Videotape Led Police to Fugitive

Investigators said Thursday that the key break in the capture of a farmhand suspected of killing four of his estranged wife’s relatives was spotting him on a surveillance tape at an Auburn drugstore.

Placer County Sheriff’s Lt. Dan Hall said detectives checked records of calls made from pay phones near the drugstore and found calls to a home in Wilmington, where friends of 30-year-old Arturo Juarez Suarez live.

Suarez was arrested without resistance at that home Wednesday evening, three days after the slayings, and was returned Thursday morning to Auburn.

Placer County Dist. Atty. Brad Fenocchio said Suarez will be arraigned Monday on charges of shooting his wife’s two brothers, raping his sister-in-law and then killing her two young children.

“There are four dead people, two of whom are children. Justice would demand that we would seek the death penalty,” Fenocchio said.

Suarez is accused of luring the members of his estranged wife’s family to a remote ranch north of Auburn on Sunday, killing the men, then raping his wife’s sister. He allegedly killed the woman’s daughter and son afterward.

The sister-in-law managed to free herself from the ropes used to tie her and summon help, authorities said. Search dogs uncovered the bodies Monday in a shallow grave concealed by a blackberry thicket.

On Wednesday, the FBI filed an affidavit indicating that investigators believed that Suarez had fled to his native Mexico, where his parents and estranged wife still live.

But following leads from the phone records, FBI agents and 15 to 20 Long Beach police units surrounded the Wilmington home Wednesday evening. Suarez came out with his hands in the air after officers telephoned the house.

Authorities still do not have a clear motive for the killings.

“There is a theory that he had an extreme fondness for [the rape victim], but there are other theories that we are also looking at,” Hall said.

According to a county arrest warrant declaration, Suarez called his sister-in-law asking to be picked up for a Monday appointment.

After arriving carrying a rifle, he asked her two brothers to help with a deer he had killed, the woman said.

Suarez returned, demanding that she fetch aluminum foil from his trailer. When she refused, he struck her on the head with an object, wrapped a chain around her neck and began punching and kicking her as her children watched, she said.

He then dragged her into his trailer, tied her up, cut her clothing off and raped her, the warrant said. She lost consciousness, waking to find her family gone.

The next day, authorities found the bodies of her husband, Jose Luis Martinez, 37; their children, Jack, 5, and Arele, 3; and Martinez’s brother, Juan Manuel Martinez, 28, all of Galt.

The men had been shot in the head, Hall said. The bodies of the children showed signs of blunt-force trauma but no gunshot wounds, he said.

Two rifles were found in Suarez’s trailer, he said.

Suarez had no criminal record and had worked legally for five summers on the cattle ranch where the slayings occurred, investigators said.

The ranch, about 50 miles northeast of Sacramento, is owned by Jack Parnell, deputy U.S. secretary of Food and Agriculture under President George Bush and now a member of the California Air Resources Board.