Original subtitles

A 911 call comes in from a man named Victor Cabrera.

He had had to dial the 911 call with his tongue

because his hands are bound, and there's a rope around his neck.

Cabrera then told police his wife was kidnapped.

When something like this happened,

with someone being tied up, someone being kidnapped,

it was a pretty big shock to the whole community.

Crimes like this don't just happen.

They're not finding any evidence of someone who has seen an abduction.

There's no follow-up ransom.

He told police it took two

to plan and carry out the murder.

She was found the next day, strangled to death in her truck.

We're not dealing with an abduction anymore.

We're dealing with a murder.

Where did you find the car?

What happened to her? How could this have happened?

The minute Victor got home,

he packed his belongings, and he disappeared.

It's bad enough looking for a fugitive in one single country.

But he could literally be anywhere in the world.

We have a dead body in a car,

and we have the inconsistencies in his statement.

Does that fit with what we found at the crime scene?

Does that fit with his injuries?

Does it fit with the pathological evidence?

The best way to think of a crime is almost like a puzzle, right?

You start off with a couple pieces that don't give you

the full picture, but the more information you start getting,

the picture becomes clearer, and then you start seeing,

"OK, this is what happened."

The first thing in a staged scene that we're looking for is,

what would be the motive to stage the scene?

We're looking for consistencies and inconsistencies.

That brings more suspicion on.

It is not what happened. There's something else that's there.

Marina, which is very close to Monterey, is very beautiful.

It's really close to the beach.

There's a lot of beautiful homes, lots of nice shops

and places to go. People seem to live very calm, quiet lives.

Not a lot of crime goes on there.

Monterey County in general is a safe county.

It doesn't mean that crime does not occur.

I think any place can have crime.

But I think law enforcement does a tremendous job

in trying to keep it safe.

Roshni Singh was a single mother.

She had a seven-year-old son. And she lived in Marina.

And she seemed to have created a nice life for herself.

She had some funds that she had saved.

She was someone who was, you know, beloved in the area.

She had a warm, bright presence and personality

and was very well-liked by everybody.

Victor worked at an auto body shop nearby called Village Motor Works.

And it was a place that he had worked for a while.

And he was hoping one day to become the owner.

From the outside,

Roshni and Victor seemed like they had a really strong bond,

that they were a strong couple.

They had been together for quite some time.

They seemed to have good chemistry, were happy together.

You know, they had just gone on a trip

to visit Roshni's sister in Fiji.

So things seem to be going well between the two of them.

Roshni's sister did have SOME red flags when it came to Victor.

She thought that he was a bit of a smooth talker,

that maybe he was a bit of a Don Juan.

But other than that,

she didn't see anything about him that would give her pause

or that would ever indicate that he could do something violent.

I was a patrol officer in 2008, in September.

That's when Victor called 911 from a gas station.

Victor Cabrera claimed two men had come into where he was.

He wasn't really sure what these men intended,

if they were going to really harm him.

He was tied up. He thought that was a robbery,

and he assumed that they had abducted his girlfriend,

who had been waiting outside in the car.

And Victor claimed that he had had to dial the 911 call with his tongue

because he was so tightly bound.

The first thing we would look for is evidence of a robbery,

because that's the complaint. So is there any forced entry?

Is there any money missing or anything like that?

That would be our first thing

that everybody wants to concentrate on because that's normal.

The timing of the robbery was very odd.

The ropes weren't knotted around his hands,

and they didn't bind his feet.

When the police come, they find that there's a rope around his neck,

and it is pretty tight,

but his feet were free, and he could have just walked out.

Police will initially have a hard time figuring out

what is really going on here. And where is this young woman?

And has something terrible happened to her, and if so, why?

Why is this so elaborate?

It seems as if someone else has to be involved

for him to be bound in this particular manner.

My question is, is why was there an abduction?

If there's a robbery, there's no need for an abduction

unless you're going to, you know,

hold for ransom or something like that.

It's not completely one thing or the other.

You take these things as they are.

You keep an open mind, and the evidence starts to kind of build up

and point you in a particular direction.

When you start to move in that particular direction,

the crucial thing is is that you still keep an open mind,

and you look for evidence that supports that theory

but also evidence that might contradict that theory.

The way that he was found doesn't make sense.

