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The Backyard Where Nicole Vanished: A Father's Offer · Scary Paranormal Stories

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: The last time anyone confirmed Nicole Montalavo was alive, she
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: was dropping off her eight-year-old son at a house she
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: had every reason to fear. She walked in. She did
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: not walk out. And when investigators finally searched that property,
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: days later, what they found in the backyard changed the
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: direction of the entire investigation and the lives of everyone
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: who loved her. There is something in this case that
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: stayed with me long after I finished reading it. The
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: way violence had been telegraphed. So clearly, so many times,
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: and still no system caught it in time. Nicole Montalvo
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: was 33 years old when she disappeared on October 21st, 2019.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: She'd been born in Orlando, Florida on August 21st, 1986.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: And for all 33 of those years, Orlando was her city.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: Her parents, Edward and Alink Montalvo, raised her there. Her son, Aya,
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: was eight years old, and the man who had spent
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: years making her life dangerous. Christopher Otero Rivera was Aya's father,
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: her estranged husband, and the reason she had been navigating
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: restraining orders since 2016. That detail matters, not as background,
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: as architecture, Nicole was a woman in the process of rebuilding.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: By February of 2019, she had filed for divorce. Christopher
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: was already on probation following an attack the previous October,
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: when he and a woman named Toni Rocker had assaulted Nicole.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: He served eight months. Two years of supervised release followed.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: The monitor on his ankle was supposed to be the
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: line between his rage and her safety. Every morning before
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: the rest of the world caught up with her, Nicole
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: played music. She had a playlist, specific songs, a specific
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: order that she put on before work. It was a
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: small thing, a private thing, the kind of ritual that
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: belongs entirely to you that no restraining order can touch.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: The people who knew her best knew about that playlist,
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: knew about that playlist. It was hers in a way
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: that the past three years full of court dates and
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: fear and controlled movement have not felt like hers at all.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: Christopher Otero Rivera had a history that the courts had
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: documented with unusual thoroughness before 2018. He had been hospitalized, involuntarily,
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: under what Florida calls the Baker Act, a psychiatric hold
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: triggered when someone is deemed a danger to themselves or others.
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: His jealousy was not a rumor. It was a clinical
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: fact written into records. that the system had read, and then,
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: in some essential way, misplaced. His father, Angel Luis Rivera,
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: was 64 years old, and lived on a property outside Orlando.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: Neighbors would later tell investigators something that stopped the case cold.
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: That Angel had allegedly offered $ 10, 000 to have Nicole killed.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: Not an abstraction, a number, a transaction. The kind of
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: detail that once you hear it, refuses to sit still.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: The rational explanation for what happened on October 21st, 2019
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: was the one Christopher's family offered immediately. Nicole had dropped
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: Aya off, exchanged a message, and left voluntarily. She had
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: simply gone. People leave. People need space. The message, they said,
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: proved it. But Nicole did not come back to pick
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: up her son. That was the first thing that didn't fit.
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: She had never, not once, left Aya without a plan
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: to return. The playlist would have been playing somewhere, waiting
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: for a morning that was not going to come. And
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: Aya was still there, in that house, on a property
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: that investigators were about to look at very differently. What
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: they found when they finally searched that backyard is the
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: part of this story that cannot be softened. October 21st, 2019,
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: was a Monday. Nicole had dropped Aya off at Christopher's
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: family home before, and nothing about that part was unusual.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: He was her son's father. She had a custody arrangement
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: to keep. What she did not have was any reason
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: to believe that delivering her eight-year-old to his grandparents' house
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: would be the last thing she ever did. She was
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: never seen again after that drop-off. Christopher's family offered an
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: explanation almost immediately. They said Nicole had left Aya with
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: them voluntarily, without incident, and that she had communicated with
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: them afterward, by message. According to them, she had simply
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: chosen not to come back. A mother who loved her
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: son enough to build a mourning ritual around him. A
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: woman who had spent three years fighting through courts. and
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: restraining orders to protect herself and her child, had simply
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: walked away. That was the story. And for a brief,
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: terrible moment, investigators had to consider it. The rational explanation
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: stopped working here. Christopher was on an ankle monitor. The
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: device logged every location he visited during those hours. It
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: placed him at his parents' property, the same property where
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: Nicole had dropped off Aya during the window when she disappeared.
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: He did not leave. The device did not lie. Then
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: came the excavator. Someone had rented heavy equipment in the
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: days immediately following Nicole's disappearance. GPS data from that machine
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: showed it operating near the Otero Rivera property. That is
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: not the kind of equipment you rent to maintain a garden.
