Fresh eyes and new technology: Digging into the cold case killing of a rookie cop in Mountainair 

It was the evening of May 7, 1988, and while most of the town of Mountainair attended a talent show at the high school, a rookie cop remained at the police department — in a cramped room atop a narrow staircase above town hall. 

Stephen Sandlin, a 21-year-old who had joined the four-man force a couple of months earlier, called his girlfriend to vent his frustrations with the chief who told him to “mellow out because he was issuing too many citations and running his radar too much.”

Before the evening turned to night, Sandlin was shot in the head with his own service weapon. 

Tuesday will be the 36th anniversary of his death. 

The case has been examined by multiple investigators over the years — former Attorney General Gary King confirmed to City Desk ABQ last week that his team came to a conclusion but was not able to definitively prove their case in 2010 — but no one has ever been charged or officially declared a suspect.

This year, the investigation is receiving a fresh look from the New Mexico Department of Justice (the recently re-branded Attorney General’s Office) whose cold case unit is using Forensic Genetic Genealogy to compare DNA from a crime scene to profiles uploaded into ancestry websites.

This is welcome news to Mountainair’s town clerk and mayor, both of whom successfully pushed to name the police station after Sandlin in 2019.

“It’s a significant thing,” said Mayor Peter Nieto, who grew up in Mountainair and was 3 years old when the homicide occurred. “One of the things that I learned when I got older was how young he was. He was so young, he had just started, he was still just a rookie. It’s just a terrible situation.”

Almost from the start, Sandlin’s death was mired in controversy and contradictions. 

Initially, investigators said he had killed himself — a finding his parents disputed — but it was later determined to have been impossible because of the angle of the gunshot wound. 

Those who remember the case — and there are many — suspect Sandlin’s fellow law enforcement officers may have had something to do with his death, and that it could have been connected to a marijuana bust he was involved in about a month prior. 

“He will never be forgotten as long as there’s still some of us around,” said Gayle Jones, who was one of the first EMTs on scene and now serves as mayor pro tem. “It stays with the community — the next generation may not realize the full impact, but it lives on. It’s always hanging, like a dark shadow.”

To report this story, City Desk ABQ drew from contemporaneous newspaper articles, incident reports and other documents as well as interviews with survivors and investigators.

Always wanted to be a cop

Sandlin grew up in Albuquerque and Bosque Farms, the oldest of three, watching his father go to work every day at the Albuquerque Police Department. 

“He always wanted to be a cop,” said Tom Sandlin, speaking with City Desk ABQ from his home in Edgewood. “At that time, I was with the Albuquerque police and I rode motors. He loved crawling up on the motorcycle. He loved wearing the boots the motorcycle guys wear.”

In March of 1988, the younger Sandlin — now a father himself — joined the Mountainair Police Department, patrolling a town of about 1,100. 

Almost immediately, Tom Sandlin recalled, his son seemed like “he didn’t like something that was going on over there.”

“He asked me about tagging in evidence and how we do it,” Tom Sandlin said. “Then when I told him that he just shook his head. It was like that wasn’t the way that he was being taught.”

Over the years, Tom Sandlin and his ex-wife Eileen, fought for closure and justice even as authorities initially classified their son’s death as a suicide.

It wasn’t until 1995, under AG Tom Udall, that Stephen Sandlin’s cause of death was officially recognized as a homicide.

Tom Sandlin said that in 2010, investigators with then-Attorney General King’s office told him that they had interviewed several people and “came to the conclusion that they knew who it was, but they couldn’t prosecute because this person was already dead.”

So when an investigator with the current administration — now called the NMDOJ — called to say they were going to investigate the case again, Tom Sandlin said he was surprised. He had thought it was over.

“Is this final, you know, will this end it?” he asked.

‘Potential DNA’ at the scene 

Before the NMDOJ launched its cold case unit, the office “spammed” small departments throughout the state, asking if they had unsolved cases they thought needed another look.

Suggestions flooded in.

In Sandlin’s case, it was the NMDOJ’s three cold case agents themselves who resurfaced old notes and added the case to the list, a spokesperson said. 

Greer Staley, the deputy attorney general over criminal affairs, said she could not discuss specifics of the case, but she would say there is at least “potential DNA” evidence that was found at the scene and they are testing it to see if there is enough to generate a profile.

