All language subtitles for Savageland.2015.720p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.H.264-NTG_englishTOfrench (v2)

A grisly discovery

in the town of Sangre de Cristo this morning and a number

of SDC residents are reportedly still missing,

because as one police spokesman put it,

the whole town is a crime scene.

You spend 30 years patrolling this border,

you're gonna see some horrible things.

We all thought it was a mass murder case,

a serial killer.

Our thoughts and prayers go out

to the families of the Sangre de Cristo victims.

A person of interest was detained.

We found the suspect covered in blood.

38-Year-old Francisco Salazar,

an illegal immigrant, has been charged with over two dozen

counts of first degree murder.

Everybody seems so shocked about this.

Not me, because I know what these people are capable of.

If this guy actually killed the whole fucking town,

kill him.

Fry his ass.

A serial killer, that was pretty

much the general consensus.

Francisco Salazar remains jailed

under high security in Hinzman.

But then the photos emerged.

It changed... it change everything

that we thought about.

I don't understand.

Why did you keep taking pictures?

Do you own a gun?

I do, and ever since I've seen these photographs

I've been sleeping with it under my pillow.

Although the area has been cordoned off

by police, sources say authorities

have been unable to quantify a specific body count.

In what's being described as a likely mass murder scene,

police recovered the bodies of over a dozen victims

in various sites throughout the town.

Police are combing the town's two square miles

as they begin to unearth more clues to this shocking tragedy.

We've got a body here.

The body count in what police are

calling the Sangre de Cristo Massacre has risen to over 20.

Residents of nearby Hinzman and the border communities

are encouraged to avoid the general SDC area

and to report any tips or suspicious

behavior to the authorities.

In all my years of law enforcement,

I've never come across anything like this.

God abandoned Sangre de Cristo.

There's nothing left.

It still amazes me that the largest single-day homicide

in history of the state of Arizona got no attention,

zero media coverage.

It's hard to imagine the scale of the carnage.

Most bodies were only partial remains,

scraps of bloody clothing, limbs in the street.

Some bloody trails ran out to a quarter mile

as if the bodies had been dragged.

Other trails veered out into the surrounding deserts

and just disappeared.

All of them men, women, children gone in one night.

I've been a writer since 1995.

I've written five different books.

I worked for a couple of years as an investigative reporter

in Los Angeles.

We covered all the things that "LA Times" didn't cover.

Every place is known for something.

South Arizona, the Vanishing Capital of the United States.

It's true.

There's been more than a few that have

gone missing from the area.

But look what's going on... drug trafficking,

human trafficking, smuggling, weapons, gang activity.

There's no place that has more crime

than here in the borderlands.

You lose one person, that's a tragedy.

To see a whole town wiped out...

We got lucky.

It was their town, not ours.

It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.

Wake up.
Listen to me.

I've been telling you this for years,

but you've ignored me up to now.

I'm telling you, you can't ignore me anymore.

A person of interest

was detained as he attempted to flee across the border.

He is reportedly a Latino man in his 30s

who was employed at Sangre de Cristo Ranch

at the time of the murders.

I've seen 40 years of crime and violence.

The only man that ever scared me was Francisco Salazar.

Francisco Salazar was an illegal that had been living

in Sangre de Cristo for seven years

after jumping the border from the Nogales, Mexico, which made

him a pretty convenient fit.

Even with all the things that go on around here,

you never expect to see something like this.

He was raving when we caught him.

He was raving when we put him in that jail cell.

Once he was in there, he didn't say too much.

23 hours after they closed Sangre de Cristo down,

Salazar staggered to desert Highway

67, 12 miles east of SDC, and collapsed

at the side of the road.

The only truck to stop was an independent rig

co-owned by Mario Schatzker Rio, who had just got his license.

He dragged Salazar into the cab, turned around,

and drove him west to the nearest town

with a hospital, Hinzman.

The hospital contacted the cops.

How are you doing?

Good.

How's Brad been?

John Parano understands his people,

just like his father... a little comforting,

a wink, a little bullying, a big hat, toothpick, his stories.

It's kind of a big show.

He never misses an opportunity to press his case,

even if it is some cheesy public access piece.

I was born and raised right here in Hinzman.

I've been elected Sheriff of Hinzman County

for seven consecutive terms.

Before that, I was a Deputy Sheriff for 10 years.

I've devoted my entire life to the good people of this area.

Sheriff, how would you profile Francisco Salazar?

If there's ever a checklist for a serial killer,

Salazar would check every box.

He was a loner.

He came from a low-class background.

He had anger issues.

His father abandoned him at an early age.

