Part 1

The Silence of Las Cruces

In this job, you learn to trust your gut. And on that November afternoon in Las Cruces, New Mexico, my gut was screaming that something was wrong.

We received a call for a welfare check on Cynthia. She was 69 years old, vulnerable, and according to her neighbors, she hadn’t been seen in weeks. That’s rarely a good sign. Usually, it’s a fall, or a medical episode. You hope for the best, but you prepare for the worst.

When my partner and I arrived at the house, the silence was heavy. It wasn’t just quiet; it was dead silent. We announced ourselves—”Police Department!”—but the only response was the echo of our own voices.

We made entry. The air inside felt stagnant, cold. The first thing I noticed was the contrast. The living room was tidy. The kitchen was clean. But as we moved deeper into the home, the atmosphere shifted.

A TV was humming in the background of an empty room. A fan was spinning, cutting through the still air. It felt like someone had just stepped out, yet the layer of dust told a different story.

Then, we found the locked door.

The master bedroom door was shut tight. No key. The knob wouldn’t turn. My partner and I exchanged a look. We both knew that whatever we were looking for was behind that door.

We managed to pop the lock. The smell hit us instantly—a scent that every cop knows and never forgets. It’s the smell of time running out.

The room was dim. But I could hear it. The sound of water. Drip. Drip. Drip.

We moved toward the bathroom. The shower was running. Through the frosted glass, I could see a shape. My hand went to my holster, purely out of instinct, though deep down I knew the threat wasn’t in the room anymore.

I pulled back the curtain.

There she was. Cynthia. Fully clothed, lying in the tub, the water cascading over her motionless body. She had been there for days.

The house was clean. The carpet had fresh vacuum lines. Someone had taken care of the house while leaving Cynthia to d*compose in the water.

This wasn’t an accident. This was personal. And as we began to piece together the evidence, we realized the person responsible wasn’t a stranger. It was the person she loved most in the world.

Part 2

The sound of running water in a house that smells like d*ath is something you never get used to. It’s a sensory contradiction that messes with your head. Water is supposed to be life, it’s supposed to be cleansing. But here, in this suffocatingly quiet bedroom in Las Cruces, it was just a clock ticking away the time since Cynthia Bzduch took her last breath.

My partner and I stood there for a long moment, the air thick and heavy in our lungs. We had to process the scene before we could even touch it. This is the part of the job the movies don’t show you—the stillness. The moments where you have to force your brain to switch from “human being” to “evidence collector.” You have to turn off the part of you that wants to retch or cry, and turn on the part that notices the dust patterns on the floor.

“Code 24,” my partner murmured, his voice low, almost respectful. That’s the code for a dead body. But this… this was something else.

We backed out of the bathroom, careful not to contaminate the threshold. We needed the Crime Scene Investigation unit, and we needed detectives. But until they arrived, this house was ours to secure. And the more I looked around, the more the hair on the back of my neck stood up.

It wasn’t just the body. It was the house itself.

As we moved back into the bedroom, I noticed the carpet. It was plush, light-colored. And there, cutting across the grain, were fresh vacuum lines. Perfect, symmetrical rows.

I stared at them, a cold knot forming in my stomach.

“Look at the floor,” I said to my partner. “Just look at it.”

He followed my gaze and nodded grimly. “Someone cleaned up.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “Someone vacuumed the bedroom while a woman was d*composing ten feet away behind a bathroom door. Who does that? Who has the presence of mind to tidy up the house while the smell of their own mother—or victim—is filling the air?”

That level of compartmentalization isn’t normal. It’s psychopathic.

We continued our sweep, moving through the rest of the house. It was eerie. The pantry was empty. Not just “low on food,” but cleared out. The shelves were bare. It looked like someone had prepared for a long siege or a permanent exit.

In the hallway, we found a strange box with wires disconnected, sitting on a side table. It looked like a modem or a router, but the lights were dark. The digital life of the house had been severed just like the physical one.

Then came the garage. We opened the door, expecting to see Cynthia’s vehicle. Instead, we were met with an empty concrete slab. Oil stains, tire marks, but no car.

“Run the plate again,” I told dispatch over the radio. “We need a BOLO (Be On the Lookout) on her vehicle. Immediately.”

While we waited for the crime scene techs, I stepped outside for a breath of fresh air. The New Mexico sun was bright, blindingly so after the gloom of that house. It felt wrong that the world was still spinning, that cars were driving past on the street, that people were going about their Tuesday afternoon while Cynthia lay in that water.

That’s when the first piece of the puzzle clicked into place, and it came from hundreds of miles away.

Dispatch crackled in my ear. “Unit 1, be advised. We have a hit on the vehicle registration.”

“Go ahead,” I said, grabbing my notepad.

“Vehicle was recovered three days ago. Abandoned. Location is near the San Ysidro border crossing… in California.”

