Las Cruces Bowling Alley Massacre: Part Three (Conclusion)

0:00 Speaker 1: Warning. Kind of Murdery contains adult themes, explicit language, and descriptions of violence. It is not suitable for anyone, and we recommend you stop listening now.

0:18 Speaker 2: True Crime with a dash of the paranormal, the garish, the strange in the darkly comic. A podcast that's about more than just murder. It's my very own pocket dimension, home to a curated collection of bizarre and compelling stories, the unsolved, the unsettling, and the unbelievable. I cover it all just so long as it's kind of murdery. Hey, everybody, welcome. I am so glad you are here. Time is money, and I am thankful that you choose to spend your time with me. I am Zevan Odelberg. And this is kind of Murdery, and you have found your way to Part three, The conclusion of the Loss Crusius Bowling Alley Massacre.

1:04 Speaker 2: That's right, I did save part three. So if you haven't listened to parts one and two yet, go catch up and then come back and join us. I'll save you a seat. That's a promise. If you are all caught up, well, then let's get right down to it. Part three, the conclusion of kind of murderies, the lost Crusius Bowling Alley massacre starts. Now it's days later, and the bowling Alley is still closed. The tape stretched across the entrance and retied where it started to sag. The front doors stay locked, the glass darkened from the inside, and unless someone steps close enough to look through it, the counter and the first stretch of lanes or just shapes behind it.

1:55 Speaker 2: Nothing about the building has changed the distance from the door to the counter, from the counter to the lanes, from the lanes to the office at the back. It all sits exactly the way it did that morning. What happened inside hasn't moved. The work has. It's laid out now across a table at the department, Photographs in rows, front counter, seating, the approach to the lanes, the office, close shots of impact points, close shots of casings before they were lifted, Evidence envelopes stacked to one side, labeled and sealed.

2:29 Speaker 2: The older detective stands with both hands on the table, leaning over the photographs, his tie gone, now sleeves rolled the same legal pad filled edge to edge across from him. The younger detective flips through his notebook, lining up what's written there against what's laid out in front of them. The sequence is fixed and doesn't change no matter how many times they go back through it. Two men walk in, seven people are moved into the office, gun fire inside the room, cash and checks taken, fire set before before they leave.

3:00 Speaker 2: The younger detective reads it again from the first page, then looks down to the photographs, as if something new might show up if he just looks long enough. It doesn't. The structure of what happened is clear. Nothing else is. The canvas sheets sit in a stack beside the photos, each one filled out in a different hand, different times, written next to names that don't connect to anything solid, most of them in the same way. Didn't see them arrive, didn't see where they went, heard the sirens, saw the smoke.

3:32 Speaker 2: The younger detective pulls one sheet out, reads it again, a witness who saw two men walking away from the direction of the Bowling Alley. Distance unclear, no vehicle, no details that hold. He sets it back into the stack and pulls the next one. That one ends faster, nothing unusual. It goes aside without being read twice. The older detective slides three photographs closer together the bullet casings from different parts of the bowling alley, one near the counter, one along the seating, one closer to the office, different sizes, different markings.

4:10 Speaker 2: He doesn't touch them, just lines the images up so they sit side by side. Two weapons were in that room. That part doesn't move. It's written down, circled, returned to every time they come back to the table. The description from the hospital is written clean on the page. Now two men, Hispanic, dark complexions, fluent English, no names attached to them, no details that separate them from anyone else who could fit that description in the city. The younger detective presses the pen into the page harder than he needs to, then lifts it and sets it down again.

4:47 Speaker 2: Phones ring in the background. They get picked up. Information comes in and gets written down, then checked and set aside. Tips come through with names attached to them, and those names get it pulled, questioned, and then cleared. When the times don't line up or the details don't hold, each one starts with something that might connect and ends the same way. No connections, nothing that stays. The older detective moves around the table and stops at the photograph of the office. The doorway open the floor marked where people were found, burn damage along the lower walls where the fire took hold.

