A Florida man who challenged police to “find the body” at his Boynton Beach home was arrested on Saturday when his wife’s remains were found in his backyard.
The victim, Mary Stella Gomez-Mullet, was reported missing on February 20, when a friend called to tell the police that she had last spoken to her on the phone two days earlier. The friend later revealed that she had heard Gomez-Mullet shouting, “No, no, Roberto!” and calling your friend’s name before the call was disconnected, according to a police report obtained by the South Florida Sun Sentinel and the local WPTV news station. When she tried to call back, the phone went straight to voicemail.
That same day, the police received a report of a bloody bag located less than a kilometer from Colon’s home. Later, family members confirmed that the items, including a crucifix tied to a white rosary chain, belonged to Gomez-Mullet. According to the police report, “all family members and friends were adamant that something must have happened to Gomez.”
Gomez-Mullet, 45, and Colon, 66, were married in January in the Delray Beach courthouse, according to WPTV. Colon described marriage to detectives as a sort of quid pro quo arrangement, in which Gomez-Mullet received US citizenship in exchange for caring for Colon’s mother, who has dementia.
Apparently, however, the arrangement started to disintegrate. Colon accused Gomez-Mullet of defrauding his mother for several thousand dollars and told the police that they were arguing about it when she went to his home on February 18. (His friend later told the police that Gomez-Mullet went to Colon’s house to drop off the items he claimed she stole and cut off contact with him.) Colon claimed that he left the house to go to a doctor’s appointment and, when he came back, Gomez-Mullet was gone.
When detectives arrived at Colon’s apartment on February 24 for a follow-up interview, they found that most of their text messages and call history had been deleted, according to the police report. They also noticed several red marks on their front door and what looked like blood splatters on the floor, walls, windows and even the roof of their workshop. Colon said the blood spatter in his workshop must have come from his dog; later it was confirmed that he was human.
Two days later, when the detectives arrived to search his apartment, Colon was combative, challenging them to “find the body, find the body”. According to the police report, he described his workshop as a “slaughterhouse”, or a place where animals are slaughtered, and his wife as a “piece of shit”. When the detectives were leaving, he smiled and said to them, “At least you didn’t find a body in my house.”
But detectives returned on March 5 to arrest Colon – not for the murder of his wife, but for marijuana possession found in his apartment during the previous search. Two days earlier, a source had informed the police that she heard Colon and Gomez-Mullet arguing weeks earlier, and that Colon threatened to strangle her to death and bury her in her backyard.
Certainly, when detectives swept Colon’s apartment again, they found human remains in the yard, which were positively identified on Friday as belonging to Gomez-Mullet.
Colon was transported to the Boynton Beach Police Department for processing, but not before detectives heard him saying to a friend, “There is one thing they cannot do, they cannot name him, Humpty Dumpty of new”.
Colon was arrested in Palm Beach County’s main prison on Friday on charges of first-degree murder. A Colon lawyer could not be immediately identified.