Jose Manuel Martinez lived for most of his adult life in the farm towns of the southern San Joaquin Valley, in California's Tulare County. Neighbors and relatives knew him as a family man who worked with his hands. He told investigators in 2013 that for more than three decades he had also collected debts and killed people for Mexican drug traffickers and other clients. He would not name any of them, and no authority has ever confirmed which organization, if any, employed him.
What courts did confirm is that he killed 12 people and tried to kill a 13th. He pleaded guilty in Alabama in 2014 to the murder of a roofing contractor who had insulted his daughter. He pleaded guilty in California in 2015 to nine murders and one attempted murder in Tulare, Kern and Santa Barbara counties, the earliest in 1980 and the latest in 2011. In 2019 a jury in Marion County, Florida, convicted him of murdering two young men in 2006 over a cocaine debt, then declined to recommend a death sentence. He has said he killed more than 30 people. Most of those claims have never been tested in a court.
Martinez was born about 1962; the Associated Press gave his age as 51 in April 2014 and 57 in June 2019. Accounts of his birthplace differ. An AP report in April 2014 described him as Mexican-born and a U.S. citizen. Jessica Garrison of BuzzFeed News, who spent years reporting on him and wrote a book about the case, says he was born and raised in California's Central Valley. A 2024 account published by the Mob Museum in Las Vegas puts his birth in Fresno in 1962 and says he spent part of his early childhood in Mexico before returning to California before his teens.
Garrison's reporting places his roots in Earlimart, a small farmworker community in Tulare County, and records that he lived in McFarland, just across the Kern County line, in the early 1980s. In later years he lived on and off in Richgrove, a farming community about 40 miles north of Bakersfield. The ABA Journal, reporting on the case in 2014, said he lived with his mother in a modest Richgrove house and mowed his own lawn.
His childhood, as his defense team presented it in Florida in 2019, was brutal. According to Garrison's account of that trial, his lawyers said he was the product of incest, and one of his sisters testified that he took beatings to protect his siblings and made sure they were fed. Defense experts told the jury he had suffered a head injury as a young man that left lasting brain damage, and that growing up among violent drug traffickers had given him what they called a "skewed moral code." The Mob Museum account adds that his stepfather led a heroin trafficking ring and was sent to federal prison in 1977. These are the defense's and later writers' accounts; no court made findings on them.
Martinez gave investigators his own version of how his killing started. He told Alabama investigators in 2013 that he had worked for Mexican drug traffickers since he was 16, collecting debts and keeping 25 percent of what he recovered, according to the Los Angeles Times (as summarized by Cal Coast News), the ABA Journal and the Valley Voice. NBC News reported in 2013 that he said he began killing at 16, and that it was unclear whether those early killings were done for anyone else. Officials said they could not verify this account.
He told Garrison a more personal story. In her account, he said he committed his first killings before he turned 18 to avenge the killing of a sister he loved. The Mob Museum account says his older sister was raped and killed in 1978 and that at 16 he tracked down and killed three men he blamed. None of these killings has been charged, and no court record or official release confirms that they took place. They remain his claims and nothing more.
Garrison writes that shortly after his 18th birthday he carried out his first killing for pay. She identifies the victim only as the husband of Cecilia Camacho, a 21-year-old mother, who was shot in the head on the way to work in the olive fields. Camacho did not learn for about three decades who had killed her husband or why. She remarried, had more children and picked oranges for decades to send them to college.
For most of the years covered by the later charges, Martinez was known to the police only as a small-time offender. The Valley Voice reported that his first California arrest was in 1989 and that his arrests there were mostly for vehicle theft, burglary and methamphetamine. AP reported that he was convicted in 2007 of theft and drug charges and served short terms in California state prison. Alabama prosecutors later said he had two prior felony convictions for drug offenses and for smuggling people at the California border. The Valley Voice reported that three of the Richgrove-area killings he later admitted took place while he was on parole.
