177: Absolutely Barbaric: Pregnant Teen Goes Missing and Her Friends Discover the Truth on Social Media! 01:01:40

Hey true crime besties, welcome back to an all new episode of Serialistly.

Hey everybody, welcome back to an all new episode of Serialistly with me, Annie Elise. I am coming to you with a pretty recent case today and it's one that really just makes my blood boil. So whatever you're doing, whether you're getting ready to commute into work, whether you're listening at work or scrubbing your bathtub, just I want you to get to a place of zen mentally because this one is absolutely crazy.

bananas. I'm trying to use a different word, but you know, I'm trying to also not get flagged. So here's the deal. Most of you guys know I'm a parent, right? I have a three-year-old and a now five-year-old little boy and my daughter's the three-year-old. And if you're a parent, you know you would obviously do anything to protect your children, right? And I don't think that there is even a thought or a

event that could come into my mind that is more horrifying than one of my children being hurt or killed. And it's a cliche to say that it's every single parent's worst nightmare, I get that, but it's a cliche for a reason. It is unthinkable that anybody can just go on with their life after losing a son or a daughter. So I can only imagine how terrifying it was when a call went through to 911 in Chicago on the afternoon of April 23rd, 2019. The

The caller was telling this operator that she had just given birth inside her home. Apparently, the labor went so quickly that she didn't even have a chance to head to the hospital. She just had her baby, a boy, right there at her house without a doctor. Now, unfortunately, this birth didn't go well either because she was saying that the baby was completely blue and she couldn't even get him to be able to breathe. 34, before that found property, can you take a right on any of my calls?

4100 West 77th Place please. The baby gave birth 10 minutes ago. The baby isn't breathing. The baby is pale and blue. They're doing CPR. Callers, call Malone CFDs and...

So two ambulances rushed over to this house, and one took the baby, who rode all alone with just the doctors but not his mother, to the hospital, and then the mother was in the second ambulance, and both of them arrived at Christ Advocate Hospital right away. Their biggest responsibility was just to save this baby, who was still having an incredibly difficult time.

He still had his umbilical cord and the placenta attached to him when he checked into the hospital. He was also still totally blue and couldn't breathe on his own. So that was their priority, saving this child.

Unfortunately, the only way that they could keep him alive was by putting him on life support because they still couldn't get him to inhale. And that was because he had suffered some pretty severe brain damage from going for so long without any oxygen. So at that point, all she could do was wait. There wasn't any known treatment or cure for brain cell death due to lack of air. So the doctors just kept the baby on life support for as long as it took for him to either recover or to die from his injuries.

But that was about all they could do. She just waited. She waited to see if the baby would get better, and days went by, then weeks, and she kept coming into the hospital to visit her son in this hospital and had a lot of conversations with the doctors and the nurses about their opinions, and that was her life for three weeks or so, up until May 16th. Now, there was one other thing that happened at the hospital that the doctors and the nurses felt was a little weird.

When the mother and the baby arrived at the hospital, they didn't really think that the story that the mother gave fit the situation. I'm going to have to backtrack a little bit to the morning of April 23rd, which was just a few hours before that 911 call came in. See, that day, a 19-year-old woman named Marlyn Ochoa Lopez went missing from her high school in Chicago. Now guys, not that this is a huge detail, but I do want you to be able to picture who we're talking about. Marlyn was missing.

gorgeous. She was beautiful. She was short, she had these big brown eyes, this dark hair, and even though she was so young, she was now married at 19 years old, and she had built a very great loving life for herself and for her three-year-old son Joshua. She was just the epitome of this beautiful, strong-willed, strong-loving mother, gorgeous inside and out.

Marlyn was a little quiet, but she was extremely responsible. She was the sort of person who just kind of kept her head down and helped keep everything running. Her family was religious, they were active in a local church, and they cared a lot about their community. Marlyn and her husband were also expecting a second baby, a little boy. Marlyn was about eight and a half months pregnant, and she was getting to that point in her pregnancy that even though her due date hadn't arrived yet, she still felt like she was ready to go into labor at any moment, just any single second.

And in fact, at 10:40 a.m. that morning while she was in class, Marlin sent a text to her husband, Yovani. She said she was starting to feel the contractions. She thought that it was time for them to get to the hospital. Yovani asked if she wanted him to come and pick her up so that he could drive her to the hospital, they could rush over there, but she said, "No, I can drive myself. Let's just get there."

and since sometimes contractions can take a little bit of a time before you actually need to go see a doctor, Yovani figured, okay, well, maybe they weren't that bad yet. If she's saying she can drive herself, maybe they're not back-to-back yet. Maybe it's nothing that's like a dire situation. But again, if you remember, Marlin was still about two weeks ahead of her due date, so it was a little bit early. Not super, super early and unheard of, but still early.

So when she left school that day, a couple of people saw her, but they thought that she looked a little bit off. However, she was about to go into labor. She was about to give birth. She climbed into her black Honda Civic and she drove away. So as far as anybody knew, her next stop was supposed to be the daycare so she could pick up her son Joshua, then figure out what she was going to do with him and go to the hospital. But she didn't make it there. She

She didn't even call to say that she was stuck in traffic or that she needed to check into the delivery room because the baby was coming. There was just nothing. No communication. Then, at 6 p.m., the daycare called Yovani, Marlon's husband, to say that Joshua still hadn't been picked up and they couldn't get a hold of Marlon. Yovani immediately realized that this was very unlike her. So he called Marlon's mom to see if she had heard anything. Maybe she did need to rush to the hospital after all. Maybe she didn't have time to go pick up her son.

