Bbcsdis before we begin, I just want a flag that this episode includes some very strong language and references to drug taking.

I was in the newsroom and I was about to eat dinner, and I remember someone at our assignment desk.

They're the ones that hear this police scanner said Hey, there's something going on in this quiet neighborhood on the northwest side of town, and we need you to go and check it out.

We didn't know what it was, but we knew someone was dead.

It's December twenty twelve and Tiffany Craig is halfway through her shift at a local TV station in Houston.

Her dinner interrupted, she heads out to the scene of the crime.

So we got to the street.

Nice neighborhood.

Nice break homes were just a couple of days before Christmas, and there were lots of families in that neighborhood that had their Christmas lights up.

Tiffany has reported live from countless crime scenes, but this case was anything but typical.

There were lots of neighbors out, which doesn't happen all that often.

Whenever we go to crime scenes, a lot of times people lock their doors and close up and they want nothing to do.

With what's going on out there, But this neighborhood was different.

This sort of thing didn't happen in that neighborhood.

Tiffany joins the throng of journalists and neighbors craning their necks to see what happened.

It was really busy, and there was lots of chatter, and there was lots of people out there asking what is going on.

I remember hearing one of the reporters tell an investigator that there was someone out there that didn't belong out.

There, someone snooping around the crime scene.

They weren't a neighbor, they weren't really on the street for any particular reason, but they were there that night and then it's as if they just vanished.

No one ever heard about this person again.

But they were on the street, and it was suspect enough that somebody that was with the group of reporters said something about it.

It's not unheard of for a killer to return to the scene of the crime for some narcissistic kick.

The police ask around to narrow in on a suspect, a local guy who'd just been released from prison with a long history of stealing and pawning things.

So detectives Carousel and du say pay him a visit.

One afternoon.

They knock on his door, but there's no answer.

Try again two hours later, same thing, and that's it.

They don't pursue this tip any further.

I guess they didn't think he was a viable suspect.

He lived around the corner from the Melgars and could have just been on his way home.

A well known ne'er dowell does not necessarily mean well known murderer all the same, it's this kind of behavior that would make anyone wary of the police investigation, not even question this guy with a criminal record.

I can understand why Liz would maybe be cautious of trusting the work the police are actually doing, but she has no choice.

She has to work with them, and that starts with searching her old house for anything that could be missing, anything that could be a possible clue.

And my parents the bed had been disassembled and moved into the living room, even the carpet had been pulled up and the floor had been painted over where obviously there had been a lot of blood.

If you remember, the house had already been combed over by the police and then scrubbed by the crime scene cleaning company.

It's impossible to know what might have been seized as evidence and what might have been stolen.

And then I went into the garage because I knew my dad had all those power tools and things were missing.

As well as finding her old backpack stuffed with the family's Xbox and other valuables taken from the house, it looks like some of her dad's tools are missing.

You could see that the toolboxes had all been rummaged through, some of them are empty.

Liz checks to see if she can find any of her dad's tools being sold online.

There's a Craigslist ad that had three of the tools that were missing, all in one ad, exact same brand, the exact like everything, and they were all being sold for like two hundred dollars, which is just not yeah, not the worth of I mean, maybe one of the tools, but it was such a low price that it was very suspicious.

She tells the police about the seller, wondering if this new lead will be the key to finding her dad's murderer.

I had a list of suspects, which I did talk to the police about.

Liz is investigating every possible avenue, looking at all the possible suspects because in her mind, there's no way on earth her mom killed her dad, and if she's going to show the police she's right, she needs to find out who did.

I'm Maggie Robinson Katz and from BBC Studios and iHeart Podcasts.

This is Hands Tied, Episode four, Suspects and Suspicions.

I wasn't surprised at first that they were looking at her, because why wouldn't you.

That would be stupid not to.

I was being realistic about it.

I thought, Okay, they're gonna look into her because like ninety percent of the time, it is the spouse.