My grip on the pen tightened. California. The border. That was a straight shot west on the I-10. A runner.

“Any occupants?” I asked, though I already dreaded the answer.

“Negative on human occupants,” dispatch replied. “But… Officer, the report states there were four dogs found inside the vehicle. Alive, but dehydrated.”

My heart sank. Dogs. Cynthia’s dogs.

In my experience, you can tell a lot about a suspect by how they treat animals. A person who kills in a fit of rage might still feed the cat. A person who kills for money might leave the dog at a shelter. But someone who drives hundreds of miles and leaves four loyal animals locked in a car near the Mexican border to bake in the sun? That is a person with a hole where their soul should be.

“Copy that,” I said, my voice flat.

We weren’t just looking for a m*rderer anymore. We were looking for a coward.

The investigation shifted gears rapidly. The house was taped off, the techs were dusting for prints, and the Medical Examiner had taken custody of Cynthia. Now, it was time to build the story of her life—and the story of her death.

We started with the neighbors. In a neighborhood like this, people see things. They hear things. They might not call 911 every time, but they take mental notes.

I knocked on the door of the house directly across the street. A woman answered, looking anxious. She had seen the squad cars; she knew something bad had happened.

“Is it Cynthia?” she asked, her hands clasping together. “Is she okay?”

“I’m afraid I have bad news, ma’am,” I said softly. “We found Cynthia inside. She’s passed away.”

The woman’s hand flew to her mouth. Tears welled up instantly. “Oh god. Oh, Cynthia. I told my husband… I told him we hadn’t seen her.”

“When was the last time you saw her?” I asked, opening my notebook.

She thought for a moment. “It’s been… weeks. Maybe a month? She used to be out in the yard with those dogs. She loved those dogs. But lately… it’s been quiet.”

“Did she live alone?” I asked, though I had a suspicion she didn’t.

The neighbor’s expression darkened. The sadness was replaced by something else. Fear? Disgust?

“She… she had her son living with her,” she said, lowering her voice as if saying his name might conjure him. “Dylan.”

“Tell me about Dylan,” I pressed.

“He’s… trouble,” she said, shaking her head. “He’s been in and out of her life. And in and out of jail, I think. He’s got problems. Drugs, maybe? Or mental issues? I don’t know. But he scared people.”

She looked over my shoulder at Cynthia’s house. “My kids were scared of him. He walked around like he was angry at the world. And Cynthia… she was afraid of him, too. But she was his mother. She couldn’t say no to him.”

“Did you ever see him hurt her?”

“I didn’t see it with my own eyes,” she admitted. “But she came over here once… months ago. She was crying. She asked if my husband could go over there because Dylan had locked her out. She said he was in a ‘mood.’ She called it his ‘episodes.’ She said he was bipolar.”

“Did you ever call the police?”

“We wanted to,” she whispered. “But she begged us not to. She said, ‘Don’t call the cops, they’ll take him away.’ She was protecting him. Even when she was standing on my porch, shivering, she was protecting him.”

I thanked her and moved to the next house. This neighbor, an older man, was less hesitant. He was angry.

“I knew it,” the man said, spitting on the ground. “I knew that boy was gonna k*ll her one day.”

“You’re talking about her son?” I asked.

“Dylan. Yeah. That psycho,” the neighbor growled. “You guys have been out here before. You know that, right? He beat the h*ll out of her.”

This was the confirmation we needed. “Tell me about that. What did you see?”

The man leaned against his doorframe, his face grim. “About four years ago. I was outside working on my truck. I see Cynthia stumbling out of her front door. She’s covered in bl*od. I mean, her face… it was a mess.”

He paused, wincing at the memory.

“I ran over to help her. I asked her what happened. She was barely coherent. She told me Dylan did it. She said he grabbed her by the hair and smashed her face into the tile floor. Over and over again.”

My stomach turned. “Did she press charges?”

“She did that time,” the neighbor nodded. “Police came, took him away. She got a restraining order. It was supposed to be for ten years or something. Until 2032.”

“So he wasn’t supposed to be there,” I stated.

“Nope. But he’s been back for a year,” the neighbor said, throwing his hands up. “I saw him taking out the trash last week. Walking around like he owned the place. I asked Cynthia about it once, and she just looked down and said, ‘He has nowhere else to go.’ She let the wolf back in the hen house, Officer. And now she’s gone.”

“You saw him taking out the trash last week?” I asked, circling the date in my notes. That gave us a timeline. “Did he seem normal? Agitated?”

“He seemed… weird,” the man said. “He was moving fast. Jerky movements. Looking over his shoulder. And then, a couple of days later, the car was gone. And the house went dark.”

I had enough. We had a victim with a history of being abused. We had a suspect with a history of violence and a violated restraining order. We had a flight risk who had already made it to the border.

