Ivan Dennings Cales confers with his attorney during his arraignment in February 2015 in the 8th Judicial District Court in Taos. Cales, 51, was found guilty of murder Friday in the death of 33-year-old Roxanne Houston of Taos. Rick Romancito/Taos News file photo
Ivan Dennings Cales confers with his attorney during his arraignment in February 2015 in the 8th Judicial District Court in Taos. Cales, 51, was found guilty of murder Friday in the death of 33-year-old Roxanne Houston of Taos. Rick Romancito/Taos News file photo
TAOS — A Taos County jury has found 51-year-old Ivan Dennings Cales guilty of first-degree murder in the death of a woman whose burned remains were discovered by hikers on Christmas Day in 2014 in a shallow grave near Carson.
After a weeklong trial and four hours of deliberations, Cales, 51, also was found guilty Friday on two counts of tampering with evidence in the death of 33-year-old Roxanne Houston, who had moved to the Taos area from Colorado in 2013.
The verdict was a victory for prosecutors, who argued Cales had killed Houston because he thought she was a witch who had cast a spell on him.
Defense attorney Thomas Clark told The Taos News, however, that the allegations of witchcraft were “nonsense.” He had filed a motion seeking to exclude some testimony pointing to a witch hunt by Cales, but the motion was denied.
Described by Taos County sheriff’s officials as a drifter from West Virginia, Cales was charged in connection with Houston’s death in February 2014. Authorities believed he had fled the area long before her remains were unearthed — she was last seen alive six months earlier — but police found him at the St. Elizabeth Shelter in Santa Fe, living under a different name and barely resembling the man in the photos that police had posted during a search for him.
Cales had briefly lived in a home west of the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge that Houston shared with a boyfriend and a former boyfriend — a man who had raised her when she was a child and also fathered two of her four children, none of whom lived with her.
Clark argued during Cales’ trial, which began Monday, that there were many people with motivation to commit the crime, but his client had none. He described the relationship between Houston and the men as a love triangle, with “one link dead, and two of the male links alive.”
Clark argued that then Taos County sheriff’s Detective Robert Salazar, who is now a deputy, failed to confirm the alibi of Houston’s boyfriend, Johny Hanson, who reportedly was jealous of Vernon McCune, her former lover who lived in the home.
“If you’re a police officer and you know the statistics, one-third of all women who were murdered in the U.S. were murdered by a domestic partner,” Clark said. “They didn’t even bother to test the truck of the domestic partner.”
According to witnesses who testified at Cales’ trial, the home Houston shared with the men was sometimes tumultuous.
Hanson testified that he left on foot for a couple of days after a squabble when Cales was still living there. When he returned, he said, Cales’ belongings were strewn across the property. He said Cales told him, “Roxanne is a liar, and I voted her out of the council.”
Cales moved to a home a half-mile away, but his belongings were still at the property, so he’d come around a lot, Hanson said.
Another witness who lived on the property, Brandon Hethcox, told the jury he’d heard Hanson yelling at Houston, saying, “I will not put up with any more lies from you, woman!”
Hethcox said he did not attend Houston’s service because “it was a New Age, mystic, pagan service” that went against his Christian religion.
Two witnesses testified that Cales had spoken about killing witches.
One was Michael Thebo, who testified during the trial that Cales had told him if a Wiccan ever cast a spell on him, he would have to kill the witch to get rid of the spell. Cales had lived on Thebo’s property. Thebo also said Cales had a .30-caliber pistol.
A ballistics report for the case was inconclusive, but it showed that a bullet found in Houston’s head was from the same class of gun that Cales owned, and there were individual markings on the bullet linking it to Cales’ gun.
A calendar and a topical graph map of the Two Peaks area that Thebo said he had found in Cales’ residence months after Houston’s disappearance were presented as evidence. The calendar was marked, “the day Roxanne left Johny’s” on Friday, June 13, 2014. On the map, an X marked a well near the spot where Houston’s remains were found.
Inmate Raymond Martinez, who had shared a cell with Cales, also said Cales had talked about witches. He had even drawn pictures of a witch hunt, and told Martinez his victim was a witch, Martinez testified. Pencil sketches of a witch hunt — done in jail and signed by Cales — were exhibited as evidence.
In a March 10 court document, a deputy district attorney says Martinez had reported to officials that Cales “talked about burning the body of a witch and cutting her hands off.”
The document also says that a deputy who attended an autopsy on Houston’s body had testified during a preliminary hearing that “the thing he found odd about the autopsy, was that the victim’s hands were missing.”
But Clark argued there was no evidence directly connecting his client to Houston’s murder, and that Cales had no motive. A search of Cales’ Jeep found no traces of blood — Cales admitted he had scrubbed its interior after Houston disappeared — and clothing believed to have blood on it came back negative for DNA, Clark said.
The most important witness during the trial, he said, was Betty Harper, who goes by the name “Sunshine.”
Harper, who lived on the same road as Houston, testified that the two had talked on the road for about 30 minutes at about 4:30 p.m. on Friday, June 13, 2014. Harper said Houston had her backpack, and she was planning to hitchhike into town to meet “Vern” to go to Colorado. Houston didn’t know when she would return.
That was the last time she was seen alive.
This story first appeared in The Taos News, a sister publication of The Santa Fe New Mexican.
