102 - The Murder of Megan Ruiz

Shaun On July three, twenty twenty four, two gunshots rang out inside the crosswinds apartment in central Las Vegas. Metro officers responded and were told a story about a woman in the middle of a manic episode. A woman who had supposedly attacked her boyfriend with a fork. But as we've seen in so many cases, that version of events was not even close to the whole story.

John What really happened involved a long pattern of domestic violence calls to that same apartment. And once detectives started untangling Jimmy Ramirez's account of what happened. Almost every piece of it started falling apart.

Shaun Hi, and welcome to Sins and Survivors, a Las Vegas true crime podcast where we focus on cases that deal with domestic violence as well as missing persons and unsolved cases. I'm your host, Sean.

John And I'm your co-host, John.

Shaun Before we get to this week's main case, we have another missing person story from the Las Vegas Metro cold case Database. William Sky Pilgrim has been missing for more than five years, since March twelve, twenty twenty. I don't know if you remember this was right before the Covid lockdown, but that day it poured rain in Las Vegas enough to set a new record for rainfall. The previous record on March twelfth was zero point two four inches, which was set back in nineteen seventy three. But rainfall total for March twelve, twenty twenty reached zero point seven seven inches, shattering that previous record, and all of that rain fell in only four hours, which caused massive flash flooding in the valley. Underneath the surface of Las Vegas, there is a network of storm drain tunnels. It's absolutely massive. It's six hundred miles of tunnels and storm drains, and there are an estimated one thousand five hundred individuals at any time Living down there, making their homes down there within that tunnel system underground. It's shady and it's cooler, and it protects people from the extreme heat and the sun. And as you all know, this is a desert and we don't get a lot of rain here. But when we do, those storm drains flood and people get swept away in the water. Sometimes people have enough notice to get out of the tunnels to safety. But on March twelve, twenty twenty, the water rose too quickly. One resident said it sounded like a freight train. Intersections were flooded, cars were stranded, and at least five people were swept away in that rushing water. That evening, William Sky Pilgrim was in the tunnels near Flamingo and University Center Drive with his partner of twenty years, Wendy Cox. Wendy said that they decided to quickly tie their arms together so they wouldn't get separated when the water carried them off. When the wall of water hit them, the current carried them out to The Wash on Flamingo Road near the Cambridge Community Centre. Wendy felt the rope get caught and snap. She grabbed on to some wire fencing that makes up the retaining wall around the wash, and she was able to pull herself out. But Sky was gone and he has not yet been found. The police searched the area that night and the next day with no sign of sky. I took a look at some of the storm drain maps, and I estimate that Wendy was carried about a half a mile, maybe three quarters of a mile, in that rushing water. Two of their friends are confirmed to have died in the flood. Larry Walker, aged twenty six, was found dead the next day. And Jeremy Hogg. He was forty years old. He was found deceased on March twentieth, twenty twenty. Wendy told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that the flood plays over and over in her mind. She said that previous times it had rained, the flooding wasn't that bad in the tunnels, so she and Sky tried to wait out the March twelfth storm, which of course is a decision she deeply regrets. She's made missing person flyers for Sky, and she's walked the edges of the wash searching for him or any piece of his clothing or his jewelry. But that was back at the height of the pandemic and during lockdown. At that time, public officials were overwhelmed. The community was staying indoors and avoiding each other, and it was hard even then, to feel that the search wasn't hopeless and even the best of circumstances unhoused people get overlooked and ignored. So during the international crisis of the pandemic, no additional resources were directed toward finding Sky. William Sky Pilgrim disappeared when he was forty four years old. Today, he would be forty nine. He's described as a black man, five feet, eight inches tall, two hundred and ten pounds. He is bald. His ears are pierced, and he has a tattoo of the phrase we the People on his arm. When the storm hit, he was wearing a black jacket, a gray Nike shirt, black echo jogging pants, earrings and three silver rings on his fingers. If you have any information about Sky, please call Metro at seven oh two eight two eight two nine oh seven, and the short link to his profile on Namus is going to be at.

John Our main case today concerns Megan Ruiz. Megan was born March twenty fifth, nineteen ninety two, right here in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her parents are named Shawna and Richard Goodney. She had three children, the youngest being only a year old at the time she died, and she had two siblings named Christopher Goodney and Kirsten. Andrea and her grandparents are Nancy and James Franklin. She grew up here in Las Vegas, and she graduated from Basic High School in twenty ten. After that, she got a degree in cosmetology and she was pursuing her passion in that field. Her favorite movie was The Nightmare Before Christmas, and she loved everything that Tim Burton ever made. She was incredibly kind to all her friends and made lasting impressions with so many people. She enjoyed many forms of artistic expression, including drawing, writing, poetry, and engaging in terrible puns. Megan met Jimmy Ramirez on a dating app, and they moved in shortly thereafter, and they had been together for about seven to eight years. They lived at the Crosswinds Apartments at forty three fifty five South Jones Boulevard, apartment twenty nine, just south of West Flamingo Road. It's not the best area in the world, and it's one of those places that advertises a ninety nine dollars move in. I looked into the apartment complex a little bit, and if you look at the reviews, it's pretty clear that the people there are not super happy with the way it's maintained. And they say things like the maintenance people never come. People are very critical of the apartment as a whole.