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: It is the kind you rent when you need to
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: move a significant amount of earth quickly. and you do
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: not want anyone asking questions about why the ground looks
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: different than it did before. Investigators moved on the property.
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: In the backyard, beneath the surface, they found what remained
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: of Nicole Montalvo. The remains were burned. They were dismembered.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: Tools capable of that work were recovered from the property.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: The condition of what was found meant one thing with
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: absolute certainty. Whoever had done this had worked to make
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: identification and cause of death as difficult as possible. The
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: medical examiner could not determine how Nicole died. That fact
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: alone describes the scale of what was done to her.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: There is no version of this story where everything makes sense.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: The message that Christopher's family had offered as proof, the
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: text that supposedly showed Nicole choosing to leave, collapsed against
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: the weight of everything else. An ankle monitor does not
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: falsify its own data. A rented excavator's GPS does not
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: malfunction on the one night someone needed it to. Blood
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: and Nicole's DNA, recovered from a shopping cart found near
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: the scene, did not appear by coincidence. And then there
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: was the Compañero de Zelda. During the eight months Christopher
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: had served after the 2018 attack, he had spoken inside
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: those walls. A fellow inmate. later identified in court documents,
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: only as the man Christopher called by a nickname, reported
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: that Christopher had spoken openly about wanting Nicole dead. Not
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: as a figure of speech, not as the venting of
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: a frustrated man, specifically with intention. The warning existed before
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: October 21st. It existed in a recorded statement, and Nicole
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: was never told. The moment investigators... reached the backyard of
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: the Otero Rivera property. The story that the family had constructed,
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: the voluntary departure, the message, the mother who simply vanished,
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: did not bend under pressure. It shattered. Julio Angel Rivera's
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: oldest son and Christopher's half-brother was contacted during the investigation.
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: He did not express disbelief. He expressed something more disturbing
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: than that. He said he was not surprised. He spoke
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: about the family he had grown up in, the violence,
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: the patterns, the things that happened inside that house that
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: never reached any official record. A man who shared a
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: father with Christopher Rivera looked at the evidence and said,
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: This fits. That single statement recontextualizes everything neighbors, investigators, and
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: courts had encountered before. Uncle Luis Rivera was 64 years
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: old when he was arrested. He had told neighbors at
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: some point before that October that he would pay $ 10, 000
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: to have Nicole killed. Neighbors had heard this. Neighbors had
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: not reported it in time. And when investigators began building
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: the case, what they found was not a son who
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: acted while a father looked away. What they found was
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: evidence of shared planning, coordinated enough that a jury would
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: later find both men equally responsible. The defense tried to
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: split that unity. At trial, Christopher's attorneys pointed toward Angel
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: as the architect. Amzhov's side pointed toward Christopher as the
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: one with motive. The jury deliberated for 90 minutes. 90
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: minutes to weigh two men's freedom against the remains of
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: a 33-year-old woman found burned and dismembered in a yard
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: she had never lived in. 90 minutes to reach a
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: conclusion that took the rest of the world. Three years
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: to fully absorb. Neither Christopher nor Angeau testified. They offered
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: no account, no explanation, no version of events in which
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: Nicole walked out of that property alive. Aya was eight
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: years old when his mother dropped him off that Monday.
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: He was still eight years old when investigators found what
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: was left of her. He did not get to say goodbye.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: He did not get an explanation that a child could hold.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: He got a custody arrangement that transferred him permanently to
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: Nicole's family, to Edward and Elick Montalvo, the grandparents who
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: had watched their daughter fight to survive for three years
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: and had believed, with reason, that the system was finally
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: keeping her safe. It was not. There is a question
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: that does not appear in any court document, any police report,
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: or any sentence handed down on July 21st, 2021. It
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: is the question that follows every piece of confirmed evidence
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: and refuses to resolve into something bearable. How many people knew?
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: The Compañero de Telda knew. He reported it, and his
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: report entered the system. Whether that report moved fast enough?
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: Reached the right desk, triggered the right warning to Nicole
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: that chain of custody is not part of the public
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: record in a way that answers the question cleanly. What
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: is part of the record is that Nicole, was not
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: told in time to matter. Neighbors knew about the $ 10, 000.
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: They had heard Angel Rivera say it. That information existed
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: in the community around that property before October 2019. It
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: did not reach Nicole in time either. Julio knew the family.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: He knew what that house produced. He had lived inside
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: the pattern long enough to recognize it on sight. And
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: when he heard what had happened, His response was not
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: grief at the impossibility of it. It was something colder. Recognition.
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: Three separate currents of knowledge. A prison cell. A neighborhood conversation.
