Daisy’s friends and family receive a shocking tip in an Instagram DM about the suspect’s whereabouts. It completely upends their understanding about where he’s been hiding all these months. They send the tip to detectives, and a day later, they finally see their dogged efforts pay off: The suspect is caught. But his long-awaited arrest marks the start of yet another nightmare. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What shocking tip does Daisy's family receive?
Mimi had been managing the Justice for Daisy Instagram account, along with one of Daisy's friends. Together, they'd been sifting through DMs from people who claimed they'd spotted Victor. They didn't want to overwhelm Susie or give her false hope, so they only passed along the most promising leads. Susie knew this, and now she was anxious to know why Mimi was calling.
But her cousin was insistent that she pull over. After some back and forth, Susie agreed. And that's when her cousin shared the news. Somebody had messaged the Justice for Daisy Instagram account. And this person said that not only had he seen Victor, he knew him. Actually, he knew Billy. That's the name Victor was apparently going by. They worked together. At a bar. In Mexico.
And he had a video to prove it. Susie was confused. Tons of people had reported seeing Victor around L.A., So how could he be in Mexico? And why would he be working at a bar? Susie wanted to see the video, but there was a catch. The guy who offered it wanted money.
He said that Victor, or Billy, or whoever, owed him money, and that if he got arrested, he wouldn't get his money back, so he had to get it somewhere else. Susie was skeptical. It was a huge risk. Because what if the man never sent the video? Or what if he did and it turned out to not be Victor in it? But her cousin had already thought this through.
Chapter 2: How does Susie react to the news about Victor?
She'd told the guy in her DMs that she needed to know for sure the video was legit. And he came up with a solution. He said he'd send her a snippet of the video, a sampling of the product before she bought it. It would disappear immediately after she viewed it in her DMs. And if she wanted to keep it, it would cost her.
When the video arrived in Mimi's DMs, she took a deep breath and clicked on the play icon. She had hoped to take a screen recording, but she was so nervous that her hands froze. Before the video ended, she realized she had just enough time to take a screenshot. And that's when she called Susie. She needed her to look at the screenshot and tell her. Was it him?
It's why she was so insistent that Susie pull over. Susie sat in her car, waiting for her cousin's text to arrive. When it did, she immediately opened it. The resolution wasn't great, but the photo clearly showed a man sitting at a high-top table with at least one other person. There was a bucket of beer and a few bottles on the table.
The man's elbow was propped up, and he was holding a cigarette between his fingers. He didn't have any of the distinctive features that were displayed on the photos of Victor. For one thing, he didn't have dark hair. It was bleached, or at least, like, the middle of it was. He wore a long-sleeved shirt, so no visible tattoos. And his face was turned to one side, and his hand was covering his ear.
Chapter 3: What evidence is presented to confirm Victor's location?
But Susie didn't need to rely on hair color or tattoos or ear piercings to know that it was Victor. She took one look at the screenshot, and she knew instantly. It was him. This man so casually smoking a cigarette at a bar. This was the man who had murdered her daughter. I'm Jen Swan. From London Audio, iHeartRadio, and executive producer, Paris Hilton. This is My Friend Daisy. Episode 7, Karma.
Seeing Victor in that photo, Susie told me, it did something to her. Those were the words that she used in her interview. It did something to me. There was something about how he looked in that image. He just looked so completely unbothered that just drove Susie crazy.
Before seeing that screenshot, she had imagined that maybe Victor had been hiding out somewhere, living in the shadows, on the fringes. She had considered that maybe Victor had made his way across the border. But whatever she pictured, it was not this. Victor, in a bar, out in the open, out of the shadows. There was something else about it that really did not sit right with Susie.
And that was the type of bar that Victor had apparently been recognized in. It's called Papa's and Beer. Maybe you've heard of it. It's not this, like, underground hole-in-the-wall dive bar. It's one of the most popular nightclubs in all of Baja. A place so massive that it calls itself the West Coast's largest beach club. And so touristy that it offers its own shuttle service from San Diego.
It was just about the last place that Susie had expected Victor to show his face. To her, the screenshot telegraphed an almost incomprehensible message. That Victor thought he was going to get away with murder. I actually tracked down the guy who sent this DM. I found his Instagram handle in the screenshot that Susie had texted to me, the one that her cousin had texted to her.
I had a phone conversation with this guy over WhatsApp. And maybe this shouldn't have surprised me, but he actually tried to make a deal with me too. He didn't want to do the interview unless he got paid for it. But just as he'd eventually given in and sent the screenshot to Mimi, he also ended up giving me the information that I was looking for.
He confirmed Susie and Mimi's version of events with me. Anyway, Susie sent this screenshot to Detective Lugo right after Mimi had sent it to her. This was the big tip they'd been waiting for. But when she got Lugo on the line, he wasn't nearly as energized about this tip as she was. Lugo said he'd already gotten a tip of his own.
And the last thing he wanted was for Victor to catch wind of it and make a run for it. Again, Susie was told to wait, to calm down, to sit back and let the detectives do their jobs. She'd heard that before. Earlier that morning, Detective Sanchez was in a meeting at the Homicide Bureau. It was a weekly meeting where he and the other detectives gave status updates on their cases.
The phone at my desk rings. And I didn't want to be rude. Somebody was talking, so I let it go to voicemail and got a message. So after the meeting, I heard it. It was a lady's voice and says, hey, I have some information on a flyer that you guys put out yesterday. Okay.
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Chapter 4: What challenges do the detectives face in the investigation?
I said, okay, just transfer him. I didn't know who he was. I wasn't sure what he was calling about. And he identifies himself as some comandante for the Rosarito Police Department. That's when it kind of clicked. Oh, man. And he says, hey, are you looking for Victor Sosa? Yeah. Says, I have him.
