When police broke down the door of a tattoo parlor on the outskirts of Las Vegas in 2015, they were looking for evidence of a completely different crime.

But what forensic scientists found in ink bottles and on the owner’s skin turned a routine arrest into one of the most gruesome cases in recent decades.

14 tattoos, 14 women, 14 lives turned to ashes and ink.

On August 26th, 1996, 22-year-old Jessica Ray stopped at a small gas station in the suburbs of Reno, Nevada.

It was around in the afternoon.

She bought a bottle of water and a bag of chips, paid with change, and walked back to the parking lot where she stood with her backpack near the entrance to the highway.

The cashier remembered her because she asked how far it was to the state line and he replied that it was about 2 hours by car if she was lucky enough to get a ride.

Jessica nodded, said thank you and headed for the side of the road.

That was the last time she was seen alive.

Jessica worked as a waitress in a small cafe in Sacramento, California.

She rented a room in a shared apartment with two girls she hardly ever talked to.

She was quiet, unsociable, and kept to herself.

She had no close friends and no family nearby.

Her parents divorced when she was 14.

Her mother moved to Oregon and rarely called, and her father died of a heart attack a year after the divorce.

Jessica grew up with her aunt in Fresno, but after graduating from high school, she left and never returned.

She lived in Sacramento for 3 years, working, saving money, and dreaming of moving somewhere in the east, maybe Colorado or Utah.

She told her co-workers that she wanted to see mountains, real mountains, not the hills of California.

On August 22nd, 4 days before her disappearance, Jessica didn’t show up for work.

The cafe manager called her home, but no one answered.

Her roommate said that Jessica had left in the morning with a backpack and said she was going to visit a friend in Reno for a few days.

She didn’t leave an address or any phone numbers.

The manager decided that she had simply quit without notice and hired another girl to replace her.

When her roommates discovered a week later that Jessica was still missing, they called the police.

But an adult woman who had rented a room and left voluntarily did not arouse much interest.

The officer on duty recorded the information and said that if she didn’t show up in a month, they could file an official missing person report.

Jessica was indeed headed to Reno.

She had a guy she knew with whom she had been corresponding for several months through newspaper ads.

They had never met in person, but he invited her to come, saying he could help her find a job.

His name was Marcus, and he worked as a bartender in one of the casinos.

Jessica told only one neighbor about this in passing while she was packing her things.

She mentioned that she might stay there if everything worked out.

The neighbor did not remember Marcus’s last name or even the exact name of the casino.

When the police tried to find him a few weeks later, it turned out that there were more than a hundred bartenders named Marcus or Mark working in Reno.

And without additional information, the search was impossible.

The gas station where Jessica was last seen was about 80 kilometers from downtown Reno on Highway 80.

It was a small building with two gas pumps, a small shop, and a restroom.

The owner, an elderly man named Walter, had been running the station for 20 years and knew the locals well.

Jessica was just another traveler to him, the kind he saw every day.

Young people hitchhiking through Nevada in search of work or a better life.

He didn’t pay attention to which car she got into and didn’t even notice when she left.

There were no cameras at the gas station.

The only thing he remembered later when the police questioned him in the fall of that year was that it was hot that day around 38° and there were several cars in the parking lot.

A truck, a couple of cars, a van.

Nothing else specific.

September passed without any news.

Jessica’s neighbors sorted through her belongings, leaving only the bare essentials and rented the room to another girl.

No one else called the police.

The missing person case was never even officially opened.

Jessica Ray simply disappeared from life as if she had never existed.

No relatives who could insist on an investigation.

No friends who would raise the alarm.

Just a name in the missing person’s file, which over time was buried under thousands of other names.

19 years passed.

During that time, Nevada changed.

Reno grew.

The gas station where Jessica was last seen changed owners and was demolished to make way for a new car wash.

Her neighbors moved away.

The cafe manager died of cancer.

And Marcus, if he ever existed, had long since disappeared from view.

No one remembered Jessica Ray.

No one except one person.

In March 2015 in Las Vegas, in a residential area north of the strip, an incident occurred that caught the attention of the police.

A woman named Carol Mitchell, filed a report against her former partner, tattoo artist Damon Crowe.

She claimed that he had held her against her will in his home for 2 days and threatened to kill her.

Damon was arrested on charges of unlawful imprisonment and assault.

He was 47 years old and worked in his own tattoo parlor, a small room on the first floor of a residential building.

Neighbors said he was quiet, withdrawn, and hardly socialized with anyone.

The parlor was open irregularly and had few customers.