He was a drifter.

And I actually worked with him for a little while.

We were part of a re-roofing crew at the pharmacy.

He was one quiet dude.

My friend dropped his sandwich at lunch.

Salazar takes a fucking picture of it.

They found dead corpses of little kids out in the desert.

A lot of folks couldn't sleep at night.

Was this the start of something bigger?

Salazar, he's... he's La Raza.

So were the rest of his thugs.

Coming here to wipe us off the map, like he did SDC.

He did odd jobs around town.

He painted houses of some of his eventual victims.

Judge Jack Hudson has instituted a full media ban

with no cameras permitted in the courtroom

and no media personnel allowed within 200

yards of the courthouse.

This Lawrence Ross guy,

he came here with the wrong idea.

Everybody saw where it was going,

so of course there was nothing but closed doors.

Sorry.

Look.

We did not arrest Salazar because he was Mexican.

We arrested Salazar because he was

covered with 15 types of blood.

AM 970, Hinzman Arizona.

This is "The Gus Greer Show," and I'm Gus Greer.

And for the next two hours, you're

going to get the most valuable thing

that you've ever had in your life... an education from me.

The Mexican, the cholo, La Raza.

It's a culture that celebrates violence.

They glorify death because they have nothing

else to look forward to.

I can't say the political climate

at the time had anything to do with the way he was treated.

I absolutely believe that an Hispanic man who is also

an illegal immigrant can get a fair trial

in the state of Arizona.

Let's not forget...

Arizona embraced the KKK after Reconstruction.

When we're talking about lynchings,

Arizona had almost as many as anywhere else in the country.

Different state, different era, same old monster...

controlling the power structure by day,

hiding behind masks at night.

Make no mistake, we are at war.

You think the government's

going to come in and save you?

You think they're going to start putting troops on the border?

Action has consequences, ladies and gentlemen.

And inaction has more serious consequences.

You have a choice to make.

Are you going to sit there and roll over, and let this tide

roll over you and destroy you and your family,

or are you going to stand up?

Are you willing to fight for what's right

and for what's yours?

When you're talking about the history of this country,

it's an indisputable fact...

there are very few minorities that have gotten a fair

trial in an all-white jury.

They didn't need a trial.

Public had already tried and convicted him

before it ever even started.

What do you get when you cross an illegal with an octopus?

What?

I don't know, but it sure can pick lettuce.

A lot of lettuce.

These damn illegal Mexicans come over

here and do all their drugs.

And he goes, that's not ours.

There's all their killings and stuff.

If you go out there like they did in the old days

in the John Wayne movies and hang one

where everybody can watch, then one day,

they gonna stop doing it.

The attorney they gave him was on his third case.

Before that, he handled some counterfeiter

and some petty thief.

Salazar was his third case.

I did my due diligence.

I'm sworn to defend my client to the best of my ability.

I think that I did that.

I sat in court.

I expected to see a monster.

I seen him.

He was just slumped over, quiet, with a blank stare.

There was no one else left alive to question.

He was the only survivor.

But Salazar never said a single word during the trial.

Teeth marks... that's something I'm not going to get into.

OK.

How's it going, Bob?

Day three of the trial, and I'm already sick to my stomach.

I never want to hear another word about the freak

eating the people he murdered.

I basically believe that if he killed these people,

I believe he should get the death

penalty for doing what he did.

He's an outcast.

He should be put to death on the spot.

Lethal injection.

Fry his ass.

And that was the level of analysis in the courtroom...

a one-man serial killer army.

They could only do forensics on seven

partial corpses that were intact enough to be tagged and IDed.

When pressed about identifying the other remains,

the coroner said on the stand, how do you run DNA tests

on 20 square blocks of bloody sand?

They didn't notice that the teeth marks on the victims

didn't match Francisco's teeth.

And yet, Francisco has bite marks.

They match the victims.

How can you botch that?

During the first trial, I felt like I needed

to seek someone out who understood

the local culture of the border.

Carlos Olivares, second-generation border

patrol agent, following in the footsteps of his father.

When you grow up in this area,

you realize that there's certain things you need to do.

There's just a protection that needs to happen.

Spend 30 years patrolling this border,

you're going to see some horrible things.

We find bodies of dead women and children,

dehydrated bodies, sometimes just 10 feet

from a hidden stash of water bottles.

Lately, these last few years on patrol,

I started seeing some things

that are getting harder to explain...

bodies that weren't just rotted by the sun.

They had been chewed... not by mountain lions or buzzards.

But nobody in my line of work talked about it.

Whatever happened in Sangre de Cristo

couldn't have been the work of just one man.

