Canyon of secrets

John Larson Correspondent

CENTRAL NEW MEXICO - It's a land of hard work, sage and bitterbrush. Ranch country is where the sky embraces everything like a blessing, but the wind, the wind can scream like a curse— wild, sudden, twisting, violent.

It’s not unlike a story that blew down from the ranchlands two years ago, and battered almost everyone.

The sheriff says it’s a cold-blooded execution.

Even the ranchowner, ABC newsman Sam ranch owner said he couldn’t understand how it happened on his land, to people he knew.

In pictures, the family looked happy: Paul Posey, the dad, Donaldson’s ranch foreman; Tryone, his third wife; 13-year old Marilea Schmeed, Tryone’s daughter from a former marriage; and 14-year-old Cody Posey, Paul’s son from his first marriage.

But family pictures, of course, never tell family secrets... they could never explain the grisly scene Sam Donaldson came upon two days after the fourth of July 2004. He immediately called the sheriffs, who arrived quickly.

John Larson, Dateline correspondent: What did you see when you went up to the ranch?

Sheriff Tom Sullivan, Lincoln County, New Mexico: The blood on the porch, blood in the kitchen, blood in the living room.  And blood smears in the kitchen.  And blood chunks of hair on the porch. It was a crime scene: a violent crime scene, obviously.

Larson: Now were you thinking that the whole family had been lost?

Sullivan: Well, we didn’t know. We didn’t know how many people lived there...

Sullivan’s detectives lit the ranch house up like a Hollywood Western and began working into the night.

They had a grisly crime scene, but no bodies. Then one of Sullivan’s deputies noticed some backhoe tracks.

Sullivan: So then, decided to follow the back hoe tracks.  And they went away from the house, down around some bluffs, and to an area where there was a compost pile.

Larson: Now this is a manure pile?

Sullivan: Manure pile.  Yeah.  And so, he just happened to notice that there was a lot of flies buzzing around one spot. We went up there with a stick, and just kind of moved some things.  We moved some of the dirt around.  Moved some of the manure around.  And you could see the back of somebody’s belt and a pair of Levis and a shirt.

By morning, in temperatures over 100 degrees, deputies uncovered three partially decomposed bodies:  Paul Posey, the father; his wife, Tryone, and his 13-year-old step-daughter, Marilea.

But the boy, Paul’s son, 14-year-old Cody?  What happened to him? Where was he?

Turns out, at the same time deputies were uncovering the bodies, Cody was down the road, playing basketball with his friends Leo and Gilbert Salcido.

Gilbert Salcido, Cody's friend: We were up all night shooting fireworks.  We were just having a blast all night. We just had fun non-stop.

Leo Salcido: I’ve never seen that side of Cody, really.  I’ve never seen him so happy.

It was a full 2 days after the killings that the seemingly innocent horseplay came to an abrupt end.

Leo Salcido:  Someone knocked on the door and it was a cop.

Sheriff’s deputies began interrogating 14-year-old Cody Posey, the beginning of an interrogation that would soon worry the two adults present, including Cody’s friends’ uncle—ranch hand, Eli Salcido.

Eli Salcido, ranch hand: That’s when I went and started asking questions to the sheriff about why, what are they doing, why doesn’t he have a lawyer. What are they doing interrogating him without a lawyer? They just told me, “He’s not being interrogated.”

Yet, investigators soon took the 14-year-old to a safe house, a room for interviewing children, where two officers, one male and one female, began their questioning.

Deputy sheriff (at the interview, on tape): Ok, you feel comfortable talking to me and Melissa like we did before?

Cody’s friend’s father was with him.

Deputy sheriff : So the argument starts in the kitchen?

Cody tells several versions of a fight he’d had with his father, a fight about how best to clean the horse corral.

Cody Posey: And, uh, he got all mad and said if it wasn’t illegal he would knock my head off and roll it across the floor.

Then, a little more than an hour after the interview began...

Deputy: Okay, now I’m sitting here and I’m watching you, Cody.   And you got tears in your eyes, and I need to know why. So what did you do, Cody?

Cody Posey: I tried getting rid of him.

Deputy: How?

Cody Posey: Get him off this planet ‘cuz it would be better here without him.

Deputy: So what did you do, Cody?

Cody Posey: I shot him.

Deputy: With what?

Cody Posey: .38 special.

Deputy: Where did you shoot him?

Cody Posey: In the head.

In a calm voice, Cody tells how he killed his family, one by one.

Deputy: What about your stepmother?

Cody Posey: I shot her too. Because she was mean.  She hit me and stuff.

Deputy: What about Marilea? What did you do to her?

Cody Posey: Shot her too so she wouldn’t go tell or nothing.

Deputy: Where did you get the gun, Cody?

Cody Posey: Marilea had it in her saddle bag for shooting snakes.

Cody explained how before the shooting began, he had carefully emptied the gun of its snakeshot, and reloaded it with more lethal bullets.

At this point Cody’s friends’ father interrupts the interview.

Eli Salcido: Don’t you think we need a lawyer, before they question you anymore, or something.

Deputy: It’s up to you guys, it’s up to you.

Salcido: Because he’s still a minor.

But by then, the deputies already had what they needed:  a full-blown confession.

Cody Posey:  I regret it. 

Deputy: You regret it? Why?

Cody Posey: It was the wrong thing to do. I miss ‘em even though they were mean.

It seemed like an open-and-shut case: Cody had confessed and there was even a videotape. But the picture of what really happened on the ranch began to change quickly.

And, in the rising wind, there was soon the sound of voices— many voices telling stories of the darkest violence, whispers of what really happened out on that ranch in the brush pasture, where only the wind bore witness.

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