Ep 15. Cold Case: Nusinaida Ramos

In March 1997, Nusinaida Ramos was found brutally beaten to death inside her Yonkers apartment. There were no signs of forced entry or robbery, leaving investigators to believe she knew her killer. For more than two decades, the case remained unsolved until a dramatic arrest in 2023 thrust it back into the spotlight, only for new twists to raise fresh questions.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

On the morning of March 10th, 1997, police were called to a three-story home in Yonkers, New York. Inside, they found 34-year-old Nusiaida Ramos dead on her dining room floor. She had been beaten, strangled, and had clearly fought for her life. Terrible. For nearly three decades, investigators searched for answers. The investigation twisted through cold leads, disputed statements, and unanswered questions. Nearly thirty years later, Nuciaida's case remains unsolved. This is the cold case of Nuceida Ramos. What's up guys? Welcome to Crime Snob Podcast, where every Monday we dive into some of those twisted local true crime stories. My name is Sandra Goriello. And I'm Alice Grelli. And if you are a self-proclaimed crime snob like us, then you are in the right place. Today I'm going to tell you the cold case story of Nucy Aida Ramos. Nucy Aida was 34 years old. She was a mother who was devoted, present, funny, and warm. Her sister-in-law Eva described her by saying, quote, she was so vibrant, so beautiful. You could be having the worst day ever, and she made you laugh till your cheeks hurt. Nucy Ida and Raphael Ramos had been married for roughly five years before their relationship fell apart. They had two children together, a young son and daughter, and by all outward appearances, Raphael had built a stable life. He was working as a corrections officer at Sing Sing Prison in Austin, New York, one of the most well-known correctional facilities in the state. Sometime in early 1995, while he was still married to Nusiaida, Raphael met a woman named Claudia Patero. Claudia was a widow. Her husband had been murdered in the Dominican Republic, leaving her alone with the young son. When she met Raphael in 1995, they began dating and things moved quickly. By the summer of 1995, Raphael and Nuciaida separated. Nuciaida was awarded custody of the two children and remained in the apartment at 98 Collins Street in Yonkers. By August of that same year, Claudia and her then nine-year-old son had moved into a Bronx apartment with Raphael. Nuciaida began rebuilding a life without Raphael. And at some point, she started looking toward a future, one that didn't include staying in New York at all. And that, along with financial strains, seemed to add to the alleged building tensions between Nuciada and Raphael. At Sing Sing, where Raphael worked, he reportedly had a locker next to another officer named Rodney Chris. The two worked alongside each other in the late 1990s, and over time, Chris noticed something about his co-worker. Raphael Ramos allegedly complained a lot. Specifically, he said that he complained about money, about child support, about what he owed his estranged wife and what it was costing him. Chris would later testify at trial that Ramos would get loud about it, that he was visibly, repeatedly upset, and that one day, when the subject of Nusaida wanting to move to Florida came up, Raphael's frustration crossed a line that Chris never forgot. According to Chris's testimony, Raphael said, quote, if the bitch tries to take the kids to Florida, I'll kill that bitch. Wow, that's there's some words. Chris testified that he told Ramos to be careful saying things like that. Because if anything ever happened to his wife, he would be the first suspect. Raphael, apparently, didn't take that warning to heart. Now I want to remind you that this is a cold case, and I want to point out that the defense challenged this testimony during the trial. Attorney Andrew Restivo pointed out that Chris had not reported those comments to police until long after the murder. Restivo also cited detective reports suggesting that when Chris first spoke to investigators, he indicated that he had heard about Ramos's statement from other colleagues, not directly from Raphael himself. Okay. On the stand, Chris pushed back, saying, quote, I did personally hear it. Maybe it's the wording I used. I heard it from Ramos. The inconsistency was there, and the jury had to weigh it. But the threat, as Chris told it, was direct and specific, he said. Visitation days for Raphael were routine. Raphael would pick up the children, spend time with them, and return them to Nuceida. On this particular Sunday, March 9th, Raphael and Claudia drove together to 98 Collins Street in Yonkers. What happened next is importantly disputed. The account I'm going to walk you through comes from Claudia