Carol told the police that she had been dating Damon for about a year.

They met in a bar.

He was charming and interesting, but over time he became controlling and aggressive.

She tried to break up with him, but he wouldn’t let her go.

That night, when she came to his place to pick up her things, he locked the door and wouldn’t let her leave.

He kept her in the apartment for 2 days, shouting and threatening her, and then suddenly let her go and told her it was better for her to keep quiet.

Carol immediately went to the police.

When officers arrived with a search warrant at Damon’s home, they found a mess, dirty dishes, and empty bottles.

In the salon on the first floor, there were two chairs, a table with tools, a glass cabinet with ink, and a sterilizer.

Everything looked normal for a small private salon.

But the detective who conducted the inspection noticed one oddity.

On the walls hung photographs of Damon’s work, tattoos on different parts of the body.

Almost all of these tattoos were on Damon himself.

arms, shoulders, chest, back, women’s faces.

Portraits of young women done in a realistic style with dates under each image.

The dates covered the period from 1994 to 2008.

The detective photographed the tattoos and asked Damon to explain who these women were.

Damon replied that they were just his work, faces from photographs he found in magazines and transferred to his skin.

No real people, just art.

But the detective was suspicious.

14 portraits, 14 dates, too specific for just art.

Damon was released on bail 3 days later.

Carol’s case was proceeding as usual, but the detective couldn’t shake the thought of the tattoos.

He sent the photos to the crime lab with a request to check if any of the faces matched the missing person’s database.

The answer came in two weeks.

Three faces were believed to match women who had disappeared in Nevada and California in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Believed because the quality of the tattoos was high, but not perfect, and it was impossible to determine a match with 100% accuracy.

That was enough to get a new warrant.

In April 2015, the police returned to Damon Crow’s house with a team of forensic experts.

This time they were looking not just for evidence of assault, but for possible clues to more serious crimes.

The salon was sealed off and all tools, ink, skin samples, and materials were seized for analysis.

Damon was arrested again and taken to the station for questioning.

For the first few hours, he denied everything.

He said it was a misunderstanding that the police were wrong.

But when he was shown the preliminary results of the ink analysis, he fell silent.

In one of the ink bottles Damon used for his tattoos, forensic experts found something unusual.

The ink contained an impurity that shouldn’t have been there.

Organic particles that upon closer inspection turned out to be human ashes and traces of blood.

Not fresh blood, but dried blood mixed with pigment.

Damon heard this and lowered his head.

A few minutes later, he asked for a lawyer.

The analysis took several more weeks.

Of the 14 ink bottles that were seized from the salon, eight contained similar impurities.

Ash and blood mixed with regular tattoo ink.

DNA was extracted from seven samples.

One of them matched data from the missing person’s database.

Jessica Ray, 22 years old, disappeared in August 1996 in the Reno, Nevada area.

The date under one of the tattoos on Damon’s shoulder matched the date of her disappearance.

When Damon was presented with this information, he was silent for a long time.

His lawyer advised him not to say anything, but Damon seemed tired.

He looked exhausted, aged, as if the burden he had been carrying all these years had finally become unbearable.

He asked for a glass of water, drank it in one gulp, and began to speak.

What he said over the next 6 hours turned the investigator’s understanding of the case on its head.

Damon Crowe was born in a small town in Arizona in 1968.

His father left the family when the boy was five, and his mother worked two jobs and was hardly ever home.

He grew up as a withdrawn child, spending his time alone, drawing and making things out of wood and metal.

At school, he was considered strange but harmless.

After graduation, he moved to Las Vegas, got a job as an apprentice in a tattoo parlor, and a few years later started his own business.

None of those who knew him could have imagined that behind this quiet craftsman was a man capable of what he began to tell investigators.

Jessica wasn’t the first.

Damon said she was the third.

He killed the first in 1994, a year after opening his studio.

He was driving down the highway late at night returning from California where he had picked up equipment from an acquaintance.

A girl was standing on the side of the road with her hand raised, hitchhiking.

He stopped.

She got in the car and said she was going to Las Vegas to look for work.

Her name was Laura and she was 24 years old.

Damon hadn’t planned anything.

He just drove her along and talked to her.

But somewhere halfway there, something changed.

He couldn’t explain what exactly.

He just realized he could do it.

That no one would find out.

He turned off the highway onto a dirt road and said he knew a shortcut.

Laura didn’t object.

They drove for about 20 minutes through the desert until they found themselves in a completely deserted place.

Damon stopped the car and hit her on the head with a heavy flashlight that he always kept in the glove compartment.

