- I'm Kate Snow,
and this is "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
- It had so much mystery involved,
pentagrams painted on the wall.
What was this young man doing in that tunnel?
- The Manson Tunnel?
- Yeah, is a pretty horrible place to die.
- The murder happened on the summer solstice.
- This whole occult story came out.
- There's evidence of occult activities
having taken place up there before.
- He told me that he had witnessed a murder...
...and that he was helping the police with it.
- Little by little, it started coming out.
- There had been some plots afoot.
- Brutal and violent and chaotic.
They are vicious killers.
It was a horrible betrayal.
**
- Hello, and welcome to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered".
Ron Baker was a curious young man studying astrophysics
to learn the mysteries of our universe,
But the college student didn't see the evil forces
at work right in front of him.
His murder happened in a dark tunnel
known for hiding secrets.
To crack this case, some might say
investigators were forced to make a deal with the devil.
Here's Keith Morrison with...
- This wasn't supposed to happen ever.
It was a chilly December morning, 2020,
the high desert outside Los Angeles.
In there, behind barbed wire
and secure locks and thick concrete,
a prisoner was placed in front of a camera.
It was a parole hearing
for a lifer who was never supposed to be set free.
50 miles away, nervous and worried,
the sister of the man's victim
listened to a live broadcast.
With her, a storied L.A. homicide detective,
now retired, named Rick Jackson,
powerless to intervene.
They waited for the board's decision,
and it all came flooding back,
as if decades had vanished,
and the strange, terrible events
had only just occurred.
- I worked homicide by the end of my career.
It was 28 years,
and you always think that you've seen everything,
and this was one of those cases that--
that just didn't make any sense.
- No, it didn't.
It still doesn't, and maybe never will.
It was just a few days after the summer solstice,
that longest day of the year.
It was June 24th, 1990.
- My supervisor called and said,
"Hey, I've got an interesting case for you and Frank,"
and so Frank and I went directly to the coroner's office
to view the body.
- Frank was Detective Frank Garcia,
Jackson's partner.
- He had multiple stab wounds and his throat was slit.
- It was a murder all right.
Close up. Personal. Bloody.
- Whoever did this wanted to make sure that it was done.
No one was gonna survive this.
- He looked to be in his early twenties,
but he had no I.D.,
so they called him "John Doe 135,"
L.A.'s 135th unidentified victim of the year.
- He had a medallion on, and-- there were two.
One was a pentagram,
and there was also one that was just a religious cross.
- Meaning something possibly?
John Doe 135 had been found by hikers
in an old train tunnel
that cuts through the rocky hills
in suburban Chatsworth.
- Went up to the tunnel the next day.
- What was it like in there?
- Strange. There's paintings everywhere,
paintings of words involving drugs--
LSD, acid.
- We were told that they would do animal sacrifices there.
There was writing on the inside of the tunnel,
things about hell and fear.
There was pentagrams,
all indicating some kind of occult activity
that was taking place in the tunnel.
- The pentagrams are long gone now,
covered by newer layers of graffiti,
hiding secrets, perhaps, horrors of the past.
But even today,
the tunnel remains a dark and spooky place.
Some of the locals call it the Manson Tunnel
because of that,
and because Charles Manson once lived nearby.
Whatever.
It was catnip for media.
- The body was found in a railroad tunnel
above Chatsworth Park.
- They have no leads, no suspects.
- If you do have any information about this case,
call LAPD Major Crimes.
- One of the many assigned to the story
was a young reporter for the "L.A. Times"
named Michael Connelly.
Yes, that Michael Connelly,
the bestselling crime novelist,
who, back then, was just beginning
to make a name for himself.
- It just, from the beginning, had so much mystery involved.
You know, what was this young man doing in that tunnel?
- And I suppose it would just add to the allure
of the idea calling it the Manson Tunnel.
- Yeah. It was a pretty horrible place to die.
That was for sure.
- And no one knew just then that they'd entered a story
already into chapter two.
The San Fernando Valley is a vast and crowded sprawl,
more than one mystery here.
It was midnight in the Valley,
a couple of hours before John Doe 135
was found in the Manson Tunnel.
Gayle and Kay Baker's home-- the phone rang.
- There was a strange voice, and it said,
"We have your son.
Uh, "Unless you give us $100,000 by 5:00 tomorrow,
"he will die."
- Their son, Ron, was a student at UCLA.
- So I called his apartment,
and I was told that he had been dropped off at a bus stop,
and he was going to a meeting at UCLA,
and he hadn't returned.
His roommate telling me that.
- The next morning, Ron still hadn't returned home.
And then the phone rang again.
Same strange voice.
- He said, "Unless you give us $100,000 by 5:00,
"he will die".
And at that time, I really did become worried,
and I called the police.
- Ron's older sister, Patty,
rushed over to her parents' house.
- The police put a wire on the phone.
Nobody called back.
The longer it went, the more worried that we got.
- Police got a picture of Ron from the family.
They checked it with the coroner's office
to see if it matched any outstanding cases
they were handling.
It did.
They called the Bakers.
- Asking about some--
if Ron would have worn some earrings and a pendant,
and he had done that.
So then they came to see us
and told us that his body had been found.
- Is there any way to understand what that was like?
- It's devastating.
- Then, the Bakers had to do the most difficult thing
they had ever done.
- We were asked to go to the coroner's office
to identify him.
- Ron Baker was just 21,
their only son.
Ron was not your average victim,
and this, not your average murderer.
- When this thing first happened,
we were just a few years past Richard Ramirez,
the Night Stalker, who was involved in pentagrams
and things like that,
and he had struck a couple of times in the Valley,
and just how that gripped the town in fear,
there's a little bit of-of here we go again.
- Yes, and there was something else about it, too:
The date. - It was a--
the evening of the summer solstice.
There were rumors going around at times
that this could have been a sacrifice
due to the multiple stab wounds
and the fact that Baker's throat was slit.
- Did you think it was an occult thing?
- We didn't know.
We certainly didn't rule that out.
- Especially when they discovered
what Ron Baker belonged to.
It had a name, The Mystic Circle.
- Cryptic clues in Ron's apartment.
- An altar, candles, the pentagram.
- Could this killing be linked to the dark arts
of the occult?
- There's evidence of occult activities
having taken place up there before.
- Was there a lot of concern
that maybe there were other people
who were in danger? - Definitely.
- The question is,
did the occult lead to his death?
- It was the word that got all the attention,
the word that brought TV crews to the notorious train tunnel
under the Chatsworth Hills,
the word that conjured up all manner of dark arts:
Occult.
- "Holy terror" reads the graffiti over the train tunnel
where Ron Baker's body was found.
