Town note
The county was named after Abraham Lincoln and was once the largest county in the United States, in land rather than in people.
about 0:06:01The story
On 8 July 2004 Sam Donaldson, the television news reporter, drove out to his Chávez Canyon Ranch in Lincoln County, New Mexico, because he had been unable to reach his ranch manager by telephone. He arrived with his wife at about 4.30 p.m. and found a large, dry reddish patch on the porch that was clearly blood, a similar spot on the kitchen floor, blood all over the laundry room, a broken pair of eyeglasses and trails showing where someone had been dragged. Donaldson, who had covered the war in Vietnam, called the sheriff's office. Deputies followed fresh backhoe tracks from the house down a ravine to a huge manure pile, where flies were clustered over one spot. A sergeant scraped the manure with a two-foot stick and uncovered a blood-soaked shirt and a human arm.
The family who lived in the ranch house had been through a great deal before that. Delbert Paul Posey was born in 1970 and married Carla Brust in 1988, just after he turned eighteen. Carla joined the Navy in 1994. In 1995 Paul's parents, J and Linda Posey, were shot to death at their ranch outside Roswell in what authorities called a murder-suicide. Paul married Sandy in 1998 and divorced her the same year, then married Tryone, a ranch woman about ten years older than him, who brought her daughter Marielea into the household. In April 2000 Carla obtained full custody and Paul gave up all parental rights. He told his aunt, 'I killed my mom,' and explained that he had wanted to sit in front with his new dad. In 2001 Donaldson hired Paul as caretaker of the ranch, and the family moved out to the property.
The abuse continued on the ranch. Ranch hands saw Paul throw a rock at the boy, hit him in the hand with a hay hook for not stacking bales quickly enough, slap him with a glove and threaten to cut off his balls if he popped the clutch in the pickup. A ranch worker, Alvera Lerma, saw cigarette burns on him. Paul slapped him a few times for not cleaning the horse stalls fast enough. He shot her twice in the head, the first round being snake shot. Marielea was close behind, and he shot her too, later saying he feared she would tell.
He dumped all three in the manure pile instead, then changed his clothes, drove his father's truck to the Hondo store for a can of Sprite and went to his friend's house near U.S. 70. He stayed there on the Monday and Tuesday nights, playing basketball, swimming in the river and setting off fireworks. When Donaldson found the blood, the bodies were still in the manure pile: Paul on top, Marielea in the middle and Tryone at the bottom, their limbs intertwined in a blanket. Marielea's left cowboy boot had come off and was lying on top of her. In the house deputies found an open notebook beside a computer keyboard with a note reading, 'Sorry coppers needed the kid to do the dirty work.'
The autopsies were carried out in Albuquerque. Tryone had been shot twice in the head, once with a bullet that lodged in the back of her skull and once with snake shot that left thirty-four pellets; Paul had a single gunshot wound near his right eye, and the bullet matched the one from his wife's brain; Marielea had two head wounds, one to the jaw that was not fatal and one through the eye that was. He said he was tired of being hit, that his father had choked him, woken him with a cattle prod and cold water, punched him and forced him to shoot his injured puppy. He said he had replaced the snake shot in the pistol with bullets but missed one. He told them where the gun was, in the river, and it was never recovered.
Defence psychologist Susan Cave said chronic depression, PTSD and years of physical and sexual abuse had overwhelmed his self-control. In 2022 Martha Burns published Blind Eye, a thinly fictionalised account.