I didn't need a law degree to know that.

Based on the overwhelming amount of evidence given,

we convicted Mr. Salazar, as I remember,

in about a half hour, which was longer than it

probably should've taken.

Salazar was an easy target.

He was a person easy to dehumanize.

To the people in Hinzman, he was just some guy

who went from job to job.

He would work on construction jobs.

He would do anything.

He's minimized as being just sort of drifter...

some cash-and-carry guy who you found on the end of a block,

and you put in the back of a pickup, do your work,

and you forgot about him five minutes

after you dropped him back off.

During the first trial, I knew that Salazar

had been interviewed on camera only once,

on the evening he'd been taken into custody.

I spent 13 months filling out Freedom

of Information Act requests at both the state

and federal level... nothing.

The Arizona Open Meetings Act?

I got nothing.

Until I got this video.

Francisco interviews.

You said that they were people that you knew,

but something wasn't right about them.

They were the same people, but they were dead.

Why didn't you hear about this tape before?

The tape was never entered

into evidence in the first trial,

and it was barred in the second one.

You didn't give serious thought to using

the video in his defense?

Have you seen the video?

It's not an insanity defense.

It's... it's a suicide note.

It sounds like the ramblings of a crazy man, sure.

But given the evidence, his story actually made

no more or less sense

than the official version.

The administrative staff were very concerned about him...

me interviewing him not being shackled to the chair,

which is a typical thing.

I wanted to get rid of as many barriers as I could,

because I could tell that he was pretty closed off emotionally,

and he was kind of in a shell in his own head,

and very, very, very scared.

I said, listen, just let him come in and sit with me,

because he was quiet.

And you guys are outside the door.

You've got cameras in here.

And... and you have guns outside there.

And whatever it is that you need to do to bust in

and what's he gonna...

what else could he do?

What's your name?

It took quite a while for him to even start

to answer any questions... his name, or where he grew up,

or basic just, assessment stuff that we do.

And I was wondering if, maybe,

he was regressing back into some childhood memory

or feeling or something.

The level of trauma that Francisco has seemed

to experience in his life could easily

be compared to somebody who has come back from being

in a combat situation.

It doesn't matter what you do to me.

They're still out there.

Who's out there?

At least they can't get me in here.

This is a guy who was facing

death, the horrors of jail.

Yet somehow he feels safer on the inside

than he does out here.

In my professional opinion, even though his story sounds

like it might be a little bit, crazy and out there,

I did not find anything about him that was psychotic...

his behavior, anything he said to me.

He was, in layman's term, completely sane.

But it didn't make any sense,

which is why I tried for the insanity defense.

He looked me directly in the eye,

and he was very specific about what he was saying.

And he never changed his story.

Salazar wasn't crazy or... or at least

not crazy all by himself.

Crazy was what he saw that night.

Crazy was seeing everyone he knew massacred.

Some of them are bloody, with blood everywhere.

It's the ravings of a madman, right?

But do you know what was really crazy?

I had to get help.

I took my camera...

The arrest report listed the items on Salazar's person

when he was dropped off by the truck driver.

One SLR 35 millimeter camera fitted

with a 70 to 200 millimeter lens and a flash unit.

Everyone around here knew he was a photographer.

He took pictures of everybody.

It was almost involuntary.

He just saw something, and he took a picture of it.

And he kind of, painted a history of his life

with it.

Salazar was a lifelong Catholic.

He believed in the power of the resurrection.

He spent seven years in SDC,

taking pictures of dead things in a dead town.

Being an illegal, strike one.

A loner with a camera, strike two.

Grace Putnam was pretty much strike

three, especially considering everything that happened.

Grace Putnam lived in SDC.

Francisco was a friend of the family.

Salazar's house was... was jammed with these

weird and... and suggestive photographs

of children and had roadkill.

I've looked at all of the earlier photos.

I've spent some time with him.

He has a photographer's eye for sure.

The best photographer I've ever seen?

No.

But he definitely had a professional eye.

The shots of the little girl... several of those

are delicate and beautiful.

The shots of the roadkill are a perfect counterpoint.

You can read what you want into anything.

That's... that's part of what makes us human, I suppose.

The shrinks have a fancy word for it.

It's... it's voyeur.

My take... pervert.

So Francisco was a photographer.

Big fucking deal.

But there was something on that tape

I couldn't put my finger on.

I had to get help.

I took my camera...

During the first trial, I tried

to contact Schatzker Rio, the truck driver

who picked up Salazar.

He didn't want to talk.

I left message after message.

We never got together in person.

But after the appeal was lodged,

that's when I got this phone message.

