Latest / Scary Paranormal Stories / The Box: No Blood, Just Her

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The Box: No Blood, Just Her · Scary Paranormal Stories

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On the morning of February 25th, 2020, a recycler working
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: the streets near the Mercado de Frutas in La Victoria, Lima,
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: came across a cardboard box that was too heavy to drag.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: He tried to lift it, couldn't. He opened the flap
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: and saw a sneaker white with yellow detailing and understood
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: immediately that whatever he had found, it was not garbage.
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: The box had been wrapped in clear plastic Neighbors said
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: they watched a red pickup truck stop, briefly on the street,
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: leave the box on the pavement, and drive away. Nobody
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: stopped the truck. Nobody called anyone. It looked like a
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: delivery that had been left at the ROM address. Inside
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: was Joliet Vidora, Peralta, 18 years old, a mother, someone's daughter,
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: someone's daughter, someone who had been alive two days before.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: And the detail that would change the direction of the
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: entire investigation was something that forensic technicians noticed the moment
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: they opened that box. There was no blood inside it. None.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: Which meant Joliet had not been killed there. She had
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: been killed somewhere else. And then someone had taken the
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: time to place her inside and seal the plastic and
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: drive her across the city and leave her on a
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: street where people walked past every morning That detail, the
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: absence of blood, is what this story turns on. There
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: is something about this case that hasn't left me since
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: I first went through the evidence. It's the gap between
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: what the box looked like from the outside and what
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: it held. The complete ordinariness of it. A package on
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: a sidewalk, and the precision that had to go into
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: what came before. This is the story of what happened
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: to Juliet Vedore. Peralta on the night of February 23rd.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: 2020 in San Juan de la Regancho Lima and how
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: a single video sent from a phone from a room
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: that no one was supposed to know about broke the
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: case wide open. Juliet Vidara Peralta had grown up in
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: San Juan de la Regancho one of Lima's largest and
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: most densely populated districts raised by her maternal grandparents in
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: a neighborhood where the streets are loud during the day
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: and go quiet fast at night. She was 18. She
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: had a daughter, a small girl she was raising alongside Fabricio,
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: a man she had been with for five years, a
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: relationship that had been straining under its own weight for months.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: On the afternoon of February 23rd, 2020, Joliet met with
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: Fabricio to talk about the two of them. They had
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: been separated. That day, they decided to try again. He
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: walked her to a bus stop around six in the evening.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: She was wearing a white floral blouse, blue jeans, and
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: white and yellow sneakers. He watched the bus pull away.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: That was the last time he saw her. That evening,
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: Joliet met up with a friend, a woman whose name
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: does not appear in the official record, and the two
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: of them went to a nightclub together. The friend later
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: told investigators that at some point during the night, Juliet
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: left the venue with a man. She left willingly. She
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: was not taken from the door, not followed out, not dragged.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: She walked out with him, and the friend did not follow.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: The man was Gary Mendoza Romero, 24 years old, known
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: in the area by the nickname El Gordo Gary, originally
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: from Tarapoto in the San Martin region. He had been
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: released from the La Libertad prison facilities Approximately one year
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: before this night, after serving a sentence for drug trafficking,
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: police sources connected him to a local criminal network known
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: as Los Charles de Pistuso. There was also a prior
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: complaint filed against him, a domestic violence allegation brought by
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: a former partner that had not resulted in a conviction.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: He operated as a small-scale drug dealer in the zones
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: surrounding the La Hacienda metro station, which placed him regularly
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: in the same neighborhoods where Joliet lived and went out.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: He was not a stranger to the system. The system
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: knew his name, his history, his face, and a year
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: after his release, he was back on those same streets.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: What happened between the moment Joliet walked out of that
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: nightclub and the moment a recycler found a box too
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: heavy to lift is what the investigation had to reconstruct
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: from almost nothing. No witnesses, to the crime itself. No
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: confession that held. No DNA recovered from the location where
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: the box was found. What investigators had was a room,
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: and something Joliet had sent from inside it. Before the
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: body was even identified, before forensic technicians had matched the
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: fingerprints to her national identity file, Joliet's family already knew
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: something was wrong. The day after she disappeared was the
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: birthday of her sister, Marks. Joliet did not come. She
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: had also left her daughter behind. Those two absences, the
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: birthday of the child, were the first signs that something
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: had broken from the pattern of her life. A young
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: woman who was trying to rebuild a relationship, who had
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: a daughter she cared for, who was going to her
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: sister's birthday the next day, had simply not come home.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: The family reported her missing. The investigation began. and somewhere
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: in San Juan de Lurigancho, in a small room inside
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: a house, there was evidence that no one had found, yet.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: No one had found yet, and a video that Joliet
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: had sent to a friend. That same night, from inside
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: that room, that would eventually point investigators to the exact
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: address where she died. The night of February 23rd, 2020,
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: Joliet left the nightclub On her own, two feet, she
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: was not dragged, she was not coerced at the door.