I mean, yeah, if we've learned anything from True Crime one oh one, the first person the police would suspect would be Sandy Jim's wife.

And then I thought, Okay, they'll look into her, they'll see that this nothing fits that, whatever evidence they have, they'll look into it, and we'll.

Move on, move on and start to focus on finding the real killer.

Liz thinks.

And so I felt like I had to kind of check their work or do their work for them.

I don't know.

I just make sure that I had covered everything and had recorded or photographed or somehow preserved everything that I had found or I had done in order for any of it to be taken seriously.

And despite all of Liz's effort, she feels like the police are continually keeping her in the dark.

She says there's been no news on the backpack and Xbox she found, and no news on the missing tools.

But then Liz has an aha moment.

Her dad, Jim, owned a couple of rental properties.

Maybe the tenants will know something.

So I call this guy and say, you know, I'm Jim Algar's daughter, and I just want to let you know that this is what has happened.

And I had the most melodramatic reaction that I had been pacing back and forth.

It just made me stop dead in my tracks, and I just thought, this man is like screaming and shouting and acting like his own mother has died.

It just seemed very suspect to me.

And Liz discovers this guy's behind on rent.

I did find something my dad had printed out saying that he was going to be evicted and less he could come up with the missing rent within this amount of time.

And then once they left, we go into the house and there are stab marks on several of the wolves and what looks like blood on some of the wolves, and it's just like the place has been trashed.

That's got me thinking, you know, alarm bell is going.

So we called the police and we did have them come.

Case number one two one seven six two six nine.

This is Sean Carriage.

Here's Kenny Homicide sixty Henry thirty nine sitting here with me.

Sir, Can you state your first and last name?

It's some ungodly hour in the morning when Detective Carousel wakes Jim's ex tendant up for questioning.

And you used to run a home from him, Melgor Yes?

Or the address that location?

Hm?

I do?

It's I thought I did.

I just woke up.

It's what it is, that dangn madress.

He tells the detectives.

He moved out a month before Jim or Hi May as he calls him, was murdered.

I remember between nine two thousand.

Okay, Uh, did you see him when you When was the last time you saw Homie?

No?

I don't remember, but it was it had to be at least a couple of months before that.

Okay.

The house was vandalized after he moved out.

He says, Okay, do.

You know anybody that would try to hurt.

You?

Never say anything that I.

Can't to this day, I just can't believe it.

I mean, me and him talk when he came over.

I mean all I ever knew about him was he worked at a school.

He worked at a school, and anything.

I think he told me he had two in houses.

Okay, yeah, I'm just trying to trying to get any cato inside on what if anybody, everybody that knew him.

That's what I try to meet with you today.

Anything else you can think of.

So he talked to him, I.

Don't know why anybody would hurt him.

I mean, he was just the most calmest person I've ever met.

He was relaxed.

Karazel asks a few more questions, but twenty minutes in decides he's heard enough.

It's a seven three am.

It's going to be the end of the interview.

Another suspect struck off the list, back to the drawing board.

In January twenty thirteen, Liz and her mom decide to sell the family home, the thought of living there too painful.

Sandy has only been back once since Jim's murder, but felt terrified just being there, wanting to leave before it got too dark, so they began looking for a new place.

In February, while Liz is packing up, she notices her dad safe.

She'd forgotten all about it, even though it was right there in the closet next to his body the night he was killed.

She takes a closer look and notices blood on the handle.

So I called detective Carousel, and I asked him about it, and he says, oh, you can just clean it like we processed it.

It's fine, you can clean it off.

And so I asked my husband to please do it because I just couldn't do it.

But it gets her thinking.

To me, it looked like someone had tried to go into it because the keys that were normally in the safe we're on the floor.

Around the same time Jim was killed, Houston was experiencing an uptick in violent robberies where homeowners were tied up and occasionally killed.

I honestly believe that the point of breaking into my family's home was not to kill anyone.