He was married twice and had children and grandchildren. Garrison describes relatives who saw him as "the nicest person in the world," and family members who worked in law enforcement. His mother, Loreta Fernandez, told the Los Angeles Times in 2014 that she did not believe he had done what he described. "This is hard for me, really hard," she said in Spanish, as quoted by AP.
The nine California murders, as set out in the charges filed by the Tulare County District Attorney on April 8, 2014, and later admitted in his guilty pleas, spanned three decades. Most of the victims were farmworkers or men from the small towns along Highway 99. Beyond what the official releases and newspapers recorded, little about their lives was ever published.
David Bedolla, 23, lived in Lindsay. On the morning of October 21, 1980, he was driving to work with his wife, his brother and his brother-in-law when he was shot on the road between Lindsay and Strathmore. He was the earliest of the charged victims.
Sylvester Ayon, 30, whose first name Noozhawk spelled Silvestre, was driving a tractor on a ranch off Refugio Road in the Santa Ynez Valley, Santa Barbara County, on the morning of October 1, 1982, when he was shot several times and killed. A 17-year-old who was with him was shot in the stomach and survived; the plea agreement identified him only by initials, and he is not named here. Santa Barbara County detectives worked the case for years. About a decade later, a Mexican national was arrested and deported to Mexico to be tried there, and the county's file stopped at that point, the sheriff's chief deputy, Sam Gross, told Noozhawk in 2014. Gross called it a revenge killing ordered by a family in Mexico and said the file showed no cartel link. In his plea agreement Martinez said he was hired in retaliation for Ayon's part in a 1979 dance hall shooting in Durango, Mexico, that killed four people, at least one of them his relative, and that three other men were with him, whom he would not name.
Raul Gonzalez, 22, lived in Earlimart. He was last seen at his home on October 19, 1982. Two days later ranchers found his body east of Porterville. He had been shot and stabbed.
Domingo Perez lived in Earlimart. AP and the Tulare County release gave his age as 29; Garrison's book gives it as 32 and describes him as a man from Mexico, married without children, who had come to the area for his brother's funeral and whose mother and sister lived in Earlimart. His family reported him missing in April 1995. His truck came back to his mother's driveway with blood inside. On May 23, 1995, his body was found in an orange grove north of Richgrove; the Valley Voice reported he had been shot once in the head. Garrison's reporting says the killing grew out of a dispute over a parked truck. She also describes how little was done: a deputy collected a cigarette butt and noted the missing man's pager, a detective took the body scene, the crime lab found no fingerprints on surgical gloves left nearby, and few relatives or friends were ever interviewed.
Santiago Perez, 56, lived in Pixley. Early on the morning of February 14, 2000, he was shot to death in his bed while his four children, all minors, were in the house.
Jose Alvarado, 25, was found on February 15, 2007, on a dirt access road outside McFarland in Kern County. He had been shot several times.
Juan Bautista Moreno, 52, was found on March 23, 2009, in an orange grove south of Elmo Highway near McFarland, shot several times. The Tulare County District Attorney's office said he was not involved with any cartel and may have been killed because he owed someone money. His daughter, Asenneth Moreno, came to the sentencing in 2015. She told KFSN-TV that she had always wanted to be in the same room as her father's killer "so he could feel something," and that she wanted to clear her father's name.
Joaquin Barragan, 45, lived in Earlimart. He went missing on September 27, 2009, and was found on September 30 on the bank of the Deer Creek canal east of the town, shot several times.
Gonzalo Urquieta, 54, also of Earlimart, went missing on February 5, 2011. On February 7 he was found in an orange grove outside Richgrove, shot several times. He was the last of the California victims.
On November 8, 2006, two young men were found dead in a pickup truck on Highway 19 in the Ocala National Forest in Marion County, Florida. They were Javier Huerta, 20, and Gustavo Olivares-Rivas, 28 (AP sometimes shortened the name to Gustavo Olivares). Both had been bound and shot several times. WCJB, a Gainesville television station, described them as Volusia County men.
