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The Mortgage and the Murder

Produced by Paul LaRosa
This story was originally broadcast on Nov. 28, 2008. It was updated on May 23, 2009.

In August 2005, Renee Ohlemacher says she awoke to the screams of her mother. Both her parents had been shot and murdered inside the family's home. Following the murders, police initially focused their investigation on Renee, and even her own relatives cast a suspicious eye on her.

But several months later, the focus shifted to a mortgage broker. Could his drive to close deals and the pressures of the job lead him to commit a double murder? Or is the family right - is Renee really behind the murders?

Every August 2nd - on the anniversary of her parents' murder - Renee stays far away from the one place she says she wants to be: at her parents' gravesite in Santa Fe, N.M. "I don't want to run into any family members. I don't want to talk to them," she tells 48 Hours correspondent Erin Moriarty. "They've hurt me way, way too much, and I'm not a forgiving person."

But more than a thousand miles away, at the gravesite, the rest of Renee's family gathers to mark the day that tore their family apart.

Spend any time with Renee's family and it's clear that deep suspicions exist on both sides. Renee's grandmother Dora thinks Renee could have had something to do with her parents' death. "She is my granddaughter but she was very nasty with me when I would ask her about her mom. She would say, 'I love my mom but I really don't miss her.'"

But Renee says, "They kept telling me, 'You know Renee, blood is thicker than water.' Well, if blood is thicker than water, then why aren't you supporting me? Why aren't you backing me up? Why weren't you there in my time of need?"

Renee is the only child of Bernadette and Greg Ohlemacher. The couple met when they were both in the U.S. Air Force. After retiring, they moved to Albuquerque and a neighborhood called "Paradise Hills."

Bernadette worked for the Federal Aviation Administration, while Greg worked at a local hospital.

Renee, 20 years old back in 2005, says she was sleeping when she was awakened by her mother's screams. "It was just one thing after another happened and then, before you know it, there's silence. My dog went silent. Everything went silent," she remembers.

At that point, Renee had squeezed herself into her crowded bedroom closet with her cell phone. She phoned police, but for some reason she first dialed a non-emergency number, not 911. It was the first in a series of missteps by Renee that made authorities and her own family suspicious.

Asked why she didn't dial 911, Renee tells Moriarty, "Because I thought that you could get through faster or something for some reason. I didn't know what to do. I was in a world of shock."

That explanation does not sit well with Renee's uncle Randy. "I think there are four-year-old kids who know that you call 911."

Randy began questioning Renee's every move. "I had to try to find answers and I felt like she knew more. She was the only one in that house who was still alive. She had to have information that would help figure things out that would help solve this."

Renee says she was distraught in the aftermath of the murders and could not understand why someone would shoot her parents.

In a video taken that morning, Renee appears so shaken, she has trouble walking. Police checked Renee's hands for gunpowder residue and blood spatter. There was none. Police also questioned her extensively.

Asked why she thinks police looked at her, Renee says, "Same question I ask every day. I was just like, 'Do whatever you want.' Go search my room you know. Do whatever you need to do. Figure it out. I had no hesitations. I had nothing to hide."

Renee soon began calling relatives but, again, the way she delivered the news made them wonder. Randy says Renee was very unemotional. "It bothered me. I thought it was a very cold message."

Police considered Renee a prime suspect, but there was not enough evidence to charge her. She went to live with her mother's family, who grew increasingly suspicious.

It was a tense time. Renee's aunts Jessica and Toni had always considered her spoiled and somewhat of a brat, and her behavior after the murders did nothing to change their minds. "When the funeral directors were taking the coffins out of her hearses, she was, 'Hi' to her friends, just happy to see them. It was like a social thing. When we were getting ready to make the procession into the church, the doors open and (snap) tears came out now. The tears were flowing, like she was on cue. Another one of my friends observed her texting during the funeral," Jessica remembers.

Jessica could not shake the feeling that Renee was somehow involved in her parents' murder. "I asked her, 'Did you have anything to do with this?' And her reaction to me was very calm and it was, 'No, no I didn't,'" she remembers.

