Original subtitles

There was a trailer over on Buck Mountain Road,

I wanna say probably about 25 yards off the road.

It's a really secluded place

on Friday, November 13th.

There's no neighbors.

The way the property was set up,

there was no way you could see anything from the road.

So once you got back there, you were at their mercy.

There was nobody coming to save you.

Nobody would hear you.

If you got brought out there, that was it.

There was no walking away from that.

On November 17th, 2015,

Virginia Rodriguez celebrated her birthday.

Every single year, no matter what,

her son Pepe would always reach out to his mother.

Pepe was a good-looking guy, 56 years old.

Pepe's real name is Jose Herran.

He was from New Jersey, but he had moved

to Pennsylvania because a friend had told him,

"Hey, maybe I can use you out here.

Maybe you can help out. I got a place for you to stay."

But that year, he didn't reach out to her.

Virginia Rodriguez, she was somewhat frantically

calling him constantly on his cell phone,

and it was going right to voicemail.

He stopped all communication with family.

There would never be a time or circumstance

that would take him away

from his mother and his daughter.

Virginia Rodriguez told

law enforcement that the last time she had talked to her son

was on November 13th of 2015, that was Friday the 13th.

I was a supervisor of a homicide unit

with the Pennsylvania State Police for 17 years.

When we got this call about this investigation,

I think investigators early on, they knew there was more to it.

I was working a cold case, and my supervisor wanted us

to drop everything and move forward

on this new information that was coming in.

We just started hitting the ground,

started talking to anybody that would tell us something.

We'd listen, we'd follow that lead,

talk to somebody else.

We're also looking into,

did Pepe use his passport,

and did he passport out of the country?

You know, all those things,

and all of them kept coming back negative.

At this point, we knew that Pepe took a chance,

and he moves to Weatherly.

So law enforcement had about a month window

from October up until November 13th,

then all of a sudden, he's gone-- vanished.

We couldn't find that he was

on the face of the Earth anymore.

Weatherly Borough sits in northeast PA,

right on the outside of Poconos.

It sits kind of secluded out in the middle of nowhere.

It's three and a half square miles.

It's got about 2,500 residents.

So it's a very tight-knit community.

People know everybody.

The town, it kind of has that hill-have-eyes,

or that creepy feeling, where it kinda feels like

somebody's always watching.

Just outside of Weatherly is

where it runs into Foster Township.

It's woods, hundreds and hundreds of acres of woods.

And then there's the stone couch.

Sits on Buck Mountain Road.

It's a rock that looks like a couch.

They say if you sit on the couch,

the first time, bad luck will happen to you.

The second time, somebody that you know will die.

And the third time, you'll die.

I wouldn't dare sit on that couch.

On August 6th, 2016, a little over a year

since Pepe had gone missing.

It was around 2 o'clock in the morning.

I received a phone call from my chief,

said that we had a large fire in town-- that jolts me.

It wakes you right up.

I jump out of bed, grab some clothes,

jump in the vehicle.

A Bunch of residents had called and said,

"There's a house on fire on Third Street,"

and we didn't really know what was going on.

Everything was burning.

I remember the heat being so intense,

I could feel the left side of my face starting to blister.

That's how hot it was.

You could smell the shingles burning,

the sting in your nose. It's the asphalt smell.

You can smell the vinyl siding burning.

It was a lot worse than I expected when I got there.

There were three houses that were on fire.

But, by the grace of God,

everybody got out without any serious injuries.

So we had an accelerant-sniffing dog,

and the dog definitely hit on some areas

that were deemed to have accelerants on 'em.

It was arson.

I told my officers to start doing interviews,

talking to the neighbors.

We need to go at it and figure out who started it,

how they started it, why they started it.

That morning after the fire,

while we were doing this investigation,

I found out that Roberto Torner

owned the property on Third Street.

He was in his late 40s, confident.

He's about as wide as he is tall.

This is what we're doing today,

taking it down caveman style, one piece at a time.

So, of course I love my job.

Wouldn't you?

Roberto Torner was a well-known name in the area.