Botero's testimony at trial. Testimony the defense, again, challenged at every turn, and I'll flag the contested points as we go. But I want you to hold the framing clearly. This is what Claudia says happened. According to Claudia, Nuciaida brought the children downstairs and out to the car herself. She was there, present and interacting with everyone. No signs of distress, nothing unusual. But then she realized the children had forgotten their bags upstairs. Raphael told Nuciaida that he needed to use the bathroom. She told him that he could come upstairs. And so Raphael Ramos went back inside the apartment, alone with his estranged wife, while Claudia waited in the car outside with the kids. She said he was only gone a few minutes. He came back down, they loaded the kids into the car, and they drove to the Bronx. That is the version Claudia told detectives in 1997. But years later she told a different story about what happened after they got back to the Bronx. And this is where things become significant. According to her later account, once they arrived at the Bronx apartment, Raphael told Claudia he had to go out. He didn't say where, he just left. Claudia stayed with the children. She estimated he was gone for about 90 minutes, and when he came back, she noticed he was no longer wearing the denim shirt and jeans that he had on that morning. He had changed clothes. And according to her testimony, she never saw that denim shirt again. Not that evening, not ever. After he returned, the four of them, Raphael, Claudia, and the two children, went to Claudia's parents' house in Queens for a little bit. And then that evening they drove back to Yonkers and went to 98 Collins Street. Raphael knocked on Nucy Ida's door but didn't get an answer. He then took the children to his father's house for the night, and then he went to sleep. Which is interesting. I know that he is not convicted in this case, but it's interesting that that didn't alarm him because it seems that she was a good mother, you know, like and she was expecting for the kids to come home. So it's interesting. Maybe he just thought that she went out or something, but the next morning, Miriam Trevino, the partner of Raphael's father, said she had been awake most of the night with a dread she couldn't shake. Knew Siaida hadn't called to check on her children, hadn't answered her phone, and it was completely unlike her. Oh, that's weird. Trevino was the trial's first witness, and she told the jury exactly how that night felt, saying, quote, I had a bad feeling. I had a bad feeling, and if anything was wrong, I didn't want the kids exposed to that. Who is this? This was uh Raphael's father's wife, but I it doesn't seem that it's his mother. Okay, okay. Or I'm sorry, they called it his partner. Oh, their partner or whatever. Yeah. Trevino and Raphael's father arranged with Nuciaida's mother to go to the apartment together that morning. They found someone to stay with the children and they went themselves. They called police when they got to the door. What officers found inside that dining room was devastating. Nuce Aida was on the floor in a pool of blood. Her head had been severely beaten. A t-shirt had been wrapped tightly around her neck. Three of her fingernails had snapped off in what was clearly a violent close contact struggle. Oh no, that's horrible. She had bled from a significant head wound, and the medical examiner confirmed that she had been strangled. She had fought. There was evidence of that everywhere. She had not gone quietly or easily, but she had not survived. When detectives interviewed Raphael Ramos, he told them that he had gone briefly into the apartment the day before to use the bathroom and had left after just a few minutes. He denied any involvement in Nuciaida's death. Claudia, when she was initially interviewed by detectives, corroborated that account. She said Raphael had been with her all day. With no physical evidence directly connecting Raphael to the crime scene, no fingerprints, no DNA match under the technology available in 1997, and with his girlfriend providing an alibi, the investigation stalled and Nuciaida's case went cold. For five years, the case sat cold. Then, in 2002, Yonker's cold case detective John Geis picked up Nuci Aida's file and began working back through the original statements. He found something that had been sitting quietly in Claudia Botero's 1997 interview. When she described what she and Raphael did after returning to the Bronx, she had said she took the kids to the store for potato chips. She used the word I and not we, just I. Detective Geis called Claudia and he asked about that word. Why I and not we? Had Raphael been with her at the store? And for the first time, Claudia told police a different story. She admitted that after returning to the Bronx, Raphael had told her