Once the social media posts go viral, the detectives on the case start feeling the pressure to solve it. They get calls from TikTok tipsters at all hours of the day and night reporting sightings of the suspect all over California and the Western United States. After continuously striking out, the detectives decide to take a cue from Daisy’s community: They post their own fliers on social media, too. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: Who is Detective Ray Lugo and what is his role in Daisy's case?
Everything looks very closed up, like they definitely don't want people just knocking in. I think I need to ring the bell. Hey, my name is Jennifer. I have an appointment with Ray Lugo. Hey. How's it going? It was a weekday afternoon, and I was at the Homicide Bureau of the L.A. County Sheriff's Department. It's this institutional-looking building in a suburban office park just east of L.A.
We have some podcasters. I'm just giving them a little tour. I want to show them some pictures, okay?
That's Detective Ray Lugo. He's got broad shoulders and a bald head. He used to be a high school football coach, and he still kind of got that coach vibe. Like, he likes to remind me that he was the lead detective on Daisy's case. He says he always had a plan for it. He walked me around the office and pointed to newspaper clippings and photographs on the wall.
And because this is Los Angeles, there were also movie posters.
The movie with Angelina Jolie, the Changeling. You know, in the movie, it's LAPD and stuff, but that was a sheriff's case and stuff. But in movies, they always put LAPD, but that was... And we didn't know, the historian told us, and we had pictures of it and stuff.
Do you feel like you get slighted if LAPD gets all the glory?
No, not really. They're the JV team to us anyway, so we don't feel that way.
All right, so if you didn't catch that, Lugo was saying that The Changeling was based on a sheriff's department's case, but that the movie made it all about the LAPD. When I asked if that bothered him, that the LAPD always gets the Hollywood treatment, he said no. I mean, it sounds like what he said was their junior varsity to us. Again, he's a former football coach.
And by the way, the LAPD and the LA Sheriff's Department have separate jurisdictions. The former patrols the city of LA, whereas the latter serves the county's unincorporated areas and more than 40 of its other cities. So everywhere from Palmdale to Malibu to Compton. It is a massive area. Lugo showed me a break room.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of the 'bulldog' mascot at the LA County Sheriff's Homicide Bureau?
I didn't know there was like this rivalry.
No, not really. We don't consider them a rival to us. They can't hang with us. They can't.
So what does it mean to be a bulldog?
The reason why, in the article, the reason why they said that was because we never give up. And that's how they teach us that here, that although even when we don't have any evidence, we just never give up. We find a way, a legal way, to try to find the suspects and convict them.
Well, that's actually what I was here to talk with Lugo about. Like, what exactly was he doing while Daisy's friends and family were putting Victor on blast? Desperately looking to get attention on the case. Where was that bulldog spirit when it came to finding a murder suspect? I'm Jen Swan.
From London Audio, iHeartRadio, and executive producer Paris Hilton, this is My Friend Daisy, Episode 6, Armed and Dangerous. In June of 2021, Lugo's cell phone had been blowing up. Susie had been calling him just about every day to ask about her daughter's case. Daisy's friends and relatives were calling him too. But those weren't the only people calling about Daisy's murder.
They put out something on social media, and they put out my number, my cell number. So I was getting calls from all over.
Lugo's cell phone number, he discovered, had been plastered all over the internet. Unbeknownst to him, it was on the TikToks and the Instagram and Facebook posts that Daisy's friends and family had made. The posts that had since gone viral. Now, Lugo was getting calls at all hours of the day.
all from people who said they'd seen a murder suspect, a 20-something guy with dark hair, distinctive eyebrows, and stretched ear lobes.
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Chapter 3: Why did Detective Lugo receive numerous calls from social media tipsters?
Lugo said things like that a lot. Things like, that's part of our job. That's what we do. I'd come here to interview him, to find out what he and his partner had been doing all that time when Daisy's loved ones were desperately looking for answers. And he'd come to this interview ready to defend his investigation.
Most people thought, oh, this was an easy case, but we didn't have any witnesses. The video was not very good at all.
Lugo had a stack of index cards in front of him, notes and talking points that he referred to every so often. We were sitting in a boardroom where, on the back wall, an American flag was printed on this big framed piece of wood. It had a thin blue line running through the middle. And in the left-hand corner, among the stars, was that cartoon bulldog in a fedora. And Lugo was in bulldog mode.
He wasn't giving up explaining how difficult the investigation was.
It doesn't happen that quick unless, you know, a husband kills his wife and, you know, he's there. Those are easy. Anybody could do those, right? You guys could do those, right? Those are domestic, but this wasn't as easy as people thought. I know at times families get frustrated with us, but we can't go play-by-play with them on all the information we have. They just have to trust us.
I think from Susie's point of view, you know, she had, and I think she told you this from the beginning too, she had this fear that this case wouldn't be taken seriously because she's Mexican or because she lives in Compton. And it's like going to Compton, it could be a body dump. It could be an unknown victim. And so I think she always had this like defensiveness of like, I have to fight.
Yeah. Yeah. No, but she has to remember too that we're Mexican too. And we, I grew up in East LA and in the worst neighborhood. And we understand that. And we're not going to let anybody get away with murder. Right? We don't do that. We have a conscience. We have a family. I've been doing this for, I'm in my 43rd year, 28 at Homicide.
And can I ask, like, how you decided to join the shift?
Like, was there something that happened in your life that... Yeah, I was born and raised in East Los Angeles. In the early 70s, we had the East LA riots. I lived half a block away from Whittier Boulevard from where it was all happening. And I remember seeing... And my parents went to a wedding, so it was me and my brothers and sisters.
