Original subtitles

We'd received a phone call at the sheriff's office

that Rex and June were missing.

I thought maybe they'd just gone off on a party with somebody.

Sheriff Stansfield picked me up

and we went to try to see if we could figure out where Rex and June were.

They were living in what we call the old Ivy House.

It's only a few miles away on the Strawberry River.

First thing we noticed,

her car was still out in the parking lot.

We went to the house and knocked on the door,

nobody answered.

We pushed on the door, it opened right up.

We went in.

The house was in kind of disarray.

It became immediately apparent something was amiss.

Her driver's license is there on the bed.

The purse is there.

I noticed June's dentures...

and I know June, and I know

she was very conscientious about her dentures.

There was evidence of struggle.

Blood stains.

And then what really hit me the hardest was Rex's hat

was laying on the floor.

To a cowboy, that is an essential tool.

You simply do not leave your hat.

That is as known as the knuckles on your hand.

Duchesne, Utah is high desert country.

If you were to scratch the surface just a little bit,

you would find a very much the spirit of the Wild West.

People are independent, hard working.

They don't like a lot of outside influence in their lives.

Deals are made on a handshake.

An honest day's work for an honest day's pay is kind of the...

the theme of life here.

You're only as good as your word

and you're only as good as your work.

Well, in 1998, I was a detective sergeant

with Duchesne County, Sheriff's Office,

and I'd grown up in that area.

And I knew every canyon, every trail,

every valley like it was my own backyard.

When Rex and June went missing, it was a huge surprise.

Rex Tanner was my dad.

Dad was working at John Pinder's, he was a ranch hand.

He's a old cowboy, that rugged, dusty, dirty look.

That was my dad.

If you ever watched Westerns,

them old cowboys that lived out on the range

with the herd, that was Rex.

June was a friend of his.

They were both single.

They lived alone.

They ate dinner together.

Just somebody to do something with, so they weren't alone.

In 1998, I was editor of the Uintah Basin Standard.

We would cover everything in Duchesne County.

June Flood was a bookkeeper, took care of paperwork

and so forth.

She was several years older than Rex.

They formed a friendship.

Rex was my older brother.

He was eight years older than me.

All of us was born cowboys. We didn't know any better.

Me and Rex, we was pretty tight.

I was actually down to my uncle's house

and one of his friends called us, says,

"I haven't heard from June nor Rex."

We felt something was definitely wrong.

It just was not Rex to...

um, not at least call if he couldn't make it.

In 1998, I was the sheriff of Duchesne County.

I grew up on a ranch not far from here.

I have spent all my working days policing the county,

so I know these people very well.

Pinder Ranch is about ten miles from Duchesne City.

It's at, what they call, the Strawberry River area of the county.

Just a typical farming and ranching operation.

It's tough country.

John Pinder was running the ranch at the time.

John was a young guy in his early 40s.

He's kind of wild.

He did crazy things.

I think he thought he could do what he wanted to do

whenever he wanted to do it.

John Pinder was very well known

for having a full grown male African lion named, Simba.

He lived in the home in the ranch house

with John and his sister, Jenny.

It was a sleepy little town.

One day, I'm patrolling on Main Street

and here comes a big blue Ram truck with a lion.

And I'm not talking a small lion,

I'm talking a full-grown African lion sitting in the back.

And it's getting towards the afternoon.

Kids are getting out of school.

He's just laughing.

And I go, "John, you need to take the lion home."

That's John Pinder and Simba.

That's John and Simba laying on the couch.

I worked on the Pinder Ranch at that time.

I was there for pretty near seven or eight months.

I did have dealings with John,

but I was told to stay away.

My brother-in-law said he's strange and don't go near him. Don't...

Just stay away from him.

Rex was the cowboy. He liked to ride.

He liked to farm.

He liked to mechanic.

He done a little of everything.

Rex was a good farmhand.

In our county, we hadn't had a homicide in 18 years.

But that day we went to Rex and June's house,

we knew in our gut something bad had happened.

You don't leave your hat, you don't leave your purse

and you damn sure don't leave your teeth

if you're going to town or going partying somewhere.

That just was wrong.

Something was very wrong.

And as we drove away and we're starting to kind of realize

we're headed into the unknown.

And that's when I saw a man named, Dave Brunyer.

Now Dave Brunyer worked for John Pinder on his ranch.

He was chopping wood at another piece of Pinder property

where John's sister Jenny was living.

And I remember saying, Oh, well, we know Dave.

He'll... We'll talk to him and see what's going on.

He came walking over to us real fast.

- Fast. - Real kind of nervous.

I rolled down the window

and we told him we was looking for Rex and June and...

- Yeah. - ...and asked him if he had seen them.

And he told us no.