He was really integrating himself from being an outsider

into this small community

by wanting to be involved in politics,

wanting to be involved with local government,

buy properties, fix them up,

be friends with the chief of police,

be friends with the mayor,

maybe run for mayor himself.

I asked Rob several times if he had anything to do

with the fire, if he set the fire,

and he adamantly says he did not.

He said he had nothing to do with it.

So speaking with Torner,

just asking him basic questions--

if he had insurance on it, if he knew what happened,

if he had any problems with anybody.

My officers started by looking at every single house to see

if there was any type of surveillance camera on it.

A couple blocks away, they found a security camera.

I noticed there was this white Mitsubishi Eclipse

with a big spoiler on the back that stuck out.

It was very distinctive, and I'm not sure how

to tie it in yet, but I need to find the car.

Knowing the sheer damage and destruction

of the fire being over a million dollars in damage,

that's when I decided to bring ATF in.

We got federal search warrants

for all the properties that Torner owned.

We pull up that morning to execute the search warrant

in the Cottage Hotel.

The Cottage Hotel was a three-story,

Pepto-Bismol color, pink gargoyles out front.

There was always weird stuff going on there.

It was a transient place.

People that lived at the Cottage,

it seemed as though they were afraid to talk,

and we didn't know why.

It was always, "I don't know anything.

I can't help you."

During these interviews with the tenants of the Cottage,

we had an individual come forward,

and he said that I needed to talk to a tenant there.

He's been there for about two, three years.

He wasn't on our radar yet.

He was just another person that we were talking to.

Oh, this is me in 2014 when I moved into the cottage,

and I had absolutely no idea what I had in store for me.

About 11 o'clock at night,

I got a phone call, and it was a blocked number.

I answered the call, and it was Sergeant Bogart.

And he told me, like,

"Look, I'm parked across the road.

You look out your window, you'll see that white car."

He's like, "Come down, get in my car,

"and I'm gonna take you somewhere.

We're gonna go, and I want you to talk to me."

He assured me, like,

"Nothing's gonna happen to you.

We're gonna protect you."

And then finally I agreed. I'm like...

"There's a place three miles away.

"When it gets dark and I know that everybody's gone

or in bed, I will meet you there."

I got in the car with him. I was terrified.

Anybody can show you a badge.

That doesn't mean they're a cop.

And then the doors locked, and then he took off.

So all of a sudden I'm in a car with a big bald dude

that has a gun,

and he's driving towards the woods.

He took us this weird back way into Weatherly.

I never went that way before. He didn't say a word to me.

So that made me even more scared.

So I'm like sitting there with my hand on the doorknob.

I literally was gonna jump out of the car.

We got to the Weatherly police station,

and there was a room full of federal agents.

So I was shocked. I was honestly shocked.

Detective Bogart, he tried to calm me down

the best he could.

He said, "You're cool, you're cool, you're cool."

We actually sit down and interview him about

what was going on.

I admitted that I knew about the fire

and that I was there,

and I tried to convey to them

that I was not a willing participant.

They didn't believe me.

Like, they absolutely did not believe me.

Donnie Warren, I think,

had a really tough decision to make,

"Am I gonna be on the good guy team,

or am I gonna be on the bad guy team?"

So I told him, "I know what happened to Pepe."

Donnie Warren was a resident there

at the Cottage Hotel.

Donnie is an individual-- a very unique individual,

to say the least.

The stories that Donnie was telling us,

it was almost hard to believe.

One of the first things he said,

that he had the vampire disease,

you know, which I didn't know what it was.

And we're like, "Oh, yeah, that's interesting, Donnie."

I got treated like a UFO abductee.

Nobody believed me.

Fast forward when you find that it's a thing.

It's Porphyria, like,

if he gets stressed out and he goes in the sun,

he starts to, like, break out. You know, it's just weird.

But when he told me he drove his white Eclipse,

and I'm like, "Does it have a big wing on the back?"

He's like, "Yes."

And I'm like, "His story makes sense.

He was here because we have the photo

to show that he was here."

And it seemed Donnie was telling the truth.

That he wanted to speak to us.

He wanted to talk to whoever was in charge.

And I even told him, like,

"Look, this-- this is actually what happened."