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Chapter 4: How does Detective Lugo describe the challenges in investigating Daisy's murder?
Chapter 5: What is the rivalry between LA Sheriff's Department and LAPD about?
The LA Times called us the bulldogs.
Lugo pointed me to a newspaper clipping mounted on a wall. It was from 1977. The headline is, Sheriff's Bulldogs Hang In Where LAPD Doesn't. Oh, so they're like pitting you against LAPD again.
Yeah, yeah.
I didn't know there was like this rivalry.
No, not really. We don't consider them a rival to us. They can't hang with us. They can't.
So what does it mean to be a bulldog?
The reason why, in the article, the reason why they said that was because we never give up. And that's how they teach us that here, that although even when we don't have any evidence, we just never give up. We find a way, a legal way, to try to find the suspects and convict them.
Well, that's actually what I was here to talk with Lugo about. Like, what exactly was he doing while Daisy's friends and family were putting Victor on blast? Desperately looking to get attention on the case. Where was that bulldog spirit when it came to finding a murder suspect? I'm Jen Swan.
From London Audio, iHeartRadio, and executive producer Paris Hilton, this is My Friend Daisy, Episode 6, Armed and Dangerous. In June of 2021, Lugo's cell phone had been blowing up. Susie had been calling him just about every day to ask about her daughter's case. Daisy's friends and relatives were calling him too. But those weren't the only people calling about Daisy's murder.
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Chapter 6: How did Detective Lugo’s personal background influence his career and approach to policing?
It's nostalgia overload as Wilmer Valderrama and Freddy Rodriguez welcome another amigo to their podcast, Dos Amigos. Wilmer's friend and former That 70s Show castmate, Topher Grace, stops by the speakeasy for a two-part interview to discuss his career and reminisce about old times.
We were still in that place of like, what will this experience become? And you go, you're having the best time.
But it was like such a perfect golden time.
Listen to Dos Amigos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There are stories from all over the country about social media users accusing the wrong person of a crime. It even happened in Compton, the city where Daisy lived, about eight months before her friends took to social media to find her killer.
33-year-old Compton resident Darnell Hicks, a father to two girls and a youth football coach, feared for his safety and his family's after being wrongfully accused on social media of ambushing two L.A. County Sheriff's deputies Saturday. He saw a Be On The Lookout post with his face on it. He and his attorney say they have no idea who started these accusations.
There are stories of sleuths misidentifying someone as a victim or filming them without their consent because, you know, they thought they were a missing person.
I've seen this video come across my Facebook story, and I keep wondering, who is this girl? Where is she?
Why does she look so lost? There are stories about the way good intentions can become misguided search parties, like this one that Sarah Turney reported on.
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Chapter 7: What role did CODIS play in identifying a suspect in Daisy's murder?
Fortunately for us, Victor had been arrested years before for some sort of assault, and they took his DNA then, so he was in the system, the CODA system. Interesting.
Do you know what that assault was regarding?
I'm not sure. Okay.
You don't know whether it was related to Daisy?
No, I don't. I know they had had an incident before. There was an incident where the grandfather had told us that months before, he struck her with the skateboard in the head. And that's why there was a breakup for a time. And... When the investigators finally spoke to Daisy, she refused to cooperate with the investigation, and she refused to prosecute.
We did talk to an investigator on that case, and she signed a waiver dropping the case.
Daisy did?
Yes.
Okay. Were there ever any records of him having a history with domestic abuse besides this one assault charge?
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Chapter 8: What are the risks of social media vigilante investigations as seen in Compton?
He said that he believed Victor had fled to Mexico, but had since returned to the LA area. And that he'd recently been seen in homeless encampments all over town. These sightings, they were the result of all the calls that Lugo had been getting. Calls from people who had seen the TikToks and the Instagrams.
I know those kids met well. And I always thanked them for calling, and I would tell them, hopefully you'll see it on the news. And we had our plan. We had the surveillance teams out there still looking. I know people think that these cases are easy, and we just arrest them and...
It would be easy to prosecute, but if you don't have any evidence, and we, at the time, we didn't have any evidence other than the blood, and it took a while for us to get that. The CODIS hit. I believe we got the CODIS hit on March 13th or 14th.
Hang on. The CODIS hit came back in the middle of March? Just three weeks after Daisy's murder? I thought about all the weeks that passed after that, weeks when her friends and family were on pins and needles waiting for updates. I thought about Daisy's neighbors, watching their backs around the apartment complex, wondering who the killer was, not knowing he had any relation to his victim.
It was impossible not to wonder what might have happened if the detectives had put out Victor's name and photo after they first got this CODIS hit. What exactly was gained by waiting an additional three months to warn the public? And what was lost? I sat there in the conference room, dumbfounded.
I'd been working on the story for three years at that point in some form or another, and this piece of information about the date of the CODIS hit, it had totally eluded me up until then. I must have had this blank stare on my face when I heard it, because Lugo suddenly seemed self-conscious. There was this awkward silence, and then he said,
You still want to talk about the investigation? Yes, I do.
I just, yeah, when you say that, I know you've explained this to me before, but when you say the CODIS that you're saying that you were able to sample the DNA from the scene and match it with the DNA from his previous arrest. Is that right? Yes, yes. Okay, but then the public didn't know to look for Victor until I think June, the end of June you put out that report.
Right, right, right. We had surveillance teams looking for him. Okay. And...
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