Ruiz found guilty in double murder trial

SEMINOLE — After seven hours of deliberation Friday night, a nine-woman, three-man Gaines County jury found Bobby Ray Ruiz guilty of capital murder in the 2012 slayings of John Allen and Jay Doyal at Allen’s home just east of Hobbs.

Ruiz, 31, of Hobbs, is the fourth and final defendant to be convicted in the crimes and the third to receive a mandatory sentence of life in a Texas prison without parole. Desirae Mata and Juan “Smoke” Castillo were convicted as accessories in 2015.

A fourth defendant, Nicomedes Daniel “Dan-Dan” Sosa,” agreed to a plea bargain deal with the state and became the primary witness for the defense. In two separate testimonies, Sosa, now serving two concurrent 33-year sentences for his role in the slayings, gave a completely different but detailed account of how he alone carried out the killings on May 10, 2012.

Along with a body of mostly circumstantial evidence from both sides, the jury was faced with the task of determining which of the two accounts was credible — Sosa’s chilling admissions, or the jailhouse confession of Castillo, corroborated by the prosecution’s key witness, Angie Brown. Brown was an Alabama inmate who befriended Mata as Mata was awaiting transport back to Texas in 2012.

The guilty sentence came amidst a barrage of evidence, much of it redundant by design, which was unleashed over the two-week trial by the defense team of Rick Wardroup and Ron McLaurin. Testimony continued into a ninth and final day on Friday, beginning with Lubbock Medical Examiner Sridhar Natarajan.

While adding nothing new to the existing trial testimony that is part of the record, Natarajan’s more meticulous description of the mortal wounds to the bodies of Doyal and Allen was yet another layer of testimony intended to highlight the erroneous information provided by Castillo in his confession to former Hobbs Police Department detective Rodney Porter.

The prosecution called witness Sierra Garcia, now under probation for crimes in Hobbs and Levelland, Texas, who was identified by Angie Brown as one who told her as the two were being transported from Plains, Texas, to Seminole for Mata’s 2015 trial that she had been with Ruiz within three days of his release from UMC Lubbock.

According to Brown, Garcia had said that she remembered a Ruiz who, while he would wince from pain from a bullet wound he had suffered eight days before the murders, was “getting around” and driving. That appeared to be corroborated by release papers from UMC Lubbock on May 3, 2012, that described Ruiz’s range of motion upon his discharge. Ruiz missed a follow-up appointment at UMC scheduled for May 10, 2012, the day of the murders.

In this trial, Ruiz family members had testified that Ruiz had been too incapacitated to have participated in the Gaines County crime, and provided alibis for his whereabouts on May 10.

On Friday, Garcia testified that she was on drugs during the time of the conversation with Brown, that she did not share information with Brown, and that recorded statements she made to Texas Ranger Brian Burney were “probably not true.”

As its final witness, the prosecution called Burney, who played the primary role in the investigation of a broader murder conspiracy. In his third appearance on the stand, Burney testified that Sosa had never claimed to be the lone shooter at the Allen house early in the investigation, and refused to corroborate statements made by Natalie Rash that Sosa had admitted to a singular role in the crime.

Under questioning by the defense, Burney admitted if an abundance of DNA from Jerry Castillo (no relation to Juan) in the Allen house had been available in 2012, he would not have eliminated Castillo as a suspect early on. While Wardroup’s line of questioning attempted to put Jerry Castillo at the scene with Sosa, prosecutor Jennifer Bassett would later remind the jury that no other evidence or testimony, including Allen’s enemies list, would implicate Castillo in a conspiracy with the accused foursome.

In closing arguments, District Attorney Philip Mack Furlow told the jury “the families of Jay Doyal and John Allen have had a long wait in their pursuit of justice.”

“It all begins with diamonds,” Furlow said, recounting the recorded conversation between Mata and a jailed Rolando Cantu. Furlow reminded the jury Ruiz’s DNA was found on items in the house, and some of the information provided by Juan Castillo during his confession had been crafted in such a way as to “minimize his own guilt,” leading to the inaccuracies.

In his close, Wardroup gave a detailed rundown of the testimony that had portrayed Juan Castillo as impaired during his jailhouse confession, and Porter as a “dirty cop.” The Lubbock attorney continued to inject Jerry Castillo into the scene and characterized Mata’s conviction as a “horrible miscarriage of justice.”

Wardroup went on to highlight Brown’s manipulation, and likened it to what he believed was prosecutor Bassett’s manipulation of language. Wardroup implied much of Brown’s information could have been discovered via a Google search.

Bassett herself delivered the kind of impassioned closing argument that has become her forte in a number of Gaines County criminal proceedings. Bassett pointed out the boastful “Most Hated” tattoos that adorned several of those implicated in this crime, including Ruiz, Sosa, and Cantu — tattoos that denote a type of especially violent criminal subculture on the streets of Hobbs, N.M.

“Most Hated,” Bassett told the jury. “Do you really think we have four totally unconnected individuals here?”

Bassett replayed for the jury the recording of Mata’s profanity-laced rant the night before the murders, belittling both the father of her child and finally the child himself. She curses Allen for his plans to leave Hobbs for Oklahoma. The recording was made on May 9, 2012.

“That is the reason it happened on May 10th,” Bassett said.

It was a tirade that included Mata’s memorable words, “people die over diamonds.” Bassett went on to point out that, within a space of just a few days and weeks, Mata had slept with Cantu, Sosa and their common enemy, Allen, all for specific reasons.

Bassett pointed out things Brown knew that could have never been discovered through a Google search, and invoked the “hit list” of persons Allen had become suspicious of, a list that did not include Jerry Castillo, but did name the four who would become suspects in his own killing.

After the guilty verdict was delivered, Cindie Doyal, mother of one of the victims, took the witness stand and thanked all the professionals and the juries involved in the process of gaining the four convictions. Cindie Doyal was allowed to offer the final words to the courtroom to end the six-year saga.

“It’s a part of the injustice that our family, and the Allen family, are having to somehow reconstruct the essence of who Jay Bradley and John Robert were in life,” she said. “The truth is, there is no way to achieve that. So instead we must let you see and hear our pain, so you can get a sense of the depth of our loss.”

Cindie Doyal described the close childhood relationship between Jay and his brother Grady and other members of the family. She reminded a silent court that on the day of his death, Jay’s car was packed for a return to her home in Arizona for Mother’s Day, and “to start a new chapter in his life.”

She ended her statements with a narrative from Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber. A part of that reading was as follows:

“I really believe that when someone else does us harm, we’re connected to that mistreatment like a chain... Maybe retaliation, or holding on to anger, about the harm done to me, doesn’t actually combat evil. Maybe it feeds it.

“Because in the end, if we’re not careful, we can actually absorb the worst of our enemy, and on some level, even start to become them. So what if forgiveness... is actually a way of wielding bolt-cutters and snapping the chain that links us? Like it is saying, ‘What you did was so not OK that I refuse to be connected to it anymore.’

“Forgiveness is about being a freedom fighter, and free people are dangerous people. Free people aren’t controlled by the past. Free people laugh more than others. Free people see beauty where others do not. Free people are not easily offended. Free people are unafraid to speak truth to stupid. Free people are not chained to resentments.

“That’s worth fighting for. There really is a light that shines in the darkness, and that the darkness cannot, will not, shall not overcome it.”