A Strange Tip | Fifteen

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2:14That's 4hers.com slash 48hours. 4hers.com slash 48hours. Weight loss by HERS is not available everywhere. Prescription required. See website for full details. important safety information, and restrictions. Before we begin, just a trigger warning. The following episode contains references to graphic physical violence and suicide. Please listen with care. Hi, this is Corporal Ireland. Hello? This is Corporal Ireland. Who am I speaking with? I want to remain anonymous. Is that okay? For two months, police have relentlessly searched for the killer of Chip Northup and Claudia Moppin. Officers had interviewed the family and people who knew the couple.

3:06They'd set up a hotline to receive tips. But nothing had panned out. And then, late on the evening of June 15, 2013, 911 dispatch received an anonymous call. They transferred it to the Davis Police Department. Okay, what are you calling to report, sir? The double homicide that happened in April this year. To determine if the caller was a crank or not, Corporal Scott Allen asked the person to share details about the crime. And then he introduced the caller to Corporal Kirith Bresnik, who knew more about the continuing murder investigation. Would you mind kind of giving me the details of the information that you have?

4:03Yeah, the person that did it, he told me everything. He told me everything he did step by step.

4:13The caller clearly knew a lot about the murders and had information that the police hadn't shared with the public or even the victim's family. He told me he stabbed her in, like, the stomach area, like, 20 to 40 times. He was telling me he was just going at it. And, well, we said he did that, and she was screaming.

4:41For weeks, the authorities have been looking at friends, family, anyone who had crossed paths with Claudia and Chip, trying to piece together who might have brutally murdered this beloved couple. I grew up with this person. Here in Davis? Yes, and I've known him better than anyone else. But what this caller revealed was beyond anything they had imagined. The person the anonymous caller knew better than anyone else was named Daniel Marsh. He was 15 years old. He's a, I think the word is psychotic basically. He's the kind of person that likes to see something hurt.

5:35I'm 48 Hours correspondent Erin Moriarty, and this is 15 Inside the Daniel Marsh Murders. Episode 3, A Strange Tip.

5:56After spending hours on the phone with police, the clearly nervous anonymous caller finally agreed to come down to the police station to talk in person. Can I get some water? Yes, please. Okay. I just wanted to learn. Stay back. The teenage tipster was Alvaro Garibay. He arrived at the station early the following morning. There, police led him into a small room and offered to grab him some snacks. Alvaro was skinny, with long black hair that was pulled up into a ponytail. He wore dark framed glasses. A camera in the room captured Alvaro as he nervously rubbed his hands together and tapped on the table next to him until the officers came back into the room.

6:50How old are you? I'm 17.

6:55We just met. Do you mind that you spell me the name again? A-L-B-A-R-O. At first, investigators weren't sure what to make of Alvaro's phoned-in tip. Given his intimate knowledge of the crime, they had to consider the possibility that he himself could have been involved. So they read him his rights. So, the other right to have been found, anything to say, can be used against you in court of law. Yeah. You can't write your attorney before and during questioning, if you can't afford it, will be appointed to you. No cost. Do you understand that? Okay. Well, I don't really, but I've heard that tons of times on TV.

7:43I later sat down with Alvaro Garibay in 2018, five years after Chip and Claudia were killed. Alvaro was then 22 years old with a full beard. They thought you were involved. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, I mean, I retrospect, I totally get it. I mean, I'm like some random kid saying that this person committed a crime. I'm like, you know, kind of freaked out at the time. The story that he had shared with the police still haunted him. The story of his once close friendship with a teenage boy named Daniel Marsh. When I first met him, he was very shy and very quiet. Alvaro met Daniel in seventh grade at Holmes Junior High School.

8:35Both of them were lonely, self-described outcasts, who bonded over their mutual love of the heavy metal band Disturbed. Like, we just hung out a lot. What would you do when you'd hang out? Just like play video games and then just like watch music videos and go on YouTube. Like watch like the dumbest YouTube videos ever and we'd just sit there and laugh for like hours. You know, like those like, like, like can't breathe kind of laughing. Alvaro said that he and Daniel became fast friends, almost family. Daniel would talk to him about his rocky home life. When Daniel was 10 years old, his parents separated and his mother had an affair with a woman.

