Inside Maricopa’s secret murder house

The only one who survived the house of horrors was the killer.

It wasn’t a righteous judgment, what he did. Pressing the barrel of a loaded gun against the face of a half-naked woman and pulling the trigger.

The likely gunman, once described as a quiet Maricopa neighbor and now believed to be living under a new identity — or dead — in a foreign country, where he has become untouchable, is the only one deserving of judgment.

His only Judgment Day will be, or perhaps was, at the hands of God, if you believe in that.
He did.

A months-long InMaricopa investigation unravels the mystery of how the public has been blind to this — a homicide, as mysterious as it was gruesome, that evaded the news for years. Neighbors never forgot — and they have questions about racism and government transparency.

Ruth Eunice Encinas, 52, is one of those neighbors on Whirly Bird Road, an unpaved byway that gnaws through 2 miles of mostly bare desert, dotted with the occasional mobile home. And one of those homes was the Maricopa house of horrors that no one ever knew about.
Until now.

Encinas told InMaricopa: “Welcome to the city of lies.”

‘He may have fled to Mexico’

The year was 2021. The day was April Fool’s. But the body on the floor, it was no joke.

María de Lourdes Moya Jasso, a complicated victim, was due to turn 53 that April. She never celebrated her birthday.

Because the body on the floor belonged to her.

By the time worried relatives asked Pinal County Sheriff’s Office for a welfare check on Whirly Bird’s 49000 block a day later, the sheriff’s spokesperson Lauren Reimer said, neither she nor her husband, Antonio Flores-Perez, had been heard from for “several days.”
Moya was dead, her pants removed. Gravity pulled all the blood it could from the bullet hole in her nose, long since dried to a sickening shade of brown, and rigor mortis had come and gone. But something was missing.

“Antonio Flores-Perez was not located,” Reimer said. “Flores-Perez was immediately considered a person of interest.”

He’s 51 years old today, if he’s still alive. No one has seen him.

Stranger yet, a months-long scour of dozens of databases of public records conducted by multiple journalists yielded no record of the couple’s marriage nor Flores-Perez’s living in Maricopa. He is a Mexican national.

Moya, meanwhile, is well documented to have lived in Pinal County at least since the early 1990s.

“Her husband was nowhere to be found,” said Encinas, who raised four daughters in Hidden Valley. “Did he flee to Mexico? My guess is yes.”

Reimer said Moya’s red Ford F-150 pickup truck was located in the following days in a remote area of western Pinal County.

“Both the scene of the homicide and the location where the truck was discovered were searched extensively over many days,” she said. “At this time, it is unknown if Flores-Perez is still alive, or if he may have fled to Mexico.”

Flores-Perez was entered into the National Crime Information Center and the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, both federal agencies, as a missing and endangered person.

He is the only suspect in his wife’s murder.

Meth, coke and Xanax

The gold wedding ring that her likely killer had once given her as a token of their specious love was still astringed her cold, stiff, dead finger, said Pinal County Medical Examiner Suzi Dolt, Forensic Technician Samantha Kuba, Crime Scene Technician Anthony John Camit and PCSO Det. Michael Hughey in a joint report released for the first time to InMaricopa Oct. 14.

Hughey has been the detective in charge of this case since day one, he said.

The nine-page report, dated May 2, 2021, describes a healthy, well-nourished woman who had only just started to decompose. But she was not recognizable — she had been shot in the face, and the bullet was still lodged in her brain, which had liquified.

Dr. John Hu, chief medical examiner, naturally classified the death as a murder caused by a gunshot wound to the head. But interviews with examiners, neighbors of the murder house and a report from the Axis Forensic Toxicology Laboratory in Indianapolis, Ind., only thickened the air of mystery surrounding the homicide case that almost immediately went ice-cold.

Dr. George S. Behonick, director of the federal laboratory that released its findings to InMaricopa, found high levels of methamphetamine, marijuana and alcohol in Moya’s liver, and moderate amounts of cocaine and benzoylecgonine, the active ingredient in Xanax.

Investigators have not concluded if she took the concoction of drugs willingly. Such a cocktail is eye-watering to see in an autopsy report, even in cases of severe drug abuse, according to several journalists who have covered cases of death for decades.

Encinas, the neighbor, meanwhile, remembers that “an older couple was renting my neighbor’s home, and the next thing I knew, the lady’s older daughters from Casa Grande found their mom decapitated.” There is no mention of decapitation in the autopsy reports.

But Moya had a long criminal history of her own.

She had pled guilty to check fraud in Casa Grande Justice Court in 2001 and making a false bomb threat in Maricopa Justice Court in 2010. In Pinal County Superior Court, she was convicted of first-degree criminal trespass, theft and criminal damage.

In her final years of life, she was arrested regularly in Maricopa for driving with a revoked license and stolen plates. Missing from her protracted criminal record, though, was a single instance of drug use.

What happened on Whirly Bird Road?

What troubles Encinas most, she said, is that for nearly three years, she believes she has been the only person outside of law enforcement who knew anything about what happened inside that needlessly bloodied home. InMaricopa discovered the case in a sweeping Freedom of Information Act request to the NCIC for cold case files in and near the city of Maricopa.

“Do not be surprised by the lack of public information you will see or read,” Encinas said.
While agencies responsible for the cold case maintain they continue to actively search for Flores-Perez, Encinas rightly questions why there was never a news story, never a press release, never a BOLO — a “be on the lookout” bulletin from law enforcement.

She thinks, however, she has an answer to her own question.