Mr. Ross,
I'm sending you something.

I found it in my cab under the seat.

Must have been there for months.

I don't know.

I don't know what it is, but I don't wanna know.

Now you have it.

You keep me out of this, though.

That's all I ask.

I called him, got no reply.

A couple of days later...

A week later, the roll arrived.

Excuse me, Sheriff.

Do you want to talk us about the Salazar case,

about how the photos are gonna affect his appeal?

No.

What Francisco said on the tape,

what everyone else discounted as insane ravings... turns out,

he documented it all.

Something primal and horrible moved through Sangre de Cristo

that night.

And the one survivor made a record of it.

Francisco had a camera with him that night.

He took it with him and recorded what he saw on

one roll of film, 36 exposures.

I'm still in the process

of appealing his conviction.

But I can't enter these photos as evidence.

I'd be disbarred.

All this stuff about the photographs is BS.

Photos prove nothing... nothing.

Many kids right here in Hinzman who could Photoshop you

into the famous grassy knoll in Dallas

with a smoking gun in your hand, and you'd believe it was you.

I've been a professional photojournalist for... Jesus,

over 40 years now.

I've shot in 'Nam, shot in Cambodia, pretty much

all around the world.

These are as authentic as they get.

Usually, when somebody is playing with film,

you can tell.

There's rough edges.

There are little things that... that a professional can tell

when looking at photography.

You look at these pictures, there is none of that.

These pictures are real.

The judge didn't want them.

Parano didn't want them.

It doesn't matter.

The photos are not evidence.

I would tell the local authorities

that they are wrong... that these are as authentic as it gets.

I'm frankly surprised their own people haven't

looked at the photos and been able

to confirm the truth of the pictures.

I'll tell you what those photos are...

a sick prank played by sick freaks.

Everybody heard about the photographs.

Nobody believed they were real.

They were trying to make us feel sympathy for a man

that didn't deserve any.

The killing started, at least as far

as Salazar's story was concerned,

before he snapped a single frame.

The only two explanations... either the... the guy

went out there and staged everything,

or he's absolutely telling the truth.

Some of them were dead.

And some of them...

He was babbling, and I thought I was going to lose him,

which I eventually did.

So I asked him to start at the beginning.

Francisco, what were you doing

when Danny showed up at your house?

I was putting film in my camera.

According to Salazar, he was loading up

his camera, getting ready to shoot

some dead coyotes or possums.

But Danny shows up on his doorstep,

bleeding out like a stuck pig.

And then you said that he...

and he was bleeding.

And you tried to help him.

And you laid him down on the couch.

Is that correct?

I saw him die.

How are you sure that he was dead?

He was dead.

I know he was dead.

The police forensic reports backed up that the victim

did die at Salazar's house.

Danny's body was one of the few

that could be identified, but barely.

Danny Montez was my cousin.

I thought he and Salazar were cool.

Montez used to work in the fields near Salazar's house.

This is where it gets confusing to me.

One minute, he's alive and on your couch, and then he's dead,

and then he's standing up, and he's coming at you,

and you're afraid.

He was dead.

And then he came after me.

And I had to stop him.

That's what happened.

So when he was telling me this story,

he was very clear and concise.

And he had seemed to, like, let a weight off his shoulders.

And he exhaled, and he got very calm after he

talked to me about this.

So he's very clear in the details about what happened.

Doesn't that seem strange to you?

This is not something I've ever heard before.

It's what happened.

It was his same body and same face, but it wasn't Danny.

Did he say anything?

No?

No words?

The boy's body was found in the middle

of Salazar's living room.

You stopped him.

How did you stop him from attacking you?

I held him.

And I hurt him.
And he stopped.

How did you hurt him?

That's tough evidence to overcome.

There's no question that Francisco hacked up

Danny Montez to pieces.

The question is, did he kill him?

So after... after all of that happened,

then

I had to get help.

If Salazar killed Montez, why would

he run into town to get help?

Because going south wasn't an option.

Here is photograph 01 of the roll.

This is the start of what Salazar saw...

what sent him back toward town.

This is what made him run.

Salazar's roll of film was a map, from the edge of town

three miles across what was left of Sangre de Cristo.

In one way, it doesn't matter

what you think the photos mean.

You can deny them.

You can look to them for clues about

what happened to your loved one.

You can call them a sick media joke.

You can even hope for salvation.

But it's something, and it's coming closer.

Salazar lived about a mile outside of town,

on the fringes.

His cabin was at the foot of the hills.

He ran away through the fields, toward the town.

Based on the light in that first picture,

it was about 15 minutes to sundown.

