The Hunt for America's Deadliest Hitman

It's 1978. Jose is 16 years old. He lives with his family on a ranch near Earlimart, Tulare County.

It's a beautiful place surrounded by Californian vineyards. One day his sister Cecilia has a request. Jose was the last person to see Cecilia alive but when he made a witness statement He then went on to shoot two more people who were also in the house A cold blooded triple homicide at the age of 16.

In the following decades, Jose will kill more than 30 people. What begins with a young act of revenge ends in one of the most ruthless hitmen for the Mexican drug cartels. His victims are scattered across the entire US and of course, in his home county Tulare.

He is taking the lives of both young and old drug dealers and farm workers, fathers and husbands. It will take over 30 years to police from three different states to bring him down. This is the story of Jose Manuel Martinez El Mano Negra, the black hand, one of America's deadliest Hitman We love animation and deep research, but it's expensive.

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It's fun and super satisfying to solve many logic problems and puzzles. Why don't you give it a shot? You know, before I ever met him, I talked to a lot of police officers, you know, homicide detectives, murder detectives who had dealt with him.

And they all said the same thing, which is when you meet him, he is the most charming person you will ever meet. This is Jessica Garrison, a journalist and author. In 2017, she met Jose in prison for BuzzFeed News investigation and her book "The Devil's Harvest".

The perspective of his family was that he was the person in the family who always took care of them. If you were in the hospital, he was the person that would come visit you If the hospital wouldn't let you in. He was the person that would find a way to like, hoist children up to the window so they could wave at you.

I think he was not a person who ever anyone who just first met him ever suspected of being a multiple murderer. How does a polite, loving family man turn into a mass murderer? Martinez is born in 1962 in Fresno, California.

He's a U. S. citizen, but he grows up in Mexico until the age of 11.

He then moves with his family to a ranch near Earlimart. At the time, Tulare is the poorest county in California. His stepfather organizes laborers for the wine industry and as a side business deals drugs.

At the age of 14, Martinez is sent on his first drug courier trip by bus. Later, he uses his own car. As a bilingual US-born teenager Martinez can easily stay under the radar of authorities.

In 1977, the police raid his family's ranch They confiscate $2. 5 million worth of heroin and various weapons. Then in 1978, while a stepfather was in custody Cecilia is murdered.

Martinez said that he was a nice man until they killed his sister. Since then, he said, “F*ck the r*pers and the child molesters". So he did in 1979: His first victim is David Bedolla.

A friend tells Martinez that Bedolla r*ped his sister. Martinez does the job for $500. His first murder for money.

In 1982 he meets a man from a mexican drug cartel, most likely Sinaloa. He only refers to him as Mr X. Mr X was involved in the moving of large amout of narcotics drugs from Mexico through California and to points beyond.

and Mr X you know gave MrMartinez numerous jobs killing people. Not every job from Mr X is directly related to murder. Most of the time, Martinez is tasked with collecting debts from smalltime drug dealers.

He receives his assignment through phone calls or brief personal meetings. A lot of it is sold on spec. I give you the drugs you sell the drugs you give some of the money back to me.

Right. But if you take the drugs and you don't give the money back to me, we have a problem. Then Jose Martinez would go and collect that money.

Martinez does end up in jail several times For example, in 1990 because of his drug career activities. But he is never charged with his murders. That's weird because his name does appear in several homicide cases.

Going back all the way to 1979. I mean, it's fine if you turn up in 1 murder case. Maybe that's bad luck.

Two maybe a coincidence, seven or eight - you got to be like huh. What's happening here? In hindsight, it's difficult to understand why no one connected the dots back then.

It will take many years and several victims before someone picks up Martinez's trail. November 2006. Martinez flies to Florida to deal with a 20 year old named Javier Huerta.

Javier is accused of stealing ten kilogram of cocaine worth around $170,000. Martinez keeps a close eye on Huertas for a few days and then he decides to strike. Martinez gets the money.

$150,000 are buried in Huertas Garden. He shoots Huerta and his colleague four times each. He binds their hands with zip ties and puts their bodies in Huerta's truck He takes the car and drives it to the outskirts of a national park, smoking a cigaret on the way, perhaps to calm down.

After the job, Martinez flies directly to his daughter's home in Alabama. His granddaughter is celebrating her birthday. He wants to use the money he just earned to make her happy.

While Martinez is treating his granddaughter at Toys R Us Investigators in Florida discover Huerta´s truck with the two dead bodies. They find a Mountain Dew can in the center console of the vehicle with a cigaret butt laying in a puddle of the yellow green liquid. They send the cigaret butt to a lab to check for DNA traces, but the test is not conducted right away.