“Don’t expect much on the real news especially if you’re not White,” she said. “These were all Mexicans this all happened to, so it wasn’t reported.

“I don’t see any other reason.”

Encinas’s daughter, when she was in high school, was a passenger in a fatal crash on Whirly Bird Road that killed two of the car’s five occupants. Her daughter survived, albeit with some injuries and mental trauma that she endures today.

The fatalities were never reported in a newspaper.

And the neighbor who lived in the house of horrors before Moya and Flores-Perez did — the owner of the property has never lived there, the Pinal County Assessor’s Office confirmed — “got shot in the head, dying instantly while chasing coyotes out of his yard,” Encinas said.

She said she was told it was a freak accident.

Could it, too, have been a murder?

“I can tell you this,” Encinas said, referring to homicides at the recondite house next door. “There are many more that were never reported on the news.”

Most area murders, recently, still unsolved

Maricopa doesn’t have a murder problem. It has, perhaps, a problem solving murders.
Three murder cases in as many years — just one has seen an arrest, in August 2021 when Tucson police captured Juan Jose Cazares Jr. hours after he gunned down two people on Prado Street in Rancho Mirage.

Most recently, the body of Crystal Uptain, 38, a Homestead resident who had Hispanic lineage, was found dumped in the desert Dec. 5, 2023, near Butterfield Station Landfill in unincorporated Maricopa on 99th Avenue near State Route 238.

It’s a case that echoes, eerily, many of the details of the Moya murder:

• Male romantic partner the only suspect
• Found with gunshot wound and pants removed
• Case went cold almost immediately
• Female victim had criminal history
• Victim linked to drug use, but never arrested for it
• Discarded vehicle among only clues
• Case begins with welfare check in Maricopa

Uptain’s live-in boyfriend, Bruce Hogan, who today calls Uptain his “widow” although the two were never married, has long been the prime suspect, investigators say. His name was printed on a bracelet still clinging to her decomposed hand, inches down from a gunshot wound in her arm.

Hogan waited nine days after Uptain disappeared to report her missing from the couple’s Grantham Road home. It was just two hours after Uptain’s grandmother, Patricia Morales, filed a missing person report when he finally dialed 911.

He told cops he didn’t report his girlfriend’s disappearance sooner because he knew she had a warrant out for her arrest. Court records showed Uptain, who worked at Fry’s Marketplace on John Wayne Parkway, was arrested in August 2023 for lying to police and a bench warrant was issued when she failed to show up for court two months later.

Hogan had told police a lover’s quarrel one month before her body was found led Uptain to leave the house because “she needed some space.” He said he was fast asleep at 5 p.m. when she left.

During the initial welfare check, he told the cops his girlfriend left in a tan 2004 Toyota Camry he owned but to which only she had the keys. But later that same day, he called Officer Nigel Bell at the Maricopa Police Station and “informed that he lied to me about Crystal’s vehicle,” Bell said.

Hogan confessed he left the car at a junkyard two weeks before the discovery of Uptain’s body. When asked, he said he didn’t know which junkyard.

Investigators discovered there was no such Camry registered to Hogan or Uptain. Hogan could not recall a VIN or license plate number.

Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Monica Bretado said last month that “this is an active and ongoing investigation” and “there are no updates at this time.” MCSO and MPD are working on the case in tandem.

An MPD spokesperson had nothing to add.

MCSO homicide detectives said they found “some suspicious circumstances involving the scene” where investigators believe Uptain’s body was dragged to a concealed area.

Uptain was barefoot with her pants removed, and her face was severely decomposed with “a lot of insect activity.” Surveyors working on a new dump site for Waste Management stumbled across her body and immediately called 911.

In her initial call to the police for a welfare check, Morales, the grandmother, said she believed Hogan harmed her granddaughter.

A teary-eyed Morales last year told MPD Officer Irene McCorry she felt “in her heart that Bruce [Hogan] killed her [Uptain]” and that Uptain “was probably dead in the desert.”
At the time, she did not know how right she was.

Morales said a month prior, Uptain called her crying after her boyfriend hit her. She said Hogan owned guns and would frequent a desert area to go shooting but didn’t specify where.

Speaking of Hogan, Laura Castaneda, who attended Uptain’s funeral, told InMaricopa “he didn’t seem sad and was laughing, and something was way off.”

“He hardly said two words about having any good memories with her,” Castaneda said. “He stayed back from everyone; it was very alarming.”

The victim’s brother, Robert Uptain, also lived at that Grantham Road home with his sister and Hogan. While police identified him as an investigative lead, he wasn’t home during the welfare check and the police report doesn’t indicate he was interviewed. He never reported his sister missing.

Hogan mentioned “drug issues” when he reported Uptain missing, according to MPD. She doesn’t have any drug-related charges on her record, court records revealed. When the story of Uptain’s murder made national headlines last December and friends and family spoke publicly about her, Hogan declined any interviews with reporters.

No other suspects were ever named. Hogan has not been charged with any crime.

All people are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. And all murder cases are cold — until they’re not.

But they do, eventually, get solved in Maricopa. Or, at least, they can.

One month after Moya was murdered on Whirly Bird Road, MPD arrested Anthony Hayes, 65, during a traffic stop. He had murdered Stella McCrary, 69, in Alabama — 33 years before.

Editor’s note: This story first appeared in print Nov. 16. On Nov. 22, a 16-year-old was shot and killed in the Maricopa Meadows. Police have not yet declared the shooting death a homicide, although two children have been arrested on undisclosed charges.