Police are hoping...
- Was 21-year-old Ron Baker the victim of a ritual killing,
an occult murder?
- Did you or your parents have any idea
who could have done this?
- No, not at all. Or why?
- And why Ron Baker, of all people?
He was a compassionate, kind, churchgoing Methodist,
not an enemy in the world.
- Okay, there's cousin Ronnie.
There, zoom.
- My brother, he was a really positive person,
a real gentle soul.
He was very smart.
He was majoring in astrophysics at UCLA.
- Intellectually curious? - Yes, definitely.
- Which probably explained why, Methodist or not,
Ron joined a club at UCLA called The Mystic Circle,
where he met fellow student Christine Reyna.
- We would meet and hear lectures and talks from people
that practiced a variety of different traditions
or alternative religion.
We've had people come in who studied Wicca.
- Wicca, the pagan nature religion.
Ron was fascinated.
- I think, as a physicist, there was something appealing
about Wicca being a nature religion.
Because what do physicists study?
They study energy, and they study forces,
and those were things
that were part of everyday language in Wicca.
- But had he encountered something much darker?
Ron shared an apartment with two roommates,
Nathan Blalock and Duncan Martinez.
The detectives drove over to talk to them.
Nathan was out of town,
so they talked to Duncan about the murder.
- He was upset. - How close was he to Ron?
- They were pretty close.
They were very different characters.
Ron was inward and naive a little bit.
Duncan was more worldly.
He had the energy, uh, charm.
- Yin and yang.
Duncan, a former Marine reservist,
was bright and funny to Ron's quiet and shy.
Duncan got a job after high school,
while Ron went to college,
but both grew up in L.A.
and had been best friends for years.
Duncan's stepfather was a professor at UCLA,
where Ron went to school.
Nathan was from Detroit,
ended up in L.A. after serving in the Army.
He'd been a great athlete growing up,
a football star,
runner-up boxing champ as a teenager.
He was the most recent member of the trio.
Duncan told detectives that on the night of the murder,
the summer solstice,
Ron had planned to take the bus to UCLA
to visit his Mystic Circle friends.
He asked for a ride to the bus stop.
- So they dropped him off, and Ron went where he went.
- And that, said Duncan, was the last time
he and Nathan ever laid eyes on their roommate.
So the cops had a look at Ron's room,
and there it was.
- An altar, candles, the pentagram,
all the Wicca stuff there.
Large knives that supposedly were used in their ritual.
- We're certainly not ruling out
the possibility that Baker's death was cult related.
- Cult related?
Satanic ritual?
Human sacrifice?
This whole business about Wicca--
how seriously did you have to take it?
- We had to take it seriously,
because it was the summer solstice,
a holiday for Wicca.
It happened in the tunnel.
There's evidence of occult activities having taken place
up there before.
- Understand, a myth that some secret groups
may have been practicing dark arts,
even harming children and others,
had a brief, unfortunate resurgence around that time,
so the idea that occultists
may actually have sacrificed a man
in a tunnel that was decorated with the signs of devil worship,
the media fixation was hardly a surprise.
- I wrote some of these stories.
I think we wrote them with reserve,
saying this is what the police have on their plate.
It's one of the things they're looking at,
but they're probably looking at many other things as well,
but I know enough now as a novelist
to know that certain words
can really fire the imagination of the reader,
and so I think these stories did that in a big way.
- This whole occult story came out,
and that was the dominant narrative for a long time.
- Were those in UCLA in this group that-that knew him,
was there a lot of worry,
concern that maybe there were other people who were in danger?
- Definitely, and made us concerned
that it was a hate crime.
- Despite their fears,
some of Ron's Mystic Circle friends
joined his family for a deeply emotional memorial service.
Ron's close friend and roommate, Duncan Martinez,
delivered the eulogy.
- As for suspects, there were none...
except, perhaps, the alcohol.
It'd showed up at the autopsy:
Booze, a lot of it.
- His alcohol was 0.21.
That's another thing that didn't fit.
Baker did not drink.
- But he fought his killer.
That much was apparent
from the traces of blood under Ron's fingernails.
So, DNA?
Well, no, not back then.
- All we could do was type and match the blood.
It was AB-positive.
Four percent of the population have AB-positive.
- Four percent.
So that could narrow down the list of suspects,
if they could ever find one.
- A mysterious phone call in the middle of the night.
Had another young man disappeared?
[sirens]
- It was, in those days, like a curse
had come to Los Angeles.
A curse of murder,
so many murders.
Bestselling author Michael Connelly
was a journalist then
on the crime beat for the "L.A. Times."
- I came here in '87,
which was the dawn of the highest murder rates
ever in the city,
and a lot of it was fueled by the crack epidemic
and gang warfare and all that.
- But the murder of Ron Baker was different,
a middle class college student,
and the questions that made the news--
Was this a ritual killing?
An occult crime? Was it Wicca related?
Detectives Rick Jackson and Frank Garcia had to know.
- We sure got an education real quick on Wicca.
We interviewed one Wicca lady
who was very knowledgeable about the practice of Wicca.
- That woman was Christine Reyna,
Ron's friend from the Mystic Circle Club,
and an expert on everything Wicca.
- It is helpful to be able to talk to somebody
who not only knows what's entailed in the occult,
in terms of at least Wicca,
but, more importantly, to actually know
what Ron himself believed and practiced.
- Reyna gave the detectives a crash course on Wicca,
its history, its peaceful rituals,
its spiritual traditions,
and Ron, she told the...
- He had absolutely no involvement
in anything that would ever involve human sacrifice.
I mean, he would never have meddled
or even ventured into anything like that, and so--
- So he worried about that himself
before all this happened?
- Yeah, absolutely. Like, that repulsed him,
and he certainly didn't think that anyone who dabbled
or followed those types of paths
were people he would ever want to associate with,
and I think that that was important
for the detectives to know
that this was not something Ron would have been attracted to.
- The more detectives learned about Wicca,
the less likely it seemed to them related to Ron's death.
- I think through that process of-of just discovery
and learning more things,
they probably quickly got off the occult trail.
It was very clear.
- Not ritual at all. - There was no ritual.
- The Wicca just faded away,
and it became even more of non-interest to us.
- So where the media was focused on Wicca,
the detectives returned to more normal sorts of police work.
They kept talking to people who were with Ron
the day he died.
Roommate Nathan was back in town and ready to talk,
not that he seemed to know very much,
and neither did Duncan, for that matter,
though he was eager to help.
The two told the same story.
They dropped Ron off at the bus stop
the night of the summer solstice,
and they never saw him again.
Then, after they heard Ron had been kidnapped,
they went looking for him,
but when Duncan told the detectives
where they searched, well, it seemed odd.