He acted like he didn't know who we was even talking about.

And then Jenny was kind of back and forth and in and out,

and it was the oddest thing.

He asked me, he said, "Can you give me a card?

And if I hear anything, I'll call you."

Now Dave Brunyer, he knows my number.

I think that the reason he was being secretive

or acting strange was because of the presence of Jenny Pinder,

who was kind of hovering in and out.

I remember trying to act along with him

and so I got him a card and said,

"Yeah, if you... if you hear of anything, let us know.

I remember the hair on the back of my neck

standing up thinking, "Oh man, this is..."

It was a bad feeling.

And I remember telling the sheriff, we need to go.

And I'm telling him something is wrong

and Dave Brunyer knows about it.

So right up here ahead of us is the main Pinder Ranch.

But I'll tell you what.

This is probably as close as I'm comfortable going right now.

There's a chance that Jenny is there.

She's known to be very volatile.

She does not like me.

I've had opportunity to arrest her before

and interact with her before.

Jenny Pinder is a lady that likes to drink.

Jenny and her boyfriend got in a fight up there one night.

He wanted to leave, so he just packed up and headed out,

jumped in his truck, went to turn the key on,

and she shot him right through the wrist with a 30-30 rifle.

So when it comes to the Pinders,

it's pick your poison.

John and Jenny were both wild and unpredictable.

In those days, the Pinder Ranch was known

as the Tower of Power

because anything and everything went on up there.

Party girls, drugs, criminal, BS.

If you wanted to get high, you wanted to get drugs...

go see John Pinder.

And June and Rex, they were both party people.

At the time, John and his wife, Beverly,

were going through a very acrimonious divorce.

John was worried that he was going to lose the ranch,

and that is something that he was not about to... to let happen,

not even lose a part of the ranch.

We hadn't really made a connection with John Pinder at all.

We were just realizing something has happened with Rex and June.

He told us a story

that he had been kind of associating with the Pinders,

partying a little bit, a little handyman work,

part-time work on occasion, um, had...

had done drugs with him.

They told us basically crazy [bleep].

I shouldn't say that.

It was... It was unbelievable.

He described body parts

for hundreds and hundreds of feet

scattered all around the area...

and said that he had been cleaning up

body parts for the last three days.

You could feel the... the trauma coming out of his voice.

He was as purely horrified as anybody I'd ever seen when he was describing it.

The first order of business was to try to confirm something

that Dave Brunyer had told us.

We put him in the back of my patrol car

and covering him up with a blanket

because he didn't want to be seen by anybody

that he might be the informant.

And we drove up Lake Canyon.

Now, I'll never forget.

We got out of the vehicle...

and walked just a matter of maybe four or five steps and right there

in kind of a driveway pull-out area,

hard-packed bare ground...

there was a femur ball

attached to a piece of femur bone just laying there.

And I had enough knowledge to recognize that as a part of the human anatomy.

We'd noticed a chipmunk nibbling on something

which looked like it was nibbling on the,

the flesh of the... of the leg.

We found about 80 pieces of body parts.

This was the real McCoy.

I remember going up to Lake Canyon area to talk to the sheriff,

and there was a long line of cars,

people curious about what was going on.

So, news spread quickly.

And they told me, "We have found parts of two bodies."

The immediate fear was that

one of them could be John Pinder's ex-wife, Beverly.

The deputies pointed out to us on that hillside

that there was a leg there.

We had a pair of binoculars and you could tell,

the leg was laying there with the sock still on.

- Striped gym sock. - Right.

We knew we had three people to locate.

Beverly, Rex, and June.

And Beverly is the only person turned out to be alive.

Uncle Milt called, says, "I need you to come out to the house.

I need to talk to you."

I said, "Okay, let me get the boys ready

and we'll be there."

He says, "No, don't bring the boys."

He said, "Lori can come, but don't bring the boys.

I just need to talk to you."

I'm like, "Baby, what do you think's going on?" you know?

What... "I wonder what Milton needs to talk to us about that the kids couldn't come."

Glen looked at me and he said,

"My dad's hurt or he's dead."

Filo was a ranch hand that worked at the Pinder Ranch with John.

He was his right hand man.

We had heard rumors

that he may have been associated

with the Sinaloa cartel from Mexico.

So we decided to give Filo an interview.

And of course, he didn't want to talk to us,

but we knew he was Catholic,

and so we hung a picture of the Savior on the wall.

And we sit Filo in there

looking at the picture of the Savior

and the little statues of Jesus.

After sitting there for 30 minutes looking at the Savior,

when we went back in, he was sobbing like a baby, crying.

And he talked.

What happened then?

And then he... he just kind of just started telling the story.

Do you remember the Sunday night that,

that you guys went to Rex and June's house?

