Injustice: The Murder of Brandy Duvall

Warning: The following story contains graphic material, including descriptions of murder and rape, which some readers may find disturbing. Discretion is advised.

Having studied and read about many murder cases and serial killers, I have become well acquainted with cases of violence and death. But few cases measure up to the scale of brutality that was shown in the 1997 kidnapping, rape, torture, and murder of 14 year old Brandaline Rose Duvall outside Denver, Colorado.

Despite the horrific nature of the crime, it is virtually unknown and has been practically forgotten about in the nearly 20 years since its occurrence.

Brandy Duvall

Brandaline Rose Duvall was a small, shy, and happy 14 year old middle school student who was born on July 28, 1982, in Denver, Colorado. To call her a complete angel would be inaccurate; she, like many youths, was involved in some illegal activities and used drugs such as alcohol, cocaine and marijuana.

But Brandy, as her friends called her, was, in general, a kind, loving young girl who got good grades, did sports, and hung out with other girls.

Her future was looking bright; she was an honor roll student, and had recently brought home her first rose from a boy.

But all of her aspirations and dreams would come to a violent, horrifying end on the night of May 30, 1997.

Deuce-Seven

In and around Denver, there lurks collections of ruthless and quarreling gangs, who argue over turf, weapons and drugs. One of the most notorious of these gangs was a Latino offshoot of the Bloods. This offshoot called themselves the Deuce-Seven, and they wasted no time in establishing a violent reputation. Members carried out drive-by attacks on rival neighborhoods, distributed drugs, and threatened informants with death.

The main leader of the Deuce-Seven was a young man by the name of Francisco “Pancho” Martinez Jr, an ex-convict with a criminal record for drug abuse and assaulting numerous women. Other members of the gang included Danny “Bang” Martinez (no relation), Samuel “Zig Zag” Quintana, and Frank “Little Bang” Vigil.

Deuce-Seven members identified themselves by wearing the color red, and considered it to be a great insult for non-members to wear the color. The patrolled streets like South Federal Boulevard, on the lookout for non-members wearing that color.

On the night of May 30, 1997, they noticed a young girl walking alone down the street wearing a red Chicago Bulls jersey, and, like sharks drawn to blood, the men pulled alongside the unsuspecting girl.

Acts of the Devil

On May 30, 1997, Brandy Duvall had spent the afternoon with two of her friends smoking marijuana and drinking a six-pack of beer. Although it was dark out, she decided to walk home to her grandmother’s house.

As Brandy walked home, the members of Deuce Seven pulled alongside her, and exchanged words with her. No one knows why, but, for one reason or another, Brandy got into the car with the men, who took her to 3165 West Hawthorne Place in Denver, Colorado.

Once there, gang member Sammy Quintana dragged Brandy to the back bedroom and drugged her with cocaine. Francisco then entered the bedroom, undressed Brandy, and, with Deuce-Seven member David Warren, sexually assaulted her with a beer bottle.

Then, Francisco and Danny dragged Brandy into the bathroom, and, ignoring the girl’s screams, sliced her anus open with a knife to have anal sex with her.

After Danny had anal sex with Brandy, Francisco took a broom handle and rammed it into her rectum as Danny Martinez watched and laughed. When Brandy lost control of her bowels and soiled her attacker’s shoes, Francisco yelled “You shit on my homeboy’s shoes, bitch”, and kicked her in the chest as hard as he could. When Brandy mouthed off to her rapist, Francisco kicked her again, this time in the head, yelling “Shut up, bitch!”. He then took Brandy to the shower, rinsed her off, and proceeded to assault her again.

Throughout the night, the 14 year old girl went through hours of rape and torture at the hands of her captors. Jose Martinez, the owner of the house where Brandy was held, later commented that the gang “was possessed by the fuckin’ devil” that night.

As Brandy lay in the bathroom, bleeding and in agony from her torment, Francisco Martinez, Danny Martinez, and Frank Vigil debated over what to do with her. Francisco argued that, if they let Brandy go, she would go to the police and they would be arrested. The gang asked Brandy if she knew where she was, and, unfortunately for the young girl, she admitted she did. Furious, Francisco kicked Brandy in the head again, and told his comrades "That's it. We're gonna have to waste her."
The gang made the decision to take Brandy into the mountains and murder her.