Asked if she believed her, Jessica says, "I wanted to. I heard what she was saying, but her actions were speaking volumes different."

Renee began making inquiries about her parents' life insurance policies, and her aunt says Renee expressed delight at her impending good fortune. She says Renee even went to test-drive a BMW.

Jessica says that just months before the murders, Bernadette increased the amount of her life insurance and made Renee her primary beneficiary.

Jessica believes her niece was aware that she'd benefit financially if her parents died. "Her mom told her everything. Her mom didn't keep any secrets from her."

But Renee tells Moriarty she only learned of the insurance policy increase and her being the sole benefactor from police.

"Police let me know that. They asked me, 'Why would she increase her insurance, Renee?' 'I don't know. I don't know. That's not my information to know,'" she recalls.

"But, you do understand then why somebody would look at the only person who survives…and who's inheriting money?" Moriarty asks.

"Right," Renee acknowledges.

"I mean, so, that was fair, right?" Moriarty asks.

"In my eyes no. I'm the only child," Renee says.

Because the accidental death clause was triggered by the murders, police say, Renee stood to inherit nearly $1 million, if she was cleared.

And she says she did push for police to try to clear her. "There was no reason for me to be a suspect."

But in fact, Renee remained the lead suspect. It wasn't just her behavior that made police detectives suspicious; it was a phone call she made right after her parents were killed.

The murders raised many questions, but one fact was never in doubt.

"All of the evidence indicates that the killer knew the house, knew the people, knew their habits, and went there for one purpose," says Albuquerque defense lawyer Joseph Riggs, who is following the case closely.

But it is not clear how the killer entered the house. There was no sign of forced entry, but Greg had left a ladder leaning against the home that could have provided access to the couple's bedroom.

Police recovered fingerprints on the ladder and one footprint at its base, but couldn't identify them.

Some neighbors did hear the gunshots, but curiously no one remembered hearing the family's dog, Sammy Jo, barking. That, says Renee's family, is a little hard to believe. "She barked at us every time we went to visit. She was a great dog, a very, very protective pet," Jessica says.

Renee has always said it was her mother's screams that awakened her. When asked, Renee says it's a possibility that the dog may have been familiar with the person in the house.

Police collected four shell casings at the crime scene fired from a 9mm Ruger, but didn't find the weapon.

John Walsh of the Albuquerque Police Department says detectives turned their attention to the victims themselves. "You look at the victim and you see where they've been, who they've had contact with, what are the motivating factors in their life, both in their private life, their work life, and their social life."

Investigators kept coming back to Renee. When they looked at her cell phone records from the day of the murder, they wondered why one of the first calls she made was to a Mike Allen.

Renee says Mike Allen was a good friend of her mother. But police were hearing rumors that he was more than just a "good friend."

Renee doesn't believe her mother had an affair, but Phil Hayes, a friend of Greg, says Greg did think Bernadette was involved in a relationship with Mike Allen.

"Greg suspected that they had a tryst over at the house," Hayes says. "He had a key. He knew the alarm code. He had the alarm code because he did watch the dog, Sammy the dog.

But Lucille Nadborne, who worked side by side with Bernadette for years at the FAA, doesn't believe there was an affair. "He's just a very, very good kind-hearted man. He wanted to be there to help Bernadette if she needed help."

And apparently, she needed a lot of help: cell phone records show that Bernadette called Mike Allen 23 times in the month leading to her death, including the day before.

"The interesting thing about Mike Allen is that he shows up at the crime scene very quickly. He hangs out for the day, and the next day he's on an airplane going back to Chicago and driving to Wisconsin or something," says Greg's brother Randy.

Mike Allen refused 48 Hours' request for an on-camera interview, but told us that he and Bernadette were just friendly co-workers.

Police said Allen was interviewed "exhaustively" and never asked for a lawyer. Weeks passed with no arrests. There was nothing - say police - to tie Allen or anyone else to the murders. They said they had no probable cause to search Allen's home and never bothered to check whether he owned a 9mm hand gun.

