by Patrick H. Moore
They say the devil is a trickster but there was nothing tricky about the way Moises Meraz-Espinoza — an 18-year old self-styled Satanist and factory worker sporting a shaved head with nearly foot long braids dangling from his scalp — walked into the South County Huntington Park Police Department two years ago to report that he had killed his mother.
Not only had he killed her, he had done very weird things to her corpse. When law enforcement walked into the Maywood apartment Meraz -Espinoza shared with his mother, Amelia Espinoza, age 42, they found a gruesome scene.
Matt Hamilton of the LA Times reports:
A trail of blood led to the bathroom, where plastic covered the walls and floor. There, they found an electrical circular saw with pieces of bone, blood and flesh stuck to the blade. Nearby, in a freezer, police found skin and muscles stored in plastic bags. The woman’s skull, with all her teeth plucked out, her eyes removed and two upside-down crosses carved into the bone, was stashed in a backpack.
Prosecutors say that Meraz-Espinoza strangled his mother and then skinned, filleted and dismembered her body as part of a satanic ritual. A Norwalk jury convicted him of first-degree murder in June.
On Wednesday, July 17th at the sentencing, L.A. County Superior Court Judge Thomas I. McKnew Jr. must of wondered why he had ever campaigned for a place on the judicial bench. While sentencing Meraz-Espinoza to 25 years to life in prison, he remarked that this particular slaying “certainly ranks up there at the top” of “the most disgusting, hideous and vulgar” cases he has seen during his 50 long, punishing years in the legal profession.
“I don’t know what I can say to turn your life around, but you’ll have a lot of time to think about it,” McKnew said.
The record shows that Meraz-Espinoza confessed to his cousin that he had killed his mother by stabbing her and had then — in some weird alternative mind-set — skinned her and cut her up into pieces. His purpose in turning to his cousin was not so much that he felt the psychological need to confess but rather because he needed her help in disposing of the the body. To her credit, she was having no part of that and instead persuaded him to do the sensible thing and turn himself into the police.
There was some speculation that Meraz-Espinoza slaughtered his mother because he was depressed over his girlfriend’s recent death. The Deputy Dist. Atty. Heba Matta scoffed at the theory, pointing out that such an explanation made no sense; if Meraz-Espinoza was depressed over his girlfriend’s untimely death, that was all the more reason to keep his mother alive. Rather, Heba Matta insisted that Meraz-Espinoza had been motivated by satanic beliefs, which he was “heavily entrenched in.”
Matta said Meraz-Espinoza has numerous tattoos that draw on satanic imagery, such as upside-down crosses and a 666 behind his right ear. Authorities recovered his copy of a satanic bible near the crime scene. The date he chose to strangle and dismember his mother, Feb. 2, 2011, also fell on a day in the satanic calendar that calls for ritual human or animal sacrifice.
“This crime was not in the heat of passion or rash and impulsive,” Matta said. “It was done for the purpose of devotion. That’s pretty much the ultimate sacrifice.”
This is somewhat unusual. The authorities often work hard to deny that any form of Satanism is involved in any slaying simply because that is a hornet’s nest they do not want to disturb. But not Deputy Dist. Atty. Heba Matta who was adamant that the murder was part of a satanic ritual.
Defense attorney Jonathan Roberts disagreed completely, contending — in what some might claim was an indirect defense of contemporary Satanism –that prosecutors were exaggerating Meraz-Espinoza’s involvement in satanic rites and were relying on dated interpretations of the church.
“The contemporary church of Satan doesn’t believe in human sacrifice,” Roberts said outside the courtroom. “I never bought that an [18-year-old] kid would adopt the principles of an organization from 50 years ago.”
Roberts also didn’t believe that his head-shaved client had “the expertise to skin and dismember a person on his own.” The defense attorney cited Meraz-Espinoza’s later statements to police that two other people were also involved. Roberts claimed that Meraz-Espinoza claimed that his participation was limited to helping to cut his mother into pieces after she was strangled.
To his credit, Meraz-Espinoza had no prior convictions. The prosecutors and the defense attorneys agreed on one thing — that the defendant’s relationship with his mother before the killing was typical for a teenager with a largely absent father. The mother-son dynamic was strained and poor Amelia Espinoza disapproved of his listening to death metal music. Of course, that didn’t stop him, Heba Matta added.
In case you’re wondering why Meraz-Espinoza got off relatively easy with a sentence of only 25 years to life, it was probably for two reasons. First, he confessed and pleaded guilty which usually helps get a lighter sentence. Second, there was no evidence that Meraz-Espinoza engaged in mayhem or torture while executing the slaying. Thus, given his prior clean record, 25 to life is probably the highest sentence that the judge could legally pronounce.
Amelia Espinoza’s internal organs were never recovered.