Early in the morning on May 31, 1997, Brandy was dragged from the house by Francisco Martinez,  Danny Martinez, Frank Vigil, and Deuce-Seven member Sammy Quintana to the car. She begged her tormentors to take her to a hospital, but they refused, and Frank Vigil punched the girl in the face as he forced her into the car. As they drove into the Colorado mountains, Brandy begged her attackers to spare her life, promising she would not tell the police. Francisco eventually tired of Brandy’s pleas, and instead brandished a knife and began stabbing the young girl again and again. When Quintana complained he was getting blood on the car seats, Francisco instead began to strangle Brandy.

Finally, the men reached a turnoff point, where they stopped the car. Francisco dragged Brandy from the car and, while Quintana held her head down, again began to stab Brandy multiple times in the chest and neck. Then, the men took Brandy’s brutalized body and hurled it into a rocky stream before driving off.

Despite having been stabbed over two dozen times, Brandy was not yet dead. With her hands cuffed behind her back, she got up and tried multiple times to climb up the ledge to the road, only to fall back down again. Finally, she fell one last time, and died from blood loss by the stream. Her body was found later that morning by two horrified tourists.

Angela Metzger, Brandy’s mother, heard on the news about a young girl’s body being found in the mountains. Her daughter had been missing for over a day, and she drove to the morgue to identify the body. Between a glass partition in the morgue, she saw her daughter Brandy’s body lying on a slab. “Wake up, baby!”, she wailed as she pounded on the glass window. “Wake up!”.

The arrests

Back at the home on Hawthorne Street, the Deuce-Seven members did their best to clean up the house. Francisco removed the bloodstained bed mattress where Brandy had been tortured and raped for hours. However, Jose Martinez kept one of Brandy’s personal mementos, a prayer card with her name on it. Eventually, Jose contacted the police and told them about the horror that had taken place in his house on the night of May 30, 1997.

The murderers of Brandy Duvall (clockwise from top left): Danny Martinez, Francisco Martinez, Frank Vigil, David Warren, Maurice Warren, and Jacob Casados. The seventh murderer, Sammy Quintana, is not pictured.

Francisco Martinez, Daniel Martinez, Sammy Quintana, and Frank Vigil were arrested and charged with capital murder, kidnapping, rape, and torture. In addition, police arrested three other Deuce-Seven members who had taken part in the brutal kidnapping and murder, David and Maurice Warren and Jacob Casados. The Deuce-Seven gang had been busted, and police intended to keep them off the street for good.

The horrific murder hardened the state's attitude towards criminals. Just five months after Brandy Duvall was murdered, Colorado carried out its first execution in 30 years, putting convicted rapist and murderer Gary Lee Davis to death by lethal injection.
Prosecutors intended to see Brandy Duvall's killers suffer the same fate.

Plea deals and Colorado’s death penalty

Because Jose Martinez had led police to Brandy’s murderers, he was exempt from prosecution and entered the witness protection program. Jacob Casados pleaded guilty to sexual assault in exchange for the murder charges against him being dropped, and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Both Maurice and David Warren also made plea deals with the government, and received prison sentences ranging from 10-15 years. All three men have since been released.

Sammy Quintana, faced with the prospect of the death penalty and facing additional charges for a separate, unrelated murder, agreed to testify against Francisco Martinez and Danny Martinez in exchange for a sentence of 96 years. Quintana now goes by the name "Sonny Tafoya", and is incarcerated in an out-of-state prison.
This left only Frank Vigil, Francisco Martinez, and Daniel Martinez, all three of whom pleaded not guilty to the charges against them.
The crime was horrifying by any standard, but this case shocked even seasoned veterans of the Denver’s homicide investigation, who had seen their share of gang-related murders. At the time of the murders, there were less than five people on Colorado’s death row, but prosecutors intended to make sure that the murderers of Brandy Duvall would face execution for their crime.

Colorado had recently introduced a new method of sentencing defendants to death. Rather than have the punishment decided by a jury, a panel of three judges would vote on the appropriate penalty for a convicted criminal. Later on, it would be this policy, this method of sentencing, that would end up denying justice for the killers of Brandaline Duvall.