The problem was Marlynn's mother also hadn't talked to her since earlier that day.

And they both knew that Marlin wouldn't go anywhere without making sure that somebody was going to take care of her son. So they called the police right away, but the detectives ended up refusing to take their statement. They said, no, you need to wait 24 hours to file a missing persons report on an adult. And this was incredibly frustrating. Not only frustrating, but also, guys, it's not true. Those early hours are crucial. However, the police had pretty much announced that they weren't going to help on that particular day. They needed to wait.

So Yovani and Marlin's parents were on their own. They were now trying to find her without any sort of help. They called every single hospital that they could think of that they thought that maybe she would have checked into, but nobody had a patient who fit her description. They called Marlin over and over, leaving these frantic voicemails asking where she was, what happened to her, if she was okay, but she never called back.

When Giovanni and the others still hadn't heard from Marlin by the next morning, he called the police again, and then finally they now agreed to report his wife as missing. Now this was really scary because even more so than just an ordinary disappearance, Marlin was now the second pregnant young woman to go missing from Chicago that very day. The other missing woman was a woman named Kiera Coles.

She was an adult who worked for the post office, and she was only three months pregnant when she went missing. She wasn't even showing yet. So there weren't a ton of similarities between the two disappearances. I mean, nothing definitively linking them, but still, what are the odds that two pregnant women go missing from the same state the same day? It was definitely unsettling and unnerving. And it was enough that Marlynn's family was very, very disturbed by this.

They were wondering, is there some kind of, I don't know, serial killer who's targeting pregnant women? What's really going on here?

And meanwhile, the police still weren't really treating Marlin's disappearance like it was a priority to them. In fact, for two days after they took the missing persons report, which was three days after she went missing, because remember, they waited 24 hours to even talk to the family and allow her to be reported as missing, they didn't even open up a criminal file on Marlin. For three days. And let me just say that again, because it absolutely infuriates me. They knew that she was missing, right? But they

They didn't think that any foul play was involved here? For an eight-and-a-half-month-old pregnant young woman who went missing while she was on her way to pick up her son from daycare, while she was having contractions...

How is there not something afoot here, right? I mean, maybe they figured that she was in a hospital somewhere giving birth, although you would think that if that was the case, she would have called, she would have texted, especially texted Giovanni to tell him what was going on. Plus, Giovanni and Marlon's parents had already called all of the hospitals that they could think of. They knew that she wasn't in any of them.

So I don't know what other theory the police could have possibly had been operating under. What, that Marlene ran away, up and vanished when she was right about to go into labor? She ran off with another man? She decided to disappear on her own? I mean, make it make sense, because I really just do not get it.

However, Marlene's family actually said that they thought that racism was a factor in all of this. They were Mexican. Marlene was Mexican. So maybe the police would have taken her disappearance more seriously if she was white. They even had to hire a private investigator just to talk to the police on their behalf because the detectives didn't assign any Spanish-speaking detectives to the case. And the Ochoa Lopez's didn't speak much English.

Can you imagine how frustrating that would be? You're trying to get the police to take this seriously. Not only are they not taking it seriously, but they're also not assigning somebody who speaks your language to the case to inform you of updates, to give you news, to ask for details and what happened. It is...

I mean, it's just really, really unsettling. And you know I don't do politics on this show, and I'm certainly not in any position to say if race was in fact a factor or not, but I will say I do understand why her relatives were frustrated. Because from their perspective, it seemed like they were just getting the brush off right and left.

And when the police were made aware of their concerns and about all of their complaints, they did issue a reply statement stating that they were taking her disappearance very seriously. They said that there were just a bunch of miscommunications within the family. But still, you've got to think, when somebody goes missing and their family is just looking for answers, I mean, that's the time to communicate as clearly as you possibly can, right?

To make matters worse, when the family gave public statements saying that they thought that there was foul play involved and they wanted tips out from the public, people actually started making prank calls to them. Prank calls. Prank tip calls. I mean, it is absolutely vile.

At least one caller said that Marlene had been kidnapped by a drug cartel, and then she was trafficked into Mexico. And even though Marlene's dad thought that right away there was absolutely no possibility that that could be true, he decided to pass this tip along to the police anyway, just in case. But the detectives also said that they didn't believe the story, so they didn't even bother to look into the tip. Then, someone from one Chicago area hospital called Marlene's mother at one point, and this caller said that they found her, that she was in the hospital, she was fine.

But after the entire family then hurried over to this hospital, rushed over to see her, it turned out that the tip was due to a mix-up.

A nurse had misread a patient's name on their file, and they thought that Marlyn had checked in. But the patient was not her. So needless to say, it was just disappointment after disappointment, and the Ochoa Lopez family felt like nobody was on their side. Not the doctors, not the police. Plus, Marlyn's three-year-old son Joshua literally couldn't understand that she was missing. He couldn't understand what was going on. How could he? I mean, he was way too young to grasp a concept like that.

But in a really heartbreaking detail, he did lose his appetite entirely because he was just so upset about the fact that his mom was gone. He just stopped eating because of this. He couldn't understand why she was gone. He couldn't understand what happened, but his body was having a reaction and he couldn't eat because of how distraught he was.

And apparently all he did all day was ask his father and his other relatives, when is mommy going to come home? Where did she go? How long until she's back? It is just heartbreaking. So in early May, about two weeks after Marlin's disappearance, the police told the Ochoa Lopez family about a newborn baby that was found abandoned in the street in Chicago. Basically, a woman was looking for parking on a crowded road, which we've all been there, and she kept circling and circling trying to find an open spot.