Migrant workers were still working.

SDC's the brown town

that actually services Hinzman.

That's where you get all the invisible people...

all of the service people, all your maids,

people who pick your food, who take care of the kids.

When we were kids, we couldn't even pronounce the damn place.

You're like "Shandray de Caso," "Sandray de Crystal."

We just call it Savageland.

The cops found what they said were the remains

of 11 victims out in the field.

That's just Savageland

living down to its reputation.

The first theory was cartels.

SDC is in an area of major cross-border drug supply lines.

Maybe drugs were passing through and some gang

wanted to stake out a new territory.

There were a lot of thieves with drugs.

Drugs were coming in and the... the cartel was coming in

and influencing the young kids.

Cartel killings are designed to make a point.

They stack the heads up all neat like it's an altar,

or they hang the bodies from bridges.

It keeps people in line.

This wasn't designed to make a point.

This was random carnage.

Salazar's running for cover, exposed, out in the open.

Coming out of the fields, he headed into town.

He came across Ron Templeton.

Templeton was a hunter from Hinzman.

Spent his off hours out here searching through the area.

I used to see him all the time out here on patrol.

I walk in the house

and expect him to be here.

It's hard to get used to the idea

that he's not in here anymore.

Did you know Ron Templeton?

The police say that you were in his truck.

Because he had a gun.

Some of the victims were from Hinzman.

Some of them were beloved members of the community.

They were not just SDC residents.

Ron Templeton was a member of the Founders Club.

People loved him.

He was such a big part of just the community,

too.

So every place I go and everything I do,

I expect to see him.

Ron Templeton was a good man.

When he came across Salazar...

he tried to find some good in him as well.

And that was his big mistake.

I tried to get him to come with me to help these people,

to help my friends.

So the man in the truck,

did he shoot at the people in the field?

What happened?

Nothing happened.

I didn't murder him.

The one thing that continues to bother me

is Francisco Salazar taking Ron down.

He's such a little man.

According to the state's case, a 5 foot 9,

170-pound Francisco ran bloody and screaming

toward Ron Templeton, who's 6 foot 1, 210 pounds, and armed.

Anyone who knew Ron knew what an expert hunter he was.

He was an expert shot, too.

He never missed.

One shot is all it took to ever kill an animal.

And for him to miss that many times that close up...

impossible to even imagine.

This is where they found Templeton's truck.

The blood trail that went off into the wash,

then disappeared.

We never found Ron Templeton's body.

His wife, Eileen, will never get the closure

that she deserves.

Sorry.

57 people died here.

And the local newspaper ran one obituary...

one white guy from Hinzman.

Many times, I lie awake at night,

wishing Ron had taken out Salazar right then and there.

People tell me not to ask questions

and keep quiet.

And then I think, are they lying to me?

Are they trying to make me feel this

is the way it happened, just to make me be quiet

and not question?

We've lived in this town forever.

Would they be lying to me?

Salazar runs until he reaches the edge of town.

You've got Danny Montez dead.

11 more in the field.

That still leaves 45.

At this time,
it's about 8:00 PM.

The more he runs, the clearer it becomes...

he's not outrunning anything.

When you got into town,

what did you see?

What did it look like?

It was like hell.

People were running.

People were hurting each other.

At this point, it's 8:15 PM.

Francisco's making his way through town,

trying to stay alive.

By his own account, he has no weapon

just his camera.

The amazing thing about being a photographer is,

so long as you are behind that lens,

so long as you are shooting through that lens,

you are indestructible.

Every photographer I know feels the same way.

While you're shooting, you can't be hurt.

I have a stultifying fear of heights.

I looking out of an upstairs window

scares the hell out of me.

In 'Nam, I used to spend half of my time

hanging out of an open helicopter door,

hanging onto a strap I wouldn't use as a belt,

and shooting away, because nothing could hurt me.

As long as I had that camera in front of my face,

nothing could hurt me.

You basically have an illegal

who's running amok all over Savageland, killing at random.

At this point, the prosecution case

starts to get a little shaky.

Salazar would've said something to my grandpa

and stuff would've went down.

My grandpa's not going to go down without a fight.

The autopsy certificates would have you believe that Salazar

was sprinting through town, dispatching victims

with a machete and pickax

like he was some kind of trained killer.

Salazar knew every square inch of that town.

That's why he was able to move so quickly

and kill without anybody realizing what was happening.

SDC is not a big place.

Salazar was in good shape.

If he were quick enough,

he could've covered all that ground.

And he did not want to leave any witnesses.

What's most amazing about these photographs

is the fact that he got as many decent photographs

as he did out of one roll.

