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‘He may have fled to Mexico’ The year was 2021. The day was April Fool’s. But the body on the floor, it was no joke. María de Lourdes Moya Jasso, a complicated victim, was due to turn 53 that April. She never celebrated her birthday. Because the body on the floor belonged to her. By the time worried relatives asked Pinal County Sheriff’s Office for a welfare check on Whirly Bird’s 49000 block a day later, the sheriff’s spokesperson Lauren Reimer said, neither she nor her husband, Antonio Flores- Perez, had been heard from for “several days.” Moya was dead, her pants removed. Gravity pulled all the blood it could from the bullet hole in her nose, long since dried to a sickening shade of brown, and rigor mortis had come and gone. But something was missing. “Antonio Flores-Perez was not located,” Reimer said. “Flores-Perez was immediately considered a person of interest.” He’s 51 years old today, if he’s still alive. No one has seen him. Stranger yet, a months-long scour of dozens of databases of public records conducted by multiple journalists yielded no record of the couple’s marriage nor Flores-Perez’s living in Maricopa. He is a Mexican national. Moya, meanwhile, is well documented to have lived in Pinal County at least since the early 1990s. “Her husband was nowhere to be found,” said Encinas, who raised four daughters in Hidden Valley. “Did he flee to Mexico? My guess is yes.” Reimer said Moya’s red Ford F-150 pickup truck was located in the following days in a remote area of western Pinal County. “Both the scene of the homicide and the location where the truck was discovered were searched extensively over many days,” she said. “At this time, it is unknown if Flores-Perez is still alive, or if he may have fled to Mexico.” Flores-Perez was entered into the National Crime Information Center and the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, both federal agencies, as a missing and endangered person. He is the only suspect in his wife’s murder. Meth, coke and Xanax The gold wedding ring that her likely killer had once given her as a token of their specious love Flores Perez
Maricopa’s secret murder house A homicide, as mysterious as it was gruesome, evaded the news for years. Neighbors never forgot — and they have questions about racism and transparency. BY ELIAS WEISS
(520) 316-6111
21300 N. John Wayne Pkwy. Unit 117
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HE ONLY ONE WHO SURVIVED the house of horrors was the killer. It wasn’t a righteous judgment, what he did. Pressing the barrel of a loaded gun against the face of a half-naked woman and pulling the trigger. The likely gunman, once described as a quiet Maricopa neighbor and now believed to be living under a new identity — or dead — in a foreign country, where he has become untouchable, is the only one deserving of judgment. His only Judgment Day will be, or perhaps was, at the hands of God, if you believe in that. He did. A months-long InMaricopa investigation unravels the mystery of how the public has been blind to this — a homicide, as mysterious as it was gruesome, that evaded the news for years. Neighbors never forgot — and they have questions about racism and government transparency. Ruth Eunice Encinas, 52, is one of those neighbors on Whirly Bird Road, an unpaved byway that gnaws through 2 miles of mostly bare desert, dotted with the occasional mobile home. And one of those homes was the Maricopa house of horrors that no one ever knew about. Until now. Encinas told InMaricopa : “Welcome to the city of lies.” T
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InMaricopa.com | December 2024
December 2024 | InMaricopa.com
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