So then, she turned down an alleyway, and that's when she heard a very faint whimpering sound. Now although it was faint, it was loud enough that she could hear it over the engine and the radio, and at first, the woman thought that it was maybe a lost dog, or maybe a lost cat, something like that.

But when she pulled over and started looking around, she didn't find any stray animal. Instead, there was a newborn baby. Literally a newborn baby. He still had his umbilical cord attached to him. He was wrapped in a beach towel, not a blanket, and he was just lying inside a dumpster.

A fucking dumpster, guys. And keep in mind, even though it was now May 7th, so spring, almost summer, that day was unusually cold. It was 49 degrees outside, and it also looked like it was going to rain. Not that it would ever, of course, be good to leave a baby in a trash can, even on a nice day, but you get what I'm saying. The boy was obviously not in very good condition after being left out in the cold without anybody taking care of him.

In fact, the woman didn't even want to wait for however long it was going to take the ambulances to get there, so she just scooped this baby up and she drove to the nearest fire station, which was about two blocks away. Once she got there, they did CPR because somewhere along the way, the boy had stopped breathing. Now, the good news was that with some medical treatment, the baby got to be in a much better condition, and he looked like he was on his way to making a full recovery.

But the question was in all of this, of course, whose baby was this? How did he end up in an abandoned dumpster, especially so soon after his birth? Again, he still had his umbilical cord on him. So the timeline seemed right. The baby was found very close to Marlin's due date. Maybe somebody had kidnapped her, had locked her up somewhere, and then she gave birth. Then the kidnapper might have dumped Marlin's baby in that dumpster after he was born. I mean, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It could make some sense, but...

I can't imagine why somebody would grab a pregnant woman off the street and then just like toss her baby out like he's literally trash, but let's be real, it does happen, and some people are just that level of screwed up. There's never a good reason for most of the crap that we talk about in these cases. But Marlynn's family, including her parents, grandparents, and husband, also thought that it was super good news that Marlynn's son might have been found.

Not just because they were grateful that he was fine and not hurt, but also the baby was a major piece of evidence about what might have happened to Marlyn and where she could have been, what could have happened to her. And it looked like all of the puzzle pieces were starting to form together because even better, just one day after that baby was found, the police told Marlyn's relatives that they had recently tracked down her black Honda Civic.

They actually found the car before that baby even turned up in the dumpster. So they sat on that news for a little while, maybe to make sure that it was really her car so they wouldn't get everybody's hopes up again just for nothing. But either way, they found it.

it. However, it was parked in a totally different neighborhood from that dumpster, the dumpster that had the baby in it, and there was also no sign of Marlin anywhere in the car. But in a weird detail, between April 23rd, the day when Marlin went missing, and May 7th, when the Honda was finally found, the car had received three separate parking tickets. So you would have thought that at some point the police would have run the plates on the car, right, while they're getting all the parking tickets, or at least noticed that it was the exact same car that a pregnant woman had gone missing in. But

But somehow, nobody put two and two together, not until about a week into May. But still, fumble or not, it was still another big piece of evidence. Everybody was one step closer to figuring out what really happened here. Marlin's family said in a statement that they definitely thought that she was still alive. I mean, she had to be. If she had given birth two weeks after her disappearance, she must have been imprisoned somewhere, just waiting to be rescued.

A little more evidence, maybe one more clue, one more tip, it might be all it took to just unlock this thing. So now, all they had to do was get a DNA test to prove that this baby was Marlin's son. But when the results came back in, they were not a match.

The baby in the dumpster had nothing to do with her. It was just some freak endangering this helpless newborn, and it all happened to coincide with the timeline of Marlin disappearing. I mean, truly, you think you're getting your hopes up. You think, how could this possibly be explained in any other way, just to then be let down, just to realize, no. It's like this deep breath, a sigh of relief that you were going to take. It's like, now you just have the pit in your stomach because...

it's not connected at all. It doesn't bring us any further into finding out what happened to Marlynn. It doesn't bring us any answers. It doesn't bring us any closer to finding our grandson, our son, our nephew, our brother. It's horrible. So now Marlynn's family was back at square one. However, some of her friends were about to get another break in this case because they managed to hack into Marlynn's Facebook account.

And that was about to be a clue into everything. And we are going to get into all of that as soon as we take a quick break to hear from our first sponsors of today's episode. Thank you guys, as always, for understanding that sponsors are essential to keeping this podcast totally and completely free.

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And this also made sense because she didn't have a ton of money and she was having a hard time getting all of the baby clothes, the supplies, the things that she was going to need after she gave birth. So a bunch of these groups had posts from people who were giving things away, things they hadn't used or things they didn't need anymore. And in fact, Marlin had a bunch of DMs back and forth with a woman who was also a member of these groups, a woman named Clarissa Figueroa. See, about a month or so before her disappearance, Clarissa had posted on a group called Help a Mother Out.

Her message said, Who is due in May? Where are the May mamas at? Marlyn responded that she was due in early May, and Clarissa told her that she had some brand new baby clothing that she was now giving away. So if Marlyn was interested in getting them for free, she should just DM her. So from there, Marlyn and Clarissa talked privately a little bit about where they should meet up, where they would make this exchange, and they settled on the afternoon of April 1st. Then they set up a second meeting three weeks later, for April 23rd.

And it sounds like Marlyn's plan was to stop by Clarissa's house after school before she picked her son up from daycare, the exact window in which she disappeared. So as soon as her friends saw this, Marlyn's friends handed all of this information directly over to the police. Like, hey, look, we solved it. We know what's going on. Look into this woman. So let's go back to the beginning when I mentioned that that first woman arrived at the hospital. When the doctors, the nurses, they were feeling like something was a little off.

