A murder, a manhunt and the grandmother who wouldn’t stop the search for her daughter’s killer

She had waited years for the news.

But when the message arrived on August 26, 2022, Joséphine Wentzel suddenly had to face a distressing possibility. She had spent six years tracking the man authorities believed was responsible for her daughter’s murder, a search that spanned thousands of miles, international borders, and dozens of possible sightings that ultimately yielded few results.

Wentzel declined to identify the sender of the message, but she said it contained a recent photo of Raymond McLeod, who was at the time one of the U.S. Marshals Service’s most wanted fugitives. Had he really been found – or was this another false hope?

She focused on the image, she said, and “just freaked out like, oh, my God, it’s him. I didn’t even want to think about it because someone might hear my thoughts and warn him to run.”

McLeod, a 42-year-old former U.S. Marine, was apprehended in El Salvador days later and is awaiting trial in San Diego on first-degree murder charges in the June 2016 strangling of Krystal Mitchell. He pleaded not guilty and is scheduled for a preliminary hearing in March. His lawyers declined to comment or did not respond to a request for comment. In court records, they said McLeod accidentally killed Mitchell during “violent, consensual sex gone wrong.”

Wentzel, a 67-year-old grandmother and former police detective, was preparing to become a snowbird in an RV when her daughter was killed. She used the unlikely platform she developed pursuing McLeod to write two books — “The Chase” and “The Capture” — and to help other grieving parents navigate the mix of frustration, despair and confusion left by an unsolved homicide.

Wentzel assisted a nonprofit organization that helps law enforcement with a series of cases in recent years, including the disappearance and suspected murder of Maya Millete, according to the Cold Case Foundation’s co-executive director. Through a nonprofit Wentzel created, Angels of Justice, she launched a campaign urging the White House to treat the country’s enormous backlog of unsolved murders as a national emergency.

In a statement, a White House spokeswoman criticized former President Joe Biden for failing to allow law enforcement to “genuinely fight crime” and said President Donald Trump is “restoring the integrity of our justice system.”

A spokesman for the Marshals Service, which apprehended McLeod, declined to comment. on questions about Wentzel’s role in his search, but in a statement after McLeod’s capture, the agency’s director said Wentzel had worked “diligently with law enforcement over the past several years to bring about this day of justice.”

The San Diego County District Attorney’s Office said she played an “instrumental” role in the search for McLeod.

“She’s going for it,” said Pat Kuiper, who credits Wentzel with helping Washington state investigators re-examine her son’s nearly two-decade-old unsolved murder. “She puts herself out there in such a way that people can’t really turn her down, because she’s so genuine and kind, but persistent and assertive.”

For Rachel Glass, whose daughter was found strangled with her pregnant roommate in Arizona 15 years ago, Wentzel provided an empathetic ear and insight into an investigative process that Glass — a longtime nurse — knew nothing about.

“If things are happening and you’re thinking, what the hell, I would call him and tell him, you won’t believe what happened now,” Glass recalled. “And she could tell me x, y and z why it has to happen like this.”

Wentzel’s husband of nearly three decades, a retired post office maintenance engineer, credits her latest chapter to the tenacity she always demonstrated.

“It’s something I miss,” he said. “I can easily get discouraged and say: forget it. But my wife, she’s not going to forget it.”

A deadly meeting in San Diego

For Wentzel, this chapter began shortly after her daughter’s death. According to a statement of facts filed by the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office, McLeod got into a fight at a San Diego bar on June 9, 2016, after he grabbed Mitchell by the throat and a man intervened, telling him to stop.

Mitchell was found dead the next day in the apartment where they were staying. According to the release, a deputy medical examiner determined she had been strangled and then compared the severity of the injury to someone who had been hit with a baseball bat or had their neck stomped on.

Mitchell, 30, was visiting the city with McLeod from Phoenix, where the couple divorced mother of two worked as a property manager, Wentzel said. To her mother, Mitchell was the life of the party – and someone who turned heads every time she entered a room.

Mitchell met McLeod at work a few weeks before — he had gone to her office to rent an apartment, her mother said — and they had traveled to San Diego. Mitchell was impressed by how McLeod seemed to care about her young son, Wentzel said, and she did not appear to be aware of his previous allegations of domestic violence.

One of those alleged incidents occurred shortly before their trip, according to California court records. In Riverside County, he was charged in April with inflicting corporal injury on his wife — an alleged crime that involved accusations that he strangled his wife, according to the statement of facts.