I had moved into the Cottage around November

a couple of years ago.

Me and my girlfriend had split up at the time.

And so I was

just basically desperate for a place to stay.

There was people in and out of there constantly.

This woman, Alba,

was the one that dealt

with the elderly people they had there.

There was a family living down the hall from me

as a couple and a couple of children.

Pepe, well, Jose Herran, had moved into the Cottage

around the beginning of November.

He was only there for, like, maybe a week and a half,

maybe two weeks at the very most.

I like Pepe. I thought he was cool.

Sharp dresser. He's a ladies' man.

A typical, you know, Cuban machismo.

Kind of like a fatherly figure type guy.

Pepe and Roberto Torner knew each other.

The first time I met Rob, I noticed straight away

that he seems like he's genuine. He's a caring guy.

He just wants to help you.

He doesn't want anything out of it.

Rob knew that I was broke, and I needed money, so,

uh, he had work around.

At first, I did a lot of painting,

and then after about a week of living at the Cottage,

things started to take a really sinister turn.

Just out of the blue,

I was told, "Oh, I need you to go over to Buck Mountain Road

and paint over a floor."

But you have to use this paint.

And he gave me four gallons of oil-based paint.

Absolutely had to be oil-based paint.

And I had to coat as many coats over the floor as I could.

So I thought it was a little weird.

Like, why would you be painting

over something that carpet goes over?

So it didn't make any sense to me.

And then when I saw what was on the floor,

I saw the volume of blood that was on the floor.

You try telling yourself that that's not what it is,

like, "No, that can't be."

It was in that moment that I realized that I saw too much,

I knew too much.

There's absolutely no way

they were gonna let me leave there alive.

The next day, there was a bag of weapons

that were put in my room.

There was a 45, a 9mm,

a 22, there was a shotgun and an AK-47.

I was told to strip them down, clean them,

make sure that there was nothing, no fingerprints,

like, no DNA, no nothing, using bleach and ammonia.

The moment that I touched the weapons, like,

I knew what they were used for.

And... that was like the point of no return.

So it was really a horrible feeling

'cause that was, like, any shot I had of people believing me

was the evidence that I was destroying,

so it was really a double-edged sword.

I did my best to, like, make it appear that I did it,

but not erase all of it.

And then I wrapped them in bags,

and then I put them back in the duffel bag.

One of the first questions I had, um,

of Donnie after he told us his story was,

"Why didn't you call 911? Why didn't you report it?"

And, according to Donnie, he did.

He went to Chief Anthony Harris, who at the time was

the Freeland Bureau Chief of Police.

And I was like, "I don't know what to do, what do I do?"

And he looked at me and said,

"That can just as easily happen to you."

I'm like, "Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

What did I just do?"

I went in the store. I came out-- Harris was gone.

I'm like, "All right, maybe he won't say anything."

I got home at The Cottage

and I saw Chief Harris walk out the front door.

As soon as I walked through the door,

all the people that were there shut up.

Somebody hit me.

And then, like a pack of hyenas...

I had a gun stuck under my chin

and told that I was a snitch and they were gonna kill me.

And I eventually talked my way out of it.

I'm like, "Look, he's misunderstood what I said.

"I don't know what he's talking about.

I didn't say that to him."

And eventually after getting

your face beat in and you saying the same thing,

I was allowed to walk away from it.

But any hope that I had of getting away

disintegrated instantly.

I lived every day of my life waiting to get killed.

I tried to make myself as invisible as possible

because I knew if I drew attention

in any way that that was--

potentially fatal.

Once they trapped you, that was it.

There was no leaving. There was just no way out.

A witness came forward.

That was Donnie Warren.

He relayed to the investigative team

that Jose, "Pepe," Herran was, in fact, a missing person

and had been living in Freeland in 2015.

We know Pepe's family last heard from him,

Friday, November 13th, 2015.

So between that report

and the information from Donnie Warren,

we knew we were onto something.

Donnie was able to get into more details

about what it was like for him and others

to live at The Cottage.

The Cottage was the center of the universe, for sure.

The Cottage was a tool

used by Roberto Torner to control people.

A lot of these people were just, in fact,

down on their luck, or they had addictions,

or they just needed a place to stay.