First of all, the mother, she was covered in blood, just completely drenched in it, guys. But all of that blood was on the top part of her body, not on her legs, not in her pelvis area, not like what you would expect if she had just had a baby. The blood was all on her chest, her arms, her face, her stomach, all of those areas, perfectly.

but literally nothing from the waist down. And sure, she could have gotten herself a little cleaned up before she called 911 and before she went to the emergency room. But on top of that, she didn't look like she had just given birth. She didn't seem hurt. She didn't seem exhausted. And, you know, labor, it's not an easy process. And I will tell you firsthand, after delivering two kids, you look a straight mess.

Not to mention, if she hadn't received any professional medical care whatsoever, she definitely would not have been in this good of condition. You would expect somebody who just went through something like that to have a hard time staying on their feet, maybe even a hard time staying awake, staying with it.

But other than the blood that was just soaking her shirt and her upper body, she could have just walked in off the street because she seemed totally fine, totally together, totally unfazed, definitely not like what you would expect. And it wasn't just appearances either. The doctors ended up giving her a medical exam just to see if she was okay after having just given birth. And when they did that, everything down below looked like it was completely normal, totally healed, if you get where I'm going with that.

that it didn't look like it had been torn, like there were any need for stitches, which if you know, you know, everything looked completely healed for this woman. Well, that woman turned out to be Clarissa. And not long after putting everything together, the detectives showed up to her house and they asked some very pointed questions.

And just to note, the baby was now almost a month old at this point. He was still in the hospital, though. He was functionally brain dead and still couldn't breathe without a lot of equipment, but he was still on life support. Ever since the day that he was born, too, Clarissa had been showing up regularly. She was talking to the doctors, making decisions about his treatment, acting like she was really his mother.

She even named the baby Xander, after her adult son, who was also called Xander. The original Xander had died sometime in mid-2018, and I don't know a whole lot about how he passed away, but I do know that it was natural causes. There was nothing suspicious about his death.

and he passed roughly nine months before Marlin went missing. But his mom, Clarissa, took his death extremely hard. She became kind of obsessed with having another baby, almost like if she had another baby, it could replace the son that she had lost. But pretty much right after her son's funeral, Clarissa announced to everybody that she was now pregnant with a new baby.

Now, at first, her family kind of just like laughed and shrugged it off because Clarissa was 46 years old. She also had her tubes tied. So how she's getting pregnant, who knows? Is this a miraculous pregnancy? What's really going on here? It would have been very, very difficult, if not impossible, for her to actually get pregnant. So

So maybe everybody thought that she was just handling her grief in a really weird way, and that it was best to let her work through it however she wanted to, but they kind of just let her alone, kind of just shrugged it off. But then, as the months went by, Clarissa started showing people these ultrasounds. She put together a nursery in her home, she posted pictures of it, she posted pictures of the ultrasounds, she posted pictures documenting every single step of this pregnancy journey, and posted them all over Facebook.

So people saw this and they were kind of like, "Wow, I guess Clarissa really is gonna have a baby after all." Even her boyfriend, this guy named Peter Bobak, thought he had in fact gotten her pregnant. Except, spoiler alert, it was all a lie. The ultrasounds weren't hers. They were probably just photos that she found online.

And I don't know if she was wearing a pregnancy belly or something like that. I have to assume that she must have been if her own boyfriend had been fooled. But to help her keep up the lie, she also joined all of those different Facebook groups. All these groups for new expecting mothers where moms can find support, find advice. But Clarissa wasn't looking for support. She wasn't looking for advice. She wasn't looking to connect with other future mothers. She was looking for something else.

potential victims. Because as messed up as her mental state had to be to actually make her think that faking a pregnancy was even a good idea, even Clarissa had to realize that pretty soon she was going to get to her due date and people were going to wonder where that baby was. So she knew that she needed to get her hands on a newborn, which meant that she needed to find a pregnant woman whose real due date was close to her fake one.

So, Clarissa connected online with Marlène sometime in March. And like I said before, the original plan was for Marlène to come over to the house on April 1st, which was a little bit more than a month before her due date. But before Marlène made it to the house, Clarissa ended up pulling her adult daughter Desiree to the side, saying that she needed her help. She needed her help killing Marlène.

Desiree's first reaction to this was like, uh, what the hell? How can you even say something like that? What is wrong with you? She even ran and went to her boyfriend telling him that she thought that her mom was planning on hurting somebody. And the

And the boyfriend, whose name has not been released to the public, took Desiree's side in all of this. They were kind of both like, uh, no, under absolutely no circumstance should we hurt, let alone kill, this girl from this Facebook group, this pregnant, innocent girl. But Marlene came over anyway. And it was the most awkward meetup of all time from the sounds of it, because you had Marlene, Clarissa, Desiree, and Desiree's boyfriend all together.

Marlene just wanted to pick up those baby clothes, but in the meantime, Clarissa was trying to get Desiree to help her kill Marlene. Desiree, of course, still refused, so then Clarissa was trying to find another way to convince her without spooking Marlene enough to make her run off before they could even do anything with her. So Clarissa was literally pulling Desiree into the other room to talk to her in private, and she left Marlene and the boyfriend just sitting alone together.

At one point, Desiree came out of one of those one-on-one chats with her mom, and her boyfriend noticed that her hands were completely shaking. He didn't know what Clarissa had said to her, but he was definitely convinced by now that nothing good was going to come out of any of this. I mean, obviously. So the boyfriend went up to Desiree, and he told her point blank, if they didn't let Marlon go home right away, he was going to call the police. He was going to call the police, and he was going to tell them everything. So that's what they did.