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: A brother's lifetime of experience. And none of them arrived
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: at Nicole's door before Christopher's ankle monitor placed him at
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: that property on the last day of her life. The
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: system had encountered Christopher Otero Rivera before October 21st It
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: had encountered him in June 2016, when Nicole filed the
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: first restraining order. It had encountered him on October 3rd, 2018,
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: when he and Tony Rocker ambushed Nicole in a place
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: she had been lured to under the pretense of a
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: dead battery. It had held him for eight months. It
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: had released him with a monitor and conditions. And then
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: it had watched the monitor data in real time as
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: Nicole disappeared, What the courts could establish was guilt. What
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: they could not establish, what no sentence resolves, is what
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: would have been different if any one of those warnings
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: had moved faster than October 21st. Nicole's sister Christina has
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: since joined a victim advocacy organization that works directly with
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: survivors of domestic violence. She did not walk away from
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: the thing that killed her sister. She walked toward it,
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: from the other side, with the specific knowledge of what
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: it looks like when the warnings accumulate and the safety
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: net fails anyway. That decision is not a footnote. It
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: is the only ongoing answer this case has produced. Aya
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: is growing up in his maternal grandparents' home. He is
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: being raised by the family that spent years watching his
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: mother try to build a life that was safe enough
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: for both of them. On the morning Nicole last dropped
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: him off, She did not know it was the last time.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: There is no evidence she hesitated at the door, no
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: witness who saw something in her face that suggested she
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: felt the weight of that particular goodbye. She left her son,
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: where she believed he would be safe, and she walked away,
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: and the morning music she would have put on the
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: next day never played. The jury took 90 minutes, 6 people,
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: 180 minutes of shared human life, and they walked back
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: in with a single word for each man. Guilty. On
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: April 21st, 2021, Christopher Otero, Rivera, and his father, Uncle
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: Luis Rivera, were convicted of second-degree murder, abuse of a corpse,
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: and tampering with evidence. The judge and jury agreed responsibility
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: was equal between them. Neither had testified. Neither had offered
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: a single word in their own defense. Three months later,
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: on July 21st, 2021, the sentences came. Life in prison
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: for the murder, 15 additional years for the dismemberment, five
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: more for the evidence tampering. Each man received the same.
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: The court made no distinction between the one who planned
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: and the one who carried it out, because the evidence
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: had made none either. There is something specific about that arithmetic.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: There is something specific about that arithmetic. Not just life,
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: but life plus 20. The additional years exist because the
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: law recognized that what happened to Nicole after she died
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: was its own separate crime. The court put a number
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: on the act of erasing her. And that number sits
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: on top of everything else every year for as long
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: as both men are alive Aya was eight years old
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: when his mother dropped him off that October evening. He
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: is older now. He lives with Nicole's parents, Edward and
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: the Elk, in the home where Nicole grew up. The
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: family that raised her is now raising her son. Nicole's
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: sister Christina did not disappear into grief quietly. She joined
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: an organization that serves survivors of domestic violence. Translating what
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: her family lost, into something that moves outward. There is
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: no way to know what she says to the people
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: she works with, or whether she tells them about Nicole.
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: But she shows up. That much is documented. Julio, Uncle
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: Rivera's oldest son and Christopher's half-brother, had known something was
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: broken inside that family long before October 2019. He had
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: reported the abuse he experienced. He was not surprised when
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: the charges came. that is its own kind of wound,
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: to have seen it coming and to have been unable
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: to stop it. The ankle monitor that tracked Christopher's location
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: the night Nicole disappeared was supposed to be the system working.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: He was on probation. He was being watched. The device
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: recorded exactly where he was and where he was turned
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: out to be the same property where Nicole's remains were found.
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: The system generated the data that convicted him. It just
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: did not generate it in time to save her. There
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: is still no confirmed cause of death. The remains were
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: too damaged. Whatever happened to Nicole on, or after October 21st, 2019,
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: the fire took that answer with it. The prosecution proved
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: murder without being able to prove precisely how it was done.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: The jury still took only 90 minutes. There is something
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: that stays with anyone who follows this case closely. Not
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: the verdict, not the sentences. Those arrived, eventually, as they should.
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: What stays is the morning of October 22nd, when Aya
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: woke up at Christopher's family home and waited. He was eight.
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: He had been left there by his mother the night before.
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: He did not know yet what he was waiting for.
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: He only knew she had not come back. Nicole Montalvo
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: was born on August 21st, 1986, in Orlando, Florida. She
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: was 33 years old. She had filed for divorce. Eight
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: months before she died, she had spent three years trying
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: to leave. The morning she dropped Aya off, she was
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: still trying. She never sent that last message. This show
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: is made by Open Media.