Frank Vigil, the youngest of the defendants, was convicted of capital murder in 1998 for his role in the killing of Brandy Duvall. At the age of 16, Vigil was too young to face execution in Colorado, so the court sentenced him to life without parole. He is currently incarcerated at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility in Ordway, Colorado.

Francisco and Danny Martinez were next up for trial, and this time, both faced the death penalty.

The Judgement

The trial of Francisco Martinez finally began in August of 1998. Francisco was arrogant, cocky, and rude during his trial, and showed not a shred of remorse for his actions. Throughout the trial, he mouthed the words “Fuck you” to Brandy Duvall’s grieving family as he smirked and laughed.

Despite his lawyer’s attempt to shift the blame to Danny Martinez, the jury was not swayed, and Francisco’s repulsive behavior and complete lack of remorse told a different story than the one the defense was portraying. The jury took less than three hours to find Francisco Martinez Jr. guilty of murder. Francisco’s fate was now in the hands of the three judge panel.

The panel noted that, even for a gang member, Francisco went above and beyond the scale of barbarity any of them had seen. It didn't take long for the three judges to reach a verdict: Francisco Martinez would have to die for his crime.

On May 27, 1999, the panel unanimously voted to sentence Francisco Martinez Jr. to death by lethal injection for the murder of Brandy Duvall.

"In nearly fifty years of collective judicial experience, this panel has never dealt with a more shocking display of conscienceless depravity than that of this defendant”, the judgement wrote.
"It is the judgement, sentence, and warrant of the Court that the defendant, Francisco Martinez Jr., be delivered to the executive director of the Colorado Department of Corrections to suffer the penalty of death by lethal injection."
That same day, Danny Martinez narrowly avoided the death penalty by a single vote, and was sentenced to life without parole for his role in the murder. Danny Martinez is currently serving his life sentence out-of-state, as part of an interstate prisoner compact arranged with the Colorado Department of Corrections.

Ring v. Arizona

Thousands of miles away, in Arizona, a convicted murderer named Timothy Ring was also sitting on death row for the murder of an armored car guard. Like Francisco Martinez, Timothy Ring had been sentenced to death by a judge panel, not a jury.

While on death row, Timothy Ring filed a lawsuit against the state of Arizona, essentially arguing that his death sentence was in violation of his Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial. Ring argued, in essence, that his sentence should have been decided by a jury, not a judge.

The case went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which, in a 7-2 decision, held that it was in violation of the Constitution for a judge, without a jury, to impose death sentences on convicts.

Ring and Colorado

Back in Colorado, two death row inmates, in the aftermath of the Ring ruling, appealed their cases to the Colorado Supreme Court, arguing that their death sentences should be overturned because they, like Ring, had been sentenced to death by judge panels, not juries.

In February, 2003, the Colorado court sided with the appellants, and overturned the death sentences of two Colorado inmates who were sentenced to death by judge panels. The two inmates were retroactively sentenced to life without parole.

One of the inmates was George Woldt, a convicted rapist and murderer condemned to death in 1997.

The other inmate was none other than Francisco Martinez Jr.

For Angela Metzger, Brandy Duvall’s grieving mother, the commutation of Francisco’s death sentence brought another wave of devastation to her family.

“They let me down, they let Brandy down”, the mother wept to a news reporter who interviewed her after the commutations. “It makes it like it was a waste of time”, she said. “It makes it like he got away with it”.

Angela Metzger was determined not to let Brandy’s name fade into an obscure case mentioned in law textbooks. She wanted people to remember Brandy as a real person.

After Brandy’s death, Angela Metzger spoke about her daughter as much as she could. Later she commented that the only good thing she felt about testifying at the murder trial was that she could talk about her daughter’s life before it was cut short by the actions of a group of deranged murderers and thugs.

Angela Metzger, whose life had been torn apart by grief and depression since her daughter’s death, died five years later from cancer, aged just 51.

However, Francisco Martinez, now 43, is still very much alive, serving his life sentence at the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility. And although he will never be released, he successfully avoided the punishment he very much deserves.

