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Sep 15, 2014 · Norma Patricia Esparza, 40, entered the plea in Orange County Superior Court in exchange for a six-year prison sentence and agreement to testify in the trial of two other suspects in the killing ...
Jul 16, 2016 · Norma Patricia Esparza, 41, was one of five people accused of helping in the kidnapping and slaying of Gonzalo Ramirez, a 24-year-old insulation installer who was hacked to death and dumped by the ...
Jul 15, 2016 · Diane Tran, 47, Gries, 45, and 41-year-old Esparza negotiated plea deals. Tran walked out of court having already served four years. "God knows I would never have willingly been part of any murder.
- A Body by The Side of The Road
- “I Thought He Was A Nice Guy”
- “You Were A Victim”
- The Night of The Murder
- “A Very Sophisticated Defendant”
- The Case Against Gianni Van
- “Shutting Down Was The only Way to Deal”
- “What If”
- Two Victims
On the morning of April 16, 1995, a passerby reported a body, wrapped in strips of blue towel and lying by the side of the road, to the police in Irvine, Calif. It was a young man, dead. Bloody gashes covered his head, shoulders, back, and arms. His skull was cracked and two of his fingers hung from one hand, nearly severed. Forensic examiners late...
Norma Patricia Esparza, a 20-year-old sophomore at Pomona College, was home in Santa Ana for the weekend when she met Ramirez. It was March 25, a Saturday night, three weeks before he was killed. Patricia had gone to El Cortez with her sister and a friend from school. Ramirez was there and asked her to dance. At the end of the evening, he asked for...
On May 24, the day after seeing Ramirez’s phone bill with “Paty” scrawled on the back, investigator Ben Meza asked Ramirez’s roommate, Eloe Silva, if he knew who Paty was, the record shows. Silva said that a few weeks before the murder, toward the end of March, Ramirez had come home and told him that he’d been in the dorm room of a girl by that nam...
Until police handcuffed her at Logan Airport, Esparza says she had no idea that she was a wanted fugitive. Held for two months in an Orange County jail, she finally told police her version of the events leading up to Ramirez’s murder. Esparza was then released on $300,000 in bail and allowed to go home to France. In December 2012, prosecutors in Or...
How much responsibility does Patricia Esparza bear for the death of Gonzalo Ramirez? Does her fear and paralysis excuse her, or should she spend years in prison for failing to save the man who raped her? I’ve read thousands of pages of law enforcement records in this case and spoken to as many of the people involved as I could find. Esparza is not ...
When investigator Ben Meza interviewed Gianni Van on June 13, 1995, five days after he talked to Esparza, Van backed up her account. He and Esparza had dated a few times a month, beginning the previous summer and continuing through February. In the first half of April, he’d gone to see her at Pomona and could tell that she was upset. When he asked ...
Esparza was born in a village without running water in southern rural Mexico. When she was five, she moved to Santa Ana with her mother; her older sister, Juana; and her younger brother, Rodrigo. There they joined her father, who’d gone to the U.S. earlier to work in a factory. Esparza has two other younger brothers who were born after the move. As...
In 2010, a pair of new Santa Ana detectives, Dean Fulcher and Frank Fajardo, launched a new chapter in the investigation of Ramirez’s murder. When I emailed Fajardo to ask why, he put me in touch with the public affairs officer for the Orange County Police, who would only say the police had “new leads” at the time. But I can’t find any new evidence...
In the local press, prosecutors have made Esparza sound untrustworthy by saying that “she wants to try this case in the media,” as well as insinuating that she is skilled at playing on emotions. The Los Angeles Times has pointed out that “according to court records, she has changed some details of her story” since she was arrested.*I asked Mancilla...
- Emily Bazelon
Aug 12, 2021 · Investigators were baffled by the brutal murder until they found Esparza’s phone number scrawled on one of Ramirez’s phone bills and reached out to the Pomona College sophomore. Norma Esparza is a Santa Ana woman who made her way from the barrio to elite schools and became a college professor in France.
- Jill Sederstrom
- 2 min
Jul 15, 2016 · Norma Patricia Esparza did not speak during her sentencing Friday in Orange County Superior Court. The 41-year-old pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter nearly two years ago in a deal with ...
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Who killed Patricia Esparza?
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Who is Patricia Esparza?
Did Esparza plan Ramirez's murder?
Nov 23, 2013 · That’s the question being asked about psychology professor Norma Patricia Esparza, who was taken into custody in Orange County, Calif., last week for the 1995 murder of Gonzalo Ramirez.