And his physical condition after having been tied up.

He didn't have any bruises, cuts.

And I find it difficult to imagine robbers

who wanted to incapacitate someone wouldn't have tied their feet.

Now, none of these things are definitive.

They are simply things that cause or raise a question in your mind,

that make you think, "OK,

I'm going to keep my mind open about this and see where it takes me."

The police would be looking for his demeanour

and whether he's worried about this girlfriend.

If she's dead and he knows it,

he's not going to be frantic.

He's not going to be demanding that they find her.

He's not going to be trying to help with any kind of search.

They would need to find the girlfriend,

find her because she is in extreme danger,

and we don't know where she is.

That person's life is on the line.

It really started off with Victor Cabrera calling the police,

saying that, "Hey, I'm at this gas station,

I work here. I was just robbed.

I was tied up, and my girlfriend,

Roshni Singh, has been kidnapped."

That was the initial information that he relayed to police.

And so police took Victor to the Monterey Police Department.

They had an interview with him at the time.

The police question him for several hours,

and his story is a long,

winding story of how he and his girlfriend have been driving around.

She reminded him that they were going to go

to Berkeley the next day. And then he realised

he had left his wallet at work, so he had to go get that.

And she got into the backseat of the car,

because there were things in the garage

that made it difficult for her to get into the passenger side.

All of these excess details were kind of needless

and windy. His story was all over the place.

Though what the police would want to do would be,

particularly if they were suspicious,

would be to corroborate that account.

The obvious means of corroborating that account

would be to have him medically examined.

If someone is punched several times,

there will usually be some injuries.

The cops would have seen he didn't have those injuries.

Most importantly, his feet were untied.

So what robber's going to tie you up

and forget your feet?

If you're going to rob somewhere,

you want to be confident that what you're after is there.

So if they were after cash,

most businesses will bank cash in the evening.

So it may be there is no cash there.

Another fact that the police might have been suspicious about was that,

according to Cabrera,

he never heard the car leaving.

Now again, it's not definitive.

It may well be he was so fearful that he never noticed it,

but he didn't hear the car leaving.

He never heard his wife scream or make any sounds.

These again would start to kind of build up the suspicions

of the officers that this was not actually a crime

and had been staged.

They're not finding any evidence of someone

who has seen an abduction.

There's no follow-up ransom.

Crimes like this don't just happen.

So if you're not finding any evidence

that's consistent with the report, you have to step back and think,

"OK, something else is going on."

When police are questioning somebody to get information,

they will be looking at his behaviour.

When is it inconsistent? For example,

if he tends to talk with his hands,

but all of a sudden they're down and stable,

or he gives certain types of gestures,

or he goes vague at certain points

when he's been highly detailed before.

So they're looking for inconsistencies in his manner

and his narrative and holes in the story.

One of the things that he told police at the time

was that he called 911 using his tongue,

and it took him about 45 minutes to do that.

So that was already kind of, "This is kind of interesting."

As police are interviewing Cabrera

and he's telling this long, detailed story,

they believe he's involved in something,

but they don't really know exactly what.

They don't have the missing car.

They don't know where his girlfriend is,

and they really can't arrest him for anything.

They were suspicious from the start,

but they just didn't have enough information to hold him.

So they had to let him go.

But they want to keep an eye on him,

and they'd actually like him to take a polygraph.

He allows them to search his house because if he says no,

that looks like he's got something to hide.

Once they do search,

they find that her phone is there and not with her.

The minute Victor got home, which was actually in Marina,

my understanding is he packed his belongings.

He was able to get a third party to drive him down

to the border of Mexico, and he disappeared.

So that tells me he wasn't free and clear at all.

He was a suspect at that point.

When police realise Cabrera has jumped the fence and left,

they know that he pretended he was going to come for the polygraph

in order to delay them and to put them off their guard.

He had such a lead on them

that he was able to get into another country.

That same day,

they received a call from someone who noticed a car that was parked

about a block away from the garage.

They ended up finding Roshni Singh in a vehicle, her body,

in an apartment complex, also in Monterey.

And that's when they realised she had been strangled,

and it was a homicide investigation at that point in time.

Because police would have expected to be able to tell him,

to convey information, "We did find the car,

and we found your girlfriend. Unfortunately, she's dead."