Meanwhile, Randy was exasperated by what he says was sloppy police work. "They left things behind that might have been key evidence. They left the home computer that was just by the entire family sitting right where it was at. They left a home phone, and answering machine."

And Renee says she was "enraged" that police didn't look through the house more thoroughly, considering she was the main suspect. "If they would actually open up their eyes and do their job in the first place, maybe they would have got other evidence. Maybe they would have found something else, instead of lollygagging around and pointing the finger at me."

Police even investigated Renee's former boyfriends but came up with nothing.

But about nine months later, police had a break in the case, with a new suspect no one had ever considered.

In June 2006, a most unlikely suspect emerged. His name is Ron Santiago, and he met Greg and Bernadette in mid-2005 when they applied for a home mortgage.

A loan officer's assistant at Countrywide Home Loans, Ron was, by all accounts, a people pleaser. "I wanted to do the best possible job I could for them, every single time," he says.

Co-workers of Ron's say he seemed particularly upset when he learned of the murders. "I was shocked. I was disturbed. It was sad to hear," says Ron.

He says he cried. "I guess I'm an emotional person. I take things serious. When I heard that, it hurt. It was sad."

But Ron had little time to dwell on it. In 2005, before the current loan crisis, business at Countrywide was booming, and Ron had trouble keeping up.

"The pressure was incredible," he says. "I've taken loan applications on holidays, phone calls on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day. We were open 24/7."

Finally, in June 2006, Ron says he just cracked. "I had made a mistake. I'm not hiding from that, I'm not denying that - that's never been a question. Have I done something wrong? I participated in something that was wrong."

What Ron calls a mistake occurred when he was preparing a loan for another couple, Catherine and Matthew Howard.

Ron says the mistake was that he over-promised. "I told them that I can get the loan done within a specific period of time and I didn't. I dropped the ball."

So instead of coming clean, Ron forged two checks totaling more than $240,000, and used them to close the Howards' loan.

Bank officials soon discovered the forgery. Ron, who had never in his life been in trouble with the law, turned himself in to the U.S. Secret Service, the agency that investigates bank fraud.

"I've never done anything illegal in my life," Ron says. "To do something that was stupid, so stupid to do and lose everything because of that stupidity, that's very emotional."

Ron was so emotional that he was taken to the psychiatric ward of a local hospital, where he took a welcome break from the hectic mortgage business.

As Brian Nguyen, a federal investigator who was then a Secret Service agent began to investigate, Catherine Howard told him of a very unsettling incident. "Catherine Howard explained to me that on the day that she was supposed to refinance her loan, the brake lines in her husband's vehicle were cut," Nguyen remembers.

And Catherine was convinced that it was Ron who had tampered with those brakes. "This guy tried to kill us. I mean that was my gut reaction," she says.

Nguyen began to dig into Ron's background and learned that one year earlier, Ron's other clients, Greg and Bernadette, had been murdered. Later he found out that Ron at one time had owned a 9mm Ruger handgun. And when Nguyen discovered that the couple had been shot with a 9mm, suddenly Nguyen's forgery investigation became something far more serious.

The Secret Service agent went back to the hospital and questioned Ron about the murders that took place nearly a year earlier. "And right away Ron said it was a Tuesday," Nguyen says, "He knew exactly what day of week August 2nd, 2005 was. And that struck me right away."

Asked how he would remember it was a Tuesday, Ron says, "Well, it was a very dramatic event. I mean again, people that I work with were killed."

Late into the night, Nguyen continued to grill a medicated Ron, who never asked for a lawyer. "I was telling the truth. I denied everything. I had nothing to do with hurting anybody, a murder. I did not, and I answered all their questions," Ron insists.

At the same time, police went to Ron and his wife's home to search for that 9mm Ruger. But Ron says he had traded the gun a year before the murders to a guy named "Robert."

After hours of searching, police found nothing to connect him to the murders until finally they looked in a bag in Ron's garage. There, police say they hit pay dirt: one spent 9mm shell casing.