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: She walked out willingly, side by side with Gary Mendoza Romero,
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: a man she had met hours before inside those walls.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: Inside those walls, that detail matters more than it might seem,
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: because it would become the cornerstone of everything his defense
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: tried to build. The friend who had gone out with
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: Joliet that night watched her leave, She did not raise
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: an alarm. There was no reason to. A young woman
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: choosing to go with someone she had just met was not,
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: in itself, a warning sign. It was just a night.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: It looked like any other night. But Juliet was 18
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: years old, and she had a daughter at home. Something
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: happened after she left that club. A rational version of events.
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: The version Gary's defense would insist on for years. was
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: that Joliet went to his room, voluntarily. That things became uncomfortable,
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: and that she left. That she walked out of that apartment,
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: in San Juan de la Regancho alive. That whatever happened next,
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: happened somewhere else. To someone else's version of this story.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: That version collapsed the moment investigators entered his room. The
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: evidence inside, Gary Mendoza Romero's apartment, was not ambiguous. It
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: was precise. on the walls, on the floor, in the
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: fabric of a space that was supposed to be just
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: a room in a district of Lima. There was blood,
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: and that blood matched Joliette Vidore, Peralta. Her fingerprints were
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: there too, not in the vague, smeared way that suggests
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: someone passed through quickly. Her presence was written into that
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: room with the kind of permanence that does not come
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: from a brief visit. But the detail that stopped investigators
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: The detail that the rational explanation could not survive was
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: the video sometime during that night. While she was inside
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: Gary's apartment, Joliet recorded a short video and sent it
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: to a friend. She had her phone. She had a signal.
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: She had, for at least one moment, the ability to
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: reach someone outside those walls. The video was not a
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: cry for help. It was casual. The kind of thing
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: you send when you are somewhere new. maybe showing a
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: friend the surroundings. But the surroundings were the problem. The
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: objects visible in that video, the furniture, the walls, the
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: specific arrangement of things inside that room, matched exactly what
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: police found when they arrived. The video was a timestamp.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: It was a map. It was Joliet, unknowingly placing herself
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: inside the scene of her own murder and sending the
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: coordinates to someone who would only understand them later. Gary
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: had claimed she left. The video proved she was there.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: His version of events had exactly one answer for the blood,
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: for the fingerprints, and for the video, and he never
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: gave it. Not during his arrest, not during questioning, not
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: once across the entire length of the trial. He maintained
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: his innocence and left the contradiction standing, like a wall
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: he had built himself, and refused to acknowledge. Forensics filled
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: in what he would not say. The cause of death
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: was strangulation. There were bruises on her head. her neck,
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: and along her arms, marks consistent with a struggle, with
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: someone fighting back, with the final minutes of a person
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: who did not accept what was happening to her. A
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: single heavy blow had been delivered to her head. There
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: were also indicators of sexual assault. And then, There was
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: one finding that said something about the man who did
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: this that no statement ever could when investigators examined the box.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: The cardboard box wrapped in clear plastic that had been
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: left on a street in La Victoria, near the Mercado
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: de Futas. There was no blood inside it. None. The
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: forensic team confirmed it. Joliet was not killed there. She
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: was killed somewhere else, her body allowed to reach a
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: state of flaccidity And then she was placed inside the
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: box and moved. Someone killed her, waited, then packaged her.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: That sequence requires time. It requires calm. It requires a
