Forensic Files II

Up next, the quiet of a country farm

is shattered by a fatal explosion.

It blew Roberto in pieces.

He caught on fire.

There are thousands of bits of evidence

and almost as many questions.

They went out to a crime scene and they collected things

that, quite frankly, didn't belong there at the scene.

And one more thing is out of place...

it's found on a sheet of paper that's blank

but still loaded with information.

When you see it, it's like, "Oh, my gosh.

That's what that is. That's what's happening."

Colusa County, which soaks up

the sun of California's Central Valley,

is home to some of the richest,

most productive farmland in North America.

At one time, Colusa County was supposedly the wealthiest county

in the United States.

A lot of the farms are big farms.

They're several thousand acres,

and they're passed on generation to generation.

The Moores were one of these farming families.

Their 1,800-acre ranch where they grew mostly rice

had been in the family for decades.

Another family, the Ayalas,

first-generation immigrants from Mexico,

worked side-by-side with the Moores

in the day-to-day operations of the farm.

It was a good life.

The work for both the Moores and the Ayalas was hard

but gratifying, and it paid well.

On the afternoon of July 16, 2011,

Fabian Ayala, who was 7 years old at the time,

accompanied his father, Roberto,

while he checked one of the Moore family rice fields.

We picked up our lunch before, picked up chicken,

and he let me eat it on the ride there.

Once we got there, all he had to do was shut off a pump.

It was a typical day, a typical chore,

but what happened next was anything but typical.

There was a massive explosion.

Once he switched the pump, everything just...

Something so loud, your ears are just echoing, like, squeaking.

The window shattered, and I look up

and he's just there on the ground.

A shocked Fabian ran to his father,

who was on fire and missing an arm.

He tried to grab his father's cellphone,

but the heat was too intense.

He ran for help.

I have no idea where I was running.

I was just looking for help, just someone, anyone.

He had to run through mud

that we call "Colusa mud."

It just cakes on your shoes.

You can't get it off.

He literally had to take his shoes off

and was running barefoot.

After running for 2 desperate miles,

Fabian was finally able to get help.

First responders found Roberto Ayala

dead at the scene and still on fire.

I was just trying to tell myself

it was a dream the whole time.

The whole...

The whole ride home, I tried to tell myself

it was a dream, but... it never went away.

At first, this looked like an accident.

Roberto had burn holes in the soles of his feet

and the bottoms of his boots,

a telltale sign of electrocution.

The electricity's gonna take its quickest path to ground.

That would not be uncommon that if it enters his body,

it actually would blow through the bottom of his feet,

out his boots.

But local detectives

weren't convinced this was an accident.

This blast was too big.

The damage to the pole

that the electrical box had been on was enormous.

It had sheared it off down almost toward the ground.

That is a very, very powerful explosion

where it will send debris

and items for several hundred, if not thousands of feet.

As for Fabian, he was lucky to be alive.

His father's truck acted as a shield.

Those items of metal

are traveling at thousands of feet per second,

and your body's not gonna stop it.

His body would not have stopped any of those items.

They kept asking me if that's really what happened.

They didn't want to believe it.

Much of this debris didn't appear to come

from the electrical box, the water pump,

or any of the equipment at the scene,

and electrocutions generally

don't result in explosions like this.

I recall turning to the detective and saying,

"You have a homicide investigation,"

and his exact words were to me is,

"I hope you're wrong,

because that's not what anybody wanted to hear."

In the case of the blast that killed Roberto Ayala,

some things became immediately apparent.

We sent off parts of the recovered items

from the explosive device,

and through the ATF labs, it was identified

as a triple-base smokeless powder,

and there was also the presence of gasoline.

The presence of gunpowder left no doubt...

someone killed Roberto with a bomb.

There has to be some kind of personal connection

because of the remoteness of where this device was placed.

So, somebody would have had to know Roberto

to have placed this device

and therefore kill Roberto and target him.

The triple-base smokeless powder in this bomb

is generally used for firearms

or ordnance used by the military.

It's always present in an IED

or an improvised explosive device.

It was a pipe bomb.

It was a cylindrical piece of metal

with screwed-in caps at each end.

Tiny bits of fishing line were found in the debris

and also what appeared to be a spring from a rat trap,

something bomb techs had seen before.

A technical term would be victim-actuated,

is what we call it in the EOD or explosive bomb squad world,

but a booby-trap device.

Whoever made this bomb knew what they were doing.

It was very sophisticated.

This was not just, throw some explosives in a pipe

and throw it in there, or anything like that.

Detectives now made a decision

that would affect the rest of the investigation.

As far as the public was concerned, there was no murder.

Publicly, they were investigating

a fatal industrial accident.

The public is not informed about it.

The manner in which this occurred,

or what we were finding for our evidence

was not released to the public.

The first question was,

who would want to kill Roberto Ayala,

a hard-working father of three?

It was just like, "Why?"

He never had problems with anybody

and there was no one to think, who did it, you know?

There was, like, no one that I thought hated him enough

or he hated someone enough

where that was even to be thought about.

As detectives started asking questions,

they soon learned there was a lot of tension

at the Moore family ranch.

Well, any time there's a family-owned

and operated business, there's obviously going to be

some backstories associated with them,

and this was one particular case where there was plenty.

Two cousins who helped run the farm,

Paul and Peter Moore, were not exactly friendly.

The cousins, Paul and Peter,

grew up together as young kids.

They played together. They fished together.

They duck-hunted together,

but they started parting as they got older.

Suspicion soon fell squarely on Peter Moore.

Peter had a reputation around town

of being a little bit of a hothead.

There were reports that Peter had had

some kind of altercation with Roberto.

He was a loudmouth.

He was a hothead. He was angry.

He had a big mouth. He threatened lots of people.

A few months before Roberto's murder,

family members said Peter

even threatened to harm his own father.

Peter was apparently so difficult

that his cousin Paul told him

he no longer stood to inherit any part of the family farm.

Paul told him that his dad, Gus, had cut him out of the will

and had put Roberto in in place of Pete,

which meant Pete wasn't going to get any of the money.

Mind you, this is a ranch worth about $18-$20 million back then.

And that looked to everyone like a good reason

for Peter to kill Roberto Ayala.

I think the motive was, ultimately would come down

to money or lack thereof or fear of lack thereof.

Years of tension within the Moore family

had Peter Moore convinced

he'd been cut out of his family's

multi-million-dollar farming business.

Even worse, he thought he'd been removed in favor of someone

who wasn't even family, longtime farm foreman Roberto Ayala.

When they were looking into it, once they realized

they had a homicide, was, who would want Roberto dead?

And Pete Moore is the first one that came to the forefront

because Pete Moore had made threats against Roberto.

His cousin, Paul, had stated