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This episode covers the 1984 death of Ernestine Perea in a mobile home outside Wheatland, Wyoming. Her common-law husband, Martin Frias, a Mexican immigrant who had entered the U.S. illegally in 1979, was charged with her murder after she was found shot with his hunting rifle beside her. In the summer of 1984, appellant, an illegal alien from Mexico, was living with Ernestine Perea in a trailer house southwest of Wheatland, Wyoming, along with their two small children and Ernestine's four-year-old daughter from a former marriage. A jury convicted Frias of second-degree murder based largely on state crime lab conclusions that Ernestine had been shot in the back.
The case did not end with the conviction shown in most of the episode. Frias's attorney, Robert Moxley, marshaled nationally-known forensic experts who proved that the original death-scene evidence had been misinterpreted, including the incorrect conclusion that the victim had been shot in the back, and obtained a new trial. A second autopsy by a Houston medical examiner reaffirmed the original back-to-front trajectory, but new gunshot-residue, acoustic, and blood-spatter experts supported a suicide theory instead. Frias, initially convicted, was acquitted on retrial in 1986, after Moxley developed forensic evidence to prove that the alleged victim committed suicide. Wyoming's Supreme Court had granted the new trial after finding Frias received ineffective assistance of counsel and that his confession was coerced. After his acquittal, Martin Frias settled in southern California, became an American citizen, and tried to get custody of his children, though they remained with Ernestine's mother in Wyoming. No further legal proceedings against him have been reported since the 1986 acquittal.
The case attracted substantial media coverage beyond this Forensic Files episode. It was featured on "The West," a syndicated television magazine on KCRA in Sacramento, and Moxley appeared with Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes in a lead segment; the case was also the subject of episodes of The New Detectives on the Discovery Channel. The underlying Wyoming Supreme Court decision, Frias v. State, also became a notable legal precedent cited in later cases involving coerced confessions and ineffective assistance of counsel claims.
Martin Frias was ultimately acquitted at retrial in 1986 and was never reconvicted. No death sentence was involved in this case — he was originally sentenced to 25–35 years for second-degree murder before that conviction was overturned. He is not known to have faced execution, and there is no indication he remains incarcerated; he was released and reportedly rebuilt his life in California.