According to what Martinez later told investigators, as reported by WFTV in 2014, Huerta had stolen 10 kilograms of cocaine worth about $210,000. Martinez said he lured the two men to a construction site in DeLeon Springs. Huerta's wife told the authorities that on November 6, 2006, her husband called her about money and told her to take $150,000 from a safe in the backyard, and that Martinez then came to the house and took another $40,000. Martinez said he killed both men so that they could not identify him. Garrison reported that he said he gave some of the money to his mother and spent some on a daughter's quinceanera.
The case went cold. Marion County investigators had a cigarette butt, found in a soda can in the truck, that had never been tested. When it was finally processed, the DNA on it matched Martinez. NBC News reported that Florida investigators made the match in February 2013 and obtained a warrant for his arrest. By then he was already the focus of a separate killing in Alabama.
Jose Arturo Ruiz, 32, was a married father of three who ran his own business, J.R. Roofing, in Decatur, Alabama. Martinez had family in the Decatur area and the two men had done business together. Martinez knew him as "J.R."
Ruiz had insulted Martinez's daughter. Accounts of the remark differ in detail; the Lawrence County Sheriff's Office said Ruiz had called her "a bad woman," and Garrison reported that he called her a bad mother. CNN reported that Martinez had decided about two months earlier that he would kill Ruiz and then came back to Alabama to do it. On March 4, 2013, Martinez, Ruiz and Jaime Romero, who was dating Martinez's daughter, drove in Romero's truck toward the edge of the Bankhead National Forest. Ruiz was shot twice in the head near the Speake community in Lawrence County. Martinez later told Romero, when Romero asked him why: "That's how I take care of my family," according to the Decatur Daily.
Two hunters, both off-duty police officers, found the body in a pasture. Next to it lay a Walmart receipt. Its time stamp led investigators to store surveillance video from Huntsville, and Romero was arrested within days. He told investigators that Martinez had fired the shots and that he had been present. The gun later found near Romero's workplace was his, but experts could not link it conclusively to the killing; prosecutors said Martinez had borrowed it. The murder charge against Romero was later dropped. Lawrence County District Attorney Errek Jett later said the case had the marks of a murder that would never be solved, because Ruiz had no connection to the area where he was found.
Sheriff Gene Mitchell told WAFF in June 2013 that deputies had held Martinez shortly after the killing but had to let him go because the case was not yet strong enough. He went to Mexico.
In May 2013 Lawrence County obtained a fugitive warrant and entered it in the national crime database. NBC Los Angeles reported that less than an hour after the warrant was posted, Martinez tried to cross back into the United States and was arrested near Yuma, Arizona. Garrison reported that he came back because he learned the police planned to question his young granddaughter. He was returned to Alabama on June 3, 2013, charged with murder and held without bail in the Lawrence County jail.
Arizona was the place of his arrest only. No killing in Arizona has been reported as charged, or as claimed by him.
At first Martinez denied killing Ruiz. In a second interview, after nearly an hour of questioning, he admitted it, and then he kept going. "After he confessed to it, it was just like opening up the floodgate," Captain Tim McWhorter of the Lawrence County Sheriff's Office told AP. McWhorter said Martinez described himself as "the guy that pays you a visit" when a debt to the cartel went unpaid, and that he was clear from the start about what he would not discuss: the names of the people who hired him. He told the investigators that he had killed about 30 men, and he included the two Florida killings, which he said were a paid job. Detectives from several states traveled to Alabama to interview him in June 2013.
The Tulare County connection ran through one deputy. Sergeant Christal Derington of the Tulare County Sheriff's Office had first met Martinez during an investigation of home-invasion robberies in 2012 and 2013. From jail he asked to speak to her. She flew to Alabama three times, and officials credited those interviews with tying him to the California cases. Sheriff Mike Boudreaux later said Martinez had asked for her by name when he decided to tell his story. Derington described him as "pleasant and cooperative," the Valley Voice reported. Marion County detective T.J. Watts, who worked the Florida cold case, came away with a different view. "He is cold-hearted and he means business," Watts told NBC News. Watts said Martinez saw himself as "a bail bondsman for the cartels," and explained the killing as the way he fed his family: if he did not do the job, someone else would.
