One Body, Then Another: The Baffling Mystery of Two Murdered Neighbors

After more than a year, the New York City Housing Authority was finally going to at least inspect the water leaking into 62-year-old Ana Del Valle’s apartment from the floor above.

“It was a constant struggle to get Housing to come by,” her daughter, Mireya, later told The Daily Beast.

Otherwise, Ana almost certainly would have headed out on the morning of Friday, May 11, 2018, as she did every day. She might have spent the day at one of the nearby community centers, maybe taking a yoga or a zumba class. Or she might have headed for the gym she had just joined even though she suffered from disabling sciatica and gnarled toes from her years or working over sweatshop sewing machines.

“She was a fighter,” Mireya said. “She had that pain and she would go on. Her thing was when we die, we’re always asleep, so you should get up and enjoy.”

At the very least, she would have just kept herself busy outside.

“She didn’t like to stay home,” her daughter recalled. “She’d be out in the community. Everyone knew her.”

But with the Housing Authority promising to finally send somebody, Ana stayed in Apartment 5C at 140 Moore St. in Brooklyn as twins Mireya and Luis, then 40, departed for work. The siblings had no presentiment that their mother was about to figure in a murder mystery that would begin with one victim and then suddenly involve two and continue to confound detectives who conducted hundreds of interviews and reviewed multiple terabytes of video.

“A real head scratcher,” NYPD Lt. Mike Spezio of the 90th Precinct Detective Squad told The Daily Beast.

Spezio has cause to believe more than one killer was involved. But he has no reason to believe that the victims are anything other than two innocent people with no personal connection to each other. He is tormented by a fundamental question that has bedeviled all his squad’s best efforts for three years.

“I just want to know why,” Spezio said.

On that fateful day, Mireya was running late and did not see her mother as she hurried from the apartment around 8 a.m. She thought maybe her mother was upstairs, checking with the neighbors whose apartment was the source of the longtime leak.

Mireya was walking to the subway when she began worrying that she had accidentally locked her mother out of the apartment. Mireya called. Ana answered and explained she had just been in another room when Mireya left and that all was well, except that she was still waiting for the Housing Authority.

When Mireya feft work that evening, she stopped to buy some flowers,

“That was Mother’s Day weekend,” she later noted.

Arriving home, Mireya saw a mop and bucket outside their unit’s door, which was unlocked. She figured her ever-active mother had used the waiting time to clean the floor’s common hallway, as she sometimes did. Ana had been known to clean even the stairwells, where there was on occasion human waste.

“I saw the mop and the cleaning supplies and I was going to get on her,” Mireya recalled. “She has sciatica and that would make it worse.”

“Why are you cleaning a hallway? You know it’s not going to make you get any better,” she was saying as she walked into the apartment.

She stopped in mid-scold when she saw mother on the floor, and her mind initially refused to process fully what she beheld.

“I didn’t understand what had happened,” Mireya remembered. “I thought maybe she fell and hurt her head. There was a pool of blood around her head. I thought she slipped or something.”

She saw that her mother’s hands were bound with the electrical cord of the massager she sometimes used to ease the pain in her limbs.

“It was like a movie,” Mireya recalled. “I was there but it was almost like I wasn't there. It was too surreal to understand what was going on.”

Two suddenly vivid details told her what had happened.

“I saw the gunshot in the forehead and I saw the [shell] casing on the floor,” she said. “I just called the police.”

She also telephoned her older brother, Hector, who has a home in another part of Brooklyn. But she could not just tell him over the phone what was too unreal, enormous and absolutely horrifying for her herself to fully accept.

“I could only tell him, ‘You need to come home,’” she said.

She stepped outside the apartment.

“I wanted to knock on people’s doors,” she recalled. “For some reason, I couldn’t. I was just yelling in the hallway for somebody to help us. Nobody came out.”

At 6:47 p.m., the police and an ambulance arrived in response to what was initially reported as an assault.

Ana was pronounced dead at the scene. Spezio and his 90th Precinct Detective Squad responded, with the Brooklyn North Homicide squad assisting. Spezio would later say that Ana had most likely been killed sometime between 8:40 a.m. and 9:30 a.m., which would mean that when Mireya called her, she had no more than two hours to live.

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The Crime Scene Unit set to work. Spezio noted that the apartment was immaculate and there was no sign anybody had rummaged through it. Nothing appeared to be missing.

Detectives began canvassing the surrounding apartments. There was no answer at 5B next door and they continued on. Nobody reported seeing or hearing anything.

Mireya and her siblings were interviewed at the station house. They could offer no insight as to why anybody would have done that to their mother.

“They are a good family,” Spezio noted.

That Sunday was Mother's Day. Spezio was off-duty and out with his family when he got a call that sent him rushing back to 140 Moore.

The ex-girlfriend of 54-year-old Basil Gray in Apartment 5B next door to Ana had become worried when she did not hear from him after a text exchange three days before. She used a hidden spare key to enter the apartment and what she saw prompted her to call 911.

Spezio arrived to what would have been a mystery just in itself. Gray had been shot multiple times and dried blood indicated he had gone from the kitchen to the living room, where he collapsed and died. His home was also immaculate and there was no sign anybody had gone through it or stolen anything.