He was very, very good at finding people's weaknesses

and then exploiting that weakness to manipulate 'em.

So people are so scared of Roberto Torner

and that's what he feeds on.

There was always rumblings when we're talking to people

and saying that, you know,

the police chief and Torner are friends.

We see 'em together all the time.

Once you're in the Torner family,

it's, uh, sort of like the mafia.

You're gonna be one of his minions.

He told us flat out, "Blood in, blood out.

It's us versus everybody else."

There was rumors in town

we were all Satanists,

that we were sacrificing animals, cult meetings,

you know, Rob sat in a throne and drank from a skull and,

you know, all of us were brainwashed.

He was talked up like Charles Manson.

And then there was Dave Alzugaray.

He was Rob's personal automaton.

He did whatever Rob told him.

If you saw Rob, Dave was there.

I know Dave did have some belief in--

Santeria and voodoo.

Dave had a bunch of, like, ritualistic items

that were related to black magic and to Santeria.

It was a ritual stone.

It had, like, a face carved in it.

One time Dave had did something that made Rob mad,

so in order to pay penance for it,

he took that carved stone and, I mean,

literally bashed himself in the face with it...

until blood would just rang out of his face.

This is my blood oath to you-- you're my brother.

This is my life. I'm giving you my life.

It was surreal, I mean,

saying-- it's surreal, to watch somebody do that.

I-- I-- I've never seen anything like it.

Roberto Torner owned several properties

in Carbon and Luzerne counties.

And Donnie Warren provided investigators

with information about weapons

and where they could find the C-4 explosives.

The Buck Mountain Road property was a big property.

It's-- it's vast.

Torner used it to store a lot of stuff.

If he had garbage, or other stuff from the work

that he was doing in town,

he would take it to the Buck Mountain Road property,

dump it and burn it.

We identified two burned piles on the property.

I think it was like the second or third day

just excavating down in the burn pit.

We started finding things.

At first, it's kind of like putting a puzzle together.

You're like, "This doesn't look like a burnt book

or normal burnt material." Like, "What is this?"

That looks like bone fragments.

We did, in fact, find fragments

that a forensic anthropologist

was able to identify as human skull.

Somebody is missing this much skull fragment,

cannot be alive-- so you can kind of deduce that,

"Hey, we couldn't prove that it was Pepe,

but if it wasn't Pepe, who was it?"

Investigators also found on Roberto Torner's property

C-4 explosives that were stolen from an army base in Kentucky.

That led to an arrest of David Alzugaray

and Roberto Torner.

While Torner was in prison,

I went to speak to him about the arson.

Every avenue you go down,

there's something that just makes you, like,

you think it can't get any worse,

and then it does.

Roberto Torner told me he did not want to talk on camera

and asked me to turn the camera off.

He said he has some information he wanted to volunteer out

for us about Pepe.

That's when he went into telling me that he instructed

Dave Alzugaray and Pepe to take some construction debris down

to the Buck Mountain Road address and burn it

like they normally always do.

But he was worried, because he knew there was some

animosity between them.

But then he's got a bad feeling.

He needs to go check on him.

Something's not sitting right with him.

Rob said he gets out and he starts yelling right away,

"Pepe, Pepe, Pepe, Pepe!"

And Dave sticks his head out from around this chicken coop

and-- and is waving to Torner.

And Rob's like, "Where's Pepe?"

And then he's like, "You believe what that guy did?"

He goes, "Pepe was my friend."

I had to look there and watch my friend die.

I'm at the State Police Barracks,

and we get the call from prison officials

that Dave Alzugaray wants to talk to law enforcement.

And then David Alzugaray confesses that he is the one

that killed Pepe.

He killed him at the Buck Mountain Road property.

And that Roberto Torner has nothing to do

with Pepe's homicide.

Friday, November 13th.

Dave Alzugaray and Pepe

went to the Buck Mountain Road address.

They were arguing.

Pepe and Torner were friends,

and they were really clicking and really getting along.

And there was a lot of jealousy from Dave

to Pepe because he felt like Pepe was kinda moving in

on his position or his friendship with Torner.