5:27 Speaker 2: Everything that matters sits inside that frame. Everything they need to identify who did it is supposed to come from that room. It doesn't. The younger detective goes back to the first page of his notes and reads the sequence again, slower this time, like changing the pace might change the outcome. It doesn't. The same order, the same result, no new line added to the bottom of the page. Outside the building, the city keeps moving the way it always does. Traffic along the main roads, business is open, people going in and out of places that look exactly the way they did before that Saturday morning.

6:07 Speaker 2: Inside the room, the file stays open. The photographs don't change, the statements don't change. The evidence stays where it's been placed. Days pass, and the work repeats, with different names at the top of the page, different people brought in and questioned, different leads that start the same way and in the same way. Nothing locks into place long enough to build on. Nothing connects back to the two men who walked into the bowling alley, took control of the room, and left without being identified.

6:39 Speaker 2: The space between what happened inside that office and who did it? Stays empty. It's a void, and it stays that way no matter how many times they come back to the table and try to fill it. The hospital room holds steady. The light is kept low, filtered through a shade that flattens everything into the same pale tone, and the only movement comes from the monitors beside the bed and the quiet work of the staff moving in and out. An officer remains just outside the door, not speaking, not shifting position, making sure no one crosses the threshold without being accounted for.

7:17 Speaker 2: Inside, the air carries that clean, sterile edge that never quite covers the smell of injury and sickness, the various reasons that bring a patience to the hospital in the first place. Melissia Repass lies against the pillows with the sheets pulled high across her body. The tubes running into her arm are fixed in place with tape that has already been replaced once since she came out of surgery. Her breathing is steady, but measured, the kind that comes from some one being watched second by second by the machines beside her.

7:51 Speaker 2: When the detectives enter, they don't come in with the same pace they carried at the bowling Alley. The older one steps just far enough into the room to be seen, then stops, giving Melissa time to recognize that someone is there before anything is asked of her. The younger one stays back half a step, notebook open but held low, not raised between them. What Melissia gives them comes in order, not because she's trying to tell a story, but because that is how it sits in her memory. The two men come through the front of the bowling Alley without being stopped, without being questioned, moving the same way anyone else would move through that space in the morning.

8:32 Speaker 2: They don't announce themselves beyond what they say to the people inside, but what they say is enough. They tell them to move, and the people in the building move from the counter, from the lanes, from where they had been standing only seconds before, all of them directed to the office in the back. Seven people inside that room, arranged without discussion, placed by where they are told to go. Melisia describes their positions in relation to the doorway, to the walls, to each other, not as measurements, but as a fixed picture that doesn't shift no matter how many times it's looked.

9:08 Speaker 2: At The men remain near the entrance to the office, controlling the space from that point. They do not pace the room, do not circle, do not need to. Everything they require is in front of them, and everything in front of them responds the way they expect it to. When the gun fire starts, she does not try to give it shape or sound. She describes instead what happens to the people in front of her, how the bodies drop and don't get back up, how the order of the room breaks apart in a way that cannot be put back together once it happens.

9:41 Speaker 2: The detectives don't interrupt her to fill in what they already know. They let the structure of the story come from her, because the structure is the one thing that holds together. After the shooting, the men move into the room itself. This part settles differently because it shifts what they were doing from control to purpose. They step over the people on the floor, moving directly to where the money and the checks would be kept, opening drawers, pulling through what's inside, checking without hesitation, without confusion.

10:13 Speaker 2: The motion is not scattered. It follows a path one location to the next, each place treated the same way. Before they move on It reads less like a search and more like a series of stops that they already anticipated. One of them moves along the edge of the room, low along the wall, where the fire begins. Melissia doesn't know what they use to start it, but she can place where it starts and how it builds. The first signs of it near the floor, before it spreads into the furniture around it. The fire does not surge immediately.

10:51 Speaker 2: It takes hold and then grows enough to move across the space. While the men are already turning away from it, they leap through the same door they came in, passing through the front of the building without anything to slow them down. No one is in a position to stop them, and no one follows them. The control they held at the start carries all the way through to the end, uninterrupted, from the moment they step inside the bowling alley to the moment they walk out. Melissa stays where she is after they are gone.