Back at the station, the financial crimes division had been working their magic. In modern policing, you don’t just track footprints in the mud; you track digital footprints in the cloud.

“We got the bank records,” the detective in charge of financials told me, sliding a stack of papers across his desk. “It’s a bloodbath.”

I flipped through the statements. Withdrawal after withdrawal. Three hundred dollars here. Five hundred dollars there. The daily maximum limit, pulled out every single day for the last two weeks.

“Her accounts are drained,” the detective said. “Checking, savings… gone. And look at the locations.”

I scanned the list of ATMs. The first few were local—Walmart, gas stations in Las Cruces. Then, the locations started moving west. Deming, New Mexico. Lordsburg. Willcox, Arizona. Benson. Tucson.

He was leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, funded by the woman he had left rotting in a bathtub.

“We pulled the footage from the Walmart ATM here in town,” the detective said, clicking a file on his computer screen.

The video was grainy, but clear enough. A man in a hoodie. He kept his head down, trying to hide from the camera, but at one point, he looked up to check his surroundings.

It was him. Dylan Alexander Waller.

He looked different than his booking photo from four years ago. He looked gaunt, hollowed out. His eyes were darting around nervously. But it was definitely him. He was using his dead mother’s debit card, punching in the PIN number that he probably coerced out of her—or maybe she had given it to him in a desperate attempt to buy peace.

“He cleaned her out,” I muttered. “He didn’t just take her life. He took everything she had.”

“And here’s the kicker,” the detective added. “The car was found at the border, right? But there’s no record of him crossing into Mexico. No passport scan. No pedestrian crossing log.”

“So he’s either in Mexico illegally,” I surmised, “or he got cold feet and he’s still in the wind.”

“Or he’s bouncing back,” the detective said. “Guys like this… they don’t do well on the run. They need resources. They need a fix. If he’s out of money, he’ll surface.”

The weeks turned into months. This is the part of the story that drives cops crazy. The waiting. We had the warrant. First-degree m*rder. Tampering with evidence. Violation of a restraining order. His face was in every database in the country. NCIC. FBI. Border Patrol.

But Dylan was a ghost.

Every morning, I checked the status of the case. Every morning, nothing. It felt like we were failing Cynthia. Her family—what little she had—was calling for updates. The neighbors were asking if “the psycho” was caught yet. And we had to tell them, “We’re working on it.”

I kept thinking about those dogs in the car. And Cynthia in the water. The image of the vacuum lines on the carpet haunted me. It spoke of a calculated madness. He hadn’t just snapped. He had lived in that house with her body. He had watched TV. He had eaten food from the pantry. He had slept in his bed while his mother lay d*ad down the hall.

He had normalized the horror.

Then came April. Nearly five months after we broke down that door.

I was at my desk, burying myself in paperwork for another case, when the phone rang. It was the jail intake officer from a neighboring county.

“Detective,” the voice on the other end said. “I think we have someone you’re looking for.”

My heart hammered against my ribs. “Dylan Waller?”

“The one and only,” the officer said. “Picked him up on a shoplifting charge and a probation violation. He gave a fake name at first, but we ran his prints. He lit up the system like a Christmas tree. Warrant for m*rder out of Las Cruces.”

“Don’t let him go,” I said, grabbing my keys. “I’m on my way.”

“He’s not going anywhere,” the officer laughed. “He looks rough, Detective. Living on the streets hasn’t been kind to him.”

“Good,” I said cold*y. “He doesn’t deserve kindness.”

The drive to the detention center felt like the longest drive of my life. I rehearsed the interview in my head a thousand times.

How do you approach a man who k*lled his mother? Do you come in screaming? Do you play the “good cop”? Do you appeal to his conscience?

I knew Dylan’s profile. He was manipulative. He was a victim-player. He blamed the world for his problems. If I went in aggressive, he would shut down. He would lawyer up. I needed him to talk. I needed him to tell me why.

I needed a confession. Not just for the court, but for Cynthia.

My partner and I arrived at the facility. We were led to an interview room. Small, concrete, cold. The classic setup.

They brought him in.

Dylan looked pathetic. That’s the only word for it. He was thin, his skin was sallow, his hair was a mess. He was wearing the orange jumpsuit of the county jail. He shuffled in, chains rattling around his ankles.

He didn’t look like a monster. He looked like a broken child. And that’s what made him dangerous. He used that brokenness as a weapon.

He sat down, avoiding eye contact. He was looking at the table, picking at his fingernails.

“Dylan,” I said, sitting across from him. “I’m Detective Miller. This is Detective Hernandez. We’re from Las Cruces.”

He nodded slightly but didn’t look up. “Hey.”

“You know why we’re here?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Probably about the probation stuff? Or the shoplifting?”

He was playing dumb. He had to know. You don’t leave a body in a shower and flee the state and think the cops are there to talk about a stolen candy bar.