Injustice

Since her murder, Brandy Duvall’s name has faded into obscurity. But, in the courts, her murderers are very much alive, with Francisco Martinez, Samuel Quintana, and Frank Vigil all continuing to file appeals of their sentences or complaints about their prison conditions. Their appeals cost the taxpayers millions of dollars. And yet, the crime they committed has almost been completely forgotten.

Virtually no one remembers the ruthlessness, brutality, and lack of mercy these killers showed when they committed their awful crime that night. No segment of 60 Minutes, no special report from CNN, NBC, ABC, or any other mainstream network has ever talked about the case. 

Indeed it appears that one of the most horrific, brutal, disturbing, barbaric murder cases in the history of America has been simply forgotten about.

Now, it isn't unusual for a murder case to fade from the public limelight, but what I found particularly disturbing is the way I learned about this case. 

I did not learn about it from a television program. I did not learn about it from an episode of Criminal Minds.
In fact, I first heard about the crime when, while studying a separate case, I read an article on the website of the Aryan Nations, a violent, white supremacist, neo-Nazi organization.
The Aryan Nations mentioned the case as an example of "white genocide", and claimed that the "Jew-controlled media" was ignoring the case on purpose because the victim was white and the perpetrators were Latino.

I was disgusted to learn about the case in this way. As horrific as the actual murder of Brandy Duvall was, I think the fact that her death has been hijacked and used by neo-Nazis to promote hatred and intolerance adds insult to injury. And even though the Aryan Nations claimed that they were preserving the memory and legacy of Brandy Duvall in the face of the "anti-white media", the truth is that reducing Brandy Duvall's murder into a simple statistic is a dishonor to her, a dishonor to her family, and an injustice to everything we stand for.

In fact, hijacking tragedies to suit an agenda of hate is nothing new for neo-Nazis. Brandy Duvall's murder wasn't the first murder case exploited by white supremacists, nor was it the last.

Ten years ago, a white couple in Tennessee, Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, were abducted, brutally tortured and raped, and murdered by a gang of black carjackers. Although the case was covered more extensively than the murder of Brandy Duvall, once again white supremacists exploited the supposed lack of media coverage and blamed it on an anti-white agenda. The Christian and Newsom families found themselves being used as pawns in a game of racial hatred - a game that they wanted no part in.

This trend is not only very dangerous; it is an insult to the victims of these crimes and an insult to their families. When racist, far-right organizations dissect these cases so they can shoehorn them into their agenda of hate, it opens the wounds these murders inflicted on countless families. It is a dishonor to the victims of these crimes and it serves the most abhorrent of agendas.

To exploit a horrific tragedy and turn it into a rallying cry for a hateful cause is perhaps the most insulting thing a person can do to a murder victim. Brandy Duvall deserves better than to be used as, in her late mother's words, "just another statistic". 

So as much as the Colorado Supreme Court failed to provide justice for Brandy Duvall, I think the biggest injustice is that Brandy's murder has become a rallying cry for white supremacists. Brandy deserves better than that. Her family deserves better than that. Brandy's memory shouldn't be tarnished and dishonored by bad faith actors with a nefarious agenda. For her sake, and for the sake of her family, I think it is incumbent upon all of us to call out this behavior wherever and wherever it appears.

And I hope that my article can, in some small way, do its part to combat the villainous forces that seek to hijack, exploit, and dishonor the memories of murder victims to suit an agenda of hatred and intolerance. Because, as my previous article on Gordon Kahl shows, that path never ends well for anyone.

The Last Word

Today, the creek in the mountains where Brandy Duvall bled to death is marked by a steel cross. Erected by her family, the cross bears Brandy’s name, and is decorated with colorful necklaces, flowers, and stuffed animals.

After her death, Brandy’s boyfriend, who had given her a rose just before her death, wrote a poem to remember her and the happier times they had spent together:

“Not a day goes by that I don’t think of you.
I sometimes wonder what would have been if you were still here with me.
Then I’m taken away to days long forgotten, the days when you were here.
The days when we would chase each other around the yard as lovesick children do.
The night ride trips up to the mountains, how we would sit in the back seat the
Entire time and watch the stars.
I can’t help but smile when I think of those times,
But I cry as I write them now.”

____

Author's Note: This article was edited on October 11, 2020