ESMERALDA GONZALEZ WAS BURIED IN CONCRETE AFTER BEING KILLED BY HER NEIGHBOURS
W hen 24-year-old Instagram model Esmeralda Gonzalez vanished in late May 2019, her worried family immediately filed a missing persons report. The young woman had aspirations of becoming an attorney and her sudden disappearance was completely out of character. Five months later, on 8 October, police following an anonymous tip stumbled across a horror find deep in the Nevada desert – a wooden structure that housed a water tank filled with concrete and the remains of an unidentified woman. Using DNA from the victim’s bones and jewellery, police made the devastating call to the Gonzalez family.
The body in the desert was Esmeralda, and she had been murdered.
Wrapped in blankets with her hands bound and her head covered in tape, Esmeralda had been encased in concrete and then hidden underneath wooden slats. An autopsy later revealed she had been strangled and injected with pool cleaner. But the anonymous tipster had not just provided the location of the missing model, they had also given police the names of the two people responsible for her murder. On 11 October, police knocked on the door of her neighbour, Christopher Prestipino, then 45. Police charged him with murder, firs-tdegree kidnapping resulting in substantial bodily harm, and conspiracy. His former roommate Casandra Garrett, and a third suspect, Prestipino’s girlfriend Lisa Mort, were also detained. An affidavit relating to the anonymous tip revealed that the Las Vegas Police Department had been told Prestipino and Garrett had “killed an unknown woman”. It detailed how, after they had hired Esmeralda – who was described in the documents as a “prostitute” – they plied her with methamphetamine. The affidavit states that Esmeralda began “acting bizarrely and speaking in the devil’s tongue”, before “threatening to call the cops on Christopher and Garrett for the drugs they had given her.” It is alleged Prestipino then tied Esmeralda to a chair, before strangling her, but she was still alive. She was then allegedly injected with pool cleaner, an act that killed her.
Prestipino was later captured on CCTV footage visiting a local hardware shop where he purchased concrete mix, wood and tools. He also rented a van that was later found to contain a cement mixer and a freezer that had been taped shut. Faced with irrefutable forensic