“We’re not here about shoplifting, Dylan,” I said, keeping my voice even. “We’re here about your mother.”

He didn’t flinch. He didn’t react. He just kept picking at his nails.

“How is she?” he asked.

The audacity of it took my breath away. He asked how is she. As if he hadn’t left her rotting. As if he hadn’t sprayed chemicals on her to hide the smell.

I decided to play along for a minute. Let him dig his hole.

“When was the last time you saw her?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, looking up at the ceiling, pretending to think. “October? Maybe September? I was living there for a bit, but we got into it. You know how she is. She’s… difficult.”

“Difficult?” I repeated.

“Yeah. She’s got issues,” he said, shaking his head. “Always on my case. Always yelling. Bad vibes, you know? So I left. I’ve been on the streets. Just trying to survive.”

“So you haven’t talked to her since October?”

“No,” he lied. “I tried to call, but she didn’t answer. I figured she was just mad.”

He was smooth. If I didn’t know the truth—if I hadn’t seen the ATM footage, if I hadn’t smelled the house—I might have believed him. He sold the “misunderstood son” act perfectly.

“Dylan,” I said, leaning forward. “We need to establish a timeline here. Because we went to the house.”

He went still. His hands stopped moving.

“We went to the house for a welfare check,” I continued. “Because nobody had seen Cynthia in a long time.”

He stared at me, his eyes blank. “Is she okay?”

I let the silence hang there for ten seconds. I wanted him to feel the weight of it.

“Your mom is deceased, Dylan.”

I watched his face closely. I was looking for the micro-expressions. The twitch of a muscle. The dilation of pupils.

His mouth dropped open. He put his hands on his head. “What? No! What do you mean?”

“She’s d*ad,” I said flatly.

“No!” he cried out, squeezing his eyes shut. “No, she can’t be! How? What happened?”

It was a performance. A bad one. There were no tears. Just noise.

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” I said. “We found her in the house. In November. She had been there a while.”

“November?” he shouted. “And I’m just hearing about this now? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“Because you were gone, Dylan,” I snapped. “You were in the wind. You disappeared. Why did you disappear?”

“I told you!” he yelled. “I was on the streets! I didn’t know! Oh my god, my mom is d*ad!”

He put his head on the table and made sobbing sounds. But his shoulders weren’t shaking right. It was all for show.

I looked at my partner. He rolled his eyes. We both knew we had a long day ahead of us.

“Dylan, stop it,” I said sternly.

He looked up, his face dry. “Stop what? My mom is d*ad!”

“We know you were at the house,” I said, pulling out the photos. I slid a still image of the ATM surveillance across the table. “We know you were using her cards. We know you were driving her car. We found the dogs at the border.”

He stared at the photo of himself in the hoodie. The “grieving son” act faltered. His eyes narrowed. The mask was slipping.

“That’s not me,” he tried.

“It is you,” I said. “And we found your fingerprints in the house. On the vacuum cleaner. On the bathroom door.”

He went quiet. The air in the room changed. The pathetic boy vanished, and something darker took his place. He sat back in his chair, crossing his arms.

“Okay,” he said, his voice dropping an octave. “Okay. So maybe I was there.”

“Tell me the truth, Dylan,” I said. “The real truth. Not the story you tell yourself to sleep at night. Tell me what happened in that room.”

He took a deep breath. He looked at the camera in the corner of the room, then back at me.

“I didn’t mean for it to happen,” he whispered. “It was… chaotic.”

“Start from the beginning,” I said. “You went back to the house. You were staying there.”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “I was staying there. She let me back in. She always lets me back in.”

“And then what?”

“We were okay for a few days,” he said. “But then… the pain. She was in pain.”

“What kind of pain?”

“Her health,” he said vague*ly. “She was sick. She was always complaining. She was miserable. She was crying all the time. She was scared she was going to lose the house. Scared of losing money.”

“So she was stressed,” I corrected.

“She was suffering!” he insisted, his voice rising. “You don’t understand. Seeing her like that… it hurt me. I couldn’t stand it. I loved her too much to watch her suffer.”

I felt a chill run down my spine. I knew where this was going. It’s the twisted logic of the narcissist. I hurt you because I love you.

“So you decided to help her?” I asked, leading him.

“I had to,” he said. “I had to end it. For her.”

“What did you do, Dylan?”

He looked down at his hands—the hands that had taken the life of the woman who brought him into this world.

“I went into her room,” he said softly. “She was lying on the bed. I laid down next to her. I held her.”

“You hugged her?”

“Yeah. I gave her a big hug,” he said, a disturbing smile flickering on his lips. “I told her it was going to be okay. I wrapped my arms around her.”

“And then?”

“And then I squeezed,” he said. “I squeezed as hard as I could.”

“Around her neck?”

“Yeah. Around her neck.”

“Did she fight back?”

