Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Body found encased in concrete likely Las Vegas woman, 24

Man Accused of Murder Appears in Court

Wade Vandervort

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

Man Accused of Murder Appears in Court

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

The victim was lured into a house a few doors from hers in southwest Las Vegas. She was drugged, tied up and killed with an injection of “pool cleaner.”

Her remains were encased in a wooden structure filled with concrete and abandoned in the desert near the Nevada-California border off Interstate 15, a tipster told police, according to court documents.

Pending DNA confirmation, Clark County prosecutors and Metro Police documents have identified the victim as Esmeralda Gonzalez, who on May 31 was reported missing.

The victim was found Oct. 8, three days before the alleged perpetrator, Christopher Prestipino, was booked on counts of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy to commit murder.

An anonymous tip on July 18 started a months-long investigation that was outlined in the 17-page motion by the Clark County District Attorney's Office to increase Prestipino’s initial $100,000 bond. Judge Jeannie Hua denied the bond altogether on Tuesday.

Prestipino’s girlfriend, Lisa Mort, who is accused of harboring, hiding or helping a felony offender, was released this week on monitored house arrest, court records show.

Mort, 31, who was jailed before Prestipino’s arrest, told detectives she didn’t know anything about Gonzalez, the documents said.

However, the couple were caught on recorded jail calls in which they discussed passports and plans to flee, the documents said. Prestipino allegedly advised her not to talk to anyone and to wipe her cellphone data.

Click to enlarge photo

Esmeralda Gonzalez

Gonzalez, 24, had bouts with mental illness, so when her family found her home empty and ransacked, it wasn’t unusual. She’d done this before, police were told.

However, this time was different, as the young woman with blond hair didn’t have a phone on her. Her car was parked at her house, and the home’s front door was unlocked and the lights were on.

The day prior, Gonzalez was seen walking around the neighborhood in little clothing, appearing to be confused, court documents said.

In the early hours of May 31, neighbors caught Gonzalez trying to open the door to the wrong house, the documents said. Home security cameras spotted her heading toward Market Height Street, toward Prestipino’s house, the documents said.

Police allege Prestipino led her inside, gave her methamphetamine, and tied her up when her behavior turned “bizarre,” according to the documents. He didn’t know about Gonzalez’s mental illness, a tipster who allegedly had spoken to Prestipino told detectives.

The tipster said Gonzalez was killed by two people who strangled her and then injected her with a chemical, according to the documents, which were filed Tuesday by Clark County prosecutors.

Police identified the second person as Casandra Bascones — a woman they have since interviewed in Wisconsin — but she denied knowing anything about Gonzalez. Detectives described her as “defensive and argumentative.”

Bascones hasn’t been formally charged in the slaying, according to an online search of Las Vegas court records.

Police said they received a call from an associate of Bascones, claiming she called after the interview with detectives. Bascones told the associate she didn’t know the missing girl who detectives showed her a picture of, but had heard about a “sex fetish game that might have gone wrong” in Las Vegas, according to documents.

The associate told police that Bascones said Prestipino hadn’t allowed her in his house for a period of time. When she asked about the wood and bags of concrete she saw, he said he was building a kitchen island, according to the documents.

Metro received other tips tying Prestipino to Gonzalez’s disappearance. Detectives were also contacted by a probation officer in Oregon with information from a man he monitors in Pahrump.

The man explained how his ex-girlfriend told him about the missing woman and being summoned to Prestipino’s house in early June when he asked her for help. In an interview with Metro in mid-September, the woman expounded on what allegedly happened next.

According to her account provided in the documents:

She showed up in the morning to see a sealed-off freezer in a moving truck. In Prestipino’s garage, she spotted bags of cement and a wooden structure.

When she tried to peer in through a gap in the structure, she saw that it was filled with cement. He asked for help moving the box, but it was too heavy.

She said she rode with Prestipino in the moving truck. Sometime during the trip, the woman told police, Prestipino began “acting strange, and turned the radio up loud on static because he thought the FBI was listening.”

That’s when he opened up about Gonzalez, the woman told police.

He gave Gonzalez meth, she freaked out and threatened to call the cops to tell them he drugged her, the documents said. He panicked and tied her to a chair, and when he tried to untie her, she punched him.

He said he strangled her until she passed out, the documents said. For a moment, he allegedly said, he thought she was dead until she woke up.

The documents don’t indicate that Prestipino told the woman he killed Gonzalez.

The woman said they stopped by a trash bin in a commercial area of Las Vegas to discard the freezer, according to the documents. If anyone looked in “it would be bad,” Prestipino allegedly said.

Then they drove to a Strip hotel where Prestipino worked, the documents said. He’d said a co-worker would let him take a forklift off the property.

The friend wasn’t there, so they loaded a jack instead.

Back at his house in the 9000 block of Iron Cactus Avenue near Pebble and Fort Apache roads, the woman said, they struggled to lift the wooden box. Neither the jack nor a cable puller could lift it.

Prestipino, according to the woman, said he would summon someone from New York to help him.

Police said Prestipino’s phone records tracked him near the Nevada-California border on June 8, the documents said. He was back in Las Vegas several hours later, again renting a moving truck and buying five 60-pound bags of concrete from a hardware store.

He returned the truck two days later. It wasn’t clear when the human remains were abandoned or how they got there.