Mm-hmm.

- Do you remember that night? - Sí.

Could you tell us about that?

What happened then?

Who said we need to talk to you?

As we talked to Filo,

he said that John was paranoid

about Rex and June

taking money out of the lion account.

Basically, the fund was for buying the food,

doing things like that for the lion.

So they killed them on a Sunday night and blowed 'em up.

But we thought maybe he was lying,

trying to put the blame on somebody else.

We'd heard rumors that Filo was working for a Mexican cartel...

and perhaps him and John had had a falling out over a drug deal.

They took the bodies...

and they piled them on top of each other...

and blew them up.

My husband went off the deep end.

I went to a dark place.

A very dark place.

It was a rough time.

Extremely rough time.

There is no forgiveness in my heart.

Filomeno immediately pointed the finger at John.

But John is nowhere to be found.

He has disappeared.

When we started looking for John,

we were told by the ranch hands

maybe he was going to head for the Mexican border.

Right off the bat we thought, well,

these people are all scared...

of what John might do if they talk.

There were employees at the ranch that would tell us,

"Well, you know, he was here a few days ago

and then he left and he left with a woman named Barbara DeHart."

John met Barbara DeHart in Idaho.

She was a married woman,

but she decided to leave her husband

and she and John became an item.

As far as the search for John Pinder was going,

by now there are warrants for his arrest for double homicide.

We believed he was in a blue Dodge pickup truck

because it wasn't at the ranch.

That's the truck he usually drove.

But we were not having a lot of luck.

Until we got notified by a Salt Lake City news station,

KSL News reporter contacted me

and said that he had just done an on camera interview with John Pinder...

and that Barbara DeHart was there.

And I... I was just...

stunned.

What is it that's going on?

They're calling it a heinous double murder.

We have two people that they're saying

were blown up and all this other stuff.

- Mm-hmm. - They're saying

that they would at least like to talk to you.

So you tell me what's going on?

Well, let me start right there.

They'd like to talk to me. I'd...

be more than glad to go in and talk to them

if I felt comfortable with circumstances, uh...

concerning my life.

We are both afraid of our lives right now.

He was aware that he was a suspect and stopped in

to basically claim his innocence.

And that's why I'm here is to try to protect myself

and let the public know what's going on with our system

and it is wrong.

We have bad, bad people in there

that are supposedly supposed to be protecting us

and I am one of the very few that

will take the initiative, step forward

and call [bleep] on it.

Despite what he was saying,

we knew John was behind it.

What we didn't know is why he'd done it.

Barbara DeHart and John went on the run together.

Instead of being afraid of him

or ashamed of what had happened, she was in awe.

"Wow! Look at the guy I'm with," you know?

And she even referred to the two of them as Bonnie and Clyde.

We had no idea of what they were capable of doing next.

Because of the media, it was big news at the time.

We got contacted ultimately by Barbara DeHart's daughter, Melissa.

We had arranged to meet with Melissa

to take a statement about what her mother had told her.

And I... I will never forget this as long as I live.

While we're preparing to meet with Melissa

to take her statement,

Barbara DeHart showed up at the house.

Now, what do you do?

We knew that Barbara DeHart

was an associate of John Pinder's,

but we didn't know if she had any complicity

in this crime or not at that time.

Didn't want to tip our hand right at that time.

So literally, we hid in the bathroom.

And I... I remember being so scared, like, what the hell?

And sure enough,

we heard her tell Melissa she had to use the bathroom.

And she's walking to the bathroom

and Melissa just said something

to the effect, "Oh, it doesn't work.

You have to go to the store" or something like that.

And she left and we got... we got out of there.

The reason we couldn't really take action is

we don't have law enforcement authority in the state of Idaho

and we didn't want her to know we were up there looking into her

with the fear she would destroy or hide more evidence.

John Pinder was placed on America's Most Wanted

while we were looking for him.

They had me do an interview with them,

but they wanted you to break down and bawl

and show your emotions,

which I'm worse now than I was back then.

There was still no word on where he is

until one day we got word through his attorneys

that he had arranged to surrender himself

at our neighboring county's Sheriff's Office.

He did very much try to blame everything on an out of control Filo,

who was there trying to take over his ranch.

His constant defense was, "I was framed."

"Well, yeah, I did some of it,

but I only did it because I feared for my life."

And that Filomeno was a member of this Mexican mafia,

that he was to be feared.

And June and Rex were murdered

because they had dared to steal money from Filomeno.

That type of behavior is vintage John Pinder,

above reproach just because he says he is.

You know, ignore my actions, believe what I'm telling you

because that's the way it is type person.

That's why we had a lot of trouble believing his story.

The evidence started to point to John.