Then Clarissa made some excuse, which I honestly can't imagine what she said to make this whole situation not seem suspicious as F, but whatever she said, it was enough for Marlin to get out of there without suspecting anything. So she and her unborn baby left Clarissa's home alive and well. And then, before Desiree's boyfriend went home, Clarissa went to him and said, April fools.

As if this was all some sort of April Fool's joke, because remember, it did go down on April 1st. So this whole plot to murder Marlene, all of those side conversations with her daughter, the fact that Desiree was literally so shaken up that she couldn't even keep her hands still. According to Clarissa, it was all just a super elaborate prank.

and Desiree's boyfriend bought it. Now, I don't know, you guys. After all of those warning signs, I mean, unless he was one of the stupidest men on earth, I don't know how Desiree's boyfriend could buy that story for more than about five seconds. And was Desiree selling that it was an April Fool's story as well? It's just...

It's too extreme. It's too extreme for an April Fool's joke. And I don't know, maybe he thought that Clarissa was lying, but he ignored it for the same reason that everybody else had been ignoring all of her other bizarre behavior up until this point. Like, maybe he thought that she was off her rocker, but ultimately harmless.

Either way, though, he just kind of sort of breathed this huge sigh of relief that Marlene got away, unscathed, she was safe. And then he went home too. Except somehow, Clarissa had convinced Marlene to come back for the baby's clothes again three weeks later, this time on April 23rd.

Now, I don't know what she could have said to offset the weirdness from that first meetup, but for whatever reason, Marlene stopped by again. And this time around, Desiree was there without her boyfriend and without the influence of her boyfriend.

So Marlene showed up at the front door and Clarissa said something like, "Oh, come in, the clothes are almost ready. I'm just, they're in the other room. I'm gathering them. Sit here, I'll go grab them for you." Marlene sat down on the couch and then Desiree plopped down right beside her with a photo album. She started showing Marlene pictures of her brother Xander, the one who had died the year before. And then while Marlene was distracted, Clarissa started cranking up the music in the kitchen.

She was increasing the volume on this music so that the neighbors wouldn't hear what was about to go down. Then, she grabbed a cable and she walked back into the living room. She stood right behind the couch, she looped that cord around Marlene's neck, and she yanked it tight.

So of course, Marlene immediately began kicking and struggling and fighting back, and I guess Clarissa hadn't expected her to have that much fight in her because she was totally caught off guard when Marlene managed to slip her hands in between her neck and that cord. She started pulling it off of her so that she could breathe. And then apparently that's the point when Clarissa yelled out to her daughter Desiree saying, you're not doing your fucking job! So Desiree grabbed Marlene's hands and she tried to yank them away from her neck.

When Marlene curled her fingers over and held on for dear life, Desiree basically had to grab each finger one at a time, prying them off the cable. And finally, Desiree got both of Marlene's hands out.

And then it only took a couple more minutes before she stopped struggling altogether and just slumped over. And at that point, Clarissa went to the kitchen, she grabbed a butcher's knife, and she cut the baby out of Marlin. Now, I don't know if she was dead or just unconscious at this point. It doesn't sound like Clarissa even cared enough to check her pulse, but...

What a horrifying nightmare. It honestly makes my skin crawl. We also know that Clarissa was obviously not a doctor. She didn't know how to do a proper C-section, and I don't know if she just thought that it would be super easy to, uh, I don't know, cut a baby out of somebody's stomach, but it never occurred to her that OBGYNs go to years of medical school for this very reason, but she wasn't prepared, obviously.

And she didn't know what she was doing because after she cut the baby out of Marlin, she ended up plopping him in a bucket. A freaking bucket. And I'm guessing that she also managed to screw up this amateur surgery in general because obviously how could she not? She had no clue what she was doing. But also because this baby almost died. He came out blue. He came out not breathing. And that's what led to the serious brain damage that meant he couldn't even leave the hospital afterward.

So let's be crystal clear. Clarissa didn't just murder Marlon in cold blood. She hurt the baby as well. Even if it wasn't on purpose, she was negligent, she was reckless, and he barely survived this birth, not to mention now all of the time that he had to spend in the hospital afterward hooked up to breathing machines just to stay alive.

And get this, at one point after it was looking more and more likely that he wasn't ever going to recover or get out of the hospital, Clarissa and her boyfriend Peter actually had the audacity to post a GoFundMe.

They wanted to raise money for baby Xander's funeral expenses. Can you even imagine? I can't even that a person could basically say to themselves, well, looks like I killed a newborn. Maybe I can still at least get some money out of this situation. It is just sick, sick, sick. I don't even have any other words to describe it.

Now, the good news is Clarissa didn't get away with any of it, not with the murder and not with the GoFundMe. Now, besides the timing of everything with Clarissa going into the hospital, the lack of birth, the Facebook messages, all of that, the police found even more evidence linking the two of them.

Remember how I said that the detectives found Marlin's Honda Civic with a bunch of parking tickets on it? Well, it turns out that it was parked just a little down the block from Clarissa's house. Literally, right there on the same street. Which I mentioned earlier, how were you not checking the plate sooner during the parking tickets? But as it turned out, the officials were also getting all sorts of tips about Marlin's case too. But it took weeks for anyone to put them all together to see the whole picture.

like how on May 9th, a social worker from the hospital told the police that they thought that Clarissa had checked in a baby to the hospital, a baby that wasn't hers. The detectives then looked at that timeline and saw that Clarissa gave fake birth on April 23rd, the same day that Marlin went missing, but that, and then they finally put two and two together, but they had like

all of these things ahead of time, in my opinion, had they just done their due diligence and their job, maybe they would have come to the conclusion sooner before hacking the Facebook or before the friends hacked the Facebook, I should say. So even when they started putting it together, the detectives questioned Clarissa, but she insisted that she didn't know anything about Marlin, that she had nothing to do with the disappearance. And I don't know if the police bought it at that point, but they still didn't arrest Clarissa.