Investigators said they believed him because of what he knew. In California, Assistant Sheriff Scott Logue said his accounts of the victims' clothing, the positions of their bodies and the calibers of the bullets were "spot on almost 100 percent of the time." No DNA evidence was used in the California case. Garrison writes that he also wrote a handwritten memoir of about 400 pages while in custody.
He also offered a justification. He told investigators that he had killed men who had sexually abused children, and he told Garrison that he lived by a code: he killed only the person he was sent for, never family members, and only men who had hurt women or children. Authorities have not confirmed that any of his victims were sex offenders.
Martinez first pleaded not guilty in Alabama, and his lawyers, Thomas Turner and Paula Bassham, said they would challenge his confession on the ground that he had not been properly advised of his rights. A week before the plea hearing he told them he wanted to change his plea. In June 2014, in Lawrence County Circuit Court in Moulton, he pleaded guilty to the murder of Jose Ruiz before Judge Mark Craig, and the judge sentenced him to 50 years in prison. The Decatur Daily described him as anxious and fidgety; he said nothing beyond answering the judge's questions. Ruiz's relatives wept after the hearing and declined to comment.
Turner told the paper that a conviction at trial could have brought 99 years to life because of his prior felonies. Sheriff Mitchell said other states had by then confirmed 17 or 18 of the killings Martinez had described.
On April 8, 2014, while he was still in Alabama, the Tulare County District Attorney's office filed nine counts of murder and one of attempted murder. Six of the killings were in Tulare County, two in Kern County and one in Santa Barbara County. Under an agreement among the three counties, Tulare County took on all of them, because most of the witnesses lived there. The special circumstances alleged were multiple murder, lying in wait, kidnapping and murder for financial gain, which made him eligible for the death penalty. Assistant District Attorney Anthony Fultz told AP that the full scope of the killings was not known.
With help from the U.S. Marshals, he was extradited to California on September 3, 2014, and booked into the Tulare County pretrial jail without bail. He pleaded not guilty at his arraignment that week and was held in isolation as a high-risk inmate. The Tulare County release said Florida and nine other states were also interested in him as a person of interest in killings.
On October 6, 2015, the day his preliminary hearing was due to begin, he pleaded guilty in Tulare County Superior Court in Visalia to all nine murders and the attempted murder, answering to each count as Judge Brett Alldredge read it. In return, prosecutors gave up the death penalty. District Attorney Tim Ward said no relative of any victim had opposed the deal. His public defender, Nathan Leedy, declined to comment.
On November 2, 2015, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole; KFSN-TV reported the sentence as ten consecutive life terms, one for each count. He spoke one word, "yes," when the judge confirmed he did not wish to talk to the media. The prosecutor, David Alavezos, said Martinez's lawyers had told him their client wanted to plead and be done with the case. "Justice was a long time coming for these many families," Alavezos said.
Marion County prosecutors sought his extradition from California in November 2015 and announced they would seek the death penalty. The case came to trial in Ocala in June 2019. In mid-June the jury convicted him of first-degree murder in the deaths of Javier Huerta and Gustavo Olivares-Rivas.
In the penalty phase, Assistant State Attorney Amy Berndt argued that the killings were cold and calculated and asked for death. The defense, led by John Spivey, called more than a dozen relatives and a series of experts. They presented him as a loving father, uncle and brother, described the abuse of his childhood and showed the jury MRI scans to argue that his brain had been damaged. Under Florida law at the time, a death recommendation required all 12 jurors to agree.
On June 27, 2019, after deliberating for about two hours, the jury of seven women and five men recommended life in prison on each count. Judge Anthony Tatti presided. Martinez smiled and hugged his lawyers, WCJB reported, and his daughter wept. Spivey told Garrison afterward that, in the end, the jurors had weighed his human side more heavily. Martinez's daughter Joanna said: "I know it was in God's hands."
The 12 murders and one attempted murder are the whole of his court record. Everything beyond them rests on his own word and on what investigators said about it.
