A murder, a manhunt and the grandmother who wouldn't stop the search for her daughter's killer

Josephine Wentzel spent years tracking down the suspect in her daughter’s death and is now helping others grieving cold cases.

She’d waited years for the news.

But when the message arrived Aug. 26, 2022, Josephine Wentzel suddenly had to confront an agonizing possibility. She’d spent six years tracking the man authorities believed was responsible for killing her daughter, a search that spanned thousands of miles, international borders and dozens of possible sightings that, in the end, had produced little.

Wentzel declined to identify the message’s sender, but she said it supposedly contained a recent picture of Raymond McLeod, who at the time was one of the U.S. Marshals Service’s most wanted fugitives. Had he actually been found — or would this be another jolt of false hope?

She focused in on the image, she said, and “just freaked out like, oh, my gosh, it’s him. I didn’t even want to think it because someone might hear my thoughts and warn him to flee.”

McLeod, a 42-year-old former U.S. Marine, was apprehended in El Salvador days later and is awaiting trial in San Diego on a charge of first-degree murder in the June 2016 strangulation of Krystal Mitchell. He pleaded not guilty and is scheduled for a preliminary hearing in March. His attorneys either declined to comment or did not respond to a request for comment. In court filings, they said McLeod accidentally killed Mitchell during “rough, consensual sex gone wrong.”