And since nobody had proven that she had done anything wrong, she still had just the complete freedom to come and go out of the hospital as much as she wanted. So she kept consulting with the doctors, she kept making decisions about what kind of medical treatment the baby was going to get, and everybody kind of just like kept going on with life. It is so bizarre.

Nobody did anything to stop her until May 14th, which was when the police finally searched her house. Now, by this time, she had plenty of time to already clean up all of the blood and get rid of the evidence. However, she didn't dispose of everything because specifically there was a rug that was completely stained with blood.

And literally while the investigators were doing their search at that precise moment, Clarissa's boyfriend Peter decided it was a great time to just take that rug out to the yard and start hosing it off. The detectives obviously caught him in the act because he's a complete moron. And as soon as he saw that they spotted him, he just like dropped the hose, dropped the bleach that he had been using. He turned and he walked away, which I mean, what? It is just so incredibly insane to me.

And even though it sounds like Peter didn't know anything about the fake pregnancy or the murder plot in advance, it was pretty clear at this point that he was helping Clarissa cover it up after the fact. Because why else would you see the police searching your house or your yard for a murder investigation, no less, and think, hey, it's now my last chance to wash off all of this blood. I'm going to clean it up. I mean, it

It's crazy, but the rug wasn't even the biggest piece of evidence that the police found, though. There was also a garbage can that was sort of tucked away out of sight in Clarissa's backyard. And when the team went to that trash can, what they were about to uncover would make this whole thing even more terrifying than they could have even imagined. And we're going to get into all of that as soon as we take one final break in today's episode to hear from the remaining sponsors.

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Just visit simplisafe.com slash serialously. That's simplisafe.com slash serialously. There's no safe like SimpliSafe. So now the puzzle pieces are starting to come together, right? They're searching the house. Idiot Peter's trying to hose off the bloody rug. And then they find this trash can that's kind of like hidden away, tucked away in the backyard. So they approach it. And when they open this trash can, they found Marlon's body inside of it.

Now by this point, she had been dead for about three weeks, and she was pretty badly decomposed. So I don't know if Clarissa just planned to leave her in there forever, or if she was maybe still trying to figure out what to do with the remains, but the cord that she had been strangled with was still wrapped around her neck.

Now, this next part, I just want to warn you, it is incredibly heartbreaking. But the Chicago Police Department sent a few officers to go notify Marlin's family because they didn't know what was going on at this point. But remember, they barely spoke English, and the police department did not even send Spanish-speaking officers.

So instead, these two patrolmen show up, they ring the doorbell, Marlyn's relatives come to the door, and that's when the detectives realized, we don't actually even know how to tell you what you need to hear. So there was like this awkward couple of minutes where the police were calling the station, they were asking for a Spanish-speaking officer to get on the phone or to come over, and I can only imagine what must have been going through Marlyn's husband, her mother, and her father's mind at that point.

I guess they knew what they were probably going to hear, or maybe they were getting their hopes up for nothing. I don't know, but it's just mishandled. So it was handled so poorly. Mishandled seems like an easy word. It was handled horribly. So instead, now this new officer showed up and he said two words, esta muerte, which is Spanish for she's dead.

That's it. That's all he said, and then he turned around and he walked away. He didn't stick around to answer any questions. He didn't try to soften the blow. It is so callous and so disgusting, and it truly was a slap in the face for Marlon's family, who now not only had to grieve their daughter, but also probably would have liked to have an update on what happened to Marlon's son. Is he still alive? Where is he? What's going on?

Well, around this same time, the detectives ended up running a DNA test on the baby that was in the hospital, the one that Clarissa said was hers. And in a surprise to absolutely no one, the test came back and said that the boy was not related to Clarissa. He was Marlene's, and he was her husband Giovanni's.

Now the bad news was that which Giovanni now named hadn't recovered and it w Giovanni would ever be abl and live his life. Still, Marlin's family even had an announcement on how wel just got out of a very lo hospital today and I think meeting and we had certa answered medically. We had

And I think that the medical questions were positive and there have been some positive developments. Yesterday I had the honor, I was very tired, but I had the honor of being with Giovanni and I believe Julie was there and some other people were there. The baby's grandmother was there, I believe Marlene's mother.

was there and they we sweet and the godfather was there a pastor I'm sorry the pastor a drone up the seven-day Adventist Church was there also and the baby breathe on his own and we're very excited to hear that as you know the baby suffered as six yeah because of his mother being murdered and as the baby lost oxygen to the brain and yesterday I'm

He was breathing on his own without a machine. So although it's still a long way to go for the baby, the baby is fighting and surviving. He's a very handsome baby who looks like his father, has a very full head of hair.

and it was breathing on his own, and we're very, very excited about that. And in a detail that I don't know if it breaks my heart or if it touches my heart, but he did open his eyes one week before Marlin's funeral, almost like he knew it was getting to be time to say goodbye to his mom for the last time. At the service, a bunch of Marlin's loved ones all wore matching t-shirts that they had printed with her face on it. The

The organizers limited the services to just friends and family, but they did stream it online, I guess because it had raised such incredible media attention, and they knew that there were a lot of people who had heard Marlin's story who cared about her, so they wanted strangers to be able to pay their respects, even if it was just digitally. And the family also used Marlin's death as a chance to step up and get more involved with the politics of it all and the community.

