Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Police: Suspect in death of woman found in concrete led cops to body

Man Accused of Murder Appears in Court

Wade Vandervort

Christopher Prestipino appears at the Las Vegas Justice Court, downtown, Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2019.

Click to enlarge photo

Casandra Garrett

Months after a Las Vegas model vanished from her southwest valley neighborhood, a pair of Metro Police detectives arrived in Milwaukee to interview a woman in search of clues about the disappearance.

But on that September visit, Casandra Garrett, 40, denied knowing the whereabouts of Esmeralda Gonzalez, a UNLV graduate with a social media presence of hundreds of thousands of followers, according to court documents.

It would be exactly three weeks later — on Oct. 8 — when Garrett, described as “defensive” and “argumentative,” was back in Las Vegas, leading detectives to a gruesome discovery, police said.

In the Mojave Desert, near the Nevada-California border, investigators found a wooden structure filled with hardened concrete and the remains of the missing woman, according to police. Gonzalez was 24. 

Garrett was later arrested in Milwaukee. She and Christopher Prestipino, 46, have since been charged on counts of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy to commit murder.

Garrett — who also uses the last name Bascones, among other aliases — is now locked up at the Clark County Detention Center.

Prestipino posted a $500,000 bond on Nov. 6, but his release was delayed and he remained in shackles as he appeared in front of Las Vegas Justice Court Judge Douglas Herndon Wednesday.

The detention center department — run by Metro — that deals with house arrest had reservations about monitoring Prestipino. But the department expressed no further roadblocks about doing so when questioned by Herndon, who then reaffirmed the release on high-electronic monitoring, which was originally ordered by a separate judge.

In the hearing, prosecutors brought up jail recordings of Prestipino talking to potential future co-defendants, which his attorney, William Terry, strongly denied. Terry did admit there was a call with Lisa Mort, who’s been charged as an accessory. But Terry said the call was not inappropriate.

“It has come to our attention that the house arrest officers have informed the court of certain concerns they have regarding this defendant’s conditions of release,” Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson said in a statement this week. “We share those concerns.”

However, as things stood after Wednesday’s hearing, Prestipino was set to walk out of jail at any moment. His trial, in which Clark County prosecutors aren’t seeking the death penalty, was scheduled for April 20.

According to Garrett’s arrest report released this week, Garrett told an ex-boyfriend about Gonzalez’s demise, which he then related to two other people, including his half-sister.

Both those people spoke to detectives.

Prestipino and Garrett were roommates in a house in Gonzalez’s neighborhood, police said. The victim, who had a history of mental illness, had been acting erratically before vanishing, family told detectives.

Gonzalez appeared disoriented in the moments before she was last seen in late May, police said. She even tried to enter the wrong house in her neighborhood, which was caught on surveillance video, court documents said.

The people Garrett allegedly spoke to told police she and Prestipino picked Gonzalez up and that the young woman was acting OK at first, according to court documents.

Earlier in the investigation, an anonymous tipster told police that the suspects had given Gonzalez methamphetamine and that she’d freaked out and threatened to call 911, according to court documents. 

Gonzalez wanted to leave, the people said. “Chris got scared” because he thought she was going to call police, according to the arrest report. That’s when the suspects “beat the victim, but she didn’t die.”

It wasn’t clear how long Gonzalez was held against her will or when she was killed.

Garrett allegedly told her ex-boyfriend: “You wouldn’t believe how hard the human life will hold onto life,” according to the arrest report.

“Towards the end of the incident (Garrett) told (Prestipino), ‘I got this’ and shot the victim up with a syringe of muriatic acid, which finally killed her,” according to the arrest report.

The anonymous tipster had also told police that the suspects injected the victim with pool cleaner, according to court documents.  

Records show Prestipino rented a moving truck in July, and GPS tracked the vehicle near the desert where the body was ultimately found.

According to a third-hand account cited in Garrett’s arrest report, Garrett and Prestipino went to the desert and pushed the concrete-filled structure out in the desert.

Garrett’s attorney did not immediately return a message requesting comment.