Anthony Martinez

Case background and investigation

Anthony Martinez was a 10-year-old boy playing with friends outside his home in Beaumont, a small city in Riverside County, California, on April 4, 1997. A man in a light-colored car pulled up and asked the children to help him find a lost kitten. When the man suddenly grabbed Anthony, one of the other boys tried to hold onto him but could not stop the abductor, who forced Anthony into the car and sped away. The broad-daylight kidnapping of a child in front of his playmates shocked and frightened the community, triggering an urgent, widely publicized search across Riverside County and beyond as volunteers, police, and the FBI joined the effort to find him.

A massive search followed. About two weeks later, on April 19, 1997, Anthony's body was found in the desert of Berdoo Canyon, in the Indio Hills roughly 40 miles away. He had been sexually assaulted and killed. Investigators recovered critical evidence at the scene, including a partial fingerprint left on tape used to bind the boy and DNA that indicated a struggle. But with no match in any database, the leads dried up, and the murder of Anthony Martinez went cold for years, haunting his family and the detectives who worked it.

The breakthrough came from an unrelated crime hundreds of miles away. In 2005, Joseph Edward Duncan III, a violent repeat sex offender and drifter, was arrested in Idaho after kidnapping two children from the Groene family near Coeur d'Alene and murdering several of their relatives. As his fingerprints and profile were processed, investigators matched him to the partial fingerprint preserved from the Martinez crime scene, tying Duncan to Anthony's abduction and murder nearly a decade earlier. Duncan had a long criminal history stretching back to his teens, including prior convictions for sexually assaulting children, and he had been in Southern California around the time of the killing. The identification finally gave a name to the stranger who had lured Anthony with the story of a lost kitten, confirming that the boy had been taken by one of the country's most dangerous predators.

On March 15, 2011, Duncan pleaded guilty to the murder of Anthony Martinez, and on April 5, 2011, he was sentenced to two life terms without parole. He was already under a federal death sentence for the Idaho murders. Duncan never faced execution: he died of brain cancer on March 28, 2021, at age 58, while a federal death-row inmate at Terre Haute, Indiana. Anthony's mother, who had waited many years for answers, expressed relief at the killer's death, saying the world was a better place without him. The identification of Duncan finally gave the Martinez family the resolution that had eluded them for so long, and it stood as a powerful example of how preserved evidence and cross-jurisdictional cooperation can close a case many feared would never be solved.