Zorro Ranch: The Crime Scene Nobody Searched

Cover-Ups GriftMatrix

Jeffrey Epstein bought a 7,600-acre ranch in New Mexico in 1993. He built a 26,700-square-foot mansion on it. A private airstrip. A helicopter pad. A hangar for his jet. Hidden cameras everywhere. Barbed wire fencing. And for 26 years, nobody – not one federal, state, or local law enforcement agency – ever searched it.

Not once.

Multiple women said they were trafficked there. Virginia Giuffre said she was ordered to have sex with Epstein and other men at that ranch. Annie Farmer testified at trial that both Epstein and Maxwell abused her there. A woman identified as Jane Doe said in court that Epstein molested her at the ranch in 2004, when she was 15. She described lying on the floor, staring up at framed photos of him grinning with celebrities and politicians while he assaulted her.

The FBI got search warrants for Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse. They raided Little Saint James island. They went through his Palm Beach mansion. But the ranch in the New Mexico desert? The one locals called “the playboy ranch”? They just – didn’t.

New Mexico’s former Attorney General Hector Balderas tried to fix that in 2019. He launched a state investigation into sex trafficking at the ranch. He was interviewing victims. Gathering evidence. And then federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York called and said stop.

The request came from SDNY – the same office where Maurene Comey, James Comey’s daughter, was one of the prosecutors on the Epstein case. The stated reason was to avoid “parallel investigations” that might produce inconsistent witness statements defense attorneys could exploit. Standard procedural language. Totally normal sounding.

Here’s what happened next: New Mexico stopped investigating. Balderas sent everything he had to SDNY – police reports, recorded witness interviews, correspondence between state agencies, documents about Epstein’s leasing of state public lands. All of it. Gift-wrapped.

And what did SDNY send back?

Nothing.

Balderas described the cooperation as “a one-way relationship.” His office urged federal prosecutors in 2020 to seize the ranch through civil forfeiture to preserve criminal evidence – files, video recordings, whatever was still in that compound. No response. He offered to help serve search warrants. No response. A December 2019 email in the Epstein files – from federal authorities to the executors of Epstein’s estate – confirmed that federal agents had “not searched the New Mexico property.” Four months after Epstein died in custody, and they still hadn’t bothered.

So the investigation that Balderas built got gutted. The evidence New Mexico handed over doesn’t appear anywhere in the 3 million-plus pages the DOJ has released. It’s just – gone.

Cool. Great. Love it here.

Fast forward to 2023. Epstein’s estate puts the ranch up for public auction. A newly created LLC called San Rafael Ranch LLC snaps it up for an undisclosed price. The identity of the buyer stayed hidden until the Santa Fe New Mexican dug through public records and found it: Don Huffines. Former Republican state senator from Dallas. Currently running for Texas comptroller on a platform of auditing state government and rooting out waste – he literally wants to “DOGE Texas Government.”

The DOGE candidate bought Epstein’s rape ranch through a shell company created one month before the purchase, kept his name secret, then challenged the tax valuation down from $21.1 million to $13.4 million partly because of the property’s “notoriety.” He got a discount on the sex crime compound because it’s famous for being a sex crime compound. The system really does work.

Huffines says he plans to turn it into a Christian retreat. He told Matt Gaetz – Matt Gaetz! – on his One America News Network show that “my faith is so strong in Jesus” and he wanted to “put light in a dark place.” He says no law enforcement has ever asked to search the property but he’d cooperate if they did. Which is an interesting thing to volunteer when nobody accused you of anything.

Meanwhile, there’s also the matter of the bodies.

An anonymous email sent in 2019 – from someone claiming to be a former employee at Zorro Ranch – alleged that two “foreign girls” who died “by strangulation during rough, fetish sex” were buried in the hills outside the property at the direction of “Jeffrey and Madam G.” That email sat in the files. Nobody investigated it. It only surfaced when the DOJ released documents under the Epstein Files Transparency Act that Congress passed in 2025.

New Mexico’s Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard read that and immediately urged state and federal authorities to investigate. And now, finally, in February 2026 – seven years after the state investigation was killed – New Mexico is doing what someone should have done in 2019.

AG Raul Torrez reopened the criminal investigation. The state legislature created a bipartisan truth commission with subpoena power and a budget of over $2 million, led by Rep. Andrea Romero. It passed unanimously. The commission held its first meeting. Survivors will testify. They’re going to try to identify who visited that ranch and which state officials might have known what was happening there.

It also turns out Epstein wasn’t just hanging out in New Mexico for the scenery. He bought the ranch from Bruce King – a three-time Democratic governor of New Mexico. Members of the King family appear in Epstein’s Little Black Book. Epstein donated money to the governor’s son, Gary King, who became the state’s attorney general. Former Governor Bill Richardson visited the ranch and appeared in Epstein’s flight logs. After the abuse allegations became public, Richardson donated $50,000 to charity – the same amount Epstein had given his 2006 reelection campaign. So thoughtful.

The ranch was the hub. It connected Epstein to New Mexico’s political class. It was surrounded by state land and King family land. It had the airstrip and the helicopter pad and the hidden cameras. And the investigation into what happened there was killed in 2019 by federal prosecutors who promised to handle it and then handled nothing.

The request to halt came from SDNY prosecutors, not political appointees at DOJ headquarters. But the effect was the same. An active state investigation got shut down. The evidence vanished into the federal system. The ranch was never searched. And by the time anyone cared again, Epstein was dead, the property had been sold, and seven years of potential evidence degradation had occurred.

Balderas put it simply: “The investigation should have been broadened, not narrowed.”

A ranch where multiple women say they were raped and trafficked as teenagers. An allegation of murdered girls buried in the hills. And for seven years, the official position of the United States government was: nothing to see here.

Anyway. That’s where we are.

Sources