And they would have expected him to be wanting to know everything.

"Where did you find the car? What happened to her?

How could this have happened?" Instead, he's fled.

So his behaviour suggests he's part of this. He's guilty of something.

Once the vehicle is found and her body is inside,

we're not dealing with an abduction anymore.

Now we're dealing with a murder.

When police go back

and start knocking on the door of the parents' house

to look for him, kind of clarify what's going on,

and now the parents are uncooperative.

Again, to me, that's another red flag,

because, why would the parents be uncooperative?

Why would he not be there? There's something else going on.

One of the breakthroughs in the case is when the body is found

because by Cabrera's account,

his wife was abducted in the early hours of the morning.

As soon as the body is found, there will be a post mortem examination,

and that would reveal quite quickly that Roshni has been dead longer

than Cabrera has indicated in his account.

So that makes it immediately suspicious.

Now, to determine time of death from a body in the first 40 hours or so

is comparatively straightforward and reasonably accurate.

A pathologist would have taken the body temperature.

They would have looked at a thing called lividity,

which is how the blood pools

by gravity to the lower parts of the body.

And they would have assessed rigor mortis.

Rigor mortis comes on slowly, builds up

and then disappears after two or three days.

So within that time,

a forensic pathologist can be reasonably accurate

about the time of death.

And in this instance,

the pathologist came to the conclusion that Roshni was dead

at the time when Cabrera described she was abducted by the robbers.

In this particular case, we have Victor,

who was remaining at the shop. He remained at the shop,

but the car was still removed.

That means there's somebody else that's involved

that we haven't known about yet.

Very clearly, we have Victor as the number one,

but who's his co-defendant?

Who helped him out?

That becomes the problem now.

Once he's fled the scene and the police are after him,

it is of the utmost importance to find him.

Because if he gets too far away,

it can become increasingly difficult to zero in on him.

Now, the case against him has become much more serious...

because now we have a dead body in a car,

and that murder and kidnapping

could land him in jail for the rest of his life.

One of the things that's most important in all of these cases

is what we call a victimology.

A victimology is a detailed study of the victim...

...what was going on in their life at the time, their overall background.

That's how we determine,

how in the world could this person become a victim of a crime?

When they do the victimology

and they discovered this insurance policy

that Victor would have collected on,

they have established their motive.

A monetary motive is one of the most universal.

We find this all the time. So now we have to go and find Victor,

because now he's really the prime suspect.

It's bad enough looking for a fugitive in one single country,

but he could literally be anywhere in the world.

Victor went to Mexico, probably believing he's untouchable,

but always looking over his shoulder

because he knows that at any time he could be arrested.

The police now don't have Victor in custody.

They don't know where he's gone. He's fled.

He's probably gone to Mexico because he does have relatives there.

When police spoke to witnesses and people who knew Roshni,

they learned that there had been money trouble.

There have been arguments. There was some real problems between them,

which added to the idea that he was involved

in something that happened to her.

One of the things in all crimes, there's always a motive.

It's like, who could possibly benefit from this event?

In this case,

they found that he took out an insurance policy against her...

...and obviously was the beneficiary if she died.

Police suspected there was an accomplice

because of the way Cabrera had been tied up.

And so they look through his cell phone data

and find messages to a man named Francisco.

And they believe that he is the accomplice,

and they want to bring him in because accomplices

are typically the weak link.

And under pressure, they might give information that will help.

It is the case of Agaton-Hernandez,

one of two people accused of killing Roshni Singh.

Hernandez is considered the accomplice,

but still, he's on trial for murder.

They have the accomplice. They brought him in, Francisco.

They're now going to be looking for,

what's in it for the accomplice?

Why would they participate in a murder and a staged robbery?

When you commit a crime with another person

or assist another person, you can be liable for murder,

even if the other person does the murder.

So this becomes a big bargaining chip

because murder for financial gain is a special-circumstances crime,

and that can elevate a homicide to a capital murder

where the death penalty could be imposed.

Or in this case, life without parole is mandatory.

When Francisco is arrested and comes into the picture,

there's not more powerful evidence against him,

but he's got more explaining to do

because he is seen next to the car where the body is found.

If he doesn't live near there, why was he there?

The police will be very curious about that.