- He told us that he and Nathan
went to Chatsworth Park,
near the tunnel, to look for Baker.
Why would anybody go look for their friend
at Chatsworth Park near the tunnel
if he was kidnapped?
- Anyway, Duncan kept talking, offering information,
which might be true, or not.
- We asked Duncan to take a polygraph test.
- How'd he do? - He failed it
in all pertinent questions involving the murder.
- Uh-oh.
Soon after that, Duncan lawyered up
and stopped talking.
- I thought we were going in the right direction,
because we had the right people.
Now, the motive for the killing,
um, still kind of tough.
- Yes, the motive.
Why in the world would Ron' friends and roommates
be mixed up somehow in his murder?
It just didn't make any sense,
especially to the Baker family.
- We were kind of shocked.
Like, what do you mean
you're looking at Duncan and Nathan?
- Did you think that they were barking up the wrong tree?
- Yes, it seemed really far-fetched.
Like, why would he do that?
I mean, we didn't know Nathan that well,
but why would Duncan do something to his good friend?
- In fact, Duncan had been to the Baker home
lots of times to hang out,
and was always the entertaining houseguest.
- He was always really personable,
uh, very funny, easygoing,
easy to talk to.
- Was he a teller of tall tales?
Fantasize a little bit as he told you stories?
- Yes, he was, and a lot of times,
the whole group would be kind of like, "Oh, yeah, whatever."
You know? He just liked to be the center of attention.
- A few weeks after the murder,
Duncan and Nathan moved out of the apartment,
and Duncan asked the Bakers for a favor.
They said sure.
- Duncan actually moved a bunch of stuff
into my parents' house, into the garage,
so my parents would talk to him every once in a while,
and I know he told my dad
that he was feeling pressured by the police,
and he felt like people were following him.
- Police may not have been following him,
but they would soon hear him.
A few weeks after the summer solstice,
middle of the night.
- It sounded like Duncan Martinez.
Had he been abducted?
Could it possibly be another kidnapping?
- We respond that night,
made a missing persons report.
- What had happened to Duncan Martinez?
- We are just waiting to see if he's gonna be found.
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
I'm Kate Snow.
Detectives investigating the murder of Ron Baker
no longer suspected the occult was involved.
Instead, they set their sights on Ron's roommates,
Nathan Blalock and Duncan Martinez.
To investigators, their story of the night Ron went missing
just didn't add up.
Then Duncan failed a polygraph.
As police zeroed in,
there was about to be another kidnapping.
Back to Keith Morrison
with "Night of the Summer Solstice".
- A cryptic phone call late at night.
A panic-stricken message from--
well, the caller didn't say,
but the voice on the line sounded familiar.
- My partner and I received a phone call from our boss,
say, "Hey, Duncan Martinez just made a phone call
"to a friend of his.
"He said he's being held as a hostage."
And then all of a sudden, there's a--
[ grunting ]
You know, like he's being beaten
or kicked or whatever.
- It was one month after Ron Baker's apparent kidnapping
and horrific murder.
So now what?
Had Ron's friend and roommate, Duncan Martinez,
been abducted too?
- So we respond that night, made a missing persons report,
and we just made the assumption
that it was a legitimate kidnapping.
- And there was no trace of Duncan anywhere.
His disappearance made the news.
- We would like to eliminate him
if he does not have any involvement in this case,
and as long as he remains gone,
we cannot eliminate him.
- And then, several days later,
a clue.
Investigators tracked down the phone number
Duncan used to make that panicky phone call
reporting his own kidnapping.
Detective Jackson gave it a ring.
- Somebody picked up and I said, "Hey, this is who I am,
"and I'm working on a case. Where are you?"
And he goes, "Well, actually,
"I'm at the airport in Las Vegas".
- It was a random stranger, not Duncan,
who answered a payphone,
and not in a warehouse in North Hollywood,
but in a crowded airport.
- The kidnapping phone call that he left was a total farce.
Nobody would have believed that.
I think the motive for him making that phone call
was if he's kidnapped,
then we'll stop looking for him.
- But the Baker family could not believe
Duncan Martinez would harm Ron,
much less kill him.
Duncan, who'd delivered such an emotional eulogy
at Ron's memorial service?
No.
And then, that weird phone call.
- So obviously, he's trying to escape.
Then we started believing that he was probably involved.
- It was a few weeks later
when Ron's father looked through the stuff
he'd so graciously allowed Duncan to store
in the Baker garage.
He opened one of the boxes, and...
- I discovered this note of things to do:
Get a new identity
and to sell his car.
But it sounded like he was getting ready
to leave the country or something.
- Didn't look so innocent,
Though it didn't exactly implicate him either.
Weeks passed.
No more crazy phone calls
and no trace of the elusive Duncan Martinez.
- He was gone, missing.
We had no idea where he was.
- So Duncan was in the wind,
and Nathan was sticking to his story
that they simply dropped Ron at a UCLA-bound bus stop
and never saw him again,
and a once-hot murder investigation
started turning ice cold.
- It got pretty discouraging.
You're just waiting to see if anything comes out,
and if he's gonna be found,
but apparently he did a good job of disappearing.
- Autumn came, Christmas, the new year,
and Ron's 22nd birthday.
- We would go visit the grave
and put flowers on all those occasions,
and it's not really how you wanna spend your-your holidays
and your birthdays. - Yeah.
- Having to remember him that way.
- Another summer solstice came, too,
the anniversary of Ron's death,
the longest day following the longest year
for the Bakers.
- We think about some things
that would have been that aren't,
what he would have made of his life,
whether we would have had more grandchildren,
things like that.
- The detectives, meanwhile, were stymied.
They were convinced that Duncan was somehow involved
in Ron Baker's murder,
but to crack the case, they had to find him,
which was not so easy.
- Where we get nervous as far as the case being stagnant for--
It was over a year, or a year and a half almost.
You know, something's gotta happen.
He's got to turn up someplace.
- Some people who've done terrible things
imagine they can disappear forever,
fake a death, change a name,
an address, an I.D.,
but living, breathing human beings have needs,
and sometimes they make mistakes.
- The case takes an unusual turn
when officials on the other side of the country
encounter a young man with a dubious identity.
- The Social Security card was new,
and that is suspicion right there.
- What was he up to?
- I'm saying to myself, that doesn't make sense.
- Where was Duncan Martinez?
For eighteen months, there wasn't a trace anywhere.
- Were you afraid he was just gone for good?
- I knew eventually, he would surface somewhere.
- You felt if you could get your mitts on him again,
you might be able to get him to talk?