It was to take money, and then things just went sideways.

Back when Sandy was being interviewed by the police, she told the detectives that she couldn't remember much about the night of Jim's murder.

The time, she says she's spent lying in the closet, tied up, waiting to be found.

It's all vague, impressionistic.

She was falling in and out of consciousness, hearing the dogs whining, realizing dimly she was tied up, then blacking out again.

But then she tells Liz that a fragment of a memory has come back to her.

She woke up for a split second and felt somebody with their knee in her back, like pulling on her arms, so she thinks that's the moment she was being tied up, and that's when she saw someone looking at what the person behind her was doing.

Sandy says that after blacking out, she came to momentarily and saw a Hispanic woman in front of her looking at the person who was tying her up.

And she said this woman looked angry, and then she passed out again.

This doesn't seem like much to go on, but for Liz, it's a game changer.

Liz remembers what the house looked like.

There were clothes haphazardly tossed on the bed, dresser drawers pulled open purses with their contents builled out.

The house looked like it had been ransacked searched.

What did that all kind of say to you?

I mean said that there was someone there who was looking to take things for money.

Even in my parents' room, my mom was missing medications that people normally would abused, so barbituates, the PhNO barbeitells she used to take for her seizures.

We didn't know if anything else was missing, like cash, because my dad always had cash on hand, but there was no cash found, so we don't know whether he had spent it or whether it was taken.

Maybe this was a robbery gone wrong.

I can't give you any numbers on home invasions during that year, but I can tell you that I covered multiple.

That's Tiffany Craig, the journalist we met earlier.

Could it be another home invasion?

This was a rampant problem in Houston back in twenty twelve, so bad that several task forces involving agencies like the FBI, Houston PD, and the ATF were formed to try and stop them.

We have multiple cases where the people are tied up and you have to wonder are they related?

Somehow is there something that could tie them together.

The similarities hadn't escaped Liz either.

I was also looking for similar crimes in the area to see if anything could be tied together or if it was the same people.

So I did find a few articles of similar home invasions, and that's.

When she stumbles across a report that seems kind of.

Familiar, where you know, they forced their way in when the husband came home quite late at night.

They asked for safe they asked for money.

They tied the family up with items from the house, and then they used like bags and baskets from the house to haul electronics away.

And that's basically how they got cause that they were able to track one of the iPads that they stole at that home invasion, and so I really started looking into this gang.

One of the victims, a mother, describes the family's ordeal on a neighborhood community website.

She explains how she was watching TV when four armed men and ski masks burst into the house with her husband, who was coming in from work.

They'd been hiding in the bushes outside and ambushed him.

The family, including two boys fourteen and twelve, were tied up in hell hossage for two hours, she writes, while they tore up our house, threatening to hurt us if we did not get them money, not knowing if we were going to die.

Tiffany remembers that case too.

I know about it because it was close to a family member of mine, and I remember hearing about it because it involved children, and I know that people were tied up, and I know they were business owners.

I remember thinking, who did that?

Who would do that?

Who would do that to a family.

The police caught the getaway driver with the stolen property in the car.

A mugshot is circulated across the media.

It's a young Hispanic woman with dark hair.

Liz reads everything she can about the case.

And she was like, kind of the head of this gang of people who were going all over Houston, targeting immigrant families who were more likely to keep their money at home, who had their own businesses.

They hadn't killed anybody.

They had hurt people, but they hadn't killed anyone.

Liz shows Sandy the woman's mugshot.

Her photo was in the newspaper, and my mom said, you know, she was like, I can't be one hundred percent certain, but she does look a lot like the person that I saw, and then I just kind of went down that rabbit.

Hole, and so down the rabbit hole, Liz goes and learns that this woman is from Columbia and has been sent to prison for the robbery.

A Mexican man is also later for his involvement.

Liz follows the lead and tracks the man down.

She starts writing to him in prison, even goes as far as getting him on the phone, where she records a conversation her relative acting as translator.

