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Murdered While Her Baby Slept: Who Killed Nicole Aguilera?
The brutal crime and its excessive overkill haunted detectives, who hope that forensics will one day crack the case.
It was 1991, and life can’t have been easy for Nicole Molly Aguilera in the city of Phoenix, Arizona. At just 18, she had two daughters aged three years and five months respectively, both of whom she was raising as a single parent with help from a few relatives.
However, the determined young woman was doing her best. That was until someone came into her modest home and brutally murdered the teenager, leaving her two little girls without a mother for the rest of their lives.
More than 30 years on, could this be a case that is eventually cracked by forensics and the careful collection of crime scene evidence?
The brutal murder
On the night of January 17th 1991, Nicole was at home with baby Reina in a crib in the next room. Little Vanessa was staying over at her grandmother’s house, so she was not at the property to witness what came next.
According to reports from Phoenix Police, neighbours heard loud voices coming from Nicole’s single-storey apartment during the early hours of the morning, but they thought nothing…