- Yeah, because I felt Duncan, at some point,
was gonna get tired of running.
- Then, it was late Autumn, 1991,
Boston, Massachusetts.
Three young men walked into the downtown federal building
and encountered a seasoned
and very particular passport agent
who just happened to have the same first name
as the elusive Mr. Martinez.
- The name is Duncan Haywood Maitland.
- Duncan Haywood Maitland looked out
at the three young men before him.
One of them spoke.
He needed a passport, he said.
Urgently.
He was booked on a flight to Paris that very night.
His name, he said, was Jonathan Wayne Miller.
- He had several pieces of identification.
One was a school transcript, which has no photo,
no description, no nothing.
- Maitland told this Jonathan Wayne Miller
that wasn't good enough.
He needed a valid ID and passport photos.
So Miller and his buddies left,
and then soon returned with the pictures.
- First thing I told him: "Where is your I.D.?"
And he said, "It's right here.
"I've got two friends. They're gonna identify me."
- "They're my I.D.! Oh, my."
- And I said, "They're not good enough.
"You need a blood relative.
"We need either your mother or your brother
"to come into this agency today."
- Was it panic Maitland was seeing in young Miller's eyes?
- He said, "It's not possible."
He said he had a very difficult time at home.
He was abused.
He finally left home and school.
He said, "That means that I only have
"an eighth grade education".
So I said, "That's fine,
but it doesn't help you with I.D."
- It won't surprise you to know Maitland had heard
more than a few stories in his time,
had seen an abundance of bogus passport applications, too.
He smelled something fishy,
especially when Miller presented one more piece of I.D.
- The Social Security card was new,
and that is suspicion right there.
It tells you that it's a new identity.
- It doesn't tell you that it's fraudulent.
It just tells you new?
- It tells you both.
- No proper I.D. No passport.
Maitland sent Jonathan Miller away empty handed,
but he wasn't done.
The next day,
Maitland started his own little investigation
into Jonathan Wayne Miller, who claimed to have been born
in the central Massachusetts town of Webster,
so Maitland called the school
listed on the transcript Miller submitted.
- And I talked to a guidance counselor there,
and I said,
"It gives English 1 and English 2."
He said, "That's freshman and sophomore English."
And I said, "Well, what grades?"
He said, "Nine and ten,"
and I'm saying to myself,
this fellow quit school eighth grade.
That doesn't make sense.
- Something else also didn't make sense.
On the fine print of that transcript...
- There was a reference to a California test.
A California test for a Massachusetts school?
I don't think so.
- Maitland knew what to do next.
He called the FBI,
which issued an arrest warrant for Jonathan Wayne Miller
for passport fraud,
only to find that Miller had vanished.
And then, it was two months later,
two months after young Mr. Miller encountered
the Boston brick wall named Maitland.
The location this time:
a stretch of highway near the little town of Nephi, Utah.
A highway patrolman pulled over a driver on Interstate 15.
The officer took the driver's I.D.,
ran the name. Jonathan Wayne Miller,
wanted by the FBI for faking a passport application.
Miller was arrested and booked in a Utah jail.
And in Webster, Massachusetts, a state detective
went to Miller's last known address,
knocked at the door,
and Jim Miller, Jonathan's father, opened it.
- And he says, "We're looking for Jonathan Wayne Miller."
And I said, "Why are you looking for him?
"He's been dead for 21 years."
- Jonathan Wayne Miller dead?
- I started crying.
It was like my whole world came caving in.
- Then who was the man locked up in that Utah jail cell?
- He refuses to tell the judge who he really is.
Well the judge says there's not gonna be any bail
until we find out.
**
- "Who was Jonathan Wayne Miller?"
asked the cop at Jim Miller's front door.
The answer was, perhaps, not quite what was expected.
- He was a happy-go-lucky baby.
He was one of the happiest go-lucky babies
I ever saw in my life.
- Jonathan was just a baby when he died.
An accident. No one's fault, really.
He wasn't quite two.
- It was bad. It was bad.
The family didn't think I was gonna make it.
- Do you ever lose that sense of loss?
- No. Nope.
And I tell people, love your children,
because when you lose one, you can't replace them.
- Little Jonathan had been dead 20 years
when that detective showed up at Jim Miller's door
to say that his son was wanted in L.A.
- I started crying.
It was like my whole world came caving in.
Right back where I was.
- That first day? - Yup.
- Jim Miller insisted his son was dead,
even told the detective where he was buried.
Yet, at that very moment,
that selfsame Jonathan Wayne Miller,
supposedly dead for two decades,
was sitting 2,000 miles away in a Utah jail cell
and very much alive, so what was going on?
Duncan Maitland,
the passport fraud specialist,
had already figured that out,
not long after that young man presented
what Maitland could see was bogus paperwork.
- So we were falling into a category,
and that category we call I.D.I.,
Infant Death Identity.
- Why would you call it that?
- Because it's a way to assume a brand new identity
without ever bumping into the person.
- You've seen this before?
- Absolutely,
and it's a good way to hide.
- Yes, the man who called himself
"Jonathan Wayne Miller"
had found and stolen Jim's baby son's identity
in an effort to disappear forever.
It was Maitland who told us how he must have done it,
by cruising cemeteries, most likely.
- You try to match a person.
If you're a male, you're looking for a male.
You're looking for a person
born within one or two years of your year of birth,
and you're golden.
Back then, it was that easy to fake an identity,
unless you ran into someone as exacting as Maitland,
who called the Massachusetts Vital Records Department
and asked a contact there to do a search
for Miller's official death certificate.
- So he went to the volume
where that death record should have been,
turned to the page number,
and guess what?
That page was missing.
- Really?
- Someone had actually
cut the original state death certificate
out of the book.
- And presto!
No death certificate suddenly brought
the late Jonathan Wayne Miller back to life.
It almost worked,
until the passport agent got suspicious,
and the FBI got involved,
and the fake Miller was pulled over
for that traffic violation in Utah.
- So he's taken into custody,
and he refuses to tell the judge who he really is.
Well, the judge says
there's not gonna be any bail until we find out.
- Faced with a long stay in jail,
the imposter finally came clean.
As you've no doubt guessed,
his real name was Duncan Martinez,
under investigation in L.A. for the murder of Ron Baker.
- We were thrilled,
'cause now at least we had that reinvigoration.
You know? - Mm-hmm.
- It's-- you get that adrenaline pumping.
We now know where he is.
- Later, Detective Rick Jackson
called Jim Miller and explained the whole messy truth
about how and why his son's identity was stolen.
- The guy was wanted for murder,
and he got to Boston
and tried to get out of the country
with a passport under my son's name.
I was mad
that someone would steal his identity and--
to commit a crime.
