mata, you can call the Yakima Police Department at 509-575-6200.

If you wish to remain anonymous, you can leave a tip with Crime Stoppers by calling 1-800-222-8477.

And if you want to call Detective Shaw directly, his number is 509-576-6791.

The Deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis.

To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com.

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