They organized public drives to give away diapers, wipes, and other supplies to people that needed them, and this happened regularly every single year because if you remember too, the whole reason that Marlin died was because she went to a stranger's house for free clothing because she couldn't afford to buy new clothing. So her relatives didn't want some other new mother to have to take this same risk just to try to take care of her baby.

Hold up, puppy. Thank you for coming out, big fella. Another young son, Joshua Lopez, now eight years old. I hope others can take a lesson from this young man right here. To have the heart that he has from what he has endured, it's just a blessing, a blessing from God that he's able to do this. Just a toddler when his mom was killed, Joshua understands the importance of the giveaway.

giving diapers and white to be safe, hand out the his father, Yavonne Lopez. help from this tragedy a for them to continue on. was just absolutely outra the police and the docto because the truth was they opportunities to figure ou way, way earlier than th

so their lawyer addressed the issues in a couple of different press conferences. On the medical side, I want to compliment them again just so I'm clear. The doctors, the nurses, they love that little baby. It's very high-quality care. They've been very good. I think they've done everything they can.

But I still am concerned that from April 23rd to May 9th, how they couldn't determine that wasn't the mother when there's so many common sense signs to determine that. And some people here do agree with us on the inside who have been providing some information. I also want to say the father...

of Marlene came to this hospital during that period of time through the emergency room with one of the flyers that he was looking through for his daughter and they were rude to him and they rejected him and they called security. Now they knew a baby had just been born. Marlene being missing was all over the news.

there were flyers all over and he went to the hospitals because that's what you do when somebody's missing and you think maybe they're hurt or they gave birth out when they were out somewhere so the father didn't know and you go to the hospital look for somebody and so

They have no protocols for that, number one, and they needed protocols and procedures, but also were concerned that he was disrespected, were concerned that it could be that his English was not good, or that he's Hispanic, he's an immigrant from Mexico. We're concerned about that.

I don't want to be so harsh to make very strong allegations of racism or discrimination, but I do believe there was some discriminatory effect here, and we believe that has to be changed. And maybe if they listen to him and realize, look, we had a baby born during this period of time that we couldn't have prevented her death, but maybe we could have found out

earlier because that over two weeks that the father and the parents were not with that baby was time that they were emotionally distressed and they were in incredible pain and suffering and some of that I believe is the fault of the hospital. Now we also want to say although it is an anti-police thing, we respect the police, we respect first responders, that we do have concerns

about, I mean, for example, we found out that the, today, we just found out about this, the police escorted the ambulances, which I guess is protocol and that's fine, they escorted the ambulances to the hospital.

Now, shortly thereafter, also remember, the car of Marlene was receiving tickets. And we're not sure about the search that the police did. Now, I know that the response from the police department is that they did everything they could and the family is in pain. And while I share their pain... Okay, while we share their pain...

I'm more objective, and I still think things were wrong. I'm not just speaking out of pain or anger. That the car was with numerous tickets, which you could do an easy search in Chicago's databases. You could do an easy search to see the car got tickets on Leeds, on ICLR, or one of the other law enforcement databases. The hospital said before they reported it on May 9th,

to the Chicago Police and then to DCFS that Chicago Police never contacted them. Now why wouldn't the Chicago Police have gone to each hospital to search for Marlene? Now this was something we just learned today.

This is very important. The Chicago police never came to this hospital, which is not that far to the city limits, but many people from Chicago, including many Chicago police officers come to, and I believe they're on the same radio band, the security here, as the Chicago police, if I'm not mistaken. So they're on the same radio band as the Chicago police department, and many Chicago police come here to this hospital.

And so the Chicago police never came to this hospital to see if Marlene was here. Marlene was here. And they never notified the hospital until an arrest was going to be made. First of all, I want to read you from this report that the standard is not met for a safe setting. On May 9th, a doctor went into the social worker

and said, "Should this mother be making decisions on the baby because it may not be the baby's mother?" Then the social worker said, "I did not know what the doctor was talking about. I did not receive any information prior to this day. A nurse left the know, but our Chicago police visited the night before."

So on May 8th, that means the Chicago police visited the hospital. And then May 9th, they're still allowing these fake murderous villains who pretended to be this baby's parents medical decisions, including a transfusion.

And we heard from some of the nurses, they were even talking about donating the baby's organs. I mean, all in all, the doctors said nothing during those 17 days of red flags. And the hospital's only statement was, our thoughts and prayers are with the Ochoa Lopez family.

Our top priority is to provide the safest and highest quality care for the patients and communities we serve. Out of respect for patient privacy and in compliance with federal and state regulations, we are unable to provide a comment. We continue to cooperate with the local authorities.

So since then, her families have all been fighting for new laws, basically kind of like how they were organizing those giveaways with the baby supplies. They don't want anybody to go through something like this again. And if the hospital technically didn't do anything wrong because of how privacy laws worked, it meant that it was time to change these privacy laws. And of course, they didn't stop there. They were going to show up in a big way at the trial against these sickos who hurt Marlin and her baby.

Clarissa was initially charged with Marlin's murder and the aggravated battery of a child because of what she did to little Yovani. She pleaded not guilty for reasons of insanity, which isn't all that surprising because it does sound like she was having some serious mental issues. Not that I think that an insanity defense would have worked for her. I mean, she clearly knows what she was doing, and she went to great lengths to cover it up as well. Not to mention all these people around her, including her daughter Desiree, and Desiree's boyfriend told her point blank it wasn't right.

but it was still her defense nonetheless. And right as it seemed like people were getting justice, like things were starting to get answers, that there might be a hope and happy ending for little Yovani, a few months after her arrest on July 18th, 2019, the police upgraded her battery charges to homicide because sadly little Yovani didn't make it.