If I go, He tells Liz he wants to help her, but denies being involved in both the gang and the violent robberies, leaving Liz with yet another dead end, unable to link the Colombian woman to her dad's death, but Liz refuses to give up on that theory.

What is some of the evidence that this gang could have been responsible for it?

So for me, it was, you know, my mom saying, she does look similar to this person, but she couldn't be one hundred percent sure because she was out of it.

She'd just been hail on the head, she was on the ground.

You know, it was like a split second.

And then I got in touch with the victims of that crime and talking to them, you know, it just sounded exactly the same.

No forced entry, right, just pushing your way in.

My dad had gone to get the dogs, he'd open the door.

It would have been an easy chance for someone to come in, and that would have made sense as to why the dogs were barking, was because someone was in the backyard.

And then just everything else, like asking for the safe.

So there was a lot that stood out to me.

There's a lot of similarities.

But you know, of course I'm not the police.

I can't run tests, i can't ask questions.

So that was as far as I could get with it.

That the cops aren't convinced homeowners were threatened with guns during home invasions, but they weren't stabbed to death.

The police said, you know, this seems more likely like it was somebody.

Knew somebody who knew the family and deliberately targeted them.

And that did kind of ring true to me.

They knew the layout of the house, and they knew where the house was located in the neighborhood, Like it's not just on the corner on the first turn or as soon as you get into the neighborhood.

It's not like in a very obvious place.

It's in one of the middle streets.

It's not even on the corner the houses.

It's like in the middle of the street.

You know.

It's just it just seemed to me that it was somebody that we knew.

All of which gets list thinking about another potential suspect, about someone from her past, a bleak period in her life.

She'd rather forget.

I don't ever want to do that again.

It was horrible.

It's something that I have zero interest in ever being involved in again.

So I met this guy when I was a teenager.

It's the late nineties, the decade of boy bands, grunge and light up sneakers.

God, I really wanted those.

We were raised in the same religion, but we were like there because our parents were there, and we didn't really have any interest in being there, And so I think that's why we became friends.

Sandy and Jim brought Liz up as a Jehovah's witness having converted as adults.

Most of their friends were Jehovah's witnesses, and Jim was a respected elder in the community.

And what was your opinion of the church.

It wasn't for me, Like from a young age, I always felt like this was not for me, This is not my belief system.

It just didn't fit, didn't feel right, And you know, I was happy to humor my parents.

I had planned that, you know, when I turned eighteen, I was gonna like slowly fade away and from the church and like go off on my own.

By the time Liz is twenty, she's no longer a part at the church, but still kept in touch with the friends she's made there.

So me and the Sky we started hanging out, and you know, we liked similar music and we had the similar interests, so we'd hang out.

There was a few people there.

The departure from her religious upbringing, Liz started to rebel, pushing away from her overprotective parents, partying instead of praying, staying out late, and experimenting with drugs, smoking a bit of weed and psychedelics.

And then one day one of his friends came over and I was introduced to heroin and it was all downhill from there.

We ended up using for about a year straight.

It was awful.

I said, I can't live this way.

I did things I'm not proud of, you know.

I stole from my parents, I you know, didn't and did certain drugs from my mom.

They were mine, but she kept them because she knew I was involved in these drugs.

And I remember one time I was demanding them of her and I was like, give me their mind, you know, I want them, and it's just things that I would not normally do.

I don't recognize that person, and.

Neither did her parents, placing a lot of the blame on Lissa's friend.

He changed her, took away their daughter, and put a strain on their marriage, causing endless arguments on what to do with Liz, how to help her, and how to get this guy out of her life.

They hated him, Yeah, my dad hated him, and he made no secret of it.

My mother, on the other hand, was a bit smarter about it because she wanted to make sure that we still came to her and that she was in our lives, because she knew that if she pushed back, then I would push back and I might just leave or disappear.

