A man accused of strangling two women on the same date but two years apart was extradited from Mexico and finally faces murder charges in connection with the over decade-old slayings.
Juan Antonio Arreola-Murillo, 42, faces three counts of aggravated murder, two counts of aggravated burglary, and one count of aggravated robbery for first murdering a young mom and then later killing a woman in her fifties, the Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office said.
“This is a 15-year-old case where we had multiple victims, so the due diligence to keep at it is important,” the county’s district attorney Sim Gill told KSL-TV.
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On February 9, 2006, Arreola-Murillo strangled 29-year-old Sonia Mejia, a young mom who was six months pregnant with her second child, according to a probable cause statement obtained by The Daily Beast. A neighbor told police that he saw a man chatting with Mejia just outside of her apartment at roughly 11:30 a.m. that day before he grabbed her by the throat and struck her in the head.
“Ms. Mejia fell to the floor inside of the apartment. The male entered the apartment and kicked the door shut,” the documents state. Mejia was sexually assaulted and her car was stolen. The woman’s husband later discovered her body in their bedroom, according to court documents.
Arreola-Murillo struck again on the same date two years later, according to authorities. On February 9, 2008, he allegedly sexually assaulted and strangled 57-year-old Damiana Castillo whose body was discovered a day later just inside her front door with ligature marks and evidence of a struggle with an overturned table, authorities said. She lived just a mile away from Arreola-Murillo’s first victim.
Police suspect that Arreola-Murillo also stole from his victims.
His spoils likely included three pieces of jewelry from Mejia, including a heart-shaped ruby ring, a diamond ring, and a pendant that went missing after Mejia’s murder, her husband told officers. Arreola-Murillo also appeared to have rifled through Castillo’s purse, dumping her wallet on the couch and messing with her jewelry boxes.
Days before the one-year anniversary of Castillo’s murder in 2009, then-West Valley City police Sgt. Mike Powell told the Salt Lake Tribune the suspect in the murders was “not considered a serial killer,” although he acknowledged that authorities were “concerned there are some similarities.”
For years, the suspect in the pair of cases was known as the ‘February 9th killer’ and local police would station additional officers in the area to ward off a third strangling in the neighborhood.
In 2010, prosecutors charged “John Doe” with two counts of aggravated murder, two counts of aggravated robbery, aggravated burglary, and aggravated sexual assault in 3rd District Court, according to Deseret News.
According to court documents, Arreola-Murillo’s identity eluded investigators until 2016 when the Automated Fingerprint Identification System maintained by the FBI revealed a match between his fingerprints and those found at Mejia’s home. An arrest warrant request was filed in 2017 and the suspect’s charging documents were amended on April 5, 2017.
But it wasn’t until November 2018 that county district attorney Sim Gill told KTVX, “We know where this person is, and we are working to bring that person into our jurisdiction.”
At that point, Arreola-Murillo had been deported to Mexico roughly 10 years before.
According to court documents, investigators had recovered fingerprints on objects at the homes of both women, including on a Cheetos bag and a Coke bottle in Mejia’s apartment, and on Castillo’s wallet in her home. The fingerprints linked the suspect to both crimes, but DNA from the Coke bottle and on items used to strangle the victims didn’t appear to match any DNA samples in law enforcement databases.
“Connecting the dots to connect that profile and that individual with an identifiable person was the next step that happened,” Gill told the Salt Lake Tribune on Monday, adding that a “paper trail” left by the suspect eventually enabled them to track him down.
Roxeanne Vainuku, a spokesperson for the West Valley police who investigated the death of Castillo, told KSL-TV that solving the case was “just another testament to the ‘never-give-up’ attitude of our investigators,” adding that for years detectives have “kept trying, kept testing, and kept searching for answers in this case.”
“It paid off and we are grateful. We hope that seeing the person responsible for this crime held accountable will bring at least some small measure of peace to Ms. Castillo’s family," she said.