9:25When his parents divorced shortly after, Daniel said he felt abandoned. Alvaro told me that the situation infuriated Daniel, who over time directed his anger at the woman that his mother was involved with. He hated her. Like, because he would tell me that I know this woman was involved in my parents' divorce, and I just want to, like, strangle her to death. I remember him saying that to me. Did you think he was serious when he talked about wanting to kill her? No. I mean, I knew, okay, well, I kind of empathize because I'm like, okay, I guess if this one, if there's a person, an individual that was responsible for my parents' divorce, I would hate them too, you know?

10:10But enough to kill them? No, no. Well, he didn't kill her, but, you know. No, but he talked about it. Talked about it, yeah. The conversations disturbed Alvaro, but he remained close with Daniel. In high school, they smoked marijuana together, played guitar, and watched YouTube videos. But eventually, Alvaro said, Daniel started spending hours watching very disturbing content. Videos of torture and beheadings. As I warned you earlier, what you're about to hear is disturbing. There was this one torture video that really hit me, that made me feel more uncomfortable and more unsettled, which was a video of this person drowning somebody.

11:03They have a video of somebody with a scarf on their face and just putting them under a tub and just drowning them. Alvaro was upset by what he saw, but he said that Daniel seemed to enjoy the videos. He just sat there, you know, just kind of like, oh, what's going on? I think like fascinated by it. When we spoke, Alvaro explained that he thought Daniel's interest in violence and hurting people was just a way to de-stress. Not something he'd try to replicate. That's how I took it. I never thought in reality this person was actually going to go do something about it, you know.

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14:56After Daniel's parents divorced, things became even more tense between Daniel, his parents, and his mother's new partner. According to Alvaro, Daniel, then 14 years old, became fixated with his weight. How thin did he get? I mean, was it really a problem? He got really thin. I think I have a couple photos of him and I hanging out, and he looks like bones. Daniel would starve himself for extended periods of time, and he regularly talked about death. And was he taking medications? He was taking antidepressants. Did he talk about what was going on in his head and his thoughts? He would tell me a lot about suicide.

15:45Daniel was sent to various therapists, according to Alvaro, and doctors tried to deal with his behavioral and health issues. In 2012, Daniel told a school guidance counselor that he fantasized about killing people. The counselor called police, who hospitalized Daniel because of the danger he posed to himself and others. When Daniel would go through these depressive episodes, writing became an outlet for him. And he was like, yeah, I've been doing a lot of writing lately. And I was like, oh, cool. What are you writing? I was like, uh, just stuff. And I was like, oh, okay. Like lyrics? And I was like, nope.

16:27I was like, oh, okay. The police had shared with me pages copied from Daniel's personal journal from this time period. And I showed them to Alvaro. You want me to go through this? Yeah, tell me. Because this is like crazy stuff. Well, tell me why you say it's crazy stuff.

16:47Because it's like, it's just random streams of consciousness. What the hell is this? Hard to read at all. It looks like someone with a gun. Yeah, yeah. In his mouth. I pulled out one page that Alvaro had already seen. Daniel himself had shown it to him. The page was covered with drawings of skulls mixed with references to serial killers Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer. And song lyrics about sex and murder. This is kind of scary when you look at it, isn't it? Oh my gosh. Okay, so when I first saw this, I didn't think too much about it. Now, I'm like 22, looking at this. It blows my mind that I, like, didn't even, like, think about what, like, could happen.

17:43Another page was covered in expletives. There's one that's, like, kill, kill, kill.

17:56Daniel seemed able to keep much of that anger bottled inside. In high school, he and Alvaro dated girls, and they all started hanging out together as a group. But then, over time, Daniel's girlfriend also observed troubling behavior. She called Alvaro. I remember her just being, like, kind of panicky and just very, like, I don't think Dan's okay. You know, like, I think he's, like, messed up or, like, he's got, like, something going on where he's, like, he just, like, snapped at me. Some of Daniel's journal entries involved his girlfriend, and these ones didn't just talk vaguely about murder. They showed just how seriously Daniel was thinking about killing.