The Rosarito Police Department had Victor Sosa. Do you remember how you were feeling when you got this phone call?
Kind of like, holy crap.
Holy crap. The murder suspect that had been on the run for months. The guy Daisy's family had been rallying the internet to find. The so-called shadow. The Richard Ramirez lookalike. the guy who had been everywhere and nowhere at once, he'd suddenly fallen right into Sanchez's lap.
It's not the first time since I've been here that I've either scheduled a vacation or I've had, like, I dropped a kid off at college, out of state, that I've gotten a call and said, hey, we arrested your guy. You know, it's like, oh my God, now what?
The comandante had Victor transported to the border. There, he was turned over to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. They located the warrant that sheriffs had filed for his arrest just four days earlier.
That had to have been probably in the afternoon, like 2 o'clock. I got a call from the CBP officer. Said, hey, we have Victor Sosa in custody. Outstanding.
Sanchez arranged to have a detective with the sheriff's fugitive division go on a road trip to one of the busiest border crossings in the world. on one of the busiest travel days of the year.
Remember, this is Fourth of July weekend. So anybody driving south, I mean, what's the travel time from here down there was probably two hours, which probably took them double that and then back up.
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Chapter 5: How is Victor Sosa finally apprehended?
So I didn't want to come in too strong, right? Because I didn't want him to shut down. A lot of it was determined on my first vision of him, right? Because I'd seen some pictures of him. He looked, obviously he was a lot younger, like, you know, he was in his 20s, early 20s or whatever it was back then. But I didn't want to come too strong or get him to shut down.
I didn't want to come in too weak, say, or he would overrun the or overtake the interview.
But when Victor walked through the door of the sheriff's station, he didn't look like he was going to overtake anything.
When I saw him, he just he seemed very, well, he looked tired, like he'd been up all night or something like that. But he looked he looked scared. And like we walked into the interview room and he was he was sitting in the back of the room. So we walk into one door. Right. He was sitting in the room, probably half this size. And he just looked at us and had that. Oh, man, who are these guys?
Right. You show up in a suit. Who are these guys to talk to me?
Victor looked so terrified that Lugo and Sanchez decided they needed to get him to relax.
We asked one of the one of the. Station detectives there, hey, can you grab this guy something to eat, right? You know, because again, he doesn't know who we are. We're trying to gain some sort of confidence so he could open up to us.
They ended up getting a McDonald's. After that, Lugo and Sanchez decided it was time to ease into the interview. And there were so many questions to ask. Questions like, what actually happened the night he allegedly met up with Daisy? Why did he go to Mexico? How long had he been there? And how did he end up working at a spring break-style nightclub?
I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.
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Chapter 6: What insights does Detective Sanchez share about the arrest?
Before the detectives could question Victor, they had to read him what's known as the Miranda Warning. It lets the person in custody know they have a Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. They have a right not to answer questions. They have a right to speak to a lawyer. And anything they say can be used against them in court.
And that's when the interview fell apart, before it even started.
He didn't understand what our attorney was. Now, I don't know if he was playing me, When you ask them, you have the right to an attorney, you understand. Well, what's an attorney? I thought he was playing like, what are you talking about? You don't know what an attorney is, right?
So you could continue the interview, but any questions or any information you gather after that, you're not going to be able to use because the defense attorney is going to throw that out based off of Miranda. So it's just... I don't want to say it was odd, and I don't know if maybe that was he was planning all along on his trip to up here.
Hey, if they ask me questions, I'm just going to play, you know, like I don't understand. But it was kind of a downer when he was like, I don't know what an attorney is. All right. Good luck.
It was, to Sanchez, a huge disappointment.
The one guy that could tell me what happened... didn't. He just... That was a big letdown.
Victor's bail was set at $2 million. The booking record from that day states that he had no property with him and no car. There's nothing listed in the line for an emergency contact. This paperwork also includes a physical description of him, including a description of one of his tattoos. the word karma on his right shoulder.
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Chapter 7: What were the detectives' strategies during the interrogation?
In the booking photo, his hair is bleached down the middle, just like in that screenshot that Susie had sent to Lugo. And where his gauges had once been were now just a pair of stretched holes in his earlobes. He looked tired, defeated. It had been a long day, and an even longer four months on the run.
The night that Victor was arrested, Susie went on Facebook and posted a public statement, first in Spanish and then in English. She wrote, In the post, Susie thanked her friends, her cousin, and her daughter's best friend. She thanked Lugo and Sanchez and all the people who called and shared posts on Instagram and Facebook and TikTok. Thanks to all of you, she wrote, this bastard is behind bars.
The post included a photo of Daisy in her prom dress, her hair glowing bright white. Susie signed off using a moniker she'd come to use again and again on social media. Daisy's mom, forever 19. Three days later, Daisy's friend, her name is Rebecca Fuentes, she posted a duet with her original TikTok. You know, the one that began, this is my friend Daisy. and she used it to announce the news.
But this wasn't just a celebration post. It was yet another call to action.
The next day, Daisy's mother and about a dozen of Daisy's friends gathered at the location in the comments.
The Compton Courthouse. It's this towering concrete building, and there's this big white sculpture in the shape of a tent in the plaza outside it. Daisy's friends streamed the whole thing on the Justice for Daisy Instagram page. It was July 6th, the day of Victor's arraignment.
We're on live. We're on live. Recording live. Yeah.
As comments trickled in on the live stream, Rebecca turned the camera on herself and read them aloud.
We're now waiting for the hearing. It should be anytime soon now. Did you guys see him? No. All of us are actually going to go in the courtroom and we're going to Basically see his face since he did what he did. I'm praying for you guys. Thank you. I mean, we're being safe about it. We're being respectful.
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