11:23 Speaker 2: The fire continues to build along the wall, spreading across anything close enough to burn. The people around Melisia do not move, and that stillness becomes part of what she is seeing. As she looks from one side of the room to the other, trying to make sense of what has happened. The detectives don't push her past that point. They let the sequence of events stand as she relays it, because what matters is already there. The positioning of the men, the control of the room, the order of actions after the shooting, the setting of the fire as the final step before they leave.

12:01 Speaker 2: Each piece fits with what is pulled from the scene, but it adds something that was not visible from the floor alone. It shows how little movement, how little activity, how little action was needed to control seven people, and how directly, succinctly everything that followed was carried out. When the detective stepped back into the hallway, the hospital sounds return around them, steady and unchanged from when they walked in. The younger detective closes the note book without adding anything further to the page, because the structure of events is already complete.

12:40 Speaker 2: He hands the note book to the older man, who carries it with him without looking down. The details held in place now not just by what was found in the building, but by the experience and memories of a witness, of a victim who was inside that room and watched it happen. In real time. By the end of the first week, the center of gravity shifts completely away from the Bowling Alley. The building stays sealed, unchanged behind the tape, but no one is standing in that lot anymore trying to solve the case from the outside.

13:15 Speaker 2: No one is standing in the Bowling Alley trying to solve the case from the inside. The work has been consolidated inside the police department, where the case is no longer a collection of scenes and statements, but a file that has to be reviewed and analyzed and added to, a file that has to produce something actionable, or the wheels of justice will refuse to move. The Bowling Alley massacre is given a permanent investigation room inside the police station. Tables are fixed in place, walls are used for more than posted note overflow, and everything that comes in is immediately sorted into where it fits or discarded when it doesn't.

14:02 Speaker 2: Photographs remain grouped by location, but the emphasis has moved to timelines and connections. Statements are broken down into components time, location, observation, and those components are compared across every person who spoke. Anything that alignes is marked, anything that drifts even slightly is flagged and held back from the core. The hospital statements hold the number of offenders, their control of the room, their position at the doorway, the sequence of gunfire followed by the search for cash and checks, and the setting of the fire.

14:41 Speaker 2: Those elements don't shift under comparison. That part of the case is stable enough that it no longer requires attention beyond confirmation. The detectives don't spend time reworking it because it doesn't produce anything new. It explains what happened, but it doesn't identify who did it. It doesn't produce a suspect. What changes is the treatment of everything outside the building. The canvas is no longer about collecting statements. It becomes about eliminating them. Names that came in during the first hours are pulled back up, checked against employment records, shift times, distances that can be traveled within the window the crime allows.

15:22 Speaker 2: People are recontacted, asked to repeat what they saw without reference to what they said before. Small differences emerge under repetition, and those differences are enough to push most of the early accounts out of consideration. A timeline is built with tighter constraints than anything written in the first days. The time the Bowling Alley opened, the last confirmed normal activity inside, the point at which control was established, and the first external indication that something was wrong. The window narrows until it can be held in a few lines on a page.

15:58 Speaker 2: Every name, every sighting, every reported movement is forced into that window. If it doesn't fit, it's removed, and most of them don't fit. The absence of a vehicle moves from a detail to a condition. No one places a car arriving with the two men, no one places a car leaving with them. That forces the search outward in a different way, not looking for a vehicle at the scene, but for where a vehicle could have been left without being seen. Streets adjacent to the Bowling Alley are mapped in terms of line of sight.

16:32 Speaker 2: What could be observed from each business, each entrance, each point where someone was standing that morning. Areas fall away is impossible without being noticed. What remains are smaller zones where a car could have waited without drawing attention, But those zones do not produce a witness who can confirm it. Leads continue to come in, but they are processed differently. Now each one is measured against the established time line before any field work is done. If it fails there, it doesn't move forward.

17:03 Speaker 2: If it passes, it is assigned, checked, and either incorporated or discarded. The volume does not slow, but the percentage that survives the first pass drops sharply. What remains after that is still not enough to identify anyone outside the department. The case expands in a way that doesn't help the investigation directly, but increases its pressure. The victim's names are no longer confined to reports. They're repeated in broadcasts, printed, spoken in public settings. Appeals for information are issued with the same descriptions, each time unchanged because nothing has been added to it.