he needed to go out, but didn't say where, and that he was gone for approximately 90 minutes. He then came back wearing completely different clothes, and Claudia said she never saw that denim shirt again. So five years after the murder, this was the first time police heard that Raphael Ramos did not have an alibi for the afternoon. But here's what's important. Claudia still did not tell Detective Geis about any confession at this point. That piece of information would take four more years to surface. So I want to take a step back here and walk you through what Claudia says was happening in the years between the murder in 1997 and 2002. In the summer of 1998, about a year and a half after Nucy Aida's death, Claudia says that she became pregnant with Raphael's child. She testified that she told him that she would only have the baby if he agreed to voluntarily take a DNA test to help clear his name from suspicion in his ex-wife's case. He allegedly refused and told her to get an abortion. Then in December of 1998, Claudia said she and Raphael had a serious fight that turned physical. She threw an iron at him and he grabbed her and choked her on the bed. And according to her testimony, while his hands were around her throat, he said, quote, it's easier the second time around. Claudia testified that she understood instantly what he meant. That he had choked someone before, that Nucyida had been the first time. Oh my god. A week after that fight, she testified, Raphael sat down and told her the full story of what happened on March 9, 1997. He told her, according to her account, that he had gone back to the Collin Street apartment that afternoon and not just for the bathroom. Raphael allegedly said that he and Nuciada were alone and she wanted to reconcile. When he said no, he claims that she told him that she was going to take him to court for more child support. And then he said he quote lost his mind. When Nucy Ida turned around, he hit her on the head with a BB gun and she fell. He strangled her on the ground with a shirt, banged her head against a radiator, and then cleaned up the blood with a mop, changed his clothes and left. That is the alleged confession. It is the single most important piece of evidence in this entire case, and it comes entirely from one person. Claudia sat on it for four years before she told Detective Geis about the 90-minute gap. And even then, she did not tell him about the confession until 2006, when she gave a sworn deposition to a prosecutor and laid out the full account for the first time. Even that was not enough to move forward, though. The lead prosecutor at the time reviewed everything and apparently decided the case wasn't strong enough to bring charges. The case went cold again for years. While all of this was unfolding privately, the relationship between Raphael and Claudia was deteriorating in its own dramatic way. In 2001, Raphael ended things with Claudia, but not in a straightforward way. He allegedly left her for her sister-in-law, the wife of Claudia's own brother. What? The defense would eventually argue that Claudia was, quote, a scorned woman bent on revenge, and that she had every conceivable motive to fabricate or embellish a story that would destroy the man who had humiliated her.

unknown 13:43

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 13:44

It's fair. But also, too, like she has no reason to protect him anymore. Yeah. She could boil until she didn't need to be anymore. So it could go both ways. It's like either she's pissed and is out for blood, like you know, like she is trying to get the book thrown at him, or she's just kind of like, What am I defending you for? I just, you know, like fuck you at this point. Yeah. They argue that her inconsistent evolving accounts over the years were not the result of trauma and fear, but of a story being constructed piece by piece over time to inflict maximum damage. There is one detail from Claudia's cross-examination that the defense leaned on particularly hard. When her sister-in-law moved in with Rafael Ramos, Claudia apparently did not warn her. She didn't tell her own brother that this man had allegedly confessed to murdering his wife. And I think this is important because even though it was her sister-in-law and maybe she didn't she was pissed, didn't care much for her sister-in-law, her nephew or niece, I believe it was her nephew, was also staying with them in this apartment. So they're like, if you think he's a murderer, you just let your nephew go live with him and didn't say anything. Claudia's answer was fear. She was afraid of what Raphael would do. The defense's answer was that no one who genuinely believed a confession would stay silent to protect the person who gave it. The jury heard both arguments. They spent five days trying to figure out which explanation was