I can't imagine why he would go with one roll.

I have a feeling he probably had more

that he lost along the way, because I've done that myself.

One roll of film and 36 exposures,

and caught as many perfect shots as he did.

It is either brilliant film work

or one of the greatest accidents of photography.

We know that Salazar gets here

to the one store in town.

It's a little way out of the rest of his route

based on the photographs.

But we do know this market had a working landline.

But if that's what he was going for, he was shit out of luck.

If you were in New York City and not Sangre de Cristo,

you would probably have 15,000 shots

of what happened there that evening

on people's cell phones.

Most people in SDC didn't have cell phones.

They had phone cards.

Once a month, they'd come to the market,

buy one, call home to Mexico, say hi to mom,

confirm the wire transfer back home.

You can't take a picture with a phone card.

We're talking about a place where life was cheap.

Illegals arriving illegally, doing illegal things.

People ask me, why didn't the people of SDC

call the police?

Immigrants don't call police.

And when you live in SDC, the police

are just another element, another criminal element

to them.

Salazar was also charged with murders

that happened at the water-tower.

But there's not a single piece of evidence

to indicate that Salazar was ever there.

And remember those people we found,

right next to the small water-tower.

We know that they ran.

We know that they ran up to the top of that water-tower.

And instead of confronting whatever was chasing them,

they chose to jump off the water-tower.

Now that just doesn't happen when you have an individual.

I don't care how horrible that individual is.

That doesn't happen.

Eight people supposedly ran up there,

trying to get away from one man?

But instead of trying to fight him

off on a single fire escape, these eight people

chose to jump.

They'd rather kill themselves and their families

instead of fight him?

They told me that Jose and his family

were some of the ones who died at that tower.

And it was only two blocks from their house.

I look at his picture and...

Maria had such a strong sense of faith...

a really strong sense of faith.

I don't have that faith.

I just don't have that faith.

And it hurts me,

because I'm more angry about that.

I can't imagine why the two of them

would do something like that.

They had to climb that.

If you think about them standing there at that moment,

and then making that decision.

Salazar was never closer than three blocks to that tower

that night.

The truth is, he had a different route in mind.

From the start, he was always heading here.

That's what he says.

It's the church.

The church mission for the Putnam family.

As for the Putnams, Francisco had been working

for them for years.

He was almost a friend.

They trusted him.

They gave him a key, to the building.

And yet, when I look at the crime scene,

doors have been ripped off their hinges.

Now why would Francisco rip the doors off the hinges

when he had a key?

What was going through your mind

when you saw this?

I don't know.

I just wanted to help my friends.

You worked for a Dwayne and Judith Putnam,

didn't you?

Yes.

How did you feel about them?

They were good people.

The Putnams were here to convert the old church

and mission offices.

They basically started a new ministry

in a town other religious groups had long since abandoned.

We're proud of our church's missionary history.

God's mission for us is to go forth to the less fortunate

and bear witness to His word.

The Putnams were some of my closest,

dearest friends in the world... truly people of God.

Dwayne and Judith's engagement was sanctioned by our church

with great excitement.

Even though she wasn't baptized in a church at the time,

we knew in her heart she'd always believed.

She had great strength.

They were my friends.

Salazar had spent the summer working

as a handyman on the mission, doing odd jobs,

running errands for Judith, hanging out with the two kids.

The Putnams went to that town to fix up that facility,

to empower those people.

This family reached out to Salazar,

and this is how he repaid them?

But Salazar was too late.

Grace is gone.

Where is Grace?

Grace is gone.

Don't you judge me.

Only God can judge me.

Only He knows what I'm seeing.

Only He knows this abomination.

I am Abraham.

A burnt...

My lambs, my little lamb.

What'd you wish for, Grace?

I get little.

Birthday girl first.

When I got there, I knew that I was too late.

Where are their bodies?

In the official version,

forensics, coupled with the Putnam phone recording,

led the police to conclude that Putnam killed his wife

and son before killing himself.

Now Putnam panicked at seeing Salazar running wild

and snapped when he heard the screams outside the mission.

So he killed his family with a machete

before turning it on himself.

That's Parano's version.

Were they still alive when you got there?

Only one of them.

But the official logic doesn't hold up.

Putnam wanted to give his family a mercy killing

so they could all go up clean to Jesus.

That's one thing.

But why dismember his little kids?

Yeah, we had dogs searching

for the other remains.

We found nothing, or Salazar won't be telling us

where he buried the bodies.

Dwayne Putnam thought he was a man of God.

But he made the wrong choice.