McLeod has pleaded not guilty, according to Riverside County records, and in a filing his attorneys in Mitchell’s case said he had “a history of consensual sexual practices that included elements of the BDSM community such as bondage, whipping, slapping, choking and erotic asphyxiation, sometimes to the point of unconsciousness.”

However, this earlier case did not go to trial and McLeod disappeared after Mitchell’s death. According to prosecutors, on June 10, he drove Mitchell’s car to San Diego International Airport, where he rented another car and drove to Mexico.

An international search

The San Diego Police Department almost immediately identified McLeod as a person of interest in Mitchell’s death. A warrant for his arrest for his murder was filed on June 13.

But McLeod was nowhere to be found. Eventually, Wentzel recalled, the Marshals Service got involved and offered a reward. But she became frustrated with the government’s inability to quickly investigate leads in foreign countries, she said. U.S. embassies didn’t seem very keen to help, she said, and she remembers a deputy marshal telling her they couldn’t just “run out and get this guy.”

“It’s another country,” she remembers him saying. “We need to get approval.”

The Marshals Service declined to comment. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

So Wentzel started looking for herself. Although she worked for several years as a police officer and detective in her native Guam decades ago, she said that experience did not prepare her for the years of social media investigation she was about to embark on.

One of her first steps was to create a “wanted” poster with photos of McLeod, along with a brief description of the murder and the amount of the reward — at the time $5,000, she said. She focused on Belize, a place she had heard might be located, and passed information between dozens of Facebook accounts — gyms and resorts, restaurants and a university, screenshots of the posts show.

After posting the information in a buy/sell group, Wentzel recalls, the responses started pouring in. Some were by phone. Others came via WhatsApp or Facebook.

“Ma’am, I saw this man, I’m sure by his tattoos and his face,” one message read, according to a screenshot.

“If he is here he will be caught,” read another.

But that wasn’t the case. And the messages continued. There was information that he was in Honduras, Guatemala. Some tipsters seemed to legitimately want to help, she said. Others appeared to be scammers.

“A guy contacted me and said, OK, he’s here,” she recalls. “I know where he works. I have pictures. I have all this. So, you know, I need you to send me $1,000.”

There was so much advice, Mike Wentzel said, that following it became a 24/7 job for his wife. Sometimes he considered asking her to call back, but he never could.

“It’s his child,” he said. “How can I tell him to stop?”

But there were times when the thought crossed his mind. Maintaining hope during the pandemic, when that steady stream of tips dried up, has been especially difficult, she said.

The last tip

As this drop in information continued, Wentzel said, local and federal officials announced that McLeod had been added to the marshal’s list of his 15 most wanted fugitives. During the spring 2021 announcement, they also announced that the reward for information leading to McLeod’s arrest had increased to $50,000.

Its last known location was in Guatemala in 2017, officials said.

Wentzel said she believed it was information related to the Central American country that ultimately led to McLeod’s capture. Five years after he was spotted in Guatemala, she said, a few informants told her they saw McLeod at a hotel just north of the country’s border with El Salvador.

Wentzel reviewed the hotel’s YouTube videos to see if she could spot his face, she recalled, and she posted a “wanted” ad on Facebook targeting accounts in the area. Wentzel said she set a 100-mile radius for the ad, meaning everyone in that area would see McLeod’s face.

Eventually, Wentzel said she learned from the Marshals Service that someone had seen one of her ads and shared a brochure with authorities that appeared to show McLeod. The brochure came from a Salvadoran English school not far from the Guatemalan hotel, she said.

It was this image that led Wentzel to conclude: “It’s him. »

Four days later, on August 30, 2022, authorities announced that McLeod had been arrested in Sonsonate, El Salvador, where he was teaching English. He landed in San Diego the next day.

Wentzel was dealing with a whirlwind of emotions as McLeod’s arraignment approached. She thought about her daughter’s final moments and ran through a litany of revenge fantasies, she recalled. But she didn’t want to sink into hatred and bitterness. So she’s tried to focus on her daughter’s children, whom she and her husband raised, and the other victims she seeks to help.

“Murder does this to you: It makes you someone you’re not, if you let it,” she said. “I never imagined living my life like this. I wanted to be a grandmother and I just wanted to travel and have fun and live the rest of my life with my family. But it did something else to me.”