Payton Moreland

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3,581 appearances 30 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard Jun 2025

Payton Moreland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Murder With My Husband · 265. The Missing Instagram Model - Esmeralda Gonzalez · 21 Apr 2025 podcast

I think to police, it's like, how did she die in her own neighborhood, just like steps away from her house? This is really the only option, is that one of the other neighbors got her before she got to her actual house. So knowing that Esmeralda was last seen wandering around the neighborhood, Chris and Cassandra are climbing to the top of the suspect list quickly.

So investigators next move is to follow up on another little detail from that tipster. The fact that Chris rented a U-Haul to get rid of Esmeraldas body. So they start calling local U-Haul stores and sure enough. One of them finds that a rental was made to a Christopher Prestapino just days after Esmeralda went missing. And on that contract is Christopher's phone number, email, home address.

He did not even try to use a fake name renting this U-Haul.

Just as the police are making some moves on this case, another anonymous tip comes in telling police, if you want to find out what happened to Esmeralda, you should speak to this woman named Trisha Ott. And police are like, oh my gosh, how many freaking tips can we get? We already have a really, really obvious one.

But it would be shoddy police work to not follow up every tip. So they track down Trisha, even though they feel like they're on the right path. And when they speak with her, they realize that this tipster actually was being helpful because she begins to connect the dots even more for police.

She tells the police that in early June, a week or so after Esmeralda went missing, her friend, Christopher Prestapino, called her in the middle of the night. He told her he needed her help moving something large and asked if she could come over to the house right away.

Trisha got out of bed, made the drive over, and when she got there, she found her friend Christopher blasting music and the TV so loud that she could barely speak to him. But also, Christopher was acting really paranoid. He was going on and on about a woman who had come over to his house and he had tied her up and maybe he accidentally killed her.

This is not the second person he's opening his mouth to.

Es ist schrecklich. Es ist verrückt. Aber das ist nicht mal die Hälfte davon. Trisha sieht einige andere wirklich schäde Sachen, während sie da war, um ihren Freund, ich glaube, einen Körper zu bewegen. Für Anfänger, das U-Haul sitzt da in der Fahrt, nur wartet, bis es aufgelöst wird. Und mittlerweile, Cassandra, Christophers Freundin, is frantically cleaning out their garage.

And according to Trisha, she's high on drugs. And the most chilling detail is there is a giant handmade wooden box in the garage. From pictures, it looks a little bit bigger than like a chest freezer. And apparently that wooden box is what Chris needs help moving into the U-Haul, getting it in. He said that him and his roommate Cassandra had been trying for hours, but were unsuccessful.

So they called Trisha to see if the three of them could get it up. Now later, having heard the news about this missing Esmeralda, Trisha was pretty certain that it was her body inside the box that she had helped move that night. Now, I want to be clear, Trisha is being forthcoming with police, but they came to her off of an anonymous tip.

The second you even had a thought that it might have been this missing woman who disappeared in that exact neighborhood and you might have helped move her body into a U-Haul, you should have contacted police. Yeah. So after this, police feel pretty certain that Christopher is their guy, so they subpoena his phone records next. And they find something else that sort of confirms Trish's story.

So needless to say, they are just gluing everything together. They're just getting some back end behind their evidence. So Christopher spent a lot of time at Home Depot. There's a specific Home Depot by his house after her disappearance. So they reach out to that store where his phone was constantly pinging. They ask for security footage. And sure enough,

Christopher Prestapino takes multiple trips in and out of Home Depot, buying all of the supplies that someone would need to build a wooden box. Just like the one Tricia described. Wood, cement mix, lime, drills, mixing paddles. And then on June 8th, Christopher's phone records placed him somewhere else that's kind of suspicious.

That day he spent multiple hours out in the middle of the Nevada desert. So police assume Christopher must have found a way to get that box inside the U-Haul and he was out there dumping it that day. So now, investigators are getting closer to finding out what happened to Esmeralda.

The issue is, they only have Christopher's cell coordinates to work off of and the Nevada desert is a pretty big place. So while they do multiple searches of the area, spanning hundreds and hundreds of miles of desert, they don't find anything.

And that's when they realized as badly as they wanted to find Esmeralda before arresting Christopher, they were going to need to go directly to Christopher to find Esmeralda. So it's September by this point and police decide that they're going to actually start with finding Cassandra, the roommate, first. Only they quickly realized she's not even in Vegas anymore.

She actually ran off to Wisconsin to her boyfriend's house. So police hop on a plane and knock on her boyfriend's door. And Cassandra is pretty good at playing dumb. She says she knows nothing about a U-Haul or a missing girl, even though Trisha... said she was there cleaning out the garage. In fact, she's really combative, which of course is not helpful.

But for now, it's not enough to arrest her. So they move to the next phase. They need to get a warrant for Christopher's house back in Vegas. So on September 20th, they knock on his door. And as much as I hate to say it, Sie finden nichts. Sie finden keine Beweise darauf, dass Esmeralda jemals in seinem Haus war, auch wenn sie dort getötet wurde.

Und Christopher sagt über und über, dass er keine Ahnung hat, wer Esmeralda ist. Er hat sie noch nie gesehen. Also sind die Polizei frustriert. Sie fühlen sich, als hätten sie eine Menge circumstantielles Beweis und viele Tipps gegen diese Leute, aber einfach nichts, um es zu beweisen.

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