When we went down to the ranch...

it was full of dynamite and ammonium nitrate.

They have their det cord and all of the makings of an explosive device.

That's what they used to blow them up with.

Pinders actually have property

that adjoin me right here on the Strawberry River.

John liked to blow things up.

Evidently, he was trained in mining or something,

and so he always had dynamite and stuff there all of the time.

He used to shoot and blast the hills and things.

He blew a tank up one time, a big old steel tank,

scattered it all over the country

and it was pretty common knowledge

that everybody knew he liked to blow things up.

He loved dynamite.

That was the way John was.

John told me that he could vaporize someone...

with dynamite and there would be nothing left to find.

He dug his big tunnels back in the hills up there behind their house.

There's two great big caves,

probably 15, 20 feet high

and 30 feet deep, back in just solid rock.

And they dynamited it all out and cleaned it out.

What was John wearing at the time?

Do you remember?

Okay.

So when you went to the lake, he had the jacket on.

By pieces of dynamite hanging on a post,

we found the American flag jacket

that John was wearing the night that the homicide happened.

But one thing became a fairly crucial piece of evidence.

John Pinder and Barbara DeHart showed up

at the KSL Television Studios in Salt Lake City.

The defendant, Pinder, said he wanted to set the record straight.

After the taping of the interview

and as they were getting ready to drive away,

he rolled down the window,

the cameraman was still there.

And Mrs. DeHart leaned over, looked out.

He was with me all night that night.

Isn't that interesting?

How could she have known what night

unless the killer told her?

Why did John Pinder do what he did?

I think this is where you want to hear the rest of the story.

John looked like a businessman in court.

He looked calm and self-assured.

One of the court dates early on,

I remember John turning around to Rex Tanner's brother

and mouthing to him,

"I didn't do it."

I knew he was guilty and he tried to convince me

he wasn't guilty.

And I told him, "You're a liar. You're a liar."

And he just kept and I finally said, "You're a [bleep] liar,"

in the courtroom and of course,

nobody said anything.

I went to the trial every day because it felt right.

I felt like I owed it to dad.

But I just remember John sitting there.

He acted like there was nothing wrong.

Laughing and joking.

He's a smug[bleep].

He just thought he could get away with anything.

That's just the kind of person he was.

He acted like he was untouchable.

He would turn around and look at...

look at the family and just have this...

grin on his face.

All rise.

It became clear that Pinder's defense was going to be,

I didn't do it because someone else did

and that someone else was Filo Ruiz.

John Pinder had ruled

his little portion of Duchesne County with an iron fist,

and Filo Ruiz was his enforcer.

So it wasn't a surprise to the jury throughout the trial

that it was at John's behest

that Filo had done any of these things.

The ultimate question of why Rex and June

were killed was resolved by the fact

that John simply did not like them very much and he was John Pinder.

He was the king of the Pinder Ranch.

He also was in the process of becoming divorced

from his wife, Beverly, and it was not a harmonious split.

John did not necessarily want to give Beverly a fair shake in the divorce,

and anyone who sided with Beverly

would likely also be on John's list of unpopular people...

and that included June Flood.

John Pinder believed that June had stolen documents

pertaining to his divorce from Beverly,

and those documents would cause him to lose the ranch.

And whether or not he thought that Rex had a part in that.

In John's mind, everybody was out to get John,

so he wanted both of them.

John and Filo burst into Rex and June's house

and used a baseball bat to break Rex's femur.

And then bashed June in the mouth.

It was kind of a violent home invasion

and they beat 'em and tortured 'em in the house.

Took 'em from the Ivy House to Lake Canyon.

They get them out and then executes them both.

And then their bodies were blown up.

The verdict in the trial came back

John was found guilty on all charges.

We were satisfied that justice had been done.

Rex and June's death had been vindicated.

Filo Ruiz had pled guilty to murder.

He did serve a prison sentence.

He was deported back to Mexico.

John Pinder was convicted.

His ultimate sentence was life in prison

with the possibility of parole.

And 22 years later, he remains in prison.

That's Rex and his grandkids, it looks like.

There was a lot of emotional damage caused from all of it.

All these years later,

it's still very emotional and very hard for all of us to...

um, put it all behind us.

I have nothing to say to John Pinder.

I was raised an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

I still feel the same, but they assured me he'll never get out.

As long as they keep him where he's at, I won't have to do my job.

I have been thinking about scattering my dad's ashes for a very long time.

He doesn't deserve to be pinned up in a box.

Did you bring your drop shot of whiskey for him?

Yep. I got his whiskey.

I can't do it.

Tell him goodbye, baby.

He took my dad from me.

He took my friend.

You've got to stay right here.

It's okay.

- Bye, dad. - Bye, dad.