Convicted sex offender accused of killing 5 babies in California cold case

Publish date: 2024-07-10

FRESNO, Calif. (FOX26) — Late last year KMPH spotted the FBI digging holes in western Fresno County.

It turns out it was linked to a decades-old cold case with accused murderer Paul Allen Perez.

In this case, five infant babies were killed between 1992 and 2001.

To this day, not all of their bodies have been found.

Did the system fail these infants? Were there investigative lapses?

Many questions have surrounded this case, but one seems to be at the forefront: How did he get away with this for so long?

We want to warn you the details of this investigation might be disturbing for some people.

"Today, we are announcing charges against Paul Perez for the serial murder of five of his own children, all babies," said Jeff Reisig, the Yolo County District Attorney.

That was back in January 2020, 13 years after a fisherman pulled a dead infant out of a waterway just east of the city of woodland near Sacramento.

The man in question? Paul Allen Perez.

"In my 40 years in law enforcement, I cannot think of a case more disturbing than this one," said Tom Lopez, Yolo County Sheriff.

In 2007, a baby less than six months old was found in a plastic container that was made to withstand the elements.

Its body was crushed by a weight at the bottom of a slough.

"As you can imagine, having an unsolved death of a child has haunted my agency for years," said Lopez.

The Yolo County Sheriff's Office couldn't determine who that baby was or how it got there until October 2019.

"The infant was identified through DNA as Nikko Lee Perez by a DNA comparison," said Matthew Wirick, Public Information Officer for the Yolo County Sheriff's Office. "It was known that the baby boy was born on November 8th, 1996, in Fresno, California."

That brought this cold case back to life.

"Science and power of DNA has shown that monsters and killers cannot hide forever any longer," said Reisig.

The Yolo County Sheriff's Office also determined Baby Nikko had other siblings with the same fate.

Five of Paul Allen Perez's six children were murdered.

All were born between 1992 and 2001.

Detectives say the kids were killed by means of lying in wait and through torture.

This case revealed unspeakable evil, and these acts ignited a resolve in the hearts of all involved to bring justice to the vulnerable, innocent victims of this case," said Lopez.

Beverly Warnock, the Executive Director of Parents of Murdered Children, also had the same reaction.

"Horrified, unbelievable," she said. "I've been with parents and murdered children for 30 years, and I have heard many stories of murder and what happened and listened to many people cry, but this one is something I can't even understand. It's probably one of the worst ones I have ever heard of."

Many have questions

"Why wasn't this reported earlier? And why wasn't an investigation done from day one," said Warnock.

Where was the mother in all of this?

Well, according to court documents from the Yolo County Superior Court, Yolanda Perez is the mother of at least four of the babies killed.

Davis Enterprise reports that Yolanda Perez underwent multiple interviews with detectives, and she confessed to witnessing the infants' abuse and disappearances, but she never reported it because she was scared.

"If you're so afraid of someone, so afraid that if you tell on him, he's going to hurt you, then she could have kept quiet for all those years," said Warnock.

Yolo County District Attorney's Office later charged Yolanda Perez with four counts of murder and child endangerment.

She pleaded guilty to child endangerment in September 2022.

She is not behind bars and is still waiting for her sentencing.

"I really do feel for the mother and what she's going to have to go through, you know, in the next couple of years to deal with this and to get this taken care of," said Warnock. "I feel for the sister if she has to testify. You know, that's very difficult to do."

According to testimonies, she and Paul Perez’s other daughter, Brittnay Perez, never spoke up.

Criminal psychologist Dr. Eric Hickey actually focused on this case in one of the classes he taught at Fresno State.

He says if Brittany and Yolanda had kept quiet, Child Protective Services would never had known.

He gave them the same names, some the same names to hide, and they moved around so CPS, but CPS wouldn't know. You can't blame CPS because they tried to do their job, but if this couple kept moving from location to location, they wouldn't know what was going on until, unfortunately, a fisherman found a body."

The real question is, could law enforcement have done something earlier? Probably not.

"We continually review our cold cases with this being an especially open question mark that we want to bring closure to," said Wirick. "We're as motivated as ever to solve this case."

KMPH reached out to the Yolo County District Attorney's Office to get additional documents and information pertaining to Paul Perez.

In a letter, the Chief Deputy District Attorney said she would not give KMPH any additional information about him and denied our interview request with the D.A. about the case because its still an ongoing investigation.

But the Yolo County Sheriff's office said because this case involves five infant children, it gives detectives additional motivation.

"Every victim matters to us, and every case matters to us; this one is particularly sensational," said Wirick. "We want to ensure that justice is served, and we want to bring closure and honor the lives of those infants that were taken needlessly."

Paul Alan Perez was already a convicted sex offender.

And Dr. Hickey says, in his decades of studying cases, this could have played a part in the killings.

"Here are these five little children because they were they found them to be tortured. That means there had to be some element of sadism involved, very likely, and as I mentioned to some law enforcement, you should consider that this could be a sex crimes case," he said. "Most people, even murderers generally, don't go to this type of extent. So that tells me this person's been fantasizing a great deal about doing harm to babies."

In his professional opinion, Dr. Hickey doesn't believe mental illness ever played a part in the murders.

Sometimes people say he had to have been crazy to do this; he was not crazy," he said. "Crazy means mental illness. There was forethought, there was planning, there was a methodology, there was sadism. None of this speaks to mental illness, it speaks to evil.

While Paul Allen Perez faces a long list of charges. If he's convicted, Dr. Hickey said one thing is clear: he never had an attachment to any of his own babies.

"It kind of verifies to me that there is evil in this world," he said. "We all do wrong things, but this wasn't a wrong thing or even a bad thing. This was horrifically horrible that came out of something in hell would do."

It is important to note when Paul Allen Perez was arrested in 2020; it was just days before he was going to be released from prison on unrelated charges.

Since Perez has a number of criminal enhancements he is facing, this makes this case eligible for the death penalty.

However, in 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom signed an indefinite moratorium on capital punishment in the state. This means that while the death penalty is still technically on the books, no one is currently being put to death by the state of California.

Perez is still facing life in prison without parole and does not have a bail set.

His next trial is scheduled for September.

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