Laura lost consciousness.

He strangled her with his hands.

He buried the body right there in the desert in a shallow grave he dug with a folding shovel from the trunk.

Then he covered it with sand and rocks.

He returned home in the morning, took a shower, and went to bed.

He waited several days for the police to knock on his door, but no one came.

No one was looking for Laura.

She was as lonely as all the others he chose later.

A few weeks later, Damon returned to the spot.

He was afraid that someone might have found the body, but everything was untouched.

He dug up the hole.

The body had begun to decompose.

The smell was terrible, but Damon forced himself to continue.

He pulled out the remains, put them in a metal container he had brought with him, and took them to an abandoned industrial area on the outskirts of Las Vegas.

There, in an old warehouse where no one ever went, he built a fire.

He burned the body for several hours.

He collected the ashes and bones in plastic bags.

At home in the basement of his house, Damon ground the bones into powder.

He had an old grinder that he had bought for working with pigments.

He mixed the ashes with a small amount of blood that he had taken before burning the body.

He kept the blood in the freezer in small test tubes.

He added it to regular black tattoo ink.

The result was a thick dark mixture.

He gave himself his first tattoo on the inside of his shoulder, a portrait of Laura from memory.

He tattooed the date below the portrait, July 23rd, 1994, the day he killed her.

The second was in 1995.

a girl named Teresa.

She was 26 years old.

He met her at a bus stop in downtown Las Vegas.

She was waiting for the last bus, but it didn’t come.

Damon approached her and offered her a ride.

She agreed.

He didn’t take her home, but to the desert, to another place 40 km from the city.

He killed her the same way.

He burned her.

He made a tattoo.

This process became a ritual for him.

Not just murder, but something more.

A way to keep his victim with him forever.

Not a photograph, not an object, but a part of her body, literally fused into his skin.

Jessica was the third.

He saw her at a gas station on that August day.

He stopped to fill up his car and noticed a girl with a backpack on the side of the road.

She had her back to him and was looking at the road.

Damon waited for her to turn around.

When he saw her face, he decided to act.

He pulled up, rolled down the window, and asked where she was going.

Jessica said she was going to Reno to visit a friend.

Damon replied that he was going there, too, and could give her a ride.

She hesitated, but agreed.

She sat in the passenger seat and put her backpack at her feet.

They drove onto the highway.

For the first half hour, they drove in silence.

Jessica looked out the window.

Damon kept his hands on the wheel and thought about what to do.

He didn’t want to do it on the highway.

Too many cars, too risky.

He had to get her far away.

He started talking to her, asking where she was from and what she did.

Jessica answered briefly without going into detail.

She worked as a waitress and wanted to move away and start a new life.

Damon nodded, keeping the conversation going while he waited for the right moment.

After an hour’s drive, he said he knew a shortcut through the old mines.

Jessica hesitated again, but he assured her it was safe, that he had driven that way many times himself.

She agreed.

They turned off the highway onto a country road.

The road wound through the hills, past abandoned buildings, and rusty towers.

There were no cars.

Damon drove for about 30 minutes until he saw the place he was looking for.

An old oak tree stood alone in the middle of a dry riverbed.

He had driven past this tree many times and knew that no one ever came here.

He stopped the car under the tree and said he needed to check the tire, which seemed to be flat.

He got out and walked around the car.

Jessica got out too and stretched after the long drive.

Damon came up behind her, took a rope he had prepared in advance out of his pocket and threw it around her neck.

Jessica tried to scream, but he tightened the noose.

She struggled for a few minutes, scratching his hands, trying to break free.

Then she went limp.

Damon put the body in the trunk and covered it with an old blanket.

He went back for Jessica’s backpack and took that, too.

He threw it away later on his way home in a dumpster behind a gas station.

The backpack was found a few days later, but no one connected it to the disappearance because there was no official report of Jessica’s disappearance at that time.

Damon returned to the oak tree 3 days later.

He brought a shovel and dug a deep hole under the tree’s roots.

He buried the body.

The location was ideal.

No one went there and the tree served as a landmark that he could easily find again.

A month later, he returned, dug up the hole, and took the remains.

The process was already familiar.

Burning, grinding, mixing, a tattoo on his chest, a portrait of Jessica dated August 26th, 1996.

In the following years, he acted about once a year, sometimes less often.

The fourth victim in 1997, the fifth in 1999, the sixth in 2001.

All of them were young women traveling alone without family or close ties.

Damon chose them deliberately.

He knew that no one would look for them.

They disappeared and the world continued to turn as if they had never existed.