He paused. “At first. She panicked. She didn’t understand. She scratched at me. She tried to scream. But I just held on tighter. I whispered to her. I said, ‘Shhh, Mom. It’s okay. Just let go. It’s better this way.’”

I fought the urge to reach across the table. The image of Cynthia—betrayed in her safest place, by her own son, hearing him justify her m*rder as she gasped for air—was horrific.

“How long did it take?” I asked.

“A while,” he said casually. “She was strong. She was a tough old bird. But eventually… she went limp. She fell off the bed.”

“And then what did you do?”

“I sat there,” he said. “I cried. I was so sad for me. I knew my life was over. I knew I was going to prison. But I did it for her.”

“You did it for her,” I repeated skeptically. “If you did it for her, why didn’t you call 911? Why didn’t you give her a proper burial?”

He looked confused. “I couldn’t. I had warrants.”

“So you put her in the shower.”

“I… I panicked,” he stammered. “I thought maybe if I put her in the shower, it would wash… wash things away. Or maybe it would look like she slipped. Like an accident.”

“You tried to stage a slip-and-fall,” I said. “After strangling her.”

“I just didn’t want to get in trouble,” he said, his voice sounding small again. “I’m not a bad person, Detective. I swear. I’ve just had a hard life. My dad beat me. My brothers hate me. I’ve got cancer.”

“You have cancer?” I asked, checking his medical file. There was no record of that.

“Well, I think I do,” he muttered. “I’ve got a lot of problems.”

“Who helped you move her?” I asked. “Cynthia wasn’t a small woman. Dead weight is heavy. You didn’t do that alone.”

He hesitated. He was weighing his options. Snitch or take the fall alone?

“My friend,” he said finally. “Bianca. She was there.”

“Bianca helped you move the body?”

“Yeah. She helped me carry her to the bathroom. We put her in the tub. We turned on the water.”

“And then you lived there,” I said. “For how long?”

“A week,” he shrugged. “Maybe ten days. We were planning on leaving. We were going to go to Tijuana. Start a new life.”

“With Cynthia’s money.”

“She didn’t need it anymore,” he said. “It was my inheritance, basically.”

The cold calculation was breathtaking.

“So let me get this straight,” I summarized. “You decided your mother was ‘suffering,’ so you strangled her to death. You staged the body in the shower to look like an accident. You cleaned the house. You vacuumed the carpet. You drained her bank accounts. You packed up her dogs. And you drove to the border to party in Mexico.”

“It wasn’t a party,” he said defensively. “I was mourning.”

“And the dogs?” I asked. “Why did you leave them?”

“They were annoying,” he said. “They wouldn’t stop barking. I couldn’t take them across the border. So I left them the car. I cracked the window. I thought someone would find them.”

“You left them to d*e, Dylan,” I said. “Just like you left your mom.”

He looked away. “I did the best I could.”

I stood up. I had heard enough. I had the confession. I had the intent. I had the admission of tampering with the scene.

“You’re under arrest for the m*rder of Cynthia Bzduch,” I told him.

He looked up at me, eyes wide. “Wait. Can I get a deal?”

“A deal?” I asked, incredulous.

“Yeah. Like… federal prison instead of state? State prison is rough. I don’t think I’ll like it there.”

I almost laughed. “You don’t get to choose, Dylan. You chose to k*ll your mother. Now the system chooses where you sleep.”

We walked out of the room. I needed fresh air. I needed to wash my hands.

We had him. But as I walked back to my desk, I couldn’t stop thinking about Cynthia. I thought about her kindness, her willingness to forgive her son, her desire to protect him even when he was the thing she needed protection from.

It’s a tragedy as old as time. The parent who gives everything, and the child who takes it all, right down to the last breath.

The case was closed, but the story wasn’t over. Now came the trial. Now came the moment where he would have to stand in front of a judge and a jury and try to sell his “mercy k*lling” story to twelve strangers.

And I would be there. I would be there to testify. To tell them about the smell. About the vacuum lines. About the dogs. And about the monster who thought he could scrub away a m*rder with a little bit of running water.

Part 3

The Facade Crumbles

Walking away from that interrogation room, I felt a kind of heaviness that doesn’t wash off in the shower. We had the confession. We had the “what” and the “who.” Dylan Alexander Waller had admitted to strangling his mother, Cynthia Bzduch, and leaving her body to decompose in a running shower while he drained her bank accounts. But as any seasoned detective knows, a confession is just the skeleton of a case. We still needed the muscle and the skin to make it stand up in court. We needed to prove that this wasn’t a “mercy killing” or a “snap decision” born of mental illness, as he was trying to spin it. We needed to prove it was cold, calculated, first-degree murder.

The days following the arrest were a blur of procedural grind. My partner and I spent hours transcribing the interview, dissecting every word Dylan had said. “I did it for her.” “She was suffering.” “I hugged her tight.” It was a narrative designed to manipulate. He was trying to paint himself as a tragic hero in a story of his own making. But the evidence—the hard, scientific facts—was about to tear that story apart.