- Is it generally the principle,
or was it because this was your Jonathan?
- Principle behind it.
I don't care whose child it was.
Let him rest in peace. Leave him alone.
- Duncan had been on the lam for a year and a half.
He had been in Boston much of that time
working as a cook in a pizzeria,
living in this apartment in a suburb called Revere,
and stealing a dead baby's name
to try to get a passport and skip town.
- Had he have gotten that passport,
who knows what would have happened?
- Instead, Duncan's devious passport scam
had put him in a Utah jail facing federal fraud charges.
But Duncan had a plan, another one.
- We get a call from Duncan Martinez's attorney
informing us that Duncan is willing to talk to us
about what happened the night of the murder.
- And talk he did.
Duncan Martinez spins a spellbinding tale.
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
I'm Kate Snow.
Nineteen months after the murder of UCLA student Ron Baker,
detectives finally caught a break.
Ron's former friend, Duncan Martinez,
had been arrested in Utah
for stealing the identity of a child who had passed away.
Now, investigators were eager to question Duncan
about what went down in that spooky old tunnel.
Back to Keith Morrison with "Night of the Summer Solstice".
- Winter, 1992,
Park City, Utah.
Resort town.
Ski Mecca.
And until he got busted on the highway
for that fake passport,
the new hideout for fugitive Duncan Martinez,
a prime suspect in the murder of his good friend,
Ron Baker.
Park City was just the next convenient place to disappear,
until that inconvenient traffic stop,
followed by his arrest on passport fraud charges.
That changed things,
so Duncan came up with a new plan.
- We get a call from Duncan Martinez's attorney
informing us that Duncan is willing to talk to us
about what happened the night of the murder,
out of the clear blue sky.
- So the detectives
and Duncan's attorney and the DA's office
agreed on some ground rules.
He'd tell the story, all right,
but only in exchange for some sort
of limited immunity from prosecution.
Otherwise, no story, no dice.
- We worked out a deal where he could talk to us freely.
We couldn't use anything he told us against him.
- There's a term for the deal they made.
They call it "king for a day."
Fancy.
- He was in charge that day.
Our hands were tied as far as what couldn't be used,
but it could give us information
to move forward to try to further the case.
- But there was a catch, a big one.
If Duncan ever let anything slip to anyone else,
or if detectives uncovered any additional evidence,
they could charge him with murder.
But on this day, right here,
he had one free day pass
to reveal all, no charge.
So what happened that night of the summer solstice,
eighteen months earlier?
Duncan explained that he and Nathan had lured Ron
to that spooky railroad tunnel,
supposedly to drink beer and meet girls.
Then, as they walked down the track, said Duncan,
Nathan tripped.
Ron made a joke.
Nathan got mad and started stabbing him.
- But it got worse.
Duncan described, graphically, Ron Baker's last moments.
- Slit his throat.
And Ron Baker,
the sweet, gentle astrophysics student,
was dead.
Then, said Duncan,
he and Nathan fled the crime scene
and raced to a payphone where, again, according to Duncan,
Nathan insisted that he, Duncan, call Ron's father
to say it was a kidnapping and demand ransom.
But Duncan said he made the call,
worried that Nathan might kill him if he didn't.
- Then he said they went home,
dumped the murder weapon, cleaned up,
and went to a party in their apartment building
before making a second ransom call the next morning, that is.
In short, said Duncan, it was really all Nathan's doing.
- It mitigated a lot of his involvement in this,
minimized everything he-he did, at least for the most part,
with the, "I didn't think it was really gonna happen."
Why would you go to the extent
to lure him up there
if you didn't really think anything was gonna happen?
- Good question.
Duncan had an answer,
which put that "Nathan lost his temper and snapped" excuse
in a whole more dubious light.
Because, Duncan freely admitted,
they had discussed doing something beforehand,
inspired by the TV show "Dragnet".
- Or maybe not a joke?
Because on the night of the summer solstice,
Duncan admitted, he and Nathan took their roommate, Ron,
to the Manson Tunnel,
and there, for reasons he couldn't or wouldn't explain,
they killed their friend.
But here, long after the fact,
Duncan was talking like some spin doctor.
- Did you hear the blame shifting?
Not the first time
Detective Jackson had encountered
that sort of behavior from people,
and, in this case, he was unconvinced.
- I think it was a joint thing, and they were both involved.
There's a French term, "folie a deux,"
which translated means "the madness of two."
It's a psychological term that two people together
get to the point where they do something
that normally neither one would do on their own,
and it's like a one-upmanship on the next.
- Two people acting together-- - Yeah.
- --can produce a poisonous mix. - Yeah.
- But Duncan, the king for a day,
deflected and denied,
always blaming Nathan for killing Ron.
Detective Garcia even tried one more time
to maybe elicit some kind of confession.
In fact, everything Duncan said that day was off-limits.
But, as we say, there was some fine print.
- We told him, you cannot talk to other people,
because if you talk to other people,
those are potential witnesses against you,
and that was part of the deal.
- "Sure," said Duncan Martinez, "A deal's a deal."
They had no choice but to let him go.
But soon, detectives and Duncan would connect once more
in ways they couldn't possibly have imagined.
- We told him, you will help us prove
that what you're telling us is the truth.
- Investigators were far from done with Duncan Martinez.
- He was about to go undercover.
- To him, this is, hey, man,
this is Hollywood stuff here.
I can really pull this off.
- Could he?
- Day after day,
the trains rolled through the dark, old Manson Tunnel,
past the strange graffiti,
past the place where Ron Baker breathed his last,
and two years went by.
Duncan Martinez returned to the good life
in Park City, Utah,
while detectives turned their attention
to his old pal, Nathan Blalock.
He wasn't hard to find.
- Nathan, we learned,
was arrested for a bank robbery he pulled
with somebody that he was doing drugs with.
- So now, Nathan was locked up at the county jail
in Riverside, California,
totally unaware that his buddy had betrayed him.
Oh, Duncan's story about what happened
in that train tunnel was a betrayal.
But was it true?
You can't charge a man with murder
based on blame from an old accomplice.
Mind you, there was some forensic evidence, a little:
Traces of blood under Ron's fingernails,
rare blood, type AB.
Duncan was type A,
but what about Nathan?
- We got a search warrant for Nathan Blalock's blood,
and that blood came back AB-positive,
Blalock's blood.
4% of the population have it.
- That was good, quite good,
but still not enough for a murder charge.
Detectives needed to place Nathan inside the Manson Tunnel
with the knife in his hands.
One possibility:
would the guy who'd ratted on him
help them some more?
- We had established a relationship with Duncan.
Uh, he knew where we were coming from.