This would allow contract investigators in the emerging field of Forensic Genetic Genealogy to try to follow a family tree until they are able to identify a suspect. 

“We work with outside labs so we are beholden to their timeline and schedule, and then genealogy itself just in general — in any case — really depends on the results, if you get any, from the testing and how long those take,” Staley said. “It depends on how removed any potential matches are from your hopeful suspect.”

Staley acknowledged that cold cases are intrinsically difficult to solve as evidence can degrade and witnesses die or move on. However, she said, the investigators see potential in this case. She said they will still try to solve it even if it turns out the suspect is dead.

“We do our best to put fresh eyes, fresh perspectives, new technology, and just smart detectives that really care about this,” she said. “That’s the way they get solved. But sometimes they don’t. And that’s not for lack of wanting to solve them, or trying, or that anyone messed anything up in the past, it’s just because sometimes that’s how it goes.”

The marijuana raid 

About a month before Sandlin was killed, Mountainair police pulled over a man named Melvin King on suspicion of drunk driving in front of the iconic Rosebud Saloon in the middle of one the main road through town.

The next day, Sandlin, Police Chief David Carson and other officers searched King’s Manzano home, finding 54 pounds of marijuana packaged for sale. It was worth up to $50,000. 

The officers loaded the marijuana into four black trash bags and after it was determined that Mountainair PD didn’t have a secure place to store it the bags were taken to the Torrance County Sheriff’s Office. About a week after Sandlin was killed investigators discovered that all but one of the bags was gone. 

Many have speculated that the bust, in some way, had to do with Sandlin’s death. 

The Attorney General at the time — Hal Stratton — was criticized for his handling of the case and two prosecutors said they were forced out of their jobs over it. One of the prosecutors alleged the “office has in its files evidence that people engaged in illegal drug trafficking conspired to kill Officer Sandlin” and nothing was done. 

Others have asked if Sandlin’s fellow officers may have been to blame.

The first person to find Sandlin mortally wounded on the floor of the police department was a 21-year-old soldier who was stationed at Fort Hood with Chief Carson’s son. The two young men were spending their military leave at the police chief’s house.

In his witness statement to police, the soldier, Eugene “Butch” Wright, said he had climbed those creaking wooden stairs to ask Sandlin about going on a ride-along the next day. Instead, he found him clinging to life in a pool of blood. 

On the table in front of where Sandlin had been sitting was a law enforcement magazine, open to an article about a memorial for a slain New Mexico State Police officer. 

In his original statement to investigators, Wright said he ran outside to Sandlin’s car and called the police chief, who arrived within 30 seconds. 

Jones and another EMT who was also the town’s mayor arrived shortly afterward to find Sandlin still breathing. By the time a doctor responded, there was nothing left to do but pronounce a time of death: 8:12 p.m.

Unsolved mystery

These days there is no police force in Mountainair. 

The last chief — who himself knew Sandlin’s father and investigated the death more than a decade ago — left in 2022. Although the town has hired a replacement, he has not yet moved to New Mexico from Florida. 

Locals are quick to point out that the Sandlin case was featured on a 2010 episode of “Unsolved Mysteries” and town clerk recalled how a couple of years ago he gave a road test to Sandlin’s girlfriend — one of the last people to talk to him before he died.  

The room where Sandlin was killed is now in disarray. Tables and desks are piled high with old electronics, furniture and cardboard boxes. A wheelbarrow sits in one room. The ceiling above an overturned desk has a gaping hole. 

When the police force returns to the town, Fulfer said they will set up shop in a newly remodeled office on the station’s ground floor. On the wall is a memorial to Sandlin. 

Outside, there’s another — bearing his picture on a stone slab like a grave stone. 

It’s this memorial that Tom Sandlin said he visits a couple of times each year to leave flowers.

Stephen Sandlin’s son — who was about a year and a half when his father was killed — now lives in Colorado. He’s in his late 30s now and comes to visit sometimes, Tom Sandlin said. He shares memories with him as much as he can, but it’s hard.

“He has a smaller frame, but as far as facial and everything he’s very similar,” Tom Sandlin said. “His dad had a Jeep and when he was young — and after his dad passed away — he’d see a Jeep and he would turn to look. Even that young, he would turn to look at it.”