18:48Okay. Wow. What is that? This is him planning to kill her ex-boyfriend. But he keeps writing, I am ready.

19:05In his original interview with police, Alvaro described the weekend of April 13, 2013. It was the weekend of Alvaro's 17th birthday, the same weekend that Chip and Claudia were murdered. Alvaro spent the time playing video games. He went to Guitar Center with his family. His friend Daniel didn't join him, but he did invite Alvaro to hang out that Sunday to talk about something important.

19:43He said, I want to tell you something important. Yeah, and he told me he had an interesting night and he wanted to talk about it. Alvaro said Daniel wanted to tell him about the interesting night he had had hours earlier. Like, he started off by telling me that he killed two people, and then I told him I don't want to hear about it, I want to know about it. According to Alvaro, Daniel said he killed two people. Alvaro didn't know what to make of what Daniel just told him, and he didn't want to hear any more. so he left but Alvaro told me that the next day Daniel still wanted to talk to him and then on Monday I go to school go to lunch and I sit down with my friend group Dan comes up to me walks up to me and he's like hey man I need to talk to you and I'm like oh okay what about and he's like just come with me and then like brings me up to the side by a locker room and he's like hey man I made the news And I'm like, okay, what do you mean by that?

20:53You know, like, what do you mean you made the news? Oh, okay, well, I'll just talk to you about it later.

21:01Later on in social studies class, someone told Alvaro about a story they had read in the newspaper. It was about a double homicide that had taken place over the weekend. And I was like, oh, snap. All right. And then that's when everything kind of just like turns into a movie. Alvaro began connecting the dots. Later, he received a text from Daniel to come over to his house. And then when I go to his room, like, you know, like I just walk in. He's sitting on his, you know, rolling chair by his computer. and I sat on the side of his bed and then he starts telling me, he's like, so I actually did it.

21:53And then I don't like talking about this too much. I know, but tell me what you can. Just describe what he told you he had done. So when he gave me basically, I'd say like a rundown of what he did.

22:12And this is what Daniel told him. that on Saturday, instead of attending Alvaro's birthday celebrations, Daniel had put on all-black clothing and a ski mask over his face. He told Alvaro that he had grabbed his mother's six-inch hunting knife and then left his home in the darkness of the night. You showed me the knife, the weapon. His shoes? Yeah, his shoes. Daniel had thought of everything Alvaro said, even wrapping the bottom of his boots in duct tape so he wouldn't leave any footprints. In his rundown, he told me how he broke into the house and then the entire act of killing those two people, like step by step, like every move.

23:08Did it seem real at that point? No, no. Everything just didn't make any sense.

23:18And why did he do this? Why did he tell you he was doing this? I have no idea. I honestly, I think about that a lot. Did he seem proud of what he had done? Yeah. Oh, yeah. He seemed very, like, content and, you know, took a lot of, I mean, it sounded like he took a lot of pleasure out of it. Did you get the impression he was kind of bragging to you about what he had just done? Yeah, he was chuckling. He was laughing about, you know, putting inanimate objects in their body. The details were so upsetting to Alvaro, so difficult to absorb, he didn't know how to respond to Daniel's story. I felt like throwing up.

24:02I felt like I couldn't feel anything. I felt very numb. And I just walked out. My head's just running, spinning. and then I'm like looking at the door and I'm like, oh my gosh, like I need to get out of here. And like, I had this feeling like the police are going to break in here and I'm like shaking.

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25:29Alvaro had told me that he was shaking and he felt like throwing up after hearing Daniel confess to the crimes. But still, Alvaro didn't immediately go to the police. You knew he had just killed two people. Why didn't you tell anybody? I don't know. But you knew he might hurt somebody else. It was just like one of those things that you just kind of... I just wasn't facing it. So help me understand why not. What? The two of you know, both of you, you both know. Well, okay, you're in high school. How do you approach this? You call the police. Yeah, well, I mean, obviously that's easier said than done.