On March 5, 2021 security staff at the Albuquerque International Sunport traced a smell of decomposition to a red Ford Ranger pickup parked on the top level of the airport garage. In the cab, wrapped in a tarp, was the truck's owner, Randall Apostalon, sixty. In the bed were plastic storage bins holding the dismembered remains of three people reported missing from Grants, a small city on Interstate 40 about eighty miles west: Jennifer Lannon, thirty-nine; Jesten Mata, forty; and Matthew Miller, twenty-one. The day before, Jennifer Lannon's former husband, Sean Lannon, had boarded a flight to Philadelphia with his three children.
Grants police described the three as friends. Jennifer Lannon, born Whitman, was separated from Sean Lannon, and prosecutors later called Mata her boyfriend. Miller was not, and the police lieutenant who spoke for the department, David Chavez, said early on that he could not see how Miller had become involved. Apostalon had no connection to Grants beyond a job. He lived out of his car and gave people rides for money.
What happened in Grants rests largely on Lannon's own account, set out in an arrest warrant affidavit filed in New Mexico on March 26, 2021. He told investigators that in late January he came home to find his former wife and Mata together, that the two were having an affair and had drugged the children to make them sleep. After Mata left, he said, Jennifer tried to overdose on heroin; she still had a pulse, so he shot her in the head. He said he meant to kill himself and put the gun away when he heard one of the children cry. It was a week, by his telling, before he could lure Mata back and shoot him, and another week before Miller came to the house and was shot. He accused Miller of selling drugs to the other two. The account was never tested at a trial.
He covered the killings by telling police and others that the three had run off with a bag of drugs, and for a time New Mexico investigators wondered whether Jennifer Lannon and Mata had something to do with Miller's disappearance. The timing has never been settled. Grants police said all three were reported missing in January; the affidavit's sequence of weeks would put Miller's death in February, and reporting from New Jersey dated his disappearance to February 1. Lannon said he cut up the bodies of Mata and Miller with handsaws and knives to fit them into containers, and carpet and flooring were later found stripped from the house. In mid-February friends who knew nothing of the contents helped him move the bins, with the rest of his belongings, to Albuquerque.
There he hired Apostalon to help move and store them. In the parking lot of an apartment complex in southeast Albuquerque he beat Apostalon to death, then drove his pickup, with Apostalon in the cab and the bins in the bed, to the airport garage.
The flight took him east. On March 8, three days after the truck was opened, Michael Dabkowski, sixty-six, was found beaten to death with a hammer in his home in East Greenwich Township, Gloucester County, New Jersey. Lannon had known him since childhood. He later said Dabkowski had sexually abused him as a boy and that he had acted in self-defense; neither claim was tested. He took Dabkowski's wallet, keys and car and drove west, and on March 10 United States Marshals arrested him in St. Louis, still driving it.
In a phone call to a relative he admitted to more killings, and he told investigators he had killed sixteen people, fifteen of them in New Mexico. Police there found no missing-person reports or other records pointing to any victim beyond the four in the truck, and no further death has been charged.
New Jersey went first. In October 2022 he pleaded guilty to murdering Dabkowski, and in December Superior Court Judge John Eastlack sentenced him under the plea agreement with the Gloucester County Prosecutor's Office to thirty-five years, thirty of them before any chance of parole. He was extradited to New Mexico in June 2023 and made his first appearance in an Albuquerque court that month. In May 2024 he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for Apostalon and was sentenced to fifteen years; at that hearing Apostalon's brother, Daniel, asked him what deranged state of mind had consumed him. On June 5, 2024, under a second agreement that reduced the charges from first degree, he pleaded guilty to three counts of second-degree murder for Jennifer Lannon, Mata and Miller and received forty-five years, to run after the Apostalon term: sixty years in New Mexico.
How the two states' sentences fit together is reported two ways. Accounts of the plea terms say he serves the New Jersey sentence first and is then returned to New Mexico for the sixty years. A report from Albuquerque television at the time of the June plea said the New Jersey sentence would run concurrently with the New Mexico terms. The published record does not resolve which is correct.