We wanted to get Ron Baker's killer.
He told us he was involved, and we told him,
you will help us prove
that what you're telling us is the truth.
He was in total agreement.
- Eager to help throw Nathan under the bus.
So a recorded phone call was set up through the jail,
and Nathan and Duncan spoke for the first time
in almost two years.
It was like old times as the two caught up,
and then Duncan started spinning a story
to get Nathan talking.
Then, without missing a beat,
Duncan cleverly got Nathan inside the tunnel
and tied him to the struggle
just before Ron Baker was stabbed to death.
Nathan got nervous.
But before they wrapped up the call,
an unexpected bonus.
Nathan was totally unaware that Duncan had just duped him,
and he invited his old friend to visit him in jail.
And four days later, there he was, wearing a wire.
- You have to understand Duncan's personality.
To him this is, hey, man,
this is Hollywood stuff here, man.
I can really pull this off.
- Then, Duncan went to work
and tried to draw Nathan out
by claiming he'd left behind his blood
on the walls of the tunnel.
- Blalock, he'd play it down,
play it down, play it down.
- That was good,
but detectives in the DA's office
still wanted a little bit more evidence
before indicting Nathan for murder.
And Duncan?
Thanks in part to his limited immunity agreement,
he remained free,
as if he'd never harmed a hair on Ron Baker's head.
And the Baker family was not happy.
Not at all.
- I didn't like it,
and my parents didn't like it,
Duncan walking away.
I mean, he was friends with Ron for a long time.
Like, he'd been at the house,
talked about him at the funeral.
At any point he could have said what happened.
- But Duncan didn't seem to care.
He was about to embark
on a whole new chapter of his life.
At the University of Utah,
the man who liked to tell stories
now had plans to make movies.
- He had a leather jacket. He had a tattoo.
He had a little bit of the bad boy thing.
- A whole new role for Duncan Martinez,
and an encore undercover performance.
When "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered" continues.
- There was a brand new student
at the University of Utah,
a guy majoring in film studies,
and his name was Duncan Martinez.
- He rushed a fraternity at the university.
He was really liked by most of the fraternity members.
He was living a pretty good life.
- Yes, he was.
22-year-old Duncan Martinez, once a big time murder suspect,
was now a big man on campus.
- He went by the name Doofus O'Reilly.
That's what he liked to tell his friends to call him,
Doofus O'Reilly.
He was the center of attraction at a lot of events.
- Charming, charismatic, life of the party.
Doofus, a.k.a. Duncan,
was a long way from that murder in the Manson Tunnel.
And here he soon caught the eye
of an attractive sorority sister named Melissa Bean,
and the two started dating.
- I hung out at a particular fraternity house,
and Duncan was pledging the fraternity,
so we got to know each other, and Duncan was quick.
He was witty, and I liked that.
He had a leather jacket. He had a tattoo.
He had a little bit of the bad boy thing.
It was as if Guy Fieri had rolled in
and come to college
with sort of the hair and the look
and the big stories.
- Melissa said it was like Duncan dropped in
from another planet,
but he instantly fit in.
- He was a leader.
He was a little bit of a Pied Piper.
I think people naturally followed him.
I think people very much liked him.
Duncan could identify with and talk to anyone
about anything that they were into.
He had a lot of capacity for dazzling people.
- Back in L.A.,
the detectives were still investigating
the Ron Baker murder, and they wanted
to put Duncan's dazzling-but-devious skill set
to use one more time
and get one more blockbuster piece of evidence.
They found Duncan at college
and persuaded him to make yet another call
to his old buddy, Blalock,
who was still behind bars for bank robbery.
Maybe this time, Duncan could spark
something really incriminating out of Nathan
to seal their case and then charge him.
- We flew up to Utah
and made the call from a Marriott hotel
where they had private lines and stuff.
They talked about a half hour,
and little by little, it started coming out.
- Naturally, the call was recorded.
And sitting in that hotel suite,
Duncan did talk as usual,
spinning another one of his stories,
saying a warrant was out for his arrest
and he feared taking the rap for Ron's murder.
Duncan kept trying to get Nathan to say the words,
to take the blame directly for stabbing Ron,
for cutting his throat.
Then, Duncan played the guilt card.
"It happened." "A mistake."
Not quite a confession, but close enough.
Now, two years after Ron Baker's murder,
Nathan was talking himself into being charged with the crime.
But Duncan Martinez, he would resume college life,
film studies, frat parties, and freedom.
After he wrapped up his undercover call with Nathan,
Detectives drove Duncan back to campus and dropped him off.
- As he was getting out of the car,
he goes, "It's really too bad
"that we had to meet under these circumstances,
"because I think it'd be a lot of fun
"to hang out with you guys".
- Was Duncan Martinez literally getting away with murder?
Maybe.
He was too smart to screw that up.
Wasn't he?
- He told me that he had witnessed a murder.
- Duncan's secret.
- I remember thinking, this has to be something
that he's made up.
Surely, this would be something
that would have caught up with him.
- Was it about to?
- It was almost as if he knew
that his facade might have been slipping.
Welcome back.
Nathan Blalock may have just incriminated himself
in the murder of Ron Baker.
Nathan had no idea detectives were recording
when his friend, Duncan Martinez, called
to discuss their deadly deed.
Police believed they were partners in crime,
but thanks to his immunity deal,
Duncan was free to go,
as long as he kept that monstrous secret to himself.
Back to Keith Morrison with "Night of the Summer Solstice".
- If Duncan Martinez was the charismatic Pied Piper
of his University of Utah fraternity,
Melissa Bean was...
Well, let her describe it.
- I was president of my sorority.
I was gonna be chief justice of the judiciary.
I was exceptionally capable
and kind of nerdy and boring.
I mean, I drove a Volvo. I was basically a Volvo.
I was the Volvo in college, right?
- And Duncan seemed to love impressing Melissa.
Is that why he told her
a story that was more disturbing than impressive?
- He told me that he had witnessed a murder.
- So he's walking up to the edge of something here?
- Yeah, he-he never really got into details,
but he had told me that he was helping the police with it.
- Duncan, fun-loving film student and party animal,
Doofus O'Reilly, tangled up in murder?
But for once, Duncan seemed serious,
deadly serious.
- He said that
he and a roommate
had talked about
going after a college friend,
and that there had been
an intentional plan.
- That he was part of.
- That, it appeared, he had been part of, yes.
I remember thinking this has to be something that he's made up.
- Another one of his many stories.
- He's just trying to be a bigger person than he is,
because, surely, this would be something
that would have caught up with him.
- But was it true?