17:42 Speaker 2: That repetition pushes more calls in, but the content of those calls follows the same pattern as before. Partial observations, uncertain times, descriptions that match too broadly to isolate the suspect. Two men, Hispanic fluent English. That's it. Inside the investigation room, the detectives stop expecting the next piece to complete what they have. The work shifts towards testing whether anything that already exists can be strengthened enough to hold on its own. The evidence remains consistent, the statements remain consistent, but consistency does not convert into identification.

18:21 Speaker 2: The crime is fully defined, but the individuals who carried it out remain mysterious. By the time the first week closes, the cases reached a point where nothing inside it contradicts anything else, and nothing inside it points to a name. The investigation continues at full scale, but the expectation of an immediate resolution is no longer part of it. What remains is a complete account of what happened inside the office and an incomplete understanding of everything beyond it, with no direct path from one to the other.

18:55 Speaker 2: In the second week, the investigation changes direction without changing its pace. The dedicated room at the police department stays active, but the focus shifts from reconstruction to comparison. What happened inside the Bowling Alley is already fixed. Now the question becomes whether anything like it has happened before, close enough in time or method to point to somewhere. Specific reports from surrounding jurisdictions are pulled and laid out alongside the existing file. Robberies involving multiple offenders, firearms, and physical control of victims are flagged first.

19:35 Speaker 2: Anything involving a back room, an office, or a movement from a public space into a confined area is separated out. I have to mention here, although there's no specific reporting on this listener, Paul did mention, and it does jump out that this crime has multiple things in common with the mo of robber Eugene Brashers and the Austin yogurt shop murders. You have multiple firearms two although there are reported to be two assailants here. You have control of the victims moving them into a back room, and you also have the setting of a fire.

20:18 Speaker 2: And it is around the same time the Bowling Alley massacre happened, first taking place on February tenth, nineteen ninety as where the yogurt shop murders occurred on December sixth, nineteen ninety one. They also both happened on a weekend. The yogurt shop murders occurred late on a Friday night, or I guess you could say in the early morning hours potentially of a Saturday, and the Bowling Alley massacre happened on a Saturday morning. Now again, there were two assailants described by victims of the Bowling Alley massacre.

20:56 Speaker 2: They were also described as Hispanic. It's worth noting that while Robert Eugene Brashers was white, if you google him and look at Google images, I think it's completely plausible, completely possible that Robert Eugene Brashers could have been mistaken for Hispanic, especially by a person under duress. So there really is quite a bit in common here New Mexico versus Texas, similar region, similar years, February nineteen ninety versus December nineteen ninety one. And of course the elements of robbery control multiple handguns of different calibers, and a setting of a fire after the crime.

21:41 Speaker 2: I'd be curious to know if law enforcement has looked into the possibility of anything that might connect Robert Eugene Brashers to the Las Crucis Bowling Alley massacre. I think it was certainly a salient and intriguing observation by listener Paul. And if anybody knows whether law enforcement has investigated anything that might connect Robert Eugene Brashers to the Los Crusius Bowling Alley massacre, I'd love to hear about it. You can email me Kindomurdery at gmail dot com, you can find me on social media, or you can call the kind of Murdery hotline, which is eight eight eight Murdery.

22:19 Speaker 2: All right, let's get back to the story. So again, reports from surrounding jurisdictions are pulled and laid out alongside the existing file. Robberies involving multiple offenders, firearms and control of victims are flagged first. Anything involving a back room, an office or movement from a public space into a confined area is separated out, and just to list them one more time, multiple firearms, control of victims, movement from a public area into a confined area, as well as setting of a fire after the crime is committed, and robbery.

22:57 Speaker 2: Of course, these are all components that the Lost Crew Us Bowling Alley massacre has in common with the Austin yogurt shop murders, although again I don't know if that connection was ever made by law enforcement, especially since the yogurt shop murders had not yet occurred, nor had brashers been identified. Obviously, but the younger detective does work through reports of similar crimes line by line, not reading for narrative, but for structure, jury method, number of offenders, how victims were handled, whether the offenders lingered or moved quickly once they had what they came for.