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: person who, after committing an act of violence, was capable
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: of sitting in the same space and deciding what to
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: do next, without panic, overriding reason. The rational explanation, a
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: crime of passion, a moment of uncontrolled rage, stopped working here.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: What the forensic evidence described was something more deliberate than that,
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: something that had a next step. There is no version
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: of this story where everything makes sense. Gary Mendoza Romero
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: had been inside the prison system before. He had been
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: convicted of drug trafficking, served time in the Penal de
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: la Libertad, and had been free for approximately one year
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: when he killed Joliet. In that year, He had rebuilt
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: a presence. He was dealing near the La Hacienda metro
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: station in San Juan del Urigancho. He was known to
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: police in the area. He had a prior complaint from
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: a former partner for domestic violence, a warning that existed
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: in a file somewhere, attached to his name, doing nothing.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: The system had already processed him once. It had released him.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: He had a file. He had a name. He had
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: an alias, El Gordo Garry. that people in the neighborhood recognized.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: And none of that prevented what happened to Joliet on
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: the night of February 23rd, when investigators began pulling at
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: the edges of his network. One name surfaced repeatedly in
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: police reports, Los Charlies de Postuso, a band operating in
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: San Juan de Lurigancho, connected to the kind of activity
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: Gary had already been convicted of. His association placed him
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: inside a social world where violence was not an aberration.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: Where the logistics of moving things, drugs, money, and, as
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: forensic evidence now suggested, bodies were not foreign territory. But
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: the investigation found no accomplices. Every exit point led back
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: to Gary, alone with no evidence that anyone else had
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: touched Joliet's case. The box, the truck, the room, all
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: of it traced a single line. What could not be
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: traced was the red pickup truck. Neighbors in La Victoria
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: had seen it. A vehicle that slowed down on the
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: street near the Mercado de Frutas left a large cardboard
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: box on the pavement and pulled away. The box was
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: wrapped in clear plastic, the kind of wrapping that made
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: it look like a delivery, like something ordinary that had
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: fallen off a root. No one stopped the truck. No
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: one took down a plate. It was there and then
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: it was gone, and no driver was ever identified. That
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: loose thread has never been resolved. The authorities determined Gary
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: acted alone, which means, by elimination, that Gary drove that truck,
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: or arranged for the box to be left, or was
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: somehow present in La Victoria that night. But no evidence
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: placed him at the drop site directly. The room in
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: San Juan de Lurigancho was confirmed. The street in La
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: Victoria was witnessed. The space between those two locations, a
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: specific chain of events that moved Joliet from one to
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: the other, exists only in fragments. Some things do not
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: need a complete explanation to leave a permanent mark. The
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: image of that truck stopping. The box being placed on
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: the ground. The truck driving away. The truck driving away.
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: All of it happening on an ordinary street, in front
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: of witnesses, who had no idea what they were looking at,
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: sits in the record as a fact with no surrounding context.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: It arrived, it left, and what it contained changed everything
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: for a family in San Juan de la Regancho who were,
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: at that exact moment, just beginning to wonder where Joliet was.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: The trial of Gary Mendoza Romero began with the weight
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: of everything that could not be undone, Prosecutor Milda Villalobos, Melgarejo,
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: laid the evidence before the court in sequence. The blood
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: in the room. The fingerprints on the walls. The video
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: Joliet had sent from inside that house the night she disappeared.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: Each piece answered a question Gary had refused to answer himself.