Shaun Do people complain about safety?

John They do actually, yeah. One of the things people often complain about is their cars and apartments being broken into. That's a big problem. People move there because.

Shaun It's affordable.

John But it's not a safe place to live. So it seemed like Megan and Jimmy had a really troubled relationship to police. Been called out to their apartment several times, according to detectives in the past because of disputes. And I dug in a little bit and it seemed like most of those were domestic battery. According to the records, Jimmy Ramirez was never arrested, but there were definitely a lot of times when they were called out. And that reminds me about what we're going to mention at the end, about how these cases seem to be treated as just a family matter, kind of the way they were thirty or forty years ago, but that's still happening. It's only after something horrific happens that the authorities start to take these things seriously.

Shaun So you said Jimmy was never arrested. Was Megan ever arrested for anything? No. Involving the two of them? No. So no arrests at all?

John Nope. None that I could find. Okay. The only information I found about Jimmy's background was the fact that he was married previously. He was married for about nine years previously. I found his divorce decree and child custody case. And also a child support case. The other thing that I will mention, but I don't have any proof of this, was just in the record. It was alleged that Megan told Jimmy at some point that she had some form of mental illness. We can't really verify that. We don't know if she actually did have a mental illness, what it was, or if she told him that, or if that's just something he said as a part of his conversation with the police. It started with Ramirez calling nine one one at about four thirty p m. He told Metro that he had shot his girlfriend Megan twice. Police responded and detained Ramirez. Megan had been shot twice in the upstairs landing of her home. She was transported to the University Medical Center and was unfortunately pronounced dead about an hour later. They also discovered that Megan's one year old was in a playpen downstairs. Initially, Ramirez told police that he shot his girlfriend because she attacked him with a fork. By the time he got to the actual interview, his story had changed quite a bit. Ramirez told police that he got home around three thirty p m from Albertsons, where he worked in the meat department, and that Megan had wanted to be intimate with him and that he told her no and went upstairs to take a shower. He is claiming that when he told her that, she got enraged and started yelling about their relationship and started following him upstairs. He claims that she broke their baby gate and picked up one of the sharp pieces of the baby gate, and was banging it against the wall and stabbing it into the wall and being violent with it. He claimed that he ran into the bedroom, grabbed his gun, a three hundred fifty seven Magnum, told her to stop twice, and when she kept coming at him, he shot her twice.

Shaun She was coming at him with the baby gate. First he said it was a fork. Now he's saying it was a baby gate, right? Like a broken piece.

John In the official interview, he said that there was a broken piece of baby gate. It was a wooden baby gate. So it was like a sharp.

Shaun Like a.

John Stick? Yeah, like a sharp stick. And he said that she was coming after him with it and that he told her to stop, and she did not. And then he shot her because he feared for his life.

Shaun And you said that he ran upstairs?

John Yes. The whole thing is a little bit confusing because they lived in a two storey apartment, and he claimed that he ran past her into the bedroom and then got his gun and then came out. But he could not explain to the police why he ran upstairs into the bedroom, when he could have also just left the apartment. He also didn't explain why they didn't call the police for help, because they had called the police a couple of times before for their domestic disturbances. He also said that he didn't call the police because he couldn't find his phone, but it turned out his phone was in his pocket. When police later asked him if he remembered mentioning the fork attack, he said in the official interview that he didn't remember saying that, and he also claimed at that time that Ruiz had no weapon, although he was claiming she had pieces of the broken baby gate. So it's really unclear exactly what happened in the moment.

Shaun Was he hurt in any way? Did they fight? Did she hit him or.

John You would expect that if this is what went down, that he would have some injuries on his body. But it turns out that he had no injuries except a small scratch. And he also never claimed that Meghan had hit him in any way. He said that he was just afraid for his life.

Shaun And he wasn't afraid about the the little kids being in the house. He didn't have anything to say about the baby.

John He didn't have anything to say about that. He was charged with voluntary manslaughter and use of a deadly weapon, and he was also charged with child abuse, neglect or endangerment because he discharged his weapon with a one year old in the house. Obviously, in the preliminary hearing, which took place July twenty fourth, twenty twenty four. Um, this is how they got to the open murder charge from the hearing document. And what they said was the state believes that this is first degree murder and that it was premeditated, willful and deliberate because the defendant left his one year old child downstairs, ran up the stairs into the danger zone, decided to run past the danger, grabbed a firearm and nothing else. Didn't close the door, didn't call nine one one, didn't do anything else other than grab a lethal weapon. And then when he's more than an arm's length away, instead of running back down the stairs, he made the willful, premeditated decision to shoot Miss Ruiz not once, but twice, as she was sliding down the bedroom door.