Melissa's happy campus life felt troubled,
and so she confided in a couple of trusted friends,
and she didn't intend that the story should spread,
but it did.
- So, kind of, me sort of being big-mouthed
about what Duncan said to me to a couple of guys
went to my brother,
went up the chain to the alums of the fraternity,
went to university police, and then LAPD,
and he's being asked to leave this fraternity.
- Then, Duncan found out
it was Melissa who leaked his story.
- He was pretty angry and pretty aggressive
and told me that I needed to keep my mouth shut.
There was sort of a restrained amount of violence in him.
- Were you frightened?
- I remember being afraid of him.
It was almost as if he knew that his facade
and the way that he had sort of slipped in
might have been slipping.
- Or maybe it was a mistake to bring it up in the first place.
- Might have been the loose lips were sinking ships.
- Back in L.A. meanwhile,
Detectives Garcia and Jackson were focused
on nailing Nathan Blalock.
He'd been sent to prison for that bank robbery,
and that's where they went to see him,
hoping to coax a confession
which they could use to finally indict him.
- So, when Nathan saw us, it was like,
"Hey, guys, what's up?" You know?
And we said, "Oh, nothing. We just-
"We want to come sit down and talk to you
"and see if we're missing something here."
- At which point, the detectives sprang
a little surprise they'd brought with them:
the audiotapes of Duncan exposing
his good friend, Nathan.
- And I said, "Would you be curious to hear
"who's saying this about you?"
And he said, "Yeah, I'd love to."
And then I said, "Well, I have a tape of that conversation,"
and we hit the button.
And as soon as he hears, his head went just like this.
I mean, it's like, we had him so bad.
- And at that point, he's kind of losing faith
on his ability to hold out and not tell us what happened.
And I believe I'm the one that said...
And that was the break right there,
his confession.
- Two-and-a-half years after Ron Baker was stabbed to death,
detectives finally had what they needed.
And a few months later,
Nathan Blalock was indicted for first degree murder.
Fair or not, Nathan would have to take the entire rap
for killing Ron Baker.
As for Duncan Martinez,
the worst thing that happened to him
was being booted from his fraternity.
- Did you make peace with the idea
that Duncan would just live the rest of his life?
- I guess-- I guess I had to.
- Some people, through guile or luck,
manage to avoid paying the price justice demands.
But it's also true that in the fraternity of the convicted,
few behaviors are considered as low, as despicable,
as the ratting out of a friend.
And, though no one knew it, fate had redress in mind,
and maybe a sense of humor in the form, this time,
of a living, breathing rat.
- Could it be that the man who talked himself out of jail
talks himself right back in?
- Was he emotional when he was telling you this?
- Not at all. - Really?
- Kind of cold and calculating.
- Christmastime in Salt Lake City, Utah.
A sporting goods store.
An alarm went off, Cops arrived,
and Detective Jim Prior was called to the police station
to interview a burglary suspect caught red handed.
- Seemed like a likable enough kid.
He'd committed a petty crime, got caught,
confessed his part in the crime.
- Seemed personable enough? - Yeah, he did.
Not adversarial at all.
- Chatty. Cordial. Cooperative.
Sound familiar? Well, of course.
The thief was Duncan Martinez.
- Did he come off as a criminal, or as a--
just a regular guy or what?
- No, my initial impression was maybe a smart--
smart aleck college kid
who could talk his way out of anything.
- But Duncan couldn't talk his way out of this one.
He was headed to jail for a two-bit burglary.
- After he was interviewed and processed,
we wanted to confirm his identity,
and he says, "Well, we can go to my house,
"and I have my ID there".
- So they went into Duncan's apartment,
found his ID,
and while there, Duncan asked for a small favor.
- He said, "Hey, can you feed my pet rat?"
- "Feed my pet rat"? - Yeah.
And the other officer that was with me,
we kind of looked at one another and said,
"Did he really say that?"
And the kid was accommodating,
so he wanted to feed his pet rat,
because he fully expected to be in jail
and didn't want his poor creature to suffer.
- So Detective Prior walked over to the cage
and fed the rat,
and if he hadn't done that,
he probably wouldn't have spotted Duncan's day planner
lying right there.
and like any good detective, he took a little peek inside...
- And found a business card.
It was Detective Rick Jackson, LAPD robbery-homicide unit.
- Robbery-homicide in L.A. That's a big deal.
- Well, that's, I guess, the tip of the spear,
if you will. - Yup.
- And it made me interested.
- So interested, he called Detective Jackson.
- He says, "Do you know a guy named Duncan Martinez?"
And I said, Yes, I know a guy named Duncan Martinez."
- And I said, "Is there anything I can help you with?"
- My mind immediately went to, we can use this.
We need to get it on tape.
- Use this?
This was the excuse Duncan had given the police
for the burglary.
- He said, "I only did this
"because somebody is extorting me,
"'cause I witnessed somebody get murdered in Los Angeles,
"and this person that I know
"told me if I didn't do this burglary for him,
"then he was gonna tell the police
"that he knew about my involvement
in this L.A. thing." - Wow.
- Everything is done, where we can't use
what he told us initially against him.
Well, this broke the rules. - Bingo.
All Duncan's blabbing just might be his undoing.
Remember, under the conditions of his "king for a day" deal,
Duncan couldn't talk to anybody about the case.
So Jackson called Prior with an idea.
- You need to call him back.
Tell him this story's kind of a wild story.
You're trying to get your mind around exactly what happened,
and tape record him.
- By this time, Duncan had bonded out of jail,
was back home.
So Detective Prior called him, left a message.
- And then, lo and behold, he calls me back.
We started talking about his situation,
just giving-- I don't want to say fatherly advice.
- And then, Prior eased into that L.A. murder thing
Duncan had mentioned.
- At that point in time, he started to open up
a little bit, and started telling his story.
- The whole story:
How he and Nathan saw a TV show about a kidnapping
and decided they could do better.
How they picked the unsuspecting Ron Baker as their victim,
lured him to the tunnel, where, supposedly,
Nathan tripped and Ron made a joke,
and then all hell broke loose.
- What was it like to hear him spin out that story?
- I'd interviewed and had taken confessions
from many people over the years,
confessed to serious crimes, robberies, homicides,
sexual assaults, but-- [sighs]
hearing him say that, for some reason,
I knew that it wasn't B.S.
He was really telling the truth, I believe.
- Yeah. - And it caused me to step back
and say, "Did I really just hear that?"
- Was he emotional when he was telling you this?
- Not at all. - Really?
- Kind of cold and calculating.
He didn't seem remorseful at all.
- Even as he recounted
Ron's last desperate effort to survive,
and his own instruction to Nathan.
- When he told Nathan Blalock to cut Ron Baker's throat.