true. When Westchester County District Attorney Miriam Roka took office in 2021, she established a cold case bureau specifically dedicated to the county's 135 unsolved homicide cases. The office received a $500,000 Department of Justice grant to support prosecutors working cold cases that involved DNA evidence. Nuce Itis' pink t-shirt was among the evidence retested using modern forensic methods, and that testing found something. The DNA of two different males on the shirt. Oh. But when those profiles were compared to Rafael Ramos after he was indicted in 2023 at the age of 54, he was excluded as a match for either profile. Oh. His DNA was not on the t-shirt that had been wrapped around Nucyida's neck. The prosecution argued contamination. Roughly two dozen police officers and crime scene technicians had processed that apartment in 1997, and the profiles could belong to any of them. The defense argued the opposite, saying the murder weapon has male DNA on it. That DNA does not belong to our client, they said, and no amount of explaining should make that disappear. Defense attorney Andrew Restivo put it plainly in his closing argument, saying, quote, don't let them try to explain away evidence in this case. To this day, those two male profiles have not been publicly identified. Rafael Ramos was arrested, arraigned, and pleaded not guilty. He was held in Westchester County jail. The defense sought to have the charge dismissed on the grounds that 26 years of delay had made a fair trial impossible. Judge George Fafito denied that motion, and the trial proceeded in White Plains in October of 2024. Wow. The prosecution's case rested almost entirely on Claudia Batero. Prosecutors Daniel Fletcher and Marissa Morrowin walked her through everything on direct examination. The bathroom trip that lasted only minutes, the 90-minute disappearance in the Bronx, the missing denim shirt, the pregnancy and the refused DNA test, the December 1998 choking, the it's easier the second time around quote, and then the full alleged confession a week later. The BB gun, the fall, the choking on the ground, the head against the radiator, and the cleanup. Under cross-examination by Linda Visco, Claudia faced repeated questions about inconsistencies in her accounts. She acknowledged that she couldn't remember many things. More significantly, she confirmed after reviewing her own prior transcripts in court that the specific detail of Raphael banging Nusaida's head against a radiator had never appeared in any prior statements that she had given. Not in her 2006 sworn deposition, not in 1997, not to Detective Geis in 2002. It was mentioned for the first time during this trial in 2024. Whether that reflects a traumatic memory that surfaced slowly over time or a detail that did not exist before the trial is something that the jury had to grapple with. I don't believe it. Visco also asked whether Claudia had seen any blood on Raphael when he returned from those 90 minutes. On his clothing, in the car, anywhere. No. Butero acknowledged that she had not. She had testified to seeing scratches on his back a few days later, but no blood on the day itself. The prosecution also called Rodney Christ to establish the threat Raphael allegedly made about the Florida plan. And they presented the argument through Morrowin that the DNA evidence on the t-shirt was the result of crime scene contamination rather than evidence of an alternative suspect. The defense, through Visco and Recibo, offered the jury a coherent alternative framework. The prosecution had built an entire case on a single witness whose story had evolved substantially over three decades, who had powerful personal reasons to want Raphael Ramos destroyed, and who was asking the jury to convict a man when the physical evidence at the scene did not point to him at all. After five days of deliberations, the jury acquitted Raphael Ramos of second-degree murder on all charges. They felt the prosecution did not prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, the highest legal standard in the American justice system. It's so fair. The Legal Aid Society of Westchester County, which had represented Ramos, released a statement saying they were grateful for what they called a thoughtful jury and expressed that they were thrilled for Mr. Ramos on his acquittal. The Westchester District Attorney's Office said it was disappointed in the outcome but respected the jury's verdict and then added, quote, We continue to mourn with the family of Nuceida Ramos. According to reports in 2023, there were 135 unsolved homicide cases in Westchester County. Nuceida is among them. If you have any information about any open homicide cases in Westchester County, you can reach the DA's office 24 hours a day at 914-995 TIPS. Anonymous tips are accepted and language assistance is available.