The last time I saw him, my dad actually told him.

He said, you're entitled, you're lazy, you don't work, you think other people should pay your way.

You're a loser.

Get out of my house.

That didn't go down so well.

He basically told my dad to go fuck himself, very loudly on the front lawn, and then peeled out and left, and I didn't see him again for a very long time.

Liz doesn't shy away from who she is or her troubled past.

She's honest that in her younger years she was kind of an asshole.

But once this guy leaves her life, she's able to use this as an opportunity to not only get clean, but stay clean, or build her relationship with her dad, start a new life for herself, meet her husband Anthony, moved to England, and try to forget about her past.

But now that she finds herself back in Texas, the memories of this time keep flooding back, and Liz starts to wonder if this person who caused so much turmoil in her life could have been responsible.

Could he have killed her dad?

Tried to rob the house and things went wrong.

You know, he hated my dad.

My dad was dead and my mom was still alive.

And then again, the police had said that because of the layout of the neighborhood and where the house was positioned, that it seemed that it was somebody we knew and not just a random hit, and she seemed very personal, like a angry type of violent death.

According to Liz, she shared this info of the police on the day they first interviewed her.

She doesn't know if they actually pursued this tip.

The guy was never interviewed by the police.

I was constantly calling asking for updates, but the.

Cops aren't returning her calls or replying to emails.

It's been months since she last heard from Detective Caaraseol.

I remember it was October and I asked the Lee detective to get an update and he said, you know this one more thing I'm waiting on.

I'll call you right back, and then I never heard from him again.

It's now July twenty fourteen, eighteen months after Jim's murder.

Liz and her mom are trying to rebuild their lives without him, But as they moved through the normal rhythms of day to day life, work, Errand's dinners together, Jim's absence is acutely felt, especially as Liz welcomes her first child into the world, a daughter who will never know her grandfather Jim.

Losing a parent is hard enough, but this existential loss of warning, something that you never even got to have, that can make anyone feel cheated, robbed, And the lack of information from the police is hardly made making things easier.

But as time goes on, they get used to it and just have to assume they are busy investigating other leads, identifying other suspects.

Until one day when Liz is on her way home.

I had dropped my husband off at the airport for a business trip, and I was going back to the house and there was like one of those community mailboxes at the front of the neighborhood.

Think of this kind of like the rows of mailboxes in an apartment complex, with each house in the neighborhood getting its own locked compartment.

So I went and I opened the mailbox and had just been rampact full of like lawyers, flyers asking to take on our case and to represent us in court?

What our case?

What's going on?

Represent us?

Why is their mailbox filled with letters from lawyers.

As Liz sorts through the piles of mail, it dawns on her none of her detay active work finding possible other suspects mattered.

I don't even know why they wasted either of our time because they did nothing with what I gave them.

They just ignored all of it because they'd already made up their minds.

The one thing she feared most happens her mom, Sandy, is charged with the murder of Jim Melgar.

The life Liz and Sandy were trying to rebuild after the loss of Jim shattered.

I really started panicking when she got charged, when they started ignoring all this other evidence just to make their theory fit.

You've been listening to Hands Tied, a new eight part true crime series from BBC Studios and iHeart Podcasts.

New episodes will be released weekly, so subscribe, follow on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss out.

If you like the show, please help us by spreading the word or giving us a five star review.

I'm Maggie Robinson Katz and the producer is Maggie Latham.

Sound design and mix is by Tom Brignell.

Our script consultant is Emma Weatherall production support is from Dan Martini, Elena Boutang and Mabel Finnegan Wright, and our production executive is Laura Jordan Rawl.

The series was developed by Anya Saunders and Emma Shaw.

At iHeart, the Managing Executive Producer is Christina Everett, and for BBC Studios, the Executive Producer is Joe Kent.

James Cook is the Creative Director A Factual for BBC Studios Audio, and the Director of Audio at BBC Studios is Richard Knight.