He never recovered enough to spend a single day of his short life out of the hospital. He was in the hospital from birth to death. And his father, Giovanni Sr., literally held his son in his arms when he passed away.

which I would say that as heartbreaking as this whole case is, that is the silver lining in this because had the doctors and the police not gotten that stick out of their ass and figured out what was going on, it's very possible that they would not have been reunited yet when he passed away. So the fact that he was able to hold him one last time and be there for him when he passed away, that is, in my opinion at least, a silver lining and a sick, twisted blessing in all of this. I don't know.

But now Clarissa wasn't the only person who was facing serious charges. Clarissa's boyfriend Peter was also charged with concealment of a homicide and obstruction of justice for his truly, truly terrible decision to hose down that bloody rug right in front of the police.

Her daughter Desiree was also charged with both murders, and I think this is obvious because she sat there and literally helped Clarissa strangle Marlin. And I also think it's worth mentioning that not too long after she got arrested, Desiree ended up giving birth in prison. She was literally pregnant when she helped her mom murder this pregnant woman. It is sick. Sick, sick, sick.

Before she could go to trial, Desiree ended up accepting a deal to testify against Clarissa. She also confessed on tape, giving some gruesome, gruesome details about how exactly she and her mom committed this murder together. And in exchange for this, she was going to get a lighter sentence of 30 years.

Now, I guess Clarissa realized at this point that there was no point in trying to act like she was innocent. I mean, no jury was going to believe that she was criminally insane with her own daughter sitting there on the stand testifying against her, talking about how they made this whole plan up in advance and figured out how to cover it up. So she ended up changing her plea to guilty. And on April 16th, 2024, she went to her sentencing hearing. This included a lot of statements from Marlon's family members. I just want to tell you that this is very difficult to pass.

This is her husband, Yovani Lopez, telling Univision that it is so hurtful, so hurtful to see the person, your wife, who you lived with for four years, and now you see her with her eyes closed. Lopez went on to say, why did these bad people do this? She did nothing to them. She was a good person. Clarissa was sentenced to 50 years in prison. And given that she was already 51 when she got the ruling, it was essentially the same thing as a life sentence.

Her boyfriend, Peter, was sentenced to four years in prison, but since he had to wait more than three and a half years to get his sentence, they let him out pretty much right afterward. And like I said, Desiree accepted a plea deal which comes with a 30-year sentence, and that was finalized during a hearing that happened on May 30, 2024.

Today, Desiree Figueroa was sentenced to 30 years in prison for the murder of Ochoa Lopez. Figueroa in court today said tearfully, I'm sorry, I can never apologize for what I did enough at all. A victim impact statement from Ochoa Lopez's husband, Giovanni Lopez, was read in court.

In it, he shares, "Your punishment will never be enough because my wife and son are gone forever, and my son Joshua will never be able to hug his mother again." During sentencing, Judge Peggy Chiampas acknowledged Desiree Figueroa's work while in prison to get an education, training, and therapy, as well as her difficult childhood. Nonetheless, the judge told Figueroa she hopes she lives every day of her life

thinking about Ochoa Lopez and her baby boy. I find it really interesting how Desiree and the judge both talked up how sorry she was and how much she had changed. Like,

that somehow could, I don't know, undo what she had done and give Marlon her life back. And even though Desiree and Peter weren't the brains of the operation, I mean, clearly they weren't as involved as Clarissa was since she spearheaded the whole thing, but Desiree should get nailed to the wall in my opinion, just like her mother did. She knew what her mom was planning on doing, and she's the one who pried Desiree.

finger by finger off the cord while Marlin was fighting for her life. Like, good on you for eventually cooperating with the investigation, but you only did it once you were caught anyway. I've covered some really messed up cases before, but it is beyond explanation how anybody can do something like this.

And again, I understand that losing a child is extremely, truly horrific. I get that Clarissa might have gone a little bit crazy while she was grieving, and I can even sort of see how it might be reasonable to her to feel like she needs a new baby to replace it. But the rest of it? I mean, unforgivable. She took her pain and she spread it around to everyone else, and now Marlin's husband, Giovanni, has to grieve the loss of a child too. It's horrible.

especially the fact that when you think about it, he held his son in his arms while he died. And layer in the whole fact that Desiree herself was pregnant and did this, inflicted this onto another pregnant woman. Like, what is even happening? And then add in the fact that Clarissa tried to make money off of this in the end by starting a GoFundMe. It's like, what is actually happening? How cruel and evil of a person are you truly?

So now Giovanni is raising his surviving son Joshua as a single father because his wife and Joshua's mother was taken far too early and had her life and the life of her unborn child just snuffed out by these selfish, cruel, calculated people.

It is awful. These stories never get any easier to share, but they are always important to share because this is not only a good example of having Marlon's story told and her legacy live on, her voice live on, but it is one of those cases that truly is important to generate awareness because as a pregnant person,

please be extra cautious, be extra careful who you're surrounding yourself with. And if you have a friend who's like, I don't know, telling you they're pregnant and you don't think they are, like maybe it's time to raise a red flag up and be like something might go afoot here. But it is one of those cases that truly does, in my opinion, generate a lot of awareness. So I truly, sincerely appreciate you taking the time to listen today.

Thank you guys so much for hearing Marlon's story and baby Yovani's story. And until the next one, please be nice. Don't kill people. Stay safe. Watch your back. All the things. Alright guys, thanks again. I will be back on the mic with you very soon. Alright.