COULD A WRISTWATCH REVEAL WHO WAS BEHIND A SPREE OF COLD-BLOODED MURDERS?
When 81-year-old retiree Jerry David inspected the outbuildings on his ranch, he was already prepared to discover the worst. It was 4 January 2019 and, sure enough, his barn – in a sleepy part of Washoe Valley, just outside Reno, Nevada, had been burgled for the second time that week. Readjusting his broad cowboy hat, he took stock of the missing items: a saw, fishing poles, an old hunting bag of ammunition, and a handgun were gone. Jerry had his suspicions about who might have done it, he told his son Steve as much. He’d recently employed Wilber Ernesto Martinez-Guzman, then 19, as a landscaper. But Jerry had fired the young man after discovering him snooping through their things. A kind and charitable couple, Jerry and his wife Sherri, 80, never filed a police report about it. Elsewhere in Nevada, just a few days later, Madison Koontz-Winkelman, 21, received a phone call from her cousin while at work. It was shocking news. Her beloved mum Connie Koontz, 56, had been found dead at her home. The mother and daughter had been best friends and loved taking trips to Disneyland. They called and texted each other every day and Connie had recently saved up and taken her beloved daughter on a holiday of a lifetime to Las Vegas for her 21st birthday. Shocked and numb, Madison assumed that her mum, who suffered from vertigo, had experienced a medical episode. However, the reality was far more sinister. Connie had been shot in the head by a mystery gunman – who’d entered through the unlocked door of her pastel-pink suburban home – before robbing and killing her.
“You never think this would happen to you, you know? This is something in a movie,” a devastated Madison said later.
A huge Disney fan, Connie Koontz was just a kid at heart and known for her cheerful nature. So when Madison tried desperately to think of a possible motive for her mum’s brutal murder, she was at a loss. Her mum hadn’t fallen out with anyone, and her sleepy neighbourhood in Gardnerville rarely saw crime, let alone on such a violent scale.
A COMMUNITY ROCKED
Connie’s murder shook the community but then, two days later another woman – Sophia Renken, 74 – was found dead at home nearby. Known affectionately as Cookie, Sophia spent her retirement horse riding and spoiling her niece and nephew. She was discovered on her bedroom floor and had been shot four times in the face and body. Nothing was stolen before her killer had fled the property. A manhunt ensued, and the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office offered a $10,000 (around £7700)reward for information on the culprit. Was there a link between the two killings? In a county where even one murder in a single year would have been rare, the fact that there’d be two in the same week seemed highly suspicious. Both of the women were older, they were retired, vulnerable an