They will also want his explanation about all this,

and they will be testing his explanation

against Cabrera's explanation.

And generally speaking,

these two accounts will not mesh together.

There will be areas that will provide the police with leverage,

and of course, the ultimate leverage that they can use,

particularly in the United States,

is that they can say, "Well,

if you come clean about this,

you will get a better break than your accomplice."

And they will pit the two accused people against each other.

Sometimes they do not need to put them against each other.

They actually choose to go against each other.

And there are counter accusations.

Counter accusations like this will kind of break the case

completely wide open, enable the police to gather more evidence

that establish that it's actually a homicide

that was planned by these two people,

rather than an abduction by these mysterious robbers.

When you go to the second suspect and they starts giving information,

the most important thing is is we always want to ask

this co-conspirator something that only a co-conspirator would know,

because that's the one that tells us this is our guy.

The autopsy report had come in to show

that Roshni had been murdered around midnight,

not during the time of the robbery.

So they can use that to pressure Francisco

to confess up to the fact that he was part of this plan

and that Cabrera had wanted to kill Roshni

in order to get the insurance payout

and then stage the robbery

and kidnapping so that neither of them would be implicated in it.

You have to be thinking about Roshni in a very detached

and indifferent way. She's just a pawn in their game,

and to them, the payout is worth,

you know, whatever risk they're taking.

She is a nobody to them.

She just the way they can enrich themselves.

Agaton was originally arrested for accessory,

but then prosecutors changed it to murder

and conspiracy to commit murder.

The defence says the charges don't add up.

I suspect that prosecutors needed a little bit more evidence,

something more direct, and I'm quite sure that they gave him a deal

in exchange for his testimony. That's often how it happens.

A guilty verdict today in the murder

of a Marina mother nearly three years ago.

Francisco Agaton-Hernandez is one of two people

accused of killing Roshni Singh.

Today, a judge found him guilty.

Francisco is found guilty of being an accomplice to murder and fraud,

and he gets a life sentence.

But they still don't have Victor.

There is no question anymore that Victor is the one behind this,

and Victor is still gone. Victor is nowhere to be found.

And so for the family,

they need the police to find him as quickly as possible.

He does have to face what he did.

For the family of Roshni Singh, they know who did this.

There's been one trial for the accomplice. It's a done deal.

He's been found guilty. He's talked about the plan,

but they don't have the perpetrator.

He's free. He's somewhere in Mexico,

and they may never get justice.

When somebody is on the run like this, oftentimes,

once they get far enough away,

more and more people have to be involved.

Once the logistics get more and more complicated,

the harder it is to find them.

And so as this is snowballing

and they're looking and they're getting more people involved,

it almost seems like it's getting harder and harder.

Victor is still missing, and the case goes cold.

Normally in cold cases,

you have a victim with an unknown suspect.

This is an unusual situation because they know who the suspect is,

but they just can't find him.

It will take a really intrepid detective to track down Cabrera.

It really requires a detective who sticks with it

and really follows each small lead.

One of the things that detectives have is that it becomes

"This is my case." We say we have ownership of this case.

"So I'm going to follow it no matter where it goes

for as long as I'm working." As a matter of fact,

we have had detectives that had retired still come back to make sure

somebody is working that case that they were working on.

They know who did it.

They just don't know how to get him back and where he is.

California is a death penalty state.

So if he's fled to Mexico,

Mexico would have some restrictions on sending him back.

As years pass,

Victor has the opportunity to totally transform his life,

maybe change the way he looks, get a totally different identity.

So many things he could be doing throughout that time,

and simultaneously, Roshni's family,

you know, are losing hope.

As time goes by,

they realise they may never find him.

If someone doesn't wanna be found, that's really difficult these days.

With cameras everywhere and social media and digital forensics,

it can be very difficult.

In 2015, I said, "Hey,

we have this old case here.

Victor Cabrera has been on the run since 2008."

And so when I started formulating a plan of, OK, well,

how can I apprehend this person?

And we didn't have any good intel, or I should say information,

that let me know where Victor was in Mexico.

It's why working in a team works so well,

is because when you have a variety of people looking at it

with different skills and backgrounds,

sometimes people come up with some ideas.

With a person on the run,

the longer they are gone makes it more

and more difficult for them to be found.