23:35 Speaker 2: Most of what comes up doesn't match single offenders, quick cash grabs, no attempt to control the room beyond what was necessary to get in and get out. Those crimes get set aside. A smaller subset remains cases where two men entered together, where instructions were given instead of for supplied immediately, where the offenders stayed long enough to direct movement rather than react to it. Even those don't align cleanly, the timing is off, or the follow through doesn't match, or the level of control breaks down under closer reading.

24:10 Speaker 2: At the same time, known offenders in the area are pulled and checked against the same criteria recent arrests, parolees, anyone with a history of armed robbery or coordinated activity coordinated criminal activity, of course, we're not talking about synchronized swimming here. The older detective reviews those names against the timeline built in the first week, eliminating anyone who can't be placed in the area or who can be accounted for when the crime occurred. The list contracts quickly. What remains is too broad to act on and too thin to build from.

24:46 Speaker 2: Nothing in that pass produces a direct lead, but it establishes something the case didn't have before. The crime does not sit comfortably within the patterns already on file. It resembles other robberies in Peace Pie, but not in a way that points to a specific crew or known method, or a name that can be pulled and pursued. In the weeks that follow, the pace of the investigation doesn't drop so much as it flattens. The same dedicated room stays in use at the police department, the same tables covered in photographs and statements, but the way the detectives move through it changes.

25:25 Speaker 2: Early on, every new piece of information had somewhere to go, some place it could be tested against what was already known. Now the flow reverses. Information still comes in, but most of it doesn't make it past the first pass. It gets checked against the timeline, against the statements, against the fixed structure of what happened inside the Bowling Alley, and it falls away before it ever reaches the center of the case. The core file doesn't expand in a meaningful way. It thickens, more pages, more names, more attempts, but nothing alters the structure that was established in the first days.

26:05 Speaker 2: Two offenders to firearms, seven people moved into the office. Gun fire, murder, theft fire. Every verified piece supports that sequence, and nothing outside of it attaches to a person who can be placed inside of it. The detectives return to the same materials because those materials are the only things that hold. Photographs are re examined, not for what they show, but for what might have been missed. Statements are re read, compared again, looking for a detail that shifts when placed next to another account.

26:42 Speaker 2: Nothing separates itself from what is already known. Time begins to show up in smaller ways. Follow up calls take longer to return. Names that were checked once are checked again, not because they've changed, but because nothing has replaced them. The same questions are asked in slightly different forms, and the answers come back the same. The absence of a vehicle remains. The description of the suspects does not narrow the empty void. The separated ven diagram between the crime and any identifiable person stays unchanged.

27:16 Speaker 2: Outside the department, the case continues to circulate. The suspect description is repeated, appeals for information continue. More calls come in, and they are handled the same way as before. Logged checked, measured against what is known. Most of them end at the same point, unable to move beyond possibility into confirmation. The volume of information does not translate into direction. By the end of this stretch, the investigation has not stopped, but it has changed form. It is no longer moving towards something new.

27:50 Speaker 2: It is holding everything that has already been established in place, maintaining it, preserving it, waiting for something that has not yet appeared. The work continues, but the case itself remains exactly where it was once the first week closed, defined in detail, but empty where it matters most. By the mid twenty tens, the Los Crucis Bowling Alley massacre case has outlived the people who first worked it. The file is no longer a single stack that can be lifted and carried. It's a system that has been added to over time, each layer built on top of what came before it.

28:28 Speaker 2: The photographs are the same, the statements are the same. The evidence recovered from the Bowling Alley is the same. What changed is the set of hands moving through it and the tools those hands have available. Amador Martinez steps into the case as the lead detective, not as someone arriving fresh, but as someone from the same place the case belongs to. He was born and raised in Los Crusis. The names in the file are not abstract to him. They are tied to a city he already knows well, a place that has carried the weight of what happened at that buling alley for decades.

