A woman accused of murdering her 3-year-old daughter nearly 30 years ago has been arrested in Mexico, ending more than 12 years as a fugitive, the U.S. Marshals Service said.
Anna Marlene Somoza, 60, was taken into custody by Mexican law enforcement on Oct. 18 in Xochitepec, Mexico, after investigators had tracked her to the city of Cuernavaca in early September. The agency said she had used ties to cartel networks to evade capture for years and will now be extradited to the United States to face first-degree murder charges in Arizona.
The charges stem from the death of Somoza’s daughter, Crystal Reyes, who was 3 years old when she died on Jan. 30, 1997. According to the U.S. Marshals Service, Reyes was subjected to severe abuse, torture and starvation before her death. She was confined to a small dog kennel, bound at the hands and feet, gagged and left for weeks at a time. On the day she died, authorities said, she was bound, suffocated with a towel taped to her face, and left inside a sealed cardboard box.
A Cold Case Cracked by DNA
The case went unsolved for nearly two decades. A hunter found human bone fragments in a remote part of Arizona in November 1998, but it was not until August 2014 that forensic DNA analysis identified those remains as Crystal Reyes. Detectives confirmed her identity using DNA from her biological father, and in December 2014 prosecutors charged Somoza and her then-boyfriend, Avelino Tamala, with first-degree murder.
Tamala was convicted in 2016 and sentenced to life in prison. Somoza, however, had already been deported from the United States years before charges were filed.
A Troubled History Before the Murder
Somoza had an extensive criminal record tied to transnational drug trafficking along the southern Arizona border in the 1980s and 1990s. After her 1993 arrest for selling and transporting marijuana, she became a confidential informant for an Arizona law enforcement agency. Through that work she met Tamala, who was a narcotics detective at the time, and the two began what the U.S. Marshals Service described as
