NM v. Isaac Apodaca

On October 29, 2022, 21-year-old Grace Jennings was found dead in a converted garage on the south side of Santa Fe, killed with a three-foot sword. The woman who swung it, Kiara McCulley, a friend Grace had known since elementary school, pleaded guilty and testified for the state. The man on trial, Isaac Apodaca, never touched the weapon. The State of New Mexico said he did not have to.

Prosecutors alleged that Apodaca built the killing with his phone: hours of text messages sent while Grace slept beside them, pushing McCulley to go through with it and promising she would rise in the ranks of a secret society called Ghost, a society police say does not exist. His own devices produced the messages, a countdown from six, a line that read "voila she dead," and a search for how to dispose of a body. The core question the jury had to answer was blunt and new: can the words you type make you a murderer, and does orchestrating a killing make you a principal even when a co-defendant physically carried it out? New Mexico's accessory liability law draws no distinction between the hand that commits a crime and the person who procures it.

On July 15, 2026, after a deliberation that continued through a courthouse power outage and a verdict read by flashlight, a Santa Fe jury answered yes. It convicted Isaac Apodaca on both counts: first-degree murder, willful and deliberate, and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. The judge polled the jury, and all twelve confirmed the verdict. The second-degree option on the form was left unsigned. Apodaca now awaits sentencing, roughly a month out, with no date set; first-degree murder in New Mexico carries a life sentence, with parole eligibility only after 30 years served. The full account is in our Day 6 desk post, and the complete story of how the case reached a jury is in the background report below.