He picked them up at bus stops, gas stations, and store parking lots.

He always offered them a ride, was always polite and calm.

He never aroused suspicion.

The oak tree became his place.

He buried all his victims under the roots of that tree.

First he buried them.

Then he returned a few weeks later when the decomposition was far enough along and took the remains.

Each time it became easier.

He stopped being afraid, stopped feeling disgust.

It became work, a routine.

>> >> murder, burial, exumation, cremation, tattooing.

The cycle repeated itself over and over again.

By 2008, there were 14 portraits on his body, 14 women whom he had turned into ashes and ink.

He couldn’t explain to the investigators why he needed to do this.

He said it was a way to preserve them, that they became a part of him forever, that he remembered each one, every face, every voice, that the tattoos were not just drawings, but monuments.

The investigators listened and took notes.

The psychiatrists who were present at the interrogation took notes.

Damon spoke in an even voice without emotion as if he were talking about something mundane.

Sometimes he paused, asked for water, then continued.

He described each victim, each place where he had taken them.

He named those he remembered.

Laura, Teresa, Jessica, Martha, Christina, Ashley, Vanessa.

He didn’t know the rest of their names.

They hadn’t had time to introduce themselves, or he hadn’t remembered, but he remembered all their faces.

The details of the tattoos matched the descriptions.

The investigators realized he was telling the truth.

All 14 tattoos were real people.

14 lives he had taken.

When he finished his story, the room fell silent.

The detective conducting the interrogation asked where exactly the oak tree was located.

Damon described the place.

He said that from the highway you had to turn onto a dirt road near an old water tower, drive 25 km north, then turn right at a large rock that looked like a lying bear.

The tree stands alone in the middle of a dry riverbed.

It is easy to find as there are no other trees for miles around.

The police organized an expedition.

In early May 2015, a group of investigators, forensic scientists, and body search specialists went to the specified location.

Damon went with them, handcuffed and under escort.

He sat silently in the car, looking out the window.

When they pulled up to the oak tree, he nodded.

Yes, this is it right here.

The tree was old and massive with a thick trunk and spreading branches.

Its roots went deep into the ground, forming small mounds and hollows around the base.

The forensic experts began their work.

They brought ground penetrating radar, metal detectors, and shovels.

They scanned the ground around the tree.

The radar showed several anomalies under the roots.

They began to dig.

The first remains were found an hour later.

The bones were partially decomposed and mixed with soil and roots.

The forensic experts worked carefully sifting through every centimeter of soil.

By the end of the day, they had found fragments of three more bodies.

The next day, the work continued.

They dug deeper and expanded the perimeter.

They found more and more remains.

The bones had mixed together over the years.

Tree roots had grown through them, and the earth had settled and compressed everything into a single mass.

Separating the remains and determining who they belong to was a difficult task.

The excavation continued for a week.

In the end, fragments of 14 different skeletons were recovered.

Some were almost complete.

Others were incomplete.

Damon did not take all the bones for cremation.

Only some of them, skulls, ribs, handbones.

He left the rest in the ground.

Forensic scientists packed up all the findings and took them to the lab.

The long process of identification began.

DNA was successfully extracted from only eight skeletons.

The rest were too decomposed and the bone tissue did not preserve any usable material.

Of the eight, three DNA samples matched records in the missing person’s database.

Jessica Ray, Martha Simmons from Arizona who disappeared in 2002, and Christina Weber from California who disappeared in 2005.

The other five did not match any records.

This meant that they were either never reported missing or their DNA samples were never entered into the database.

The families of the three identified women were notified.

For Jessica’s mother, it was a call she hadn’t expected after nearly 20 years.

She had long since come to terms with the idea that her daughter was probably dead, but she still hoped.

When the detective broke the news, she didn’t cry.

She just sat silently on the phone for a few minutes, then asked if Jessica had suffered.

The detective replied that her death had been quick.

It was a lie, but a necessary one.

Martha Simmons family reacted differently.

Her brother flew to Las Vegas the next day, demanded to see Damon, and yelled at the police station that he wanted to look him in the eye.

He was refused.

Christina Weber’s parents searched for her for seven years, hired a private investigator, and traveled across half the state.

When they were told that her remains had been found, her father said only one word.

Finally, Damon Crowe was officially charged with 14 counts of first-degree murder.

The trial began in September 2015.

The defense tried to have him declared insane, but a psychiatric evaluation showed that Damon was fully aware of his actions, planned them, and understood the consequences.

He was not mentally ill in the legal sense.

He was a serial killer who acted methodically and deliberately for 14 years.