The evaluation probably isn't a big priority Huerta was a construction worker aand had many co-workers in the car with him. so investigators had little hope of a hit. In fact, the results won't reach them until years later Martinez escapes conviction for the murder of Huerta, at least for the time being.

In 2009 Martinez kills a man named Joaquin Barragan in Earlimart for $8,000. He used a woman as a lure. She brought drugs from Barragan, contacting Martinez when the meeting was set.

Three days later, Barragan's body is found under a blanket, his hands bound with zip ties. The police questioned many people in Earlimart about the murder. They learn that Barragan knew he was being pursued by a contract killer known as El Mano Negra, The Black Hand.

A woman tells investigators that Martinez tried to hire her to lure Barragan to a remote location. Others say that El Mano Negra is, in fact, Martinez's nickname. The investigators don't have enough evidence against him, but they still decide to make a move.

They arrest Martinez for violating probation. But when they knock on his door, he scrambles out his phone, removes the SIM card and swallows it. Nothing else on there can incriminate him.

When the police questioned Martinez, he claims that everyone in Earlymart is lying and that he didn't kill Barragan. They send him to prison anyway for violating his probation terms. When Martinez gets out of prison about a half a year later, he directly marches to the Violent Crime Division of the Tulare County Sheriff's Office.

He wants his white Chevy Suburban back that the police had seized from him. Martinez agrees to answer a few questions from the police in return. He hints that he is a collector for a mexican drug cartel from Guadalajara and he also claims to know that Barragan was murdered, not due to debts - but because he was a rat The investigators are suspicious.

They suggest a lie detector test. These aren't technically valid ways of determining a lie, but police will still often use them for investigations. Martinez agrees.

He's asked several times if he knows who killed Barragan Martinez, of course, denies that he killed him. The lie detectors response to Martinez's answers are clear Deception is indicated. Still, the investigator's hands are tied.

without clear evidence of a confession they can't pin Martinez down. In the end, the black hand once again slips from their grasp. The cigaret butt is still in the lab.

The police in Florida have other cases to handle and they forgot about those bodies in that truck. It looks like Martinez can just keep going on forever. But then something happens in Alabama.

Early 2013, 35 years after the murder of Martinez sister 33 years after he shot David Bedolla for 500 bucks. Martinez is now 51 years old. He is once again visiting his daughter in Alabama.

He spends a lot of time with his grandchildren picks them up from school, dresses them up as Disney princesses and has "spa days" with them. His daughter knows he's a criminal, but she thinks he's just a smuggler who helps to bring people across the border into the U. S.

. While at her home, Martinez has an idea. He learns that a friend of his daughter's partner needs help collecting a debt.

He'll help him. But in reality, he just wants to learn from the friend a little bit about his daughter's partner. Jaimie Romero.

Is he a good guy? He meets with a friend named Jose Ruiz In the car Martinez asked Ruiz about his daughter's partner. Ruiz says Romero is okay, but he proceeds to call his girlfriend names and a terrible mother.

He doesn't realize it's Martinez's daughter so… Martinez decides to forgive him, realizing that we’re all human, on this rotating rock in the void, and naturally we can make mistakes. He patiently tells Ruiz, hey, I’m her father, and that’s not a kind way to speak about my daughter. No - Martinez decides that Jose Ruiz must die.

But not right now. People saw them together. So he returns to California for the time being and Ruiz is allowed a few more weeks on earth.

On March 4th 2013, Martinez is back. He goes on a little tour with Romero and Ruiz. They stop to stretch their legs in a remote national park.

Martinez pulls out a gun, points it at Ruiz and says "The woman you insulted is my daughter, you bastard. " Then he shoots him twice in the head. He gets back in the car and tells the shocked Romero to drive and better keep this to himself.

The police quickly discover the dead Ruiz and find a Walmart receipt with him. They review surveillance cameras and identify a companion of Ruiz - it’s Romero. He is arrested and suspected of murder.

Shortly afterward, Martinez contacts the police, providing Romero with an alibi and claiming that they were together at the time of the killing. But the police do not believe him, and Romero remains in custody. One month later, Martinez is visiting his son in Earlimart.

Suddenly the police start banging on the door. Martinez is convinced they are there because of him - Romero must have talked! He flees the house, and a sheriff deputy named Christal Derrington gives chase.

In reality, Martinez had nothing to fear. The police officer doesn’t know a thing about the murder in Alabama. She had come to visit Martinez's son because she is investigating a series of robberies and hopes for his assistance.