Shaun So they looked at the fact that she had no no deadly weapon, nothing that could have hit him from any kind of distance, nothing that could have broken through a closed door. He had access to his phone. He could have gone right back out the door to call for help, but instead he chose to go past her when she was in this agitated state that he's claiming right into their bedroom to get this weapon and didn't just point it. Close the door. Tell her to go downstairs. Not even, like, threaten her with the gun. Just went ahead and shot her twice right there on the stairs on the landing.

John And that's where they got the first degree murder charge.

Shaun Because he had a lot of time to think about what he was doing.

John Yes. And they had already called the police several times, too. So it wasn't like they were unfamiliar with the process of how to call the police when there was a domestic disturbance.

Shaun And he said she didn't have a weapon, so he wasn't afraid that there was another gun in the house that he could have got. She could have gotten. That's right. And there was nothing that you saw in the record in the history because you said she was never arrested, but also he was never arrested anytime the police came out to the house. But there was nothing about her ever pointing a gun at him in the past or stabbing him or something like that.

John There's nothing about the gun in the past. Before that, like there was never an incident with a gun before this. Okay, possible they just had the gun for protection because they lived in not the safest area, so that makes sense. The trial took place in September of twenty twenty five, and Ramirez ended up taking a plea agreement. On September twenty nine, twenty twenty five, he pled guilty to one count of voluntary manslaughter, which carried a sentence of between four and ten years, and then he got a deadly weapon enhancement for an additional four to ten years consecutive. So we're at eight to twenty years. And then another count for child endangerment, which was two to six years concurrent with count one. So the total effective sentence is somewhere between eight and twenty years. And he has four hundred and ninety nine days of credit for time served. He was given that sentence on November thirteen, twenty twenty five, just a few weeks after the hearing started. With the plea agreement for all that happened, he got somewhere between eight and twenty years. He was at CDC for a while. But as you and I noticed when we were researching this, we were wondering why he hadn't been transferred to prison yet, but really, it wasn't. It wasn't that long ago. It was only about a month ago that he was sentenced. And it took, I guess, several weeks for the transfer to come through. But just two weeks ago, he was sentenced to High Desert State Prison in November.

Shaun But there was nothing that was ever alleged about him being actually afraid of her.

John There was nothing about that. He didn't allege that.

Shaun But there was nothing that you read that his attorney was saying that they didn't try and make much of a case for self-defense. It doesn't sound like.

John No, it didn't look like they were going to be able to do that. So I'm guessing that's why he took the plea. We'll continue the discussion about that in the Swing Shift episode. But at the end of the day, Jimmy Ramirez received a sentence of somewhere between eight and twenty years for killing Megan Ruiz and endangering their one year old child. Realistically, with credit for time served and good behavior, he's likely to serve far closer to the lower end of that range. And that's for taking the life of a thirty two year old mother of three, someone with a family, a future, a future. A creative spirit. A community that loved her. And it's a sentence to me that feels incredibly light. And like I said, we'll go into more about that in the swing shift, about some other cases that we were reminded of with this.

Shaun And I know our listeners, you know this. We talk about this way too often. This isn't unusual. We see it over and over again in these domestic violence homicides. There are warning signs. There's repeated disputes. Arguments are escalating. There's attempts by the victim to try and keep the peace. But until the violence becomes fatal, like you said, it's being treated as this private matter, something that the two people can work out among themselves, despite all the evidence to the contrary. And afterward, after the unthinkable, horrible things happen. The system tries to fit that tragedy into whatever charge they can negotiate voluntary manslaughter. These plea deals, none of it captures the years of danger that someone was living in. Someone like Megan was was living in danger.

John She deserved much more than the justice she received. Her children deserved more, her family deserved more, and stories like hers are a reminder of how urgently we need better recognition of that intimate partner violence, that domestic violence, better intervention, better protection long before someone loses their life. Because what happens here happens everywhere.

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Shaun If you or someone you know is affected by domestic violence or need support, please reach out to local resources or the National Domestic Violence Hotline. A list of resources is available on our website. Survivors. Comm. Sins and survivors. A Las Vegas true crime podcast is researched, written, and produced by your host, Sean and John. The information shared in this podcast is accurate at the time of recording. If you have questions, concerns or corrections, please email us. Links to source material for this episode can be found on our website. sinsandsurvivors.com

Speaker 3 views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast creators, hosts and their guests. All individuals are innocent until proven guilty. This content does not constitute legal advice. Listeners are encouraged to consult with legal professionals for guidance.