The number he gave changed with the telling. In June 2013 Alabama officials reported that he had confessed to about 30 killings; in April 2014 AP reported claims of up to 40; the Porterville Recorder, in September 2014, cited an admission of more than 50 contract killings nationwide; Garrison's book counts 36 killings in 12 states. In her reporting, he named Washington, Idaho, Oklahoma, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Colorado and the San Joaquin Valley among the places he said he had killed. In 2014 Alabama officials said other states had confirmed 17 or 18 of the killings, but no state other than Alabama, California and Florida has been reported as filing charges. The Tulare County Sheriff's Office called him a person of interest in other local homicides, and Garrison wrote that Central Valley police suspected him in many killings they never charged.
His claim to have worked for Mexican drug cartels has not been confirmed. He refused to name any organization or associate, and Assistant Sheriff Logue said in 2015 that there was no simple way to check it: "There were whispers for a long time." The Mob Museum account says his work was mainly debt collection and enforcement for the Sinaloa network, while noting that he claimed to work freelance; no prosecutor or court has made that finding. His account of killings before 1980, including the revenge killings he said he committed as a teenager, is also uncorroborated in any official source.
Jessica Garrison's book, The Devil's Harvest: A Ruthless Killer, a Terrorized Community, and the Search for Justice in California's Central Valley, was published by Hachette Books on August 4, 2020. It draws on his handwritten journals. Garrison, a former Los Angeles Times reporter, argued that he got away with killing for so long partly because many of his victims were poor farmworkers, some without legal status, in towns where police budgets had been cut, residents distrusted the authorities and few questions were asked when a man was found shot in an orange grove. Speaking to Valley Public Radio in 2020, she described Earlimart as a community whose residents had been left without protection. McFarland, the town near which two of the victims were found, had dissolved its own police department in 1991, she noted.
After the Florida verdict in June 2019, Martinez was serving life without parole in California, a 50-year term in Alabama and two life terms in Florida. A Mob Museum account in June 2024 said he was serving his sentences in California. No later report has said where he is held.
About 1962: Born; accounts differ on whether in Mexico or in Fresno, California.
1978: Year the Mob Museum gives for his older sister's killing; he later claimed revenge killings as a teenager (never charged).
October 21, 1980: David Bedolla, 23, shot while driving to work between Lindsay and Strathmore.
October 1, 1982: Sylvester Ayon, 30, killed on a ranch near Santa Ynez; a 17-year-old wounded.
October 19 to 21, 1982: Raul Gonzalez, 22, last seen at home; found east of Porterville.
April to May 23, 1995: Domingo Perez reported missing; found in an orange grove north of Richgrove.
February 14, 2000: Santiago Perez, 56, shot in his bed in Pixley.
November 6 to 8, 2006: Javier Huerta, 20, and Gustavo Olivares-Rivas, 28, killed; found in a pickup in the Ocala National Forest.
February 15, 2007: Jose Alvarado, 25, found near McFarland.
March 23, 2009: Juan Bautista Moreno, 52, found near McFarland.
September 30, 2009: Joaquin Barragan, 45, found on the Deer Creek canal bank.
February 7, 2011: Gonzalo Urquieta, 54, found outside Richgrove.
2012 to 2013: Tulare County deputies meet him during a home-invasion robbery inquiry.
February 2013: Florida DNA match on a cigarette butt from the 2006 truck.
March 4, 2013: Jose Arturo Ruiz, 32, shot in Lawrence County, Alabama.
May 2013: Arrested near Yuma, Arizona, on an Alabama warrant.
June 3, 2013: Returned to Alabama and charged; confesses to Ruiz's killing and many more.
April 8, 2014: Tulare County files nine murder counts and one attempted murder count.
June 2014: Pleads guilty in Lawrence County Circuit Court; 50 years.
September 3, 2014: Extradited to California.
October 6, 2015: Pleads guilty in Tulare County Superior Court.
November 2, 2015: Life without parole.
June 2019: Convicted of two first-degree murders in Marion County, Florida.
June 27, 2019: Jury recommends life; two life sentences.
August 4, 2020: The Devil's Harvest published.