Asked how the spent shell casing ended up in his bag, Ron says, "That is the whole case. They're saying because that shell casing was in my gun bag in my garage that I was the one that pulled the trigger to kill these people."

And that's what police alleged: investigators said it was a ballistics match to the four casing recovered at the murder scene.

Nearly a year after Bernadette and Greg were gunned down in their home, Ron was arrested, charged and jailed for the couple's murders.

He says he hasn't done "anything to anyone," but if he did, the question is motive. It's the big hole in the case.

"We can't explain why does anyone murder anyone? I mean lots of times, you look at a case and it just doesn't make any sense but it happens time and time again," says District Attorney Kari Brandenberg.

His motive certainly was not money. If Ron closed on the loan, he stood to make only a few hundred dollars. And why would Ron - the ultimate people pleaser - want to hurt his own customers?

"People really liked Ronald Santiago and he had a good reputation up until recently as a good loan officer," Moriarty points out.

"I think that the common misperception is that criminals have to be bad people and they can't have any good qualities. And you know that there's a very good positive part of them and then there's that part of them that commits the crime that they're accused of committing," Brandenberg says.

Police speculate that the couple became upset when their $40,000 loan was delayed and threatened to report Ron to his boss. To stop the couple, police say Ron killed them. It does sound a little far fetched, even to Renee.

Soon after Ron's arrest, Renee was cleared by police, allowing her to collect her parents' insurance money. But she still questioned Ron's involvement. She says she never even heard his name before. "I just knew my parents were dealing with Countrywide. That's all I knew."

Ron's lawyer Joseph Riggs says Ron clearly told the couple they did not qualify for the loan. "There was no evidence that there was to be a closing ever, at all."

Ron says he does like to help people, but that he had made no promises to Greg and Bernadette.

Riggs and his co-counsel, Natalie Bruce, say the case against Ron is flimsy at best. "This was a unique case in that there was a great number of people who could have been, should have been, and I think were suspected of being involved in this case," Riggs says.

Besides Bernadette's friend Mike Allen, there was an angry woman who repeatedly made threatening phone calls to Bernadette at work. Bernadette's co-worker Lucille says Bernadette was scared of the caller.

The woman believed Bernadette was having an affair with her boyfriend.

"We later learned from the police investigation that Bernadette was so fearful of being shot she had a partition built outside her work cubicle a couple of years before," Riggs says.

It sounds incredible, but Lucille says it is absolutely true. She also says she told police about the calls.

The woman was in the Albuquerque area around the time of the murders, but investigators do not believe she was involved.

Greg's brother Randy gave police another lead - a male friend from out of state who'd been calling Bernadette non-stop.

But investigators never considered Bernadette's friend a serious suspect. They never even called him. When 48 Hours did call him, the man in question told us that he had gone to Albuquerque to see Bernadette a year before her death. He said they were friends and that he had nothing to do with her murder.

"The police are treating this, with respect to Ron Santiago, with blinders on. They cannot look at anything else other than Ron Santiago," Riggs says.

But the Albuquerque police are confident they have the right guy, mainly because of too many close calls involving Ron's clients.

Remember what happened to Catherine Howard's break line, which had been cut on the day her loan was supposed to close? And another of Ron's customers had two separate homes burn down.

"You know one coincidence, two coincidences - but you start layering these things and it becomes not just highly curious but very troubling," says police spokesman John Walsh.

Ron's reaction to all of this? "It's frightening, it's scary. I have not done anything to anyone. I did not hurt anyone, I didn't tamper with anyone's personal belongings, their vehicles, anything. I've not done anything wrong."

Authorities have no proof that Ron was responsible for any of those incidents. And there is almost no physical evidence that connects him to the murders either.

Walsh acknowledges that none of Ron's fingerprints, DNA, or blood was found in the house.

The key to the police case is that incriminating shell casing found in a bag in Ron's garage. But how did that single shell casing end up there? Did Ron put it there or did someone else?