An added twist came when there proved to be shell casings of two different calibers: .380 and 9mm. Some guns can fire both, but ballistics examination indicated two weapons were used. That suggested there were two gunmen.

The detectives now knew why Gray had not answered when they knocked on his door two days before. Security camera video showed him entering the building with a coffee around 8 a.m. that Friday looking relaxed, as befitting someone who lived a quiet life peddling perfumes and such on the street.

“That probably was within an hour of his demise,” Spezio later said.

The video and subsequent interviews enabled detectives to determine that Gray rode up in the elevator with a number of other people, casually chatting.

“He got off on his floor and nobody got off with him,” Spezio said.

And now knowing that multiple shots had been fired by two guns, the detectives again went door to door. They were all the more frustrated as person after person gave the same response.

“It just baffles me that nobody in that building saw anything,” Spezio said. “I just don’t understand it.”

Video of both the front and back entrances as well as the surrounding streets did not capture anyone who appeared to be trying to conceal their face or otherwise acting suspiciously.

“Nobody leaving in a huff,” Spezio said. “You don’t see anybody running out.”

The detectives did note that one building resident changed his clothes three times in less than an hour. They questioned him, but he became less of a suspect and more of a possible witness when he showed them a cell phone video he said he had taken the day of the killings through the front door peephole in his apartment.

Detectives released the video to the public, hoping somebody would identify them. But the figures were wearing knit caps and heavy clothing more in keeping with winter cold than a brisk May morning. And the quick-change witness said he had lost the phone used to make the video. The lead went nowhere. The detectives nonetheless relocated the man and his family when he expressed fear for his safety.

Meanwhile, as many as 20 detectives at a time worked the case. A narcotics dog was brought in and confirmed that there had been no drugs at the scene. The area’s major bad guys were questioned and professed to know nothing.

“I believe many of them told us the truth,” Spezio later said.

Lesser criminals were also interviewed, with little result.

“We’re debriefed hundreds of people,” Spezio said.

Cops handed out flyers and made it known that a reward had grown to $23,500. The FBI got involved.

“They have a lot more resources and leeway,” Spezio noted.

Spezio was left with a host of questions about the killing he could not answer. Was it planned? Did Ana and Gray interrupt something? Did Ana happen to be in the hallway when something happened involving Gray? Did she see exactly what happened?

Spezio could only say, “I don’t know.”

He did say that from seeing Ana after the shooting, “It seemed she wasn’t expecting it.”

Spezio theorized that the killers may not have initially known what they were going to do, or they would not likely have gone to the trouble of tying her up. He could only hope that she did not have to listen to them discuss what to do with her.

“How long was she tied up? How long were they discussing it before they decided?” Spezio wondered.

On the first anniversary of the killings, Ana’s children held a vigil outside the building. The elder son, Hector raised a megaphone and addressed all those inside.

“I want you to say something,” he said, adding, “It could be your mother next. She was special.”

Mireya handed out leaflets with a photo of Ana, saying, “This is our mom. If you know anything…”

The family had set up a Justice for Ana Del Valle Facebook page. One video shows her dancing, forming a heart shape with her fingers. Another shows her smiling and giving a thumb’s up. https://www.facebook.com/search/top?q=justice%20for%20ana%20del%20valle

“She just wanted to live her life,” Mireya said.

The second anniversary was followed by the third.

“I never thought three years would have passed without anybody being caught,” Mireya said.

She and Hector told The Daily Beast that their mother had come to America with her children from Honduras in 1983.

“The American nightmare started as the American dream,” Mierya said.

Hector was 10 and the twins were five when they arrived in the U.S. They would remember that Ana had her first encounter with an escalator at the airport in Dallas.

“She was very nervous,” Mireya recalled.

Ana supported them by working in a sweatshop with the intensity that comes with being paid by how much you produce.

“Per dozen of sweaters,” Hector said.

Ana made sure they had new clothes at the start of each new school year.

“So we could be the best we could be,” Mireya siad.

Somehow, it had ended with Ana tied up and executed for reasons nobody can yet determine.

“Our mom died and we died with her,” Mireya said. “We’re basically just going on because we want justice for her.”

Nobody could be more determined than Spezio to get it for both victims, whom he views as equally innocent. Many cops have one particular case that stays with them, and this is Spezio’s.

“This is my baby,” he said. “I’m on it every day. I’m thinking about it every night. I eat and breathe the case.””

He remains convinced that somebody in Ana’s building has critical information.

“I just want somebody in 140 to come forward,” he said. “I know somebody in 140 knows.”

Spezio keeps in his office a photo taken of the press briefing after the second killing. It shows Deputy Chief Michael Kemper of Brooklyn North Detectives addressing the media, with Spezio standing off to the side with the look of a squad boss suddenly facing a second killing next door to one that was already a baffling mystery.

“I didn’t know if it could be a serial killer or what it was,” he recalled.

Three years later, he has discounted the possibility of a serial killer, but he still does not have an answer. He is nonetheless confident about the ultimate outcome.

“I know we’re going to get them,” he said.

He said that if the case is unsolved when he retires and maybe moves out of state, he will come rushing back when he hears there has been an arrest.

“I'll be on the next plane,” he said.

To ensure the authorities do not forget their mother, Ana’s children call the detectives and the FBI every month.

“Religiously,” Mireya said. “She just wanted to live her life.”