For a pastor, a man of the Bible,

it must be hard to see these photos.

They show what you might call a inconvenient resurrection.

The only thing he can do is deny it.

God saw what Dwayne did.

He was a murderer and a suicide.

OK, both of you.

Say hi to mommy.

Hi!

Hi, mommy.

Run!

Where was Grace Putnam?

She wasn't there.

Where was she?

If Grace wasn't at the mission...

She was at school.

The school is on the outskirts of town.

And Salazar still has a distance to go,

through the most densely populated area of town,

where most of the bodies were found.

Most of the killings

occurred on the street or just inside the entrances to homes.

People rushed out to see what was happening,

to protect their families.

If this bullshit story were true,

why didn't Salazar put down his camera and help those people?

Salazar was a handyman.

He had keys for vacant buildings all over town.

He could cut through building to building from one end of town

to the other, hide, look out.

Look, most of the time,

he probably wasn't even close to the action.

A 70 to 200 millimeter lens pulls

in all sorts of distant detail.

Sometimes, you get nothing.

Sometimes, you get something extraordinary.

Why did Francisco take the photos?

The better question is, why not?

You are capturing moments of time

that you are the only person, it's a moral imperative,

almost.

You're the person with the camera.

You're the only person there with that option.

You take the pictures because you must,

because somebody has to take those pictures.

Salazar makes his way down Main Street

and gets to the preschool.

All the children of the people who died in that field,

they were in that preschool.

That's the thing that messed with me the most...

what happened at that preschool.

We're not the same as they are.

We don't kill babies.

There's almost nothing that you could

say to change people's minds.

Even planting the possibility, the idea

that you hurt or killed children.

Went to the school.

When I got there...

There were nine kids in the preschool

and one teacher, Lisa Reyes.

Forensics indicated that some of the kids

had hidden behind a curtain.

That's a child's natural instinct to think,

if they make themselves invisible,

they can save themselves from the monster.

When I came back, like I said,

I couldn't believe it.

I didn't want to believe it.

And to go to the funeral was one of the hardest things.

It was a closed casket.

All the family was there.

A lot of people wish that they would have been able to see her

before she...

keep my own last memory of...

I wouldn't want to see her in there anyways.

I remember her the way I remember her.

Linda Perez is my daughter.

She was five years old.

She lived with her father in SDC.

I worked in Hinzman.

I hardly got to see her because I worked long hours.

She was wearing a purple top and pants

and white tennis shoes.

She was very picky about what she wanted to wear.

When I left, she was three.

And I wasn't even nice to her.

I could have been nicer to her.

But she was always bugging me,

I feel like an asshole.

Benny.

You wanna see him?

He's right here.

Look at that.

Look at that smile.

He was born premature, and he was tiny.

Tiny.

He weighed 2 and 1/2 pounds.

And he had some problems.

He got pneumonia as a newborn.

But he had a tough, strong heart.

I could have gone home more,

but it was a piece of shit town.

And I left when I could.

And I was just hoping, maybe, when she got older,

we could make up for lost time.

That's all I was thinking.

But now I don't have time.

I took this from her school.

This was the last thing she was wearing.

Grace is gone.

Where is Grace?

Grace is gone.

I couldn't find her.

By his own account, Salazar couldn't even get

inside the school.

He scurried around the back by the storeroom.

The one aspect of that roll of film that sort of fascinates me

is why he spent so much of the last

of it taking pictures of that one subject,

that little girl.

I wouldn't have.

It's not what I would've done.

And I don't think most other professional photographers

would've done it either.

She was on the other side of the window.

She was reaching out.

I couldn't help her.

Based on my evaluation,

this was the first time that Salazar

even used his flash unit.

The question is, why now?

I tried to stop them with the flash.

With the camera?

Did it help?

Did it stop them for a little while?

Only when it flashed.

Those last photographs...

there's the one where he's reaching through the bars,

where he is trying to take the girl's hand

and suddenly he stops being a historian,

stops being an observer, and becomes an active participant.

The moment he stopped being a photographer

and decided to do a single human action to save somebody else...

I just held her hand.

...is the moment that changed everything for him.

You give up being a photographer to become a human being.

And you lose what has kept you alive and safe through

the rest of the process.

I just held her hand.

And I sang.

He was planning this all along.

There's only three possibilities.

Either he's lying, he's crazy, or he's telling the truth.

And in my professional opinion, he's not lying

and he's not crazy.

Salazar had his shot in court.

We're appealing.

That's all we can do at this point.

It's in the hands of the criminal justice system

of the state of Arizona.

I'm going to be glad

when this appeal goes nowhere so this town

can start going somewhere again.