The Body Doesn’t Lie

The most crucial piece of that evidence came from the Office of the Medical Examiner. I remember the day the full autopsy report landed on my desk. It was a thick manila envelope, the kind that lands with a dull thud. I brewed a fresh pot of coffee before opening it. I knew what was inside would likely contradict everything Dylan had told us.

He had claimed it was a gentle act. A hug. A release from pain.

The photos and the pathologist’s notes told a different story. Cynthia hadn’t just drifted off to sleep in her son’s arms. She had fought.

The hyoid bone was fractured. That doesn’t happen from a “hug.” That requires significant, sustained force. There were deep hemorrhages in the neck muscles. But it was the defensive wounds that broke my heart. There were signs of trauma on her hands and arms—faint, due to the decomposition, but visible to the expert eye. She had clawed. She had struggled. In her final moments, realizing that her own son was squeezing the life out of her, she didn’t just accept it. She fought to live.

This wasn’t euthanasia. It was an execution.

The report also noted the state of the body regarding the water. Being under the running shower for days had accelerated certain processes and washed away trace evidence on the skin, but it couldn’t wash away the internal truth. The water wasn’t an accident; it was a forensic countermeasure. He knew exactly what he was doing.

The Accomplice

We also had to run down the lead about the “friend” Dylan mentioned. He had thrown a name out—Bianca. He claimed she helped him move the body.

In my experience, suspects often invent accomplices to spread the blame, or they implicate innocent people to create confusion. But Dylan’s details were specific. We tracked down “Bianca” (a pseudonym for the individual involved) within a week.

The interview with her was vastly different from the one with Dylan. She was terrified. She was a trans woman who had been living on the margins, much like Dylan, and he had manipulated her just as he had manipulated his mother.

When we brought her in, she was shaking. She thought she was going down for murder.

“I didn’t kill her,” she sobbed, clutching a tissue. “I didn’t know she was dead until I walked in the room.”

“Tell us what happened,” I said, keeping my voice calm. “Dylan says you helped him.”

“He told me she fell,” she insisted. “He told me she had an accident in the shower and he needed help moving her because he was scared the cops would think he did it. He said he had warrants and couldn’t call 911.”

It was a plausible lie for someone like Dylan to tell. He preyed on people’s fears of the police.

“He asked me to help lift her,” she continued, her voice trembling. “She was… heavy. We put her in the tub. He turned on the water. I asked him why, and he said it was to ‘clean her up’ before he called someone. But he never called anyone.”

She confirmed the timeline. She confirmed that they stayed in the house. She confirmed the eerie normalcy of it all—ordering food, watching TV, sleeping in the guest room while Cynthia lay dead a few yards away.

“Did you know he killed her?” I asked.

“I suspected,” she whispered. “But I was scared of him. If he could do that to his mom… what would he do to me?”

Her testimony was the corroboration we needed. It proved that Dylan had involved others, that he had solicited help to conceal a human body, and that he had maintained the lie for days.

The Jailhouse Calls

While we were building the case on the outside, Dylan was busy digging his own grave on the inside.

There is a golden rule in law enforcement: Prisoners always talk. And they always forget that the phone lines are recorded. Every call from the Doña Ana County Detention Center starts with a robotic voice saying, “This call is subject to monitoring and recording.” Yet, inmates ignore it every single time.

I made it a ritual to listen to Dylan’s calls every morning. I wanted to hear the “remorse” he claimed to have. I wanted to hear him crying about his mother.

I never heard a single tear.

Instead, I heard a narcissist complaining about the quality of the jail food. I heard him whining to friends about how unfair his bail was. I heard him joking about his “situation.”

In one particularly chilling call to a friend, he laughed about the media coverage.

“Did you see me on the news?” he asked, sounding almost proud. “They’re making me look like a monster, bro. It’s crazy.”

“Man, what did you do?” the friend asked on the other end.

“I just did what had to be done,” Dylan replied, his voice devoid of emotion. “She was tripping. I handled it.”

I handled it.

That phrase stuck with me. He didn’t speak of his mother as a human being. He spoke of her as a problem, a nuisance, an obstacle that he had “handled.”

In another call, he discussed his defense strategy.

“I’m gonna go for the insanity plea,” he told an acquaintance. “I’ll tell them I heard voices. I’ll tell them I blacked out. The federal prison is nicer anyway. They got better TVs.”

There it was. The calculation. He wasn’t crazy; he was cunning. He was strategizing his legal defense based on which prison had better amenities. He viewed the justice system as a game to be gamified, and his mother’s murder was just the entry fee.

We transcribed these calls and added them to the file. They would be the nail in the coffin of his “mercy killing” defense.

