If you only looked at her online life, Esmeralda Gonzalez had it all together. Her Instagram page had more than 300k followers. She was a professional model with a BA in Communication and a penchant for posing in revealing outfits (and sometimes no outfits at all). She liked expensive handbags, jewelry, and watches and she loved her dog Bonita.
Unfortunately, her life ended in a truly tragic way: she was murdered, covered in concrete and left in the Las Vegas desert to rot. So, how could such a terrible thing happen?
On May 12, 2019, Esmeralda posted to her Instagram page for the last time. She was sitting outside on a carpet cleaning a dog’s face.”Because dogs make the world a better place,” she said in the post. What you can’t tell from the photo is that she was struggling with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, for which she required medication to maintain “her perception of reality”. In just a few days she would be dead.
Esmeralda was a Las Vegas native; she grew up in the well-known Westside neighborhood. Growing up she played chess and did beauty pageants. Her ex-boyfriend Matthew Mosey said she was “a very driven young woman with her whole life ahead of her.”
By the 31st her brother Juan Gonzalez Madera, who hadn’t heard from her in a few days, went to check on her. When he arrived he found her car in the driveway and the door unlocked. To add to the confusion, her wallet and purse were inside the house. Suspecting Esmeralda was off her meds, her brother promptly called the cops.
Las Vegas Police, while investigating, learned that Esmeralda’s boyfriend had called her brother and family because he thought she was acting weird. He was so worried that he took her cell phone and her keys. Inside the house everything was in disarray, indicating to them that she was undergoing a mental health crisis.
At this point, police thought she was simply missing, and asked for footage from the security cameras in the house.
While canvassing, police collected security footage from neighbors. Clark County Chief Deputy District Attorney, Pam Weckerly, said the footage police found was “concerning,” and that Esmeralda was walking around the neighborhood in “lingerie and high heels… and wasn’t walking steadily.”
Police also learned that she had fought with her boyfriend (hence him stealing her keys), but when they watched footage from the home they saw that she was alone. They then started investigating her Instagram page for anything suspicious.
After more investigating, police learned that Esmeralda showed up at a BMW dealership in lingerie to try and get a key for her car. In the video, she seemed confused and lost. Because it was Vegas, employees at the car dealership assumed she was a stripper and didn’t think twice about it. At this point, she was still just a missing person, but police were beginning to piece together a timeline.
After the person who drove her to the dealership was cleared and questioned, they learned she knocked on a neighbor’s door. Then she was just gone. It wasn’t until police got an anonymous tip on July 18 that they got a break in the case. The tip said a man named Christopher Prestipino killed Esmeralda, along with his roommate Cassandra Garrett. The tip went on to say that “they had injected her with a pool cleaner before taking her out to the desert in a U-Haul truck and dumping her.”
Police looked into Prestipino and found out he had drug charges, and that he lived “essentially on the same street” as Esmeralda. Someone else called the police and told them to speak with a woman named Tricia Ott. When they visited her she told them Prestipino came to her for help. Ott told police she went to his house and saw a U-Haul and a huge wooden box. She said Cassandra was there and she was “whacked out of her mind.”
Ott said that Prestipino was acting incredibly paranoid, and that he told her that there was a woman at the house who “freaked out” and that he tied her up and thought maybe he killed her. Police then went to the local Home Depot and saw footage of Prestipino buying a lot of wood, along with lime, building materials, concrete, and screws. They then checked his cell phone records and found out he had been in the desert for a long time on the 8th of June.
Police then questioned Prestipino’s girlfriend Lisa Mort, who was in jail on something unrelated. She denied any knowledge of anything. She was lying, and would eventually be charged as an accessory. Then they questioned Cassandra and all she said was “I wasn’t in the garage.” Finally, they confronted Prestipino with a search warrant. He told police he had no idea what they were talking about and that he’d “never seen her before.” Below is a picture of Prespitino and Lisa Mort.
Investigators eventually convinced Cassandra to take them to the body if they let her get her things in order before she went to jail. Eventually, they found a corpse in a large wooden crate that was covered in concrete. Though the body was unrecognizable they identified Esmeralda through her watch and DNA.
Cassandra then gave a full statement about what happened. She said she found Gonzalez walking around the neighborhood and brought her to Prespitino’s house. Some news reports say that Prestipino propositioned Esmeralda for sex without knowing she was in a fragile mental state. He gave her meth, police said, and Esmeralda started speaking in the “devil’s tongue.”
Panicking, Prestipino tied her to a chair. She started yelling about cops and tried to punch him, so he strangled her and then Cassandra injected her with pool cleaner. Then they started the long process of disposing of the body.
Mort would eventually plead guilty as an accessory. She got two to five years in prison. Cassandra pleaded to voluntary manslaughter and got 20 years with eligibility for parole after eight. Prespitino was given a 10 to 25-year sentence for second-degree murder and 15 years for kidnapping, to be served concurrently.