If you'd been a reporter like me

in an inner city, you've seen murders.

You've seen murders of every type.

I can tell you in a second, gangland shot,

personal shot, in terms of,

two different people who know each other.

I can tell you how a person died.

Murders have signatures.

So who had the resources, the political will the anger,

the motive to carry out the single-night massacre

of an entire town?

It's a familiar story we've seen played out time and time again.

It's not smoke and mirrors.

It's desert, sand, hate, and fear.

Nat Turner, the Scottsboro Boys, the Tulsa race riots,

Zoot Suit Riots, Camp Grant Massacre,

Operation Wetback, Rodney King.

Sangre de Cristo.

This is the community that we are.

We do take an eye for an eye, because not only is that fair,

that's our God-given right.

And we will be watching the border for all future Salazars.

God bless America, my home, sweet home.

They don't care who you are.

They don't care what you do.

They'd basically rather shoot you...

than give you a dollar.

The Great Wall of America between us and Mexico,

I don't hear them trying to build that wall

between here and Canada.

And they're not saying somebody...

some Canuck is coming down and killing people up in Michigan.

There's a lot more Salazars out there... more Ramirez,

more Sanchezes, more Carloses.

But make no mistake... it's a matter of when, not if.

Basically, there's 100,000 that try to come across,

and there's only maybe 1,000 border patrol.

They ain't going to get everybody.

Maybe we've just got our priorities

right here in Arizona.

A lot of our people have been waiting a long time for this.

I'm also proud that this state is carrying out

Salazar's sentence in half the time it took to do

the same to Timothy McVeigh.

At 12:05 AM Arizona time... not bleeding

liberal time, not East Coast wine and cheese time,

not West Coast free drugs time...

American justice was served.

No more lawyers' appeals.

No more bills.

No more three square meals a day.

No more excuses.

And no more fear, my friends.

Francisco was the only witness to what happened that night.

And the court killed his photographs.

And then the state killed him.

Do you know where Salazar gets buried?

He gets buried right here, in the state of Arizona!

He must be pretty pleased with himself.

He snuck in here, he hid here, he killed here,

he's executed here.

But even in death, he manages to avoid being deported.

Except they got it all wrong.

This doesn't end with the execution of Francisco Salazar.

Francisco Salazar's photos don't end with Francisco Salazar.

I wish I was there.

I wish I had been the guy behind the camera.

Why did Francisco take the photos?

I don't know.

Maybe he thought he was going to die like everybody else.

Why the hell not?

At least leave something behind.

Leave some record behind so he didn't die for nothing.

There's a piece of history left.

And if you're going to go out, go out with something of value.

Do something.

Make your death count for something.

The photos show us the truth.

The truth is that I'm the one who found the photos.

I'm the one who released them.

Ross found the truth, but he couldn't see it.

He got scared.

I don't blame him.

As a journalist, I deal in facts, not speculation.

And the facts are that Francisco recorded whatever moved

through that town that night.

And that was the only real evidence.

And the local will to investigate was nonexistent.

So the photos exist in a vacuum.

I think a lot of people

will sleep better at night believing that they are photoshopped

than believing they are seeing something

that is happening.

There's no going back to normal.

Because normal doesn't exist anymore.

There were no masks, no cartels, no mob of illegals at night.

The photos do tell us something.

They're numbered.

Number one was taken from the southern

watch in the foothills, number 36 at the schoolhouse.

When you look at the crime scene, the police reports,

the layout of the town, you realize that this carnage

wasn't random.

It was just so huge that nobody could see the bigger picture.

They were always heading in one direction.

They were heading north.

Have you ever actually seen the border fence?

It's 20 feet high, corrugated steel,

razor wire in some places.

Anyone with any regard for human life

would stay the hell away from that fence.

Do you own a gun?

I do.

And ever since that... I've seen these photographs,

I've been sleeping with it under my pillow.

This is a cruel land

where death is a certainty.

We grow up with it.

We accept it.

You know what made my morning?

Hearing that some group of unknown patriots

found where Salazar's grave was and dug it up.

The body's gone, my friends.

And good riddance.

Seven weeks after Salazar's execution,

the mutilated remains of two campers

were found in the Tonto National Forest, 115 miles

north of Sangre de Cristo.

Five unexplained deaths in Sitgreaves.

Multiple attacks in Ajo, Callente, Willcox to the east.

Hilldale was the first town in Utah... 12 dead.

The same patterns emerging east to Juarez.

Up into New Mexico in Alamogordo, five dead.

In Trevino Ranch, three dead, nine unaccounted.

The hell is this?