The Defense Strategy

As the trial date approached, Dylan’s court-appointed defense team did exactly what he said they would do. They filed motions suggesting mental incompetency. They painted a picture of a troubled young man, riddled with cancer (which medical records still failed to substantiate) and bipolar disorder, who snapped under the pressure of caretaking.

They tried to suppress the confession. They argued that he wasn’t read his Miranda rights properly (he was), that he was under duress (he wasn’t), and that he was dehydrated and delirious during the interview (he was coherent enough to lie for the first hour).

The judge, a stern woman who had seen it all, denied the motions one by one. The video evidence was too clear. Dylan had been calm, conversational, and lucid until he was cornered.

But the most insulting part of the defense was the character assassination of Cynthia. They tried to portray her as a difficult, overbearing woman whose “suffering” was so immense that Dylan felt he had no choice. They tried to put the victim on trial.

It’s a tactic we see often in domestic homicide cases. Look what she made me do. It made my blood boil. Cynthia had spent her life bailing him out, paying his debts, sheltering him when the world turned its back. And in return, his defense was now using her kindness as proof of her “instability.”

The Calm Before the Storm

By late 2024, nearly two years after the murder, we were ready for trial.

The District Attorney, a sharp prosecutor named Sarah, called me into her office for trial prep.

“JD,” she said, looking over the file. “This guy is going to try to charm the jury. He’s going to play the ‘sad boy’ card. We need to hit them hard with the facts. I need you to be the voice of the scene.”

“I’m ready,” I told her.

“The photos,” she said, tapping the folder. “We have to show them. The jury needs to see what he did. It’s going to be rough.”

“They need to see the vacuum lines,” I said. “That’s the smoking gun for his state of mind. The cleaning.”

“Agreed.”

The night before the trial began, I drove past Cynthia’s house one last time. It was dark now. The “For Sale” sign had been up for months, but the house hadn’t sold. It had that stigma. The “murder house.”

I sat in my cruiser and looked at the window of the master bedroom. I thought about the fear Cynthia must have felt in those final moments. I thought about the betrayal.

I remembered the neighbor’s words: She protected him.

That was the tragedy. She protected him from the world, but she couldn’t protect herself from him.

I went home, ironed my uniform, and polished my badge. Tomorrow, we weren’t just police officers. We were storytellers. And we had to tell the story of a woman who had been silenced by the person she loved most.

The stage was set. The jury was selected. Dylan Alexander Waller was about to face the music, and he wouldn’t be able to turn this off like he turned off his mother’s life.

Part 4

The Trial: December 2024

The Doña Ana County Courthouse is a place of heavy echoes. When the trial of State of New Mexico v. Dylan Alexander Waller began, the atmosphere in the courtroom was suffocating.

I sat at the prosecution table, right behind the District Attorney. Across the aisle, Dylan sat with his defense team. He had cleaned up for court. He was wearing a button-down shirt that looked too big for him, his hair combed neatly. He wore glasses now, giving him a scholarly, harmless appearance. It was a costume. Underneath, he was the same man who had laughed about “handling” his mother.

The jury selection—voir dire—had been grueling. We needed twelve people who could look at gruesome evidence without looking away, yet remain objective. We ended up with a mix of locals: a teacher, a mechanic, a retired nurse. Normal people who were about to be dragged into a nightmare.

The Opening Statements

The prosecution opened with a simple, devastating narrative.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Sarah began, standing tall before the jury box. “This is not a case about a mercy killing. This is a case about greed. About selfishness. About a son who decided that his mother’s life was less important than his desire for her money and his freedom.”

She outlined the timeline: The murder, the cleaning, the theft, the flight. She promised to show them the face of a cold-blooded killer.

The defense, in turn, tried to play the heartstrings. They spoke of Dylan’s “troubled past,” his “mental anguish,” and the “complex relationship” between mother and son. They used words like tragedy and accident and misunderstanding.

I watched Dylan during this. He was nodding along, looking down at the table, acting the part of the victim. It took everything in me not to shake my head.

The Evidence Unfolds

Over the next week, we laid out the puzzle pieces.

First, the financial records. The jury watched in silence as we projected the bank statements on the screen. Day after day of maximum withdrawals. The video of Dylan at the Walmart ATM, hood up, withdrawing cash while his mother lay dead. The sheer volume of transactions painted a picture not of a grieving son, but of a man cashing a winning lottery ticket.

Then came the neighbor’s testimony. The man who had seen Cynthia bloodied years prior took the stand. His voice shook with anger as he described the abuse she had suffered.

“She was afraid of him,” he told the jury, pointing a trembling finger at Dylan. “She told me he was going to kill her. And he did.”

Dylan didn’t look up.

Then, it was my turn.

I took the stand, swearing to tell the truth. Sarah guided me through the discovery of the body. I described the silence of the house. The smell. The locked door.