29:05 Speaker 2: By the time Detective Martinez takes over, the sequence of the crime is not in question, and there are still no confirmed identities, no arrests, no direct link between the evidence and the suspect. What Detective Martinez inherits is not uncertainty about the event, but rather the absence of resolution. The evidence is sent out again, not because it was mishandled, but because it can, now, now being in the mid twenty tens around twenty fourteen, be examined in ways that were not available in nineteen ninety.

29:39 Speaker 2: Materials collected from the office are tested with updated forensic methods. Each submission is logged, each result returned with a level of detail that refines what is already known without extending it beyond its limits. Where something can be clarified, it is clarified. Where it cannot, it remains unchanged. Detective martine Is works the case as something active, not archived. That distinction is maintained deliberately. Tips are taken, names are still checked. Each piece of information is measured against the same fixed structure that has defined the case from the beginning.

30:16 Speaker 2: Most of them resolved the same way, unable to attach to the two men who entered the building and left without being identified. When he speaks about the case, Detective Martinez does not describe it as something finished. This event twenty five years ago pretty much rocked the foundation of Las Crusis, he says. He states it without emphasis, as a fact that does not require explanation. He describes the work the same way. We've utilized numerous resources throughout the years to try to solve this, so it's not a cold case.

30:50 Speaker 2: It's very active. The file reflects that it continues to grow, not with breakthroughs, but with attempts, re examinations, updated reports, new line of inquiry that begin and end within the same boundaries. The structure of the crime remains intact. The absence the void at its center remains intact as well. The materials recovered from the Bowling Alley are no longer just photographs and reports. They are physical objects that can be tested again not because they were overlooked, but because the methods used to examine them continue to change.

31:23 Speaker 2: Detective amid Or Martinez pushes those materials back through the system. Casings are re examined not for what they confirmed years earlier, but for whether anything new can be pulled from the markings left behind. Items collected from the officer are evaluated again, looking for traces that could not be isolated before. Each test is precise within its scope, and each result returns with the same limitation refinement without identification. The evidence becomes clearer in detail, but it does not extend beyond the boundaries already established.

31:58 Speaker 2: It does not identify a suspect or suspects, and until something enters that file that can attach a name or names to the two men who walked into that bowling alley and left without being identified, the case holds exactly where it's been from the beginning, complete in what happened and incomplete in who did it, and for all the reasons already mentioned. The overlapped the similarities the commonalties in modus operendi from a similar region the American Southwest, New Mexico and Texas, to similar years nineteen ninety in nineteen ninety one to a similar time of year, winter December and February, a nearly matching time of the week the week end late Friday night early Saturday morning, a crime that involved two different firearms of two different calibers, that involved control of the victims, moving them from a public space to a private space in the back, a robbery, a less than immediate exit, a fire set after the crime, and the fact that if you google Robert Eugene Braschers, I do believe that he could be plausibly mistaken for hispanic, especially by a person under duress.

33:15 Speaker 2: All of these things are potential commonalities between the Austin, Texas yogurt chop murders and the Las Crusus Bowling Alley massacre. Of course, in the case of the Bowling Alley massacre, Brashers would have had to have had an accomplice, which he did not apparently have in any of his other crimes. But the Bowling Alley massacre did happen before the yogurt chop murders. Perhaps he was evolving or slightly less set in his ways, But for all of these reasons, for all of these potential points of contact, I would love to know whether Detective Amador Martinez, any of his predecessors, contemporaries, or successors have investigated a potential connection between the Las Crusis Bowling Alley massacre and Robert Eugene Brasher's the Austin Yogurt chop Killer.

34:08 Speaker 2: If anyone has any information about this question, please do reach out to me. Also, if you happen to have friends, family, acquaintances, somebody you bumped into on an elevator, anybody you know who enjoys a true crime podcast, please do tell them about the show. I sure would appreciate it. And please, please please do join me a week from today next Wednesday, April twenty second, for a brand new story, a brand new episode of the show. Thank you so much for being here. I'm Zevanodleberg and this has been kind of Murdery.

34:46 Speaker 1: If you like the show, please subscribe, review and tell your friends. You can find us on social media at kinda Murdery or email at Kinamurdery at gmail dot com