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: The jury did not need to deliberate long. The verdict
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: came back unanimous. Guilty. The sentence was the maximum the
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: law allowed. life in prison with no possibility of release.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: Gary Mendoza Romero, 24 years old, would spend the remainder
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: of his life inside the walls of the Lurigancho Penitentiary
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: in Lima. The court also ordered reparation payments to Joliet's family,
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: mandatory psychological treatment for both the family and the convicted
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: and formal civil disqualification of Gary from any future role
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: in society outside those walls. He never explained the blood.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: Through every stage of the investigation, through every session of
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: the trial, through the reading of the verdict itself, Gary
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: maintained the same story. Joliet had been in his room.
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: She had changed her mind. She had left on her own.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: Someone else must have found her afterward. That was his version,
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: and he held it without variation. But the blood on
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: the walls of his room matched Joliet's DNA. Her fingerprints
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: were there. The video she sent from inside that space
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: showed objects that investigators later found and catalogued in that
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: same room. There was no version of his story that
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: absorbed those facts without breaking apart entirely. The court saw that.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: The jury saw that. Gary saw it too. He simply
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: never said so out loud. There is something that stays
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: with this case long after the legal proceedings close. Not
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: the verdict which was clear and deserved, not the sentence,
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: which was final. What lingers is the detail that forensic
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: analysis confirmed early, and that the trial never fully made
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: human again. There was no blood inside that cardboard box.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: Joliet was killed in one place. Then, time passed. Then
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: someone moved her body, folded it into a box, wrapped
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: that box in transparent plastic. and placed it in the
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: back of a red pickup truck. The truck drove to Yubateros,
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: near the fruit market in La Victoria, and stopped. The
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: box was left on the street. The truck drove away.
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: Neighbors saw it happen. They saw what looked like an
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: abandoned package. They did not stop anything because there was
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: nothing in that moment that looked like anything other than
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: a delivery being left at the wrong address. That is
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: the part that does not resolve. The driver of that
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: truck was never identified. No accomplices were formally established. The
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: court determined that Gary acted alone. But alone does not
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: fully account for the logistics of what happened between the
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: moment Juliet died and the moment a recycler lifted a
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: box that was too heavy and saw a white and
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: yellow sneaker inside. Alone does not explain every hour of
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: that interval. The court closed what the law required it
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: to close. Some of what happened in between remains, in
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: the exact words of the forensic record, unaccounted for. Juliet's
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: daughter was a small child when her mother left for
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: the disco on the night of February 23rd, 2020. She
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: did not come home. The next day was Marx's birthday,
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: and Juliet was not there either. The family waited. Then
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: they searched. Then the phone calls began, the kind that
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: families make when waiting is no longer possible. The identification
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: came through fingerprints at the Lima morgue, matched against national
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: identity records, because Joliet had no identification on her when
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: she was found. There is a version of February 23rd,
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: where Fabrizio walks her to the bus stop at six
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: in the evening, and she turns back to look at
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: him once before the bus comes. There is a version
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: where that look is the last thing anyone who loved
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: her saw of her face in an ordinary moment. By
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: the time the recycler found the box, two days later,
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: Joliet had already been gone from the world for approximately
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: 48 hours. The city had continued around that fact without
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: knowing it. Gary Mendoza Romero is alive. He is inside
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: the Lurigancho Penitentiary, and he will remain there. The sentence
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: is permanent. The case is closed in every legal sense
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: that matters. Joliet's daughter is still growing up. That is
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: the detail this case leaves behind. Not the verdict, not
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: the sentence, not the name of the man who will
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: never leave that prison. A child who will grow up
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: knowing what was in that box, and who put it there,
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: and that it could not be undone, and that the
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: law did everything it was designed to do, and that
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: her mother still did not come home. The red truck
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: drove away. Nobody stopped it. And somewhere in Lima, a
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: little girl is learning the shape of a world that
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: let that happen. This show is made by Oba Media.