The entire case against Ron really comes down to something as small as the 9mm shell casing. The only evidence that ties him to the murders is that spent shell casing that the police say they found in his garage. They say it's a match to the casings left at the murder scene. But how reliable is that ballistic testing?

"The science is not sufficiently accurate to allow it to be admitted in a trial, that's what we're saying. Shell casing analysis is under attack across the country," says Riggs.

But shell casing analysis is really beside the point, according to Riggs and Natalie Bruce: they are challenging the very presence of that casing in Ron's bag.

"So the area that you want to focus on when you're looking at this first picture is right here in the corner of the bag," Bruce explains, looking at photographs of the bag.

"What the police do is they take a step-by-step sequence of photographs," Riggs explains. "This is the gym bag as they first found it sitting on the floor in this garage."

"Now when I just look at that bag, just looking at it from here, I don't see any kind of shell casing," Moriarty remarks.

In fact, there is nothing in that corner until several photographs later. And then, Natalie Bruce says something dramatic happened. "The casing isn't there. The casing isn't there. The casing isn't there. All of a sudden, it is there. It's the most important thing we've found in a year and a half of investigation. "

Asked how the spent shell casing ended up in his bag, Ron says, "I don't know how it got there. I did not put it there. Is it a possibility that someone put in there that could have been part of law enforcement? There is a possibility, but I'm not going to accuse."

It sounds preposterous, but even the Albuquerque police admit that a shell casing may have gone missing from the crime scene. The officer who first arrived saw five or six casings but investigators only collected four.

"Is there a possibility that the jury may think that shell casing was planted by the police?" Moriarty asks D.A. Kari Brandenberg.

"There's that possibility," she acknowledges. "I mean, when you try cases, crazy things happen. It's unpredictable, it's a gamble and anything can happen."

Just as Brandenberg was preparing the case against Ron, there was a surprise development: Ron's lawyers determined that the police search warrant was a daytime warrant, barring police from entering Ron's house after 10 p.m.

"We believe and we believe very strongly that they did make entry into the home before 10 p.m.," Brandenberg asserts.

But Judge Pat Murdoch shocked the district attorney by ruling that the search was illegal, and that means that the shell casing found in Ron's garage - the only physical evidence in the case - cannot be used at trial.

Brandenberg's reaction? "You're angry. You're disappointed."

She says that casing was "critical", and that without it they have very little to go forward.

Brandenberg is appealing the judge's decision, and for now, the murder trial is in limbo. After spending 17 months in jail, Ron was freed on bail.

Shockingly, many members of Bernadette's family, especially her sister Toni, to this day believe Renee carried out a plan to murder Greg and Bernadette. "No doubt in my mind. She may have not pulled the trigger. She may have not been the shooter, but I have no doubt she had everything to do with this," Toni says.

"My mom taught that when somebody hurts you in such a powerful way, there is no need to stick around. There's no need to have them in your life," Renee says.

And true to her word, Renee did not stick around. After she was cleared by police, she moved out of state and cut off all contact with her entire family. "Maybe they shouldn't have put me through hell," she says.

Ron, still charged with a double homicide, is remarkably the one who is upbeat. Divorced, Ron remarried a former high school sweetheart - a lawyer, and now works in her law office. "We've been blessed, we got married in February. I mean God has blessed," he says, even though he's still facing two charges of murder. "I've been blessed, and I can honestly say this, I would go through it again to be where I'm at right now."

"What bugs me is that he's still living a normal life. He's got a family. I don't get to have laughs with my mom, I don't have a home. I don't have somebody to go back to," Renee says.

Even without a trial, police say the case is solved. But the family believes the true killer may still be out there. Randy remains determined to make good on the promise he made to his brother: "I made a promise to him standing beside his casket that I would do everything in my power to bring somebody to justice, to see that somebody paid for this crime, that somebody did jail (time). And I feel like there are a lot of questions that have not been answered."

Still searching for answers, members of the Ohlemacher family filed a civil suit, charging that Renee and Ronald Santiago were involved together in a plot to kill the Ohlemachers. There is no evidence to support that allegation.

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