They could change appearances drastically.

As more time goes by, witnesses may move or pass away.

Evidence may go missing...

...and memories can fade.

You're getting further and further away from your suspect.

Obviously, the biggest part is, where is he?

Because if I don't know where he is, then nothing else really matters.

He's going to be keeping tabs on the news.

He's going to be keeping tabs on the investigation.

He is going to find out what police have done so far

through social media, through news outlets.

Then he's going to realise he is actively being sought after,

which will cause him to go deeper underground.

We also kind of had to figure out, who does he know down there?

Who does the family know in Mexico?

That could give us potential areas of where he could be.

Someone who's staying on the run is going to meet other people

and especially if he decides he's going to start over again

and get a job and get into relationships

and, you know, maybe even have a family.

All of those people are potential weak links.

Especially if he's hidden what he has done

and the fact that he's a wanted person.

They may just post his picture.

They may talk about him, you know,

without really realising they're giving something to police

to track him down.

So each time he makes a connection with people

or has a record of something, like a job,

he's leaving himself open to being found.

Roshni's family have to live with the idea

that he might be getting to have a great time,

getting to start a new relationship,

perhaps even inflict more pain on another woman.

And just the idea that he's able to do that

is something that plagues them.

Something too to understand is the way Mexico works.

It's a lot different than the United States.

Some people can be bribed and be given money, and so they can

just walk out of police stations and so forth if you have some money.

We figured out there was kind of a general area where

he could potentially be...

...one of the big cities, Guadalajara.

We knew that his brother had some dealings down there.

We started our liaison with some of the units down there.

Through that, we got another lead that we were able to then figure out

who Victor's girlfriend was.

I was like, "OK, well, I'm not going to look for Victor anymore.

I'm gonna start looking for this girlfriend,"

cos in my mind, I was like,

girlfriend is going to be a little bit more open about her life,

and I figure her communication footprint is gonna be much larger

than Victor's would be.

And through her footprint,

we then got information that she worked at a factory

right outside of Guadalajara.

And so we were able to get some eyes on this factory.

And so the first problem we had is this factory was huge.

It was, like, a 10,000 employee type of place.

And so we're like, "Oh, gosh, how are we going to find this person?

It's like a needle in a haystack."

So one thing we kind of lucked out on is Victor was driving a vehicle

from Michoacan, so he had different plates.

And so we did some more surveillance,

ended up seeing a vehicle with Michoacan plates in that location.

And that's when we were able to, you know, first got our first eyes

on Victor Cabrera in the vehicle.

And so we knew he would come

and go pick up his girlfriend from work every day.

And so we flew down to Guadalajara.

After ten years have gone by since Victor committed this crime,

he was probably under the impression

that he was gonna get away with this. It was all going to be fine.

He had started a new life.

They weren't going to find him.

The day of the actual arrest,

Victor Cabrera was driving,

and all the windows were blacked out from what I recall.

And so we're sitting in this big high rise,

and I'm excited because I'm like, "Hey, we're going to do this.

We're going to get Victor in custody."

Remember we saw the car. He's headed towards the factory,

And they pulled him over,

and I was actually able to see him getting taken into custody.

While he was taken into custody, Victor, the whole time,

denied it was him. He was like, "You have the wrong person.

My name is not Victor. I am not the person you're looking for."

We were able to look at all of his documentation he had on him,

and his driver's licence and his Mexican identification card,

and everything had actually a new identity on it.

So he had very legitimate documentation

that was not under his name.

Once that occurred,

he was transported to the immigration building in Guadalajara.

He still denied he was Victor. Clearly was Victor Cabrera.

And so we ended up showing him a photograph

of his California driver's licence. And said, "Well, this is you."

And eventually he gave in and said, "Yeah, that is me.

I am Victor Cabrera."

Mi nombre es Victor Cabrera.

Victor Cabrera was arrested Monday

after federal agents found him living on the run in Guadalajara,

Mexico.

When Victor is finally found and arrested,

there is a sense that now he can be brought back.

Now there can be a trial or some kind of plea deal,

that justice can finally be done on this case.

Roshni's family finally get that phone call

they've always been waiting for. The police have located Victor.

They're extraditing him back to the United States,

and they're finally going to get

that justice they've been waiting for.

