Cartel ties kept fugitive mother hidden for 12 years
US Marshals arrest Arizona woman wanted in 3-year-old daughter's 1997 murder, detective boyfriend already serving life sentence
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Arizona child murder suspect detained in Mexico after over a decade on the run
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Anna Marlene Somoza
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Avelino Tamala
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Crystal Reyes
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US Marshals arrested Anna Marlene Somoza, 60, in Mexico after more than twelve years as a fugitive, ending the hunt for a woman wanted in the 1997 death of her three-year-old daughter in Arizona. Somoza will be extradited to the United States to face first-degree murder charges. She stayed out of reach, authorities said, with the help of close connections to cartels.
The daughter, Crystal Reyes, was subjected to severe abuse, torture and starvation before she died, according to the Marshals Service. She was confined to a small dog kennel, bound by her hands and feet, gagged and left for weeks at a time. On January 30, 1997, she was suffocated with a towel taped to her face and left to die inside a sealed cardboard box.
The case moved slowly. A hunter found human bone fragments in a deserted area of Arizona in November 1998, and forensic DNA analysis identified them as Crystal's remains in August 2014, after detectives confirmed the girl's identity through her biological father. In December 2014, prosecutors charged Somoza and her boyfriend at the time, Avelino Tamala, with first-degree murder.
Tamala was a narcotics detective. Somoza had met him while working as a confidential informant for an Arizona law enforcement agency, a role she took after a 1993 arrest for selling and transporting marijuana — and after years connected to a transnational drug trafficking network along the southern Arizona border. The relationship became romantic, according to the Marshals Service. Crystal was born in Mexico in 1993; shortly after her birth, mother and daughter moved in with Tamala in Arizona. Tamala was not the girl's father. He was convicted of the murder in 2016 and sentenced to life in prison.
Somoza had already been deported by the time anyone charged her. The abuse went undetected in part because Crystal was not attending school; the majority of child-abuse reports come from teachers, counselors and schools, Stacy Vaughan of the organization Childhelp told Fox News Digital.
Nearly thirty years passed between Crystal's death and her mother's arrest in Mexico.