So there was just weird things boiling up

between Alzugaray and Pepe.

Dave ultimately said he shot Pepe.

He dismembers him.

Puts him in five-gallon buckets.

Dave was chopping him up like some type of butcher.

Then Pepe was dumped into the Lehigh River.

According to David Alzugaray,

he was chopped into so many tiny pieces,

that we probably wouldn't find him.

In my experience,

and I've investigated homicides for 19 and half years,

it usually doesn't happen where someone just confesses.

His demeanor, it's very matter of fact,

very to the point.

However, he almost--

it felt like he was trying too hard

to tell us that he wanted all the blame,

that it was all him.

We stopped the river.

We did an extensive search of the Lehigh River.

And nothing was found.

So, at that point,

we really suspected it was all a lie,

he was covering up for somebody.

That's when we got Alba Veras to flip.

We put her into witness protection.

Alba was a resident of The Cottage,

and she was helping out watching

Roberto Torner's children.

She got caught in this situation the same way I did.

She answered an ad in the newspaper for a job,

and then they talked her into moving in there,

and then they just pretty much did the same thing to her

that they did to me.

Alba wasn't living in The Cottage anymore.

She was in a different place in her life.

She escaped.

She wasn't under Torner's spell anymore.

We asked her what she knew about Pepe.

She was very forthright in telling us

secrets from The Cottage.

Roberto Torner had instructed her, during 2015,

that he wanted her to clean a bunch of cutting instruments,

and he instructed her where to hide 'em.

She told us about the weapons and all the cutting instruments

inside The Cottage that were still there.

So we immediately went to The Cottage.

We went up into the attic.

Removed some insulation in the furthest corner

of that attic, and voila!

There's ammunition. There's cutting instruments.

There's cleavers. There's machetes.

There's sharp objects.

And Alba, she told us

that she did have a romantic relationship

with Roberto Torner.

Roberto Torner started to question her

about her loyalty.

It was her, Roberto Torner, Dave Alzugaray, and Pepe.

And they drove out to the Buck Mountain Road property.

OK, you know what to do.

Torner handed Alba a gun

and told her, "I want you to shoot Pepe."

She took the gun in her hand.

She held it up.

Alba had to make a choice. What was she willing to do?

I consider Roberto Torner a psychopath.

He's deceitful. He's narcissistic.

He's manipulative.

The worst of the worst.

He had these people, these minions, under him,

and he was in control.

It was like this cult-type thing,

where he just instructed people to do things,

and they just did it for him.

Alba, Alba Veras, was willing to do almost anything

to earn Roberto Torner's love.

She thought that if she killed Pepe,

for him, she would be somehow proving herself to him.

She put the gun up.

But she just could not do it.

And she broke down,

started shaking uncontrollably, started crying.

That's when he said, "That was a test.

I was testing your loyalty to me."

When the rubber met the road, she just could not do it.

She's not a killer, and it was at that time that Roberto Torner

knew that she wasn't going to be able to do it.

So then the plan changed.

On the eve of Friday the 13th,

Alba told us she heard some noises

coming from the basement of The Cottage.

She went down there to investigate.

She found Roberto Torner and David Alzugaray

manipulating semi-ammunition.

They actually created dummy rounds.

So that would render them incapable of firing.

They manipulated these rounds

and they provided Jose Herran with the gun that was loaded

with these dummy rounds.

On Friday, November 13th,

I remember Pepe.

He had used my phone to call his mother.

Within half hour, 45 minutes after talking to his mother,

they took him out.

I tried to tell myself, like, "No, they're not gonna do that."

Like, "There's no way."

But that was just, you know, me lying to myself.

When they arrived there,

David Alzugaray pulls out a 22 caliber revolver,

starts shooting.

Jose Herran tried shooting back,

and because they were dummy rounds,

nothing happened.

David was in pursuit,

firing the gun repeatedly at him.

They shot him at least five times.

That's when Roberto Torner walked up to Jose Herran,

and he finished and by shooting him in the back of the head.

And, by David Alzugaray's own confession,

he was chopped up into very, very tiny pieces,

put into blue buckets.