- That still makes your hair stand up?
- It does a little bit, yes, for sure.
And I'm thinking about it getting shivers.
- Even now? - Yeah. After 27 years.
- Soon after, at the L.A. police station,
Rick Jackson received that precious audiotape.
- It was like an early Christmas gift,
and I was thrilled.
- Duncan had broken the rules of his agreement.
All he had to do was keep his mouth shut,
and he did not.
So now, Duncan Martinez was indicted for the murder,
just like Nathan Blalock.
Soon, he'd return home to L.A.,
but this time for trial for the murder of Ron Baker,
but Duncan Martinez had yet another plan,
and he intended to go free.
- Two trials, two verdicts, and one final twist.
- My heart just sank. - All these years later.
- To deal with another heartache at the hands of Duncan.
I'm glad that my parents aren't around to see this.
- Ron Baker could have been starting his career
as an astrophysicist
by the time his roommates went on trial
for first degree murder,
a crime so senseless that even as a jury was seated,
Ron's family and the detectives
were still struggling to understand.
- They were separate trials.
Nathan had the first trial.
- It was March 1996.
Nathan's didn't take long, and neither did the verdict.
- And they came back: guilty.
- No surprise,
and the court showed no mercy.
He was sentenced to life without parole.
Now, Duncan.
But before his trial began, because he had helped the cops,
Duncan was offered a deal, a good one.
Plead guilty to second degree murder,
and just maybe walk after around 12 years,
but it wasn't to be.
- He basically gave us the middle finger
and said, "No, I want less."
- "I want a better deal."
- "I wanna go on probation or I want seven years or whatever."
That wasn't in the cards.
- So Duncan put on his best behavior
and took his shot in court.
The defense made the arguments of a man
who'd had the confidence to turn down a deal,
insisted Duncan didn't kill Ron, that was Nathan,
and without Duncan's help, they said,
the cops would never have cracked the case.
Except, remember that story about watching "Dragnet"
and actually planning the crime?
And how in that dark tunnel,
while their victim struggled to survive,
it was Duncan who gave the order to finish him off?
Which the jury could not ignore.
- It was less than it took for Nathan's jury to come back,
and he was convicted for the same thing.
- Guilty of first degree murder,
sentenced to life without parole.
He had made his choice, no deal,
and he'd paid the price.
- I wasn't surprised at all
in the fact that he'd turned down a second degree murder.
He would have been out by now.
- So, he made his bed.
He should just have to lie in it now?
- That's the way I feel.
- But he would kill his best friend just for a thrill?
- It happens. There's no explanation for it,
and maybe it's back to the madness of two.
Together, they created this,
and that's what the jury felt,
based on the evidence that was put forward to them.
To do something like this to a friend, in this case,
that's exactly what happened,
and he didn't stop it, and he could have.
- I tell myself, had it not been for Martinez,
Baker would have never been dead.
When you put the two personalities together,
Blalock and Martinez,
now you got the dynamite and the fuse.
- Duncan and Nathan were both sent away,
destined to die in prison,
and nearly 25 years went by, young men to hard core lifers.
Ron's parents died.
Sister Patty married, had two children.
Detectives Jackson and Garcia retired.
And then, one June evening in 2020,
right around the summer solstice...
- So I'm sitting, scrolling through Facebook,
and somebody posted an article
about the governor pardoning and commuting a bunch of people,
which, sure enough, I see Duncan Martinez, age 50,
and, you know, my heart just sank.
- Her heart sank,
because Duncan's sentence had been commuted,
making him eligible for parole,
and nobody had notified Patty.
Later, she saw the commutation letter from the governor,
which said...
- I know there's a pressure to release inmates,
but there are a lot more types of inmates
that could be released
than people that have committed murders.
- But he has been a model prisoner.
You know, he's behaved. He's obeyed the rules.
He's-- maybe he's schmoozed a few people, too, along the way,
but he's not done anything bad,
and had he made a deal,
he would have been out a long time ago.
- Right. - So why not?
- And it comes back to the victim.
A nice kid, wouldn't-hurt-a-fly kind of person.
He never got a chance to be a good, productive citizen.
- Nevertheless, December 8th, 2020,
Rick Jackson and Patty Baker met
to watch and participate via livestream
in a formal parole hearing.
- He looks old, doesn't he? - Yeah.
- The parole board would not let us record the proceedings,
but they did provide a few pictures
of the man who came before them.
Duncan is 50 now.
His hair's turned gray. He's gained a few pounds.
Patty tried to stay calm as she prepared to watch.
- Well, my anxiety is pretty high.
There's that doubt in the back of my mind.
What if? - It's a wild card,
and who knows what Duncan will say today?
He can be a charming guy. He's engaging.
He's always used it for his benefit
and to manipulate others.
- Duncan, talkative as always, addressed the board.
Said he was deeply remorseful,
that he took responsibility for what happened,
that he was a terrible person back then,
but now was a changed man.
Low risk of violence, said a prison report.
Patty and Rick spoke up too.
They implored the panel to keep Duncan,
a master manipulator, locked up forever,
just as the jury ruled he should be all those years ago.
- It's not life with parole. It's life without parole.
- Then, as Duncan waited patiently inside the prison,
the panel spoke privately to discuss his fate.
Keep him where he is, locked up,
or release him?
It took less than 30 minutes, and then three little words:
"Suitable for parole."
- It's a gut punch,
mostly because it's a worse gut punch to Patty.
- I'm disappointed in our system,
and I'm glad that my parents aren't around to see this,
to deal with another heartache at the hands of Duncan.
- Duncan told us he couldn't comment just now,
but his attorney gave us this statement,
saying Martinez takes responsibility for his actions,
is remorseful,
has done all he can to rehabilitate himself in prison
and earned the right to be released.
But we wondered, why did Duncan get a shot at parole
and not Nathan?
Well, for one thing,
Nathan didn't apply back in 2017 when Duncan did,
so his case was not considered,
though he has applied now,
and it's gone to the governor's office,
which is not releasing details.
We asked Nathan himself
if he had some sort of comment to make.
And he wrote back this letter,
which we showed Patty.
- "What started as an accident
"became a nightmare for so many.
"I can't ask the Baker family for forgiveness.
"It is up to them to determine if I'll ever earn that right."
I'm glad he took accountability
for his actions.
It still doesn't bring my brother back.
It still doesn't change what either of them did.
- What they did.
The madness of two.
Nathan Blalock is still serving his life sentence,
but Duncan Martinez?
In April of 2021, Duncan was released on parole,
just in time for the summer solstice.
- That's all for this edition
of "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
I'm Kate Snow. Thank you for watching.