“Detective Miller,” Sarah asked, “what did you observe about the state of the bedroom?”

“It was immaculate,” I replied, looking directly at the jury. “The bed was made. The surfaces were dusted. And the carpet… the carpet had fresh vacuum lines.”

“Why is that significant?”

“Because,” I said, pausing to let the weight of the words sink in, “it showed that after the struggle—after the violence that occurred in that room—the defendant didn’t call for help. He didn’t panic. He got the vacuum cleaner. He cleaned the room. He erased the violence so he could live in that house comfortably.”

I saw the jurors exchange looks. The “vacuum lines” detail always landed hard. It was so domestic, yet so psychopathic.

Then came the photos.

We had warned the jury, but nothing prepares you for images of a body in advanced decomposition. We showed the position of Cynthia in the shower. The water running over her.

I heard a gasp from the jury box. One juror, a young woman, put her hand over her mouth and looked away.

Dylan refused to look at the screen. He stared at his hands, feigning distress.

The Cross-Examination

The defense attorney tried to rattle me. He asked if I had “pressured” Dylan into a confession. He asked if I had considered that Dylan was in shock.

“Sir,” I said firmly. “I have interviewed hundreds of people in shock. People in shock cry. They scream. They ask for help. They don’t drive to the Mexican border with their mother’s debit card and leave their dogs to die in the heat.”

The attorney moved on quickly. He knew he wasn’t winning that exchange.

The Verdict

The trial lasted two weeks. The jury deliberated for less than four hours.

When the bailiff announced that a verdict had been reached, the tension in the room was electric. I sat up straighter. Cynthia’s few remaining relatives were in the back row, holding hands.

“We the jury,” the foreman read, his voice steady, “find the defendant, Dylan Alexander Waller, guilty of Murder in the First Degree.”

A collective exhale went through the room.

“Guilty of Tampering with Evidence. Guilty of Violation of a Restraining Order.”

Dylan didn’t scream. He didn’t cry. He just slumped in his chair, looking annoyed. As if he had lost a game of cards.

The Sentencing: February 10, 2025

Sentencing hearings are often more emotional than the trial itself. This is when the facade drops and the reality sets in.

Dylan was brought in, now wearing the orange jumpsuit again. The “scholar” costume was gone.

The judge asked if he had anything to say.

This was his moment. A chance to apologize. A chance to show a shred of humanity.

Dylan stood up. He looked at the judge, then at the gallery.

“I loved my mom,” he said, his voice flat. “I know people think I’m a monster. But I did what I thought was right. I’m not a bad person.”

That was it. No apology. No “I’m sorry.” Just a justification. I’m not a bad person.

The judge wasn’t having it.

“Mr. Waller,” the judge said, peering over her glasses. “You committed one of the most heinous acts imaginable. You betrayed the most sacred bond in human existence—the bond between a mother and her child. You didn’t just kill her; you discarded her. You left her to rot while you spent her money. Your actions were not those of a loving son, but of a predator.”

She slammed the gavel.

“I sentence you to life in prison for the charge of First Degree Murder. Additionally, I sentence you to three years for tampering with evidence, to be served consecutively.”

Consecutive. That meant the clock wouldn’t even start ticking on the second charge until he died or served the first.

“You will be eligible for parole in 30 years,” the judge concluded. “In the year 2055.”

Dylan would be nearly 60 years old. He would spend the best years of his life in a concrete box, exactly where he belonged.

Epilogue: The Echo of Water

As they led him away in cuffs, Dylan looked back one last time. He locked eyes with me. There was no defiance left, just a hollow realization that his games were over.

I walked out of the courthouse into the bright February sun. The air was crisp. It was finally over.

But cases like this don’t just end. They stick to your ribs.

I thought about the dogs. That was the one small mercy in this whole nightmare. They had been rescued from the car at the border. A local rescue group had taken them in. They were rehabilitated, rehydrated, and all four had been adopted into new, loving homes. Cynthia’s “babies” were safe.

I drove back to the station, the radio off. I needed the silence.

People ask me why I do this job. Why I look at the things no one should see. Why I listen to the lies of men like Dylan.

I do it because of the vacuum lines.

I do it because evil exists, and it doesn’t always look like a monster in a movie mask. Sometimes it looks like a clean carpet in a quiet house. Sometimes it looks like a son hugging his mother.

Cynthia Bzduch didn’t deserve to die in fear. She didn’t deserve to be a line item in her son’s twisted budget. She deserved peace.

We couldn’t save her life. But we saved her truth. We made sure the world knew that she didn’t “slip and fall.” She was taken. And the man who took her would never hurt anyone again.

I washed my hands in the station bathroom. The water ran clear and cold over my skin. I watched it swirl down the drain, thinking of that shower in Las Cruces.

I turned the faucet off tight. The dripping stopped. Finally, there was silence.