This was a carefully staged-managed homicide

by Roberto Torner.

A short while later, Donnie observes the van return,

but there's only two people in it,

and it's Roberto Torner and David Alzugaray.

And they were laughing and joking,

and they had his head in a bucket

in the back of the van.

That was horrifying.

"Oh, I'm Leatherface. Oh, I'm Leatherface."

Like joking.

He peeled his face off, like, literally peeled his face off,

stuck it over his, was joking about

being Leatherface.

Having seen that, it was like, there's no way to erase it.

There's no way to not think about it.

I still have nightmares about it.

We believe that Torner did this out of jealousy.

See, Pepe's is this good-looking guy,

he's smart, he's a good talker.

Girls started paying more attention to him,

thought he was better looking, and Torner didn't like this.

He just wanted someone that was gonna follow him,

someone under his control, and that wasn't the case.

Roberto Torner was a very paranoid man.

It was Friday, November 13th, when-- when they killed Pepe.

I don't know if it was a way of, like,

spreading fear about himself, you know,

a way of kind of making himself scarier.

Ultimately, Liza Robles,

who was Roberto Torner's girlfriend,

mother of his children, came forward

and recollected that night.

She woke up to go to the bathroom,

and both Roberto and David were cooking.

She believed it to be steak.

She asked for a piece of the steak,

and Roberto said, "No."

He said, "That's Pepe."

That's the allegation.

I heard, what was left of Pepe?

And then they made it into sandwiches.

They called all these people to come over.

Rob made a big deal out of it.

"Oh, this is a special recipe, and we've got

these Cuban sandwiches." I knew what it was.

It was so nauseating for me, and it was disturbing.

It was one of the most ghoulish things I've ever witnessed

in my entire life, and not so much the act,

but the attitude, the laughter.

They were treating it like it was a birthday party.

I was so sickened by it, I had to throw up.

So, with all the evidence,

we have the weapon that killed Pepe.

We had David Alzugaray

as the person that shot him with that weapon,

that 22 caliber revolver.

We had the Glock, which was a 9-millimeter,

that matched those manipulated rounds.

It really validated the whole case.

So, in February of 2020, we charge Dave Alzugaray

and Roberto Torner for the murder of Jose Herran,

who is Pepe.

As reporters approached him, they asked him about the case.

I have no idea what that is.

You should ask the Chief of Police, though.

But David already confessed to murdering him.

You got to ask the Chief of Police.

He was referring to Chief Anthony Harris

of the Freeland Borough Police Department.

Witnesses were telling us also

that there was a friendly relationship

between Roberto Torner and Chief Harris.

We told we told Chief Harris that we would be in contact

with him again. That was on a Friday.

On Monday, Anthony Harris took his own life by suicide.

The trial was a little over a week,

but the jury deliberated for six hours before they came back

and rendered their verdict of guilty on all counts,

including first degree murder and arson.

He was convicted on Halloween Day,

which was, you know, just symbolic.

David Alzugaray ended up accepting a plea deal

to third degree murder with a fixed sentence, which,

when calculated out in time, is essentially a life sentence.

Getting the verdict of guilty on all counts was, to me,

most important to give justice to Jose Herran's mother

and his daughter.

He was the world to them,

always making sure that they were OK.

He was that guy in their family.

Roberto Turner and David Alzugaray,

they're some of the most horrible,

diabolical monsters

I faced in my career.

Getting him off the streets, it was very important

because who knows what else he was capable of,

what else he would have done,

or what he did that we don't even know about.

And I believe wholeheartedly

there's more dead people out there.

That we'll never know unless other witnesses

come forward.

Alba feared for her life all the time.

To this day, when I talk to her, she's still afraid

of Roberto Torner, even though he's incarcerated for life.

Seeing him get arrested

and then seeing him get convicted,

I hope that something good

will come out of all that suffering.

It's so unbelievable.

You could never imagine people actually

doing these things outside of a horror movie.

Friday, February 13th

started out like any other day.

That was the day that my daughter never came home.

The Encino Police Department

started searching for Amber DeBuff.

Where's Amber? Where's Amber?

Something's wrong. I need to find my little girl.

Is there a monster among us?