A murder, a manhunt and the grandmother who wouldn't stop the search for her daughter's killer

She’d waited years for the news. Krystal Mitchell.Courtesy Josephine Wentzel Raymond McLeod.San Diego County Crime Stoppers But when the message arrived Aug. 26, 2022, Josephine Wentzel suddenly had to confront an agonizing possibility. She’d spent six years tracking the man authorities believed was responsible for killing her daughter, a search that spanned thousands of miles, international borders and dozens of possible sightings that, in the end, had produced little. Wentzel declined to identify the message’s sender, but she said it supposedly contained a recent picture of Raymond McLeod, who at the time was one of the U.S. Marshals Service’s most wanted fugitives . Had he actually been found - or would this be another jolt of false hope? She focused in on the image, she said, and “just freaked out like, oh, my gosh, it’s him. I didn’t even want to think it because someone might hear my thoughts and warn him to flee.” McLeod, a 42-year-old former U.S. Marine, was apprehended in El Salvador days later and is awaiting trial in San Diego on a charge of first-degree murder in the June 2016 strangulation of Krystal Mitchell. He pleaded not guilty and is scheduled for a preliminary hearing in March. His attorneys either declined to comment or did not respond to a request for comment. In court filings, they said McLeod accidentally killed Mitchell during “rough, consensual sex gone wrong.” Wentzel, a 67-year-old grandmother and former police detective had been preparing for life as an RV'ing snowbird when her daughter was killed. She has used the improbable platform she developed pursuing McLeod to write two books - “The Chase” and “The Capture” - and to help other grieving parents navigate the mix of frustration, despair and confusion left by an unsolved homicide. Wentzel has assisted a nonprofit that helps law enforcement agencies with a series of cases in recent years, including the disappearance and alleged murder of Maya Millete , according to the Cold Case Foundation’s co-executive director. Through a nonprofit Wentzel established, Angels of Justice, she launched a campaign urging the White House to treat the country’s massive backlog of unsolved murders as a national emergency. In a statement, a White House spokeswoman blamed former President Joe Biden for failing to enable law enforcement agencies to “truly fight crime” and said that President Donald Trump is “restoring integrity to our justice system.” A spokesperson for the Marshals Service, which apprehended McLeod, declined to comment on questions about Wentzel’s role in finding him, but in a statement after McLeod’s capture the agency’s director said Wentzel had worked “diligently with law enforcement these past years to see this day of justice arrive.” The San Diego County District Attorney’s Office has said she was “instrumental” in the search for McLeod. “She goes for it,” said Pat Kuiper, who credits Wentzel with helping push investigators in Washington state to take another look at the nearly two-decade-old unsolved murder of her son. “She goes for it in such a way that people can’t...

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