And so we then I met him at the airport,

boarded a plane, and we flew back to the US.

So I actually got to spend about five-plus hours with Mr Cabrera.

It's a long ten years

with a lot of time wondering if this will ever happen.

But finally, the case is done.

So here in California, the first thing that happens is

he's brought in front of a judge,

and he's asked what his plea is. In this case, he pled not guilty.

A not-guilty plea is not uncommon in these types of cases

because saying not guilty is "You don't have the evidence against me."

And during that time between his not-guilty plea and his trial,

his attorneys will have time to build a case,

build an investigation, build a defence.

So by the time he gets to trial,

his attorneys will be completely ready.

Most cases that go to court,

there is a package of evidence that, direct or indirect,

points to the guilt of an individual.

So they would be very careful

about getting a precise account from Cabrera.

They would go over the story many times

to establish whether there was any contradictions or inaccuracies

or pull out detail that he might have forgotten.

Once they have that account,

the question they have in their mind is,

"Well, does that fit with the rest of the findings?

Does that fit with what we found at the crime scene?

Does that fit with his injuries?

Does it fit with the pathological evidence?"

And in this instance, it doesn't.

And then we went to trial in August of 2018.

Victor's finally at trial,

and he faces a 12-person jury,

who's going to determine whether he's guilty or not.

In terms of the forensic

or the more technical evidence that's presented in court,

the most powerful evidence is from the highly experienced,

credible forensic pathologist.

So that is likely to resonate strongly with the jury.

The other areas around the rope

and the lack of injuries to Cabrera.

Now these are more subjective, but it may well be

that the pathologist would have got involved in that as well

and commented that it's very unusual for someone to be involved

in a fight or to be assaulted and have no injuries whatsoever.

At the time, Victor had a very good defence attorney

named Larry Biegel. And really,

in the system, you want the defence attorney to do a good job

because it keeps the system fair. They brought their defence.

We had our case to present.

And so, I think we let the facts speak for themselves.

In this case, the jury found him guilty of murder

with the special circumstance of murder for financial gain.

And what that means is he is not eligible for parole.

Special circumstances can elevate a murder case

to a death penalty case or a case of mandatory life without parole.

And in this case, that's what he got.

Once there's a conviction, there is great personal relief,

a lot of personal satisfaction, because you've worked nights,

you've discounted your own family,

you've done things above and beyond

sometimes what's necessary in order to bring this forward.

At the end of the day, it's, you know,

what evidence was presented that found him guilty?

I think it's the totality of it.

Lots of little pieces that come together.

He's dialling a phone with his tongue for 45 minutes

where he's barely tied up. Does that make sense?

Right? It doesn't make sense.

Also, then locating the crime scene in Marina.

I mean, that's kind of a big clue,

is if the crime scene is not at this gas station

or in this vehicle,

that, really, the murder happened in a whole nother location.

And it happens to be the house where he's living.

It is as if Victor is overlooking the fact

that the person he murdered was a human being,

and he just saw dollar signs.

For me, it's just something where it's,

try to feel good for the family.

I hope they feel that they get some type of closure.

I'm not sure if you can ever get any type of full closure.

But at least he's not still running around and free.

That he's paying for what he did.

This is probably Victor's first murder.

It's probably his first robbery,

but it's not ours, the cops.

We know what we're looking for,

but they don't know because they've never actually done it.

He killed a mother. He killed somebody's sister,

somebody's daughter. That's terrible.

But these type of crimes, it really affects a lot of people.

Not only does it affect family,

of course, very much so, her son.

but also now the Cabreras at the same time too.

They have to live with something like that too.

There was this added element to the fact

that Victor had tied himself up,

had staged this whole entire thing to look like an abduction of Roshni,

and added a whole nother element to this case

of having planned this whole entire thing

and lost this beautiful life over it.

Was justice done? I believe so.

Victor Cabrera, he's in prison.

I don't think he can hurt anybody again, hopefully.

He's paying for his crime.

Roshni was such a beloved member of her community,

family. So many people admired her,

and especially her ability to take care of her son as a single mom.

And when it came out that Victor had committed this crime for money,

something as small and paltry as $600,000,

people just couldn't believe that somebody was capable

of doing something so awful for something so insignificant.

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