She apprehends Martinez and brings him to the station. A colleague whispers to Derrington that the man she brought in is El Mano Negra, supposedly a contract killer responsible for several murders in the area. They could arrest Jose Martinez and hold him because for being a felon in possession of a gun and instead he convinced them to let him go so and he offered to get them.

You know, get bad guns off the street. we have a lot of guns everywhere many of them are legal and many of them are illegal and so the police were interested in kind of getting illegal guns and Jose Martinez assisted them with this. They thought it was because he didn't want to get locked up that may be true.

But I think it's also because he kind of wanted to keep tabs on he knew he'd committed this murder in Alabama he knew he had all these other murders and he kind of wanted to keep an eye on. Did they suspect him? As Martinez collaborates with the police in California, an unsolved case in Florida is reopened.

It’s from 2006 - the murder of Javier Huerta. Investigators finally receive the lab report regarding the cigarette butt in the Mountain Dew they found all those years ago. They get a hit.

The DNA belongs to a man who had previously been in prison Jose Manuel Martinez. A detective named TJ Watts takes on the murder case. At this point, Martinez is still not their primary suspect, but Watts is puzzled by why a Californian's cigarette butt would turn up so far away in Florida.

He contacts an investigator in California, who tells him Martinez's story - that they know him, that he's helping them collect illegal weapons, and that he's involved in several murder investigations, but that they can't prove anything against him. But then the investigator in California tells Watts a small but crucial detail: Many of the murders involved the use of zip ties. Watts is intrigued - he also has a few unsolved murders on his desk where zip ties were used.

He has a strong suspicion that Martinez might be the person he's looking for. He doesn't see him as a useful informant like the colleagues in California do. Watts believes Martinez might just be a killer.

He marks him as a Person of Interest. Meanwhile, Jaime Romero is still locked up in an Alabama prison, facing accusations in the murder of his friend Jose Ruiz. He is terrified of his father-in-law.

He witnessed his cold bloodedness first hand. But he can’t go to prison. He has a daughter and a life at home.

So he calls for the man in charge, Detective McWhorter, and talks. On May 17th, the investigators finally issue an arrest warrant for Martinez on murder charges. When he returns back to the US from a trip to Mexico, Martinez is arrested in Arizona.

He learns that there's a warrant out for him for murder. His only question is where the warrant came from. McWhorter is the first to hear about Martinez's arrest at the border.

He immediately sets off for Arizona to personally bring him back. On the way back to Alabama, they talk about life, the military, and even share a pizza at the airport. McWhorter is surprised at how little Martinez seems to care about being charged with murder.

Upon arriving in Alabama, they are met by Detective Watts. He, too, had jumped on a plane to interrogate Martinez. Neither detective expect Martinez to confess.

Perhaps he would spend some time in jail and then make a mistake during a phone call from inside. At best, Martinez might admit to being at the crime scene but try to blame everything on Romero. But things take a different turn.

Martinez confesses almost immediately to killing Ruiz. He also confesses to the murder case in Florida. He provides detailed descriptions of the crime scenes, the number of bullets used, and says, "If I hadn't done the job, someone else would have.

" But it doesn’t end there. Martinez then asks for Christal Derrington, the Deputy Sheriff from Tulare. When she arrives in Alabama, he drops a bombshell: He's a contract killer and has killed numerous people.

He goes on to confess to one murder after another. it was a long list I mean you know Crystal Darrington said that she was just like frantically texting her bosses like oh my god another one you know and then I think the next day he's like oh my gosh I have another one. It was a shocking list of murders He confesses to over 35 murders - today it is thought to be over 40.

They went back and reinvestigated all of them they didn't just take his word for it. They tried to make sure it was true. and ultimately they decided that they believed it.

Martinez is brought to trial for most, but not all, of his murders. Some cases couldn't be resolved. At the time, he even faces the death penalty, which doesn’t seem to worry him.

In the end, Martinez is sentenced to 50 years in prison in Alabama for the murder of Ruiz, life in prison without the possibility of parole in California for nine murders, and two consecutive life sentences in Florida. Martinez certainly didn't make it easy for the police. He left few traces, often there were no concrete pieces of evidence, and as a hitman, there was usually no direct connection between him and his victims.

Especially in the 80s and 90s, police in California had a lot of murders to deal with, they had limited resources. But there is also another reason why Martinez wasn’t caught for so long. There are other people who would say we didn't try that hard to get him in part because the people that he was killing were not people that created these giant outcry he was generally killing people without very much power and so I think that was sort of one of the heartbreaking things to me when I started working on this is that I went and found some of the family members of some of his victims and many of them said over and over it seems like no one cared that our relative was killed I think that to me was sort of the craziest and most heartbreaking part of this case.